Queen Victoria

Home , Frogmore, House of Hanover, John Conroy, The Queen Adelaide

George III 1760 1820

The Prince 1811 1820 Regency

George IV 1820 1830

William IV 1830 1837 Victoria 1837 1901

1819

May 24, Monday: At a performance of La Gazza ladra in Gioachino Rossini’s home town of Pesaro, followers of Caroline of Brunswick, Duchess of Wales did everything they could to disrupt the proceedings. She and her lover were hoping to repay a perceived snub he had given them during the previous year’s performance. Most citizens hoped to make his return a gala occasion but the toughs forced the town fathers to smuggle him in the stage door. They carried out whistling and disruptions from all sides of the theater. Rossini would never set foot in Pesaro again.

Alexandrina Victoria, who would in 1837 become Queen Victoria, was born in Kensington Palace in London, the 1st and only child of Edward, Duke of Kent (allegedly) and Princess Victoria Maria Louisa of Saxe- Coburg-Saalfeld — and hemophilia became a fact of life in the English and eventually the Russian royal families. As there is only one chance in 50,000, genetically, that Indolent Edward had been biologically her father and that that gene for hemophilia had been introduced into the royal family at this point by a chance mutation, it seems likely that from this point forward all the Brit troubles with their royals have been utterly unnecessary. If Victoria was a bastard, then it should be the socialite Ernst, Prince of Hanover on the throne right now, not Elizabeth II — and Chuckie “I want to be your tampon” Stuart would have been being the mere socialite.1

Two women reigned during Thoreau’s florut. There were many similarities:

Dynasty Period Person Florut

Windsor 1837-present Queen Victoria 1837-1901 Ch’ing 1644-1911 The Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi 1861-1908

1. Hey, let’s dig her up the way the Empress Dowager was dug up. Maybe we can shuck the lot of them. What price news copy? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Two women reigned during Thoreau’s florut. There were many similarities:

Dynasty Period Person Florut

Windsor 1837-present Queen Victoria 1837-1901 Ch’ing 1644-1911 The Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi 1861-1908

It was the Duke and Duchess of Kent who selected the name Victoria, but her uncle George IV, who had a certain sort of rank in the family, insisted that she be named Alexandrina after her godfather Tsar Alexander I of Russia.

Victoria’s putative or official daddy would die when she was but eight months old and her mama the Duchess of Kent would then ( :-) develop a close relationship with Sir John Conroy, an ambitious Irish officer. Conroy, nice man that he was, would act as if ( :-) Victoria were his own daughter and would have a major influence over her as a child:

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 24th of 5 M / Went this morning to Connanicut with our fr D Buffum to attend the funeral of Robert Watsons daughter. - D was concerned in a very lively & pertinent testimony which I hope may tend to the instruction & edification of some present -we returned & dined at J L Greenes & then crossed the ferry & got home before 5 OC PM RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

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PRINCE ALBERT QUEEN VICTORIA

August 26, Thursday: Albert, who would become Prince Albert the consort to Queen Victoria of England (also known as Mrs. Brown), was born near Coburg in Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

1820

January 23, Sunday: Edward Augustus Hanover, Duke of Kent and Strathern, 4th son of King George III of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, King of Hanover and father of the princess who would become Her Majesty Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India, died of pneumonia in Woodbrook Cottage at Sidmouth in Devon, England. The princess would be raised by her mother.

In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 23rd of 1 M / Our Morning was pretty well attended by male & female considering that the ground is coverd with Snow Father Rodman & Hannah Dennis were engaged in lively testimonys. —Silent in the Afternoon, but I believe true Worship was performed. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

1830

On the death of King George IV, his brother William Henry Hanover, the duke of Clarence, became King William IV of England.

George III 1760 1820

The Prince 1811 1820 Regency

George IV 1820 1830

William IV 1830 1837

Victoria 1837 1901

At the funeral he “talked constantly and walked out early.” His wife, Adelaide Amelia Louisa Theresa Caroline of Saxe-Coburg Meiningen (1792-1849), of course simultaneously became Queen.

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WALDEN: As with our colleges, as with a hundred “modern PEOPLE OF improvements”; there is an illusion about them; there is not WALDEN always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

ADELAIDE HARRIET MARTINEAU

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PRINCE ALBERT QUEEN VICTORIA Since William’s wife Adelaide had given birth to no surviving children, Victoria became his heir.

William’s health was not good and he feared that Sir John Conroy would become the power behind the throne if Victoria became queen before she was eighteen. The Wellington ministry collapsed.

Henry Peter Brougham continued as a Whig MP. He was a leading advocate of freedom of the press, of national popular education, of tithe reform, and of the abolition of slavery. With the accession of the Whigs to government he became the Lord Chancellor and was made a baron.

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1835

Receiving a request for an autograph by England’s Princess Victoria, James Fenimore Cooper sent her a manuscript of “The Minikins.” He and his family spent the summer in Cooperstown, New York.

Frederick C. Mills, newly-elected chief engineer of the Genesee Valley Canal, presented a report based on the previous year’s survey.

$1,548,100 in tolls were collected on New York canals.

1836

August: In England, a meeting between King William IV and Princess Victoria as described by Charles Greville, Clerk of the Privy Council:

When the King arrived at Windsor and went into the drawing room (at about ten o’clock at night), where the whole party was assembled, he went up to Princess Victoria, took hold of both her hands and expressed his pleasure at seeing her there and his regret at not seeing her oftener. The next day it was his birthday, and though the celebration was what was called private, there were a hundred people at dinner, either belonging to the Court or from the neighborhood. The Duchess of Kent sat on one side of the King and one of his sisters on the other, the Princess Victoria opposite. After dinner the King made a very long speech, in the course of which he poured forth the following extraordinary tirade: “I trust in God that my life may be spared for nine months longer, after which period, in the event of my death, no regency would take place [because by that point in time the Princess Victoria having achieved her 18th birthday would be officially an adult

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PRINCE ALBERT QUEEN VICTORIA and thus no regent would need to be appointed for the interim period]. I should then have the satisfaction of leaving the royal authority to the personal exercise of that young lady (pointing to the princess) the heiress presumptive of the Crown, and not in the hands of a person near me, who is surrounded by evil advisers [Conroy], and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which she would be placed.” This awful speech (with a great deal more which I forget) was uttered in a loud voice and excited manner. The Queen Adelaide looked in great distress, the Princess [Victoria] burst into tears, and the whole company was aghast. The Duchess of Kent said not a word. It was an unparalleled outrage from a man to a woman, from a host to his guest, and to the last degree unbecoming the situation they both of them fill. King William IV would manage to hold onto this world somehow until 27 days after Victoria’s 18th birthday. Although he was unaware of this, in fact Victoria distrusted Sir John Conroy and had been resisting his attempts to exert influence over her. As soon as she would become queen in 1837, she would banish him from the Royal Court.

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1837

June 20, Tuesday: When King William IV of the house of Hanover died of pneumonia in his palace, his niece Victoria

acceded to the throne of England. The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Howley, tried to shove the ring on a finger that was too big for it, which was, shall we say, not good, and embarrassing all around. The monarch would banish Sir John Conroy, her ambitious Irish counselor, from the royal court in order not to be in any

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PRINCE ALBERT QUEEN VICTORIA way under his influence. Soon she would be receiving a couple of death threats:

George III 1760 1820

The Prince 1811 1820 Regency

George IV 1820 1830

William IV 1830 1837

Victoria 1837 1901

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QUEEN VICTORIA PRINCE ALBERT Speaking of thrones, at this point, although there was a water closet of the Harington design in Richmond Palace, there wasn’t a single such device in Buckingham Palace, the nobles there being in the habit of using servants with chamber pots. A throne, a throne, my queendom for a throne!2 GOD IN THE JAKES WATER SUPPLY Table of Altitudes

Yoda 2 ' 0 '' Lavinia Warren 2 ' 8 '' Tom Thumb, Jr. 3 ' 4 '' Lucy (Australopithecus Afarensis) 3 ' 8 '' Hervé Villechaize (“Fantasy Island”) 3 ' 11'' Charles Proteus Steinmetz 4 ' 0 '' Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (1) 4 ' 3 '' Alexander Pope 4 ' 6 '' Benjamin Lay 4 ' 7 '' Gary Coleman (“Arnold Jackson”) 4 ' 8 '' Queen Victoria with osteoporosis 4 ' 8 '' Queen Victoria as adult 4 ' 10 '' Margaret Mitchell 4 ' 10 '' length of newer military musket 4 ' 10'' Charlotte Brontë 4 ' 10-11'' Harriet Beecher Stowe 4 ' 11'' Laura Ingalls Wilder 4 ' 11'' a rather tall adult Pygmy male 4 ' 11'' John Keats 5 ' 0 '' Clara Barton 5 ' 0 '' Isambard Kingdom Brunel 5 ' 0 '' Andrew Carnegie 5 ' 0 '' Thomas de Quincey 5 ' 0 '' Stephen A. Douglas 5 ' 0 '' Danny DeVito 5 ' 0 '' Immanuel Kant 5 ' 0 '' William Wilberforce 5 ' 0 '' Mae West 5 ' 0 '' Mother Teresa 5 ' 0 '' Deng Xiaoping 5 ' 0 '' Dred Scott 5 ' 0 '' (±) Captain William Bligh of HMS Bounty 5 ' 0 '' (±) Harriet Tubman 5 ' 0 '' (±)

2. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is credited with the 1st water closet in the USA, within a private home. This does not, however, explain anything about his poetry. Nowadays, when the Queen of England travels, she takes along a special toilet that blends and cooks her excreta into an homogenous and sterile and entirely anonymous fluid — in order to prevent the more imaginative of her loyal subjects from getting bold ideas about the money to be made in the retailing of personal mementos of her majesty. This, and the events of a very recent year in Canada, of course bring special meaning to the common phrase “when the royal shit hit the fan.” 10 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (2) 5 ' 0 '' (±) John Brown of Providence, Rhode Island 5 ' 0 '' (+) Bette Midler 5 ' 1 '' Jemmy Button 5 ' 2 '' Margaret Mead 5 ' 2 '' R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller 5 ' 2 '' Yuri Gagarin the astronaut 5 ' 2 '' William Walker 5 ' 2 '' Horatio Alger, Jr. 5 ' 2 '' length of older military musket 5 ' 2 '' 1 the artist formerly known as Prince 5 ' 2 /2'' 1 typical female of Thoreau's period 5 ' 2 /2'' Francis of Assisi 5 ' 3 '' Volt ai re 5 ' 3 '' Mohandas Gandhi 5 ' 3 '' Sammy Davis, Jr. 5 ' 3 '' Kahlil Gibran 5 ' 3 '' Friend Daniel Ricketson 5 ' 3 '' The Reverend Gilbert White 5 ' 3 '' Nikita Khrushchev 5 ' 3 '' Sammy Davis, Jr. 5 ' 3 '' Truman Capote 5 ' 3 '' Kim Jong Il (North Korea) 5 ' 3 '' Stephen A. “Little Giant” Douglas 5 ' 4 '' Francisco Franco 5 ' 4 '' President James Madison 5 ' 4 '' Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili “Stalin” 5 ' 4 '' Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 '' Pablo Picasso 5 ' 4 '' Truman Capote 5 ' 4 '' Queen Elizabeth 5 ' 4 '' Ludwig van Beethoven 5 ' 4 '' Typical Homo Erectus 5 ' 4 '' 1 typical Neanderthal adult male 5 ' 4 /2'' 1 Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 /2'' comte de Buffon 5 ' 5 '' (-) Captain Nathaniel Gordon 5 ' 5 '' Charles Manson 5 ' 5 '' Audie Murphy 5 ' 5 '' Harry Houdini 5 ' 5 '' Hung Hsiu-ch'üan 5 ' 5 '' 1 Marilyn Monroe 5 ' 5 /2''

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1 T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia” 5 ' 5 /2'' average runaway male American slave 5 ' 5-6 '' President Benjamin Harrison 5 ' 6 '' President Martin Van Buren 5 ' 6 '' James Smithson 5 ' 6 '' Louisa May Alcott 5 ' 6 '' 1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 5 ' 6 /2'' 1 Napoleon Bonaparte 5 ' 6 /2'' Emily Brontë 5 ' 6-7 '' Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 5 ' ? '' average height, seaman of 1812 5 ' 6.85 '' Oliver Reed Smoot, Jr. 5 ' 7 '' minimum height, British soldier 5 ' 7 '' President John Adams 5 ' 7 '' President John Quincy Adams 5 ' 7 '' President William McKinley 5 ' 7 '' “Charley” Parkhurst (a female) 5 ' 7 '' Henry Thoreau 5 ' 7 '' 1 the average male of Thoreau's period 5 ' 7 /2 '' Edgar Allan Poe 5 ' 8 '' President Ulysses S. Grant 5 ' 8 '' President William H. Harrison 5 ' 8 '' President James Polk 5 ' 8 '' President Zachary Taylor 5 ' 8 '' average height, soldier of 1812 5 ' 8.35 '' 1 President Rutherford B. Hayes 5 ' 8 /2'' President Millard Fillmore 5 ' 9 '' President Harry S Truman 5 ' 9 '' 1 President Jimmy Carter 5 ' 9 /2'' 3 Herman Melville 5 ' 9 /4'' Calvin Coolidge 5 ' 10'' Andrew Johnson 5 ' 10'' Theodore Roosevelt 5 ' 10'' Thomas Paine 5 ' 10'' Franklin Pierce 5 ' 10'' Abby May Alcott 5 ' 10'' Reverend Henry C. Wright 5 ' 10'' 1 Nathaniel Hawthorne 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Louis “Deerfoot” Bennett 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Friend John Greenleaf Whittier 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 President Dwight D. Eisenhower 5 ' 10 /2'' Sojourner Truth 5 ' 11''

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President Grover Cleveland 5 ' 11'' President Herbert Hoover 5 ' 11'' President Woodrow Wilson 5 ' 11'' President Jefferson Davis 5 ' 11'' 1 President Richard M. Nixon 5 ' 11 /2'' Robert Voorhis the hermit of Rhode Island < 6 ' Frederick Douglass 6 ' (-) Anthony Burns 6 ' 0 '' Waldo Emerson 6 ' 0 '' Joseph Smith 6 ' 0 '' David Walker 6 ' 0 '' Sarah F. Wakefield 6 ' 0 '' Thomas Wentworth Higginson 6 ' 0 '' President James Buchanan 6 ' 0 '' President Gerald R. Ford 6 ' 0 '' President James Garfield 6 ' 0 '' President Warren Harding 6 ' 0 '' President John F. Kennedy 6 ' 0 '' President James Monroe 6 ' 0 '' President William H. Taft 6 ' 0 '' President John Tyler 6 ' 0 '' John Brown 6 ' 0 (+)'' President Andrew Jackson 6 ' 1'' Alfred Russel Wallace 6 ' 1'' President Ronald Reagan 6 ' 1'' 1 Venture Smith 6 ' 1 /2'' John Camel Heenan 6 ' 2 '' Crispus Attucks 6 ' 2 '' President Chester A. Arthur 6 ' 2 '' President George Bush, Senior 6 ' 2 '' President Franklin D. Roosevelt 6 ' 2 '' President George Washington 6 ' 2 ''

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Gabriel Prosser 6 ' 2 '' Dangerfield Newby 6 ' 2 '' Charles Augustus Lindbergh 6 ' 2 '' 1 President Bill Clinton 6 ' 2 /2'' 1 President Thomas Jefferson 6 ' 2 /2'' President Lyndon B. Johnson 6 ' 3 '' Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 6 ' 3 '' 1 Richard “King Dick” Seaver 6 ' 3 /4'' President Abraham Lincoln 6 ' 4 '' Marion Morrison (AKA John Wayne) 6 ' 4 '' Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior 6 ' 4 '' Thomas Cholmondeley 6 ' 4 '' (?) Franklin Benjamin Sanborn 6 ' 5 '' Peter the Great of Russia 6 ' 7 '' Giovanni Battista Belzoni 6 ' 7 '' Thomas Jefferson (the statue) 7 ' 6'' Jefferson Davis (the statue) 7 ' 7'' 1 Martin Van Buren Bates 7 ' 11 /2'' M. Bihin, a Belgian exhibited in Boston in 1840 8 ' Anna Haining Swan 8 ' 1''

Fall: Lord Melbourne, head of the Whig party, was Prime Minister when Victoria became queen. Melbourne was a widower whose only child had died, and at the age of 58 had grown rather conservative after a liberal youth. The Lord advised Queen Victoria not to attempt Charles Dickens’s OLIVER TWIST, OR THE PARISH BOY’S PROGRESS since it dealt with “paupers, criminals and other unpleasant subjects.” In general he treated Victoria as if she were his departed daughter and she grew quite fond of him and began to depend upon him for political advice. An apartment being available for him at Windsor Castle, it was guestimated that he was spending six hours a day with the queen. Sometimes when Victoria passed a crowd in public, someone in the background would shout out “Mrs. Melbourne.” Lord Melbourne’s old friend, Thomas Barnes, editor of The Times, wrote “Is it for the Queen’s service — is it for the Queen’s dignity — is it becoming — is it commonly decent?” A rumor was put into circulation, that the Queen was considering marrying him.

The 32-year-old Count Francesco Arese had already seen his share of political drama when he had arrived in New York earlier this year to rejoin his good buddy, the exiled Louis Napoleon. Born in Milan, Arese had been nine when the Austrians took over his country and arrested his uncle and a number of family friends. In his adolescence, he had involved himself in rebel conspiracies against the Austrian regime. He had been about to be arrested when his mother had arranged for him to flee to Switzerland and live in a castle there as a guest of family friends, the Bonapartes. Arese and Louis Napoleon had traveled together through Europe until Arese

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QUEEN VICTORIA PRINCE ALBERT had signed up to go fight in Algeria. When he had returned to Europe, he had found that his good buddy Louis Napoleon, after an unsuccessful bid for the throne, had been exiled to the USA. He had come to New York to be with him. Shortly after Arese’s arrival, Louis Napoleon’s mother Hortense sent word to her son that her health was failing, and Louis Napoleon left America to be with her. Arese stayed on in America, and in this year traveled extensively, through Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and New England. In the 1st chapter of his A TRIP TO THE PRAIRIES, Arese would include brief comments on New-York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, and at the end of the book he would include a few pages of his impressions of Boston, but the bulk of his book was about his travels in the western part of the country, and the steamboat passengers, emigrant farmers, and fur traders he had talked with, and about the native Americans of various tribes whom he had encountered:

WISCONSIN. Fall 1837. Relationship between Indians and Half-Breeds The etymology of the names of rivers, prairies, rocks, and other places in this country, derives, as one may have noticed, very often from some circomstance or souvenir connected with them, which passes from mouth to mouth and from generation to generation, and thus acquires a geographical authority. The funniest derivation I have heard of is that of the name of a prairie which the hunters along the Mississippi call the Ferribault (sic) Woman’s Prairie. Here in a few words is the etymology:-Mr. Ferribault’s wife was a half-breed who affected the costume and the customs of white people and made fun of Indians. Some young Indians in the neighborhood, vexed at her jokes, swore to be revenged, and one fine day they got hold of Mrs. Ferribault and, as the Indians say, passed her around on the prairie; and the chronicle has it that 25 young Indians inflicted upon her the most terrible punishment (from the moral point of view) that can be inflicted on a woman. Fortunately Mrs. Ferribault put up with all these outrages for the love of God and felt only the better afterwards.

PRAIRIE EXPEDITION DEPARTING FROM ST. LOUIS. Fall 1837. General remarks about the Indians; Education, Appearance; Marriage. Largely based on Arese’s experiences with the Sioux and the Menominee. The training of children among the savages lasts a very short while. As soon as they are able to look after their own needs, or at least to stand on their legs, they have entire freedom and live with their parents as with strangers, receiving from the father nothing except lessons in courage, slyness, and revenge-practical lessons, of course, not merely theoretic. The Indians may marry as many wives as they are able to feed. Usually they buy them from their parents. The wife has an entirely passive role, she is almost the slave of her husband. It is she who cooks the meals, takes care of the babies, the tents, the horses, and in a word, the whole establishment. When her husband is away at war or hunting, it is she who tans the skins and the furs and tailors the clothes. On the trail it is the wife that carries the babies, and the baggage, and attends to all the work connected with camping. The husbands are jealous or pretend to be jealous and cut off the noses and the ears, sometimes even kill wives that have failed to be faithful. The wives’ behavior is in general pretty regular, whereas that of girls is not in the least so. A girl gives or sells herself to anybody she chooses, and does it almost coram populo, without her reputation’s suffering the slightest bit. When a stranger arrives in a tribe and is well received, it never fails that he is given a woman for the time he is to be there. In any case, supposing he wants one, he need not lack. “Running the match” is a phrase in use among the Canadian hunters: it is one of the better methods for getting girls, and the pursuit goes like this: You enter a tent when the fire there is out. You have been careful to have a torch in your hand, or it would be better to say, a lighted piece of wood. You go along past the different girls in bed, and the one who puts it out, receives you in her arms. That is how it is sometimes done; but ordinarily you just go into a tent where you know there is a pretty girl, you stir up the fire so as to be able to pick her out among the other people, you bring her a present of a mirror, some glassware, a knife, or any other little thing, and your happiness is assured. In general the savages do not know the charm of mystery and consider the actual formula with which one gives proof of lively emotion as an animal function and nothing more. As I have said above, when I was travelling with an Indian family [of Menominee Indians], the husband would prove to his wife, before me, the lively interest she aroused in him; and that in a little tent twelve feet square, while I was tranquilly smoking my pipe, and no more embarrassed than if it had been the cat. The women wear their hair smooth, parted on the forehead and falling over the shoulders. They wear a little skirt of blanket or leather, which they attach above the hips with a strap. Their corsage is formed by the same piece as the skirt and held up by a pair of small suspenders passing over the shoulders. Others wear a skirt separate from the waist, and in that case the skirt is held in the same way by a belt which is covered by the skirt falling back over it: as to the waist it is a sort of sleeveless waistcoat. The skirts come halfway to the knee. For stockings they wear a mitosse or embroidered leggings which come to the knee: for shoes, moccasins. On their backs they wear either a blanket or a skin, which covers them from head to foot. When they can have their clothes of blanket, red is the favorite color. On the trail they carry a baby, sometimes even two, inside the blanket

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PRINCE ALBERT QUEEN VICTORIA on their back, and supported by the top of the head. The women’s costume is perhaps more picturesque than the men’s.

