Nevertheless, he could not quite give up all hope.
Another opportunity offered, and he made another effort—but
there was not very much conviction in it, and it was
immediately crushed. “My dear Uncle,”
the Queen wrote, “I have to thank you for your
last letter which I received on Sunday. Though
you seem not to dislike my political sparks, I think
it is better not to increase them, as they might finally
take fire, particularly as I see with regret that
upon this one subject we cannot agree. I shall,
therefore, limit myself to my expressions of very
sincere wishes for the welfare and prosperity of Belgium.”
After that, it was clear that there was no more to
be said. Henceforward there is audible in the
King’s letters a curiously elegiac note.
“My dearest Victoria, your delightful little
letter has just arrived and went like an Arrow
to my heart. Yes, my beloved Victoria!
I do love you tenderly...
I love you for yourself, and I love in you
the dear child whose welfare I tenderly watched.”
He had gone through much; yet, if life had its disappointments,
it had its satisfactions too. “I have all
the honours that can be given, and I am, politically
speaking, very solidly established.” But
there were other things besides politics, there were
romantic yearnings in his heart. “The only
longing I still have is for the Orient, where I perhaps
shall once end my life, rising in the west and setting
in the east.” As for his devotion to his
niece, that could never end. “I never press
my services on you, nor my councils, though I may
say with some truth that from the extraordinary fate
which the higher powers had ordained for me, my experience,
both political and of private life, is great.
I am always ready to be useful to you when
and where and it may be, and I repeat it, all
I want in return is some
little sincere affection from you.”
The correspondence with King Leopold was significant
of much that still lay partly hidden in the character
of Victoria. Her attitude towards her uncle had
never wavered for a moment. To all his advances
she had presented an absolutely unyielding front.
The foreign policy of England was not his province;
it was hers and her Ministers’; his insinuations,
his entreaties, his struggles—all were quite
useless; and he must understand that this was so.
The rigidity of her position was the more striking
owing to the respectfulness and the affection with
which it was accompanied. From start to finish
the unmoved Queen remained the devoted niece.
Leopold himself must have envied such perfect correctitude;
but what may be admirable in an elderly statesman
is alarming in a maiden of nineteen. And privileged
observers were not without their fears. The strange
mixture of ingenuous light-heartedness and fixed determination,
