The Queen's ‘Little Trip’: The Royal Visit to Scotland in 1842

Abstract

When Hugh Miller, the editor of the Edinburgh Witness, surveyed the history of royal 'progresses' in Scotland he discerned a feature that was common to all of them: they were 'peculiarly impressed by the stamp of their time, and linked in most instances with the main events and more striking traits of the national history'.1 Taking his survey back to a time when Scotland was experiencing the 'hideous' sleep of popery, Miller wrote with enthusiastic distaste of James IV's pilgrimage across Scotland, 'bound with a girdle of rope, and with a huge belt of hammered iron pressing uneasily on his loins'; the only sound that could be heard was 'the whip plied in self-inflicted flagellation, or the chaunt of the peniten tial psalm'. Passing on to the reign of Mary Queen of Scots, Miller described her entering Edinburgh as a woman of dangerous beauty: 'Mary the loose, the voluptuous, the unprincipled, alike fitted to enchant a lover or to destroy a husband, the victim of her own unregu lated passions, the canonised martyr of Popery, in no degree less surely the martyr of adultery and murder'. He moved on to describe Charles I and Archbishop Laud visiting Edinburgh in 1633 when their insistence on religious services 'in the English manner' served as a pre liminary to the outbreak of the Civil Wars and a foretaste of the outright popery of James VII in the 1680s.2 Miller's article was no mere exercise in antiquarianism; the event that had induced him to take up the theme of royal progresses was one from his own day the visit to Scotland from 1-15 September 1842 of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and Sir Robert Peel, the prime minister. This visit, which took the royal party by sea to Edinburgh and was fol lowed by an excursion to Perthshire, might, so Miller feared, take its place as a story of disaster alongside the other royal progresses he had described. His fear was not that Victoria would embark on an agony of religious ecstasy by flagellating herself round the Highlands. Nor did he raise the possibility that Albert would be done to death at the command of a voluptuously murderous Queen. The royal visit, Miller argued,