November: In LondonLONDON , Queen Victoria’s progress to the Guild Hall.

1838

Dr. George Combe’s ON THE FUNCTIONS OF THE CEREBELLUM BY DRS. GALL, VIMONT, BROUSSAIS, ROGET, RUDOLPHI, PRICHARD, TIEDEMANN; ALSO ANSWERS TO THE OBJECTIONS URGED AGAINST PHRENOLOGY, WITH DR. A. COMBE (Edinburgh: MacLachlan & Stewart). The author visited the United States to investigate the treatment of criminals. His brother Dr. Andrew Combe became personal physician to the British royal family. The Phrenological Association, formed as an alternative to the British Association which had spurned the phrenologists, first met in Newcastle. The Birmingham Phrenological Society was established. It was a good year for phrenology.

May 15: Queen Victoria permitted the painter Thomas Sully a long period in which to study her head, face, and shoulders while he elaborated the preliminary paintings of this 18-year-old which are now to be viewed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Also winding up in that museum would be the finished huge oil Sully would produce, after its exhibition tour through Boston, Montréal, Québec, New Orleans, and New-York.

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1839

In LondonLONDON , Highgate Cemetery opened.

Opening of the LondonLONDON & Croydon Railway from Corbett’s Lane to Croydon.

In LondonLONDON , opening of the Eastern Counties Railway from Mile End to Romford.

Lord Melbourne, leader of the Whigs, resigned after a defeat in the House of Commons and Sir Robert Peel, as the head of the Tory party, became Prime Minister. Since it was the custom at the time for the Queen’s ladies of the bedchamber to be of the same political party as the government, Peel asked Victoria to replace her Whig ladies with Tory ladies. When Queen Victoria refused, Peel resigned and Melbourne and his Whigs returned to office. Soon after the return of Lord Melbourne as Prime Minister, the Queen saw Lady Flora Hastings, one of her ladies-in-waiting, getting into a carriage with Sir John Conroy, and a few months later she noticed that

Lady Hastings appeared pregnant. When Victoria approached Lady Hastings about this she claimed to be still a virgin. Victoria insisted upon a medical examination by her personal physician, who ascertained that although Lady Hastings was indeed swelling, she was indeed also a virgin. The swelling was an internal cancer. The story was leaked to the newspapers so that when a few months later Lady Hastings died of what was found to have been cancer of the liver, Victoria became very unpopular with the British public. Soon afterwards an attempt was made to kill Victoria while she was riding in her carriage in LondonLONDON .

She was quite the target — further attempts would be made in 1842 (twice), 1849, 1850, 1872, and 1882.

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PRINCE ALBERT QUEEN VICTORIA November 23, Saturday: During this year Queen Victoria’s cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, had been visiting LondonLONDON , and Victoria had been falling in love with the guy. Although he initially had doubts about such a relationship, on this date Queen Victoria was able to publicly announce an engagement to be wed.

The couple would wed in February 1840 and then during the following 18 years of royal wedded bliss Albert would inflict 9 childbirths upon his queen — while meanwhile her personal bodyguards would be thwarting 4 more assassination attempts.

1840

The Phrenological Association met in Glasgow. The Exeter Phrenological Society was established. Dr. Andrew Combe completed his PHYSIOLOGICAL AND MORAL MANAGEMENT OF INFANCY. George Combe returned from the United States to Scotland and his MORAL PHILOSOPHY was published. The most reputable phrenologist in the English-speaking world, he pronounced that a man of science could tell, merely by looking at the skull of a Hindu, how it was that “one hundred millions of them are at this moment kept in subjection by forty or fifty thousand Englishmen.” See, you can just look at his skull and tell, that sucker’s dead. During the 1840s George Combe, Robert Noel, and Dr. Gustav Scheve would be lecturing on phrenology in Germany — which would turn out to be as fertile a field as England.

This sort of thing is needed, in order to help us understand how such a public personage as Charles Dickens could speak as he would in 1857 upon the mutiny in the Indian colony: I wish I were Commander in Chief of India. The first thing I would do to strike that Oriental race with amazement ... should be to proclaim to them in their language, that I considered my holding that appointment by leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested. Hold it hard against them, Chuck! During this year, serial publication began of Charles Dickens’s MASTER HUMPHREY’S CLOCK as an initial part of his THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP. ATTITUDES ON DICKENS

February 10, Monday: The wedding of Queen Victoria with Prince Francis-Albert-Augustus-Charles-Emmanuel, Duke of Saxe, Prince of Saxe-Colburg and Gotha, her first cousin Prince Albert. It was a rainy day. The bride wore a white dress — which ever after would be the trend for brides. She wore only items of British manufacture (lamentably, this has not become equally popular). The Queen’s wedding band was a gold serpent with its tail in its mouth –such a singularly appropriate symbolization of the British Empire!– adorned with a dozen small diamonds (it would be buried with her, although, lamentably, not on her tiny finger). During the following eighteen years of royal wedded bliss the hubby would inflict a total of nine childbirths upon Victoria — while meanwhile her personal bodyguards would be thwarting four more assassination attempts.3

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Spring: François Pierre Guillaume Guizot accepted the post of French ambassador to London, and shortly afterward Thiers succeeded to the ministry of foreign affairs. The professor would be received with distinction by Queen Victoria, and by British society. He would be able to persuade the British to return Napoleon’s corpse to France.4

3. There seems to be no record to corroborate the urban legend that Queen Victoria used cannabis to help her endure menstrual cramping. If she did happen to utilize the drug for that purpose, however, there is in addition no record that her royal “we” was ever amused — that is, that it occurred to her that this drug might have a function that was merely recreational. We note, despite the party hat, that her expression is halfway between a scowl and a sneer, which is not the characteristic expression of a doper:

4. Napoleon had died of stomach cancer after five years on St. Helena and his corpse, minus the penis, had been underground there, at this point, for some two decades. When dug up, the corpse would be discovered to be still in pretty fair condition. The frigate that would bring it back toward France, La Belle Poule, would be specially painted black to mark the solemnity of the occasion. That severed penis, it seems, now belongs to an American urologist, Dr. John Kingsley Lattimer, who bid $38,000 for it at an auction. 20 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRINCE ALBERT QUEEN VICTORIA May 1, Friday: The 1st adhesive postage stamp (the “Penny Black” of England, 64 million of them, printed by the inventor Jacob Perkins) was issued — an idea whose time would arrive on Wednesday, May 6th. The volume of postal correspondence increased by two orders of magnitude.5 These first stamps showed Queen Victoria, with a black head for a penny letter and a blue head for a twopenny letter.

At this point lightweight paper was being used for letters sent abroad, because the weight of a letter determined the postage to be paid. English postage rates for overseas mail were 12 times as high as American rates, a shilling rather than a penny even at the minimal weight. Envelopes were coming into use for enclosing mail, although p Pre-gummed envelopes like this fine example would not be available until quite a bit later, during the 1870s:

5. We owe the idea to Rowland Hill (1795-1879), a retired Brit schoolteacher who in 1837 had written POST OFFICE REFORM: ITS IMPORTANCE AND PRACTICABILITY. By the time of the writing of WALDEN, letter postage in the USA would have become a minimum of three cents:

WALDEN: For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life –I wrote this some years ago– that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest.

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1841

In England, the government report “The Health of Towns” began to appear (to 1844).

Robert FitzRoy became the member of Parliament representing Durham, England.

Lord Melbourne resigned as Prime Minister. By this point it was Prince Albert, rather than Melbourne, who held the main influence over Queen Victoria’s political views. Whereas Melbourne had advised Victoria not to think about nasty dirty social problems, Prince Albert invited Lord Ashley to Buckingham Palace to talk about what he had discovered about child labor in Britain. Queen Victoria would have a good relationship with the following two prime ministers, Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell. However, she would disapprove of Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary who believed the main objective of the government’s foreign policy should be to increase Britain’s power in the world. This sometimes involved adopting policies that embarrassed and weakened foreign governments, whereas both Prince Albert and Queen Victoria considered that the British government should be helping to preserve the European royal families, to which they were related not only by sympathy but also by blood, against the various revolutionary groups advocating republicanism. Victoria also objected to Palmerston’s record of sexual misconduct, in that he had attempted to seduce one of Victoria’s ladies in waiting. Palmerston had entered Lady Dacre’s bedroom while staying as Queen Victoria’s guest at Windsor Castle and only Lord Melbourne’s intervention had saved him from being removed from office.

The Greener egg-shaped rifle bullet with an opening at one end in which there was a tapered plug was applied by Delvigne to an elongated bullet with a hollow base. FIREARMS

At this point the French military was adopting Thouvenin’s tige rifle, in the firing chamber of which there was a pillar (“tige”) upon which one needed to crush the bullet with blows from the ramrod, causing the bullet to expand into the grooves of the barrel.

June: Christian C.J. Bunsen was sent on a special Prussian mission to England, that was scheduled to last until November. During this stay in England, however, he made himself so very appreciated that, when the king of Prussia would propose a shortlist of three names as potential Prussian ambassadors to the Court of St. James, his name would be the one selected by Queen Victoria. He would occupy this diplomatic post for the following 13 years. Two discoveries of ancient manuscripts made during his stay in London, one containing a shorter text of the EPISTLES OF ST IGNATIUS and the other an unknown work ON ALL THE HERESIES, by Bishop Hippolytus, would lead Bunsen to author, in 1852, his HIPPOLYTUS AND HIS AGE: DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE OF ROME UNDER COMMODUS AND SEVERUS. VOLUME I, HIPPOLYTUS VOLUME II, HIPPOLYTUS

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QUEEN VICTORIA PRINCE ALBERT November 9, Tuesday: Birth of the infant Albert Edward who would become Edward VII, King of England from 1901 to 1910.

On the other side of the world, the Brits in Cabul, Afghanistan would have been glad to hear of this royal birth, but unfortunately at the moment they were fighting for their lives and the issue was in doubt. It was necessary for them to relieve their General of his command –due to the condition of his health rather than to his prolonged periods of indecision or the stupid mistakes he had been making– and at the Envoy’s request Brigadier Shelton was called in from the Bala Hissar “in the hope that, by heartily co-operating with the Envoy and General, he would strengthen their hands and rouse the sinking confidence of the troops. He entered cantonments this morning, bringing with him one H.A. gun, one mountain-train ditto, one company of Her Majesty’s 44th foot

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PRINCE ALBERT QUEEN VICTORIA regiment, the Shah’s 6th infantry, and a small supply of attah” (flour).6

6. Lieut. V. Eyre (Sir Vincent Eyre, 1811-1881). THE MILITARY OPERATIONS AT CABUL: WHICH ENDED IN THE RETREAT AND DESTRUCTION OF THE BRITISH ARMY, JANUARY 1842, WITH A JOURNAL OF IMPRISONMENT IN AFFGHANISTAN. Philadelphia PA: Carey and Hart, 1843; London: J. Murray, 1843 (three editions); Lieut. V. Eyre (Sir Vincent Eyre, 1811-1881). PRISON SKETCHES: COMPRISING PORTRAITS OF THE CABUL PRISONERS AND OTHER SUBJECTS; ADAPTED FOR BINDING UP WITH THE JOURNALS OF LIEUT. V. EYRE, AND LADY SALE; LITHOGRAPHED BY LOWES DICKINSON. London: Dickinson and Son, [1843?]

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1842

Ice from the ponds of New England began to arrive in England. The first cargos were brought over not by the Frederic Tudor firm from Fresh Pond in Cambridge but by Gage, Hittinger & Company and then by the Wenham Lake Ice Company, both of Boston. A large block of ice from the lake near Wenham MA was presented to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at Windsor, and the royals exclaimed in public over the purity and clarity of the ice and allowed it to be generally known that they were arranging for a regular supply for themselves.7

Completion of the Wapping tunnel under the Thames River below London. “Wapping” merely refers to the wharves of London. How come you didn’t know that? The tunnel engineered under the Thames River by Marc Isambard Brunel between 1825 and this year, which was the 1st tunneling ever done underwater except by worms, connected Wapping and Rotherhithe, which would otherwise be unconnected. This Thames Tunnel is now a part of the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground, which means that you may enjoy it at your leisure. It is 1,506 feet in length and 23 feet by 37 feet in bore, so you can close your eyes and imagine that for the longest time this was the biggest bore of any tunnel made through soft ground. Or, you may close your eyes and imagine that it is the 20th Century and you are traveling under the Channel in a new Chunnel through the chalk connecting England and France, which would otherwise be unconnected. Readers of Charles Dickens’s 1849 DAVID COPPERFIELD will remember Wapping as the spot at which Martha Endell the soiled dove committed herself to the garbage-laden Thames. (For an illustration, refer to the “Wapping” painting — the

7. After the assassination attempt of 1839, two attempts would be made on Queen Victoria’s life during this year, and then attempts would be made in 1849, 1850, 1872, and 1882. 26 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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most famous one done by Whistler.)

THE SCARLET LETTER: Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door, is a certain room or office, about fifteen feet square, and of a lofty height, with two of its arched windows commanding a view of the aforesaid dilapidated wharf, and the third looking across a narrow lane, and along a portion of Derby Street. All three give glimpses of the shops of grocers, block- makers, slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers, around the doors of which are generally to be seen, laughing and gossiping, clusters of old salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping of a seaport. The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint; its floor is strewn with grey sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude, from the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a sanctuary into which womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom and mop, has very infrequent access. In the way of furniture, there is a stove with a voluminous funnel; an old pine desk with a three-legged stool beside it; two or three wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and infirm; and – not to forget the library – on some shelves, a score or two of volumes of the Acts of Congress, and a bulky Digest of the Revenue laws. A tin pipe ascends through the ceiling, and forms a medium of vocal communication with other parts of be edifice. And here, some six months ago – pacing from corner to corner, or lounging on the long-legged tool, with his elbow on the desk, and his eyes wandering up and down the columns of the morning newspaper – you might have recognised, honoured reader, the same individual who welcomed you into his cheery little study, where the sunshine glimmered so pleasantly through the willow branches on the western side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go thither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco Surveyor. The besom of reform hath swept him out of office, and a worthier successor wears his dignity and pockets his emoluments.

Queen Victoria was 1st delivered by rail from Windsor to London: Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. — Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall” published in this year 1842

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QUEEN VICTORIA PRINCE ALBERT May 29, Sunday: A “little, swarthy, ill-looking rascal ... of the age of twenty-six to thirty, with a shabby hat and of dirty appearance” (we owe this description to Prince Albert) pointed a pistol at Queen Victoria’s carriage in St. James’s Park.

Robert Collyer’s half-brother William Wells died of tuberculosis. (While Robert was in his late teens, he would fall under the influence of an adult whom he considered to be “the best read man in Ilkley,” a woolcomber named John Dobson, who was functioning as a Methodist Local Preacher.)

May 30, Monday: In an attempt to catch the pistol-pointing “little, swarthy, ill-looking rascal” of the previous day, Queen Victoria’s carriage repeated its path through St. James’s Park, this time at a greater pace and with beefed-up escort.8 The guy did take a shot at the carriage, and was subdued by plain-clothes agents. John Francis would be immediately sentenced to death for treason but on July 1st his life would be reprieved — he was to spend the remainder of his existence at a penal colony.

July 1, Friday: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Henry C. Wright went off on a 3-week lecture tour of Cape Cod.

John Francis had been sentenced to death for taking a shot at Queen Victoria on May 30th. On this day his life was reprieved — he was to spend the remainder of his life in a penal colony.

July 3, Sunday: John William Bean discharged a pistol charged only with gunpowder, paper, and tobacco in the direction of Queen Victoria. He would be sentenced to 18 months imprisonment for the offense “intent to alarm.”

1843

An Ethnological Society was founded in London, with James Cowles Prichard at its head, as a benevolent spin- off of a benevolent earlier Society for the Protection of Aborigines. Although, temporarily, people differing from us are lower, we may in our graciousness reach down and pull them up toward our own higher level through education, enculturation, and control.9

In a related moment at the Royal Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park, Queen Victoria watched as Jenny the orangoutan made herself a cup of tea and drank it: He is frightful & painfully and disagreeably human. The Queen didn’t need to form an Ethological Society for the teaching of proper manners to the lower primates, as the Royal Zoological Gardens (Zoological as in Zoo) was already in existence.

8. I don’t understand this — wouldn’t they have draped one or another lady-in-waiting in the Queen’s hat and coat, for this entrapment attempt? History gives us to believe that it was actually the Queen again but I’m not sure I am willing to credit that! 9. It’s for their own good, of course, which is why it is so iniquitous for them to attempt to resist. Catherine Hall has commented upon this cultural racist “belief in brotherhood and spiritual equality combined with an assumption of white superiority” in WHITE, MALE AND MIDDLE-CLASS: EXPLORATIONS IN FEMINISM AND HISTORY (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992, page 214). In addition, Patrick Brantlinger has suggested in his RULE OF DARKNESS: BRITISH LITERATURE AND IMPERIALISM, 1830-1914 (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 1988, page 174) that: Paradoxically, abolitionism contained the seeds of empire. 28 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June 3 Saturday: Donna María Dolores de Porris y Montez, who would become the first woman ever to have herself photographed smoking a cigarette, made her dance debut on the London state in a black velvety bodice and a red, blue, and purple skirt, overlaid with a large black lace mantilla. Her dance, El Oleano, included as its high point a notorious sequence in which the dancer was to search her skirts for a crawling tarantula “rather higher than was proper in so public a place” while the audience shouted out “Spider! Spider! Spider!”10 She was portraying herself as the tragic wife of the hero Don Diego Leon, recently killed in an attempt at a putsch against the Spanish monarchy. She had studied dancing for all of five months and nevertheless her act bombed. However, she would be going around for ever so many years proclaiming quite spuriously that Queen Victoria had been delighted with her in this initial appearance.

To those who had previously known this danceuse, she was a former Mrs. James, a divorcée from southern Ireland, and was not “Lola Montez” but plain Eliza Gilbert.

1845

August 11, Monday: The first day of a 3-day celebration in Bonn, of the unveiling of its new Ludwig van Beethoven monument. Attending were the King and Queen of Prussia, Queen Victoria, and Prince Albert. In the evening, during dinner, a small concert directed by Giacomo Meyerbeer featured Jenny Lind. There were other famous musicians in attendance, such as Louis Spohr, Hector Berlioz, and Franz Liszt.

10. We can compare this 19th-Century erotic gesture with 20th-Century performers such as Madonna and Michael Jackson, who attract attention to their vocal performances by fondling their crotches onstage. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 29 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1846

A pamphlet appeared in Boston summarizing the munificence and beneficence of the 1,496 men in the commonwealth who were worth at least $50,000, each. BOSTON’S FIRST MEN

Strict rules were utilized for the determination of benevolence. Since Queen Victoria had given $900,000 for relief in the Irish Potato Famine out of her vast fortune, the size of which was approximately known — by computation a Boston laborer receiving an average wage would have needed to donate $0.80 in order “to be precisely as benevolent as Her Majesty.” Similarly, the editors knew of a Boston man with an annual income of $20.00 who annually gave $0.50 to charity. It was on the basis of this sort of “widow’s mite” high standard that only 375 of the 1,496 were being declared to be “more or less Benevolent”:

Amount of property owned $244,780,000

Number worth over one million dollars 18

Number worth just one million dollars 8

Number worth three fourths of a million dollars 10

Number worth half a million dollars 45

Number worth quarter of a million dollars 147

Number who began poor, or nearly so 705

Number who rec’d all, or the greater part, by inheritance or marriage 282

Number of rich Farmers 90

Number of rich Manufacturers (Cotton, Woolen, &c.) 53

Number of rich Merchants (and Various Traders) 463

Number of rich Lawyers (including Judges) 75

Number of rich Physicians 31

Number of rich Clergymen 12

Number of rich Brokers (including some speculators) 46

Number of rich Publishers 11

Number of rich Editors 4

Number of rich Shoe makers (and Dealers) 50

Number of rich Tailors (and Clothes-Dealers) 10

Number of rich Carpenters (and Ship-Builders) 15

Number of rich Masons 9

Number of rich Butchers (and Provision-Dealers) 13

Number of rich Distillers 14

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Number ascertained to be more or less Benevolent 375

Number of rich Old Bachelors 68

While this benevolence was going on in Boston in the New World, in Ireland the apparently sound and meaty white tubers of the new potato crop, upon which so very much depended, suddenly again disintegrated into stinking black slime — just as they had in the previous harvest season. This episode of the “late blight” of Phytophthora infestans was merely as bad as before but the population was already in an emaciated condition.

Therefore a visit which had been planned for Queen Victoria would obviously need to be postponed. Of over 100,000 malnourished, cholera-ridden Irish, off-loaded from the converted cargo holds of sailing ships into Canadian quarantine stations, one-third died within this year. Next to a wharf at Montréal, in a pit, 6,000 bodies were dumped and the cause of death was set down simply as “ship fever.” Spectators on the banks of the St. Lawrence noticed that, as survivors of the trans-Atlantic voyage were being barged upriver toward the Canadian interior, they appeared too weak to return the waves of children on shore.

