The Sun.
London, England, 1854-01-23 00:00:00

THE PRINCE CONSORT.

(From the Illustrated London News.)

We have hitherto purposely abstained from mak-
ing the slightest allusion, or giving the least cur-
rency to the reports that, for the last six or seven
weeks, have been industriously circulated in the
press and in society relative to his Royal Highness
the Prince Consort. But the time has at length
arrived when it is no longer desirable, even if it
were possible, to keep silence upon the subject. If,
by our notice of them, the accusations of which the
illustrious Prince has been the object could pene-
trate into any wider circles than those which they
have already reached, we should deem it a matter
alike of delicacy and of duty to refrain from givin,,
their authors the advantage of our pages for the
propagation of their slanders, even although the
refutation went side by side with the falsehood.
But the calumnies against the Prince have been so
long and loudly blazoned abroad—from the pot-
houses and the pot-house journals in which they
originated, to the clubs and places of public resort,
and from thence to the columns of almost every
newspaper in the country—that our silence is no
longer necessary.
The man who has the high honour of being the
husband of a Queen Refpiant ofa country like England
stands in an exalted, and therefore in a perilous posi-
tion. If any one be obliged to walk warily, it is he.
To no individual who stands is the precept that he
should " take heed lest he fall," so applicable as to
him. Too lofty to be strictly a subject—too power-
ful in the secrecy of his home, to be safely trusted
with power in the senate or the cabinet—too nearly
allied to the Crown to be quite dependent upon its
favour, or to be quite independent of all that con-
cerns its honour and dignity—he is surrounded on
every side with difficulties and anomalies. He is
placed too high to have any objects of ambition,
such as those which captivate the minds or quicken
the energies of other men. Wealth and title can
have no attraction to his mind. He has the high-
est of all title ; and if he have not wealth enough
to satisfy him, no effort he can make can procure
him any increase to it. His pretensions can inter-
fere with no man's advancement. His functions
are so entirely non-political and ornamental, that
if any office be bestowed upon him, it is that the
office may be honoured by his acceptance of it—
' and not that he may thereby acquire any additional
rank or importance. And yet, though so little is
allowed him to do, much is expected of him. By
' custom and consent, if not by the constitution of
' this country, be is the first and most honoured sub-
ject of the Crown. But the Christian law, and by
the law of domestic affection, he is the head and
chief of the most illustrious family in the land ; and
the Queen of Great Britain is as much his subject
as every other happy and dutiful wife is the subject
of the lord and husband whom she has selected.

If his hand be too much seen in social life, and
if he manifest too lively an interest in the affairs
that take place around him, he will be reckoned a
meddler who oversteps his province ; if it be too
little seen, and if he does not sympathise with the
world in which he lives, he will be accounted a
simpleton or a nobody. The amiable Prince, whom
the Queen of the greatest empire in the world freely
chose for her husband, understood all these things.
He felt both the delicacy and the difficulty of his
position on one side, and its responsibility and dig-
nity on the other. Of necessity a stranger, he
made it his first duty to become an Englishman—to
study our feelings, our habits, and our virtues, that
he might in all things become a model to English
gentlemen and to English society. So admirably
did he comprehend his duties, and so gracefully did
he perform, that, next to the Queen herself, he be-
oame the most popular person in her dominions.
His public appearances were few, but they were
always judicious. He never advocated a cause
which it was not proper that he should countenance;
but always—as in the case of the Great Exhibition
of 1851—lent his powerful aid to schemes of utility
that were national, but non political. He felt, as if li
instinctively, what objects it was his duty and pri-
vilege to favour, and what objects it was better
that he should leave to other and freer, but less
splendid, agencies, to uphold and foster. His
remarks, whenever he addressed an assemblage
of Englishmen and women, invariably showed
that he possessed not simply a good head but a good
heart, and gave proofs of abilities that, had he been
born in a less exalted station, would have raised
him to eminence and honour. No one breathed a '
syllable in his disparagement. For his own sake,
as well as for that of the Queen, he was esteemed
and beloved by all classes. It was felt that, what-
ever the Royal families of other States of Europe
might be, England had the happiness of possessing,
in Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, models of
domestic virtue and of public usefulness.
But it has pleased some malignant—or, perhaps,
merely thoughtless—persons to set rumours afloat
with respect to his Royal Highness, which have a
tendency to diminish his well-earned popularity, if
they have not already accomplished that undesir-
able end. The accusations, at first vague and un-
meaning, gradually shaped themselves into some-
thing like consistency. It was at first asserted
that nothing could account for the dismissal of
Lord Palmerston two years ago, but the enmity of
Prince Albert to that statesman. The whispers,
however, did not swell into a roar on that occasion.
It was only when his lordship announced, some
weeks ago, his determination to withdraw from the
Ministry that they again began to be heard. A
certain class of political quidnuncs and pot-house
busy bodies could not imagine anything so prepos-
terous as that Lord Palmerston should be capri-
cious, or that he should be guilty, once or twice
in his life, of an error of judgment; but they could
imagine easily enough that Prince Albert should
have a personal to the object of their ado-
ration, and that he should forfeit the good opinion
entertained of him, and which had been steadily
increasing for twelve years, by exercising political
power iu an underhand and unworthy manner.
They, therefore, explained Lord Palmerston's re-
signation in their own fashion, and without a shadow
of proof began to accuse the Prince of unconstitu-
tional intermedling in the affairs of State. They

