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her reign also contained, as one of the illustrations, the Queen seated upon a white charger addressing the troops at Tilbury, when England expected the coming of the Armada. Now from my earliest days a white horse in a picture has had the same fascination for my eye as it seems to have had for the brush of Wouverman. Even Death in the illustrated Bible lost most of its terrors because he was the Rider of the Pale Horse. The combination of my beloved aunt's name with the heroic figure on the white charger was irresistible. I dreamed about Queen Elizabeth that night, and fell in love with her on the spot. I might have fallen out again, with the usual celerity of boyhood, had not my elder sister, whose name was Mary, happened to make disparaging remarks concerning Queen Bess because, forsooth, she had cut off the head of my sister's namesake Mary of Scotland. I had a terrible moment. It did seem awful to have fallen in love with a queen who could be so cruel, but it was only for a moment. The woman whom I loved could do no wrong-especially as my sister abused her. Therefore Mary Queen of Scots deserved all she got. So the great feud began in our family, as sooner or later it begins everywhere, between the partizans of the two queens. But from that moment there was one queen in English history who commanded the whole-hearted devotion of her sworn knight errant―ætat.

seven.

The incident was not without its bearing upon the relation in which I stood to Queen Victoria then and thereafter. For that infantile passion for Queen Elizabetha passion so intense that I would not look at a book which said a bad word of her, and which would send me to bed in a storm of tears if anyone derided the crowned idol of my soul-effected what might otherwise have never been accomplished. It broke down for me, a Republican born of Republicans, that passionate hatred of monarchs which otherwise might have reigned with unbroken sway. In the midst of the fierce objurgations which were hurled against despots, kings, and all the crowned enemies of the human race, I always made a mental exception in favour of Queen Elizabeth.

This brings me to the political starting-point which I found waiting for me when I began to think of things. Independents-my father was an Independent minister— were by tradition opponents of the Monarchy. Oliver Cromwell is the hero-saint of the denomination, which kept his memory green during the dismal years that passed before Thomas Carlyle arose to disinter the Lord Protector from the rubbish heap under which his memory had been buried. Add to this that I was born in the midst of a passionate upheaval of Republican enthusiasm. I was a child of 1848-9. Down to the seventies my political heroes were the Republican apostles, the Mazzinis, the Garibaldis, the Kossuths, the Victor Hugos of the European Revolution. In our home the American Republic was the avowed ideal of my father's political dreams. He was born the son of a Sheffield cutler, in the days when Sheffield cutlers were Radicals much given to rattening. He shared the political passions of Ebenezer Elliott, and to his dying day he never could free himself from his prejudice against the Tory aristocracy as the class that taxed the people's bread. "Twould be a good thing for England," he used to say in his grim jocular fashion, "if our whole aristocracy could be put on board an old hulk and scuttled in mid-Atlantic." As for the Queen, his note was one of contemptuous toleration rather than of active dislike. "A good woman, no doubt," he said, "but she has only to sign her name. Any goose that could sign her name would do as well." Notwithstanding which political heresies based on sheer lack of information and the distorting influences of early environment, my father was one of the best of men, the most law-abiding of citizens, and the kindest parent boy could ever have.

It is necessary to make this explanation to render conceivable the curious little

feeling of resentment which is the very first feeling I can remember associating with the person of Her Majesty. It must be much more than thirty years ago, if it is a day, but I remember as well as if it only happened yesterday, the odd boyish feeling that something had gone wrong somehow in the world at large when the news came that

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our Queen Victoria had gone over to France and had been kissed-actually been kissed by Louis Napoleon. Who Louis Napoleon was I at that time could have little notion. But to my parents he was the man of the 2nd December, the criminal of the Coup d'État, the usurper who had strangled the Republic in the night after he had sworn before high Heaven to defend it to the death. In common with many others

they resented-and rightly-the haste with which Lord Palmerston condoned the treacherous assassination of the Republic, and they bitterly grudged the embrace which our good Queen gave to the usurper whose fingers had dripped with the blood of his massacred fellow-citizens. "She ought not to have let him kiss her," was all that I felt, and in that there lay plainly perceptible now, but unsuspected then, the first germ of the sense of ownership in the Queen, which when fully developed makes every Englishman a prouder man to-day when he reflects upon the glories of the reign. But in my case the budding sense of identity with the Queen, as representative of the whole nation, began with a feeling of anything but pride, rather, indeed, a feeling of humiliation that she had let

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THE CROWN PRINCE FREDERICK OF PRUSSIA.

(Late Emperor Frederick III.)

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pinafore there was ever a longing, lingering look behind for the days of Good Queen Bess, and much disparaging regret that we only lived in the prosaic humdrum days of Queen Victoria.