We don’t know precisely how many people have starved to death or, weakened by starvation, succumbed to diarrhea and fever or to cholera in Ireland during the ensuing period, but we do know that the first great die- off would occur during the winter of 1846-1847. A table prepared after the fact by Census Commissioners, presented here, in all probability under-estimates the mortality because of the manner in which they collected data: for a family all of whose members succumbed zero deaths would be tabulated. Of the total number of deaths, which would be between 500,000 and 1,500,000, the percentage of that total which would occur in each

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Mortality, expressed as %ages of the 1841 Population Year %

1842 5.1%

1843 5.2%

1844 5.6%

1845 6.4%

1846 9.1%

1847 18.5%

1848 15.4%

1849 17.9%

1850 12.2%

Prior to 1845 the average intake of an Irish adult during a winter had consisted of ten to twelve pounds of potatoes, with buttermilk, daily. In the oncoming winter it would consist of one pound of Indian meal or one bowl of soup with one slice of bread — and to prove oneself worthy to receive such sustenance one would need to be doing daily hard labor.

In this year a painting was made of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. The 5-year-old appears well enough nourished.

A Mrs. Thynne brought some of the corals of Torquay to London “for the purpose of study and the entertainment of friends.” Each day, this lady’s housemaid11 would need to spend thirty to forty-five minutes pouring the six gallons of salt water of the aquarium backward and forward before an open window, in order to keep it fresh. The “aquarium craze,” something that Brits would be referring to as “sea-gardening,” had

11. Possibly, but of course not necessarily, an Irish woman. 32 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRINCE ALBERT QUEEN VICTORIA fairly begun.

On a related note (?), the “Boston Museum” was constructed on Tremont Street in Boston.12 Many edifices of this type were in this period becoming economically possible, due in part to the wealth being generated by the sea trade and in part to of the eagerness of these Irish unfortunates to part with their labor for ridiculously low wages. —Hey, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good!

At this point John Mitchel and other Young Irelanders who had come to disdain the doctrine of “moral force” broke with Daniel O'Connell and founded the Irish Confederation, devoted to an agenda of the doing of harm so that good might result. –Hey, let’s give terrorism a chance!

Thomas Carlyle would be doing his part, from this year into 1851, by making a study of the situation in Ireland in order to inform curious Englishmen what they ought to make of it.

12. This structure is not to be confused with the “Boston Museum of Natural History” which was constructed in 1863 in the newly filled Back Bay and which eventually became the Museum of Science. This structure wasn’t a museum at all, it was a 1,200-seat auditorium at which plays were regularly performed. It was termed a “museum” in order to reassure blue-blooded Boston clients who might have been reluctant to visit anything so vulgar as a “theater.” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 33 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1847

September 22, Wednesday: At 11:10AM in the Harvard Observatory on Concord Road, William Cranch Bond made another record by eyepiece projection from his refractor telescope of sunspots as they were moving across the face of the sun:

The telescope known as “The Great Refractor” that had been ordered in 1843 had arrived from Merz & Mahler of München, Germany and was at this point being installed on Concord Avenue in Cambridge. For two decades this would be the largest and most significant telescope in the United States, equal to the finest in the world. All day there had been frantic activity in preparing this new 15-inch telescope, under the dome at the top of the tower, for its first real observations of deep space.

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At 4PM the astronomers had managed to fasten the great object glass into its mounting and obtain a glimpse of the moon, and then:

At 3 1/2 AM Turned the Great Telescope upon the Nebula in Orion — with a power of 180 — … the revelation was sublime … the whole appearance of this nebula was altogether different from the representations given in Books.…

All the cloudiness of this nebula seemed to have been resolved, in the eye or in the imagination of these astronomers, into a discrete sparkle of pinpricks of light.13

There is a grandeur, an almost overpowering sublimity in the scene that no language can fully express.

Visitors from the community began standing in line for an hour in order merely to look at Saturn for 30 seconds. The astronomers became concerned that with 400 people crowding into a 30-foot room there would be so much dust raised as eventually to damage this new instrument. Soon the observatory would be closed to the general public, and open only to astronomers, their assistants, and occasional specially invited guests such as Jenny Lind, Henry Thoreau, and Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. ASTRONOMY

1849

March: Cholera appeared in the west of Ireland. The rescheduled tour by Queen Victoria, originally planned for 1846 and canceled then due to the famine, would need to be confined to the east of the island. In addition, this tour was declared not to be a state visit but a private one — so the monarch would not be required to take any posture in regard to famine or epidemic.14

13. Unfortunately, later observations with higher power instruments have indicated that this nebula in Orion, although it is indeed lighted from inside by individual stars, is quite gaseous and cloudy. These 1847 astronomers were being carried away by their hope for the penetrating power of their big instruments. (It’s a guy thing, right?) 14. After the assassination attempt of 1839 and the two attempts of 1842, a 4th attack would occur during this year, and then attempts would be made in 1850, 1872, and 1882. What happened in this year was that an Irishman, William Hamilton, attempted to alarm Queen Victoria by discharging a pistol loaded only with powder in the direction of her carriage as it passed between Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park. Interestingly, nobody seems to remember on what day of the year this event took place! Hamilton would be awarded the maximum punishment under the 1842 act, of seven years in a penal colony. 36 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1850

June 3, Monday: In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the East India Company’s founding by Queen Elizabeth I, on behalf of the Company, Lord Dalhousie presented the famous Koh-i-noor diamond to Queen Victoria.

WALDEN: White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light. If they were permanently congealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! We never learned meanness of them. How much fairer than the pool before the farmer’s door, in which his ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their plumage and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth.

LAKES OF LIGHT

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June 3: I visited this afternoon (June 3d) Goodman’s Hill in Sudbury–going through Lincoln over Shermanns Bridge & Round Hill & returning through the Corner. It probably affords the best view of Concord River meadows of any hill– The horizon is very extensive as it is, & if the top were cleared so that you could get the western view–it would be one of the most extensive seen from any hill in the county. The most imposing horizon are those which are seen from tops of hills rising out of a River valley The prospect even from a low hill has something majestic in it in such a case. The landscape is a vast amphitheater rising to its rim in the horizon– There is a good view of Lincoln lying high up in among the hills– You see that it is the highest town heareabouts, & hence its fruit. The river at this time looks as large as the Hudson. I think that a river valley town is much the handsomest & largest featured. Like Concord & Lancaster for instance. Natural centers. Upon the hills of Bolton again the height of land between the Concord and Nashua I have seen how the peach flourishes. Nobscot too is quite imposing as seen from the west side of Goodman’s Hill. On the western side of a continuation of this hill is Wadsworth’s battle-field. Returning I saw in Sudbury 25 nests of the new–(cliff?) swallow under the eaves of a barn They seemed particularly social and loquacious neighbors–though their voices are rather squeaking. Their nests built side by side looked somewhat like large hornets nests, enough so to prove a sort of connexion. Their activity sociability & chattiness make them fit pensioners & neighbors of man–summer companions–for the barn yard. The last of may & the first of June the farmers are every where planting their corn & beans & potatoes.

June 27, Thursday: Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed from Liverpool toward New-York, aboard the US packet Waterloo.

Queen Victoria was riding in her carriage when an ex-army officer Robert Francis Pate, Jr. (1819-1895), possibly insane, whacked her on the bonnet with a short cane having a brass ferule, raising a bruise and producing a little blood. Pate would fail to prove insanity in court and would be sentenced to the maximum under the 1842 act, seven years in Tasmania. (Upon his return from the prison colony he would marry an heiress and lead a quiet life in London. The New York Times would report in 1899 that this had inflicted “a wound upon her Majesty the scar of which she still carries.”)

Lafcadio Hearn was born on the island of Santa Mauria off the east coast of Greece, product of a marriage between a Irish soldier, Surgeon-major Charles Bush Hearn, and a local girl, Rose Cerigote.

Summer: Herman Melville borrowed Henry Thoreau’s A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS from the library of Evert Augustus Duyckinck.

Prince Albert talked to Lord John Russell about the Lady Dacre incident (a lusty bedchamber invasion in the palace) when Queen Victoria asked for Lord Palmerston to be sacked as Foreign Secretary: How could the Queen consent to take a man as an adviser and confidential counsellor in all matters of State, religion, society, Court, etc., etc., he who as her Secretary of State and while a guest under her roof at Windsor Castle had committed a brutal attack upon one of her ladies? Had at night by stealth introduced himself into her apartment, barricaded afterwards the door and would have consummated his fiendish scheme by violence

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had not the miraculous efforts of his victim and such assistance attracted by her screams saved her. Lord Russell informed the queen that he would be unable to accomplish this because Lord Palmerston had such great popularity in the House of Commons.15

1851

July 9, Wednesday: Henry David Thoreau visited Harvard Observatory on Concord Avenue in Cambridge. Perhaps this had been suggested by John Downes, who earlier in the year had been in touch with the observatory about the occultation of stars. It has been presumed that it was the director, William Cranch Bond, age about 62, who showed Thoreau around and answered his questions. I suggest that it would more likely have been his son the assistant observer George Phillips Bond, six years out of Harvard College, who would

have been providing such a public relations service, and that the director would have been reserving himself for occasional visitors who thought they had cachet and who might be more easily offended, such as Prince Albert. My reasons for suspecting this are that I can’t believe the astronomers would have taken Thoreau seriously, plus George was more of Henry’s own age group, plus George is known to have had an abiding interest in nature and in particular in ornithology.16 ASTRONOMY

Thoreau stopped by the Boston Society of Natural History and checked out Volume I of the MEMOIRS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, new series.

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote to Frederick Douglass while serializing UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, asking him for contacts for information about slave life on cotton plantations. In this letter she took issue with his opposition to colonization and with his criticisms of Christianity: You may perhaps have noticed in your editorial readings a series of articles that I am furnishing for the Era under the title of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life among the Lowly” - In the course of my story, the scene will fall upon a cotton plantation - I am 15. The Commons liked the trick Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston (1784-1865), “Lord Pumice-Stone,” had — of always leaving a situation worse rather than better. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 39 HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUEEN VICTORIA PRINCE ALBERT very desirous to gain information from one who has been an actual labourer on one - & it occurs to me that in the circle of your acquaintance there might be one who would be able to communicate to me some such information as I desire - I have before me an able paper written by a southern planter in which the details & modus operandi are given from his point of sight - I am anxious to have some more from another standpoint - I wish to be able to make a picture that shall be graphic & true to nature in its details - Such a person as Henry Bibb, if in this country might give me just the kind of information I desire you may possible [sic] know of some other person - I will subjoin to this letter a list of questions which in that case, you will do me a favor by enclosing to the individual - with a request that he will at earliest convenience answer them - - I have noticed with regret, your sentiments on two subjects, - the church - & African Colonization - & with the more regret, because I think you have a considerable share of reason for your feelings on both these subjects - but I would willingly if I could modify your views on both points. After all my brother, the strength & hope of your oppressed race does lie in the church - In hearts united to Him ... Every thing is against you - but Jesus Christ is for you - & He has not forgotten his church misguided & erring though it be.... This movement must & will become a purely religious one ... christians north & south will give up all connection with [slavery] & later up their testimony against it - & thus the work will be done -

July 9, Wednesday: When I got out of the cars at Porter’s Cambridge this morning –I was pleased to see the handsome blue flowers of the Succory or Endive Cichorium intybus –which reminded me that within the hour I had been whirled into a new botanical region. They must be extremely rare, if they occur at all in Concord. This weed is handsomer than most garden flowers. Saw there also the Cucubalus behen or Bladder Campion. also The Autumnal dandelion Apargia Autumnalis. Visited the Observatory. Bond said they were cataloguing the stars at Washington? or trying to. They do not at ASTRONOMY Cambridge of no use with their force. Have not force enough now to make mag. obs. When I asked if an observer with the small telescope could find employment –he said “O yes –there was employment enough for observation with the naked eye –observing the changes in the brilliancy of stars &c &c –if they could only get 16.A case in point is the treatment awarded by historians of the science of astronomy to Henry Thoreau’s visit in the official study on the first four directorships of the Harvard College observatory, by Bessie (Judith) Zaban Jones and Lyle Gifford Boyd, entitled THE HARVARD COLLEGE OBSERVATORY: THE FIRST FOUR DIRECTORSHIPS, 1839-1919 (Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1971). This is a meticulous book, quite elaborately documented. Yet I note that in dealing with Thoreau’s visit, they have deviated from their standard practice: they have

1.) quoted from his JOURNAL without scholarly apparatus of footnotes and citations,

they have

2.) quoted incorrectly,

and they have

3.) tried to make a mere joke of his visit, by an aside the point of which seems to be that this guy Thoreau was so far out in left field, who else would come up with the sort of comment he could come up with, whatever his comment might mean if anybody ever tried to take such a person seriously.

In fact, Thoreau’s visit was quite serious, and bore directly upon the struggle the current director was having as a volunteer “gentleman” researcher with the likes of Professors Louis Agassiz and Benjamin Peirce, and all the other ideologs of scientific bureaucracy whose primary objective then as now was not discovery itself, but rather their seizure of control over all processes of discovery. I suppose I am saying that since we cannot expect serious people to take Thoreau seriously today, we can have no reason to assume that serious people would take Thoreau seriously in his own day — certainly not to the extent of extending VIP treatment to someone who was not acting in any manner as VIPs should act! 40 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRINCE ALBERT QUEEN VICTORIA

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QUEEN VICTORIA PRINCE ALBERT some good observers.– One is glad to hear that the naked eye still retains some importance in the estimation of astronomers. Coming out of town –willingly as usual –when I saw that reach of Charles River just above the Depot –the fair still water this cloudy evening suggesting the way to eternal peace & beauty –whence it flows –the placid lake- like fresh water so unlike the salt brine –affected me not a little– I was reminded of the way in which Wordsworth so coldly speaks of some natural visions or scenes “giving him pleasure”. This is perhaps the first vision of elysium on this rout from Boston. And just then I saw an encampment of Penobscots –their wigwams appearing above the rail road fence –they too looking up the river as they sat on the ground & enjoying the scene. What can be more impressive than to look up a noble river just at evening –one perchance which you have never explored –& behold its placid waters reflecting the woods –& sky lapsing inaudibly toward the ocean –to behold as a lake –but know it as a river – tempting the beholder to explore it –& his own destiny at once. haunt of waterfowl – – this was above the factories –all that I saw That water could never have flowed under a factory –how then could it have reflected the sky?

WALDEN: Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot Indians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and I thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am become somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night, and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this. I am far from jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of.

August 22, Friday: Prince Albert had invited the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes to stage an international yacht race around the Isle of Wight. In response, Commodore John Cox Stevens of the New-York Yacht Club had had an enlarged version of the local pilot boats constructed, naming this yacht the America. In English waters on this day, therefore, the 1st America’s Cup race took place. The America beat 14 English yachts around the island, coming to anchor ahead of them by more than half an hour.

August 22, Friday: I found last winter that it was expected that I would give some account of canada because I had visited it and because many of them had & so felt interested in the subject–visited it as the bullet visits the wall at which it is fired & from which it rebounds as quickly & flattened (somewhat damaged perchance)– Yes a certain man contracted to take 1500 live Yankees through Canada–at a certain rate & within a certain time– It did not matter to him what the commodity was– If only it were dilivered to him according to agreement at the right place & time–and rightly ticketed–so much in bulk–wet or dry on deck or in the hold– at the option of the carrier how to stow the cargo & not always right side up– In the mean while it was understood that the freight was not to be willfully & intentionally debarred from seeing the country if it had eyes– It was understood that there would be a country to be seen on either side–though that was a secret advantage which the contractors seemed not to be aware of– 42 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRINCE ALBERT QUEEN VICTORIA I fear that I have not got much to say not having seen much–for the very rapidity of the motion had a tendency to keep my eye lids closed– What I got by going to Canada was a cold and not till I get a fever shall I appreciate it. It is the fault of some excellent writers–De Quincy’s first impressions on seeing London suggest it to me– that they express themselves with too great fullness & detail. They give the most faithful natural & living account of their sensations mental & physical–but they lack moderation and sententiousness–they do not affect us by an ineffictual earnesst and a reserve of meaning–like a stutterer–they say all they mean. Their sentences are not concentrated and nutty. Sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them–which do not merely report an old but make a new impression– Sentences which suggest as many things and are as durable as a Roman Acqueduct To frame these that is the art of writing. Sentences which are expensive towards which so many volumes–so much life went–which lie like boulders on the page–up & down or across. Not mere repetition but creation. Which a man might sell his grounds & castle to build. If De Quincy had suggested each of his pages in a sentence & passed on it would have been far more excellent writing.– His style is no where kinked and knotted up into something hard & significant which you could swallow like a diamond without digesting.17

August 23, Saturday: Queen Victoria boarded the yacht America with a group of English yachtmen, who proceeded to search the hull (most discretely, I assure you) for hidden engines of propulsion.

Eventually Henry David Thoreau would shift his vocabulary somewhat, in accord with this 1851 capture of the “America’s cup” by the yacht America, in that he would refer to the osprey as “the America yacht of the air.”

1 August 23, Saturday: To walden to bathe at 5 /2 AM Traces of the heavy rains in the night The sand and gravel are beaten hard by them. 3 or 4 showers in succession. But the grass is not so wet as after an ordinary dew. The verbena hastata at the pond has reached the top of its spike –a little in advance of what I noticed yesterday– only one or two flowers are adhering. At the commencement of my walk I saw no traces of fog. but after detected fogs over particular meadows & high up some brooks’ valleys –and far in the deep cut the

17. In April-May 1841, Henry David Thoreau had been reading in an English translation, André Dacier’s THE LIFE OF PYTHAGORAS: WITH HIS SYMBOLS AND GOLDEN VERFES. TOGETHER WITH THE LIFE OF HIEROCLES AND HIS COMMENTARIES UPON THE VERSES. COLLECTED OUT OF THE CHOICEFT MANUFCRIPTS, AND TRANFLATED INTO FRENCH, WITH ANNOTATIONS. BY M. DACIER. NOW DONE INTO ENGLISH. THE GOLDEN VERSES TRANFLATED FROM THE GREEK BY N[ICHOLAS] ROWE, EFQ. (London: Printed for Jacob Tonfon, within Grays-Inn Gate next Grays-Inn Lane. 1707), a book in Bronson Alcott’s library, when he came across a comment about the discourse of Socrates of Athens. Thoreau copied “Hierocles said — ‘That the discourses of Socrates resembled cubes, because they remained firm wherever they might fall.’” into his literary notebook of the period. If it was the Dacier volume of 1707 from which he derived this sentiment, then Thoreau altered a reference to gaming dies into a reference to geometric shapes. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 43 HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUEEN VICTORIA PRINCE ALBERT wood fog 1st muskmelon this morning– I rarely pass the shanty in the woods, where human beings are lodged literally no better than pigs in a stye little children –a grown man & his wife –& an aged Grandmother –living this squalid life squatting on the ground – but I wonder if it can be indeed true that little Julia Ruyaden calls this place home comes here to rest at night – & for her daily food –in whom ladies & gentlemen in the village take an interest– Of what significance are charity & alms houses? That there they live unmolested! in one sense so many degrees below the alms house! beneath charity. It is admirable– Nature against alms houses. A certain wealth of nature not poverty it suggests– – Not to identify health & contentment aye and independence with the possession of this world’s goods. It is not wise to waste compassion on them. As I go through the deep cut I hear one or two early humble bees come out on the damp sandy bank – whose low hum sounds like distant horns from far in the horizon over the woods. It was long before I detected the bees that made it.– So far away musical it sounded like the shepherds in some distant eastern vale greeting the king of day. The farmers now carry –those who have got them– their early potatoes & onions to market – starting away early in the morning or at midnight. I see them returning in the afternoon with the empty barrels. Perchance the copious rain of last night will trouble those who had not been so provident as to get their hay from the Great Meadows where it is often lost. PM– walk to Anursnack & back over Stone B I sometimes reproach myself because I do not find anything attractive in certain more trivial employments of men –that I skip men so commonly & their affairs –the professions and the trades –do not elevate them at least in my thought and get some material for poetry out of them directly. I will not avoid then to go by where these men are repairing the Stone Bridge –see if I cannot see poetry in that –if that will not yield me a reflection. It is narrow to be confined to woods & fields and grand aspects of nature only.– The greatest & wisest will still be related to men. Why not see men standing in the sun & casting a shadow –even as trees– may not some light be reflected from them as from the stems of trees– I will try to enjoy them as animals at least. They are perhaps better animals than men. Do not neglect to speak of men’s low life and affairs with sympathy – though you ever so speak as to suggest a contrast between them & the ideal & divine– You may be excused if you are always pathetic – but do not refuse to recognize. Resolve to read no book –to take no walk –to undertake no enterprise but such as you can endure to give an account of to yourself Live thus deliberately for the most part. When I stopped to gather some blueberries by the roadside this afternoon I heard the shrilling of a cricket or a grasshopper close to me quite clear almost like a bell –a clear ring –incessant not intermittent like the song of the black fellow I caught the other day –and not suggesting the night, but belonging to day– It was long before I could find him though all the while within a foot or two– I did not know whether to search amid the grass & stones or amid the leaves. At last by accident I saw him, he shrilling all the while under an alder leaf 2 feet from the ground – a slender green fellow with long feelers & transparent wings. When he shrilled his wings which opened on each other in the form of a heart perpendicularly to his body like the wings of fairies, vibrated swiftly on each other. The apparently wingless female as I thought was near. We experience pleasure when an elevated field or even road in which we may be walking –holds its level toward the horizon at a tangent to the earth –is not convex with the earths surface –but an absolute level– On or under E side of Annursnack Epilobium coloratum colored willow herb (near the spring.) Also Polygonum sagitatum Scratch grass. The Price Farm Road –one of those everlasting roads– which the sun delights to shine along in an August afternoon – playing truant– Which seem to stretch themselves with terrene jest as the weary traveller journeys– Where there are three white sandy furrows (liræ), two for the wheels & one between them for the horse –with endless green grass borders between –& room on each side for huckleberries & birches.– where the walls indulge in peaks –not always parallel to the ruts –& golden rod yellows all the path– Which some elms began to fringe once but left off in despair it was so long. From no point on which can you be said to be at any definite distance from a town. I associate the beauty of Quebec with the steel-like and flashing air. Our little river reaches are not to be forgotten. I noticed that seen northward on the Assabet from the cause- way bridge near the 2nd stone bridge. There was man in a boat in the sun just disappearing in the distance round a bend. lifting high his Arms & dipping his paddle – as if he were a vision bound to land of the blessed.– far off as in picture. When I see Concord to purpose – I see it as if it were not real but painted, and what wonder if I do not speak to thee. I saw a snake by the roadside & touched him with my foot to see if he were alive – he had a toad in his jaws which he was preparing to swallow with his jaws distended to 3 times his width –but he relinquished his prey in haste & fled –& I thought as the toad jumped leisurely away with his slime covered hind quarters glistening in the sun –as if I his deliverer wished to interrupt his meditations –with out a shriek or fainting –I thought what a healthy indifference he manifested. Is not this the broad earth still – he said.

