Following earlier tensions with France, a Volunteer Militia movement had sprung up in Britain. Largely middle class in nature and funded from both state and private means, it had developed into a respectable addition to the nation's home defense and would remain so until the First World War. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert reviewed 21,000 of these men in the afternoon of a gathering of Volunteers, mostly from London, in Hyde Park. (By John Osborne)
Source Citation
Joseph Irving, The Annals of Our Times .... (London: MacMillan and Company, 1869), 421.