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THE 
 
 YOKE OF EMPIRE 
 
 SKETCHES OF 
 THE queen's prime MINISTERS 
 
 BY 
 
 REGINALD B. BRETT 
 
 &PX(^ TT^dcav 
 
 ilontion 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited 
 
 NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1896 
 
 yf // rig/its reserved 
 
^k>^ 
 
 ^^'C 
 
 ^^^ 
 
 afc..^.v i iviORSE STEPHEfclflJ 
 
THIS VOLUME 
 IS 
 
 dedicated 
 
 to the youngest of the 
 
 queen's 
 
 prime ministers 
 
 509837 
 

i^'C'i-C* 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 In this volume the writer has endeav- 
 oured to illustrate a single point — the 
 human relation between a Constitutional 
 Sovereign and her Ministers. Our form 
 of Government may change, and the 
 Victorian legend may become as obso- 
 lete as the Elizabethan, but of the 
 imagination of Englishmen both cannot 
 fail to keep fast hold so long as the 
 Empire endures. Meanwhile, to living 
 statesmen, and to those who will follow 
 them, the story indicated in these pages 
 is the primary lesson of that monarchical 
 republic which has been fashioned out 
 of their ancient traditions and their 
 modern necessities by the English people. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 1. The Queen and her First Prime 
 
 Minister 
 
 2. The Queen and her Second Prime 
 
 Minister . . . . . 
 
 34 
 
 3. The Queen and her " Permanent 
 
 Minister " . . . . .64 
 
 4. The Queen and Lord Palmerston . 89 
 
 5. The Queen and Lord Beaconsfield . 117 
 
 6. The Queen and Mr. Gladstone . 152 
 
 7. Conclusion . . . . .191 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 I. 
 
 H.M. The Queen .' 
 
 
 . Frontispiece 
 
 2. 
 
 Lord Melbourne 
 
 ro 
 
 face page i 
 
 3. 
 
 Sir Robert Peel 
 
 
 34 
 
 4. 
 
 H.R.H. Prince Consort 
 
 
 64 
 
 5- 
 
 Lord Palmerston 
 
 
 89 
 
 6. 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield 
 
 
 117 
 
 7. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone . 
 
 
 152 
 
NOTE 
 
 These chapters, with the exception of the 
 two last, have appeared in the Nineteenth 
 Century^ and are reprinted with the kind per- 
 mission of Mr. J. Knowles. 
 
I 
 
 THE QUEEN AND HER FIRST 
 PRIME MINISTER 
 
 When from the vantage-ground of far- 
 distant centuries men come to look back 
 upon the history of the British Empire, 
 probably no figure will surpass in bril- 
 liancy and interest that of Queen Vic- 
 toria. In order to form a just idea of 
 the strong relief in which the Queen 
 will stand out from her predecessors, it 
 is necessary to imagine Elizabeth known 
 to us by the light of her own utterances 
 and those of her contemporaries ; for it 
 is thus that the Queen is revealed to the 
 readers of her journals, her correspond- 
 ence, and the memoirs of those who 
 have been privileged to observe closely 
 the higher political movement of her 
 
2 THE QUEEN AND HER i 
 
 reign. The life of the Queen has been 
 laid open to the eyes of all who care to 
 look. It is pure and honest and simple 
 beyond the lives of most women, and 
 harmonises with the fancies upon which 
 idealists have loved to dwell. Emotional, 
 with full play of the higher feelings, 
 tempered by caution and sound reason, 
 the Queen has reigned over half-a-cen- 
 tury without making a personal enemy, 
 without creating a political foe. It is a 
 famous record ; for the negative virtues 
 are the rarest of all in monarchs. No 
 act of cruelty sullies the rule of Queen 
 Victoria, and, so far as her subjects can 
 judge of her, she has been unjust to none 
 of them. This alone, apart from the 
 lofty moral atmosphere in which she has 
 always moved, is higher praise than any 
 of her ancestors can boast. 
 
 It was ** in a palace in a garden, meet 
 scene for youth and innocence," as one 
 in later years to be her Minister has 
 said, that she received the news of her 
 accession to a throne overlooking " every 
 sea and nations in every zone." There 
 are but few who would deny that the 
 sequel to her reign has proved worthy of 
 
I FIRST PRIME MINISTER 3 
 
 the opening. Seldom has a woman been 
 called upon to play a more difficult part 
 than the young girl, hardly eighteen 
 years old, who in June 1837 stood with 
 bare feet, and in her night-dress, receiving 
 the homage of the Lords who had come 
 to announce to her that she was Queen 
 of England. 
 
 The scene has been admirably de- 
 scribed. William the Fourth was dead. 
 The Archbishop of Canterbury and 
 Lord Conyngham were despatched to 
 inform the Princess Victoria of the fact. 
 It was a warm night in June. The 
 Princess was sleeping in her mother's 
 room, her custom from childhood, and 
 had to be summoned out of her sleep. 
 The messengers awaited her in the long, 
 unlofty room, separated only by folding- 
 doors from that which was inhabited by 
 the Duchess of Kent and her daughter. 
 The young girl entered alone, in her 
 night-dress, with some loose wrap thrown 
 hastily about her. The moment she 
 was addressed as "Your Majesty" she 
 put out her hand, intimating that the 
 Lords who addressed her were to kiss it, 
 and thereby do homage. Her schooling 
 
4 THE QUEEN AND HER i 
 
 and her instincts were admirable from 
 the first. Self-possession combined with 
 perfect modesty came naturally to her. 
 A few hours later, at eleven o'clock in 
 the morning, the child-Queen met her 
 Council. In the corridor at Windsor 
 there is a picture which commemorates 
 the event. Never, it has been said by 
 an eye-witness, was anything like the 
 first impression she produced, or the 
 chorus of praise and admiration which 
 was raised about her manner and be- 
 haviour, certainly not without justice. 
 Her extreme youth and inexperience, 
 and the ignorance of the world concern- 
 ing her — for she had lived in complete 
 seclusion — excited interest and curiosity. 
 Asked whether she would enter the 
 room accompanied by the Great Officers 
 of State, she said she would come in 
 alone. Accordingly, when all the Lords 
 of the Privy Council were assembled, 
 the folding-doors were thrown open, and 
 the Queen entered, quite plainly dressed 
 and in mourning, and took her seat for 
 the first time, a young girl among a 
 crowd of men, including all the most 
 famous and powerful of her subjects. 
 
I FIRST PRIME MINISTER 5 
 
 She bowed, and read her speech, handed 
 to her by the Prime Minister, Lord 
 Melbourne, in a clear and firm voice, 
 and then took the oath for the security 
 of the Church of Scotland. Immediately 
 the Privy Councillors were sworn ; the 
 royal Dukes of Cumberland and Sussex 
 first by themselves. It was observed 
 that as these two old men, her uncles, 
 knelt before her swearing allegiance, she 
 blushed up to the eyes, as if she felt the 
 contrast between their civil and natural 
 relations. Her manner was very grace- 
 ful and engaging, and she kissed them 
 both, and, rising from her chair, moved 
 towards the Duke of Sussex, who was 
 too infirm to reach her. She spoke to 
 no one, nor could the smallest difference 
 in her manner be detected, though care- 
 fully scrutinised to see whether she drew 
 distinction between Lord Melbourne 
 and the Ministers on the one hand, or 
 the Duke of Wellington and Sir R. Peel 
 on the other. Occasionally, when in 
 doubt what to do, she looked to Lord 
 Melbourne for instruction ; but this 
 rarely occurred. No wonder he was 
 charmed ; no wonder that Sir R. Peel 
 
6 THE QUEEN AND HER i 
 
 was amazed at her manner and behaviour, 
 at her apparent deep sense of the situa- 
 tion, at her modesty and her firmness. 
 No wonder that the Duke of Wellington 
 was constrained to admit that if she had 
 been his own daughter he could not have 
 desired to see her perform her part 
 better. 
 
 It was not only by her appearance 
 and manner that the Queen made her 
 charm felt. She acted in difficult cir- 
 cumstances with every sort of good 
 taste and good feeling, as well as good 
 sense. To the Queen Dowager her 
 behaviour was perfect. She wrote to 
 her in the kindest terms, begging her to 
 consult only her health and convenience, 
 and to remain at Windsor as long as 
 she pleased. This much any tender- 
 hearted woman might have done ; but 
 her thoughtfulness for the feelings of 
 others already was apparent in the 
 smallest and least expected details. 
 When about to go down to visit the 
 Queen Dowager at Windsor, to Lord 
 Melbourne's great surprise she told him 
 that the flag on the Round Tower was 
 flying half-mast high, and that as they 
 
I FIRST PRIME MINISTER 7 
 
 would probably elevate it on her arrival, 
 it would be better to send orders before- 
 hand not to do so. He had never 
 thought of the flag, nor did he know 
 anything about it. Attention to details, 
 which some would consider trifles, but 
 which differentiate more than great 
 actions the thoughtful from the thought- 
 less mind, has from her youth upwards 
 been characteristic of the Queen. Of 
 her good sense and caution ample proof 
 was soon given in her treatment of those 
 who had been about her since childhood. 
 Upon none of them did she exclusively 
 rely. Conroy she dismissed at once, 
 with a pension, from her immediate 
 surroundings. The Baroness Lehzen 
 remained as before her companion. It 
 was noticed that whenever she was asked 
 to decide upon some difficult matter she 
 invariably said she would think it over 
 and reply on the morrow. Men, know- 
 ing to what extent she relied upon the 
 advice of Lord Melbourne, imagined 
 that in everything she consulted him. 
 He, however, declared that to many of 
 his questions a similar reply was given. 
 The Minister was quickly absorbed 
 
8 THE QUEEN AND HER i 
 
 by the novel and exciting duty which 
 had fallen to him. No human relation 
 could be more fascinating than that in 
 which he stood to the Queen. Perhaps 
 no man before or since has quite filled 
 the place that Lord Melbourne occupied 
 in the life of a girl who was not his wife 
 or his daughter. For four years he saw 
 the Queen every day. He was formed, 
 as an acute observer noticed, to ingratiate 
 himself with her. The unbounded con- 
 sideration and respect with which he 
 treated her, his desire to consult her 
 tastes and wishes, the ease of his frank 
 and natural manners, his quaint epigram- 
 matic turn of mind, all helped to charm 
 the girl who was his sovereign, but who 
 also stood to him in statu pupillari. 
 The excitement — for it could have been 
 no less to him, a man of the world, 
 with a romantic bias, as well as a keen 
 practical intelligence — of having to guide 
 and direct such a pupil can be well 
 imagined. 
 
 He never betrayed his responsibility 
 nor presumed upon his position. It was 
 a piece of rare good fortune which found 
 him Minister at the King's death. With 
 
1 FIRST PRIME MINISTER 9 
 
 all the immense powers of head and 
 heart which the Queen came later to 
 discover in Sir R. Peel, it is more than 
 doubtful if he could have fulfilled in the 
 summer of 1837 ^^^ duties so easily 
 assumed by his rival. 
 
 Lord Melbourne's life had been 
 chequered by curious experiences. In 
 the sphere of politics he had found him- 
 self on pleasant lines ; but in private his 
 lot had been cast with that of a woman 
 versed in all the wearing secrets of 
 romantic passion. To turn from the 
 memory of his wife's wild excesses in 
 thought and language, to the pure- 
 hearted and simple girl whom the Fates 
 had given him as a Queen and a 
 daughter must have touched him to 
 the quick. 
 
 Varied as is the business of a Prime 
 Minister, full as his mind must neces- 
 sarily be of State affairs, Lord Mel- 
 bourne's absorbing interest became the 
 blossoming of this youthful character 
 under his watchful eye and careful 
 guardianship. 
 
 He was no longer young, but he was 
 not old. At the Coronation, after the 
 
lo THE QUEEN AND HER i 
 
 heroic figure of the Duke of Wellington, 
 it was to Lord Melbourne that the 
 attention of onlookers was mainly- 
 directed. 
 
 His head was a truly noble one [wrote 
 Leslie, no mean judge]. I think, indeed, he 
 was the finest specimen of manly beauty in 
 the meridian of life I ever saw ; not only 
 were his features eminently handsome, but 
 his expression was in the highest degree in- 
 tellectual. His laugh was frequent, and the 
 most joyous possible, and his voice so deep 
 and musical, that to hear him say the most 
 ordinary things was a pleasure ; but his frank- 
 ness, his freedom from affectation, and his 
 pecuHar humour rendered almost everything 
 he said, though it seemed perfectly natural, 
 yet quite original. 
 
 Chantrey's bust and the beautiful 
 portraits in the corridor at Windsor — 
 one taken when he was but a boy, the 
 other in middle life — corroborate the 
 view of his contemporaries. His 
 memory was prodigious, and he read 
 voraciously. In classical attainments, 
 including a neat talent for verse, he was 
 up to the high average level of the 
 educated men of his time. In knowledge 
 of history and of politics he was not 
 
1 FIRST PRIME MINISTER ii 
 
 surpassed by any ; and no living Eng- 
 lishman was by age, character, and 
 experience so well qualified for the task 
 which lay under his hand. 
 
 That the young Queen should have 
 become attached with almost filial regard 
 to her Minister is not surprising, and 
 that he admirably fulfilled his duty was 
 never questioned by those who knew 
 the truth. Sir R. Peel, his chief political 
 opponent, admitted that the Queen 
 could not do better than take his advice 
 and abide by his counsel ; and the Duke 
 of Wellington, then Leader of the Oppo- 
 sition to him in the House of Lords, 
 declared publicly that Lord Melbourne 
 had rendered the greatest possible service 
 by making the Queen acquainted with 
 the mode and policy of government, 
 initiating her into the laws and spirit of 
 the Constitution, and teaching her to 
 preside over the destinies of the country. 
 
 The initiation of the Queen into the 
 spirit of the Constitution even Lord 
 Melbourne's political foes felt could not 
 be in better hands; and although the 
 Times, then a party journal, declared the 
 all but infant and helpless Queen to be 
 
12 THE QUEEN AND HER i 
 
 delivered up into the hands of the Whig 
 Minister, and evidently anticipated the 
 worst results from it, these prognostica- 
 tions were happily falsified. Her uncle, 
 the King of the Belgians, and his curious 
 mentor, the physician Stockmar, from 
 the first endeavoured to instil into the 
 Queen's mind her responsibilities as a 
 constitutional sovereign, and the supreme 
 importance of holding an impartial 
 balance between the two great political 
 parties. Had Lord Melbourne been a 
 degree less loyal, had he been an office- 
 seeker, had he possessed an exaggerated 
 belief in his own infallibility, the Queen 
 might not have responded so readily to 
 the wise advice of her relative and of 
 Stockmar. She has allowed the admission 
 to be made on her behalf that between 
 her accession and her marriage, in spite 
 of Lord Melbourne's daily lessons, in 
 reality because of their charm, she had 
 drifted insensibly into political partisan- 
 ship. Had it been otherwise she would 
 not have been human ; but it is to the 
 credit of Lord Melbourne that neither 
 by precept, nor hint, nor suggestion did 
 he encourage his sovereign's bias towards 
 
I FIRST PRIME MINISTER 13 
 
 the Whig party. He taught her the 
 duties of queenship in their widest sense. 
 
 No pedagogue could have done this [says 
 one of the most fascinating of biographers] ; 
 a professor from one of the universities might 
 have taught her the letters of the Constitution 
 in a course of morning lessons, but he would 
 probably have failed to convey along with it 
 that informing and quickening spirit without 
 which the letter profiteth nothing, or leads to 
 mischief. 
 
 He was, as he has been called, a 
 Regius Professor, but with no pro- 
 fessional disqualifications ; and if to 
 political Crokers, spell the word as you 
 will, his influence seemed dangerous, the 
 Tory leaders recognised the indispensable 
 nature of his task, and acquiesced in his 
 performance of it. He was a Whig, no 
 doubt, says his biographer, but at any 
 rate he was an honest-hearted English- 
 man, in no merely conventional sense a 
 gentleman, on whose perfect honour no 
 one hesitated to place reliance. He 
 lived at Windsor Castle, and had 
 constant access to the Queen. In 
 the morning he carried and explained 
 to her letters and despatches. After 
 
14 THE QUEEN JND HER i 
 
 luncheon he rode with her, taking his 
 place next to her. Or he rode by her 
 side when she drove, with the Duchess 
 of Kent, in a low carriage drawn by four 
 white ponies, attended by grooms in 
 scarlet, and a number of gentlemen 
 riding in attendance. Or perhaps it 
 was a review of troops in the park, when 
 her Minister would stand and watch his 
 charge as she rode between the lines, in 
 the Windsor uniform riding-habit, with 
 the blue ribbon of the Garter, and a 
 smart schako trimmed with gold lace, 
 returning the salutes of her troops by 
 raising her hand to her cap in true 
 military fashion. " The most fascinat- 
 ing thing ever seen," veteran officers 
 would declare ; and can there be any 
 doubt that Lord Melbourne agreed with 
 them in his hearty way ? Or he would 
 be still prouder of her when, after 
 bidding farewell to departing relatives, 
 and about to leave the ship, the captain 
 and officers betrayed their anxiety to 
 assist her down the tall side of the 
 vessel, she looked up with the greatest 
 spirit, and said quite loud in her silvery 
 voice, " No help, thank you ; I am used 
 
I FIRST PRIME MINISTER 15 
 
 to this," and descended, as an eye-witness 
 noticed, " like an old boatswain." It is 
 not, perhaps, astonishing that Lord 
 Melbourne should have joined in the 
 enthusiastic cheers of her sailors. Or 
 he accompanied her on those Sunday- 
 afternoons, from four to five, when the 
 band played upon the incomparable 
 terrace at Windsor ; and there are those 
 who still remember the crowds of people, 
 thick-set rows of men, women, and Eton 
 boys, pressing round the child-Queen as 
 she walked, her courtiers hardly able to 
 cleave a passage through them, and Lord 
 Melbourne walking half a pace behind 
 her, on her right, stooping a little so as 
 to be quite within earshot ; a fascinating 
 sight ; the homage of a protector. 
 