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PRINCE ALBERT QUEEN VICTORIA December 9, Tuesday: Henry Thoreau made no entry in his journal (he was busy surveying the Ministerial lots SE).

In France, a coup d’etat orchestrated by President Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and Count Morny (his half- brother) had brought an end to the “Second Republic” — in 1852 Louis Napoleon would begin his reign as Napoleon III and proclaim a 2d French Empire. Therefore on this day Hector Berlioz wrote of Louis- Napoléon Bonaparte “this coup d’etat was the work of a master; indeed, it was a veritable masterpiece.” Lord Palmerston would also congratulate Louis Napoleon on his coup d’etat. This would upset Lord John Russell and other radical members of the Whig party, and this time he would accept the advice of Queen Victoria and sack Palmerston (six weeks later Palmerston would take revenge by helping bring down Russell’s government).

1853

August 28, Sunday: In his diary Charles Greville, Clerk of the Privy Council, described Queen Victoria’s relationship with Lord Palmerston: Nothing will induce Her Majesty to have Palmerston as Prime Minister. There are old offences, when he was at the Foreign Office, which sunk deep into her mind, and besides this the recollection of his conduct before her marriage, when in her own palace he made an attempt on the person of one of her ladies, which she very justly resented as an outrage to herself. Palmerston, always enterprising and audacious with women, took a fancy to Lady Dacre and at Windsor Castle, where she was in waiting and he a guest, he marched into her room one night. His tender temerity met with an invincible resistance. The lady did not conceal his attempt and it came to the Queen’s ears. Her indignation was somehow pacified by Melbourne, then all- powerful. Palmerston got out of the scrape with his luck, but the Queen has never forgotten and will never forgive it.

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1855

William MacGillivray’s NATURAL HISTORY OF DEESIDE AND BRAEMAR (published posthumously on his behalf by order of Queen Victoria, herself a rare old bird).

In the Victoria colony of southeastern Australia, named of course after the queen, a law was passed to restrict Chinese immigration, which had soared during the recent gold rush. The new law stipulated that there would be a poll (head) tax on each Chinese immigrant. (Presumably this wasn’t Queen Victoria’s fiat but something dreamed up locally.) THE TRAFFIC IN MAN-BODY

William Henry Harvey’s “Some account of the marine botany of the colony of Western Australia,” in Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy (22:525-566). Also, his “Algae,” in J.D. Hooker’s THE BOTANY OF THE ANTARCTIC VOYAGE 2: FLORA NOVA-ZELANDIAE II (London: pages 211-266, plates 107-121).

Lord Palmerston became Prime Minister. Queen Victoria found it difficult to work with him18 but their relationship gradually improved. On Palmerston’s death she would remark in her journal: “We had, God knows! terrible trouble with him about Foreign Affairs. Still, as Prime Minister he managed affairs at home well, and behaved to me well. But I never liked him.”

18. Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston (1784-1865) was such an abrasive type that he was referred to –both among those who admired him and those who detested him– as “Lord Pumice-Stone.” 46 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRINCE ALBERT QUEEN VICTORIA In England, Richard Wagner conducted the orchestra of the Philharmonic Society in return for the sum of £200. He found out he didn’t like the cold, rainy English climate, which left him with a “collection of rheums and catarrhs,” and he commented on the fact that Queen Victoria’s nose was red (he also noted with interest that she wasn’t fat; she noted on her part that his satin pants fitted him real well). The critic of the Times found the 1st version of his Tannhäuser was “not music at all” (a 2nd version also would be unappreciated, later, in Paris).

Our national birthday, the 4th of July, Wednesday:19 It was while the Emerson gate was festooned with its usual 4th-of-July black mourning cloth for the slave that Whitman’s anonymous book LEAVES OF GRASS arrived in the mail.

In Worcester, Massachusetts, citizens demonstrated against city officials who had refuse to fund the usual drunken 4th-of-July event.

In Columbus, Ohio there was a parade of firemen, Turners, and other local tough-guy societies, and after awhile this segued into a downtown riot, leaving one corpse and several citizens injured. Inspired by the George and Godfrey Frankenstein panorama of Niagara Falls, the poet Corrila rhapsodized the birthday of our nation by a reference to these painters/presenters in a poem ending: “America, Niagara, Frankenstein— Three names united in a kindred bond— Glad freedom’s home — her voice of Praise — her mind.” The poet was equating this name, not at all sarcastically, with the collective mentation of America! George Frankenstein would later be renowned for his Civil War scenes while Godfrey Frankenstein’s painting “Lagonda Creek” has been described as representing the “Emersonian Transparent Eyeball,” the eye of inner

19. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 51st birthday.

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QUEEN VICTORIA PRINCE ALBERT man transcending the ego to view God’s nature, in the surrounding landscape, and himself, as one.

Godfrey enjoyed the romantic setting of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, painting dramatic scenes of the rugged landscape. (Well, lots of people enjoyed the romantic settings of the White Mountains of New Hampshire. In fact, in this year Currier & Ives was issuing a print featuring fishing at “Silver Cascade” in this area.)

Frankenstein Cliff in Crawford Notch was named after Godfrey by Dr. Bemis, who owned land in the area. Dr. Bemis, like Dippel and like the “Victor Frankenstein” of Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley’s romance FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, was fascinated with technology. He invented artificial teeth, developed a new genetic strain of apples, and is credited with taking the very first Daguerreotype landscape images (scenes in the White Mountains). This venue would be remarked upon by Henry Thoreau, Waldo

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PRINCE ALBERT QUEEN VICTORIA Emerson, Thomas Cole, Daniel Webster, and Hawthorne. For instance, in SKETCHES FROM MEMORY Hawthorne would describe the area around Frankenstein Cliff: A demon it might be fancied or one of the Titans, was traveling up the valley elbowing the heights carelessly aside as he passed, till at length a great mountain took its stand directly across his intended road. He tarries not for such an obstacle but rendering it asunder a thousand feet from peak to base, discloses its treasures of hidden minerals, its guileless water, all the secrets of the mountain’s innermost heart, with a mighty fracture of rugged precipices on each side. This is the Notch of the White Hills. It is only today that a name such as “Frankenstein” evokes either an image of a monster from a Hollywood makeup lab or an image of the “Mad Scientist” of Hollywood.

Hoping to promote South Carolina’s trade in sea island cotton, William Elliott was serving as South Carolina’s commissioner to the Paris Exposition, and on this day addressed the Imperial Agricultural Society of France (in a letter home from Europe, he wrote of having seen Queen Victoria’s legs20).

Thoreau saw Frederic Edwin Church’s “The Andes of Equador” at the Athenaeum gallery in Boston.

July 4. To Boston on way to Cape Cod with C. The schooner Melrose was advertised to make her first trip to Provincetown this morning at eight. We reached City (?) Wharf at 8.30. “Well, Captain Crocker, how soon do you start?” “To-morrow morning at 9 o’clock.” “But you have advertised to leave at 8 this morning.” “I know it, but we are going to lay over till to-morrow.”!!! So we had to spend the day in Boston, — at Athenaeum gallery, Alcott’s, and at the regatta. Lodged at Alcott’s, who is about moving to Walpole.

20. In this year she was 36 and although an exceedingly short person (4 ' 10 '' before osteoporosis would shorten her another couple of inches) she had not yet begun to become rotund. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 49 HDT WHAT? INDEX

QUEEN VICTORIA PRINCE ALBERT

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November 17, Saturday: Henry Thoreau saw John Goodwin returning in the morning from the river with two mink, one trapped, the other shot, and half a dozen muskrats.

The Reverend Dr. David Livingstone made himself the initial white man to see the Mosi-oa-Tunya waterfall (that name meant “smoke that thunders”), about which he would be exclaiming:

“Scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight.” Be that as it may, the Reverend would be supplying this waterfall with a more appropriate name, Victoria Falls, because, really, he was an Englishman dude and this was the era of colonialism and of course it was his monarch Queen Victoria who was the greatest smoker, and thunderer.

November 17: Just after dark the first snow is falling, after a chilly afternoon with cold gray clouds, when my hands were uncomfortably cold.

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QUEEN VICTORIA PRINCE ALBERT It is interesting to me to talk with Rice, he lives so thoroughly and satisfactorily to himself. Ile has learned that rare art of living, the very elements of which most professors do not know. His life has been not a failure but a success. Seeing me going to sharpen some plane-irons, and bearing me complain of the want of tools, he said that I ought to have a chest of tools. But I said it was not worth the while. I should not use them enough to pay for them. “You would use them more, if you had them,” said he. “When I came to do a piece of work I used to find commonly that I wanted a certain tool, and I made it a rule first always to make that tool. I have spent as much as $3000 thus on my tools.” Comparatively speaking, his life is a success; not such a failure as most men’s. He gets more out of any enterprise than his neighbors, for he helps himself more and lures less. Whatever pleasure there is in it he enjoys. By good sense and calculation he has become rich mid has invested his property well, yet practices a fair and neat economy, dwells not in untidy luxury. It costs him less to live, and he gets more out of life, than others. To get his living, or keep it, is not a hasty or disagreeable toil. Ile works slowly but surely, enjoying the sweet of it. Ile buys a piece of meadow at a profitable rate, works at it in pleasant weather, he and his son, when they are inclined, goes a-fishing or a-bee-hunting or a-rifle-shooting quite as often, and thus the meadow gets redeemed, and potatoes get planted; perchance, and he is very sure to have a good crop stored in his cellar in the fall, and some to sell. Ile always has the best of potatoes there. In the same spirit in which he and his son tackle up their Dobbin (he never keeps a fast horse) and go a-spearing or a-fishing through the ice, they also tackle up and go to their Sudbury farm to hoe or harvest a little, and when they return they bring home a load of stumps in their hay-rigging, which impeded their labors, but, perchance, supply them with their winter wood. All the woodchucks they shoot or trap in the bean-field are brought home also. And thus their life is a long sport and they know not what hard times are. Rice says there are no bees worth hunting about here now. Ile has sometimes been to a large wood in the west part of Sudbury, and also to Nagog, yet there was little honey there. Saw Goodwin this afternoon returning from the river with two minks, one trapped, the other shot, and half a dozen muskrats. Mink seem to be more commonly seen now, and the rising of the river begins to drive out the muskrats. Labaume says that he wrote his journal of the Campaign in Russia each night, in the midst of incredible danger and suffering, with “a raven’s quill, and a little gunpowder, mixed with some melted snow, in the hollow of my hand,” the quill cut and mended with “the knife with which I had carved my scanty morsel of horse-flesh.” Such a statement promises well for the writer’s qualifications to treat such a theme. THE CAMPAIGN IN RUSSIA

1856

At the age of 16 Bertie was required to attend Faraday’s Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institute, on Attraction, and produce a report of what he was learning about chemistry. His father Prince Albert would examine these notes and complain of their inadequacy.

A collection of sentimental stories by Horatio Alger, Jr.’s BERTHA’S CHRISTMAS VISION.

The Reverend William Rounseville Alger’s THE POETRY OF THE ORIENT, OR METRICAL SPECIMENS OF THE THOUGHT, SENTIMENT, AND FANCY OF THE EAST, PREFACED BY AN ELABORATE DISSERTATION was published in Boston by the firm of Whittemore, Niles and Hall. (This editions of poems translated from the Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit languages would be republished in an enlarged 2d edition in Boston by the firm of Roberts Brothers in 1865, and in an further enlarged 4th edition in 1874, and in a further enlarged 5th edition in 1883.) POETRY OF THE ORIENT

The Reverend’s AMERICAN VOICE ON THE LATE WAR IN THE EAST was published in Boston by the firm of John P. Jewett & Co.

The Reverend’s THE CHARITIES OF BOSTON, OR, TWENTY YEARS AT THE WARREN-STREET CHAPEL: AN ADDRESS / DELIVERED AT THE CHAPEL BY WILLIAM R. ALGER, SUNDAY EVENING, JAN. 27, 1856 was published in Boston by the firm of J. Wilson.

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1858

Queen Victoria proclaimed the permanency of British rule over India. To make sure that everyone got the message that opposing Great Britain was an exceedingly risky agenda, it was arranged that there was to be a mass execution of Sepoy mutineers, inventively, by tying them individually over the muzzles of cannon. Generations of little white boys would be enabled to play the popular game “blow the guts out of the little brown man.”

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1859

Mr William White Cooper’s ON WOUNDS AND INJURIES OF THE EYE, the initial ophthalmic textbook in English devoted to injuries of the eye. He was appointed Surgeon-Oculist in Ordinary to Queen Victoria.

During the first few months of this year, Victoria’s son Albert Edward was making an educational trip to Rome. Then he spent the summer studying under Lyon Playfair and others at the University of Edinburgh in preparation for matriculating in October at Christ Church, Oxford.

1861

Albert Edward, Prince of Wales transferred from Christ Church, Oxford to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he would be tutored in history by Charles Kingley, Regius Professor of Modern History. Prince Albert opened a dossier on his son Bertie’s marital prospects (inspecting this dossier, we find that one of the favorable comments made in regard to the Princess Alexandra as royal marriage material was that she had not as yet “read a novel of any kind”).

Nicholas A. Woods, in THE PRINCE OF WALES IN CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES, wondered about Niagara Falls in the following interestingly suicidal manner: “Who that has ever gazed down here from this bridge can wonder at the belief of the Indians that an evil spirit resided beneath these dreadful waters?21 ...As you gaze upon the rush you feel a horrid yearning in your heart to plunge in and join the mad whirl and see the mystery out.”22

In this year if you were feeling truly desperate, you could attempt suicide with a sackful of tomatoes. Although Godey’s Lady’s Book had come to accept that the fruit could be both “delicious and wholesome” when properly prepared, it was also warning that you needed to really cook cook cook these strange fruits — you needed to simmer the little mothers in fact for not less than three hours.

Fort Niagara would be reoccupied shortly after the outbreak of civil war, but not because the post was considered of any importance to the war effort. A Confederate attack on Western New York was of course considered rather unlikely. The explanation is that the soldiers being assigned there simply could not be used elsewhere. They were of the 7th United States Infantry Regiment that had surrendered to a Confederate force at Mesilla, New Mexico on July 25, 1861. Following common practice, these prisoners of war had been paroled on the basis of their promise not to fight again until the procedures of formal exchange had been completed. After their return to the North, the companies of the 7th Infantry were therefore stationed at border posts, far from the front. The formal exchange procedure for these men would come finally, in 1863, and the troops would then join in the civil strife and Fort Niagara would once again be a pretty fort without a garrison.

21. The native American tribes who lived adjacent to the falls of the Niagara strait, between the eastern tip of Lake Erie and the western end of Lake Ontario, who were initially the Onguiaarhas and later the Senecas, of course had legends about the falls. One of the legends was that Hihnon, the benevolent Seneca thunder god, lived in a crystal cave beneath the cataract. Another of the legends had not only Hihnon but also a nameless negative demon who would sometimes appear as a great water serpent. Then again, there was a story of a nameless demon who demanded at least four human sacrifices per year — perhaps this one could be an expression of Tawiskaro, a Seneca devil with a heart of flint, the maker of cliffs and precipices, thorns and briers, whose mother died while giving birth to him through her axilla. 22. One may speculate that there must have been some sort of linkage between the 19th-Century concept of the sublime and repressed forbidden thoughts of suicide. Otherwise, it would be difficult to explain their great preoccupation with the sublime. 54 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

PRINCE ALBERT QUEEN VICTORIA August: Queen Victoria and her consort Albert visited their son Albert “Bertie” Edward at Curragh Camp in Ireland, where the Prince of Wales would be obtaining some military experience (etc.) on maneuvers with the Grenadier Guards.

Henry Thoreau visited “Brooklawn,” the home of Friend Daniel Ricketson in New Bedford:

[D]uring the summer of 1861, the last one he saw, he made me a visit at New Bedford, and though suffering by night and by day with his troublesome cough, was able to ride about the country and by the seashore, as well as to take short rambles for his favorite plants, or in search of those not found in his own vicinity of Concord. The following is a list of the plants he found at this time, August, 1861, which before he had not seen: — Malva Sylvestris, Spartina Juncea, Teucrium Canadense, Chenopodina Maritima, Obione Arenaria, Proserpinaca Pectinacea, Linum Virginianum, Aster Spectabilis, and an undescribed species of Lactuca.

Ricketson, who had not seen Thoreau for almost a year, attempted without success to persuade him to visit a particular New Bedford physician, Dr. Denniston, who was an advocate of the water practice. “My impression is that his case is a very critical one as to recovery; he has a bad cough and expectorates a great deal, is emaciated considerably; his spirits, however, appear as good as usual, his appetite good. Unless some favorable symptom shows itself soon, I fear that he will gradually decline.” After having failed to persuade Thoreau to visit this practitioner, he would impose upon the physician to go to Concord: “Dr. Denniston, to whom I recommended you to go, has kindly consented on his way from New Bedford to Northampton, to go to Concord to see you. He has had much experience and success in the treatment of bronchitis, and I hope his

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QUEEN VICTORIA PRINCE ALBERT visit to you will result in placing yourself under his care, which I much desire.” He would accompany this physician to Concord, but the two of them would be “unable to awaken in Thoreau an interest in his mode of treating disease by the water practice.” (After that visit, Ricketson would not again see Thoreau alive.)

November 9, Saturday: Fighting continued at Ivy Mountain / Ivy Creek / Ivy Narrows.

This was Prince Bertie’s 20th birthday. When rumors would arise that he had smuggled Nellie Clifden into Windsor Castle for a tryst, he would be able to reassure his father Prince Albert that those rumors had been false — because it had been another woman who had been smuggled into the castle.

November 25, Monday: Worried father Prince Albert visited his son Bertie at Cambridge, to discuss his son’s sexual liaison with the Irish actress Nellie Clifden. The two had a long walk and talk in the rain, the gist of which would have been “For goodness sake keep it in your pants.”

[This seems to be the appropriate place to introduce a comment about self-fulfilling prophesies. Early on these parents had subjected their child to a series of inspections by a reputable phrenologist, Dr. Andrew Combe, who had felt his head bumps and announced, essentially, that due to “defective” brain development Bertie was going to be naturally a sexy sort of guy who would have a lifelong problem with keeping it in his pants. His brain would make him do it! Bertie had grown up knowing that this was his scientific diagnosis and had never been informed that this “science” was hokum. So, what do you expect, question mark? Parents, let this be a warning to you — do not let anyone manipulate your child’s head bumps. Beyond that, do not allow anyone even to cast your child’s horoscope! There is such a thing as the self-fulfilling prophesy and it is the duty of every decent pair of parents to protect their offspring from that sort of mentalist trap.]

“I look upon Phrenology as the guide of Philosophy, and the handmaid of Christianity; whoever disseminates true Phrenology, is a public benefactor.” — Horace Mann, Sr.

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December: Prince Albert died of typhoid fever. Oh you horrid boy Dirty Bertie you spawn of Satan you killed your own father my beloved Albert for whom I will now grieve for all of my life! Queen Victoria continued to carry out her constitutional duties such as reading all diplomatic despatches. However, she completely withdrew from public view and now spent most of her time in the Scottish Highlands at her home at Balmoral Castle, drinking claret mixed with whiskey. Victoria even refused requests from her government to open Parliament in person. Politicians began to question whether Victoria was earning the money that the State paid her. While at Balmoral the queen became very close to John Brown, a Scottish servant. Victoria’s friendship with Brown caused some concern and rumors began to circulate that the two had secretly married. Hostility towards Victoria increased and some Radical MPs even spoke in favor of abolishing the British monarchy and replacing it with a republic.

Upon the death of Prince Albert, Charles Dickens cancelled some of his public readings of GREAT EXPECTATIONS.

