Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/572

 dinner-party at Cambridge Cottage, Kew, the residence of his great-aunt, the duchess of Cambridge, but all was too strictly regulated to give a youth much satisfaction. His sojourn at White Lodge was interrupted in August, when he went with his parents to Cherbourg, and renewed his acquaintance with the emperor and empress of the French. On 9 Nov. 1858, his seventeenth birthday, one purpose of his retirement to Richmond was fulfilled. He was made a colonel in the army unattached and at the same time was nominated K.G., though the installation was postponed. The date was regarded by his parents as marking his entry on manhood. Among their gifts was a memorandum signed by themselves solemnly warning him of his duties as a Christian gentleman. Gibbs, too, retired from the prince's service, and his precise post was allowed to lapse.

But there was no real change in the situation. His parents relaxed none of their vigilance, and a more complete control of the prince's affairs and conduct than Gibbs had exercised was now entrusted to a governor, Colonel Robert Bruce. The colonel fully enjoyed Prince Albert's confidence; his sister, Lady Augusta, was a close friend of the queen and was lady-in-waiting of his grandmother, the duchess of Kent. At the same time Charles Tarver was formally installed as instructor in classics.

For the next four years the prince and Col. Bruce were rarely parted, and Col. Bruce's wife, Catherine Mary, daughter of Sir Michael Shaw Stewart, usually assisted her husband in the strict discharge of his tutorial functions. The first incident in the new regime was a second foreign expedition of more imposing extent than the first. Travel was proving attractive, and his parents wisely encouraged his taste for it. During December a short visit, the first of many, was paid to his married sister at Potsdam (December 1858). Next month he with Colonel and Mrs. Bruce started from Dover on an Italian tour. Stringent injunctions were laid on Bruce by his parents to protect the prince from any chance intercourse with strangers and to anticipate any unprincipled attempt of journalists to get into conversation with him. The prince was to encounter much that was new. He travelled for the first time under a formal incognito, and took the title of Baron of Renfrew. On leaving England he presented colours to the Prince of Wales's royal (100th) Canadian regiment, which was in camp at Shorncliffe (10 Jan. 1859), and delivered to the soldiers his first speech in public. The duke of Cambridge was present and pronounced it excellent. From Dover he crossed to Ostend to pay at the palace of Laeken, near Brussels, a first visit to his grand-uncle, King Leopold I. The king's influence over him was hardly less than that which he exerted on the boy's mother and father. Passing through Germany, the party made a short stay at Berlin, where Lord Bloomfield gave a ball in his honour. It was the first entertainment of the kind he had attended, and he was 'very much amused' with his first cotillon. He reached Rome near the end of January and settled down for a long stay. King Victor Emanuel was anxious to offer him hospitality at Turin. But Queen Victoria deemed King Victor's rough habit of speech, of which she had some experience at Windsor in 1855, an example to be avoided, and the invitation, somewhat to Cavour's embarrassment, was declined. At Rome the prince was soon busily engaged in seeing places and persons of interest. Attended by Bruce, he called on the Pope, Pius IX, and talked with him in French. The interview 'went off extremely well,' Queen Victoria wrote to King Leopold (15 Feb. 1859), and the pope interested himself in the endeavour to make the visit to Rome 'useful and pleasant' (Queen's Letters, iii. 411). Of duly approved English sojourners the prince saw many. He impressed Robert Browning as 'a gentle, refined boy' ; he was often in the studio of the sculptor John Gibson, and an introduction there to Frederic Leighton led to a lifelong intimacy.

The outbreak of war between Italy and Austria in April hastened the prince's departure at the end of three months. H.M.S. Scourge carried him from Civita Vecchia to Gibraltar, where he was met by the royal yacht Osborne. From Gibraltar he passed to Lisbon, where he was entertained by Pedro V, king of Portugal. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were attached to the Portuguese royal house by lineal ties and sentiments of affection. King Pedro's mother, Queen Maria, had been a playmate of Queen Victoria, and his father, Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, was a first cousin of both Queen Victoria and her consort. With Portugal's successive monarchs the Prince