broadly hinted that the husband of the Queen was
the enemy of England—that he betrayed State
secrets to foreign Powers ; and that, while the re-
sponsible Ministers of the Crown were endeavour-
ing to support the cause of Turkey, he, the irre-
sponsible adviser of his wife, was doing his best to
betray that cause, and to serve the interests of the
Emperor of Russia. The utter improbability of
such charges signified nothing to the hot-brained
partizans who made them. The accusation once
set in motion, rapidly acquired impetus. To jour-
nals that administer to the coarse tastes of the tap
room, such slanders against a personage so distin-
guished were in the highest degree welcome. There
is nothing so intelligible and, we are sorry to say,
so popular as scandal. it is not every one who
can talk politics. Few can converse well upon
the drama, the sciences, or the fine arts. Ques-
tions involving literary taste and scholarship do not
greatly interest the masses ; and, though all under-
stand the great and daily topic of the weather, it is
a topic that is apt to lose its flavour. Not so im-
mortal scandal ? A piece of slander never tires
either the great or the little vulgar. It is always
acceptable, either at the club or at the tea-table—
at the tavern or in the beer-shop. It taxes no
man's brains to grapple with its intricacies ; and
the more lofty the position of the slandered person,
the more keenly it is relished. Besides, as everybody
knows, slander is a very marketable commodity to
struggling newspapers that desire to thrust them-
selves into notoriety. The cowardly nature of the
assaults against the Prince's character was never
allowed to deter the utterers of such stories. The
Prince would not reply to them. Had it been
Mr. Brown or Mr. Jones, or any other companion
of Mr. Doyle's Tour, who had been maligned, the I
courts of law might have been appealed to. Had
it even been Lord Palmerston who had been the
victim of misrepresentation, his lordship might
have stooped from his lofty eminence
raised and
demo-
lished by a breath the flimsy superstructure
by his assailants. The Prince Consort was_ not in
so enviable a position. He was too far above the
anonymous slanderers even to be aware of their
existence ; and it is likely that their stories had
been for many weeks in circulation before his
Royal Highness had any knowledge of them. The
Smith taunt of the Rev. Sydney against Sir R.
Peel seems to have been the maxim on which they
acted—" Select for your attack," said the caustic
wit, 6‘ a place where there can be no reply, and an
opponent who cannot retaliate, and you may
slander in safety." Much may be said for the
prudence of such a course of conduct ; but can
anything be said for its manliness or for its de-
cency."
Upon the general question of the influence which
the Prince may naturally be supposed to exercise,
it is scarcely worth while to enter. To deny to
him all concern and interest in the events which so
nearly concern and interest her whom he is bound
to solace, to advise, and to protect, would be to
deny nature as well as expediency. If a responsible
Minister at anytime demanded an audience with the
Queen, and with the Queen only, Prince Albert would
nut, of course, be present ; but if the Minister de-
mand no such private audience, and have no objec-
tion to the Queen's husband, but would rather
court it than otherwise, Prince Albert can do no
wrong in remaining ' • or, if any wrong be done,
the Minister, not the Prince, is responsible. Ho is
not only the Queen's husband, but a Privy Coun-
cillor, and has a double right to give his advice.
Those who clamour so loudly against the presumed
political interference of the Prince should ask them-
selves whether it would be better to increase his
private and domestic influence, by degrading and
leafienin hip public importance That his intiusce

was ever exercised in a manner injurious to the in-
terests of this country, or to the rights of the re-
sponsible Ministers of the Crown, we hold to be a
falsehood, not the less wicked because it happens
to be absurd. It is an insult not only to Prince
Albert, but to the Queen, even to suppose it.

