CHAPTER XXXVI

QUEEN VICTORIA AT BALMORAL--KING EDWARD AT DUNROBIN--ADMIRAL SIR HEDWORTH LAMBTON--OTHER ANECDOTES

Invercauld, of which Lord Glenesk was long tenant, lies near Balmoral; a name famous the world over as the Highland home of Queen Victoria and then of the late King. A castle on which the very German taste of the very German husband of the great Queen has left its mark. It is no more a fine castle than Buckingham Palace is a fine palace. It stands, however, in a beautiful country and some of the best drives within easy reach are those on the Invercauld property. They are private but all gates swing open to Kings and Queens.

The privacy was one thing the Queen liked. So long as she was in the Highlands the loyalty of her subjects was expected to manifest itself by ignoring her presence. If you saw the Sovereign approaching you effaced yourself. You slipped behind a tree or looked over the hedge or retied your shoelaces. You might do anything except be aware of this august lady's presence and recognize it by the usual salute and the bared head {346} as she went by. The Queen was ever, as her son was, insistent upon etiquette. No form of ceremony must be neglected. But at Balmoral the etiquette consisted in the absence of all form or ceremony outdoors. You were expected to know this, and if you did not know it but stood at attention with lifted hat this mark of homage would not be well received. I once heard a stranger who had offended in this way say that the look upon the Queen's face as she passed was a lesson not to be forgotten.

Her Majesty drove quietly about in a pony carriage with perhaps the ever faithful John Brown in attendance to lay a shawl about her shoulders or take one off, as he judged best. You might see him do as much as that in the publicity of Hyde Park in London. It was partly in the simplicity of this Highland life that the Queen found repose. Her Majesty would sometimes stop at Invercauld House for tea, apparently as one neighbour appealing to the hospitality of another. But I imagine these impulses were announced beforehand and that the list of guests at Invercauld was known at Balmoral. During one week there was among them a lady who, for purely technical reasons, was never received at Court though she went almost everywhere else in London and had, and has, a position almost unique. But so long as this lady remained at Invercauld House the Queen found herself too much occupied with business of State to come to tea.

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Royalty knows, or knows about, almost everybody. The late King was always the best informed man in his dominions. It was rare that he met a man or woman whose face and history were not familiar to him. He did once at Dunrobin Castle. This was not many years ago, when the King and Queen were circumnavigating this island-part of their Empire in the royal yacht. The yacht anchored for some days in the bay off the castle. The King or Queen, or both, came ashore during the day and returned to sleep on board. As the King, the Duke of Sutherland, and Captain Hedworth Lambton, commander of the yacht, were walking up from the pier through the gardens to the castle, a man passed them. "Who is that?" asked the King. The Duke had to admit he could not tell. "Oh, sir," said Captain Lambton, "don't you know the castle is full of people whom the Duke doesn't know and the Duchess never sees?" The King took this pleasantry as it was meant; aware that there was beneath it just that evanescent adumbration of fact which made it plausible.

Captain Lambton, then the Hon. Hedworth Lambton, brother to the present Earl of Durham, is now Admiral the Hon. Sir Hedworth Lambton, K.C.B., the youngest man of his rank in the service; or was when he was made admiral. Noted for the quaint felicity of his sayings, sometimes with an edge to them; noted for his service with the Naval Brigade in South Africa and the relief of Ladysmith; noted as a skilful seaman who had {348} commanded the cruiser division of the Mediterranean fleet and afterward the China squadron. The Lambtons are a family apart, and Sir Hedworth is a man apart, even amid his own family. There are few men who give you a stronger impression of having made their own that rule of life which consists in taking things as they come. Struggling through the watercourses of the veldt with his 4.10 gun, or on the quarter-deck of the royal yacht in harbour with only duties of ceremony to perform, he is the same man.