 Visitors at Windsor were struck with 
 the Minister's manner to the Queen. 
 The mixture of parental anxiety and 
 respectful deference was naturally re- 
 sponded to by her, and she gave him her 
 entire confidence. Greville remarked 
 that he had no doubt Melbourne was 
 passionately fond of her, as he might be 
 of a daughter if he had one, and the 
 more so because he was a man with a 
 
i6 THE QUEEN AND HER i 
 
 great capacity for loving without having 
 anything in the world to love. As they 
 are the impressions of an eye-witness, 
 and a man of discrimination, it is worth 
 while to quote Greville's Journal of the 
 15th December 1838 : — 
 
 Went on Wednesday to a Council at 
 Windsor, and after the Council was invited 
 to stay that night ; rode with the Queen, 
 and after riding, Melbourne came to me and 
 said her Majesty wished me to stay the next 
 day also. This was very gracious and very 
 considerate, because it was done for the express 
 purpose of showing that she was not dis- 
 pleased at my not staying when asked on a 
 former occasion, and as she can have no 
 object whatever in being civil to me, it was 
 a proof of her good nature and thoughtfulness 
 about other people's little vanities, even those 
 of the most insignificant. Accordingly I 
 remained till Friday morning, when I went 
 with the rest of her suite to see the hounds 
 throw off, which she herself saw for the first 
 time. The Court is certainly not gay, but 
 it is perhaps impossible that any Court should 
 be gay where there is no social equality ; 
 where some ceremony and a continual air of 
 deference and respect must be observed, there 
 can be no ease, and without ease there can be 
 no real pleasure. The Queen is natural, good- 
 humoured, and cheerful, but still she is Queen, 
 
I FIRST PRIME MINISTER 17 
 
 and by her must the social habits and the tone 
 of conversation be regulated, and for this she 
 is too young and inexperienced. She sits at 
 a large round table, her guests around it, and 
 Melbourne always in a chair beside her, where 
 two mortal hours are consumed in such con- 
 versation as can be found, which appears to 
 be, and really is, very uphill work. This, 
 however, is the only bad part of the whole ; 
 the rest of the day is passed without the 
 slightest constraint, trouble, or annoyance to 
 anybody ; each person is at Hberty to employ 
 himself or herself as best pleases them, though 
 very Httle is done in common, and in this 
 respect Windsor is totally unlike any other 
 place. There is none of the sociability which 
 makes the agreeableness of an English country 
 house ; there is no room in which the guests 
 assemble, sit, lounge, and talk as they please 
 and when they please ; there is a billiard-table, 
 but in such a remote corner of the Castle that 
 it might as well be in the town of Windsor ; 
 and there is a library well stocked with books, 
 but hardly accessible, imperfectly warmed, 
 and only tenanted by the librarian : it is a 
 mere library, too, unfurnished, and offering 
 none of the comforts and luxuries of a habit- 
 able room. There are two breakfast-rooms, 
 one for the ladies and the guests, and the 
 other for the equerries ; but when the meal is 
 over everybody disperses, and nothing but 
 another meal reunites the company, so that, 
 c 
 
i8 THE QUEEN AND HER i 
 
 in fact, there is no society whatever, Httle 
 trouble, Httle etiquette, but very little resource 
 or amusement. 
 
 The life which the Queen leads is this : 
 she gets up soon after eight o'clock, break- 
 fasts in her own room, and is employed the 
 whole morning in transacting business ; she 
 reads all the despatches and has every matter 
 of interest and importance in every department 
 laid before her. At eleven or twelve Mel- 
 bourne comes to her and stays an hour, more 
 or less, according to the business he may have 
 to transact. At two she rides with a large 
 suite (and she Hkes to have it numerous) j 
 Melbourne always rides on her left hand, and 
 the equerry-in-waiting generally on her right ; 
 she rides for two hours along the road, and 
 the greater part of the time at a full gallop ; 
 after riding she amuses herself for the rest of 
 the afternoon with music and singing, playing, 
 romping with children, if there are any in the 
 Castle (and she is so fond of them that she 
 generally contrives to have some there), or in 
 any other way she fancies. The hour of 
 dinner is nominally half-past seven o'clock, 
 soon after which time the guests assemble, 
 but she seldom appears till near eight. The 
 lord-in-waiting comes into the drawing-room 
 and instructs each gentleman which lady he 
 is to take to dinner. When the guests are 
 all assembled the Queen comes in, preceded 
 by the gentlemen of her household, and 
 
I FIRST PRIME MINISTER 19 
 
 followed by the Duchess of Kent and all her 
 ladies ; she speaks to each lady, bows to the 
 men, and goes immediately into the dining- 
 room. She generally takes the arm of the 
 man of the highest rank, but on this occasion 
 she went with Mr. Stephenson, the American 
 Minister (though he has no rank), which was 
 very wisely done. Melbourne invariably sits 
 on her left, no matter who may be there ; she 
 remains at table the usual time, but does not 
 suffer the men to sit long after her, and we 
 were summoned to coffee in less than a 
 quarter of an hour. In the drawing-room 
 she never sits down till the men make their 
 appearance. Coffee is served to them in the 
 adjoining room, and then they go into the 
 drawing-room, when she goes round and says 
 a few words to each, of the most trivial nature, 
 all, however, very civil and cordial in manner 
 and expression. When this little ceremony 
 is over, the Duchess of Kent's whist table is 
 arranged, and then the round table is mar- 
 shalled, Melbourne invariably sitting on the 
 left hand of the Queen, and remaining there 
 without moving tul the evening is at an end. 
 At about half-past eleven she goes to bed, or 
 whenever the Duchess has played her usual 
 number of rubbers, and the band have per- 
 formed all the pieces on their list for the night. 
 This is the whole history of her day : she 
 orders and regulates every detail herself, she 
 knows where everybody is lodged in the 
 
20 THE QUEEN AND HER i 
 
 Castle, settles about the riding or driving, 
 and enters into every particular with minute 
 attention. But w^hile she personally gives 
 her orders to her various attendants, and does 
 everything that is civil to all the inmates of 
 the Castle, she really has nothing to do with 
 anybody but Melbourne, and with him she 
 passes (if not in tete-a-tete^ yet in intimate 
 communication) more hours than any two 
 people, in any relation of life, perhaps ever do 
 pass together besides. He is at her side for 
 at least six hours every day — an hour in the 
 morning, two on horseback, one at dinner, 
 and two in the evening. This monopoly is 
 certainly not judicious ; it is not altogether 
 consistent with social usage, and it leads to 
 an infraction of those rules of etiquette which 
 it is better to observe with regularity at 
 Court. But it is more peculiarly inexpedient 
 with reference to her own future enjoyment, 
 for if Melbourne should be compelled to 
 resign, her privations will be the more bitter 
 on account of the exclusiveness of her in- 
 timacy with him. Accordingly, her terror 
 when any danger menaces the Government, 
 her nervous apprehension at any appearance 
 of change, affect her health, and upon one 
 occasion during the last session she actually 
 fretted herself into an illness at the notion of 
 their going out. It must be owned that her 
 feelings are not unnatural, any more than 
 those which Melbourne entertains towards 
 
I FIRST PRIME MINISTER 21 
 
 her. His manner to her is perfect, always 
 respectful, and never presuming upon the 
 extraordinary distinction he enjoys ; hers to 
 him is simple and natural, indicative of the 
 confidence she reposes in him, and of her 
 lively taste for his society, but not marked by 
 any unbecoming familiarity. Interesting as 
 his position is, and flattered, gratified, and 
 touched as he must be by the confiding 
 devotion with which she places herself in his 
 hands, it is still marvellous that he should be 
 able to overcome the force of habit so com- 
 pletely as to endure the life he leads. Month 
 after month he remains at the Castle, sub- 
 mitting to this daily routine ; of all men he 
 appeared to be the last to be broken in to the 
 trammels of a Court, and never was such a 
 revolution seen in anybody's occupations and 
 habits. Instead of indolently sprawling in all 
 the attitudes of luxurious ease, he is always 
 sitting bolt upright ; his free and easy language, 
 interlarded with " damns," is carefully guarded 
 and regulated with the strictest propriety, and 
 he has exchanged the good talk of Holland 
 House for the trivial, laboured, and wearisome 
 inanities of the Royal circle. 
 
 Greville noticed that the Queen never 
 ceased to be Queen, and that all her 
 naivete, kindness, and good-nature were 
 combined with the propriety and dignity 
 demanded by her lofty station. 
 
22 THE QUEEN AND HER i 
 
 Lord Melbourne had been in public 
 life for many years, and since 1835 ^^ 
 had been Prime Minister ; but as leader 
 of the Whig party, and as a statesman, 
 although he had exhibited skill, and 
 occasionally power, he had never shown 
 himself to be indispensable, or to be 
 filling an office that could not have been 
 equally well filled by half-a-dozen of 
 his contemporaries. Now, however, all 
 was changed. The importance of his 
 work, as is commonly the case, was at 
 the time not fully appreciated. Doubt- 
 less far more interest was felt in the 
 controversial questions of domestic 
 politics which then divided parties ; and 
 the respective attitudes of Lord Durham 
 and Lord Brougham were thought to 
 have far deeper influence on public 
 affairs than the relation of the Queen to 
 her Minister. 
 
 In reality, however, the inevitable 
 Irish question, troubles in Egypt, missions 
 to Afghanistan, Persian wars, all im- 
 portant in their way, sink into insignifi- 
 cance beside the great political event 
 which was exclusively controlled by 
 Lord Melbourne when he undertook to 
 
I FIRST PRIME MINISTER 23 
 
 form the political character of the 
 Queen. 
 
 It is difficult to over-estimate the 
 value to England and to the Empire of 
 the four years of teaching which the 
 Queen received at Lord Melbourne's 
 hands. 
 
 It is possible to exaggerate the effect 
 produced by such admirable letters as 
 those of the King of the Belgians, and 
 the sound dogmatising of Baron Stock- 
 mar ; but Lord Melbourne's daily culture 
 of the Queen's mind, his careful pruning 
 away of extraneous growths harmful in 
 a constitutional sovereign, his respectful 
 explanation of her duties, cannot have 
 failed to have rendered her more fit to 
 receive and profit by the closer friend 
 and guide who was to follow, and whose 
 teaching was in a great degree a variation 
 upon the text of the Whig Minister. 
 
 Speculation staggers at the prospect 
 of what might have occurred if Queen 
 Victoria had' exhibited the obstinacy of 
 her grandfather, or the partisanship of 
 Queen Anne, or the unconscientious 
 neglect of duty so conspicuous in George 
 the Fourth. Those first four years of 
 
24 THE QUEEN AND HER i 
 
 her reign were crucial in their import- 
 ance to the formation of her character as 
 a sovereign and a woman. From their 
 novelty and excitement they must have 
 left the young girl in a mental state only 
 too ready to receive lifelong impressions 
 of good or evil. The Queen has said 
 that they were years full of peril for her, 
 and has expressed her gratitude that 
 none of her children have had to run the 
 risk she believes herself to have incurred. 
 It was England's good fortune as well as 
 the Queen's that at such a moment Lord 
 Melbourne's guiding hand was held out 
 to her. 
 
 In spite of all that he could do to 
 inure her to the idea, it soon became 
 clear that the Queen viewed with dismay 
 a change of Ministers which would de- 
 prive her of his advice and companion- 
 ship ; her feelings, when strongly stirred, 
 have always been but partially under 
 control ; and when the crisis of his 
 ministerial fate arrived in May 1839, 
 Lord Melbourne's earnest endeavour to 
 smooth the way for Sir Robert Peel was 
 not altogether successful. 
 
 The "Bedchamber Question" seems 
 
I FIRST PRIME MINISTER 25 
 
 by the light of subsequent years to have 
 admitted of only one proper solution ; 
 and that Lord Melbourne showed want 
 of foresight in not preparing the Queen's 
 mind for the inevitable change in the 
 personnel of her Court, and want of re- 
 solution in advising her to yield to Sir 
 Robert Peel's strong representations, has 
 never in recent years been denied. The 
 temptation was strong to support her in 
 her maidenly desire not to part with the 
 Duchess of Sutherland and other ladies 
 who had been around her since her ac- 
 cession ; while party tacticians derived 
 hopeful satisfaction from the capital 
 which they hoped to make of Ministerial 
 devotion to the person of the youthful 
 sovereign, and of self-immolation upon 
 the altar of her natural feelings. As is 
 obvious from his subsequent life. Lord 
 Melbourne, when the moment of part- 
 ing came, was singularly loth to leave 
 his pupil while any chance remained 
 which enabled him to continue to live 
 the engrossing life of the past two years. 
 It came to pass, however, that the 
 Princess of nineteen was strong enough 
 to overturn a great Ministerial combina- 
 
26 THE QUEEN AND HER i 
 
 tion ; that in doing so she was supported 
 by the Whig party ; that the phrase, " I 
 have stood by you : you must now stand 
 by me," in the mouth of a sovereign, 
 successfully appealed to one of the house 
 of Russell ; that the charming petulance 
 of the cry, " They wish to treat me like 
 a girl, but I will show them I am Queen 
 of England," went unchallenged at a 
 Whig Cabinet ; and that the doctrine 
 that the principle was not maintainable, 
 but that they were bound as gentlemen to 
 support the Queen, actually decided a 
 Whig Government to continue to enjoy 
 for two years a further term of office. 
 Such is the force of the human element 
 in great affairs, to the confusion of doc- 
 trinaires, and of unfortunate devotees of 
 science. 
 
 Possibly some kind divinity inter- 
 posed to assist the Queen at this moment, 
 pregnant as it was with a change vital to 
 her reign, as well as to her personal happi- 
 ness ; for in a few short months it was 
 to Lord Melbourne, a real friend of com- 
 parative long standing, rather than to a 
 stranger, however kindly disposed, that 
 she came to announce her intention of 
 
I FIRST PRIME MINISTER 27 
 
 asking Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg to 
 become her consort ; and it was not from 
 formal lips, but from the heart of her 
 Minister and friend, that the words of 
 approval and congratulation flowed. No 
 one else could have said to her in homely 
 language, " You will be very much more 
 comfortable, for a woman cannot stand 
 alone for any time, in whatever position 
 she may be " ; and no one during the 
 trying months that followed, in which 
 the joys of a love-match were curiously 
 blended with painful discussions in Par- 
 liament, and hateful but necessary public 
 arrangements, could have filled adequately 
 Lord Melbourne's place in the eyes of 
 the fatherless girl who stood alone, with- 
 out a male friend or protector of any kind. 
 It is not surprising that at the Council, 
 when she announced her approaching 
 marriage, her nervousness should have 
 permitted her to notice only the kindly 
 face of her Prime Minister, and still less 
 wonderful is it that in that momentary 
 glance she should have seen that his eyes 
 were full of tears. The prevision of 
 work well-nigh accomplished must have 
 rushed upon him with full and saddening 
 
28 THE QUEEN AND HER i 
 
 force, and the feeling of pleasure in the 
 Queen's happiness must have been shot 
 with sorrow at the thought of the fas- 
 cinating tutelage which was about to 
 end. 
 
 During the eighteen months that fol- 
 lowed the loth of February 1840, when 
 the Queen was married, to the 31st of 
 August 1 841, when Sir Robert Peel was 
 sent for by the Queen, her Minister was 
 engaged in the task of providing him- 
 self with a successor. For it was only 
 in a limited sense that Peel took his 
 predecessor's place, and the real successor 
 to Lord Melbourne, in influence, in 
 authority, and in guidance, was Prince 
 Albert, a mere boy in years, but who 
 had been so carefully trained, and was 
 happily endowed with such singular 
 powers of self-control in one so young, 
 that he from the first seemed to experi- 
 ence no difficulty in taking Lord Mel- 
 bourne's place at the side of the Queen. 
 It was as though a guardian had relin- 
 quished his trust ; and with the fall of 
 the Melbourne Government the reign of 
 the Queen may be said to have come of 
 age. 
 
I FIRST PRIME MINISTER 29 
 
 For some time the end of the Ad- 
 ministration was seen to be approaching, 
 and abnormal perception in reading 
 political signs was not required to fore- 
 cast the result of an appeal to the country 
 whenever it should take place ; but Lord 
 Melbourne's fall, though generally wel- 
 comed, carried with it an unusual degree 
 of personal pain to the Sovereign and 
 her Minister. Notwithstanding his re- 
 gret, Lord Melbourne took leave of the 
 Queen with his usual cheerful smile, 
 although the pathos of parting from 
 something more cherished than political 
 power rings in the almost familiar words 
 of farewell which she herself has recorded. 
 He pretended that his principal sorrow 
 was for her, but in reality his was the 
 heavier burden. '' For four years I 
 have seen you every day ; but it is so 
 different now to what it would have 
 been in 1839." ^^ ^^^ different, no 
 doubt, and it was Lord Melbourne above 
 all who was about to feel the quality of 
 the difference. 
 
 During the leave-taking the Queen 
 admits that she was much affected, and 
 that the separation from her old friend 
 
30 THE QUEEN AND HER i 
 
 was a trying time for her, when all the 
 consolation which her husband could 
 give her was required. This was freely 
 bestowed, and the exigencies of her great 
 position speedily reinvolved her in affairs 
 of State, clouding regrets in the dust of 
 strenuous and constant duty. 
 
 To Lord Melbourne, however, the 
 end of life had come. He was sixty- 
 three, still young as the days of states- 
 men are now counted, but his work was 
 done and his mission fulfilled. He 
 had placed the sceptre and globe in the 
 hands of the youthful Sovereign, and 
 there was no further need for him in the 
 world. 
 
 The truth seemed to strike him with 
 overwhelming force, and although he 
 tried to simulate a continued interest in 
 public affairs, and to persuade himself 
 that he was yet in full career, the melan- 
 choly of hopelessness gradually enveloped 
 him, and threw into deep shadow the 
 remaining years of his life. To resume 
 old habits, to turn to the classics, to 
 books, to old friends anxious to welcome 
 him, or to new ones eager for his society, 
 seemed alike impossible. The reaction 
 
I FIRST PRIME MINISTER 31 
 
 was too great, and the difference between 
 what was and what had been too pro- 
 found. 
 
 Into a solitary and loveless life the 
 most thrilling human element had been 
 accidentally introduced, and, like Silas 
 Marner, who, expectant of mere gold 
 coin, suddenly found the golden head of 
 a child, so Lord Melbourne, in the 
 lottery of political life, obtained not only 
 the first place, but a prize from which 
 the wifeless and childless man could 
 not find himself bereft without complete 
 loss of mental balance. It is painful to 
 lift the veil from those last sad years, 
 when at Brocket, the home of his youth, 
 the ex- Minister slowly sank into the 
 grave. 
 
 Hearts break oftener than is generally 
 supposed, and they are cleft upon curious 
 and unnoticed angles. Many attempts 
 were made, by the Queen herself and 
 others, to rouse the drooping spirit of 
 one whose name is associated with a 
 nature almost reckless in its insouciance 
 and gaiety ; but they were fruitless. 
 When the end finally came, no one 
 grieved more deeply than the Lady 
 
32 THE QUEEN AND HER i 
 
 whose debt to him was so heavy, and 
 was so fully recognised. It was some 
 consolation to feel that during the last 
 '* melancholy years of his life " his pupil 
 and her husband had been often the 
 " chief means of giving him " fitful 
 gleams of pleasure ; and no one can doubt 
 the sincerity of the passage in the Queen's 
 Journal which records how " truly and 
 sincerely" she deplored "the loss of one 
 who was a most kind and disinterested 
 friend of mine, and most sincerely at- 
 tached to me " — one who was, " for the 
 first two years and a half of my reign, 
 almost the only friend I had." 
 
