To the bride's parents, if not to herself and her betrothed, the fact that the marriage negotiations were not quite pleasantly conducted must have been not only painful but astonishing. It was actually suggested that the ceremony should take place in Berlin, but Queen Victoria very properly scouted the proposal, which was really in the circumstances disagreeably like an insult. She wrote in her emphatic, italicising way to Lord Clarendon, the Foreign Secretary: "The Queen _never_ could consent to it, both for public and private reasons, and the assumption of its being _too much_ for a Prince Royal of Prussia to _come_ over to marry _the Princess Royal of Great Britain IN_ England is too _absurd_, to say the least. The Queen must say that there never was even the _shadow_ of a _doubt_ on _Prince Frederick William's_ part as to _where_ the marriage should take place, and she suspects this to be the mere gossip of the Berliners. Whatever may be the usual practice of Prussian Princes, it is not _every_ day that one marries the eldest daughter of the Queen of England. The question therefore must be considered as settled and closed." In view of all this and of what was to befall the Princess Royal in the land for which she even then cherished so fond an affection, and of which she had already formed so high an ideal, there is something intensely pathetic in the blindness of her parents to the real conditions of her future life. This blindness is shown with amazing clearness in the sentence, certainly inspired and very likely written by Queen Victoria herself, which concludes the chapter, in Sir Theodore Martin's _Life of the Prince Consort_, dealing with the betrothal of the Princess Royal: "No consideration, public or private, would have induced the Queen or himself [_i.e._, Prince Albert] to imperil the happiness of their child by a marriage in which she could not have found scope to practise the constitutional principles in which she had been reared." The idea that the Prussia of that day, or indeed of any day, would have amiably afforded a foreign princess scope to practise constitutional principles of any sort seems extraordinary, and yet, as we shall see, there was some little justification for it at the time, though it was quickly swept away by the course of events. The confirmation of the Princess Royal took place on March 20, 1856, in the private chapel at Windsor Castle. The Princess was led in by her father, followed by her godfather, the King of the Belgians, who had come to England on purpose, and the Royal children and most of the members of the Royal family were present, as were also the Ministers, the great officers of State, and many of those whom Disraeli was wont to describe as the "high nobility."