Between 1858 and 1885 all the Queen’s nine children married; and every one knows that she took just as much delight and interest in their prospect of forming happy homes of their own as any other mother in her wide dominions could have done. In other words, politics and political responsibilities of the weightiest kind have not unsexed her. In arranging the marriages of her three elder children, Her Majesty had had the advantage of the knowledge and judgment of the Prince Consort. It can hardly be by accident that the brides and bridegrooms of our Royal House have not been brought up in the full blast of the hothouse atmosphere of Court life. We know that the Queen and Prince Consort looked upon this atmosphere as dangerous and pernicious, and kept their own children as much apart from it as was possible; their sons and daughters-in-law, with one exception, were selected from those who had not passed their earliest and most impressionable years as the children of reigning Sovereigns. It has been already noted that the Queen did not allow her private inclinations, which would doubtless have been gratified by keeping the Princess Alice with her, to postpone the marriage which had been sanctioned by the Prince Consort. Prince Louis, indeed, thought that his betrothed wife would not have held to her engagement after her father’s death, seeing how her mother depended on her for comfort in her great sorrow; but he was mistaken, and the marriage took place not long after the date originally fixed, July 1st, 1862. In the autumn of the same year the Queen, who visited her uncle, King Leopold, at Laeken, arranged to meet, for the first time, her future daughter-in-law, the Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Later, in 1862, the beautiful young Princess visited the widowed Queen at Windsor, and received a mother’s welcome from that warm, tender heart. All references to the Princess of Wales throughout the Queen’s journals and the Princess Alice’s letters are most loving and tender. “Dear, sweet, gentle Alix,” are among the many endearing epithets bestowed on her by her mother and sister-in-law. The marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales on March 10th, 1863, took place in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. It was a most magnificent ceremonial, and was the first Royal marriage celebrated in that Chapel since that of Henry I. in 1122. At the wedding Prince William of Prussia, aged four, was placed between his two little uncles, Arthur and Leopold, who were instructed to keep him quiet. Bishop Wilberforce says that he resented any interference, and bit his uncles on their “bare Highland legs” if they tried to control him.