The Queen was attended by all the great ladies and gentlemen of
her Court, and followed by an immense train of members of the royal
family, ambassadors, cabinet ministers and nobility generally--in all,
two hundred carriages of them. The day was a general holiday, and the
streets all along the line of the splendid procession were lined with
people half wild with loyal excitement, shouting and waving hats and
handkerchiefs. It may have been on this day that Lord Albemarle got off
his famous pun. On the Queen saying to him, "I wonder if my good people
of London are as glad to see me as I am to see them?" he replied by
pointing to the letters "V. R." "Your Majesty can see their loyal cockney
answer-'_Ve are_.'"
One account states that, "the young sovereign was quite overcome by the
enthusiastic outbursts of loyalty which greeted her all along the route,"
but a description of the scene sent me by a friend, Mrs. Newton Crosland,
the charming English novelist and poet, paints her as perfectly composed.
My friend says: "I well remember seeing the young Queen on her way to
dine with the Lord Mayor, on the 9th of November, 1837, the year of her
accession. The crowd was so great that there were constant stoppages,
and, luckily for me, one of them occurred just under the window of a
house in the Strand, where I was a spectator.
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