Abolitionist lecturers began at this point to dominate the annual lecture course of the Smithsonian Institution sponsored by the Washington Lecture Association, which was the leading lectern in Washington DC, paving the way for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and pushing the US President toward issuance of an Emancipation Proclamation. What had happened was that the head of the Institution, Henry, had become so suspected of sympathy to the Southern cause, that he had become unable to resist the pressure to allow the lectures. Pierpont had eased Henry’s concerns by limiting the course to twelve lectures and by inviting scholars such as Edward Everett, a former Whig politician and ex-president of Harvard College; Orestes A. Brownson; Oliver Wendell Holmes; James Russell Lowell; Ralph Waldo Emerson; and Cornelius C. Felton, president of Harvard College, to counterbalance abolitionists such as Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune; Henry Ward Beecher, minister at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York; Galusha Anderson, pastor at the Second Baptist Church of St. Louis; Wendell Phillips, an immediate abolitionist from Boston; and the Reverend George Barrell Cheever (1807-1890), a Congregational minister from New-York. To keep out troublemakers, high ticket prices were set and tickets could only be purchased several hours in advance of the lecture. A ticket for a single lecture cost twenty-five cents. A ticket for the entire course of lectures cost three dollars for a lady and a gentleman, two dollars for a gentleman, and a dollar and a half for a lady. The organization, however, had not been able to secure many of the lecturers Pierpont had promised Henry and invited Radical replacements for them. Moreover, it doubled the course from twelve to twenty-four lectures to accommodate the great interest in abolition circles to speak in Washington. Of those with a literary reputation,

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QUEEN VICTORIA PRINCE ALBERT only Brownson and Emerson accepted Pierpont’s invitation, and they were instructed to lecture on politics rather than literature. The association had hoped to have Everett, the leading American orator, open the course, but he was unavailable. The lectures offered by Horace Greeley, Wendell Phillips, the Reverend George B. Cheever, and other abolitionists from this point until April 1862 offer a case study of radical antislavery Christian political activity and its clash with American science. The lectures aroused among these establishment scientists great fears of mob violence and roiled their Institution in popular disputes. Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, believing that black people could live with white people only in a state of servitude, would close the course in April 1862 by forbidding further lectures on partisan topics.

At some point during this month the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson had a last conversation with his failing friend Thoreau: [H]e mentioned most remarkable facts [about the local distribution of bird species], which had fallen under his unerring eyes. • The Hawk most common in Concord, the Red-Tailed species [Red-tailed Hawk Buteo jamaicensis], is not known near the sea-shore, twenty miles off, — or at Boston or Plymouth. • The White-Breasted Sparrow is rare in Concord [does the Rev. intend the White-throated Sparrow Zonotrichia albicollis?]: but the Ashburnham woods, thirty miles away, are full of it. • The Scarlet Tanager’s [Scarlet Tanager Piranga olivacea’s] is the commonest note in Concord, except the Red-Eyed Flychatcher’s [is the Rev. referring to the Olive-sided Flycatcher Contopus borealis that Thoreau called the “Pe- pe”?]; yet one of the best field-ornithologists in Boston had never heard it. • The Rose-Breasted Grosbeak [Rose-breasted Grosbeak Pheucticus ludovicianus] is seen not infrequently at Concord, though its nest is rarely found; but in Minnesota Thoreau found it more abundant than any other bird, far more so than the Robin [American Robin Turdus migratorius].

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PRINCE ALBERT QUEEN VICTORIA • But his most interesting statement, to my fancy, was, that, during a stay of ten weeks on Mount Monadnock, he found that

the Snow-Bird [Dark-eyed Junco Junco hyemalis] built its nest on the top of the mountain, and probably never came down through the season. That was its Arctic; and it would probably yet be found, he predicted, on Wachusett and other Massachusetts peaks.

(We don’t know of an occasion on which Thoreau lived atop Monadnock for ten weeks. His longest stay of which we now have record would have been the summer of 1844, when he also hiked in the Catskills, and that entire summer itinerary could not possibly have begun before May 1st and could not possibly have continued past August 14th, for a total “window of opportunity” of some 15 weeks. That was before our guy had become greatly preoccupied with birdwatching. Any remarks that Thoreau made about birds and this mountain would likely have been based on observations made during his four-day-and-five-night trip there in August 1860, by which point he had learned the difference between a hawk and a handsaw. However, had the Rev. learned something through direct conversation, about the trip Thoreau had made as a youth in 1844, that would indicate an extended mountain camping experience of which we do not now have record?)

1863

Bertie had reached the age of 21. His mommy Queen Victoria lamented to his elder sister that he “shows more and more how totally, totally unfit he is for ever becoming King!”

“I look upon Phrenology as the guide of Philosophy, and the handmaid of Christianity; whoever disseminates true Phrenology, is a public benefactor.” — Horace Mann, Sr.

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March 9, Monday: Queen Victoria took bride Alexandra and bridegroom Bertie to Frogmore, to obtain the blessing of the corpse Albert in the royal mausoleum.

General Ulysses S. Grant sent a fake gunboat down the river in front of Vicksburg, attracting a lot of shot and shell. The vessel had been constructed of logs and its smokestacks were merely stacks of empty barrels. Other barrels had circles of black paint in the middle of their lids, to resemble mortars — the Union troops of course referred to this as their “Quaker” gunboat.

1868

While Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was visiting England, Queen Victoria invited him to take tea with her, and she noticed while he was walking down a corridor in her palace that her servants seemed to be acutely aware of just who this American was. Later on that night she would confide to her diary that she had made inquiries and had discovered “that many of his poems are familiar to them.” Judging by the length of his grave, which is most remarkably truncated, the poet was by no means a tall man — so he and the diminutive queen may have made a rather engaging couple as they strolled down that corridor:

A Truncated Table of Altitudes

Queen Victoria, prior to osteoporosis 4 '10 '' 1 typical female of Thoreau’s period 5 ' 2 /2'' 1 typical Neanderthal adult male 5 ' 4 /2'' Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 5 ' ? '' Henry Thoreau 5 ' 7 '' 1 the average male of Thoreau’s period 5 ' 7 /2 ''

Does anyone know exactly how short a fellow Longfellow was?

During this year William Gladstone, leader of the Liberals in the House of Commons, became Prime Minister. Gladstone’s government had plans for a series of reforms including the extension of the franchise, elections by secret ballot and a reduction in the power of the House of Lords. The Queen disagreed totally with such policies as these but lacked the influence to stop Prime Minister Gladstone’s coalition from passing either the 1867 Reform Act or the 1872 Secret Ballot Act.

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1869

March 4, Thursday: Thomas Carlyle visited the Queen of England in her castle home. At one point this confirmed explainer became so intense in informing her about the beauties of his Galloway that he pinned her dress to the floor with the leg of his chair.23

Ulysses S. Grant was inaugurated as President of the United States of America. INAUGURAL ADDRESS

23. Talk about captivating one’s audience! We were not amused. To her journal, Victoria would describe this man as “a strange- looking eccentric old Scotchman, who holds forth, in a drawling melancholy voice, with a broad Scotch accent, upon Scotland and upon the utter degeneration of everything.” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 61 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1872

February 29, Thursday: After the assassination attempt of 1839 and the two attempts of 1842 and the attempt of 1849 and the attempt of 1850, a 6th threat was made against Queen Victoria — and then a final attempt would be made in 1882. What happened was that as the queen’s carriage emerged from Buckingham Palace it was confronted by a 17-year-old Irishman, Arthur O’Connor, who was attempting to demand release of Fenian prisoners. Prince Arthur knocked an unloaded rusty flintlock pistol out of this Irish youth’s hand and he was subdued by Victoria’s servant John Brown.

O’Connor would be sentenced to flogging and transportation but the queen would spare him the flogging. The queen would persuade herself that John Brown alone had saved her life and he would receive a medal (the queen would find herself being humorously referred to by her subjects as “Mrs. Brown”).

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1874

The Tory Benjamin Disraeli regained the Prime Ministership from William Gladstone, leader of the Liberals — and this time would be able to hold the leadership until 1878. He would seek to bring back the British Empire. First in 1875, he would purchase for Britain a large interest in the Suez Canal, which was a key link in the shipping route that connected Britain with its vast empire in India and the Far East.24 At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Disraeli would help prevent Russian expansion in Turkey and would award Cypress to Berlin.

Queen Victoria much preferred Disraeli’s conservatism to William Gladstone’s liberalism. She also approved of the man’s charm. The Prime Minister would later remark that: “Everyone likes flattery, and when you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.”

Macedon, New York’s Erie Canal Lock #60 was converted to a double lock.

12,424,705 barrels of wheat and corn were shipped on the Illinois and Michigan Canal.

Once again work began on Wisconsin’s Portage Canal. The US Government began rebuilding the Fort Winnebago lock.

Colonel Merrill recommended Congress authorize thirteen locks and movable dams on the Ohio River, between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Wheeling, West Virginia.

1880

Queen Victoria was very upset when William Gladstone replaced Benjamin Disraeli as Prime Minister.

(When Disraeli would die during the following year, Victoria would write to his private secretary that she was devastated by the news and could not stop crying. Gladstone’s relationship with Victoria would fail to improve. As well as her objection to the 1884 Reform Act, Victoria would disagree with Gladstone’s foreign policy. Gladstone believed that Britain should never support a cause that was morally wrong! Victoria held the contrary view, that not to pursue Britain’s best interest was not only misguided, but close to treachery.)

24. The hopelessly Eurocentric term “Far East” had been created in 1852 to designate “the extreme eastern regions of the Old World.” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 63 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1882

The London Zoo sold Jumbo Elephant to Phineas Taylor Barnum for $10,000. I don’t know how much that was per pound. The loss of the animal to merry old England caused such an uproar that Parliament and Queen Victoria acted to retain it, but Barnum was nevertheless able to sail with his purchase. Jumbo’s first appearance on this side of the water yielded the showman $30,000, which was nice but not nearly as much as he might have obtained had he been able to exhibit Victoria.

March 2, day: Queen Victoria was leaving Windsor railway station where Scotsman Roderick McLean was lying in wait. However, he was spotted by some boys from nearby Eton College who set about him with their umbrellas so his shot missed. He would be tried for high treason and the jury would find him “not guilty, but insane,” which meant he would spend the remainder of his life at Broadmoor Asylum in Berkshire, England.

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1885

Charles George Gordon, known as Chinese Gordon, was killed during the siege of Khartoum by the forces of the current pretender to the status of “Mahdi.” (He had been governor of the Sudan from 1877 to 1880 and had returned in 1884 to aid the Egyptian government that was faced with the fanatics of this fundamentalist Moslem movement. In our own era, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini would be asked again and again by his followers: “Are you the Mahdi?”) MAHDISM

Queen Victoria sent a telegram to Prime Minister William Gladstone criticizing his failure to take action to save General Gordon. Gladstone was furious because the telegram had been uncoded and had been delivered by a local station-master — as a result of this telegram it became public knowledge that Victoria disapproved of her prime minister’s foreign policy. The relationship would become even more strained when Gladstone would discover that Victoria was passing on confidential documents to the Marquess of Salisbury, leader of the Conservatives. Then the Marquess of Salisbury became Prime Minister, and would remain in power for 12 of the last 15 years of Victoria’s reign. The Queen shared Salisbury’s imperialist views and would be thrilled when General Kitchener was successful in avenging General Gordon in the Sudan in 1898. A nationalist first and a moralist only second, she would enthusiastically support British action against the Boers in South Africa.

1886

May 29, Saturday: Queen Victoria, whose personal regard had been won by Mr William White Cooper, announced her intention of dubbing him a Knight Bachelor.

Pharmacist John Pemberton took out an ad in the Atlanta Journal advertising “Coca-Cola.” The drink contained cocaine from the coca leaf and caffeine from the kola nut, hence its name. The formula called for the use of five ounces of coca leaf per gallon of syrup, not at all an insignificant amount of the stimulant (in 1904 the process would be altered to utilize “spent” leaves, leaves from which most of the drug had already been extracted).

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June 1, Tuesday: Mr William White Cooper, oculist to Queen Victoria, Knight Bachelor designate, died at Fulmer in Buckinghamshire. (Sir D’Arcy Power had it that Mr White Cooper had been the last medical man to fight a duel; however, the details of said “last duel” are unknown and we are now aware that it was not the last, for in 1898 in Paris Dr. Jean Charcot and Dr. Lagelouze would engage in an honor duel with swords. The Queen would direct that despite the fact that he had died merely as a Knight Bachelor designate rather than as one who had actually completed the ceremony of kneeling on a pillow before her and being “dubbed,” his wife should be entitled to the honour and precedence of Dame Cooper. He had, surviving him, also three sons and two daughters.)

1894

May 21, Monday: The new Manchester Ship Canal had been in use since New Years Day, providing the city with direct access to the sea. On this day Queen Victoria “opened” it.

According to a letter from Eben J. Loomis to Alfred Winslow Hosmer of this date, which is preserved in the Alfred W. Hosmer Collection of the Concord Free Public Library, The story of the meeting at the jail of Mr. Emerson and Mr. Thoreau was told me by Maria Thoreau in the following words:— “Henry, why are you here?” “Waldo, why are you not here?” So I think that may be considered authentic and accurate. WALDO EMERSON MARIA THOREAU This emerging tall-tale-with-a-moral would see its 1st publication on December 14, 1939, in an obituary of a lifelong Concord resident, “Howard Melvin Passes Away in 85th Year” in the Concord Journal. Since Melvin had not been alive when Thoreau was jailed, this was at best hearsay: One time Emerson and Thoreau agreed not to pay their taxes because they were so high. Well Thoreau didn’t pay and they put him in the lock-up. When Emerson came to see him I guess he’d gone ahead and paid his because he said to Thoreau, “Henry! Henry! Why do I find you here?” Then Thoreau said, “Ralph! Ralph! Why aren't you here?”

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1901

January 22, Tuesday: Alexandrina Victoria, who had in 1837 become Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and of all British conquests across the earth, Empress of India, and had survived seven thwarted assassination attempts, died at the age of 82 after a reign of 63 years in the presence of her family (including her grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany) at Osborne on the Isle of Wight.

George III 1760 1820

The Prince 1811 1820 Regency

George IV 1820 1830

William IV 1830 1837

Victoria 1837 1901

She would be succeeded by her son Albert “Dirty Bertie” Edward, who had been waiting for this for all of four decades, as Edward VII.

Two women reigned during Thoreau’s florut. There were many similarities:

Dynasty Period Person Florut

Windsor 1837-present Queen Victoria 1837-1901 Ch’ing 1644-1911 The Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi 1861-1908

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The Queen is dead. Long live the King.

January 23, Wednesday: An obituary appeared in The New York Times: OBITUARY Longest Reign In English History The Story of Victoria’s Life and Queenhood Grief for Her Husband She Was at One Time Much Criticised for Living in Seclusion The Monarch Just Dead Witnessed the Growth of the British Empire to the Greatest in the World By THE NEW YORK TIMES The reign of Queen Victoria, who came to the throne of her ancestors in 1837, was the longest in English history; indeed, it was one of the longest in the history of Europe, whether the ancient nations or the modern be considered. English reigns remarkable for length are those of Henry VI., 39 years; Henry

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VIII., 38; Elizabeth, 45; Edward III., 50; Henry III., 56, and George III., 60. It thus appears that the only reigns besides Victoria’s that exceeded fifty years are those of Henry III. and George III. In the case of Henry, however, it is to be borne in mind that he ascended the throne when only a boy of ten, with Pembroke and others as Regents, while George III. during the last ten years of his life was a hopeless lunatic, and his son served as Regent until his death. Victoria’s more than half century of reign began when she was a grown-up woman and legally of age. No Regent was necessary. At the time of her death also she was the oldest monarch that ever ruled Great Britain. French history, however, supplies us with a reign considerably longer than hers, that of Louis XIV., who sat on the throne of France from 1643 until 1715, a period of seventy-two years, of which only nine belong to the Regency of Anne of Austria. But German history yields us no parallel. Neither the Carlovingian, the Hohenstaufen, the Hapsburg, nor the Austrian line affords a single reign that exceeded fifty years in length. Nor does the long line of Roman Emperors who ruled in Rome supply an instance of such length of regal days in power. The longest reign was that of Constantine the Great, 31 years; the next longest that of Valentinian III., 30 years, while reigns so celebrated in Roman annals as those of Tiberius, Claudius, Domitian, Trajan, and Diocletian extended over only 23, 13, 15, 19, and 21 years, respectively. If we include the later Eastern Empire, one reign of 56 years (Basil II., who had a colleague for seven years) is found and one of 48 (Constantine VII., who had several colleagues). But this is the best Rome can show. In another and greater sense, however, was this reign a memorable one in English history. Literary endeavor and the search for knowledge in no other single reign, save that of Elizabeth, made such splendid contributions to the stock of new facts and written words that men will not willingly let die. Science in this reign made such extraordinary additions to almost every department of knowledge and industry that there is no other reign to be mentioned in the same sentence. The scientific results achieved by the mind of man in the age of Victoria stand alone as at once the wonder and the blessing of mankind. Many former reigns contributed their shares to the dominions over which Victoria ruled, but no former sovereign actually reigned over anything like so extensive an area as she. In her time vast areas were added to the British Empire in Africa, India, and the Pacific, so that it was never quite so true as in her time that the British Empire was one on which the sun never set. Never before could it have been said by Webster with the same truth, in that fine and famous sentence of his, that the British Empire was one “whose morning drum beat, following the sun and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England.” Parentage and Childhood Though the family name of Queen Victoria was Guelph, and though the royal house to which she belonged was that of Hanover, the

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blood that coursed through her veins was a mixture of blood that had furnished England with sovereigns before the time of the Norman William down through the eight hundred and more years that had elapsed with the death of George III. When the Saxon Matilda became the Queen of Henry I., the Saxon and Norman lines were united on the English throne, and it was a daughter of Matilda, married in France, who brought in the Plantagenet line. Through a marriage with Elizabeth of York the Tudor family gained the Plantagenet blood, and by a marriage with the Princess Margaret, sister of Henry VIII. and daughter of Henry VII., the Scotch house of Stuart gained the blood of the Tudors. From this house of Stuart, Victoria claimed her crown. Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, eldest daughter of James I., first of the Stuart Kings of England, had a daughter, Sophia, who became the wife of Ernest August of Hanover, and thus the mother of that son who became King George I. of England. Elizabeth of Bohemia was a devoted Protestant, though as a child she had been reared in Catholic surroundings. Her life as a Queen was a stormy and eventful one, for those were days when religion and war were natural associates. Her steadfast devotion to Protestantism cost her much. Her faith was sorely put to the test throughout many years, but Protestants in England got to regard her as a kind of martyr. She could little have believed, however, that such momentous results to her family were to ensue from this devotion. It was that vital point in England’s Constitution which secures crown to “heirs of the body, being Protestant,” which made a descendant of hers two generations later King of England, and thus set up the Hanoverian line. George III. was the father of a numerous family. Nine were sons, of whom two died young, and six were daughters. The eldest son, afterward George IV., had only one child by his Queen, and this a daughter who died childless soon after marriage. Frederick, the second son, having no children, died before his elder brother, thus making William, the third son, the successor after George IV. William was the father of two daughters, but both died in their infancy. Other children he had had, but they were illegitimate. Owing to the long Continental wars of the period and the Royal Marriage act, this son, William, and the next, Edward, Duke of Kent, had remained unmarried until they were middle-aged men. The death of George IV.’s daughter and only child had now made the question of succession very serious. These two sons and the seventh son, Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, were accordingly instructed with their duty to find wives of princely birth, and all three in the same year espoused each a Princess. Two of them, William and Edward, were married on the same day. It was William’s fortune, as already said, to lose the two daughters that came to his marriage with the Princess, but Edward, who was blessed with only one daughter, like Viola, she was “all the daughters of her father’s house, (and all the brothers, too”) not only did not lose the child, she lived to become the illustrious Victoria, Queen and Empress. The bride whom the Duke of Kent had chosen was already a widow. Her first husband had been the Prince of Leiningen. She was a daughter of the house of Saxe-Coburg, had had two children by her first marriage, and was now a little over thirty years of

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age and beautiful. The Duke of Kent, when he married her, was a tall and rather stoutish man of fifty-eight. For various reasons, one of them the want of means to live becomingly in England, they made their home in the Castle of Amorbach, in Bavaria, which was part of the inheritance of the Duchess’s young son by her first husband. In a short time there was promise of a child, and the Duke, anxious that the possible heir to the British throne should be born in England, concluded to go with his wife to London. They obtained apartments within the plain brick walls of Kensington Palace. So poor was he that the help of friends was required to make the change; none of these friends, however, were his brothers; the brothers were unfriendly to the Duke. In Kensington Palace the apartments assigned to them were those which had been added to the old palace by Sir Christopher Wren. Here, on the 24th of May, 1819, was born the future Queen of England. From her mother the infant received the name of Victoria, and from the Emperor of Russia that of Alexandrina. For some years she was commonly known as the Princess Drina, the name Victoria being substituted later on in her girlhood. Considerable pomp attended the infant’s baptism. The gold font which had long been in a state of disuse was brought from the Tower, and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London were in attendance to perform the ceremony. Among those present was Prince Leopold, brother of the child’s mother, afterward King of the Belgians, and then the childless widower of that Princess Charlotta, who had been the only heir of George IV. Prince Leopold was a devoted brother and uncle. The future of the Duchess was not bright, and to this brother she became deeply indebted for practical assistance through many years. When the child was six months old she was taken by her parents to Sidmouth, on the Devonshire coast, and here in a cottage the Duke soon afterward met his death. He had come home one day with his feet wet, after a long walk, and had stopped to play with his daughter before changing his boots. A chill was the result, and a fatal attack of inflammation of the lungs ensued. Extremely odd was it that the father of Victoria should be a man who did not marry until he was fifty-eight, who should then have a child in a year, and should die seven months after the child was born. This misfortune to the Duchess was attended by others. George III. died soon afterward, and as his successor had had an unfriendly feeling for his brother Edward, little help was to be expected now for Edward’s widow and daughter, who had been deprived by Edward’s death of all means of subsistence. It was in this emergency that Prince Leopold’s brotherly generosity became of such value to the stricken family. Back to Kensington they went, and thence to Claremont, the house which belonged to Leopold, and where his short married life had been spent. Here he often received his sister and niece for long periods, and saw that their wants were supplied. Years afterward Victoria said the days she spent at Claremont were the happiest of her childhood. All the more creditable was the devotion of Prince Leopold when it is recalled that the child born to him, dead a