 It may be the tendency of modern 
 times to look less upon individual char- 
 acter than upon vast masses of nameless 
 men as the determining factor in great 
 public affairs, so that hereafter English- 
 men may come to view the history of 
 their race much as some of us gaze upon 
 the stars, with an indefinite and confused 
 sense of glory, the riddle of which we 
 cannot read ; but it is impossible that 
 those who look back to the reign of 
 Queen Victoria should not pause for a 
 moment, held in thrall by the moving 
 
I FIRST PRIME MINISTER 33 
 
 figure of the girl-Queen, stepping as it 
 were from innocent sleep, with bare feet 
 and dazzled eyes, upon the slippery steps 
 of her throne, supported by the tender 
 and respectful hand of the first of her 
 long series of Prime Ministers. 
 
II 
 
 THE QUEEN AND HER SECOND 
 PRIME MINISTER 
 
 When Lord Melbourne became the 
 Queen's Prime Minister on her acces- 
 sion in 1837, she was a young girl only 
 a few days over eighteen years of age. 
 When Lord Melbourne was succeeded 
 by Sir Robert Peel in 1841, the Queen 
 was still a girl in years, but she was 
 twenty-two and married. Under the 
 gentle auspices of Lord Melbourne the 
 girl -Princess had become a woman and 
 a queen. Sir Robert Peel's task was a 
 very different one. By the Queen's side 
 he found a prince three months younger 
 than the Sovereign, a foreigner by birth, 
 full of keen intellectual interests, of 
 singularly strong and masterful character, 
 absorbed by honourable ambition to 
 
II SECOND PRIME MINISTER 35 
 
 Utilise powers he was conscious of 
 possessing, and yet, owing to the jealous 
 regard of English statesmen in former 
 times, precluded by constitutional usage 
 from taking his place on the throne 
 beside his wife. The Queen had been 
 anxious to make her husband King- 
 Consort, and indeed had strained every 
 nerve to bring it about ; but Lord 
 Melbourne had turned a deaf ear to 
 hints and suggestions, and it was only 
 when he met her plain request by the 
 rough though not unfriendly remark, 
 " For God's sake let's hear no more of 
 it, ma'am ; if you once get the English 
 people into the habit of making kings, 
 you may get them into the habit of un- 
 making them," that the subject was 
 dropped. 
 
 Sir Robert Peel, when he took office 
 in 1 841, found the Queen's husband her 
 friend and secretary, but when he quitted 
 office in 1847 ^^ ^^^^ Prince Albert in 
 fact, though not in name, coequal 
 Sovereign and King-Consort. Up to 
 the time of the birth of the Princess 
 Royal the Queen alone possessed pass- 
 keys of all the official boxes which were 
 
36 THE QUEEN AND HER ii 
 
 sent by the Ministers to the Palace. 
 That event saw the first advance in the 
 political position of the Prince, for he 
 was then put in possession of duplicate 
 keys and established as private secretary 
 to the Queen ; but when, four years 
 afterwards. Lord John Russell went to 
 Windsor at a crisis in the destinies of 
 Sir Robert Peel's Government, he could 
 not fail to notice the great change that 
 had taken place. 
 
 Formerly, as he knew, the Queen 
 received her Ministers alone ; they com- 
 municated with her only, although they 
 were aware that everything was known 
 to Prince Albert ; but now the Queen 
 and the Prince together received Lord 
 Lansdowne and Lord John Russell, and 
 both of them, where the first person 
 singular had been used, now employed 
 the first person plural. 
 
 If Lord Melbourne's instinct was 
 adverse to an official recognition of the 
 Prince as king, others, including Stock- 
 mar, were equally opposed to the idea, 
 and though the Queen's tenacity in- 
 duced her to reopen the question with 
 Sir Robert Peel, the Prince's sound 
 
II SECOND PRIME MINISTER 37 
 
 judgment prompted him to see that the 
 point was not pressed. To Peel, how- 
 ever, the Prince owed, as the Queen 
 herself has affirmed, his introduction 
 into public life. It was natural that a 
 nature so intense, so full of romantic 
 zeal to act rightly, and withal so self- 
 commanding as that of Prince Albert, 
 should appeal to the new Prime 
 Minister. The difficulty lay at first in 
 the seeds of prejudice which had been 
 sown in the mind of the Queen by the 
 action of Peel himself when leader of 
 the Opposition to Lord Melbourne's 
 Government. Two years before her 
 marriage the Queen had occasion to 
 meet Sir Robert Peel under circum- 
 stances which had galled and pained her, 
 and if her behaviour to him personally 
 had been perfectly kind, the dislike with 
 which she regarded him as a successor 
 to Lord Melbourne had become obvious 
 to those about the Court. The resigna- 
 tion of her Ministers in May of that 
 year had been altogether unexpected by 
 her, and Lord John Russell has related 
 that, during her interview with him, the 
 young Sovereign was dissolved in tears ; 
 
38 THE QUEEN AND HER u 
 
 that afterwards she remained secluded 
 for a whole day, refusing to dine as 
 usual with her courtiers, and invisible 
 to them all. Upon Lord Melbourne's 
 advice, however, she sent for the Duke 
 of Wellington, and before seeing him 
 she had regained her composure. The 
 Duke of Wellington, Tory as he was, 
 adopted a position which in these days 
 is supposed to be the special privilege of 
 Radical politicians ; and in refusing to 
 be Prime Minister he relied mainly on a 
 view, now a mere pious opinion, that 
 that post should always be held by a 
 member of the House of Commons. 
 When he urged the Queen to send for 
 Peel, whatever her reluctance may have 
 prompted, she consented at once, and 
 upon the Duke suggesting that it would 
 be more in accordance with usage that 
 she should herself write to the man who 
 was about to be her Minister, she did so 
 without comment, merely requesting the 
 Duke to mention to him that he would 
 receive a communication asking him to 
 repair to the Palace. Peel has recorded 
 that when he arrived in full dress, 
 according to custom, somewhat doubtful 
 
II SECOND PRIME MINISTER 39 
 
 of his reception, he was received ex- 
 tremely well, and left the Queen per- 
 fectly satisfied, having accepted the 
 responsibility of attempting to form a 
 Government. 
 
 In order to appreciate the impression 
 made upon the Queen by Peel, it is 
 necessary to picture him as he then was 
 in the prime of life ; a man of great 
 vigour, tall and manly, in his fiftieth 
 year only, but with almost thirty years 
 of parliamentary and official life marked 
 on his face. His political career com- 
 menced when he was a lad of twenty- 
 two. Three years later he was Chief 
 Secretary for Ireland, and he had been 
 ever since that time one of the most 
 conspicuous figures in the House of 
 Commons. Now he was fifty, and on 
 the eve of becoming, with the exception 
 of the Duke of Wellington, the most 
 prominent Englishman of his day. In 
 some respects he was a new type, and 
 belonged to a new order of statesmen. 
 Sprung from a mercantile stock, he 
 possessed the defects and virtues which 
 are inherent in the provincial middle 
 class. He was essentially, as has been 
 
40 THE QUEEN AND HER ii 
 
 well said of constitutional statesmen, a 
 man of common opinions though of un- 
 common abilities ; and while in thought 
 and ideas other men laboured, he entered 
 into their labours. If he was devoid of 
 all originality of mind, he was rich, 
 decorous, hard - working, and had 
 devoted himself regularly to the task of 
 politics. In appearance when young, 
 when his hair was brown and curly, he 
 struck Mr. Disraeli as the possessor of 
 a very radiant expression of counte- 
 nance ; he appeared to Carlyle later in 
 life as a man 
 
 finely made, of strong, not heavy, rather of 
 elegant stature ; stands straight, head slighdy 
 thrown back, and eyelids modestly drooping ; 
 every way mild and gentle, yet with less of 
 that fixed smile than portraits give him. . . . 
 Clear, strong blue eyes, which kindle on occa- 
 sion, voice extremely good, low toned, some- 
 thing of cooing in it, rustic, affectionate, 
 honest, mildly persuasive ; . . . reserved, 
 seemingly, by nature ; obtrudes nothing of 
 diplomatic reserve ; on the contrary, a vein 
 of mild fun in him ; real sensibility to the 
 ludicrous. 
 
 Another physical attribute noticed by 
 the shrewd old Scot is curious. On 
 
II SECOND PRIME MINISTER 41 
 
 some occasion, when Peel was showing 
 off his gallery of pictures at Bath House, 
 and in so doing spread his hand over that 
 of Dr. Johnson in Reynolds's well-known 
 portrait, to illustrate some anecdote, 
 Carlyle observed that it was ** as fine 
 a man's hand as I remember to have 
 seen, strong, delicate, and scrupulously 
 clean." 
 
 It may be thought that the qualities 
 which Carlyle found to his taste were 
 not necessarily appreciable by a young 
 girl. Greville, whose point of view 
 was somewhat different from that of 
 the Scottish poet, was present at the 
 first dinner which the Queen gave to her 
 Minister. He observed that while she 
 talked to her new much as she used 
 to do to her old Ministers, and made 
 no difference in her manner to them. 
 Peel when spoken to could not help 
 putting himself into his " accustomed 
 attitude of a dancing -master giving 
 lessons " ; and he charitably suggests 
 that she would have liked him better 
 if he could have kept his legs still. 
 
 In the drawing-room, after dinner. 
 Lord Melbourne's chair had gone, and 
 
42 THE QUEEN AND HER n 
 
 the Lord-in- Waiting had orders to put 
 the Ministers down to whist, while the 
 Queen sat at her round table, with Lord 
 Melbourne no more, but flanked by two 
 ladies, whom Greville evidently thought 
 scarcely capable of sustaining the burden 
 of companionship for a whole evening. 
 Bishop Wilberforce said of Peel that in 
 his family he was reserved and shy : that 
 he had the air of a man conscious of 
 great powers and slight awkwardnesses, 
 and this failure in manner was not limited 
 to his domestic circle, for the Queen told 
 Lord Melbourne that she found Peel so 
 shy that it made her shy, and rendered 
 intercourse difficult and embarrassing. 
 Melbourne anticipated that this would 
 wear off, and wear off it did, as the 
 acquaintance between Peel and Prince 
 Albert, and consequently between Peel 
 and the Queen, ripened into regard and 
 friendship. 
 
 The new Minister believed, he had 
 been frequently told, that the Queen 
 looked upon him with mistrust and dis- 
 like ; and this hostility was known to 
 have originated in the disputes called by 
 the slang name of the *' Bedchamber 
 
II SECOND PRIME MINISTER 43 
 
 Plot," when Peel's manner, even though 
 his contention may have been sound, was 
 said to have been peremptory and harsh. 
 Lord Grey's considerable experience of 
 Court politics drove him to the conclu- 
 sion that, although Peel was without 
 Court favour, and although his manners 
 and character were not best calculated to 
 obtain it in the eyes of a young Queen 
 of twenty-two, yet if he were prudent 
 and conciliatory, he had no doubt of his 
 successfully making his position secure 
 and comfortable. If Lord Grey had no 
 doubts. Peel had many, and he had been 
 given to understand that the Queen's 
 dislike of him would lead her to " trip 
 up his heels whenever she could." 
 
 Lord Melbourne had done his best 
 to assure Peel that these suspicions were 
 ill founded, and so anxious was he to 
 bring about a good understanding be- 
 tween the Sovereign and the man he felt 
 sure would some day inevitably be her 
 Minister, that it showed itself in queer 
 ways and at unexpected moments. At 
 a Court ball more than a year before he 
 quitted office, he noticed that Peel stood 
 proudly aloof, and going up to him he 
 
44 ^^^ QUEEN AND HER n 
 
 whispered with great earnestness, " For 
 God's sake, go and speak to the Queen." 
 Peel made no move, but it was said at 
 the time that both entreaty and refusal 
 were eminently characteristic of the two 
 men. 
 
 When, however, it became necessary 
 for Peel to "speak to the Queen," no 
 one could have behaved with finer tact. 
 Almost the first declaration he made to 
 her was to the effect that if any other 
 ministerial arrangement had been possible, 
 or if any other individual could have 
 been substituted for him, as far as his 
 own personal inclinations were concerned, 
 he should have been most ready to give 
 way. He took great care to explain 
 everything to her, both his proposals 
 and his reasons for them. He adopted 
 Lord Melbourne's advice not to suffer 
 any appointment he was about to make 
 to be talked of publicly, until he had 
 first communicated with her. " The 
 Queen," said Lord Melbourne, "is not 
 conceited ; she is aware there are many 
 things she cannot understand, and she 
 likes to have them explained to her 
 elementarily, not at length and in detail, 
 
II SECOND PRIME MINISTER 45 
 
 but shortly and clearly ; neither does 
 she like long audiences, and I never 
 stayed with her a long time." It would 
 have been well if all her Ministers had 
 borne this advice in mind ; for who 
 can doubt that the Queen has suffered 
 much at the hands of prolix political 
 enthusiasts, who have treated her as 
 though she were not a woman but a 
 man, and not a sovereign but a public 
 meeting ? 
 
 Almost immediately after his first 
 audiences, Peel announced himself to be 
 not only satisfied, but charmed, and 
 declared that the Queen's behaviour to 
 him had been perfect. He had assured 
 her that his first and greatest care should 
 be to consult her happiness and comfort, 
 and that he would take upon himself the 
 responsibility of putting an extinguisher 
 on the personal claim of any one to be 
 near her who should be disagreeable to 
 her or to whom she was disinclined ; 
 and the Queen never found her Minister 
 swerving from this duty. Indeed, he 
 may have carried his desire to be agree- 
 able rather further than was consistent 
 with due regard for the claims of his 
 
46 THE QUEEN AND HER ii 
 
 political friends, and certainly much 
 further than they would be carried by 
 any Minister in these days. To some 
 extent this was forced upon him by the 
 difficulty of following Lord Melbourne 
 in office. He could not afford to be as 
 unceremonious as his predecessor, and 
 he was obliged to be more facile. When 
 he refused to dine with the Lord Mayor 
 in the first November of his Premier- 
 ship, on the ground that he was com- 
 manded to the Palace, it was observed 
 that Lord Melbourne under similar 
 circumstances would have gone to the 
 Guildhall. Peel did not think he could 
 afford to excuse himself to the Queen ; 
 and men marvelled at the frequency with 
 which his visits to the Palace were 
 repeated. 
 
 At her first Council with her new 
 Ministers, an occasion of severe trial, the 
 Queen conducted herself with a dignity 
 and self-control that excited in them the 
 greatest admiration. It was noticed that 
 she looked very much flushed, and her 
 heart and eyes were evidently brimful of 
 tears, but she was perfectly composed, 
 and throughout the whole of the pro- 
 
II SECOND PRIME MINISTER 47 
 
 ceedings — the farewells of her old Min- 
 isters, the friends who had stood about 
 her at her accession, the surrender of 
 their Seals or Wands of Office, and the 
 transference of these to new men, most 
 of whom were unknown to her — she 
 preserved her self-possession, composure, 
 and dignity. In so young a woman it 
 was thought a great effort of self-control, 
 upon an occasion which might well have 
 elicited uncontrollable emotions. The 
 dejection which Peel had noticed during 
 his first interview, when she expressed 
 deep regret at parting with her Minis- 
 ters, had almost disappeared, thanks to 
 the dignified kindness with which he had 
 assured her of his desire to serve her, 
 and the good taste of his declaration 
 that he had never presumed to anticipate 
 being sent for, and had had no com- 
 munication with anybody, and was quite 
 unprepared with any suggestions. This 
 was a coup de maitre, and from that 
 moment the Queen's revulsion of feeling 
 in favour of her Minister may be pre- 
 sumed to have commenced. Many at- 
 titudes that towards a monarch might 
 by some be considered as subservient. 
 
48 THE QUEEN AND HER ii 
 
 when the monarch is a woman become 
 merely the high-bred homage due from 
 the stronger to the frailer sex. Before 
 Peel had been many months in office he 
 had vanquished the dislike of the Queen, 
 and had laid the foundation of a regard 
 on her side that never was shaken. 
 
 If to a large extent this was due to 
 the pains which he took to ingratiate 
 himself with her, it was mainly owing 
 to the circumstance that in Prince Albert 
 he found a ready sympathiser and a con- 
 genial friend. The admiration of these 
 two remarkable men was mutual. Sir 
 Robert Peel had been introduced to 
 Prince Albert by Lord Melbourne some 
 months before the latter retired from 
 office, but this acquaintanceship had not 
 been followed up by any closer inter- 
 course ; so that, when the new Minister 
 found himself necessarily thrown with 
 the Prince, he was still embarrassed by 
 the feeling that the Prince might bear 
 malice for the part which he had taken 
 during the debates on the Marriage 
 Settlement, the effect of which had been 
 seriously to curtail the income proposed 
 by Lord Melbourne. In the Prince's 
 
II SECOND PRIME MINISTER 49 
 
 demeanour not a shade of soreness could 
 be traced, and Peel was touched. To 
 Lord Kingsdown he said that he had 
 found Prince Albert one of the most 
 extraordinary young men he had ever 
 met ; and although so little was then 
 known of the Prince that the expression 
 may have appeared exaggerated, it seems 
 trite enough by the light of fuller know- 
 ledge. 
 
 His aptitude for business was wonderful ; 
 the dullest and most intricate matters did not 
 escape or weary his attention ; his judgment 
 was very good ; his readiness to listen to any 
 suggestion, though against his own opinions, 
 was constant ; — 
 
 and these were all qualities which were 
 bound to excite the attention and attract 
 the sympathies of Peel. There was, it 
 is true, a closer bond which united the 
 two men, the unswerving fortitude with 
 which they both braved misrepresentation. 
 
 Every imaginable calumny is heaped upon us, 
 especially upon me ; and although a pure 
 nature, conscious of its own high purposes, is, 
 and ought to be, lifted above attacks ; still, it 
 is painful to be misrepresented by people of 
 whom one believed better things. 
 
