| Victoria, Queen of England |
| by James Parton, 1868 |
|
Related topics: • About Queen Victoria |
Not much can be said in commendation of the more recent ancestors of Queen Victoria. George the First was fifty four years of age when he stepped ashore at Greenwich, and walked to the royal palace in its park, hailed and saluted as King of England. He was an honest, hearty man, brave and resolute; but he had an incurable narrowness of mind, and he was as ignorant of all that a king ought to know as the kings of that period generally were. "My maxim is," he used to say, "never to abandon my friends; to do justice to all the world, and to fear no man."
The saying does him honor. He was a man of punctual and business-like habits, diligent in performing the duties appertaining to his place, so far as he understood them. But, unhappily, when he left his native country, he left his heart behind him. He loved Hanover, and a man can no more love two countries than two women. He understood Hanover; he never understood England; and the thing which he had at heart, during his whole reign, was the aggrandizement of Hanover. He had the satisfaction of dying in his native land, which he was accustomed frequently to visit, and his dust still reposes there in the electoral mausoleum.
His son, George the Second, with all his narrowness and ignorance, was not without his good and strong points. Like most of his ancestors, he was honest, well-intentioned, and brave; and, like most of his ancestors, he was singularly unfitted to have anything to do with the government of a great nation. The ornament of his court was Queen Caroline, a patron of art and literature, whom the king loved truly, and scolded incessantly, whom he sincerely respected and continually dishonored. The scenes which took place at the death-bed of this queen show us something of the character of both of the ill-assorted pair.
The king," says a recent writer, "was heart-broken, but he was himself. He could not leave her in peace at that last moment. By way of watching over her, he lay on the queen's bed all night in his nightgown, where he could not sleep nor she turn about easily. He went out and in continually, telling everybody, with tears, of her great qualities. But he could not restrain the old habit of scolding when he was by her side.'How the devil should you sleep when you will never lie still a moment!' he cried with an impatience which those who have watched by a death-bed will at least understand.'You want to rest, and the doctors tell you nothing can do you so much good, and yet you always move about. Nobody can sleep in that manner, and that is always your way; you never take the proper method to get what you want, and then you wonder you have it not.' When her weary eyes, weary of watching the troubled comings and goings about her, fixed upon one spot, the alarmed, excited, hasty spectator cried out, with a loud and quick voice, 'Mon Diets qu'est ce que vous regardez? Comment pentt-on fixer ces yeux comme ca?' he cried. He tortured her to eat, as many a healthful watcher does with cruel kindness.'How is it possible you should know whether you like a thing or not?' he said. He was half-crazed with sorrow and love, and a kind of panic. And he was garrulous, and talked without intermission of her and of himself, with a vague historical sense, as if talking of a life that had come to an end.
"One incident of this death-bed scene is probably without a parallel in the history of the human race: She counselled him to marry again, as he sat sobbing by her bedside. Poor man, he was hysterical, too, with grief and excitement. Wiping his eyes and sobbing between every word, with much ado, he got out this answer:'on -- j'aurai des maitlesses.' To which the queen made no other reply than,'Ah, me .Dieu! cela n'einpeche pas a!' Criticism stands confounded before such an incident."
Such was George the Second, the great-great-grandfather of the present virtuous sovereign of England. Such was the British Court a little more than a hundred years ago.
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