Three days later—10th March—the royal wedding was celebrated wit splendour in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, this being the first ceremony of the kind which had taken place in that historic fane—with its "'bannered depths of minster gloom"—since the time of Henry I. The wedding presents hnd been gorgeous and costly beyond all precedent—the diamond necklace offered to the Princess by the city of London alone cost £10,000—, and for bridesmaids the beautiful Princess had eight daughters of Dukes, Marquises, and Enrls. The storied Chapel was one scintillating blaze of uniforms and jewels, the number of wedding guests bein 900 of the highest rank and station in the land, The Queen herself, still in the deepest mourning, took no part in the brilliant ceremony which she simply watched from the privacy of the royal closet. The Prince of Wales wore a General's uniform, with the mantle of the Garter and gold collar and jewel of that order, and the decorations of the Golden Fleece and the Star of India, his chief supporters being his brother-in-law, the Crown Prince of Prussia, and his uncle, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
"Two things struck me much," wrote Dr. Norman McLeod who was present, "one was the whole of the royal Princesses weeping, though concealing their tears in their bouquets, as they saw their brother, who was but to them their ' Bertie," and their dead father's son, standing alone waiting for his bride. The other was the Queen's expression as she mised her eyes to Heaven, while her husband's choral was sung. She seemed to be with him alone before the throne of G" The ceremony was described by the Bishop of Oxford as "the most moving sight I ever saw—the Princess of Wales calm, feeling, self-possessed. The Prince with more depth of manner than ever before." The gorgeous, touching ceremony was succeeded by wedding breakfast in St. George's Hall, and then the royal couple left for a brief honeymoon at Osborne. The ocexsion had been observed as a national holiday, and the illuminations that night throughout the kingdom, notably at Edinburgh with its magnificent natural aptitude for pyrotechnic display, wore totally beyond the power of ordinary words, and would have needed a pen of fire dipped in rainbow hues. Such a day of popular rejoicing had never before been seen as that on which the entire nation celebrated the coming into its midst of the—
"Blissful bride of a blissful heir, Bride of the heir of the Kings of the Sea."
On their return it was noticed thst the royal couple looked the very picture of happiness; indeed, the Prince of Wales would have been an extraordinary mortal had he not been fascinated by the charms of his lovely young wife. 'I saw a great her," wrote Dean Stanley, who was one of the first guests at Sandringham, during the Easter following the royal mar-"and can truly say that she is as charming and beautiful creature as ever passed through a fairy tale."
Io was at the side of his blooming bride that the Prince of Wales had figured at what was, perhaps, the greatest popular pageant ever witnessed in the streets of London; and in the next greatest demonstration of the kind the same royal couple Sen formed the central figures. 18 e's bringing home of his bride had stirred the stolid British nation to an unprecedented display of loyal sentiment but even the intensity of this feeling was surpassed, nine years later, when the nation once more came out in its millions to celebrate the rescue of its beloved Prince from the clutches of a rival bride—not of Denmark, this time, but of Death. Those only who lived through the two events could have any adequate idea of the intense feeling of loyalty, curiously latent at ordinary times, which binds the British people to their ruling house as with the bonds of an ever-growing love.
'THE PRINCE'S HEALTH, which had already been blessed with two Ju the eighth year of his married life sons and three daughters—the nation was thrown into a state of alarm on hearing that the Prince of Wales was suffering from typhoid fever; and popular attention, which had hitherto been monopolised by the course of the war between France and Germany, now exclusively concentrated on the progress of the conflict between the universal enemy and the Heir to our Crown, This was exactly ten years after the Prince Consort had fallen a victim to the malady to which his eldest son now equally threatened to become a prey. The Prince and Princess, it appeared, had been staying with Lord and Lady Londeshorough near Scarborough, and it was there, beyond doubt, that he had caught the contagion, as the Prince's groom and Lord Chesterfield, who were also there, had likewise been stricken with the same illness. The Prince sickened in London, but insisted on going to Sandringham, where he was exclusively nursed by his wife and his sister, Princess Alice (of Hesse-Darmstadt), who happened to be in England on a visit.' If the Princess had been popular before, she became doubly so now when it became known that she was tending her husband with such self-sacrificing devotion.
Presently the Prince's state became very critical, a fact which was made apparent to the nation, even more so than by the medical ' bulletins, from the hurrying of the Queen herself to the sick-bed of her eldest son. The whole nation, the whole Empire, wns plunged into a fever of alternate hope and fear. In every town crowds waited anviously for the newspapers containing the latest news of the royal sufferer's condition, and the Government found it expedient to forward the bulletins to every telegraph office in the United Kingdom. Never even in the days of the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny had news of battle been more anxiously awaited and scanned than were these bulletins of the momentous fight that was known to be raging in the Prince of Wales's sick room at Sandringham. In the Churches of every religious community special prayers wore fervently offered up for his recovery, but these seemed to have as little effect as the skill of the Prince's physicians, who included Jenner and Gull.
At length, on the Ist of December, the Prince recovered consciousness, and as this had been the birthday of the Princess of Wales, so it also became the birthday of renewed hope to the British people. But this rally was soon followed by snather relapse, for, though the fever had spent itself, the Prince's strength had also been used up. Still, the natural strength of his constitution, which had never been impaired by youthful excesses of any kind, enabled him to fight the good fight with dogged English pluck, and the nation heaved a deep sigh of relief on hearing that the Princess had written to the Vicar of Sandringham; My husband, thank God, being somewhat better, I am coming ta
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.