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 gretting his inability to make her personal acquaintance while she was in the neighbourhood of his dominions ; and when his son and heir was born a day or two later, on 22 Aug. 1858, she at once wrote a cordial note of congratulation. Now his interview with her lasted three hours. Only Duke Ernest was present with them. The queen prudently deprecated the notion that she desired to enter in detail into political questions, but her maternal anxiety for her children at Berlin impelled her (she said) to leave no stone unturned to stave off the dangers that threatened Prussia. She knew how greatly Prussia would benefit if she won a sympathetic hearing from the emperor. He heard her respectfully, but committed himself to nothing, and the interview left the situation unchanged (, Memoirs, iv. 134). But the interest of the episode cannot be measured by its material result. It is a signal proof of the queen's courageous will and passionate devotion to her family.

Soon after parting with Emperor Francis Joseph, the queen set her face homewards, only pausing at Darmstadt to see her daughter Alice in her own home. Arrived in England, she paid her customary autumn visit to Balmoral, and spent some days in September with her friends the Duke and Duchess of Athol at Blair Athol. Afterwards she temporarily issued from her seclusion in order to unveil publicly at Aberdeen, on 13 Oct. 1863, a bronze statue of the prince consort, which Marochetti had designed at the expense of the city and county. In reply to unveiled at the address from the subscribers the queen declared through Sir George Grey, the home secretary, that she had come ' to proclaim in public the unbounded reverence and admiration, the devoted love that fills my heart for him whose loss must throw a lasting gloom over all my future life.' The occasion was one of severe and painful trial to her ; but it proved the first of numerous occasions on which she presided over a like ceremony. She welcomed the multiplication of statues of the late prince with such warmth that by degrees, as Gladstone said, they 'covered the land.'

Before the end of the year (1863) there broke out the struggle in central Europe which the conflicting claims of Germany and Denmark to the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein had long threatened. English ministers and the queen had always kept the question well in view. In 1852 a conference in London of representatives of the various parties had arranged, under the English government's guidance, a compromise, whereby the relation of the duchies to Germany and Denmark was so defined as to preserve peace for eleven years. The Danes held them under German supervision. But in the course of 1863 Frederick VII of Denmark asserted new claims on the disputed territory. Although he died just before he gave effect to his intentions, his successor, the princess of Wales's father, Christian IX, at once fully accepted his policy. Opinion in Germany, while at one in its hostility to Denmark and in its deliberate resolve henceforth to exclude her from the duchies, ran in two sharply divided currents in regard to their future status and their relation to Germany. In 1852 Denmark had bought off a German claimant to the duchies in the person of Duke Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, but his son Duke Frederick declined to be bound by the bargain, and had, in 1863, reasserted an alleged hereditary right to the territory, with the enthusiastic concurrence of the smaller German states and of a liberal minority in Prussia. Two of Duke Frederick's adherents, the kings of Saxony and Hanover, actually sent troops to drive the Danes from Kiel, the chief city of Holstein, in December 1863, and to put him in possession. The government of Prussia, on the other hand, was indifferent to Duke Frederick's pretensions, and anticipating embarrassment from co-operation with the small German states, it took the matter entirely out of their hands. The king of Prussia induced the emperor of Austria to join him exclusively in expelling the Danes from the two duchies, and it was agreed that the two powers, having overcome the Danes, should hold the territories jointly until some final arrangement was reached. There were thus three parties to the dispute the king of Denmark, Duke Frederick of Augustenburg with his German champions, and the rulers of Prussia and Austria.

Two of the three litigants, the king of Denmark and Duke Frederick, each clamoured for the queen's support divided and the intervention of English interests. arms. The queen, who narrowly watched the progress of events and surprised ministers at home and envoys from abroad with the minuteness and accuracy of her knowledge, was gravely disturbed. Her sympathies were naturally German and anti-Danish ; but between the two sections of German opinion she somewhat hesitated. Duke Frederick was the husband of the daughter of her half-sister Féodore, and she