CHAPTER XI. 1839. Declaration of the Marriage to the Privy Council.-List of Privy Councilors present.-The Queen's Journal.-Proceedings at Coburg and Gotha.-Letter from Prince Ernest to the Queen.-Preliminary Arrangements. THE public declaration of the intended marriage had been necessarily delayed till it should have been officially communicated to the Privy Council; but on the 15th, the day after the departure of the princes, the Queen mentions in the memorandum from which the account of her betrothal has been chiefly taken, that she wrote letters to the queen dowager, and to the other members of the English royal family, announcing her intended marriage, and received kind answers from all. On the 20th of November the Queen, accompanied by the Duchess of Kent, came up from Windsor to Buckingham Palace, and on the same day Lord Melbourne brought for her approval a copy of the declaration which it was proposed to make to the Privy Council. The Queen relates that she had much conversation with him at the same time on the various arrangements to be made, and the steps to be taken with regard to the marriage. £50,000 was the amount of annuity which it had been proposed to settle on the Prince; and in this Lord Melbourne said that the cabinet (most erroneously as it turned out) anticipated no difficulty whatever, except perhaps in case of survivorship. The Queen records in her Journal that she observed "she thought this would be very unfair," and that Lord Melbourne expressed his entire concurrence with her, hoping, however, that the difficulty might not arise. On the same occasion, Lord Melbourne told the Queen of a "stupid attempt to make it out that the Prince was a Roman Catholic!" Absurd as such a report was, the Prince, as the Queen remarks in her Journal, "being particularly Protestant in his opinions," Lord Melbourne told the Queen that he was afraid to say any thing about the Prince's religion, and that the subject would not therefore be alluded to in the proposed declaration.* It will be seen that this omission was afterward severely commented upon in the House of Lords. The Privy Council met on the 23d, when upward of eighty members assembled in the bow room on the ground floor in Buckingham Palace. "Precisely at two" (the Queen records in her Journal) "I went in. The room was full, but I hardly knew who was there. Lord Melbourne I saw looking kindly at me with tears in his eyes, but he was not near me. I then read my short declaration. I felt my hands shook, but I did not make one mistake. I felt most happy and thankful when it was over. Lord Lansdowne then rose, and, in the name of the Privy Council, asked that 'this most gracious and most welcome communication might be printed.' I then left the room, the whole thing not last * Memorandum by the Queen. |