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few years before Victoria’s birth, had it lived, would have been the direct heiress to the throne. For many years after her birth, Victoria’s position as heir apparent was doubtful. George IV. was still alive, hating his Queen, and might live to have another wife, and by her have children. Even so late as 1830, when that grossly-dissolute King ended his life, the life of William IV. stood between her and the throne. William, however, had no legitimate heir; he was nearly sixty-five and in rather poor health, and the likelihood that he would now have issue was extremely small. Victoria had not been brought up with any assurance that she was heir to the throne. Strict orders were in force that no one should speak to her on the subject. Economy in expenditures was found necessary by her mother. For a Princess, the life of the child was one of very straitened circumstances. Even when her income was only a child’s pocket money, she was taught to limit her expenditures by the amount of money she possessed. Stories told to show the enforcement of this rule of her mother’s easily explain those habits of economy and saving for which, as Queen, Victoria became a subject of captious criticism from English Radicals. When William IV. became King, Victoria was twelve years old. Statesmen then saw as all but inevitable that this little girl was to be the future Queen, and a bill was brought into Parliament making the Duchess of Kent Regent in case her daughter, by the death of William ere she came of age, should be called upon to take the crown. Matters having gone this far, it was thought time for her to know her position as a Princess. The story told is that her governess contrived to convey the information by placing in one of her books a genealogical table showing the fact. Finding this table and examining it, the Princess one day said to the governess, “I never saw that before,” to which answer was made: “It was not thought necessary you should, Princess.” “I see I am nearer the throne than I thought,” said she. “So it is, Madam.” After a pause the Princess, lifting up the forefinger of her extended right hand, remarked: “How many a child would boast, but they don’t know the difficulty. There is much splendor and there is much responsibility.” At the coronation of William she had not been allowed to appear; nor was she brought forward into prominence in the Court circle. For this her mother was upbraided on one occasion by the King at his own table, and a scene of distress ensued, in which Queen Adelaide was put to confusion and the Princess brought to tears. From the atmosphere of the Court she was withheld so far as possible, and travel in England was made a leading feature in her education. Cities and towns, cathedrals and historic houses were visited and careful knowledge of them obtained. On the Throne In England eighteen is the age at which a royal Princess reaches her majority. Victoria passed this period on May 24, 1837, on the morning of which day she was awakened by a serenade. Among her many presents was a piano sent by the King, who lay then on a bed from which he did not rise. Less than a month afterward,

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on June 20, at 2:20 A.M., the King breathed his last, at Windsor. Immediately after this a carriage drawn by four horses and containing the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain departed for Kensington Palace, and at 5 o’clock dashed up the central avenue that led to the door. What followed has been described in the “Diary” of Miss Wynn: “They knocked, they rang, they thumped for a considerable time before they could arouse a porter at the gate; they were again kept waiting in the courtyard; then turned into one of the lower rooms, where they seemed to be forgotten by everybody. They rang the bell and desired that the attendant of the Princess Victoria might be sent to inform her royal Highness that they requested an audience on business of importance. After another delay and another ringing to inquire the cause, the attendant was summoned, who stated that the Princess was in such a sweet sleep that she could not venture to disturb her. They then said: ‘We are come on business of State to the Queen, and even her sleep must give way to that.’ It did, and to prove that she did not keep them waiting, in a few moments she came into the room in a loose white nightgown and shawl, her nightcap thrown off and her hair falling upon her shoulders, her feet in slippers, tears in her eyes, but perfectly collected and dignified.” About the first words the young Queen spoke when she was told the news were to request the Archbishop to pray for the widowed Queen Adelaide. When they had departed she went to her mother and informed her of the mighty change in her fortunes. Then she addressed a letter of condolence to her aunt Adelaide, asking her to remain at Windsor as long as she pleased. The letter was addressed “To her Majesty the Queen.” She was reminded that she ought to write instead, “To her Majesty the Queen Dowager,” but her answer was: “I am aware of that, but I will not be the first to remind her of her altered position.” It was arranged that a Council should be held that day at Kensington. The hour fixed was 11 A.M. In Greville’s “Diary” the following account of this Council, which a familiar picture by Sir David Wilkie has made well known, is given, and Greville was not a man given to emotion: “Never was anything like the first impression she produced, or the chorus of praise and admiration which it raised about her manner and behavior, and certainly not without justice. It was very extraordinary, and something far beyond what was looked for. Her extreme youth and inexperience, and the ignorance of the world concerning her, naturally excited intense curiosity to see how she would act on this trying occasion, and there was a considerable assemblage at the palace, notwithstanding the short notice that had been given. She was plainly dressed and in mourning. After she had read her speech and taken and signed the oath for the security of the Church of Scotland, administered by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Privy Councilors were sworn; the two royal Dukes first by themselves, and, as these old men, her uncles, knelt before her swearing allegiance and, kissing her hand, I saw her blush up to the eyes, as if she felt the contrast between their civil and their natural relations, and this was the only sign of emotion that she “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 73 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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evinced. Her manner to them was very graceful and engaging; she kissed them both and rose from her chair and moved toward the Duke of Sussex, who was furthest from her and too inform to reach her. She seemed rather bewildered at the multitude of men who were sworn and who came one after the other to kiss her hand; but she did not speak to anybody, nor did she make the slightest difference in her manner, or show any in her countenance to any individual of any rank, station or party. I particularly watched her when Melbourne and the Ministers, and the Duke of Wellington, and Peel approached her. She went through the whole ceremony, occasionally looking at Melbourne for instruction when she had any doubt what to do, which hardly ever occurred, with perfect calmness and self-possession, but at the same time with a graceful modesty and propriety particularly interesting and ingratiating. On the following day occurred the ceremony of the proclamation, when, according to custom, the Queen made her appearance at the open window in St. James’s Palace, surrounded by the great nobles of the realm in their robes of state. At Kensington a range of apartments separate from her mother’s were at once set apart for her use, and there she lived until July 13, when she left the home of her childhood for Buckingham Palace. She did not go to Windsor until the September of that year, and she then reviewed her troops from on horseback. She opened the first Parliament of her reign in November, and in the following June she was formally crowned in Westminster Abbey. Harriet Martineau, an eye-witness, has described that scene with much felicity. “The throne,” says she, “covered, as was its footstool, with cloth of gold, stood on an elevation of four steps in the centre of the area. The first peeress took her seat in the north transept opposite at 6:45, and three of the Bishops came next. From that time the peers and their ladies arrived faster and faster. Each peeress was conducted by Goldsticks, one of whom handed her to her seat and the other bore and arranged her train on her lap and saw that her coronet, footstool, and book were comfortably placed. About 9 the first gleams of the sun started into the Abbey, and presently traveled down to the peeresses. I had never before seen the full effect of diamonds. As the light traveled, each lady shone out as a rainbow. The brightness, vastness, and dreamy magnificence of the scene produced a strange effect of exhaustion and sleepiness.” Wife and Mother Albert, Prince Consort of England, was the second son of Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg- Gotha, and was born Aug. 26, 1819, so that he was three months younger than Victoria. Five years after his birth his father and mother had separated, two years later the mother was divorced, and in 1831 she died, having never seen her son since the separation. Prince Albert first saw the Princess Victoria in the Spring of 1836, when he made a visit to England with his father and his elder brother. The visit lasted a month, and the cousins are believed to have parted very reluctantly. Victoria, in a letter to her uncle, begged him to “take care of the health of one now so dear to me, and to take him under your special protection.” From a much earlier time the idea of a union

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between these two had been entertained at Saxe-Coburg, and as Victoria’s accession became more and more a certainty it took firm hold. Meanwhile, great care was taken with the education of the Prince. For one thing, it was necessary that he should know English. The position he was likely to fill was kept clearly in view. When Victoria had become Queen, Albert wrote that he had heard with great satisfaction of the “astonishing self-possession” she had shown. “You are Queen,” said he, “of the mightiest land of Europe. In your hand lies the happiness of millions.” Albert was not Victoria’s only suitor. She was indeed a great catch; there was none like her in Europe. There had scarcely been one like her in England since Elizabeth. She was sought by Prince Alexander of the Netherlands, by Prince Adalbert of Prussia, by Duke Ernest of Wurtemberg, and even, it is said, by Prince George of Cambridge, her cousin, afterward the Duke of Cambridge, and whose morganatic wife, Mrs. Fitz-George, died early in 1890, the only wife he ever chose to have. Albert well understood how the strict etiquette of the Court obliged the Queen to take the initiative, and hence, on his second visit, in October, 1839, when the purpose of his visit was clearly understood, he waited anxiously for some sign of the Queen’s decision in his favor. This he had the happiness to obtain on the second evening of his visit, at a ball, when she gave him her bouquet, and he received a message from her that she desired to speak with him on the following day. Victoria up to this time had been somewhat reluctant to consider an immediate marriage, as she thought both herself and Albert too young, but State reasons and the wise influence of Prince Leopold, who was uncle to both, prevailed to change her inclinations. In the following year occurred the wedding. Albert landed at Dover and went thence to Canterbury and London, being received at Buckingham Palace at the hall door by the Queen and her mother, attended by the whole household. In order that the people might be better pleased the Queen decided upon noon as the hour for the wedding, instead of the evening hour common with royal persons. The wedding took place in the Chapel of St. James’s Palace, and thence Queen and Prince were driven to Windsor, the roads being lined with rejoicing crowds. Three days were passed at Windsor and then they returned to London to receive the congratulations of the people. One of the most charming and wholesome domestic pictures that royal lives have afforded is furnished in the married life of Albert and Victoria. Its influence on English domestic life in general must have been far-reaching. Prince Albert was a man of honest purposes and devoted affections; he was endowed with noble ambitions guided by intelligence. Painting, etching, and music were accomplishments that afforded amusement to both, and the Prince was a man of taste and skill in landscape gardening. He loved a country life and early hours. To these tastes the Queen learned to conform, though she had formerly preferred town life; in fact, she became eventually as fond of the country as was he. Many glimpses of their domestic occupations and manners are afforded in the biography of the Prince and the journals kept by the Queen, which were made public several years ago.

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Elsewhere interesting glimpses have also been given. One of the most interesting is contained in a letter from Mendelssohn to his mother. He had been asked by the Prince to play on the organ at Buckingham Palace and called by appointment. “I found him alone,” says Mendelssohn, “and as we were talking the Queen came in also, alone, in a simple morning dress. She said she was obliged to leave for Claremont in an hour, and then, suddenly interrupting herself exclaimed: ‘But, goodness, what a confusion!’ for the wind had littered the whole room and even the pedals of the organ (which, by the way, made a very pretty figure in the room) with leaves of music from a large portfolio which lay open. As she spoke she knelt down and began picking up the music. Prince Albert helped, and I, too, was not idle.” The difficulties encountered at the outset of this union were incident to the peculiar relations of the Queen and Prince. Head of the family though the Prince was in his position as husband, his place in public affairs was necessarily subordinate. Great tact and a large amount of genuine sense and right feeling were necessary on his part to make the path a smooth one. Undoubtedly the common judgment now is that he bore himself with conspicuous good sense and dignity in this trying situation. His character was naturally strong. His disposition was essentially resolute, and a proper degree of independence was essential to his happiness. In the royal household many were reluctant to surrender the powers they had formerly exercised, and others were disappointed that the husband of the Queen was a foreigner. To a friend the Prince wrote, in the May following his marriage, that his difficulty was to fill his place “with proper dignity,” because he “was only the husband and not the master of the house.” The Queen, however, soon showed her determination that in all matters not affairs of State the Prince was to exercise paramount authority. Sir Theodore Martin, the biographer of the Prince, says the example of the Queen was itself “enough to quell resistance,” while the Prince’s own “tact, forbearance, and superior grasp of mind were not long in removing every obstacle to his legitimate authority. “In finding his right position in regard to public affairs, the Prince had to feel his way cautiously and to inspire confidence in his ability and tact no less than in his freedom from personal ambition.” A large degree of credit for his success belongs to Baron Stockmar, who, along with Prince Leopold, had been and still continued to be an efficient and successful guide and adviser to the Prince. No act of the Prince’s life at this time showed his sense of his position with better effect on the English people than his letter to the Duke of Wellington declining to become Field Marshal Commander in Chief of the English Army. In this letter he said he had resolved “to sink his own individual existence in that of his wife; to aim at no power by himself or for himself; to shun all ostentations; to assume no separate responsibility before the public; to make his position entirely a part of hers.” The Queen became the mother of nine children. The first was born in November, 1840. This was the Princess Royal, (Victoria by name,) who afterward (1858) was married to the Crown Prince of Prussia, and has since become known as the Empress Frederick of

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Germany. On Nov. 9, 1841, was born Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, who married the Princess Alexandra of Denmark in 1863. The third child was Princess Alice, born in 1843, married to Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt in 1862, and who died in 1878. The fourth was Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, born in 1844, married to the Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna of Russia in 1874, assumed the title of Duke of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, and died July 30, 1900; the fifth was Princess Helena, born in 1846, and married in 1866 to Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein; the sixth, Princess Louise, born in 1848, and married to the Marquis of Lorne in 1871; the seventh, Arthur, Duke of Connaught, born in 1850, and married to the Princess Louise of Hohenzollern in 1879; the eighth, Leopold, Duke of Albany, born in 1853, married to the Princess Helene of Waldeck-Pyrmont in 1882, and died in 1884, and the ninth and last, Beatrice, born in 1857, married to Prince Henry of Battenberg in 1885, and widowed, Jan. 20, 1890. These children of the Queen, with one exception, have each had children of their own. A few years ago the record stood: The Princess Royal, six, of whom the present Emperor of Germany is the oldest; the Prince of Wales, six, of whom one died in infancy, and the eldest of whom, Albert Victor, born in 1864, died in July, 1892, leaving his brother, the Duke of York, heir to the throne after his father; Princess Alice, one; the Duke of Edinburgh, five; Princess Helena, (sometimes called Princess Christian,) four; Princess Louise, none; the Duke of Connaught, three; the Duke of Albany, one, and Princess Beatrice, two. Several of the Queen’s grandchildren are already married, and she has been for some years a great- grandmother. First among them is the present Emperor of Germany, whose first child was born in 1882; another is his sister Sophia, married to the Crown Prince of Greece, and another, the daughter of the Prince of Wales, married in 1889 to the Duke of Fife, a marriage which gave satisfaction in England for the negative reason that it was not contracted with a prince of German blood. Antipathy to German Princes is now an instinctive feeling to a large class of the English people. It dates back to the beginning of the Hanoverian line, early in the eighteenth century. A saying of Lord Chesterfield’s illustrates how deep this feeling was in his time. There had been discussion of the Stuart Pretender. Chesterfield said England ought to contrive to make him Elector of Hanover, for this would make it certain he could never mount the throne of England. At the time of her first jubilee, which was celebrated with extraordinary splendor on a perfect June day in 1887, the Queen had thirty-one grandchildren living and six great- grandchildren. The second or diamond jubilee, ten years later, celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of her succession, was equally impressive in its pageantry. Until Her Widowhood The domestic life of the Queen for the twenty years her husband lived was singularly happy. Fate seemed to shower upon her every blessing to which a woman could aspire. It was not an eventful twenty years; eventful years are seldom years of happiness. The “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 77 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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record of this period, besides the birth of children, embraces travel to various parts of her dominions and the Continent, return visits from European sovereigns, the purchase and enlargement of country homes, and the education of her children. Following the christening of the Prince of Wales with much state and splendor in 1842 came the visit of the King of Prussia, against which various Courts had intrigued in vain; then the first visit to Scotland, which she was subsequently to love so well, and then her visit to King Louis Philippe of France. The year 1844 was marked by several royal visits to London. First came the King of Saxony, then the Emperor of Russia, and then the King of the French. In 1845 the Queen went to Germany with the Prince, and was entertained by the King of Prussia. A few years of married life had inspired a wish for homes remote from London. In September, 1846, possession was taken of the house at Osborne, on the Isle of Wight. It was private property, and the Prince enlarged and beautified it, bestowing upon it the best products of his taste in landscape gardening. The pride of the Prince in this place was that he made his farming pay. The place was really created by him. Even the trees in most cases owed their existence to him. By his will the Prince made Osborne the personal property of the Queen. In 1846 the royal family sailed around the west coast of Scotland, visited the Duke of Argyll, and explored Fingal’s Cave. “It was the first time,” wrote the Queen, “that the British standard with the Queen of Great Britain and her children had ever entered Fingal’s Cave, and the men gave three cheers, which sounded very impressive there.” This visit renewed the Queen’s liking for the Scotch Highland countries, and desire for a home there took definite form when her physician recommended the air and climate. The Balmoral property was then acquired. It was only a small castle, with a picturesque tower and a garden in front. Improvements on a vast scale were necessary ere it should take on its present fine proportions. It is built of red granite, in baronial style, with gables and turrets and a square clock tower. Like Osborne, Balmoral is private property. In the Autumn of 1855, when the Queen first occupied Balmoral, news reached her by telegraph of the fall of Sebastopol. Bonfires were lighted on the hills to commemorate the event. Here came in that Autumn the Crown Prince of Prussia to woo and win the eldest daughter of the Queen, who is now the Empress Frederick. One of the royal visits that belongs to those happy twenty years was a visit to Ireland, one of three or four made by the Queen. It occurred in 1849, and was the first royal visit to Ireland since 1821. She landed in the Cove of Cork, on a spot to which was given the name of Queenstown. She went on to Dublin, and expressed much delight at the enthusiasm with which she was received. Waving her handkerchief from the paddlebox as the royal yacht was about to sail away, an old woman in the crowd below called out to her: “Och, Queen darlint, make one of the childer Prince Patrick and ould Oireland will die for ye!” Ten months later the Queen’s fourth son was born. She named him Arthur, after Ireland’s greatest soldier, the Duke of Wellington, and Patrick, after Ireland’s patron saint.

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Early in the sixties, sorrows thick and first came upon the Queen. Her mother, after a surgical operation upon her arm, was taken with a chill, and when the Queen arrived was unconscious. She died without recognition. Relatives of Queen and Prince by marriage, the King of Portugal and his brother, Prince Ferdinand, died of typhoid fever. Then came the unlooked-for illness of the Prince Consort. “Am full of rheumatic pains,” wrote the Prince in his diary, “and thoroughly unwell. Have scarcely closed my eyes at night for the past fortnight.” He had grown gradually worse, when news came of the seizure of Mason and Slidell from the British steamer Trent. Lord John Russell advised the Queen to demand reparation and forwarded a dispatch for her approval. The terms of this dispatch seemed to the Prince too harsh. He wrote out his objections, telling the Queen he could scarcely hold his pen while doing so. These suggestions were adopted. Late in December the Prince Consort breathed his last. The body was deposited in the royal vault in St. George’s Chapel, and subsequently removed to the splendid mausoleum erected to hold it. Victoria’s life after her husband died continued for many years to be one of quiet seclusion. Her people saw little or nothing of her, and the projects with which she was occupied for doing honors in public to his memory were, for the most part, the only ones in which she manifested particular interest. So prolonged was this devotion of hers that many criticisms were at length made on the seclusion of the Queen. Radical leaders were not slow to make use of these circumstances and to point out her obligations to the country as things to which private sorrows should give way. One would search long to find a record of such absorbed devotion on the part of a reigning monarch. The memorials erected in Albert’s honor suggest in their way the most notable that history records. On the Appian Way, beyond the walls of Rome, the wealthiest Roman of his time reared “a stern round tower” to the memory of his wife, which survives to our time as one of the most interesting monuments that the traveler in that land beholds. On the banks of a river in a land over which Victoria ruled, another eminent man set up a memorial to his wife, in what we know as the Taj Mahal, which has come to be accepted as the most beautiful architectural tribute that exists in memory of a lost wife, Victoria’s tributes were to a lost husband. The Prince Consort had been dead not three months when the Queen laid at Frogmore the first stone of the mausoleum that now holds his dust. A few years later she began at Balmoral the immense cairn bearing the inscription, “To the Beloved Memory of Albert, the Great and Good Prince Consort, Erected by His Brokenhearted Widow, Victoria, 21 August, 1862.” Six of her children (“my poor six orphans” she called them) placed each a stone upon this pile. Granite without mortar was used in its construction, the shape being that of a pyramid. In various cities, among them Edinburgh and Aberdeen, statues of the Prince Consort were set up, and in London the colossal Albert Memorial, which was for a long time a spot of extensive pilgrimage to all visitors to London. In 1867 she laid the foundation stone of the Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences, in which was carried out a project the Prince had “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 79 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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in hand when he died. These years in the sixties were of further note in a domestic way for marriages, deaths, and births. In 1863 the Prince of Wales completed his twenty-first year, and was married. One of the grandest sights London had seen was the reception it gave to the bride of the Prince, the beautiful daughter of the King of Denmark. On hilltops throughout England, Scotland, and Wales, were set beacon lights. The marriage took place in St. George’s Chapel, at Windsor, and was witnessed by the Queen from a recess or closet. She was still in deep mourning, and did not join the wedding party. Another marriage of special interest occurred in 1870, being that of Princess Louise and the Marquis of Lorne. This was a union between a Princess and a subject, as was the Fife marriage of 1889. Old George III. would never have sanctioned such a union. His Marriage act forbade it, except with the approval of the reigning sovereign. Private grief came to the Queen in 1864, when her uncle Leopold, then King of the Belgians, passed away; he had been a friend of great value to the Princess Victoria in her childhood, and she felt the loss keenly. The five years now past had taken from her not only this uncle, who was like a father to her childhood, but her husband and her mother. Six years later came the illness of the Prince of Wales, when his life was for some days in great danger from typhoid fever. On his recovery the Queen went in state to St. Paul’s Cathedral to give thanks, and the day was made a national festival. It was a day in February, and she sat in an open carriage with the Prince at her side. The route going lay along the Strand and Fleet Street, and returning along Oxford Street. In August of the same year a visit was paid to Edinburgh, when the Queen occupied rooms in the historic Palace of Holyrood. In September her half-sister, the Princess Hohenlohe-Langenburg, to whom she was much attached, died. After the Franco-Prussian war England received the royal French exiles. Chiselhurst, in Kent, became the home of the failed Emperor, his wife, and son, and much kindness was shown to them by the Queen, who retained for many years afterward a special fondness for the afflicted ex-Empress Eugenie. When Napoleon died, in 1873, 40,000 persons were said to attend his funeral, 2,000 of them being French. The Queen in that year received a visit from the Shah of Persia and the Czar of Russia, whose daughter had just become the wife of the Queen’s second son. With Lord Beaconsfield as Prime Minister in 1877 a new eminence was acquired by the Queen. She was made Empress of India, and proclamation of the fact was formally made in the old Mogul capital of Delhi, as well as at Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. She opened Parliament in person that year and did Lord Beaconsfield the great honor of a visit to his home, Hughenden Manor, where she took luncheon and planted a tree. In December of the next year, on the seventeenth anniversary of her father’s death, died Princess Alice, and in March, 1884, another child of the Queen, the Duke of Albany, died. Readers will not fail to recall the message sent to Mrs. Garfield on the death of the President: “Words cannot express the deep sympathy I feel with you at this terrible moment. May God support you as He alone can!” Another event, the marriage of Princess Beatrice, in 1885,

