The Queen never herself opened a paper. Extracts were read out to her each day by one of her ladies; these being selected by another lady appointed for the purpose as those most likely to interest the royal mind. It was made known in the press that her Majesty never read the divorce cases; neither did she read politics or the police news. No controversial side of the national life ever entered her brain--until somehow or another it was reached by the dim uproar of the Women Chartists' movement. She expressed her disapproval, and the page was turned.
Her instinctive tastes stood always as a guide for what she should be told; and experience limited her inquiry. In all her life her influence had never been used for the release of an unjustly convicted prisoner, the abatement of an inhuman sentence, or the abolition of any abuse established by law. Queens who had done these things in the past were medieval figures, and such interference was quite unsuitable for a royal consort under modern conditions. Had Philippa of Hainault lived in these more enlightened times she would have been forced to let the Burghers of Calais go hang and restrict herself to making provision for their widows and orphans; for to arrest any act of government had long since ceased to be within the functions of a queen.
Like her husband, this royal lady was surrounded by officialdom, or, rather, by its complementary and feminine appendices--the wives and daughters of the aristocracy, of politicians, of ecclesiastical and military dignitaries: these to her represented the sphere, activity, and capacity of her own sex. Other women--pioneers of education and of reform, rescue-workers, organizers, writers, orators, had--the majority of them--lived and died without once coming in contact with the official leader of Jingalese womanhood; for they and their like were outside the official ranks, and stood for things combative and controversial and dangerously alive, and only a few of them had been brought to Court in their venerable old age, to be looked at as curiosities when their fighting days were over and their work done.
On the governing boards of the hospitals to which the Queen gave her patronage there was not a single woman--or a married one either; but when her Majesty visited the wards she was very nice to the nurses. She was, in fact, very nice to everybody, and everybody was very nice to her.