 E 
 
50 THE QUEEN AND HER u 
 
 These words, written by Prince Albert 
 at a time when his popularity was far 
 from great, mere boy as he was, with 
 the English people, might well with 
 equal truth have been written by Peel 
 two years afterwards, when the storm of 
 obloquy broke over him. It was natural 
 that minds, both proud, both reserved, 
 both anxious always to do right, both 
 misunderstood, should have drawn closely 
 together. Before he had been two years 
 her Minister, the Queen wrote to Peel 
 that he was " undoubtedly a great states- 
 man, a man who thinks but little of 
 party, and never of himself" ; and the 
 Prince was already full of admiration 
 at the resolve shown by the Minister 
 to adopt his own line, and not to be 
 turned aside from what he believed to be 
 desirable by the fear of making political 
 enemies or of losing support. After his 
 death Peel's character was summed up 
 by the Prince in words which carried the 
 warm approval of the Queen : — 
 
 The constitution of Sir Robert Peel's mind 
 was peculiarly that of a statesman, and of an 
 English statesman : he was Liberal from feel- 
 ing, but Conservative upon principle. While 
 
II SECOND PRIME MINISTER 51 
 
 his impulses drove him to foster progress, his 
 sagacious mind and great experience showed 
 him how easily the whole machinery of a state 
 and of society is deranged ; and how important, 
 but how difficult also, it is to direct its further 
 development in accordance with its funda- 
 mental principles, like organic growth in 
 nature. It was peculiar to him that in great 
 things, as in small, all the difficulties and 
 objections occurred to him ; first he would 
 anxiously consider them, pause, and warn 
 against rash resolutions ; but having con- 
 vinced himself, after a long and careful inves- 
 tigation, that a step was not only right to be 
 taken, but of the practical mode also of safely 
 taking it, it became a necessity and a duty to 
 him to take it ; all his caution and apparent 
 timidity changed into courage and power of 
 action, and at the same time readiness cheer- 
 fully to make any personal sacrifice which its 
 execution might demand. 
 
 If the Prince owed to Sir Robert Peel 
 his initiation into public life, he also 
 acquired from him much knowledge of 
 the people over whom, in conjunction 
 with the Queen, he was about to rule. 
 There was something singularly attract- 
 ive in the intimacy of the two men so 
 different in age and education and train- 
 ing. Peel acted as moderator of the 
 
52 THE QUEEN JND HER ii 
 
 youthful enthusiasms of the Prince for 
 reform, although he gave him invaluable 
 assistance in the changes which the 
 Prince introduced into the customs of 
 the English Court. 
 
 Many abuses were, thanks to the 
 Prince, swept away ; and thanks to Peel 
 this was done without a great outcry 
 from the manifold interests involved. 
 Peel was full of hearty praise of the 
 wise and judicious economy founded 
 upon good management and order in 
 the Queen's household, under the eye 
 of Prince Albert. To this he bore a 
 strong testimony in the House of Com- 
 mons ; and the simple domestic tastes 
 of the Queen and her husband, no less 
 than their profound delight in natural 
 beauty, suggested to Peel the desira- 
 bility of the Isle of Wight as a place 
 of retreat for them. Osborne was 
 brought to the notice of the Queen 
 by him, as a spot where privacy 
 and repose could be ensured, and 
 which, at the same time, was sufficiently 
 near to the seat of Government to 
 afford no great inconvenience to her 
 Ministers. 
 
n SECOND PRIME MINISTER 53 
 
 It was entirely through Sir Robert Peel 
 [the Queen once wrote], who knew how 
 much we wished for a private property, and 
 his extreme kindness, that we heard of and all 
 about Osborne. When we showed him all 
 we had done in 1849, he spoke, with evident 
 pleasure, of his having been the means of our 
 getting it. 
 
 The Queen had had an opportunity 
 of estimating the domestic taste of her 
 Minister, for within two years of his 
 taking office she had visited his home at 
 Drayton. The visit gave great pleasure 
 to Peel, although it cost him many an 
 ill-natured jest ; his entertainments were 
 cruelly criticised, and the fact that the 
 proud and reserved Minister had actu- 
 ally condescended to dance before the 
 Queen supplied the wits of the press with 
 subject for endless mockery. Raleigh's 
 cloak for the feet of Elizabeth was said 
 to be dry commonplace compared with 
 the gallantry of Sir Robert, who offered 
 himself up as a dancer for her Majesty's 
 diversion. It was as if the Archbishop 
 of Canterbury had performed on a tight- 
 rope. All this cheap wit, and the gibes 
 of the Morning Chronicle^ although the 
 
54 THE QUEEN AND HER u 
 
 pride of Peel may have chafed under 
 them, only served to strengthen the 
 mutual regard of the Queen and her 
 Minister ; for Peel grew rapidly in the 
 good graces of the Sovereign. During 
 her journey to Scotland, accompanied by 
 Sir Robert Peel and Lord Aberdeen, the 
 Prime Minister constantly travelled and 
 drove with the Queen, leaving his own 
 carriage to be occupied by his private 
 secretary, Mr. Drummond ; and it was 
 to this special mark of favour that he 
 owed his life, since the madman who 
 shortly afterwards shot the unfortunate 
 Drummond did so under the delusion 
 that the man he had so often seen 
 driving in Peel's carriage must be the 
 Minister himself. When the Queen 
 was abroad on a visit to the King of the 
 French, Peel's "cheering letters" were 
 anxiously awaited, and especially was 
 this the case owing to the fear then 
 entertained that her Minister might sink 
 under the weight of unpopularity which 
 was beginning to gather round him. A 
 short while before, when the Maynooth 
 Bill had sapped the foundations of his 
 power, the Queen, to mark her sense of 
 
II SECOND PRIME MINISTER 55 
 
 the importance of the measure and her 
 confidence in Peel, had offered him the 
 Garter. It was refused on grounds 
 characteristic of him : that his heart was 
 not set on titles of honour or social dis- 
 tinctions ; that he sprang from the 
 people and was essentially of the people ; 
 that in his case such honour would be 
 misapplied ; that the only distinction he 
 coveted at her hands was that the Queen 
 should say to him, "You have been a 
 faithful servant, and have done your 
 duty to your country and to myself." 
 
 That this opinion was entertained by 
 his royal mistress he already well knew, 
 for she had sent to him a letter written 
 by King Leopold in warm terms which 
 she had more than endorsed : — 
 
 Peel works so hard and has so much to do 
 [the Queen wrote] that he sometimes says he 
 does not know how he is to get through it all. 
 ... In these days a Minister does require 
 some encouragement, for the abuse and diffi- 
 culties he has to contend with are dreadful. 
 
 If such opinions were expressed to and 
 about Sir Robert Peel, his appreciation 
 of them is curious and worth noting : — 
 
$6 THE QUEEN JND HER n 
 
 Sir R. Peel is scarcely less obliged to your 
 Majesty for your goodness in communicating 
 to him the favourable opinion which King 
 Leopold has been pleased to express of the 
 course of public policy, pursued with the 
 sanction, and frequently under the special 
 direction, of your Majesty, by Sir R. Peel. 
 His Majesty has an intimate knowledge of 
 this country, and is just so far removed from 
 the scene of political contention here as to be 
 able to take a clear and dispassionate view of 
 the motives and acts of public men. Sir R. 
 Peel looks to no other reward, apart from 
 your Majesty's favourable opinion, than that 
 posterity shall hereafter confirm the judgment 
 of King Leopold, that Sir R. Peel was a true 
 and faithful servant of your Majesty, and used 
 the power committed to him for the main- 
 tenance of the honour and just prerogatives of 
 the Crown and the advancement of the public 
 welfare. He would, indeed, be utterly un- 
 worthy if, after the generous confidence and 
 support which he has invariably received from 
 your Majesty, he could have used power for 
 any other purposes. 
 
 If he could write in these terms to the 
 Sovereign, in his Memoirs he wrote with 
 even greater warmth : — 
 
 I will not say more than that the generous 
 support which I had uniformly received from 
 her Majesty and from the Prince, and all 
 
II SECOND PRIME MINISTER 57 
 
 that passed on the occasion of the retirement, 
 made an impression on my heart that can 
 never be effaced. I could not say less than 
 this without doing violence to feelings of 
 grateful and dutiful attachment. 
 
 When Peel was forced to resume 
 office preparatory to carrying out his 
 repeal of the Corn Law, his " unbounded 
 loyalty, courage, patriotism, and high- 
 mindedness " were noted by the Queen 
 in her Journal, and she speaks enthusi- 
 astically of his " chivalry " to her, and 
 the "excitement and determination" 
 which he exhibited in what he thought 
 so good a cause. " We are seelenfroh '* 
 (glad in soul), wrote Prince Albert, *' at 
 the arrangement under which the Prime 
 Minister remains in office " ; and there 
 was no doubt of the sentiments of the 
 Court, although a paper so bitterly hos- 
 tile to Peel as the Examiner recognised 
 the " scrupulous observance of constitu- 
 tional rules which marked the conduct " 
 of the Queen at that trying time. 
 
 The parting between the Queen and 
 her Minister could not, however, be 
 long delayed. When it came, there 
 were poignant regrets on both sides. 
 
58 THE QUEEN AND HER u 
 
 Peel may have sighed with relief at 
 escaping from the cares of office, noble 
 as these then were ; but his parting from 
 the Queen cost him some tears. 
 
 Yesterday [the Queen wrote to King Leo- 
 pold] was a very hard day for me. I had to 
 part with Sir Robert Peel and Lord Aberdeen, 
 who are irreparable losses to us and to the 
 country. They were both so much overcome 
 that it quite upset me, and we have in them 
 two devoted friends. We felt so safe with 
 them. Never during the five years that they 
 were with me did they ever recommend a 
 person or a thing that was not for my or the 
 country's best, and never for the party's ad- 
 vantage only. . . . 
 
 Few men who knew Peel as a Minister, 
 and even in his home life, would have 
 readily believed him capable of a display 
 of emotion. His composure and power- 
 ful self-command in Parliament were 
 compared to those similar qualities in 
 Mr. Pitt by Lord Stratford, who had 
 seen both of them in turn lead the 
 House of Commons. It is true that a 
 few men, Bishop Wilberforce for one, 
 had noted the tenderness of nature 
 which underlay the cold husk which 
 
II SECOND PRIME MINISTER 59 
 
 Peel turned outward to the world. The 
 Queen had had experience of this on a 
 previous occasion, for in early days of 
 her intercourse with him, after the at- 
 tempt upon her life by Bean, Sir Robert 
 Peel hurried up from Cambridge to con- 
 sult with the Prince, and upon the 
 Queen entering the room she was sur- 
 prised to see the Minister, in public so 
 cold and self- commanding, unable to 
 control his emotion, and burst into 
 tears. 
 
 Self-repression was the rule with Peel, 
 and these revelations of the real man 
 were rare. It was once said that his 
 temper was really bad, morose, and 
 sullen, but if so these characteristics 
 were never obvious during the months 
 of furious temptation to which he was 
 subjected by his political foes. During 
 the four years that Sir Robert Peel lived 
 after his fall from power there was no 
 cessation of intercourse between him and 
 the Queen. In him the Queen and the 
 Prince found an adviser to whom they 
 could always turn with perfect reliance 
 on his disinterestedness and sincerity. 
 He ceased to be the leader of a party, 
 
6o THE QUEEN AND HER ii 
 
 and for this reason he found himself able 
 to correspond with the Prince " without 
 saying a word of which the most jealous 
 or sensitive successor in the confidence 
 of the Queen could complain." 
 
 Although ostracised from political 
 office, no living Englishman at that time 
 stood higher in the opinion of moderate 
 men of both parties. " Everybody," 
 Greville wrote, " asks with anxiety what 
 he says, what he thinks, and what he 
 will do." When for a few hours after 
 his fatal accident he lay dying, the whole 
 nation watched by his bedside ; the 
 entrance to his house was besieged by 
 immense crowds, and the sadness upon 
 the faces of his friends as they passed 
 from the door was reflected in the eyes 
 of thousands who had never known him 
 by sight. When he was dead the Queen 
 wrote, *'The sorrow and grief at his 
 death are most touching, and the country 
 mourns over him as a father. Every one 
 seems to have lost a personal friend " ; 
 and these words were endorsed, as the 
 Queen's words often have been during 
 her reign, by the sentiments of her 
 people. " We have lost," said the Prince, 
 
II SECOND PRIME MINISTER 6i 
 
 ** our truest friend and trustiest counsellor, 
 the throne its most valiant defender, the 
 country its most open-minded and greatest 
 statesman." The character of Sir Robert 
 Peel has often been placed in various 
 lights by those who knew him, who 
 admired and liked him, or who admired 
 and hated him. The Duke of Welling- 
 ton, in a voice broken with emotion, 
 bore testimony to the love of truth 
 which animated the great commoner 
 under whom he had been willing to 
 serve. Mr. Gladstone, in characteristic 
 words, has laid stress on his qualities of 
 ability, sagacity, indefatigable industry, 
 his sense of public virtue, and his purity 
 of conscience. 
 
 The encomiums of friends may be 
 sweet enough to the heart and ear, but 
 they are not those by which a man of 
 disinterested mind would soonest find 
 himself judged worthily. To men like 
 the Duke of Wellington or Mr. Glad- 
 stone, who served under him, to the 
 Queen and Prince, whom he served so 
 faithfully, PeeFs character would naturally 
 appear exalted by the shadow of death. 
 As his epitaph, it would perhaps be 
 
62 THE QUEEN AND HER u 
 
 better to let stand the famous passage 
 in which Mr. Disraeli, in his inimitable 
 and epigrammatic style, summed up the 
 character and career of the Minister he 
 had so bitterly opposed. He was not, 
 
 notwithstanding his unrivalled powers of de- 
 spatching affairs, the greatest Minister this 
 country ever produced, because, twice placed 
 at the helm, and on the second occasion with 
 the Court and Parliament equally devoted to 
 him, he never could maintain himself in power. 
 Nor, notwithstanding his consummate parlia- 
 mentary tactics, was he the greatest of party 
 leaders, for he contrived to destroy the most 
 compact, powerful, and devoted party that ever 
 followed a statesman. Nor, notwithstanding 
 his great sway in debate, was he the greatest 
 of orators, for in many of the supreme re- 
 quisites of oratory he was singularly deficient. 
 But w^hat he really was, and v^^hat posterity 
 will acknowledge him to have been, is the 
 greatest Member of Parliament that ever lived. 
 Peace to his ashes ! His name will be often 
 appealed to in that scene which he loved so 
 well, and never without homage even by his 
 opponents. 
 
 If, when those lines were written, they 
 fell under the notice of the Sovereign, 
 she must have read them with mixed 
 
II SECOND PRIME MINISTER 63 
 
 feelings of acquiescence in their truth, 
 and of resentment against the hand that 
 had penned them. It must have seemed 
 then to her and the Prince almost a 
 sacrilege to find the memory of the friend 
 and adviser, so recently honoured, treated 
 with qualified though warm approval by 
 the politician who in life had so bitterly 
 traduced him. Yet time has curious 
 revenges ; for that politician was not only 
 in later days to endorse as Minister much 
 of the policy which Peel inaugurated, 
 but was to stand, both as Minister and 
 friend, in an even closer relation to the 
 Queen than Peel himself ever occupied. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE QUEEN AND HER "PER- 
 MANENT MINISTER" 
 
 Strong as the mutual feeling undoubtedly 
 was which bound Sir Robert Peel to the 
 Court, it differed in quality from that 
 which the Queen had experienced to- 
 wards the Minister under whose guidance, 
 as a young and friendless girl, she had 
 assumed her great office. Peel, how- 
 ever, if he had not exactly occupied 
 Lord Melbourne's place, could distinctly 
 claim to have established himself upon a 
 firm and enduring footing in his relation" 
 to the Sovereign. To the Queen he was 
 not only a Minister but a friend. When 
 he fell from power, Lord John Russell, 
 who succeeded to his office, did not 
 succeed to the position which he held at 
 Windsor or at Osborne. Owing to the 
 
Ill " PERMANENT MINISTER " 65 
 
 tact exhibited by the Queen and Prince 
 Albert, there was no very noticeable 
 difference, in so far as the public was 
 concerned, between the place occupied 
 at Court by the new Prime Minister and 
 that which his predecessor had filled. 
 A difference, however, there was, and 
 the finer shades of it appear very clearly 
 by the light of the Queen's journals and 
 the Prince's correspondence. The de- 
 tachment of the Queen from political 
 partisanship was as complete as ever. As 
 in duty bound, so in reality, her sympa- 
 thies seemed henceforth always at the 
 command of her Minister, be his colour 
 Whig or Tory. Although the training 
 of a Stockmar may induce in a sovereign 
 absolute loyalty to a political leader who 
 happens to be the servant of the Crown 
 for the time being, it cannot command 
 affection or create intimacy. Neither 
 Lord John Russell nor Lord Derby ever 
 complained of the support accorded to 
 them by the Sovereign. Lord Aberdeen, 
 who had been Foreign Secretary under 
 Peel, and had shared to some extent with 
 him the affectionate esteem of his royal 
 mistress, certainly had no cause to com- 
 
66 THE QUEEN AND HER m 
 
 plain, and when he was forced to re- 
 linquish his post, even amid the chilly- 
 atmosphere of that Crimean winter, the 
 Queen stood almost alone in assuring 
 him of her continued " personal aiffection 
 and regard." One Minister, it is true, 
 found himself in antagonism to the 
 Crown ; but Lord Palmerston's troubles 
 culminated while he still held subordinate, 
 though very high, office ; and from the 
 day he became Prime Minister he himself 
 recorded his satisfaction at the " cordiality 
 and confidence" with which he was 
 treated by the Queen. 
 
 In point of fact, from the fall of Peel, 
 in 1846, to the fatal 14th of December 
 1 86 1, the relation between the Sovereign 
 and the Prime Minister was recognised 
 to be wholly different from what it had 
 previously been. A marked and re- 
 markable personality had come between 
 the ruler and the chief of her " confi- 
 dential servants." During the fiy^ years 
 of Sir Robert Peel's Administration, while 
 public attention was fixed on parlia- 
 mentary conflicts and fiscal changes rous- 
 ing the wildest animosities, popularly 
 supposed to be pregnant, by enthusiasts 
 
Ill " PERMANENT MINISTER " 67 
 
 of national salvation, and by critics of 
 national ruin, silently and unwatched 
 there was developed an influence which 
 altered fundamentally the whole relation 
 of the Crown to the people, and moulded 
 the Monarchy into the shape which it 
 has now assumed. During those five 
 eventful years the Queen's husband 
 passed from boyhood to manhood, and 
 from prince in name became king in 
 fact. From the moment of her marriage 
 the Queen had recognised, as was natural 
 to a young wife, the intellectual quality 
 of her husband's mind and the moral 
 force of his character. 
 
