Chapter 1

Reign of Queen Victoria--Outlook of Royalty in 1819--Duke and Duchess of Kent--Birth of Victoria--Wisely trained by Duchess of Kent--Taught by Fraeulein Lehzen--Anecdotes of this Period--Discovers that she is next to the Throne.

The reign of Queen Victoria may be aptly described as a period of progress in all that related to the well-being of the subjects of her vast empire. In every department of science, literature, politics, and the practical life of the nation, there has been steady improvement and progress. Our ships circumnavigate the globe and do the chief carrying trade of the world. The locomotive binds industrial centres, and abridges time and space as it speeds along its iron pathway; whilst steam-power does the work of thousands of hands in our large factories. The telegraph links us to our colonies, and to the various nationalities of the world, in commerce and in closer sympathy; and never was the hand and heart of Benevolence busier than in this later period of the nineteenth century. Our colonial empire has shared also in the welfare and progress of the mother-country.

When we come to look into the lives of the Queen and Prince-Consort, we are thankful for all they have been and done. The wider our survey of history, and the more we know of other rulers and courts, the more thankful we shall be that they have been a guiding and balancing power, allied to all that was progressive, noble, and true, and for the benefit of the vast empire over which Her Majesty reigns. And the personal example has been no less valuable in

Wearing the white flower of a blameless life, Before a thousand peering littlenesses, In that fierce light which heats upon a throne, And blackens every blot.

In the year 1819 the family outlook of the British royal house was not a very bright one. The old king, George III., was lingering on in deep seclusion, a very pathetic figure, blind and imbecile. His son the Prince Regent, afterwards George IV., had not done honour to his position, nor brought happiness to any connected with him. Most of the other princes were elderly men and childless; and the Prince-Regent's only daughter, the Princess Charlotte, on whom the hopes of the nation had rested, and whose marriage had raised those hopes to enthusiasm, was newly laid in her premature grave.

But almost immediately after Princess Charlotte's death, the king's third and fourth sons, the Dukes of Clarence and Kent, had married. Of the Duke of Clarence we need say little more. He and his consort eventually reigned as William IV. and Queen Adelaide, and they had two children who died in earliest infancy, and did not further complicate the succession to the crown.

The Duke of Kent, born in 1767, fourth son of George III.--a tall, stately man, of soldierly hearing, inclined to corpulency and entirely bald--married the widowed Princess of Leiningen, already the mother of a son and a daughter by her first