The great scare was over, but the special constables were
as proud as Wellington's army after Waterloo.
When the Chartist leaders had been tried for sedition and sentenced to
terms of imprisonment, and the Irish leaders had been transported, things
looked so flat in England that the young French Prince turned again to
France to try his fortune. It was his third trial. The first two efforts
under Louis Philippe to stir up a revolt and topple the citizen king from
the throne had ended in imprisonment and ridicule; but now he would not
seem to play a Napoleonic game. He would fall in with republican ideas
and run for the Presidency, which he did, and won. But as the countryman
at the circus, after creating much merriment by his awkward riding in his
rural costume, sometimes throws it off and appears as a spangled hero and
the very prince of equestrians; so this "nephew of his uncle," suddenly
emerging from the disguise of a republican President, blazed forth a
full-panoplied warrior-Emperor. But this was not yet.
In September of this year the Queen and Prince first visited a new
property they had purchased in the heart of the Highlands. The Prince
wrote of it: "We have withdrawn for a short time into a complete mountain
solitude, where one rarely sees a human face, where the snow already
covers the mountain-tops and the wild deer come creeping stealthily round
the house.
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