 When she failed to make him King- 
 Consort she was determined that he 
 should not be forced into obscurity. 
 In a most curious memorandum, written 
 by the Queen's own hand, she refers 
 to "Prince George of Denmark, the 
 very stupid and insignificant husband of 
 Queen Anne," who " never seems to have 
 played anything but a very subordinate 
 part " in public affairs ; and it is clear 
 that it was not her intention that any 
 such derogatory phrase should ever justly 
 be applied to her own consort. Although 
 
68 THE QUEEN AND HER m 
 
 the Queen may have believed it to be 
 true that Prince Albert owed his initia- 
 tion into public life to Sir Robert Peel, 
 in point of fact the Prince was indebted 
 to the Queen herself; for even if Peel 
 was attracted by the ardour and keen- 
 ness of the young Prince's mind, it never 
 would have occurred to him — fully 
 aware as he was of the political risk he 
 ran — to bring the Prince forward unless 
 he had been conscious that in so doing 
 he was establishing an important hold 
 upon the regard of the Queen. A very 
 acute observer has remarked that before 
 he became her Prime Minister there was 
 probably no man in her dominions whom 
 the Queen so cordially detested as Sir 
 Robert Peel ; but that he found means 
 to remove all her prejudice against him, 
 and to establish himself high in her 
 favour ; and that when he resigned 
 office the Queen evinced a personal 
 regard for him scarcely inferior to that 
 which she had manifested to Lord Mel- 
 bourne. At the time it was not so 
 plain as it has since become to what 
 special adroitness Sir Robert Peel owed 
 this remarkable revulsion of feeling on 
 
Ill " PERMANENT MINISTER " 69 
 
 the part of the Queen. It is now clear 
 that it was due to his recognition of 
 Prince Albert as de facto coequal sove- 
 reign. Lord John Russell was the first 
 with adequate opportunity, as well as 
 sufficient previous experience, to take 
 note of the change which had occurred 
 in the relation of the Sovereign to her 
 Ministers. When he succeeded Sir 
 Robert Peel in office he found that he 
 could no longer expect to see the Queen 
 alone. At every interview between the 
 Sovereign and her Prime Minister the 
 Prince was present. Although, if he 
 had desired to enforce it. Lord John 
 Russell's right to exclude every one 
 from these audiences was incontestable, 
 prudence and tact convinced him at 
 once that the new procedure must be 
 accepted. He stated in confidence to 
 a friend his astonishment at the great 
 development which had taken place. 
 The Prince had become so "identified 
 with the Queen that they were one 
 person" ; and it was obvious to him that, 
 while she had the title, he was really 
 discharging the functions of sovereign, 
 and was king to all intents and purposes. 
 
70 THE QUEEN AND HER m 
 
 At this time the Prince was in years 
 almost a boy. Although barely six- 
 and -twenty, he seems to have experi- 
 enced no difficulty in holding his own 
 with Lord John Russell, in spite of the 
 Minister's age and experience, extending 
 over many long years of public life. 
 The qualities to which the Queen had 
 yielded exercised a powerful influence 
 over the minds of all those into whose 
 close companionship, whether for busi- 
 ness or pleasure, her husband was thrown. 
 If Sir Robert Peel had been impressed 
 by the young German prince. Lord John 
 Russell and Lord Aberdeen were not 
 less moved by his grave and intense 
 individuality. The effect produced 
 upon successive Ministers by inter- 
 course with him was so marked that 
 groundless suspicions and jealousies, 
 bidding fair to be dangerous, were 
 excited in the minds of politicians who 
 were outside the sphere of his influence. 
 It began to be said that there was a 
 power " behind the throne," and there 
 was but a step between this suggestion 
 and the wilder assertion that this power 
 was used in a sense hostile to the in- 
 
Ill ''PERMANENT MINISTER " 71 
 
 terests of England, and on behalf of 
 foreign States to whom by blood and 
 birth the Prince was more closely allied. 
 From whispers in drawing-rooms and 
 club-windows rumours spread into pro- 
 vincial town-halls and country market- 
 places. Ignited by the public press, 
 suddenly the flames of unpopularity 
 were fanned into a blaze, and Prince 
 Albert became the object, not only of 
 abuse and attack, but also of public 
 impeachment. At one moment it was 
 even credited that he had followed in the 
 wake of former traitors to the State, 
 and had been immured in the Tower. 
 The storm broke, and was allayed 
 in the House of Commons. Then 
 the curious and somewhat unusual spec- 
 tacle was observed of a Prime Minister, 
 together with his predecessors and suc- 
 cessors in that office, agreeing to support 
 each other in an apparently ungrateful 
 cause. 
 
 Attempts have been made to analyse 
 the reasons which underlay the Prince's 
 unpopularity. His dress, the cut of his 
 clothes, his manner of shaking hands, 
 his seat on horseback — all these con- 
 
72 THE QUEEN AND HER m 
 
 tributed, it was said, to the prejudices of 
 the aristocracy against him. In the 
 Scotsman newspaper, in 1854, there ap- 
 peared an article accounting for the 
 hostility to the young German Prince 
 on the score of his virtues ; that as a 
 "moral reformer" he was bound to be 
 obnoxious to all who, " conscious of 
 their own stinted capacities and attain- 
 ments, tremble for their social position 
 should the lower and middle classes be 
 thoroughly instructed and civilised." 
 By some he was thought a dangerous 
 metaphysician, and by others a prig. 
 His reserve was a standing grievance 
 in higher spheres of society. He was 
 lacking in accustomed freedom and ease 
 of manner ; and he never conformed to 
 the ways of the so-called "fast" people 
 in the fashionable world. Above all, 
 he was a " Peelite malgre lui^^ and 
 offended thereby the old-fashioned 
 Tories on the one hand and the ad- 
 vanced section of the Liberal Party on 
 the other. If he was not accused of 
 attempting openly to trench on the 
 privileges of the Sovereign, he was 
 credited with exercising a secret and 
 
Ill " PERMANENT MINISTER " 73 
 
 baneful influence. As he himself put 
 it to the Duke of Wellington, he 
 
 shunned ostentation, and sank his own indi- 
 vidual existence in that of his wife 5 he 
 assumed no separate responsibility before the 
 public, but he became her sole confidential 
 adviser in politics and assistant in com- 
 munication with the officers of the Govern- 
 ment, the father of the royal children, the 
 private secretary of the Sovereign, and her 
 permanent Minister. 
 
 Herein lay the gravamen of the 
 charge against him, apparently admitted 
 by himself. A Prime Minister sup- 
 ported by a parliamentary majority had 
 a right to the support and intimate con- 
 fidence of the Crown, but a " permanent 
 Minister" was a wholly novel and un- 
 constitutional personage. Lord Mel- 
 bourne had congratulated the Queen on 
 the inestimable advantages she possessed 
 in the counsel and assistance of her 
 husband. Under Peel the Prince's 
 position had become clearer, and he 
 was duly installed as private secretary 
 and intimate " counsellor " of the Queen, 
 taking part in all affairs regarding the 
 Crown or bearing on foreign policy, 
 
74 THE QUEEN AND HER m 
 
 with the privilege of being present at 
 all audiences between the Sovereign and 
 her Ministers. The internal dissensions 
 of Lord John Russell's Cabinet, the 
 constantly - recurring difficulties with 
 Lord Palmerston, the dismissal of that 
 Minister from the Foreign Office in 
 1 85 1, and his retirement again in 1853, 
 all contributed to give colour to the 
 reports of unconstitutional interference 
 on the part of the Prince. That his 
 influence, brought to bear upon the 
 vacillating will of Lord John Russell, 
 effected the dismissal of Palmerston in 
 1 85 1, no one, by the light of documents 
 now revealed in the Life of the Prince 
 Consort, can doubt. Lord John Russell's 
 biographer has also, probably with some 
 reluctance, but in the interests of truth, 
 made this plain. Yet, when the debate 
 in Parliament took place in January 
 1854, in which the attacks on the 
 Prince culminated, no one who had 
 been Prime Minister, or had any hope 
 of becoming so, was found to support 
 the accusation that he had been guilty 
 of the exercise of undue interference. 
 On the contrary, all combined to praise 
 
Ill « PERMANENT MINISTER " 75 
 
 him. Lord Palmerston had, through 
 the Press, already exonerated him by- 
 stating that he had exercised "no 
 influence on the Foreign Secretary's 
 resignation and return to office." Lord 
 John Russell and Lord Aberdeen took 
 the whole responsibility of everything 
 that had taken place upon themselves, 
 and bore eloquent witness to the " con- 
 stitutional action of the Queen." How, 
 they then argued, could the Prince have 
 exercised unconstitutional influence over 
 her, since she herself had not moved a 
 hair's breadth outside the limits of the 
 Constitution } Even Lord Derby, much 
 less well disposed, was driven to speak 
 sharply of the '' gullibility of the public " 
 and the ''absurd attacks on the Prince." 
 In point of fact, however, the influence 
 of Prince Albert was at this time over- 
 whelming. In March 1851 it was his 
 aversion from Mr. Disraeli, shared by 
 the Queen, that contributed largely to 
 the reluctance of Lord Derby to attempt 
 the formation of a Government, and in 
 all probability prevented him from doing 
 so ; and it was the antipathy of the 
 Prince to Lord Palmerston, also shared 
 
76 THE QUEEN AND HER in 
 
 by the Queen, that procured from Lord 
 John Russell the dismissal of Lord 
 Palmerston in December of the same year. 
 
 Even if, as was asserted. Lord Palmer- 
 ston was addicted to the " monstrous habit 
 of treating with contempt alterations in 
 despatches that had been prescribed to 
 him, and sending despatches from which 
 the Queen and Lord John had struck 
 out certain passages with the same 
 restored," there is no doubt that this 
 habit never galled the Prime Minister 
 to the extent that it annoyed the Prince. 
 
 Almost a year before the final rupture 
 with Palmerston the Prince had at- 
 tempted to sting Lord John Russell into 
 a proper spirit of rebellion against his 
 masterful colleague. On 1 5th May 1 850 
 he wrote : — 
 
 My dear Lord John — Both the Queen 
 and myself are exceedingly sorry at the news 
 your letter conveyed to us. We are not sur- 
 prised, however, that Lord Palmerston 's mode 
 of doing business should not be borne by a 
 susceptible French Government with the same 
 good humour and forbearance as by his col- 
 leagues. The Queen hopes to be well enough 
 to see you on Sunday at one o'clock. — Ever 
 yours truly, Albert. 
 
Ill " PERMANENT MINISTER " yj 
 
 Clearly the struggle was not between 
 the Prime Minister and his subordinate. 
 In strength of will and force of character 
 they were too unequally matched. It 
 lay between the subordinate Minister 
 and the " permanent Minister," who was 
 in truth a foeman worthy of Palmerston's 
 steel. It ended, as similar struggles in 
 England nearly always have ended, in 
 the triumph of the subject over the 
 monarch. The biographer of Lord John 
 Russell, who can have had no legitimate 
 bias towards Palmerston, points out 
 that, in spite of the attacks upon his 
 policy and his methods, the victory re- 
 mained with the Foreign Secretary ; and 
 if four years of office had deprived him 
 of the confidence of the Crown, he had 
 gained in exchange for it the confidence 
 of the people. It is to the high credit 
 of the Prince that when Lord Palmerston 
 shortly became, as he was bound to do, 
 the First Minister of the Queen, the rela- 
 tions between him and the Court were 
 no less cordial than those which the 
 Queen had established with his prede- 
 cessors in office. Although, by offering 
 first Bagshot Park to Lord John Russell, 
 
78 THE QUEEN AND HER m 
 
 which he refused, and subsequently Pem- 
 broke Lodge, which he accepted, the 
 Queen had given evidence of her regard 
 for his upright and loyal nature, the 
 intimacy between her and that Minister 
 was of a different quality from that 
 which had subsisted between her and Sir 
 Robert Peel. To some extent, doubt- 
 less, this arose out of the disposition of 
 Lord John Russell himself. Naturally 
 cold in manner, if he took no pains to 
 win goodwill from his followers, he took 
 even less to ingratiate himself in the 
 eyes of one who was not only a sove- 
 reign, but a lady. He was the typical 
 leader of that stiff, cold oligarchy which 
 had governed English sovereigns and the 
 English nation by qualities and merits 
 altogether independent of the heart and 
 of the affections. 
 
 Next, cool and all unconscious of reproach, 
 Comes the calm Johnny, who upset the coach. 
 How formed to lead, if not too proud to 
 
 please ! 
 His fame would fire you, but his manners 
 
 freeze. 
 
 The Prince, like all men themselves 
 reserved in manner, resented reserve in 
 
HI " PERMANENT MINISTER " 79 
 
 Others. It is clear that to him and to 
 the Queen the sentimental charm of 
 Aberdeen appeared far more attractive 
 than the crude honesty of Russell. As 
 Foreign Secretary in Peel's Government 
 he had been much throv^n with the 
 Prince ; and Lord Melbourne, soon after 
 his fall, noticed that of the new Minis- 
 ters Lord Aberdeen was preferred by the 
 Queen. 
 
 In December 1852, when Lord Derby 
 resigned, the Queen might have turned 
 quite naturally to Lord John Russell for 
 assistance or advice. He had been her 
 Prime Minister for five years, and no 
 other statesman then living had held that 
 office at all. The Queen, however, sent 
 for Lord Aberdeen and Lord Lansdowne. 
 It is true that at that time, owing to the 
 confusion of parties and the position of 
 the Peelites, the chances of Lord John 
 Russell's forming a Government could 
 have been small; but the opportunity 
 was not given to him. He consented, 
 however, to serve under the Peelite who 
 had been his opponent, just as two years 
 afterwards he consented to serve under 
 the Whig who had been his subordinate 
 
8o THE QUEEN AND HER m 
 
 almost ten years earlier in his career. In 
 point of fact, while the " permanent 
 Minister " was in the Queen's service the 
 headship of the Cabinet was a matter 
 which seemed to her to aiFect no one but 
 the rival claimants themselves and their 
 rival ambitions. 
 
 From Lord Derby she parted with 
 civility, but without any strong expres- 
 sion of regret. During his ten months of 
 office in 1852, as well as during his year 
 of office in 1858, he enjoyed her friendly 
 but unenthusiastic support. Lord 
 John Russell, thanks to a longer term 
 of official life, and consequently to a 
 larger term of official intercourse, was 
 on terms of somewhat greater cordiality 
 with the Queen. If cold, his deport- 
 ment to her was always most respectful ; 
 he was enough at Court, a cynic ob- 
 served, to show that he enjoyed the " con- 
 stitutional confidence of the Sovereign, 
 without being domiciled as a favourite." 
 The extreme levity of Lord Derby, his 
 incapacity for taking grave and serious 
 views, his authority resting altogether, 
 as it did, upon his oratorical gifts, were 
 not likely to endear him to the intense 
 
Ill " PERMANENT MINISTER " 8i 
 
 nature of Prince Albert ; and to such a 
 Minister, in the eyes of the Prince, Lord 
 John Russell very greatly, and Lord 
 Aberdeen in an eminent degree, appeared 
 in favourable comparison. Neither of 
 these, however, was to be estimated by 
 the standard of Melbourne, and still less 
 of Peel. There came a time when the 
 Queen, in her " desolate and isolated 
 condition," did indeed turn to " no other 
 than Lord Russell, an old and tried 
 friend of hers," just as there also came 
 a time when Lord Aberdeen was pri- 
 vileged, as he himself relates, to kiss the 
 Queen's hand on saying farewell, and 
 instead of finding it held out in a life- 
 less manner for the purpose, " to his 
 surprise, when he took hold of it to 
 lift it to his lips, found his own hand 
 squeezed with a strong and significant 
 pressure." This he perhaps rightly inter- 
 preted as a proof of real regard ; but, 
 apart from the Minister's queer disclosure, 
 there is evidence in the Queen's own hand- 
 writing of her feeling towards him : — 
 
 She wishes to say what a pang it is for her 
 to separate fi-om so kind and dear and valued 
 a friend as Lord Aberdeen has ever been to 
 
82 THE QUEEN AND HER iii 
 
 her since she has known him. The day he 
 became her Prime Minister was a very happy 
 one for her ; and throughout his Ministry he 
 has ever been the kindest and wisest adviser, 
 one to whom she could apply for advice on all, 
 and trifling occasions even. This she is sure 
 he will still ever be, but the losing him as 
 the first adviser in her Government is very 
 painful. 
 
 Considering the circumstances of the 
 parting, amid the frosts and failures of 
 that Crimean winter, and considering the 
 hostile attitude of public opinion towards 
 the Administration of which he was the 
 head, the kindness and warmth of the 
 Queen to a fallen and unpopular servant, 
 though not unusual in her, are none the 
 less worthy of admiration. It will be 
 seen, and easily appreciated, how com- 
 pletely Ministers of this type were 
 dominated and eclipsed in the eyes of 
 the Queen by Prince Albert. Her 
 "permanent Minister " was always about 
 her ; and she needed neither the advice 
 nor support of any other. From the 
 fall of Peel, in 1 846, to the fall of Aber- 
 deen, in 1855, the Queen looked else- 
 where than to her Prime Minister for 
 
Ill '* PERMANENT MINISTER " 83 
 
 advice and support.' The stronger per- 
 sonality of her husband overshadowed in 
 her eyes the man who happened at the 
 time to be the chief of her " confidential 
 servants." 
 
 If by sheer personality the Prince was 
 able to impress a nature so unsympa- 
 thetic as that of Peel, and influence a 
 man so cold in the ordinary relations of 
 life as Russell, it was not extraordinary 
 that he dominated the mind of her to 
 whom he was a daily, almost an hourly, 
 companion. No woman with any appre- 
 ciation of intellect, or sensitiveness to 
 character, could fail to be touched by the 
 intense earnestness that breathed through 
 every fibre of his nature. Lady Lyttel- 
 ton, the governess of the royal children, 
 noticed how this thoroughness of deep 
 feeling permeated through everything 
 that he said or did, even things so trivial 
 as his playing of the organ. It was 
 natural, then, that solemn occasions 
 should have for him a deeper significance 
 than for the majority of young men. 
 The Queen has described how, when he 
 was a little over twenty, he chose to 
 treat the great sacrament of his Church : 
 
84 1HE QUEEN AND HER iii 
 
 The Prince had a very strong feeling about 
 the solemnity of this act, and did not like to 
 appear in company either the evening before 
 or on the day on which he took it, and he and 
 the Queen almost alvi^ays dined alone on these 
 occasions. 
 
 In his ordinary behaviour to the 
 Queen, no less than in his attitude on 
 these graver occasions, it is easy to trace 
 the secret of his power and influence. 
 
 He would frequently return to luncheon at 
 a great pace, and would always come through 
 the Queen's dressing-room, where she gener- 
 ally was at that time, with that bright loving 
 smile with which he ever greeted her ; telling 
 her where he had been, what new buildings he 
 had seen, what studios, etc., he had visited. 
 Riding for mere riding's sake he disliked, and 
 said Es ennuyirt mich so. 
 
 It is not surprising that when his life 
 ended, and the loss of her friend, coun- 
 sellor, and Minister was understood in 
 all its fulness by the Queen, she should 
 have likened it to the " beginning of a 
 new reign." This is, in truth, what it 
 was. From the time of the Queen's 
 illness at the birth of the Princess Royal, 
 when the responsibilities of the Sovereign 
 
Ill " PERMANENT MINISTER " 85 
 
 were undertaken by the Prince, with the 
 tacit approval of the Ministry, to the 
 14th of December 1861, when his life 
 ended, he was Mayor of the Palace, and 
 all the threads of a constitutional sove- 
 reignty were in his hands. The Queen's 
 style is so familiar to the readers of her 
 journals and letters that no one could 
 mistake the source of the communica- 
 tions sent in her name to her Ministers 
 during those years. 
 
