ith the Queen at all
the events of a busy, crowded week; he directed most of the detail and
guided the complicated etiquette and procedure of the occasion; he
personally controlled the arrangements for the splendid procession
through the streets of London; he overlooked the plans for the service
in the Abbey and for the protection of the massed multitude in the
streets; he received and entertained many of the Royal personages who
came from abroad. In both of these great events the Prince of Wales
appreciated the new and peculiar significance added to the formal or
popular British celebrations by the presence of Colonial leaders and
troops and visitors. He had, in fact, to stamp the Imperial character
and standing of these great demonstrations.

CHAPTER XI.

The Prince and His Family

The home life of the Prince and Princess of Wales was never an
absolutely private one. It was lived in the light of an almost ceaseless
publicity. Not that the actual house of the Royal couple was, or could
ever be, unduly invaded; but that every visitor was a more or less
interested spectator and student of conditions and that every trifling
incident, as well as the more important matters, of every-day life were
remembered, repeated, or recorded as they would never be in an ordinary
household.

HOME LIFE OF THE ROYAL COUPLE

Memoirs of British statesmen, leaders in art, or literature, or
religion, or the Army and the Navy, teem with references, during forty
years, to the life of the Heir Apparent and his wife at Sandringham or
Marlborough and, without exception, they convey the impression of honest
domestic happiness and unity. Gossip during that long period there had
been, of course; unpleasant inuendoes had been uttered in a small and
unpleasant section of the press; peculiar and, for the most obvious
reasons, impossible stories had been cabled from time to time across the
Atlantic; but they were patiently borne by those who were the easy
victims of silly statements and they were more than controverted by the
tributes published from men who have lived on terms of intimacy with the
Royal family and whose death lifted, occasionally, the seal of secrecy
from their natural reserve and made the expression of their opinions and
experiences possible.

The steady growth of the Prince and Princess in popular favour and the
fact that even the most irresponsible or unscrupulous purveyor of news
to such sheets as Mr. Labouchere's _