1851: Mallard House
To Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria
I have received with mingled relief and mortification Your Majesty’s most gracious communication of the 2nd instant, and I hasten, before my feelings can either cool into sullenness or rise into undue warmth, to offer such acknowledgements as become a subject singularly honoured and yet not wholly appeased.
It would be affectation to deny that the extinction of the ancient Keepership of the Royal Duck-Ponds and Overseer of the Marshes still presses upon me as a wound to the sentiment of ancestry. The title, however humble it may sound to modern ears, was for us a watchword of conquest and of service, the very echo of that first rough covenant made between my forefather and the Norman Sovereign on English soil. That thread, once broken, cannot be re‑spun, though all the gold of the Treasury were to be twisted in its place.
Yet, while the symbol is lost beyond recovery, I am bound in honour to recognise the singular munificence with which Your Majesty has been pleased to temper the rigour of necessity. The provision of an annuity of two hundred thousand pounds, secured in perpetuity, together with the new dignities and estates which Your Majesty designs to attach to my house, must be acknowledged as a mark of favour such as few Sovereigns in any age have extended to any subject. If my pride is not wholly reconciled, my gratitude is nevertheless profoundly engaged.
Permit me, therefore, to accept, with all due humility, the style and honour of Earl of Beakhurst, and the broad lands with which Your Majesty is pleased to endow the title in England, Ireland, Scotland, and India. They shall be held—and, I trust, administered—in such a manner as may justify Your Majesty’s confidence, and prove that, if one venerable office be resigned to time, the spirit of service which once animated it survives under altered forms.
If I have spoken with some warmth in my former letter, I entreat Your Majesty to attribute it to an over-solicitude for the dignity of a name long intertwined with the fortunes of the Crown. Your present act of consideration cannot wholly efface the sense of loss of an amount five times that which you now offer, but it does much to assure me that Your Majesty neither forgets the past nor undervalues those by whom it was fashioned. I remain, therefore, not without a certain melancholy, yet with renewed devotion,
Your Majesty’s most loyal, grateful, and obedient servant and cousin, Duke of Mallard, Earl of Beakhurst, Prince de la Mu, Duc deCanard, Marquis de Canard, Baron Entenbraten, Condé el Ánade, Principe Anatroccolo, Viscount d’Anetis, &etc
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