example of Francis. Her Majesty, who had been very earnest to save
the life of the miserable beings attacking her, desired an alteration
in the law as to such assaults; and their penalty was fixed at seven
years' transportation, or imprisonment not exceeding three years, to
which the court was empowered to add a moderate number of
whippings--punishments having no heroic fascination about them, like
that which for heated and shallow brains invested the hideous doom of
"traitors." The expedient proved in a measure successful, none of the
later assaults, discreditable as they are, betraying a really
murderous intention. It has been remarked as a noteworthy
circumstance that popular English monarchs have been more exposed to
such dangers than others who were cordially disliked. It is not
hatred that has prompted these assassins so much as imbecile vanity
and the passion for notoriety, misleading an obscure coxcomb to think

                        "His glory would be great
   According to _her_ greatness whom he quenched."



CHAPTER III.

FRANCE AND ENGLAND.

[Illustration: Buckingham Palace.]

It is  necessary now to look at the relations of our Government with
other nations, and in particular with France, whose fortunes just at
this time had a clearly traceable effect on our own.

For several years the Court of England had been on terms of
unprecedented cordiality with the French Court. The Queen had
personally visited King Louis Philippe at the Chateau d'Eu--an event
which we must go back as far as the days of Henry VIII to
parallel--and had contracted a warm friendship for certain members of
his family, in particular for the Queen, Marie Amelie, for the
widowed Duchess of Orleans, a maternal cousin of Prince Albert, and
for the perfect Louise, the truthful, unselfish second wife of
Leopold, King of the Belgians, and daughter of the King of the
French. It was a rude shock to all the warm feelings which our Queen,
herself transparently honest, had learnt to cherish for her royal
friends when the French King and his Minister, Guizot, entered into
that fatal intrigue of theirs, "the Spanish marriages." Isabella, the
young Queen of Spain, and her sister and heiress presumptive, Louisa,
were yet unmarried at the time of the visit to the Chateau d'Eu; and
about that time an undertaking was given by the French to the English
Government that the Infanta Louisa should not marry a French prince
until her sister, the actual Queen, "should be married and have
children." The possible union of the crowns of France and Spain was
known for a dream of French ambition, and was equally well known to
be an object of dislike and dread to other European Powers. The
engagement which the French King had now given seemed therefore well
calculated to disarm suspicion and promote peace; but the one was
reawakened and the other endangered when it became known that he had
so used his power over the Spanish court as to procure that the royal
sisters of Spain should be married on one day--Isabella, the Queen,
to the most unfit and uncongenial of all the possible candidates for
her hand; Louisa to King Louis Philippe's son, the Duke of
Montpensier. The transaction on the face of it was far from
respectable, since the credit and happiness of the young Spanish
Queen seemed to have hardly entered into the consideration of those
who arranged for her the _mariage de convenance_ into which she was
led blindfold; but when regarded as a violation of good faith it was
additionally displeasing. Queen Victoria, to whom the scheme was
imparted only when it was ripe for execution, through her personal
friend Louise, Queen of the Belgians, replied to the communication in
a tone of earnest, dignified remonstrance; but apparently the King
was now too thoroughly committed to his scheme to be deterred by any
reasoning or reproaches, and the tragical farce was played out. It
had no good results for France; England was chilled and alienated,
but the Spanish crown never devolved on the Duchess of Montpensier.
Within two little years from her marriage that princess and all the
French royal family fled from France, so hastily that they had
scarcely money enough to provide for their journey, and appeared in
England as fugitives, to be aided and protected by the Queen, who
forgot all political resentment, and remembered only her personal
regard for these fallen princes.

The overthrow of the Orleans dynasty in 1848 was a complete surprise,
and men have never ceased to see something disgraceful in its amazing
suddenness. Here was a great king, respected for wisdom and daring,
and supposed to understand at every point the character of the land
he ruled, his power appearing unshaken, while it was known to be
backed with an army one hundred thousand strong. And almost without
warning a whirlwind of insurrection against this solid power and this
able ruler broke out, and in a few wild hours swept the whole fabric
into chaos. Nothing caused more surprise at the moment than the
extreme bitterness of animosity which the insurgents manifested
towards the king's person, unless it were the tameness with which he
submitted to his fate and the precipitancy of his flight. There was
something rotten in the state of things, men said, which could thus
dissolve, crushed like a swollen fungus by a casual foot. And indeed,
whether with perfect justice or not, Louis Philippe's Administration
had come to be deemed corrupt some time ere his fall. The free-spoken
Parisians had openly flouted it as such: witness a mock advertisement
placarded in the streets: "_A nettoyer, deux Chambres et une Cour_":
"Two _Chambers_ and a _Court_ to clean." A French Government that had
been crafty, but not crafty enough to conceal the fact, that was
rather contemned for plotting than dreaded for unscrupulous energy,
was already in peril. The still unsubdued revolutionary spirit,