Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol III (1901).djvu/464

 merston at the moment was disabled by gout, and the cabinet was under the somewhat severe and pedantic control of Lord John Russell. The reproof awoke the queen to a sense of her position. Gradually she controlled her anguish, and resigned herself to her fate. She had lost half her existence. Nothing hereafter could be to her what it had once been. No child could fill the place that was vacant. But she did not seek to ease herself of her burden. She steeled herself to bear it alone. Hitherto the prince, she said, had thought for her. Now she would think for herself. His example was to be her guide. The minute care that he had bestowed with her on affairs of state she would bestow. Her decisions would be those that she believed he would have taken. She would seek every advantage that she could derive from the memory of his counsel. Nothing that reminded her of him was disturbed no room that he inhabited, scarcely a paper that he had handled. The anniversary of his death was henceforth kept as a solemn day of rest and prayer, and the days of his birth, betrothal, and marriage were held in religious veneration. She never ceased to wear mourning for him ; she long lived in seclusion, and took no part in court festivities or ceremonial pageantry. Now that the grave had closed over her sole companion and oracle of one-and-twenty years, she felt that a new reign had begun, and must in outward aspect be distinguished from the reign that had closed. But the lessons that the prince had taught her left so deep an impression on her, she clung so tenaciously to his spirit, that her attitude to the business of state and her action in it during the forty years that followed his death bore little outward sign of change from the days when he was perpetually at her side.

V In the 'two dreadful first years of loneliness' that followed the prince's death the queen lived in complete seclusion. dining often by herself or with her half-sister, and seeing only for any length of time members of her own family. But her widowhood rendered her more dependent than before on her personal attendants, and her intimacy with them gradually grew greater. Of the female members of her household on whose support she rested, ,the chief was Lady Augusta Bruce, and on her marriage to Dean Stanley on 23 Dec. 1863, congenial successors to Lady Augusta were found in Jane Marchioness of Ely, who had been a lady of the bedchamber since 1857 and filled that office till 30 April 1889, and in Jane Lady Churchill, who was a lady of the bed-chamber from 4 July 1854 and remained in attendance on the queen till her sudden death on Christmas day 1900 less than a month before the queen herself died. Even from the lower ranks of her household she welcomed sympathy and proofs of personal attachment. She found Scotsmen and Scots-women of all classes, but especially of the humbler, readier in the expression of kindly feeling than Englishmen and Englishwomen. When she paid, in May 1862, the first painful visit of her widowhood to Balmoral, her reception was a real solace to her. Her Scottish chaplain, Dr. Norman Macleod, gave her more real consolation than any clergyman of the south. She found a satisfaction in employing Scots men and women in her domestic service. John Brown, a son of a farmer on her highland estate, had been an outdoor servant at Balmoral since 1849, and had won the regard of the prince and herself. She soon made him a personal retainer, to be in constant attendance upon her in all the migrations of the court. He was of rugged exterior and uncourtly manners, but she believed in his devotion to her and in his strong common sense, and she willingly pardoned in him the familiarity of speech and manner which old servants are in the habit of acquiring. She took all his brothers into her service, and came to regard him as one of her trustiest friends. In official business she derived invaluable assistance in the early years of her widowhood from those who were filling more dignified positions in her household. The old objections to the appointment of a private secretary to the queen, now that the prince who had acted in that capacity was no more, were not revived, and it was at once conferred without debate on General the Hon. Charles Grey, a younger son of the second Earl Grey, who had been since 1846 private secretary to the prince, and whose sister, Lady Caroline Barrington, was since 1851 the governess of the royal children. Some differences of opinion were held outside court circles as to his tact and judgment, but until his death in 1870 his devotion to his work relieved the queen of much pressing anxiety. She also reposed full confidence in Sir Charles Phipps, keeper of the privy purse, who died in 1866, and in Sir Thomas Biddulph, who was master of her household from 1851, and after 1867 sole keeper of the privy purse until his death in 1878. No three men could have served her more single-mindedly than Grey, Phipps,