Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/577

 Each made a favourable impression on the other. On 4 Oct. Prince Albert writes ; 'We hear nothing but excellent accounts of the Princess Alexandra; the young people seem to have taken a warm liking to one another.' Again, when the Prince of Wales returned to England a few days later, his father writes to Stockmar: 'He has come back greatly pleased with his interview with the princess at Speier.'

For the present nothing further followed. The prince resumed his residence at Cambridge. He was in London on 31 Oct., when he was called to the bar at the Middle Temple, was elected a bencher, and opened the new library at the Inn. But his studies at Cambridge went forward during the Michaelmas term. The stringent discipline was proving irksome, and he was involuntarily coming to the conclusion, which future experience confirmed, that his sojourns at the two English universities were mistakes. On 25 Nov. Prince Albert arrived to offer him good counsel. He stayed the night at Madingley Hall. A chill caught on the journey developed into what unhappily proved to be a fatal illness. On 13 Dec. the prince was summoned from Cambridge to Windsor to attend his father's deathbed. Prince Albert died next day.

At his father's funeral in St. George's Chapel on 23 Dec. the prince was chief mourner, in his mother's absence. He joined her the same day at Osborne. At the queen's request he wrote a day or two later a letter publicly identifying himself with her overwhelming anxiety to pay her husband's memory all public honour. On the 28th he offered to place, at his own expense, in the gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society, a statue of the prince instead of one of the queen which had already been cast for erection there, by way of memorial of the Great Exhibition of 1851.

II The sudden death of his father, when the prince was just turned twenty years of age, was a momentous incident in his career. The strict discipline, to which his father had subjected him, had restrained in him every sense of independence and had fostered a sentiment of filial awe. He wholly shared his mother's faith in the character and attainments of the dead prince. In her husband's lifetime the queen had acknowledged his superior right to control her sons. But after his death she regarded herself to be under a solemn obligation to fill his place in the family circle and to regulate all her household precisely on the lines which he had followed. To all arrangements which the prince consort had made for her sons and daughters she resolved loyally to give effect and to devise others in the like spirit. The notion of consulting their views or wishes was foreign to her conception of duty. Abounding in maternal solicitude, she never ceased to think of the Prince of Wales as a boy to whom she owed parental guidance, the more so because he was fatherless. A main effect of his father's death was consequently to place him, in his mother's view, almost in permanence 'in statu pupillari.' She claimed to regulate his actions in almost all relations of life.

Earlier signs were apparent, even in Prince Albert's lifetime, of an uneasy fear on the queen's part that her eldest son might, on reaching manhood, check the predominance which it was her wish that her husband should enjoy as her chief counsellor. In 1857 she had urged on ministers a parliamentary enactment for securing Prince Albert's formal precedence in the state next to herself. Stockmar was asked to press upon her the imprudence of her proposal, and it was with reluctance dropped (, Lord Oranville). But the episode suggests the limitations which threatened the Prince of Wales's adult public activity. In his mother's sight he was disqualified by his filial relation from filling the place which her husband had held in affairs of state or from relieving her of any political duties. His mother accurately described her lasting attitude alike to her husband's memory and to her children in a letter to King Leopold (24 Dec. 1861) : 'And no human power will make me swerve from what he decided and wished. I apply this particularly as regards our children Bertie, &c. for whose future he had traced everything so carefully. I am also determined that no one person, may he be ever so good, ever so devoted among my servants is to lead or guide or dictate tome' (Letters, iii. 606).

The Prince of Wales always treated his mother with affectionate deference and considerate courtesy. Naturally docile, he in his frequent letters to her addressed her up to her death in simple filial style, beginning 'Dear Mama' and ending 'Your affectionate and dutiful son.' To the queen the formula had a literal significance. But on reaching man's estate the prince's views of life broadened. He travelled far from the rigid traditions in which he had been