On this visit her brother, Joseph John Gurney, and two nieces accompanied her.  Soon after arriving at the Hague, Mrs. Fry and Mr. Gurney, being introduced to the King by Prince Albert, were commanded to attend at a royal audience.  This the travellers did, and, after about an hour’s conversation, departed highly gratified.  Another day they spent some time with the Princess of Orange, the Princess Frederick, and other members of the royal house:  all these personages were anxious to hear about the work of prison reform, and to aid in it.  After this they departed for Amsterdam, Bremen, and other places; but their journey resembled a triumphal progress more than anything else.  The peasantry followed the carriage shouting Mrs. Fry’s name, and begging for tracts.  Sometimes, in order to get away, she was compelled to shake hands with them all, and speak a few words of kindly greeting.

They extended the journey into Denmark, and were treated with marked honor from the first.  The Queen engaged apartments for the travellers at the Hotel Royal, and on some occasions took Mrs. Fry to see schools and other places, in her own carriage.  On a subsequent day, when dining with the King and Queen, Mrs. Fry and Mr. Gurney laid before their Majesties the condition of persecuted Christians; the sad state of prisons in his dominions; they also referred to the slavery in the Danish colonies in the West Indies.  Mr. Gurney having only recently returned from that part of the world, he had much to tell respecting the spiritual and social state of those colonies.  Mrs. Fry records that at dinner she was placed between the King and Queen, who both conversed very pleasantly with her.

At Minden, they had varied experiences of travelling and travellers’ welcomes.  “I could not but be struck,” says Mrs. Fry in her journal, “with the peculiar contrast of my circumstances:  in the morning traversing the bad pavement of a street in Minden, with a poor, old Friend in a sort of knitted cap close to her head; in the evening surrounded by the Prince and Princesses of a German Court.”  The members of the Prussian royal family were anxious to see her and hear from her own lips an account of her labors in the cause of humanity.  The representatives of the House of Brandenburgh welcomed Mrs. Fry beyond her most sanguine expectations; indeed, it would be nearer the truth to say that in her lowly estimate of herself, she almost dreaded to approach royal or noble personages, and that therefore she craved for no honor, but only tolerance and favor.  She never sought an interview with any of these personages, but to benefit those who could not plead for themselves.  Her letters home exhibit no pride, boastfulness, or triumph; all is pure thankfulness that one so unworthy as she deemed herself to be should accomplish so much.  Writing to her grandchildren she says: