Page:Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (IA lifeofhermajesty01fawc).pdf/163

 It was in the midst of all this excitement that Princess Louise was born, on March 18th, 1848. With all the fear caused by the anticipation of the Chartist movement on April 10th, it is not surprising that the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, strongly urged the removal of the Court to Osborne. It is not impossible that the three-weeks-old baby was even more persuasive than the Prime Minister. However this may be, the Queen left London for Osborne on April 8th, not without some criticism from Greville. Greville was nothing if not critical; he had blamed Sir Robert Peel for resigning in 1844, and thus causing a ministerial crisis when the Queen was near her confinement, and he now blamed Lord John Russell for advising the Queen to go to Osborne with her new-born infant, in anticipation of a Chartist riot in London on April 10, 1848.

There was an immense feeling of relief all over the country when the day passed off so quietly. The popular feeling in London was manifested by the cheers which greeted the Duke of Wellington when he turned out early the next morning to his post at the Horse Guards. The Prince wrote to his private secretary on April 11th, "What a glorious day was yesterday for England. … How mightily this will tell all over the world!" The utter inability of the revolutionary germ to thrive in the soil of constitutional liberty was the lesson of 1848. Repeated illustrations of the same fact have been given in more recent times. After the explosion in Greenwich Park in 1894, caused by the Frenchman Bourdin, the police seized an anarchist club near Tottenham Court Road, and caught a gang of eighty men representing the anarchist propaganda in London. Every man but one was a foreigner, and the solitary Englishman was a journalist who had come, not to revolutionize, but to get copy for his paper!