 Take, for example, the following 
 letter : — 
 
 Osborne, loth March i860. 
 
 The Queen, in returning Lord Cowley's 
 private letter and secret despatch, agrees with 
 Lord John Russell that he has deserved praise 
 for his mode of answering the Emperor's 
 Napoleonic address. 
 
 The circumstance is useful, as proving 
 that the Emperor, if met with firmness, is 
 more likely to retract than if cajoled, and that 
 the statesmen of Europe have much to answer 
 for for having spoiled him in the last ten years 
 by submission and cajolery. The expressions 
 of opinion in the House of Commons have 
 evidently much annoyed the Emperor, but 
 they have also had their effect in making him 
 reflect. If Europe were to stand together, 
 
86 THE QUEEN AND HER m 
 
 and make an united declaration against the 
 annexation of Savoy, the evil might still be 
 arrested ; but less than that vi^ill not suffice. 
 The Emperor's last conversation with Lord 
 Cowley is still very vague, leaving him free 
 to do very much what he pleases. 
 
 The substance and style of such a 
 letter are unmistakable, and it bears but 
 little resemblance to the memoranda of 
 the Queen which have been quoted. Im- 
 pressed evidently upon it is the hand of 
 the " permanent Minister," whose autho- 
 rity in Council and weight in argument 
 told heavily in the scale against those of 
 Lord Russell and Lord Aberdeen when- 
 ever differences of opinion between the 
 Ministers and the Sovereign arose. 
 
 It was only when, in the case of Lord 
 Palmerston, the Prince was brought into 
 collision with a will as strong as his own 
 that anything in the nature of a conflict 
 was sustained ; and even then, after a 
 battle in which the spoils of war were 
 fairly divided, the sagacity of the Prince 
 led him to appreciate the force of the 
 statesman with whom he had to deal, 
 and the necessity of compromising their 
 differences. Just as, years before, he 
 
Ill " PERMANENT MINISTER " 87 
 
 had acquiesced in the wisdom of Lord 
 Melbourne's counsel, and had induced 
 the Queen to grant a " general amnesty " 
 in her feelings towards the Tories, so he 
 granted an amnesty to Palmerston, and 
 loyally supported him as First Minister 
 of the Crown. 
 
 If, then, the personal relations between 
 the Queen and her Ministers during the 
 full manhood of the Prince were colder 
 and more distant than those which pre- 
 ceded this period, after his death she was 
 once more forced into closer personal 
 intercourse with them, though doubtless 
 of a very diiFerent quality. 
 
 It is a curious speculation to try and 
 imagine what might have occurred had 
 the Prince Consort lived into late middle 
 age, and into more democratic times. 
 There was nothing in his nature, as it is 
 known to us, which gives the impression 
 that he would have feared democracy. 
 His views were as broad and as elastic 
 as those of Peel. Like Peel's great pupil 
 and follower, whose career has only just 
 ended, the Prince Consort's ideas might 
 easily have kept abreast of the most ad- 
 vanced opinions of the time. Had he 
 
88 HER ''PERMJNEN7 MINISTER" m 
 
 lived he would now be ten years the 
 junior of Mr. Gladstone. How, as 
 " permanent Minister," he would have 
 steered through the breakers which beset 
 Lord Beaconsfield's Government in 1 879- 
 80, and Mr. Gladstone's in 1884-85, it 
 is impossible to conjecture. Owing to 
 the extreme youth of the Queen the 
 interposition of his strong personality 
 was tolerated for a while. How this 
 interposition would have stood the ten- 
 sion of years may only be conjectured. 
 The eclipse of the constitutional advisers 
 of the Sovereign by a " permanent Min- 
 ister," even though he be the consort of 
 the Queen, could not fail to be other 
 than an experiment in politics. It must 
 be plain to every one who has carefully 
 noted the inner life of the Palace, as 
 described under the authority of the 
 Queen herself, that it is an experiment 
 which might not safely have been pro- 
 longed, and certainly could not safely 
 bear repetition. 
 
TV 
 
 THE QUEEN AND LORD 
 PALMERSTON 
 
 " Excellent speech of Palmerston's ! 
 What a knack he has of falling on his 
 feet ! I never will believe after this that 
 there is any scrape out of which his 
 cleverness and good fortune will not 
 extricate him. And I rejoice in his luck 
 most sincerely ; for though he now and 
 then trips, he is an excellent minister, 
 and I cannot bear the thought of his 
 being a sacrifice to the spite of other 
 powers." This note, written about 1 849, 
 appears in the Journal of Lord Macaulay, 
 who may be said to have possessed a 
 genius for commonplace, and whose 
 views about men and things represented 
 the average of English opinion to a degree 
 unachieved by any contemporary writer. 
 
90 THE QUEEN AND iv 
 
 Lord Macaulay saw with the eyes of 
 the majority of his countrymen, only 
 rather more intently and clearly ; and 
 this passage contains the secret of Pal- 
 merston's hold upon them. First and 
 foremost he was lucky, and there is, in 
 the view of the average Briton, Cato 
 notwithstanding, no more glorious attri- 
 bute. Secondly, he was known to be 
 an " excellent minister," free from subtle- 
 ties, and endowed with a plain under- 
 standing, after the manner of a well-to-do 
 citizen. Finally, he was believed to be 
 viewed with jealousy and dislike by all 
 foreigners and in constant danger from 
 their intrigues, sufficient in itself to insure 
 him the highest place in the regard of 
 men who still, like their hero Nelson, 
 had been taught in childhood to " hate a 
 Frenchman as they did the devil." 
 
 He was, one of his lifelong opponents 
 said of him after his death, English to 
 the backbone ; and he contrived to make 
 Englishmen immeasurably of more ac- 
 count in their own eyes, and to some 
 extent in those of other nations. Pal- 
 merston to his contemporaries appeared 
 physically a man of commanding height. 
 
IV LORD PALMERS70N 91 
 
 Lord Lome — his biographer — quotes a 
 description of him, he evidently believing 
 it to be true, in which he is represented as 
 tall and slim. In point of fact he was rather 
 below than above the average height ; but 
 a fact of this kind appeared incredible of 
 the Minister who had succeeded in adding 
 a cubit not only to his own moral stature, 
 but to that of the most insignificant of 
 his countrymen. When, after at least 
 ten years of smouldering, the irritation 
 of conscientious colleagues, political foes, 
 and baffled doctrinaires culminated in 
 an attack upon Palmerston in the House 
 of Commons in reference to the treat- 
 ment of an obscure Greek, the Minister 
 held the House spell-bound from the 
 dusk of one day to the dawn of the next, 
 and, in a speech of extraordinary force 
 from a man who never aspired to rhetoric 
 or even eloquence, reached the zenith of 
 his power and fame. He had confounded 
 his enemies. " It has made us all proud 
 of him," said Sir Robert Peel, addressing 
 the House of Commons for the last 
 time, and the eulogy found a ready echo 
 in the hearts of Englishmen scattered all 
 over the world. If he wished to create, 
 
92 THE QUEEN AND iv 
 
 as he declared, a belief that a British 
 subject, in whatever land he may be, 
 shall feel confident in the broad fact of 
 his nationality, that Civis Romanus sum 
 was to be the guarantee of every Briton 
 against injustice and wrong, he succeeded 
 beyond his hopes ; and so lofty was the 
 spirit he roused, that when for a moment 
 the people believed their favourite Min- 
 ister to have been false to his own tradi- 
 tion, and to have yielded to the threats 
 of French militarism, they tore his Con- 
 spiracy Bill to shreds, and hurled him 
 unceremoniously from power. In spite, 
 however, of this little accident, Lord 
 Palmerston remained for a quarter of a 
 century the most popular of Englishmen 
 in his own country and the most feared 
 abroad. To foreigners generally, and 
 the French in particular, he was — as De 
 Jarnac called him — the incarnation of 
 La ferfide Albion. Yet the keystone of 
 his foreign policy was a good under- 
 standing with France, and it is to the 
 credit of his skill as a Foreign Minister 
 that he was able to maintain the French 
 alliance without for a moment forfeiting 
 the dignity or independence of England 
 
IV LORD PJLMERS70N 93 
 
 as a portion of the price he paid for it. 
 This counted for something among the 
 causes of his popularity. His sympathy, 
 openly expressed, for popular liberties, 
 his dislike and contempt for petty tyranny 
 or oppression, counted for more; while 
 most of all, his cheerful courage in the 
 midst of the difficulties of the Indian 
 Mutiny, and the disasters of the Crimean 
 winter, his never-failing belief that all 
 would be well, and his clear-headed 
 appreciation of what was required, in- 
 spired the nation with a confidence that, 
 so long as Palmerston was there, clouds, 
 however black they might appear, would 
 presently disperse. 
 
 A final cause, which contributed not 
 a little to the Minister's success, lay in 
 the exaggerations and mouthing of the 
 "Manchester School" of politicians, who, 
 having scored heavily in the fight for 
 Free Trade, had got to beheve them- 
 selves infallible, and their doctrines 
 only a degree, if at all, less worthy of 
 absolute credence than the Gospels. It 
 had become the fashion with politicians 
 of that school to belittle England, and 
 to obtrude upon the world a cheap cos- 
 
94 THE QUEEN AND iv 
 
 mopolitanism with an air of superior 
 virtue, extremely galling to men who, 
 either in their own person or by the 
 energy and often by the blood of their 
 sons or brothers, had helped to expand 
 the Empire. 
 
 It was only natural that these men — 
 and they formed the large majority — 
 should rally round the Minister who 
 appreciated their sacrifices and took pride 
 in their successes. In politics the law 
 of reaction is well-nigh inexorable, and 
 just as the necessary militarism of the 
 first fifteen years of the century produced 
 the " Manchester School," so that worthy 
 body of doctrinaires was responsible for 
 the ultroneous rule of Palmerston. 
 
 A Minister who kept racehorses and 
 had at his command a good store of 
 very blunt vernacular, who could not 
 be got to admit that he understood an 
 abstract thought, who always knew what 
 he wanted and was determined to carry 
 it out regardless of the opinions of 
 others, who conceived his own ideas to 
 be superior to those of other people, 
 who never looked farther than to- 
 morrow, and much preferred not to 
 
IV LORD PALMERSTON 95 
 
 think beyond this evening, but who at 
 the same time was determined to estab- 
 lish the privilege of an Englishman 
 to the side -walk all over the world, 
 while men of other nations might step 
 into the gutter — this Minister repre- 
 sented aspirations which had long ago 
 sickened under rounded periods in- 
 tended to convince humanity that bread 
 and calico summed up their total re- 
 quirements, and were more than suf- 
 ficient for rational happiness. This was 
 the popular conception of Palmerston 
 when in 1855 he became First Minister 
 of the Crown. 
 
 To the Queen he had, for many 
 years, appeared in a somewhat different 
 and less ideal light. There were points 
 in his character which she could not fail 
 to respect and admire, but there was 
 much in his methods as well as in his 
 views which was galling at the time 
 both to her proper pride as Sovereign, 
 and to her dignity as a member of the 
 royal fraternity of Europe. Palmerston 
 had shared the universal admiration 
 excited by the young Queen on her 
 accession. He has left on record his 
 
96 THE QUEEN AND iv 
 
 agreeable impressions of her first Coun- 
 cil. He was also warmly in favour of 
 her marriage with Prince Albert, and 
 volunteered to Stockmar his opinion 
 that of all possible alliances he chiefly 
 approved the marriage with the Prince. 
 These sentiments were, however, in 
 Palmerston mere platonics, and re- 
 strained him not at all from thwarting 
 or from disregarding altogether the 
 ideas of both the Queen and the 
 Prince if they happened to run counter 
 to his own. 
 
 To the Prince the character of Pal- 
 merston was unsympathetic, and to his 
 speculative mind the positivist Minister 
 was highly uncongenial. Some men, it 
 has been said, think by definition, others 
 by "type." Palmerston never thought 
 otherwise than by "type," and to the 
 Prince he seemed a statesman of a 
 commonplace order, possessing un- 
 doubtedly the powers of a first-rate 
 man, but holding the creed of a second- 
 rate man. His frivolity appeared un- 
 pardonable in the Germanic eyes of the 
 Prince, and his policy as frivolous and 
 hand-to-mouth as his morals. "When 
 
IV LORD PJLMERSTON 97 
 
 I was a young man," Palmerston used 
 to say, " the Duke of Wellington made 
 an appointment with me at half- past 
 seven in the morning ; and I was asked, 
 * Why, Palmerston, how will you con- 
 trive to keep that engagement ? ' * Oh,* 
 I said, ' of course, the easiest thing in 
 the world : I shall keep it the last thing 
 before I go to bed ! ' " These were not 
 the habits, and badinage was not the 
 tone, of the young Court ; so that a 
 ^no. grain of prejudice hampered the 
 relations between the ebullient Foreign 
 Secretary and his royal mistress. For 
 fifteen years after her marriage, until 
 as her First Minister Palmerston kissed 
 hands in 1855, the friction was constant, 
 and at times paralysing to good govern- 
 ment. Opposition only confirmed him 
 in his determination to persevere with 
 a policy, or indulge a fi-eak of temper. 
 In this again he was, as Lord Malmes- 
 bury observed, English to the backbone, 
 and in nothing was this characteristic 
 more marked than in his resolve to 
 withstand the influence of the Crown. 
 
 If the quarrel — for no other word 
 adequately describes it — between the 
 
 H 
 
98 THE QUEEN AND iv 
 
 Queen and Lord Palmerston originated 
 in the conflicting disposition of her 
 Foreign and her permanent Minister, 
 it shaped itself upon the policy to be 
 pursued in regard to France, and the 
 personal relations existing at the time 
 between the royal families of France and 
 England. With nothing of the doctrin- 
 aire about him, Palmerston avoided alli- 
 ances, and formed his judgment upon 
 questions of foreign policy as they arose. 
 Vaguely he may be said to have desired 
 to keep well with France, but he had 
 given way, as Lord Stratford de Red- 
 cliiFe remarked, to a strong feeling of 
 resentment against Louis Philippe, and 
 he mistrusted and ultimately detested 
 the whole house of Bourbon. The 
 Prince, on the other hand, full of the 
 great idea of German unity, looked 
 upon France as an enemy to European 
 progress, but was, with the Queen, on 
 terms of intimacy with the King of the 
 French. In 1 840, when, by supporting 
 the revolt of Mehemet Ali, France tried 
 to obtain a quasi control of Egypt, 
 Palmerston declared " the Mistress of 
 India could not permit France to be 
 
IV LORD PALMERSTON 99 
 
 mistress directly or indirectly of the 
 road to her Indian dominions." This 
 declaration, since exalted from a plati- 
 tude into a shibboleth covering the 
 whole " Eastern question," might have 
 obtained the assent of the Queen ; but 
 when it was followed by a negotiation 
 with France and Spain relative to the 
 marriages of the Spanish house, culmin- 
 ating in an apparent act of duplicity on 
 the part of Louis Philippe, goaded by 
 an ill-considered despatch of the Foreign 
 Secretary, a state of irritation was en- 
 gendered between the royal families very 
 painful to the Queen, and laid by her 
 at the door of Lord Palmerston. In her 
 capacity as Sovereign she was stung by 
 the remark that she looked at things par 
 la lunette of Palmerston, and although 
 she courageously and loyally supported 
 her Minister's '' unfortunate despatch " 
 in her correspondence with the Queen 
 of the French, she did not forgive her 
 Minister for having, as she believed, 
 placed her in a painful predicament. 
 
 Between Lord Palmerston and Mr. 
 Gladstone there are not many character- 
 istics in common, but they were alike 
 
loo THE QUEEN AND iv 
 
 in the youthful enthusiasm which in 
 old age both statesmen retained. Mr. 
 Motley, describing a party given by 
 Lady Palmerston, uses terms which 
 could now be applied with curious veri- 
 similitude to Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone. 
 In 1848 Lord Palmerston was sixty- 
 four years old, but his enthusiasm for 
 constitutional freedom, not in his own 
 country, where that blessing had long 
 obtained, but in foreign states, was 
 such that in the view of the Queen it 
 induced him to forget that, as England 
 was not prepared to employ force of 
 arms for its achievement, " despatches 
 full of unpleasant truths unpleasantly 
 put could only occasion sore and angry 
 feelings towards this country, without 
 advancing in any degree the cause they 
 were intended to serve." 
 
 His creed was the creed of Canning, 
 but his methods were often those of 
 Mrs. Grundy. Occasions were not 
 wanting at that time for the display 
 of his boyish desire to " improve 
 the occasion," and his lectures to 
 foreign rulers gave umbrage in many 
 quarters, and still further widened the 
 
•5 ; %> 
 
 \ : 
 
 IV LORD PALMERSTON loi 
 
 breach between the Minister and his 
 Sovereign. 
 
 Undoubtedly the tone adopted by- 
 Lord Palmerston was often carelessly 
 offensive. " I do not object," said Sir 
 Robert Peel, ''to his lordship's giving 
 advice to the Spanish Government, but 
 to his mode of giving it." It was im- 
 possible that enthusiasm so exuberant 
 should not occasionally meet with rebufl^. 
 On one occasion Spain successfully re- 
 torted upon what Peel called the "as- 
 sumption of superiority " in the style of 
 the Foreign Secretary ; while later on, 
 Russia replied in language described by 
 Lord Stanley as " bitter, imperious, and 
 offensive, but not more bitter, more 
 imperious, more offensive, than the pro- 
 vocation." To the Queen these checks 
 to her Minister appeared humiliations, 
 and they were deeply felt and strongly 
 resented. Among her Ministers, as well 
 as among their opponents, she had many 
 sympathisers, and a moment came when 
 Lord John Russell, unable to submit 
 any longer to the haughty deportment 
 of the Foreign Secretary, resolved to 
 retire from the Government. "I feel 
 
102 THE QUEEN AND 
 
 IV 
 
 Strongly," he wrpte, ''that the Queen 
 ought not to be exposed to the enmity 
 of Austria, France, and Russia on 
 account of her Minister." Lord John, 
 however, was mistaken in this assumption, 
 for it was not to the enmity of those 
 nations, but of their rulers, that the 
 Queen was exposed on account of her 
 Foreign Secretary ; and in Lord John 
 Russell's confusion lies the justification 
 of Palmerston. The Queen could not be 
 expected to appreciate at the time, for 
 it was far from clear even to Palmer- 
 ston himself, the service he rendered 
 to the Monarchy in that year of con- 
 vulsion, when thrones all over Europe 
 were tottering. In 1848 the middle 
 class on the Continent were in open 
 revolt against their rulers. Amid the 
 storms of that year, when no monarch 
 elt secure, Palmerston' s " airs of superi- 
 ority " and his " constitutional lectures " 
 galled intensely, and at no period in 
 history can England have been more 
 cordially detested by neighbouring 
 powers. 
 
