3-008-888 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Her Majesty the Queen leaving Greenhithe [in Kent] in the Royal Yacht for Germany, 1862. '...notwithstanding the strict privacy under which it was her Majesty's desire to take her departure and the precautions adopted by the authorities to exclude all visitors from the vicinity of the place of embarkation, the railway-trains and river steam-boats poured in their thousands of visitors, and long before midday the road facing the dockyard was thronged with a multitude of her Majesty's subjects of both sexes, anxious to catch even a mere glimpse of their Queen. On the approach of the first of the Royal carriages it was observed that the blinds were closely drawn, when the most respectful silence was simultaneously observed and strictly maintained throughout...Her Majesty was...received on board the Fairy by Captain Seymour, C.B., commanding the Royal yacht...the vessel steamed down to Green-hithe, preceded by the Bustler, to clear a passage from the numerous craft crowding about the roadstead. The Fairy was followed by the Vivid and a couple of steam-vessels belonging to the Trinity Board and the Conservators of the Thames, which acted as escort'. (Queen Victoria was in mourning for her husband Prince Albert who had died nine months earlier). From "Illustrated London News", 1862.