MR. OWEN STANLEYsaid, he would beg to ask the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, If the statement in the public papers is correct, that Her Majesty the Queen has declined to accept the offer of the Plantagenet Statues from Fontevrault, made by the Emperor of the French, in deference to the expressed feelings of the French people against their removal? He wished further to ask the noble Lord, whether he can, either through Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen or the Ambassador at Paris, convey to the Emperor of the French the earnest wish of many in this country that the effigies of our most illustrious Sovereigns and their consorts should be restored to their proper position in the Abbey of Fontevrault, and no longer be left in their present neglected state in a deserted vault?
LORD STANLEYWhen, in answer, Sir, to a Question put to me by the hon. Member, I last gave some information to the House on this subject, I said that the Emperor of the French, with that courtesy which he had invariably shown towards this country, had offered those statues to Her Majesty, and that that offer had been accepted by Her Majesty with gratitude. Since that time the state of the case has altered. Information reached us from various quarters to the effect that the Emperor in his anxiety to meet what he supposed to be the wishes of the people of England—an anxiety for which we owe him a debt of gratitude—had placed himself in a position of some little difficulty. We learnt that legal objections were taken to the removal of those statues, which it was thought could be overcome only by legislative action on the part of the French Chambers. Independent of that consideration, there is no doubt that in the locality where those memorials of antiquity are preserved there arose—however little care might up to the present time have been taken of them—a very strong feeling against their removal. Now, we felt that it could not be the wish of Her Majesty, or the Government, or of this House, or the English public that any misunderstanding should spring up between the Emperor and his own subjects out of a matter in which he acted solely out of a feeling of kindness 818 and courtesy towards this country. We therefore advised Her Majesty—and Her Majesty was graciously pleased to accept the advice—that she should at once release the Emperor from his promise, and that that promise should be looked upon as if it had not been given. A communication to that effect has been conveyed to His Majesty; I have not yet received an answer to that communication; but I assume that the removal of the statues will not now take place, and that the matter may be looked upon as at an end. In reply to the second Question of the hon. Gentleman, I may state that in the letter which, by Her Majesty's command, I wrote on the subject, I ventured to express a hope that, as we had waived whatever claim we might be supposed to possess on the French Government as to the removal of those memorials, some means would be taken—seeing that their value seemed now to be known and appreciated in the locality to which they belonged—to preserve them, and that they would not be allowed to remain in the neglected state in which they were now understood to be.