 To the English middle classes, how- 
 ever, with their ludicrous vanity and 
 
IV LORD PALMERSTON 103 
 
 Pharisaical faith in their own institu- 
 tions, the attitude of their representative 
 in the Councils of Europe was a keen 
 source of delight. Palmerston's lectures 
 were read and approved with avidity, 
 and while he ministered to the weakness 
 of his countrymen, he fostered in them 
 a wish to maintain their existing con- 
 stitution intact as an example to other 
 nations of a perfect form of government. 
 If the Queen had occasion to wince 
 at his methods, she owes largely to 
 Palmerston the ease with which the 
 English monarchy weathered a storm 
 that proved so fatal to other royal 
 houses. His methods were, without 
 question, doubly painful to her ; for not 
 only was the language he employed 
 calculated to embroil her with foreign 
 potentates, with whom she was on terms 
 of friendship, but it frequently happened 
 that over the form of the Palmerstonian 
 philippics she was not permitted to 
 exercise her privilege of imposing a re- 
 straining hand. The ostensible cause — 
 if it was not altogether the real one — of 
 the friction which existed for fifteen 
 years between the Sovereign and her 
 
104 THE QUEEN JND iv 
 
 Minister was the careless or studied 
 neglect of the latter to submit his de- 
 spatches for correction and remark before 
 they were sent to the embassies abroad. 
 As early as 1 840 Lord John Russell had 
 complained to Lord Melbourne that he 
 only received "despatches in a printed 
 form some days after they are sent off," 
 and reminded the Prime Minister that 
 in the "days of Lord Grey every im- 
 portant note was carefully revised by 
 and generally submitted to the Cabinet." 
 Other colleagues of the Foreign 
 Secretary were no less hurt at his high- 
 handed indifference to their opinion. 
 Lord Howick, the late Lord Grey, 
 partly on this ground refused to serve 
 with him, and thus prevented the forma- 
 tion of a Liberal Administration five 
 years later. And eleven years after- 
 wards, in 1 85 1, on this very ground. 
 Lord John Russell when Prime Minister 
 was driven to remove his insubordinate 
 colleague from office altogether. The 
 principle followed by Lord Grey in 
 1848, when the tension between Palmer- 
 ston and the Queen became very great, 
 was at the instance of Lord Lansdowne 
 
IV LORD PALMERSTON 105 
 
 admitted by Palmerston. For although 
 Lord John Russell was Prime Minister, 
 he found it necessary to appeal to Lord 
 Lansdowne to remonstrate with his un- 
 ruly Foreign Secretary. " The Queen's 
 disapprobation of everything Lord Pal- 
 merston does increases," wrote Lady John 
 Russell in her diary at this time ; and 
 although Palmerston pretended to believe 
 that the " Queen gave ear too readily to 
 persons hostile to her Government," it is 
 plain that the Prime Minister and the 
 Sovereign were in perfect accord. 
 
 In the summer of 1 849 a very able 
 State paper was drawn up by the Prince 
 in the name of the Queen, expounding 
 the constitutional rule that the control 
 of foreign policy rests with the Prime 
 Minister, and directing that all despatches 
 submitted for her approval should pass 
 through the hands of Lord John Russell. 
 Whether this was or was not a constitu- 
 tional rule, Palmerston, although he 
 declared it would " reduce his flint gun 
 to a matchlock," found himself forced to 
 yield, and agreed to alter the existing 
 arrangements in accordance with the 
 Queen's wishes. When the final crisis 
 
io6 THE QUEEN AND iv 
 
 came, and when after his dismissal from 
 office he had to defend his conduct in 
 Parliament, the Queen's memorandum 
 and his acquiescence in the terms of it 
 were used with damaging effect by Lord 
 John Russell against him. Before, how- 
 ever, the fall of Palmerston, an event 
 had occurred which raised him to the first 
 place in the eyes of his countrymen. 
 This was the attack on his policy in the 
 House of Commons, and his great speech 
 in his own defence. After the Don 
 Pacifico debate, Palmerston became the 
 first of living statesmen in the eyes of 
 the people, a position he never lost till 
 the day of his death fifteen years after- 
 wards. From that time, too, he became 
 more attentive to the wishes of the 
 Queen, although a few months later the 
 old Adam reasserted itself, when over 
 the reception of Kossuth and over the 
 presidential difficulties in France his 
 attitude caused the long - smouldering 
 flame to burst forth. His fall then be- 
 came inevitable. The Coup d'Etat in 
 France, at once approved by him without 
 consultation with his colleagues, or the 
 knowledge of the Queen, was his coup 
 
IV LORD PALMERSTON 107 
 
 de grace. ** Palmerston is out," wrote 
 Charles Greville, " actually, really, and 
 irretrievably out." 
 
 Although the cause was but half 
 guessed at the time, it was known in full 
 to this acute observer and critic. He 
 had watched for some years the widening 
 breach between the Sovereign and her 
 Minister. "As to Palmerston being 
 corrected or reformed, I don't believe a 
 word of it," he had written a year before 
 the crash came, and his prognostication 
 was singularly accurate. He was keenly 
 alive to the dislike of the Court : " The 
 Queen's favourite aversions are : first 
 and foremost Palmerston, and Disraeli 
 next," although the commentator may 
 truly lay stress on the " candid and dis- 
 passionate spirit" with which in later 
 years these statesmen were received by 
 their Sovereign. When, however, the 
 tension was greatest, the Queen, acting 
 on the advice of Stockmar, took no 
 active steps to overturn the Foreign 
 Secretary, but allowed the initiative to 
 be taken by Lord John Russell ; so that, 
 although for one moment Lord Palmer- 
 ston may have spoken of a '* cabal " 
 
io8 THE QUEEN AND iv 
 
 against him, his good sense speedily 
 convinced him that he was mistaken, 
 and within a few days of his fall he 
 could speak of the Court without bitter- 
 ness, and in strong terms could praise 
 the *' sagacity of the Queen." 
 
 Palmerston's " tit for tat," as he termed 
 it, followed very quickly upon his ejec- 
 tion from office, and when the Govern- 
 ment fell he could afford to smile. His 
 triumph over Lord John Russell was 
 complete. Never again was he the 
 subordinate of that statesman in office. 
 The blunders of the Aberdeen Govern- 
 ment, of which he was the only popular 
 member, left Lord Palmerston the one 
 indispensable Englishman, and the up- 
 shot of his quarrel with the Court and 
 with the leader of the Whigs was to 
 make him the Queen's Prime Minister. 
 Although he was never Foreign Secretary 
 after 1 8 5 1 , his interest in foreign affairs 
 remained undiminished. The Queen 
 has related how when he was Home 
 Secretary in 1853, she, interested in and 
 alarmed about the strikes in the North, 
 put a question to him : " Pray, Lord 
 Palmerston, have you any news ? " He 
 
IV LORD PJLMERSTON 109 
 
 replied, " No, madam, I have heard 
 nothing ; but it seems certain the Turks 
 have crossed the Danube." Strikes, 
 responsible as he was for order, were as 
 nothing to him compared with the in- 
 tricacies of the Eastern Question, about 
 which it was not necessary for him 
 specially to concern himself. In 1855, 
 although a futile attempt was made to 
 form an Administration under Lord 
 Granville, in which both Palmerston and 
 Russell were to serve, the universal 
 desire of the nation, supplemented by 
 Lord John's want of tact, placed Lord 
 Palmerston at the head of the Govern- 
 ment ; and except for a short interval 
 three years later, when his supposed 
 subservience to Napoleon the Third cost 
 him his office. Prime Minister he re- 
 mained until his death ten years after- 
 wards. 
 
 From the moment he became her 
 First Minister his position relative to 
 the Queen underwent a marked change. 
 Lord Aberdeen, who was on friendly 
 terms with the Prince, said to Bishop 
 Wilberforce, a few months after Palmer- 
 ston's accession to office, that ''the Queen 
 
no THE QUEEN AND iv 
 
 has not altered at all in her real feelings 
 to him. She behaves perfectly well and 
 truly to him. It has always been her great 
 virtue, but she does not like him a bit 
 better than she did, nor the Prince either." 
 If this was the case, there is no corro- 
 boration of it, and indeed all the evidence 
 points to the gradual arriving at a per- 
 fectly good understanding with both the 
 Queen and the Prince. The causes of 
 difference had indeed passed away. No 
 doubt the Prince still found much which 
 was unsympathetic to him in Palmerston's 
 character. Although he could admire, 
 as every one did, the great physical vigour 
 of a Prime Minister who, when seventy 
 years old, could row on the Thames 
 before breakfast, or swim in the river 
 like an Eton boy, or who, when nearly 
 eighty, was able to ride from London to 
 Harrow and back in one day, yet he 
 shrank from what Lord Houghton 
 called " Palmerston's ha-ha and laissez- 
 faire.^^ The Prime Minister's ethical 
 views amused the maids-of-honour, and 
 made them laugh, but they seemed 
 drearily inadequate to the grave-minded 
 Prince. When, however, the fatal 
 
IV LORD PALMERSTON in 
 
 December of 1 86 1 crushed the Queen's 
 life, Lord Palmerston was the first to 
 realise the irreparable loss which, as wife 
 and Sovereign, she had sustained, and to 
 appreciate her meaning when she spoke 
 of having to "begin a new reign." 
 
 For many years before the Prince's 
 death, he and Palmerston had worked 
 well together. Their struggle had ended 
 in 1855, when Palmerston became Prime 
 Minister. While the Prince had con- 
 tended for a constitutional punctilio, 
 Palmerston had fought for his own hand. 
 It was not on principle that he objected 
 to the control by the Prime Minister 
 and the Crown over the Foreign Secre- 
 tary ; his objections were founded on 
 the circumstance that he himself was the 
 Foreign Secretary it was proposed to 
 control. Of late years, owing to the 
 accident of Lord Salisbury combining 
 the office of Foreign Secretary and Prime 
 Minister, the desirability of having two 
 heads instead of one to manage the 
 foreign relations of the country has been 
 erected into a principle. The after- 
 thought sprang in the usual way from 
 the spirit of opposition, and not from 
 
112 THE QUEEN AND iv 
 
 any rational or careful consideration of 
 the question based on experience. Those, 
 however, who denounced Lord Salisbury 
 must recognise the force of the Queen's 
 contention in her struggle with Palmer- 
 ston, and her celebrated memorandum 
 must to them appear the charter of 
 Foreign Office subservience. In reality 
 the temper of the Foreign Secretary is the 
 key of the situation. Given a man full 
 of restless activity and hasty enthusiasms, 
 then the mere time involved in sending 
 despatches in red boxes to the Queen is 
 so much gained for reflection. Given a 
 minister of a calmer type, control or 
 supervision is only a work of super- 
 erogation, and frequently a fatal loss of 
 the psychological moment. When the 
 Queen was engaged in endeavouring to 
 check the youthful ardour of Lord 
 Palmerston, she was little more than a 
 girl in years, while he was well beyond 
 the farthest limit of middle age. Yet 
 in many ways he was incomparably the 
 younger of the two. To the Queen 
 supreme responsibility came early in life, 
 and, as usual, it aged her ; while to 
 Palmerston supreme responsibility came 
 
IV LORD PJLMERSTON 113 
 
 late, and found him still a boy in mind. 
 He was fifty years in the House of 
 Commons before he led that assembly ; 
 and during that half-century, although 
 constantly in office, he had not been a 
 regular speaker or even a regular at- 
 tendant in the House. " I can't get that 
 three-decker Palmerston to bear down,'* 
 Mr. Canning used to say ; and Palmer- 
 ston always hesitated to formulate views 
 upon any subject which was not his 
 special care at the moment. He refused 
 to set his mind to work up hypotheses. 
 In fact, he was a typical man of the 
 world, and, as it has been often said, a 
 man of the world is not an imaginative 
 animal. When Lord Houghton found 
 himself next to Mr. Gladstone at dinner 
 half-a-century ago, he found him "excited 
 about China and the cattle-plague, and 
 half-a-dozen other things"; when he 
 found himself next to Lord Palmer- 
 ston he could get no farther than the 
 inevitable ha-ha and laissez-faire. 
 What was admirable, however, in Lord 
 Palmerston, was his ever-present sense 
 of the dignity of England. " Tell M. 
 Guizot from me," said Metternich, " that 
 
114 THE QUEEN JND iv 
 
 one does not with impunity play little 
 tricks with great countries." Lord 
 Palmerston never stooped to little tricks 
 himself, and would not tolerate them in 
 others. This attitude, together with his 
 firmness about the military forces of the 
 Crown and his cheerful confidence in 
 the' fortune and stamina of his country- 
 men in 1853 and 1857, was thoroughly 
 appreciated by the Queen ; so that when 
 the end came she could look back and 
 mourn honestly at the breaking of 
 " another link of the past," and feel sin- 
 cerely and " deeply in her desolate and 
 isolated condition how one by one those 
 tried servants and advisers are taken from 
 her." As befitted him, Lord Palmerston 
 died in harness. Realistic and Hellenic 
 in spirit as he was, like his prototype of 
 old who kept a bow which he strung 
 daily to test his failing strength, the 
 Prime Minister within a few weeks of 
 his death was seen to come out of the 
 house at Brocket, look lest he was ob- 
 served, and then slowly and deliberately 
 climb an iron railing as a test of his 
 bodily vigour. He was over fourscore, 
 and death took him quickly and kindly 
 
IV LORD PJLMERSTON 115 
 
 while still in full possession of his facul- 
 ties and still in the plenitude of power. 
 Four years before he died, the Queen 
 must have felt that her life had ended. 
 Yet it is now a generation since Lord 
 Palmerston's death, and the Queen, to 
 whose sagacity he bore witness so long 
 ago, still sagaciously rules the nation 
 that he helped to make great. As the 
 first portion of her reign may be said to 
 have synchronised with the fall of Peel, 
 so the second portion ended with the death 
 of Palmerston. Henceforth she was 
 destined to be thrown with a new gener- 
 ation of public servants, men well known 
 to her by name and fame, some of whom 
 had already served her in positions of 
 responsibility, but none of whom had 
 passed in close relation with her through 
 the excitements of her queenship, and 
 the joys and sorrows of her married life. 
 In spite of differences and quarrels, the 
 Queen had always extended to Lord 
 Palmerston that straightforward support 
 of the lack of which none of her Minis- 
 ters have ever complained, and when he 
 died she could not help feeling that her 
 youth had passed away with him, and 
 
ii6 LORD PALMERSTON iv 
 
 that she was left a lonely woman face to 
 face with the awful responsibilities of her 
 great office, without one human being in 
 the world whom she could call an old 
 friend. 
 
V 
 
 THE QUEEN AND LORD 
 BEACONSFIELD 
 
 On the wall of Hughenden Church may- 
 be seen a memorial tablet, recording the 
 gratitude and affection of Queen Victoria 
 for the services and for the memory of a 
 man who without question was the most 
 interesting and striking figure of her 
 reign. The inscription which it bears 
 was written by the Queen herself. " To 
 the dear and honoured memory," so it 
 runs, " of Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield, 
 this memorial is placed by his grateful 
 and affectionate Sovereign and friend, 
 Victoria R.I. * Kings love him that 
 speaketh right.' — Prov. xvi. 13." This 
 inscription is in many ways noteworthy. 
 To find a memorial erected by a sovereign 
 to a subject is in itself sufficiently re- 
 
ii8 THE QUEEN AND v 
 
 markable, but so rare an act of con- 
 descension is unique coupled with public 
 expressions of gratitude and friendship. 
 
 These qualities are not common in 
 kings accustomed to accept devotion or 
 service as their due, and even from Queen 
 Victoria such strong words read strangely 
 when it is remembered that they are 
 from the hand of a Queen of England 
 towards one whom her ancestors would 
 have scorned as the son of a hated and 
 despised race, whom to this day some of 
 her relatives and regal cousins hound and 
 persecute with all the unenlightened 
 fervour of the middle ages. It was meet, 
 however, that in a Christian church such 
 a memorial, raised by the supreme head 
 of that Church, to a Jew by blood and 
 by every fibre of his nature, should be 
 rounded off by a quotation from the 
 proverbial philosophy of the most famous 
 ruler of his race, and fitter still that there 
 should be found affixed to it a signature, 
 the novelty of which to English eyes 
 recalls the fact that T.ord Beaconsfield 
 aspired to rank witli Bismarck and 
 Cavour as the consolidator of Imperial 
 rule^ 
 
V LORD BEJCONSFIELD 119 
 
 If in politics an opportunist, in 
 character no man could have exhibited 
 greater consistency throughout a long 
 life ; and that Lord Beaconsfield should 
 lie, not in Westminster Abbey sur- 
 rounded by the ashes of the " Venetian 
 party," but among the villagers of a Buck- 
 inghamshire hamlet, under a memorial 
 raised to him by the occupant of the 
 Throne, was a fit climax to the creed he 
 professed in youth, and carried with him 
 to almost supreme power, and to the 
 grave. If he began political life amid 
 the contemptuous jeers of a Tory House 
 of Commons, he lived to receive the pro- 
 found adulation and enjoy the absolute 
 confidence of the Conservative party. 
 If the first thirty years of his political 
 existence were passed in the cold shadow 
 of royal disapprobation and dislike, he 
 lived to become the darling of the Court 
 and to earn the inscription which adorns 
 his tomb. These variations of senti- 
 ment were in no way due to changes in 
 Disraeli himself, but rather to the slow 
 appreciation by others of his rare per- 
 sonality. His character never under- 
 went any marked development, while 
 
120 THE QUEEN AND v 
 
 the ideas which well-nigh choked his 
 youth found expression in maturity and 
 old age. In his political enthusiasms 
 and hatreds he was alike consistent and 
 persevering. No one ever suspected 
 him of a weakness for the Whigs whom 
 he hated, nor doubted his sympathy for 
 the people whom he trusted, and his 
 regard for the Throne which he upheld. 
 As a Tory Democrat he appeared an 
 abnormal growth to the "sublime medio- 
 crity " of Peel and of his party, yet he 
 lived to establish household suffrage and 
 to convert the diadem of the English 
 kings into an Imperial crown. 
 
 In youth Disraeli brooded over 
 problems of statecraft, and these very 
 problems he lived largely to solve as a 
 Minister. To those who read his politi- 
 cal tracts, cast by him into the original 
 form of the political novel, and who were 
 familiar with his foppish appearance and 
 his florid style of speech, it appeared im- 
 possible that he should figure in any 
 other character than that of the political 
 charlatan and social buffoon. Yet over 
 these prejudices, permanent in some 
 minds, completely overcome in others. 
 