The Crimean war came on. A child of five or even a boy of seven hears but vague echoes of those far-off events. But I remember a picture of the Queen on a white horse reviewing troops about to depart, and my memory vaguely conjures up associations of Her Majesty bidding farewell to a one-armed general, and having something to say to Lord Colin Campbell, who-why I don't remember was much the most popular hero in our nursery. A floating battery was built at Jarrow shipyard too late to take part in the war, but otherwise my personal association with the

Crimea is of the slightest. The Indian Mutiny is not linked with the Queen in my memory.

I have however omitted mentioning one notable link in the chain that almost insensibly brought the Republican family on Tyneside into touch with the Royal Family at Windsor. The first great International Exhibition of 1851 was an event the full significance of which is to this day but imperfectly appreciated. Only last year the Irish Recess Committee reported incidentally that the revival of the industrial and agricultural life of Wurtemburg dates from the effect which that Exhibition produced on the mind of a German visitor. Vague traditions of the marvels and wonders

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all there was the constant presence of the Prince Consort, and over it the glorifying vision of the Queen.

Those who were born after the fifties can form no conception of the strength of the hold of the Republican idea upon many Englishmen. Byron's vigorous verse and the revolutionary poetry of Shelley were but the most conspicuous expressions of a sentiment which found many minor exponents from Moore to Ebenezer Elliott. The "monarch-murdered soldier" was the mode of describing the victims of war. It was assumed that the Republic meant peace, and that with the disappearance of despots all the horrors of war and of armed peace would disappear. The idealist, the visionary, the poet, and the philosopher all talked and thought as if Monarchy

were an anachronism-a belated survival which must speedily vanish from a world in which enlightened humanity would "have no more use for kings." In the midst of this all but universal assumption that Monarchy was played out, and that the crowned heads existed but to menace the world with war, there came to birth this gigantic object-lesson as to the pacific service which Royalty could render to Humanity. The Exhibition was the Prince Consort's child. It was his idea, and its success was in no small measure the result of his untiring energy, his sagacious prescience, and his capacity to oversee and overrule. Prince Albert could never have achieved this great result had he not been Prince Consort. It was from the steps of the Throne he was able to inaugurate and to direct an enterprise which, to the imagination of our fathers, seemed to promise the dawn of millennial peace. The dream passed. But the memory of the vision and of its artificer remained. In the record of the re-establishment of the prestige of the constitutional monarchy in this country, the Exhibition of 1851 will occupy a more prominent position than any that has yet been accorded to it. It may not have impressed the statesman and the diplomat. But to the silent million which saw and marvelled and rejoiced it was a portent indeed.

The next date in my calendar was the first wedding in the Royal Family. I was then a boy of ten or eleven. We kept up a kind of make-believe that we did not care about such trivialities, but as a matter of fact we carefully cherished a coloured print of the Princess Royal, and worked ourselves up into quite a state of excitement over her future. We did not like the look of the Prince of Prussia as he appeared in the prints. He did not seem good enough for her. And my father, who was ever much exercised in his dear old heart about German neology, shook his head gravely over the marriage. Mother did not like it either, and I think we should have all been devoutly glad if it had been broken off. But it came to pass, and it is a curious instance of the hold the Family had established even in that Republican household, that I remember the incident of the Royal marriage far more vividly to-day than even any of the ghastly incidents of the Indian Mutiny. We had already begun to take a personal interest in the Family. It was our Family. Republicans though we were, we were English, and as long "as the Monarchy lasted," &c. Such were the salves with which we plastered our consciences. But looking back upon it now, after the lapse of thirty years, I can better appreciate the inestimable political and imperial advantage of having at the foretop of the State not a politician, but a Family every domestic episode in the life of whose members weaves a new thread of living interest between the head of the State and the humblest of the citizens.

Nor was it only in pleasurable incidents that the Family justified its position. The bond was drawn still more closely by Death than by Wedlock. Of this I can speak from personal experience. When a boy of twelve, I was sent from home for the first time in my life to a boarding-school in Yorkshire. A few months later, as we were going in to supper one night, the passing bell began to toll and the news spread from mouth to mouth that Prince Albert was dead. He had never been much more than a name to me, but the sudden quickening sense of sympathy with those who were mourning their dead revealed the existence of a new link. Queen and plebeian, we stood equal before the bier of Death. How that bell tolled, tolled, tolled that night, each slow and heavy stroke falling heavy on the aching heart, reviving the memories of the departed, and blending sovereign and subject in the communion of a common grief.

succeeded mourning, and the bridal What a sudden thrill of delight there that the marriage of the Prince of

Less than two years passed, and joy had blossom shone bright instead of widow's weeds. ran through the school when it was announced Wales to the Princess Alexandra was to be kept as a public holiday, in which the

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