He came to Dalmeny House for the week-end while the _Victoria and Albert_ was lying at Queensferry. On the Sunday morning he asked Lord Rosebery and his house-party to go with him to the yacht for morning service. We drove through the charming park to the Leuchold Gate and so to Queensferry pier, whence a launch took us on board. The yacht has a displacement of something more than five thousand tons. Those external lines of beauty which you expect in a yacht had been omitted by the Admiralty designers responsible for this vessel, but once on board everything is admirable. The ship was lying in the Forth, above the bridge, waiting for Queen Alexandra to embark for Copenhagen. Nothing could be smarter than the decks and the crew except the officers; all in full uniform.

It was August, and though some Americans say the sun never shines on these islands, there are moments of exception and this was one. It was burning hot. Captain Lambton read the service, {349} his officers and guests about him, the men in front, all amidships on the upper deck. He came to the Lord's Prayer, the sailors all kneeling and all caps off. In the very middle of it, without a change of intonation or accent, he said to his men: "If anybody feels the sun they may put their caps on." I suppose a super-devout churchman might have been shocked, but the reader was captain of the ship and he had no idea of allowing one of his men to have a touch of sunstroke. It appears they were in no danger for not one of them put on his cap. Nor did any one seem to think his captain's interlocutory sentence out of place. I have seen often enough both in the navy and in the army that the most rigid disciplinarian may be of all others the most careful of his men's health and comfort.

In these Dreadnought days nothing of the pre-Dreadnought period counts. But I was once on I believe, the first Dreadnought, of a type long since antiquated, with a low freeboard forward and the whole expanse of the forecastle deck so arranged as to be, with reference to the rest of the vessel, a lever on which the Atlantic might pile itself up. I asked the captain what might happen in a heavy head sea. "The chances are," he answered coolly, "she would go down head foremost." However, at the moment she was comfortably anchored off Queensferry.

That danger exists no longer for the model is obsolete, and this particular ship no doubt went long since to the scrap heap. But the unsolved {350} problems of naval warfare are still numerous. A fighting admiral in the British navy will tell you strange things if he happens to be in a talkative mood. Nothing is better worth listening to than the discourse of a man who has command of a great fleet or of a great ship, whether of war or commerce. I quote one sentence:

"You want to know what is likely to happen when two modern battle fleets meet at sea, equal in fighting strength and under equal conditions. No man knows. It has never yet happened. But the chances are both would go to the bottom."

Out of many Highland incidents I choose one, for brevity's sake.

Invermark. A place renowned for many kinds of sport, salmon fishing included. It belonged, when I knew it, to the late Lord Dalhousie, who generally let it and confined himself to Brechin Castle, with excursions to Panmure House. Invermark was a lodge and nothing more; just room for half a dozen guests and their guns and servants. Lord Dudley and the late Lord Hindlip had it together one year. Lord Hindlip was the head of the great brewery firm of Allsopp & Co. He announced to us one night at dinner that he must go to London next morning on business. He went, returning two days later. He had spent twelve hours in London. Somebody said "I hope your business turned out all right." Lord Hindlip answered: "I don't know about all right. I bought £750,000 ($3,750,000) worth of hops a price which makes it impossible there should {351} be any profit in the next twelve months' brewing." Nobody asked but everybody looked another question: "Then why buy?" Lord Hindlip continued his sentence as if he had not noticed our curiosity. "But if I had not bought yesterday there would have been no brewing of beer at all for the next twelve months, nor perhaps ever."

This was one of the houses--perhaps only those belonging to the great brewers--where beer was served with the cheese instead of port. But not the kind of beer known to the ordinary mortal. Beer specially brewed, long kept, tenderly cared for, and somehow transformed into a transcendental fluid, transparent, golden in colour, nectar to the taste, strangely mild on the palate, but swiftly finding its way to the brain if you were ensnared into drinking a tumblerful. There was nothing to warn you unless your host warned you, which he generally did not. He perhaps rather pressed it upon you as they do the Audit ale at Trinity College, Cambridge, with a hospitality not free from guile. That I knew through the late Mr. Justice Denham, who was my host, and when I resisted he told me how Lord Chancellor Campbell had praised the mildness of the ale, and had a second drink, and then a third; and upon emerging from the buttery into the fresh air found himself embarrassed; he, the hardest head at the Bar of his time. A story which I hand on as a warning to the next comer.

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