The honours that Sir Leonard Tilley received from Her Majesty, in recognition of his great public services, were very gratifying to his friends as well as to himself, and when he was made a Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George, in 1879, his temperance friends embraced the first opportunity on his return to St. John to have a banquet in his honour, at which he wore, for the first time in public, the insignia of the knightly order of which he had become a member. There was probably no public event in the whole course of his life which gave him greater pleasure than this proof of the attachment of his old friends.
Sir Leonard's last visit to England was marked by an extremely gracious invitation to visit the queen at Osborne, in the Isle of Wight. While he and Lady Tilley were sojourning at Cowes a message was sent summoning them to Osborne House, where they were received by Her Majesty in the beautiful grounds that surround that palace. The Princess Louise and Princess Beatrice, with an equerry in waiting, were the only other persons present. After an interesting conversation they were permitted to visit the private apartments of Her Majesty, and the Prince Consort's farm.
Sir Leonard Tilley was first married in 1843 to Julia Ann, daughter of the late James T. Hanford, who died in 1862. By her he had seven children, two sons and five daughters. In 1867, he married Alice Starr, daughter of the late Z. Chipman, of St. Stephen. By this marriage he had two sons, Mr. Herbert C. Tilley, of the Imperial Trust Company, who resides in St. John, and Mr. L. P. DeWolfe Tilley, barrister, who is also a resident of St. John. These two sons, Herbert and Leonard, were the prop and comfort of his declining years and were devoted wholly to him to the end.
Sir Leonard Tilley's second marriage was contracted at the time when he was exchanging the limited field of provincial politics for the wider sphere which confederation opened up to him in the parliament of Canada. It was a fortunate union, for it gave him a helpmeet and companion who was in full sympathy with him in all his hopes and feelings, and who was singularly well qualified to preside over his household, which, in his capacity of a minister of the Crown, had become, to a considerable extent, a factor in the public life of Canada. Lady Tilley had a high ideal of her duty as the wife of a cabinet minister and of the governor of New Brunswick, and was not content to lead a merely ornamental life or confine her energies within a narrow range. She saw many deficiencies in our appliances for relieving human misery, and with a zeal which could not be dampened, she sought to remedy them. The Victoria Hospital at Fredericton is her work; hers also is the Nurses' Home in connection with the Public Hospital in St. John, and the Reformatory for the care of bad or neglected boys, who are in danger of becoming criminals if they are not educated and disciplined when they are young. In every work of philanthropy Lady Tilley has always taken not only an active, but a leading part, and her position has enabled her to enlist in the cause of humanity the energies of many who, under other circumstances, might not have given their attention to philanthropic work.