THE PATE OF SIR JOHN FRANKLIN
SEALED BY THE ADMIRALTY.

(From the Morning Chronicle.)
The public, which has so lately been informed of
the groundlessness of the recent announcement of
the intentions of the Admiralty with respect to
the missing expedition, will have been taken by
surprise at the notice which we published on Sa-
turday, from Friday night's Gazette, to the effect
that, from the 31st of March next, the crows of
her Majesty's ships Erebus and Terror will be con-
sidered as having died in the service of their coun-
try. We trust, for their own sakes, that the Ad-
miralty may not be legally in error in acting upon
such an assumption. That the conclusion thus set
forth is strangely premature cannot be gainsayed,
since at this moment we are wholly ignorant of the
results of last year's operations in the Arctic Seas,
inc!uding not only what may have been effected by
Sir Edward Belcher, but also that most important
exploration by Captain M'Clintock north-west from
Melville Island, which he intended to extend to a
distance of 1,200 miles over the land and ice. In
the face of our inevitable ignorance as to the issue
of these expeditions, we are surely not justified in
assuming the deaths of those for whom search is
yet being made. The Admiralty may, indeed,
withdraw the pay which these devoted men have
earned at such a fearful sacrifice. We can under-
stand and excuse the economical motive, but that
they should strike out their names from the com-
panionship of their brother officers, and substitute
for the uncertainty of a possible existence the
.decree
that they have now ceased to live, is, we think,
going very far beyond what the present state of
our knowledge warrants. Whenever the search
for these brave and unfortunate men is finally
concluded, after an examination of the region
which Sir John Franklin, in obedience to his
orders, necessarily entered from Wellington
Channel in order to pass to the meridian
of Behring Strait----and which region, we cannot
too often repeat, has not been explored either
by Sir Edward Belcher or by his predecessors—
whenever we can proclaim that this explora-
tion has been thoroughly effected, and in vain,
then, and not till then, shall we be entitled to
pronounce over their names the doom to which
they are now prematurely consigned. Whether
the civilised world, which has been a spectator of
our efforts, will acquiesce in a step which antici-
pates the conclusion of the drama, before its closing
scene, we think very doubtful, and we fear that
the honour of the country will not be raised by it.
The acquisition to our geographical knowledge
by the late discovery of Captain M'Clure, will
cease indeed to throw lustre upon the British
name if it be made the signal for putting a sum-
mary and final extinction on the search for the
brave men who have imperilled their existence in
that very cause. It will throw little credit on the
British navy that the discovery of the North-west
Passage and the abandonment of poor Franklin and
his followers should stand side by side in their
annals. It cannot have been forgotten that every
expedition of search has been declared to have had
the rescue of the missing ships as its sole object ;
and much is to be regretted that by the present
act any doubt should be thrown on the sincerity of
such professions.

(From the Morning Herald.)

The notice which appeared in the last Gazettc
will have fallen heavily upon many an anxious
heart, and with some we fear has pealed a knell to
long-cherished and now disappointed hopes. It is
the fiat of the Board of Admiralty, that from the
31st of March next the crews of her Majesty's ships
Erebus and Terror shall be wiped out of the book
of the living. They have assumed the office of
executioner, and Europe stands up as a witness to
the deed.

Whether the stroke of a pen can do the work of
the headsman's axe may be matter of opinion, and
even though the deed be duly authorised by the
Times, in the face of these we boldly denounce its
indecency and its inefficacy. The Admiralty can
take away thepay of those whose places they would
fain fill up in the list, and we do not blame them
for wishing to save the public money ; but we
trust the House of Commons will take leave to in-
quire upon what principle of justice or reason the
present moment is selected as the fitting one
—how it comes to pass that the Board has
not deferred the step until we have learned
something of the result of their own expedition
commanded by Sir Edward Belcher, a part of
which, under Captain Kellett, had an excellent
point for future operations (already commenced at
our last dates from thence) at Melville Island. It
is alleged that Sir Edward Belcher had drawn back
from his mission on the very shores of the Polar
Sea, in face of the open water which had been the
highway of Sir John Franklin's progress ; that he
receded from this position, instead of executing the
instructions he carried out and the object in view.
But so long as those instructions have not been
carried out, this object not executed, there will
remain a space comprising no less than 70 degrees
of distance, between Wellington Channel and
Behring's Straits, within which Sir John Franklin
pursued his way in obedience to his orders, which
has never been entered at all. This is a fact which
demands reiteration, and it may be worse for the
Admiralty that they have chosen to ignore it for
the sake of getting rid (if they can) of a trouble-
some and expensive question, heedless of their own
and the country's honour.
The close of the financial year affords, we pre-
sume, the coveted opportunity for balancing ac-
counts with the living and the presumed dead; but
we doubt if any among the friends of those who are
now summarily deprived of pay, position, and even
life itself, will acquiesce in the arbitrary sentence
now passed. It is a question which all are alike
competent to pronounce and act upon, and is no
exclusive privilege of Arctic officers—none, at least,
but such as Sir Edward Belcher and Captain Kel-
lett, who are on the spot, and therefore able to
judge of the only circumstances which should in-
fluence such a decision. We trust, therefore, that,
if Arctic authority be cited, we shall know the in-
dividuals referred to, since, as a body, there aro
various degrees of weight to bs attached to the per-
sons composing it.
It strikes us forcibly—and no doubt many will
share the feeling—that, did not the friends of the
missing party owe it to the administration of the
Duke of Northumberland that Sir Edward Belcher's
expedition was sent out, they would not have re-
ceived the rude shock to their hopes which has now
been inficted.

One word as to the terms of the notice. We
would charitably hope the Admiralty are better in-
formed than they presumed their readers to be,
when they sanctioned the expression, that " if in-
telligence be not received before the 31st of March"
the names would be removed from the list. We
need hardly remind our readers that the doubt im-
plies forgetfulness of the fact, that every avenue of
intelligence from the Arctic Seas has been, and will
continue, sealed by ice until long after the date
named. The close of the financial year, and the
period when Arctic news reaches us, are separated
by an interval of six months.

THE MILITIA.—We mentioned some days since that
it was intended by government to enrol 20,000 Irish
militia. To these we understand 10,000 Scotch militia
will be added. It is intended that these men shall be
used to replace any troops that may be sent to the
Mediterranean.
PORT PHILIP AND COLONIAL GOLD COMPANY.—
This company, established two years back, have issued
a full report of their proceedings preparatory to their
meeting on Tuesday. It narrates the despatch of Mr.
Evan Hopkins to Melbourne in 1852, followed by an
expedition of 105 persons, consisting of clerks, miners,
bays, &c., who were to work for the company on tri-
bute, materials and rations being found them ; the dis-
appointment of the directors at finding that Mr. Hop-
kins had fixed this tribute at only one-third of the
amount collected, while the company undertook every
expense and risk ; and the final check to all immediate
prospects of success by the accidental burning of the
company's store and premises erected at a great expense
at Forest-creek, in the neighbourhood of Mount Alex-
ander. Much vexation is likewise shown to have been
caused by the unbusinesslike delay of the Government
official in attending to the company's application for the
lease of a specific locality. Under these circumstances,
the present position of the concern is shown to be as
follows:—All the miners sent out from England were,
with the exception of six of the best, dismissed, but an
assay-office has been established under the charge of
Mr. Birkmyre, which is answering very well, ad a
lease of a piece of land at Fryer's-creek has at length
been obtained from the Government, upon which sys
tematic operations are to be commenced without delay
Of the original paid-up capital, amounting to 97,5001.,
the sum tl4; remains is represented by cash, buildings,
stores, &c., at Melbourne, valued at 47,8141., and cash
in England, amounting to 12,9741., making a total of
60,7881.: the balance, together with 2,9851., obtained
by the sale of shares at a premium, and 3,258/. profit on
the purchase of golddust, having been chiefly absorbed
in the experiment, against which so many warnings
were given, of sending out persons from this country
with the expectation that on their arrival in Australia
they would work for the distant shareholders on any
other than ruinous terms. The penalty of' this mistake
having, however, been paid, there is no reason to pre-
vent the future operations of the company from being
such as, with good management, 'may retrieve that
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