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should be added to this domestic record. She was the youngest of the Queen’s children and had long been her mother’s inseparable companion. Mr. Frith, the artist who painted a picture of the Prince of Wales’s marriage, related that he once asked the Princess at Windsor if she would not have liked to be one of the bridesmaids at her brother’s wedding. “No, I don’t like weddings,” she said. “I shall never be married; I shall stay with Mamma.” This undoubtedly was the fate already fixed up as in store for her. Her marriage, however, was at the time understood to have taken place with the understanding that she was not to leave her mother. Her husband died in 1896. Queen Victoria’s life was several times in danger from violence. Serious illness she never knew until the last. When a Princess, some shot from a gun accidentally passed very near her. After she was a Queen repeated attempts were made to shoot her. Four months after her marriage, a young bartender out of employment fired at her twice while she was riding with the Prince at Windsor, both shots missing them. In the next year a man snapped a pistol at her carriage window as she was returning from church in London, but the charge failed to go off. On the day after this man’s sentence of death was commuted to transportation for life another pistol was snapped at her carriage, but it, too, missed fire. Other attempts were made in later years, but the Queen was never hit. She appears to have been as safe from harm as Washington appeared to be to the Indians, who thought he bore a charmed life. Reform Bills and Ireland From the foregoing review of what may be called the personal side of the Queen’s life the course of this article naturally reverts at this point to the public measures and events of this remarkable reign. When Victoria assumed the crown, English statesmen had been for some years occupied with measures of electoral reform. The new Ministry, headed by Lord Grey, that came into power with the accession of William IV., in 1830, prepared a bill in March of the next year, and after a dissolution finally carried it in the Commons in September on a third reading by a majority of 100. But the Lords postponed the reading of it for six months and Parliament was prorogued. In December of the same year, when Parliament reassembled, what was known as the act of 1832 was read in the Commons without division, and in March went to a third reading by a majority of 116. In the House of Lords the fate of the measure was not so happy. By a majority of 9 it got to a second reading in April, 1832, but before further progress was made a motion that enfranchisement should precede disenfranchisement led to a majority vote of 35 against the Ministry, which resigned two days later. Great public excitement ensued on this defeat. Prominent in opposition to the measure had been the Duke of Wellington, whose fall as Prime Minister before Earl Grey was due to his declaration against any kind of Parliamentary reform. This opposition made the Duke extremely unpopular for a time. On the anniversary of his victory at Waterloo he was hooted by a mob in London, and he considered it necessary to protect the

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windows of his town residence, Apsley House, by iron shutters. Late in the year 1832 the bill was at last made a law, Earl Grey having been induced to resume office on obtaining power from the King to create enough new Peers to secure a majority. By this reform bill 56 boroughs in England, containing populations of less than 2,000 each, were disfranchised, 30 others were reduced to one member only, 22 new ones were created with power to send two members, and 20 others with power to send one. These boroughs which had been disfranchised were rotten boroughs. Victoria thus ascended the throne with a Parliament elected very differently from the Parliaments former sovereigns had met on their accession, and the note of progress having been thus auspiciously sounded, a new era in Parliamentary government was about to open. If her reign did not see this reform act passed, she was the first English sovereign who had not to recognize these rotten boroughs. Later on in her reign reform bills became familiar subjects in Parliamentary life. Twenty- two years after William IV. had set his name and seal to the act of 1832 Lord John Russell introduced a new bill, but the war with Russia in the Crimea led to its withdrawal. Five years later Mr. Disraeli brought in a bill, and it was rejected. In the following year Lord Palmerston brought forward a bill, only to withdraw it. Other bills followed in rather rapid succession, to meet no better fate. Great reform meetings were held in the large towns, one in London in 1866 having as a feature a procession of 25,000 men, and one in 1867 a procession of 18,000. As a result, finally, was passed the act which received the royal assent in August, 1867. By this the franchise was granted in boroughs to householders rated for relief of the poor and to lodgers resident for twelve months and paying £10 a year, and in counties to persons of property of a clear annual value of £5, and to occupiers of lands or tenements paying £12 a year. Reform acts of later date were those of 1884 and 1885, which, together, form an enactment which has been pronounced “the most extensive reform ever attempted in England.” By the one of 1884 the suffrage which in 1867 had been conferred upon householders and lodgers in boroughs was now extended to the same classes in counties. Household suffrage was thus established for counties as well as boroughs. It applied to Scotland as well as England, and was extended to Ireland. England thenceforth practically has possessed universal suffrage. Just as bills for reform of the suffrage have been an almost constant feature of Parliamentary discussion, so has the Irish question; this question, like the poor, England has had always with her. The legislative union of the two islands was only two years old when Emmet’s insurrection occurred. This was in 1803. Seventeen years later George IV. made his visit. Then, in 1829, was passed the Roman Catholic Emancipation act, and in 1831 the Irish Reform act, results closely linked with the public career of Daniel O’Connell. When Victoria came to the throne the poor laws were before Parliament, and a year later were ready for her signature. In 1840 was formed the Young Ireland Party, followed by the great repeal movement; O’Connell’s trial for political conspiracy and his conviction, the failure of the potato crop, O’Connell’s death, the transportation of O’Brien, Meagher, 82 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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McManus and O’Donoghue in 1849, the Queen’s visit a month later, and the Fenian agitation, begun in 1864, with the trials and executions in 1867. With Gladstone as Prime Minister, after these Fenian affairs came the passage of the bill which in 1869 disestablished and disendowed the Irish Church. It was three years later that a Home Rule Party was heard of, through the leadership of Isaac Butt, but an abler and stronger man, Charles S. Parnell, soon superseded him, and the formidable Land League movement was organized. Land acts passed under Gladstone’s rule had changed considerably the system of tenures in Ireland. When, in 1881, the Land League was suppressed, it made its appearance again with a new name, the National League. A period of lawlessness, unusual for a long period in Ireland, now ensued and culminated in the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke, the Chief and Under Secretaries for Ireland, followed by the severe Crimes act, which may have prevented other atrocities, though it did not easily restore good order. Later events are more familiar still, and especially The London Times’s case against Mr. Parnell, the Pigott forgeries, and the long-drawn-out commission. Chartism and Corn Laws Connected with these reform movements early in Victoria’s reign was the agitation to which the name Chartism was given. It dates from a period shortly after the act of 1832 was passed, that act being regarded as not sweeping enough, and took its name from the demand made on Parliament for a people’s charter. Six points in this charter were universal: suffrage, vote by ballot, annual Parliaments, payment of members, abolition of property qualification, and equal electoral districts. For the most part the Chartists were men from the lower classes. A year after Victoria became Queen they held meetings in various parts of England, armed with guns and pikes and carrying torches, and a proclamation was issued against them. For some time they held a sort of Parliament of their own, and in 1848 they arranged to hold a monster meeting in Kensington Common and march to Westminster with a petition to Parliament. It was their intention to bring out 200,000 persons at this meeting, and the authorities were greatly alarmed. Public buildings, including the Bank of England, were fortified by military forces under the Duke of Wellington, and special policemen, numbering 150,000, were sworn in, one of them being Louis Napoleon, afterward Emperor of the French. Estimates of the number who attended the Chartist meeting have been as low as 20,000. Probably 50,000 is near the truth. Slight encounters with the police occurred, and then the procession dispersed. The monster petition they were conveying to Parliament had been signed by nearly 6,000,000 names. It was sent to Parliament in detached rolls, in several cabs. With this extraordinary effort the career of the Chartists came practically to an end. One of the chief causes of this was the prosperity which now returned to English industries consequent on the repeal of the corn laws in the Ministry of Sir Robert Peel. The celebrated league formed to secure the repeal of these laws,

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which levied duties on the importation of corn into England, the word corn being equivalent to breadstuffs, was founded at Manchester in 1838. Among its supporters were John Bright, Richard Cobden, and Charles Villiers. Meetings soon began to be held in various English towns, and in 1842 a fair held at Manchester realized $50,000 for the league. In the same year 600 deputies from provincial associations held a meeting in London, and the league in the same year began to raise $250,000 for printing pamphlets and sending out lecturers. In March, 1843, an important meeting was held in Drury Lane Theatre. London, and in 1845 immense meetings were held in Manchester and a bazaar was opened in Covent Garden, London, the Manchester meetings helping forward the league’s ambition to raise $1,250,000 for the expenses of this war on the corn laws. For a time Sir Robert Peel held out against the arguments of Cobden and Bright, but at last, in 1846, a bill introduced by him was passed and assented to by the Queen. This famous bill reduced the duty on wheat to 4s. (when brought in at or above 53s.) until February, 1849, after which date it became 1s. per quarter only on all kinds of imported grain, whatever the price. In 1860 even this duty of 1s. per quarter was taken off, so that complete free trade in corn existed thenceforth in England. Chinese and Crimean Wars The first years of Victoria’s reign were years of peace; until the war in the Crimea began, (sixteen years after her accession,) England was little disturbed by her foreign relations. Indeed, the state of Europe in general throughout that period was one of unusual quiet, so far as rivalry among the nations was concerned. Whatever of disturbance occurred was in home affairs rather than foreign. More than one reigning monarch was made anxious for the security of his throne. In France the monarch had good reasons for his anxiety, for he lost his throne altogether and, unregal King that he was, departed for England under the name of Smith. Europe still retained a very vivid recollection of the wars of Napoleon. England’s mighty effort against the Emperor had cost her Treasury a very pretty sum of money, and she was more than willing to live at peace with the other powers while recovering her strength. Reform bills in Parliament, moreover, and the corn law agitations, with the attendant commercial depression, afforded her ample occasions for the exercise of wisdom and statesmanship. Save for the war with China, begun in 1839 and ended with the peace of Nankin late in 1842, England had no war on her hands until the portentous cloud arose on the Bosporus in 1853. Visits from the Emperor of Russia and the Kings of France, and visits of the Queen to the Kings of France and Prussia, and not wars, had been the international events of the time. Wellington and Sir Charles Napier, the soldiers of a former generation, had died, and so had Thomas Moore and Wordsworth, poets who had long since done their work and were already stepping aside for Browning and Tennyson. This war in China, like many of England’s wars, was a war for trade. Opium in the first instance was the cause. Mandarins had complained bitterly of the introduction of opium by the English

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merchants, and for years had attempted to prevent its importation. That the mandarins were disinterested is shown by the fact that when in April, 1839, some 20,000 chests were handed over they destroyed them. The precise occasion for declaring war was the Chinese demand made in this year for the surrender of opium. Peace was not formally secured until July, 1843. By the terms of this treaty England was to receive from China the sum of $21,000,000, and Hongkong was ceded to her in perpetuity, while Canton, Amoy, Foo-Choo-Foo, Ning-Po, and Shanghai were thrown open to British trade, and British Consuls were permitted to reside there. The war in the Crimea was an outgrowth of designs respecting Turkey long entertained by Russia. When the Czar Nicholas in 1844 made his visit to London he conversed with Wellington and Lord Aberdeen in regard to the dissolution of the Sultan’s empire. Later on a formal communication, which was kept a state secret for ten years, was sent to London by the Czar’s Minister, and the Czar had several conversations on the same subject with the British Envoy at St. Petersburg. It was in one of these conversations that the Czar compared Turkey to “a sick man” who was in a state of decrepitude and at the point of death. His proposal related to the disposition of the dying man’s property. He had no objection to English possession of Egypt, but would not consent to its establishing itself on the Bosporus. Some years later dispute arose between Russia, as representing the Greek Churches, and France, representing the Latin ones, as to the exclusive possession of the holy places in Palestine. A commission appointed by Turkey decided in favor of Russia. The French accepted this decision, though reluctantly. Further claims on Turkey were then made by Russia. A protectorate was demanded for herself over the Greek Christians who resided in Turkish dominions. The Sultan regarded this as inimical to his own authority, and the Russian Minister, his ultimatum having been rejected, departed from Constantinople. The Sultan then appealed to his allies, and the English and French fleets advanced for his protection. By July, 1853, the Russians had entered Moldavia; by September English and French ships were in the Dardanelles; in October Turkey had declared war against Russia, and two weeks later had committed the first act of war by firing on a Russian flotilla. The Danube remained the scene of operations for some months, but the scene gradually advanced eastward, with engagements at Rustchuk, Silistria, Odessa, and the blockading of the mouths of the Danube by the allies. Operations in the Crimea began properly with the landing of the armies of the allies in September, 1854. In that month 65,000 men, with 5,000 horses and 50 pieces of artillery, went ashore in the Bay of Eupatoria and marched in the direction of Sebastopol. They met the Russians at the River Alma, and after a severe engagement, in which the Russians lost 5,000 men and the allies 3,400, forced them to retreat to Sebastopol, where preparations were made for the defense of the fortress. Balaklava was seized by the British, and early in October the attack on the fortress was begun. It was impossible to make an attack from the water, as the Russians had sunk vessels at the entrance to the harbor. The incidents of this celebrated siege

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need only be named here. They include the battle of Balaklava, with the charge of the light cavalry, which Tennyson has celebrated; the defeat of the Russians at Inkerman, Florence Nightingale’s work in the hospitals, tales of great suffering from cold weather, the death of the Czar Nicholas, the siege of Kars in Armenia and Gen. Williams’s long defense, the retirement of the Russians to the north forts and the destruction of their fleet, the explosion of 100,000 pounds of powder in the French siege train at Inkerman with great loss of life, the destruction of the Sebastopol docks, and the treaty of peace concluded in Paris in March, 1856. England lost in this war nearly 24,000 men, of whom 270 were officers. Those killed in action and who died of wounds numbered 3,500; cholera caused the death of 4,244, and other diseases nearly 16,000. The losses of the French were 63,500 men, and of the Russians nearly half a million, according to English statistics. England added to her national debt in consequence of this war the sum of $200,000,000. Mutiny in the East One year later occurred in India the first incidents of that famous mutiny, the suppression of which was to tax the best energies of England’s administrators and soldiers for more than two years to come. In the year 1857-8 was to occur the hundredth anniversary of the battle of Plassey, the winning of which battle by Clive had laid the foundation stone of the English dominion. It had long been predicted by native astrologers that on this anniversary the English power would come to an end. The first serious consequences of native belief in the prediction were shown in a mutinous spirit that broke out among the sepoy soldiers when it was decided that a new kind of cartridge and rifle should be used. Use of this greased cartridge was regarded as involving defilement to a Musselman and sacrilege to a Hindu, and a cry of danger to caste and creed spread rapidly. It was said that the cartridges were greased with hog fat; that to use them a native would sin against his religion; that the English desired him to do so in order to make him an easy convert to Christianity. Disturbances broker out and massacres of Europeans were committed. Mutineers who marked to Delhi were joined by the garrison there, a second butchery was committed, and a restoration of the Mogul Empire was proclaimed. Delhi became thenceforth a centre of revolt. Risings soon occurred in the Northwest Provinces and at Benares, while at the military station of Cawnpore several thousand sepoys revolted under Nana Sahib and committed the famous massacre of June 27, in which neither age nor sex was spared. Other revolts and other massacres occurred, and in Oude, a recently annexed kingdom, took on the character of a popular insurrection. Lucknow was the capital of Oude, and nearly every regiment there and elsewhere in Oude mutinied. Allegiance to the ex-King of Oude was proclaimed, and a siege of Lucknow, then commanded by Sir Henry Lawrence, was begun. The other brother was then in the Punjab, and by his genius the Punjab was saved after a few risings. In this mutiny the rebels had an immense advantage because of the small number of European troops in the country. Delhi was

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the object of the first movement against them, and, after a siege of three months, was taken and the King sentenced to perpetual exile. Sons and a grandson of his were captured outside the city by Capt. Hodson, who shot them with his own hands. Gen. Havelock, who had collected a small force at Allahabad, then moved on Cawnpore. Shortly before his entry into the town, more than two hundred women and children were made the victims of a second massacre. Havelock pursued Nana Sahib and defeated him, and then, having been joined by Gens. Outram and Neill, pushed on to relieve Lucknow, where Henry Lawrence had died of a wound some weeks before. Neill was killed in action soon after, and Havelock died two months after Neill. In the meantime Sir Colin Campbell had arrived in India with the rank of Commander in Chief. Later on in the new year European troops landed in Calcutta, but Sir Colin at Cawnpore in December had defeated Nana Sahib and the 25,000 rebels under him. Troops from the Punjab were then supplied by John Lawrence, and Lucknow was gradually retaken. When Gwalior had been secured in June, 1858, the last great battle of the mutiny had been fought, although some resistance was maintained until February, 1859. In the Spring and Summer of that year the whole population was disarmed; over 1,200 forts were destroyed, and over 1,300,000 arms surrendered. A result of this mutiny, and a point of great moment in India’s history, was the formal transfer of the direct Government of India from the East India Company to the British Crown. Many natives thought the company an individual, and that the Queen had hanged him for his offenses and then taken matters into her own hands. In November, 1858, Victoria was proclaimed in the principal places of India, and thus became the sovereign to that country in a sense which no other British monarch had been before her. The proclamation of Victoria as Empress of India occurred in London in May, 1876, and in the Indian cities in January, 1877. Later Wars Wars of lesser moment during Victoria’s reign need only be referred to briefly. A second one was waged in China, and in 1860 Pekin was entered by the English. In 1867-8 occurred the war in Abyssinia. English missionaries and others had been held in confinement by King Theodore, and Sir Robert Napier was sent with an army to demand their release. He met the King in battle and overthrew him, then entered and destroyed Magdala, and, the King having committed suicide, his crown and royal mantle were found and taken to England as a present to the Queen. Early in March 1874, Sir Garnet Woiseley returned from a successful expedition against the Ashantees. Then followed, in 1878, the Russo-Turkish war and the treaty of Berlin, by which England acquired Cyprus. Wars in Afghanistan and Zululand (in the latter the Prince Imperial of France lost his life) came then, and next the Egyptian campaigns with the battle of Tel-el-Kebir and the death of Gordon at Khartoum. War affected the conquest of Burmah and its annexation. Such an incident as Lord Kitchener’s conquest of the dervishes and overthrow of the Mahdi in the Soudan, though undertaken in the cause of Egypt, add to the military glory of Victoria’s

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reign. The military operations in South Africa need only be briefly referred to. There had been more or less trouble between the English colonists and the Boers for many years and the series of incidents that began with the Jameson raid and included the trial of Cecil Rhodes and the still unfinished Boer war cannot yet be viewed in perspective. Victoria and Elizabeth The reign of Victoria in many points suggests a comparison with the reign of Elizabeth, for one thing in its length, for another in its illustrious men, for another in the changes wrought in the conditions of the people. But the lands over which Elizabeth was Queen were very different in area and importance from those which acknowledged Victoria as sovereign. Elizabeth was really the Queen of a very small territory and a very small people. The only one of England’s present vast colonial and dependent territories that was then hers was Newfoundland. England possessed nothing in Australasia until 1787, nothing in Africa until 1787, nothing in Asia until 1785. Save her American dependencies she has acquired nearly everything outside the British islands in this century. Scotland itself was not united with England until the death of Elizabeth brought James VI. of Scotland to the English throne as King of the two countries. The England of Elizabeth then comprised England proper, Ireland, Newfoundland, and what other lands, now part of the United States, she could properly call her own. The area of England proper is 50,823 square miles, that of Wales 7,363, of Ireland 32,531, of Newfoundland 40,200, or a total of 130,817 square miles for the kingdom of Elizabeth. This is actually an area considerably less than the area of Bechuanaland, in South Africa, which England acquired in 1885. It is less than the area of the State of California and only about one-half the area of Texas. Victoria reigned over an area of 9,720,000 square miles, or more than seventy times the area of Elizabeth’s empire. In population the showing, could we possess exact figures, would be no less surprising. England, with Wales, has to-day a population of about 32,000,000. This showing makes it appear that within this century the population of England and Wales has more than trebled, for the census of 1801 gave a total of only 8,892,536 souls. If anything like this increase went on during the 200 years between Elizabeth and George III., we may accept the population in Elizabeth’s time as only a very few millions. With Ireland and Newfoundland added, the total could not have reached 8,000,000. Now the population of the lands over which Victoria reigned shows the mighty total of 388,000,000 souls, or more than forty times 8,000,000. A similar statement of comparisons for the trade of England, for her national wealth, her army, and her navy, did we possess the statistics, would be as startling. Elizabeth’s England was really about as much like Victoria’s England as the Rome of Scipio (purely an Italian State) was like the Rome of Hadrian, (practically the known world or, as Gibbon put it, “the fairest parts of the earth and the most civilized portions of mankind.”) But if the lands over which Elizabeth reigned possessed in population only a fortieth of what was possessed by those

