On the 20th of November the Queen went in State to the House of Lords to
open Parliament for the first time, with as great a crowd of members and
strangers present as had flocked to witness the prorogation in July. In the
course of the month of December the bills were passed which fixed the
Queen's income at three hundred and eighty-five thousand pounds a year, and
further raised the Duchess of Kent's annuity from twenty-two thousand,
which it had been latterly, to thirty thousand a year. On the 23rd of
December the Queen went to give her assent to the bills, and thank her
Parliament personally, according to old custom on such an occasion. On
presenting the bill the Speaker observed that it had been framed in "a
liberal and confiding spirit." The Queen simply bowed her acknowledgement.

Lord Melbourne, "with the tears in his eyes," told Lord Campbell that in
one of his first interviews with the Queen she had said to him, "My
father's debts must be paid." Accordingly the late Duke of Kent's debts
were paid by his daughter, in the name of herself and her mother, in the
first year of Queen Victoria's reign. In the second year she discharged the
debts which the Duchess of Kent had incurred in meeting the innumerable
heavy calls made upon her, not only as the widow of one of the Royal Dukes,
but as the mother of the future Sovereign.

The summer of 1838 was gay with the preparations for the Queen's
coronation. All classes took the greatest interest in it, so that splenetic
people pronounced the nation "coronation mad." Long before the event
coronation medals were being struck, coronation songs and hymns written,
coronation ribands woven. Every ingenious method by which the world could
commemorate the joyful season was put in practice. The sentiment was not
confined to the inhabitants of the United Kingdom. "Foreigners of various
conditions, and from all quarters of Europe, flocked in to behold the
inauguration of the maiden monarch of the British Empire. In the Metropolis