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Victoria claimed, and an area of only one-seventieth of Victoria’s area, Elizabeth’s power as a sovereign was far greater than Victoria’s. Real power Victoria never had; she reigned, but did not govern. Elizabeth governed as well as reigned. Dr. Augustus Jessopp has said of Elizabeth that “her name will go down to posterity as one of the great personages of history, the virgin Queen, who, by sheer force of character, gained for herself the credit of all the grand achievements which her people effected in peace or war, whose name was held in something more than honor from Persia to Peru, from Russia to Algiers; who crushed the tremendous power of Spain, broke forever the spiritual tyranny of Rome, and lifted England into the first rank among the kingdoms of the world.” England’s present Constitution differs vastly from the Constitution of Elizabeth’s day. That broadening down of popular Government “from precedent to precedent” which Tennyson refers to has made the English monarch hardly more than a symbol of the State, a sort of perpetual President, shorn of real authority, but hedged about with stately homes and elaborate ceremonial. In a nominal sense the Crown is the Executive, but in such a sense only. Real authority lies in the Cabinet, which has come to absorb the functions of the old Privy Council, or “the King in Council.” The Cabinet owes its existence and the tenure of its place to Parliament, and Parliament, in turn, owes its life to the people. Any Cabinet failing of a majority in the House of Commons ceases to be useful and retires; its successor is the creation, not of the Queen, but of Parliament, and hence indirectly of the people. Apologists for monarchy as it exists today in England pretend for it only authority and influences of another sort. Walter Bagehot has said for it that it “retains the feelings by which the heroic Kings governed their rude age, and has added the feelings by which the Constitutions of later Greece ruled in more refined ages.” He then proceeds to illustrate how a family on a throne is “an interesting idea,” how the Government is strengthened “with the strength of religion”; how the monarch is useful as the head of society and morality, and how a monarch without power enables the real rulers to change without heedless people knowing it. He thinks it well that the masses do not know how near they are to elective government in England; they are not fit for it, and did they realize the fact as it is they “would be surprised, and almost tremble.” Vast, then, as has been the change in the area and population of the British Empire since Elizabeth, the change n the authority of the sovereign is quite as impressive. It is certainly curious, and it is also an instructive commentary on the efficiency of popular government, that England’s empire has expanded almost in exact proportion to the decay of the personal authority of her sovereigns. No account of the life and reign of Victoria would be complete which failed to give due prominence to the influence of her personality all over the world and frequently in grave crises. Her example as a wife and mother and as a potentate adhering to the spirit as well as the tenets of Christianity in all her public acts has been generally recognized and admired. By her “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 89 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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own people her assertion, in a public address, after the diamond jubilee in 1897, that she hoped to reign until the end of her life, was heartily welcomed. England’s Vast Possessions A detailed statement of England’s colonies and dependencies is worth attention here. In Europe she has Gibraltar, Malta, and Gozo, with a total population of 184,879. In Asia her possessions consist of Aden, Brunei, Ceylon, Cyprus, Hongkong, India, the Indian Feudatory States, the Keeling Islands, the Kuria Muria Islands, Labuan, North Borneo, Perins, Sarawak, and the Straits Settlements. The total population of these lands is 261,564,000 souls, and the total area 1,903,800 square miles. This Asian population is more than twice as large as the population of all the lands ruled over by the Czar of Russia, and this Asian territory of England is very nearly as large as European Russia and two-thirds as large as the United States. In Africa, England possesses Ascension Island, Basutoland, Bechuanaland, Berbera, British East Africa, Cape Colony, Gambia, the Gold Coast, Lagos, Matabeleland, Mauritius, Natal, the Niger Districts, Nyassaland, St. Helena, St. Paul and Amsterdam, Sierra Leone, Socotra, Tongaland, Zambezia, Zanzibar and Pemba, Ibea, and thence to the Egyptian frontier, the Northern Lomal coast, Tristan d’Acunha, and Zululand. The total area for Africa is 2,462,436 square miles, and the total population, 39,836,600. On the American side of the globe England’s possession are these. The Bahama Islands, Barbados, Bermudas, Canada, Falkland Islands, Guiana, Honduras, Jamaica, Turk’s Island, Leeward Islands, Newfoundland, South Georgia, Trinidad, Tobago, and the Windward Islands, a total area of 3,648,236 square miles (the area of the United States, including Alaska, is 3,501,404,) and a population of 6,235,211. In Australasia the British Empire claims the following: The Cook Archipelago, the Fiji and Rotumah Islands, the Kermadec Islands, New South Wales and Norfolk Islands, New Guinea, New Zealand, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia, Auckland, and several small islands. For this region the total area is 3,270,532 square miles, and of population 3,675,811. A grand total for the colonies and dependencies, with the figures for Great Britain and Ireland as made up just before the census of 1891 in the United Kingdom, gave a total of 11,355,057 square miles and a total population of 366,642,105 for all the English possessions, against 108,814,172 souls in all the Russian lands and 8,644,100 square miles. From these figures it may be seen to what surprising extent the English Empire surpasses the Russian in area and population. The area of the Chinese Empire is 4,179,559 square miles, but in population, according to the imperfect estimates, the English Empire is outdone by the Chinese; the figures are 404,000,000 souls. The lands that came to England in Victoria’s time are many. First should be named India itself, for, as already stated, it was governed by the East India Company (of course by authority from Parliament) down to the time of the mutiny. Only then did it

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pass under the direct administration of the Crown. Other points and countries to be named are: Aden, (1838,) Brunei, (1888,) Cyprus, (1878,) Keelling Islands, (1857,) Labuan, (1846,) Perim, (1855,) Sarawak, (1888,) Basutoland, (1868,) Bechuanaland, (1885,) Berbera, (1884,) Gold Coast, (1861,) Lagos, (1861,) Matabeleland, (1888,) Natal, (1838,) Niger Districts, (1885,) Socotra, (1875,) Zululand, (1886,) Cook Archipelago, (1888,) Kermadec Islands, (1886,) New Guinea, (1884,) New Zealand, (1841,) Queensland, (1859,) and South Australia, (1836.) England’s colonial possessions are of three classes. First come the Crown colonies, like Gibraltar and Hong-Kong, which are controlled entirely by the home Government; second, are those like Natal and Ceylon, which have representative government, in which the Crown retains only the right of veto on legislation and the home Government the control of public officers; and third, those like Canada and Queensland, which possess responsible government, the home Government having no control over any public officer, though the Crown retains the right to veto on legislation. There are also protectorates, with Governments more or less organized, under Crown administration. Great Facts of the Reign It is not in wars and mutinies, not in State pageants, with coronations, marriages, or funerals, not in acts of Parliament or the talk of Parliamentary leaders that the real glory of an enlightened monarch’s reign will be found. The condition of the people, the advances they have made in material well-being and other means to happiness, the intellectual products of great minds made accessible to all--these and the like of these make for real glory and greatness. Above most things also was Victoria’s reign, a reign in which industrial affairs were transformed as never before. The story of what machinery and steam and electricity have done is, if properly looked at, a more moving story than any Crimean war or Indian mutiny affords. Their influence has pervaded every class in the British Empire, and they will still be exerting their influence when this century shall have long since rounded out its full hundred years. Three inventions of great moment--the spinning jenny, the spinning machine, and mule were, it is true, all made in the course of the reign of George III.; they had in reality begun to prepare the way, as it were, for the commercial expansion which became an accomplished fact in the reign of Victoria. Before the age of Victoria, Watt also had made practical use of the power of steam, just as great progress had been made in the study of electricity. But it was in Victoria’s time that the electric telegraph, the telephone, and the electric light came into the service of man, and in hers that the vast improvements made in our methods of locomotion were accomplished. One or two short lines of railroad existed when she came to the throne, but they were so insignificant that the present system practically belongs in its creation and extension to the years of Victoria. There is no space to enlarge here upon the mighty transformation in the commercial, social, political, and physical world which has been brought about by this single fact in the Englishman’s “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 91 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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history. Connected in a very practical way with it belongs another, dating almost from the first month of the reign. In the year 1837 Rowland Hill was advocating, with all the zeal and courage of a man who knew he was right, the establishment of a uniform system of penny postage, and early in 1840 he saw the system carried into effect. Early in 1890 occurred the jubilee anniversary of this event, and it was duly celebrated throughout England. In order to realize what was the change wrought by Rowland Hill, it is well to recall that the ordinary postal rates before his reform came into effect were these: For any place not exceeding 15 miles in distance, 8 cents; for any not exceeding 20 miles, 10 cents; not exceeding 30 miles, 12 cents; not exceeding 80 miles, 16 cents; not exceeding 170 miles, 18 cents; not exceeding 230 miles, 22 cents; not exceeding 300 miles, 24 cents, and so on, increasing 2 cents for every additional 100 miles. By this system a letter from London to Liverpool was charged 20 cents, and one from London to Edinburgh 24 cents. How the substitution for this system of a uniform penny rate, combined with regular and rapid railway mail trains, has operated for the advancement and happiness of mankind is obvious to any one. Had the reign of Victoria no other great achievements to record besides these of cheap postage and rapid travel by steam, it would still deserve to be ranked among the great epochs of English civilization. Later years, however, have seen the penny-postage system in some ways superseded by the telegraph- -even a telegraph that connects continents otherwise divided by great oceans--and still later ones have seen the telephone disputing with the telegraph its claims to usefulness in the service of man. With respect to the marine steam engine, the fact is not quite so impressive, it having been in use for some years before the locomotive had become familiar, but the reign has witnessed mighty advances over what had been previously done. Screw propellers were not in successful operation until the year of the Queen’s ascension, and it was in the year 1838 that the Great Western startled most living men by steaming from Bristol to this city in eighteen days. Closely related to the growth of England’s cotton industries has been this vast improvement in the methods of transporting the raw material. Instead of slow- sailing ships, there have been fast steamers; instead of weeks, voyages have become matters of days. Steam, moreover, as a stationary motive power has made such strides forward that the inventions of Arkwright, Hargreaves, and others have become powers of vaster meaning to the cotton and woolen industries than ever was dreamed of by the men of an earlier reign. Skilled labor to guide these machines has been superseded by mechanical contrivances propelled by steam, so that the total cost of attendance upon a pair of self-acting mules carrying 2,000 spindles has been reduced to about $15 a week. Connected by a natural link with these inventions has also been the expansion of the iron industries of England. Railways called for iron, other machinery called for it, and the use of iron, instead of wood in shipbuilding and other kinds of building brought about colossal transformations. In 1837 the total yearly

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output of crude iron in England was only about 1,000,000 tons. Now it is over 8,000,000 tons. Twenty years after 1837 an invention was applied in iron manufactures which has wrought great changes in the world. This was Sir Henry Bessemer’s process for making steel by blowing air into molten pig iron. This process, supplemented by the Gilchrist-Thomas process, has caused the price of steel to be greatly reduced, so that steel competes with iron now for many purposes of construction, notably in railroad rails and building beams and girders. To these inventions, and their influence on the convenience with which the burdens of life are borne, must be attributed the growth in England’s population. Until the opening of the century fewer than 11,000,000 souls lived in Great Britain; this number by 1841 had become nearly 19,000,000, and it is now somewhere about 41,000,000. No less than 22,000,000 souls, or more than the total for 1801, have been added in the time of Victoria. With this growth of population there came, as was inevitable, greater demands on existing means of subsistence, followed by want and distress that gave such peculiar force to the anti-corn law agitation, of which record is made elsewhere in this article. Besides its effect on the case with which men obtained their daily bread, probably the most momentous results of the repeal of the corn laws were political. By means of that law was shattered the political power of the old landed interests of England. Combined with the great reform bills by which household suffrage has finally been secured for counties and boroughs alike, it has wrought a revolution in the political texture and capacities of the English people, only the more marvelous because of the peaceful methods by which it was acquired. Victorian Literature If we turn now to the literature of this reign a noble and lasting output will be found, and under this head may be included books produced by men of science, like Darwin, Lyell, and Spencer, who have given us books as epoch-making as any the mind of man ever produced. It is not for contemporaries to say if the verse of Tennyson and the prose of Macaulay, Carlyle, and Thackeray will live with the corresponding products of the mind made by Pope or Dryden, by Fielding or Hume, in previous reigns; but we may assume with some confidence that the chances are good for a reasonable degree of immortality. Some of the great writers or a former age still lived on when Victoria came into her royal possessions. For the most part they had done their best work, however, and they properly belong to the last of the Georges. Among these were Wordsworth, who did not die until 1850; Southey, who died in 1843; Landor, who lived on until 1864; Moore, who died in 1852, and Campbell, in 1844. Macaulay was thirty-seven years old at Victoria’s accession, but he had not published any collected series of his essays; he had not published his “Lays,” and more than ten years were to elapse before the first volumes of his “History” were to see the light. Tennyson was twenty-seven years old in the year 1837, and had been before the public with “Poems by Two Brothers,” “Poems, Chiefly Lyrical,” and the volume of 1833. He had been criticised with severity, and notably so by “Christopher North.” For the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 93 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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next nine years he was to remain silent, but when, in 1842, he came forth again it was to win very general recognition as a poet of the finest order. The poetry of Mrs. Browning almost exclusively belongs to this reign, and so does that of her husband. “Pauline” had previously appeared without Browning’s name; in 1836 he first attracted real attention by his “Paracelsus.” Matthew Arnold’s first success, the poem on Cromwell, dates from 1843. Swinburne was born in the year of Victoria’s accession. Dickens’s first volume, “Sketches by Boz,” came out in 1836, and a year later Thackeray, then ambitious to be an artist and not an author, was offering Dickens to undertake the illustrations for “Pickwick.” Ere the genius of George Eliot should become known twenty years were to elapse. Carlyle had written many of his essays, his “Schiller,” his “Sartor,” and was then in the midst of his “French Revolution,” but still waiting for the day when literature should raise him above actual want. He had arrived in London from Craigenputtock three years before, and had made his home in a house that “remnant of genuine old Dutch-looking Chelsea” in which he was to die, a lonely and brokenhearted old man, more than forty years afterward. Succession To the Throne No Interregnum Under the British Constitution--The Sovereign Never Dies Albert Edward, Prince of Wales for more than 59 years, is now “Edward VII., by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India.” There is no such thing as an interregnum in the unwritten British Constitution, the force of which is by no means lessened by the fact that it exists as a “legal fiction.” In spite of the fact that from the moment of Queen Victoria’s death the Prince of Wales became King, with all the powers and rights attached to the monarchy, the ceremony of coronation possesses in the British regime considerably more importance than in some monarchies. Queen Victoria succeeded to the throne on June 20, 1837, and was crowned on June 28, 1838. About the same interval of time will probably be allowed to intervene before Edward VII is crowned. The ceremony of coronation, in the case of the English Kings, grew out of the other ceremony of anointing the monarch, with which it is now combined. The most significant portion of the ceremony as it has existed in England for the last 200 years is the solemn “coronation oath.” This is virtually a double pledge- -a pledge by the King that he will preserve the established laws, and a pledge by the people, represented by some great functionary, that they will be faithful subjects. The modern form of the coronation oath dates from the coronation of William and Mary, in 1689. In that year the oath was made at every point more precise and explicit than before, and in particular there was added an express engagement on the part of the sovereign to maintain “the laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel, and the Protestant reformed religion as it is established by law.” It provides, further, that the King shall preserve to the Bishops and clergy, and the churches committed 94 Copyright 2012 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to their charge, all their actual and legal rights and privileges. The intention of this pledge is to restrain the King in his administrative, not his legislative, capacity. It binds him to preserve the established law, not to refuse his assent to any future modification of that law that may be made by Parliament. The oath which is administered to the new monarch immediately after his succession is another form of the coronation oath. It will thus be seen that, while the new King has succeeded to the throne, the coronation that must follow will set the seal on his accession. This state of things is different from the custom in many European countries, where the ceremony of coronation seems gradually to be dying out. Kaiser Wilhelm has never been crowned; neither have the rulers of Greece and Portugal. The accession of the new ruler of the United Kingdom will be followed immediately by the “proclamation,” when the King will appear, probably at Buckingham Palace, and a herald will announce that there is a new King. The Mayors of all cities will also announce the event. Certain oaths will be administered to Edward VII. at his first Privy Council, but the “coronation oath” can only be administered at the ceremony which gives it its name. Although the succession to the Crown is automatic, this is not the case with the transferrence of the title of Prince of Wales. Therefore, that title belongs to the sovereign, having been founded by a historic act, which is too well known to need recapitulation. However, the title “Prince of Wales” has been taken by the eldest son of the sovereign for many hundreds of years, and there is not the slightest doubt that one of the first official acts of Edward VII. will be to confer it by royal letters patent upon the Duke of York. In the few hours or days between Queen Victoria’s death and his elevation to the Princedom of Wales, the true title of the heir apparent to the throne will be Duke of Cornwall. Unlike the princedom, this title passes automatically and carries with it the income of £50,000 a year. One of the principal sources of revenue of the heir to the throne. The new ruler of the United Kingdom was born on Nov. 9, 1841, and created Prince of Wales on Dec. 4 of the same years. America’s Debt To Victoria The Queen Averted War Over the Mason-Slidell Incident of the Rebellion At one time Queen Victoria, acting on the advice of the Prince Consort, was virtually the sole means of preventing war between Great Britain and the United States. Sympathy in Great Britain, at the opening of the civil war in this country, was decidedly with the South. When the first few months of hostilities showed a check to the Union forces, there were boasts that the rebels would win, and the British sympathizers were only awaiting an opportunity to show something more effective than sympathy. It was at this time that serious cause for friction occurred

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between the Northern States and Great Britain. Mason and Slidell, the Confederate envoys, were taken from the British ship Trent on the high seas by the San Jacinto and held as prisoners. Secretary of the Navy Welles declared that the action of Capt. Wilkes of the San Jacinto had the “emphatic approval of the Navy Department,” and the House of Representatives voted a resolution of thanks to Capt. Wilkes. The action was taken in the United Kingdom as a deliberate violation of neutrality and an expression of hostility. The papers demanded war, and even the British public was roused to the extent of holding public meetings calling for revenge. Preparations for war were made, and to Earl Russell, the Foreign Secretary, was intrusted the task of formulating a virtual ultimatum. His lordship prepared the demand, and wrote it in language so insulting that a tenth-rate power could hardly have acceded to it without losing all trace of self-respect. The demand had to be submitted to her Majesty, who had insisted from the time she began to reign on all her rights as sovereign, particularly in questions of international importance. The Prince Consort was lying ill unto death. When the dispatch arrived, the Queen, worn out by nursing her husband, had gone out for a short drive. The demand to the United States, which called for the return of the Confederates within seven days, got into the hands of the Prince Consort. He took a pen, for the last time in his life. He changed the demand so that it could be complied with by this country without sacrifice of dignity. When the Queen returned she made up her mind instantly to consent to the dispatch of the demand in the form to which it had been altered by Prince Albert. The arguments of Lord Russell were of no avail, and he had to give way. What followed is a matter of history. A friendly answer was returned by the United States, and the two Confederate envoys were given up. What would have happened without the counsel of Albert and the firm stand of Victoria can only be surmised. The tone of Lord Russell’s demand before it was modified may be judged by another dispatch to the British Minister to Washington, which was not submitted to the Queen: “Should Mr. Seward ask for delay,” wrote the Earl, “you will consent to a delay not exceeding seven days. If, at the end of that time, no answer is given, or if any other answer is given except that of compliance with the demands of her Majesty’s Government, your lordship is instructed to leave Washington with all the members of your legation and to repair immediately to London. You will also communicate Mr. Seward’s answer to Vice Admiral Milne (of the British Atlantic Squadron) and to the Governors of Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Jamaica, Bermuda, and such other of her Majesty’s possessions as may be within your reach.” The Queen’s Wealth Few Persons Know Its Amount--Estimated at £6,000,000 Only the confidential clerks at the famous old London banking

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house of Coutts & Co., with the Keeper of the Privy Purse and one or two unofficial friends of Queen Victoria, are aware of the extent of the fortune which is left by her Majesty. There is no doubt, however, that this fortune is a very large one, some estimates placing it as high as £6,000,000. Until the later years of her life, after the death of the Prince Consort, the Queen was unable to save much. After her bereavement, the comparative retirement in which she lived made an enormous reduction in expenses possible, while her private estate was augmented from other sources. Her father, the Duke of Kent, left her nothing. Indeed, he was on the verge of bankruptcy during the greater portion of his life. From Prince Albert the Queen inherited the greater portion of his estate of £600,000, while a fortune of £500,000 came to her in an entirely unexpected manner. There was a certain private gentleman named John Camden Nield, the son of a goldsmith who had been employed by George III., who lived in a miserly fashion solely that he might leave his accumulated wealth to Queen Victoria. He bequeathed to her every penny he possessed, leaving his relatives unprovided for. This injustice the Queen did not tolerate. She accepted the gift, but provided that annuities be paid to Mr. Nield’s relatives. It is said that the interest on the £500,000 has been allowed to accumulate, until the amount has been nearly doubled. The allowance made by Parliament to the Queen has been £385,000 a year, of which amount nearly £70,000 was for personal expenses and unappropriated. The revenues from the Duchy of Lancaster brought her Majesty’s income up to over £100,000 annually, the proportion of which that has been saved in the last thirty years can only be guessed at. The value of the presents given to her Majesty on various occasions has been enormous. Especially valuable were the gifts she received at her two jubilees. Her private plate alone is said to be worth considerably over £400,000. The disposition to be made of the Queen’s estate is as much a mystery as the size of the estate itself. It is regarded as probable that little or nothing will go to the King, as he will be provided for by Parliament, which may also pay his debts, if they are of an extent calculated to embarrass him. Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company

1909

June 26, Saturday: The Victoria and Albert Museum opened in London. Named in honor of his parents, the building was inaugurated by King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra.

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2012. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: October 18, 2012

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.

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Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place your requests with . Arrgh.