V LORD BEACONSFIELD 121 
 
 Disraeli triumphed by sheer force of 
 talent and energy. With the dawn of a 
 new era in English politics, in 1832, his 
 strenuous public life began ; and when, 
 half-a-century later, he had had his fill of 
 life and honour, men began to appreciate 
 how full the intervening years had been 
 of indomitable strife, devoted to the 
 gradual conquest of the ear of the House 
 of Commons, of the confidence of the 
 Conservative party, of the goodwill of 
 the Sovereign, and of the support of the 
 nation. All these were finally won, and 
 this extraordinary child of Israel, whose 
 ancestors were unhappy refugees hunted 
 from Spain to Venice, whose immediate 
 forebears were poor immigrants into a 
 London suburb, sat himself down in the 
 seat of the chief of the House of Stanley, 
 dictated his will to the proudest aristo- 
 cracy on earth, posed as the representa- 
 tive of the English race among the 
 assembled Powers of Europe, took Great 
 Britain into the hollow of his hand, 
 clothed a nation houtiquiere with Im- 
 perial purple, left behind him a cause 
 identified with his name, and a party 
 strong enough to defend it, and finally 
 
122 THE QUEEN AND v 
 
 sank into a grave smothered with flowers 
 by the hands of the people, and sur- 
 mounted by a memorial inscribed by the 
 hand of the Queen. The Napoleonic 
 era of marvels furnishes no example 
 more romantic of the triumph of in- 
 dividual capacity over hostile conditions. 
 Although much has been made by 
 political adversaries of the flattery by 
 which Lord Beaconsfield is supposed to 
 have influenced the Queen, there is not 
 a scrap of evidence to show that in his 
 relations with the Sovereign he employed 
 arts or adopted methods foreign to those 
 used by Lord Aberdeen or by Sir Robert 
 Peel. The secret of his success lay not 
 in subservience to the will of the monarch, 
 but in masculine appreciation of her 
 sex. It is noteworthy that among all 
 his personal triumphs that over the 
 Queen was the longest deferred. In 
 1852, when he took office as Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer, his position as leader 
 of the House of Commons was assured. 
 Yet it was with reluctance that the Con- 
 servative party, under severe pressure 
 from its chief, yielded to his leadership, 
 and even as late as 1867 powerflil Tory 
 
V LORD BEJCONSFIELD 123 
 
 peers, like Lord Lonsdale, were known 
 to doubt whether Disraeli would ever be 
 loyally accepted by the party in succes- 
 sion to Lord Derby as their head. That 
 the English people were far from placing 
 trust in him was clear from the minority 
 in which for twenty-two years they left 
 his following in Parliament ; and it was 
 well known that in his office of Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer he had been unwillingly 
 approved by the Queen, so violent was 
 her prejudice against him, mainly on the 
 ground that the holder of that office was 
 not brought into personal contact with 
 the Sovereign. By 1874 the English 
 people had been won over, and Mr. 
 Disraeli was at last, after a prolonged 
 and patient novitiate, entrusted with a 
 large majority in the House of Com- 
 mons. Thenceforth his task was easy, 
 and the entire confidence of his party 
 was his reward for the triumph they 
 owed to his adroit leadership. Mr. Dis- 
 raeli then stepped from the ranks of 
 clever politicians, and took his place 
 among European statesmen. It was at 
 this time that the last barrier between the 
 Prime Minister and the Queen fell to 
 
124 THE QUEEN AND v 
 
 the ground. Dislike, dating from a 
 time when Disraeli's bitter invective was 
 goading to fury Sir Robert Peel's friends, 
 and among them the Sovereign, had long 
 since given way ; but only half confi- 
 dence had supervened, bred of mistrust 
 in the alien and too nimble politician. 
 Now this in turn was swept aside, and 
 Lord Beaconsfield filled the place so long 
 left vacant, and became the " friend " of 
 the Queen as well as First Minister of the 
 Crown. 
 
 Antipathies, to a far greater extent 
 than is generally supposed, have a 
 physical basis, and although Disraeli in 
 youth possessed a certain weird beauty, 
 it was of a kind unlikely to attract 
 favourably either men or women of a 
 northern race. When he first rose to 
 address the House of Commons on the 
 7th of December 1 837, he was 
 
 very showily attired, being dressed in a bottle- 
 green frock-coat and a waistcoat of white, of 
 the Dick Swiveller pattern, the front of which 
 exhibited a network of glittering chains ; large 
 fancy -pattern pantaloons, and a black tie, 
 above which no shirt collar was visible, com- 
 pleted the outward man. A countenance 
 
V LORD BEACONSFIELD 125 
 
 lividly pale, set out by a pair of intensely black 
 eyes and a broad but not very high forehead 
 overhung by clustered ringlets of coal-black 
 hair, v^^hich, combed away from the right 
 temple, fell in bunches of well-oiled small 
 ringlets over his left cheek. 
 
 Then, again, his manner of speaking was 
 not that to which the House of Com- 
 mons was accustomed. He is thus 
 described by an eye-witness : — 
 
 His gestures were abundant : he often 
 appeared as if trying with what celerity he 
 could move his body from one side to another, 
 and throw his hands out and draw them in 
 again. At other times he flourished one hand 
 before his face, and then the other. His voice, 
 too, is of a very unusual kind : it is powerful, 
 and had every justice done to it in the way of 
 exercise ; but there is something pecuHar in 
 it which I am at a loss to characterise. His 
 utterance is rapid, and he never seemed at a 
 loss for words. On the whole, and notwith- 
 standing the result of his first attempt, I am 
 convinced he is a man who possesses many of 
 the requisites of a good debater. That he is 
 a man of great literary talent few will dispute. 
 
 To eyes by long usage inclined to gauge 
 a man by the symmetry of his top boots 
 and the stains on his hunting coat, or, 
 
126 THE QUEEN AND v 
 
 as in the case of Castlereagh or Althorp, 
 to trust an orator in inverse ratio to his 
 intelligibility, Disraeli seemed untrust- 
 worthy and dangerous. Sober men, too, 
 looked askance at this foreign-looking 
 person who could fashion an epigram 
 as readily as they could knock over a 
 cock pheasant. Even so cosmopolitan a 
 bishop as Wilberforce, though he was 
 fascinated, could not recognise in him a 
 countryman. *' I enjoyed meeting Dis- 
 raeli," he wrote as late as 1867. "He 
 is a marvellous man. Not a bit a Briton, 
 but all over an Eastern Jew ; but very 
 interesting to talk to." Yet this was 
 thirty years later than that famous first 
 appearance in Parliament, which had 
 provoked alike uproarious mirth from an 
 undiscriminating assembly, and the well- 
 remembered threat from its victim that 
 a day would come when they would be 
 forced to give him a hearing. 
 -^ Certainly, when Bishop Wilberforce 
 wrote, the time had long passed when 
 Disraeli had need to crave a hearing from 
 the House of Commons. In 1852 his 
 " pre-eminence in opposition had given 
 him an indisputable title " to the leader- 
 
V LORD BEJCONSFIELD 127 
 
 ship of that assembly ; but, strangely- 
 enough, popularity had not accrued to 
 him with power. Four years later his 
 titular leader. Lord Derby, writing to 
 Lord Malmesbury, observed : " As to 
 Disraeli's unpopularity, I see it and re- 
 gret it, and especially regret that he does 
 not see more of his party in private ; 
 but they could not do without him, even 
 if there were any one ready and willing 
 to take his place." Personal contact, 
 according to this practised and shrewd 
 observer, was the cure for the vehement 
 prejudices of his party against their ab- 
 normal political chief. " Disraeli has 
 no influence in the country," observed 
 Greville, about this time, " and a very 
 doubtful position in his own party." Yet 
 personal contact rarely triumphs over 
 prejudice, and proverbially seldom 
 strengthens respect unless the latent 
 qualities in a man are of the loftiest 
 order. That this was the case with Mr. 
 Disraeli seems not improbable, for cer- 
 tain it is that his foes were chiefly to be 
 found among those to whom personally 
 he was unknown, while few men have 
 been so well served and so well liked 
 
128 THE QUEEN AND v 
 
 by those with whom he desired and 
 claimed intercourse. 
 
 In the early years of her reign the 
 Queen can have heard but little of Dis- 
 raeli. Although the chief of the Young 
 England party, and the author of novels 
 that had a certain vogue, he and his 
 following were not at that time a serious 
 factor in politics. To Disraeli, however, 
 to his romantic fondness for women, and 
 to his reverence for the stately aspect 
 of the Throne, the Queen's personality 
 already strongly appealed. Had he not 
 felt strongly the charm before which 
 Lord Melbourne and Peel succumbed, 
 the celebrated passage in SyMl could not 
 have been written : — 
 
 Hark ! it tolls ! All is over. The great 
 bell of the metropolitan cathedral announces 
 the death of the last son of George the Third 
 who probably will ever reign in England. He 
 was a good man : with feelings and sympa- 
 thies ; deficient in culture rather than ability ; 
 with a sense of duty ; and with something of 
 the conception of what should be the character 
 of an English monarch. Peace to his manes ! 
 
 We are summoned to a different scene. 
 
 In a palace in a garden, not in a haughty 
 keep, proud with the fame but dark with the 
 
V LORD BEACONSFIELD 129 
 
 violence of ages ; not in a regal pile, bright 
 with the splendour, but soiled with the in- 
 trigues of courts and factions ; in a palace in 
 a garden, meet scene for youth, and innocence, 
 and beauty, came a voice that told the maiden 
 that she must ascend her throne ! 
 
 The Council of England is summoned for 
 the first time within her bowers. There are 
 assembled the prelates and captains and chief 
 men of her realm ; the priests of the religion 
 that consoles, the heroes of the sword that has 
 conquered, the votaries of the craft that has 
 decided the fate of empires ; men grey with 
 thought, and fame, and age ; who are the 
 stewards of divine mysteries, who have toiled 
 in secret cabinets, who have encountered in 
 battle the hosts of Europe, who have struggled 
 in the less merciful strife of aspiring senates ; 
 men, too, some of them, lords of a thousand 
 vassals and chief proprietors of provinces, yet 
 not one of them whose heart does not at this 
 moment tremble as he awaits the first pres- 
 ence of the maiden who must now ascend 
 her throne. 
 
 A hum of half - suppressed conversation, 
 which would attempt to conceal the excite- 
 ment which some of the greatest of them have 
 since acknowledged, fills that brilliant assem- 
 blage ; the sea of plumes, and glittering stars, 
 and gorgeous dresses. Hush ! the portals 
 open ; she comes ; the silence is as deep as 
 that of a noontide forest. Attended for a 
 K 
 
I30 THE QUEEN AND v 
 
 moment by her royal mother and the ladies of 
 her court, who bow and then retire, VIC- 
 TORIA ascends her throne ; a girl, alone, 
 and for the first time, amid an assemblage 
 of men. 
 
 In a sweet thrilling voice, and with a com- 
 posed mien which indicates rather the absorb- 
 ing sense of august duty than an absence of 
 emotion, THE QUEEN announces her 
 accession to the throne of her ancestors, and 
 her humble hope that divine Providence will 
 guard over the fulfilment of her lofty trust. 
 
 The prelates and captains and chief men 
 of her realm then advance to the throne, and, 
 kneehng before her, pledge their troth, and 
 take the sacred oaths of allegiance and supre- 
 macy. 
 
 Allegiance to one who rules over the land 
 that the great Macedonian could not conquer ; 
 and over a continent of which even Columbus 
 never dreamed ; to the Queen of every sea, 
 and of nations in every zone. 
 
 It is not of these that I would speak ; but 
 of a nation nearer her footstool, and which at 
 the moment looks to her with anxiety, with 
 affection, perhaps with hope. Fair and serene, 
 she has the blood and beauty of the Saxon. 
 Will it be her proud destiny at length to ^ear 
 relief to suffering millions, and, with that soft 
 hand which might inspire troubadours and 
 guerdon knights, break the last links in the 
 chain of a Saxon thraldom ? 
 
V LORD BEACONSFIELD 131 
 
 It was in 1845 ^^^^ Sy l?il wb.s pub- 
 lished, a year fertile with events which 
 for the first time brought Mr. Disraeli 
 prominently to the notice of the Queen 
 and of the Prince Consort, and to which 
 may be traced a hostile prejudice lasting 
 in the case of the Prince till his death, 
 and in the mind of the Queen for the 
 space of a generation. 
 
 His attacks on Sir Robert Peel, viru- 
 lent and unrelenting, were looked upon 
 by the Sovereign, not as the legitimate 
 assault by one political opponent upon 
 another, but as the stroke of an assassin 
 at the heart of a friend. The whole 
 nature of the Prince, his sanity and love 
 of sober discussion, his loyalty and re- 
 spect for character, his economic mind 
 and hatred of claptrap, revolted against 
 the Protectionist Ahithophel. To his 
 Teutonic eyes Peel was the noble, broad- 
 minded English gentleman, slowly beaten 
 down by the arts of this Satanic Jew. 
 It was a sentiment widely shared even 
 by those glad to make use of any stick, 
 effectually tempered, with which to beat 
 one whom they feared as a despoiler and 
 branded as a traitor. The Queen shared 
 
132 THE QUEEN AND v 
 
 the Prince's views, and when, six years 
 later, she was obliged to receive Mr. 
 Disraeli as a Minister, her reluctance 
 was well known and secretly condoned 
 by her subjects. " Make them fear 
 you, and they will kiss your feet," said 
 some one to Vivian Grey ; and Disraeli 
 invariably took his own sermons to heart. 
 He had made the House of Commons 
 fear him, and the House of Commons 
 accepted the " smile for a friend and the 
 sneer for the world " with which he 
 enforced his rule. That he, like his 
 colleague George Smythe, could prove a 
 splendid failure he was determined should 
 not be ; and the obstacles which hitherto 
 had yielded to his untiring courage he 
 was resolved should be surmounted to 
 the last. 
 
 " The only power," said Coningsby, 
 " that has no class sympathy is the Sove- 
 reign " ; and this thesis he was bent on 
 proving, in spite of the Sovereign her- 
 self It was a question of perseverance, 
 high daring, and time. To him, a son 
 of patriarchs whose span of life was 
 counted by centuries, the flight of time 
 appeared a small factor. He was never 
 
V LORD BEACONSFIELD 133 
 
 hurried. It seemed as if he, too, one of 
 the chosen people, might expect to live 
 beyond the ordinary term of man's life. 
 After twenty years of strife for the lead 
 of the House of Commons, he, an alien, 
 was at length the first man in that proud 
 assembly. He could well wait, if neces- 
 sary, twenty more for the confidence of 
 the English people and that of their 
 Sovereign. 
 
 With marvellous endurance and patient 
 tenacity — those heroic qualities of his race 
 — he waited; and he had his reward. 
 " The most wonderful thing," wrote 
 Bishop Wilberforce, not a friendly wit- 
 ness, " is the rise of Disraeli. It is not 
 the mere assertion of talent, as you hear 
 so many say. It seems to me quite 
 beside that. He has been able to teach 
 the House of Commons almost to ignore 
 Gladstone, and at present lords it over 
 him." 
 
 It was to certain great qualities of 
 character, as extraordinary as his intel- 
 lectual powers, that Mr. Gladstone him- 
 self bore witness in asking the House 
 of Commons to vote a public monument 
 to Lord Beaconsfield. These were his 
 
134 THE QUEEN AND v 
 
 Strong will, his long-sighted persistency 
 of purpose, his remarkable power of self- 
 government, and last, not least, his great 
 parliamentary courage. " I have known," 
 said Mr. Gladstone, " some score of 
 Ministers, but never any two who were 
 his equal in these respects." 
 
 Had the Prince Consort lived, regard 
 on his side must have followed the 
 inevitable intimacy into which the two 
 men were thrown. To Mr. Disraeli the 
 Prince's qualities were apparent from the 
 first. Although in 1854, when jealousy 
 of the Prince's position near the Queen 
 culminated in an attack upon him in 
 Parliament, Disraeli remained silent, he 
 had written only a few days before a 
 strong expression of favourable opinion. 
 "The opportunity," he says, "which 
 office has afforded me of becoming 
 acquainted with the Prince filled me 
 with a sentiment towards him which I 
 may describe, without exaggeration, as 
 one of affection." That the feeling was 
 far from reciprocal is well known. The 
 Prince's was not a nature to be taken 
 by storm. That he would have yielded, 
 as the Queen yielded ultimately, to the 
 
V LORD BEJCONSFIELD 135 
 
 firm pressure of a powerful character no 
 one can reasonably doubt. Partisanship 
 has invested Lord Beaconsfield in later 
 days with the attributes of those artful 
 men who, as it has been said, study the 
 passions of princes and conceal their 
 own, in order to acquire and retain in- 
 fluence. If Lord Beaconsfield, in his 
 dealings with the Sovereign, stooped to 
 the employment of arts, they were of the 
 simplest kind. He once described his 
 method to a friend. '* I never contra- 
 dict,'' he said ; "I never deny ; but I 
 sometimes forget." To the bore or 
 the Pharisee such maxims may seem 
 degrading ; but there is many a man, 
 under the pressure of ministerial or 
 domestic sufferings, who will envy the 
 serene philosophy of Lord Beaconsfield. 
 Chance is often the determining factor 
 in our likes and dislikes ; and it so hap- 
 pened that the year 1874, which gave 
 Mr. Disraeli his majority, establishing 
 him a second time Prime Minister, was 
 psychologically favourable to his influ- 
 ence at Court. His first administration, 
 seven years before, extending over a few 
 months only, had given him inadequate 
 
136 THE QUEEN AND v 
 
 Opportunity. Now his personal magnet- 
 ism could be employed under circum- 
 stances altogether favourable. The Queen 
 had been engaged for some time in the 
 heart-stirring task of reconstructing for the 
 perusal of her people th^Life of the Prince 
 Consort. To contemplate old journals 
 and letters, to permit the past to invade 
 the present, to revive the memory of 
 youth and friends long dead, is to open 
 the heart and mind to new and kindling 
 impressions. The Queen was enabled 
 to realise afresh how much she had lost. 
 Of the friends of her girlhood not one 
 remained ; and of those who had stood 
 near the throne during her early married 
 life. Lord Russell alone was left — already 
 in the half- shadow of death. Almost 
 the last link with the past snapped by 
 the death in May 1874 of M. Van de 
 Weyer, who had been the friend of her 
 uncle King Leopold, and had received 
 a large and intimate share of the con- 
 fidence of the Queen. For reasons, 
 some obvious and some obscure, Mr. 
 Gladstone followed rather in the steps of 
 Palmerston and Derby than those of 
 Aberdeen and Peel, whom in character 
 
V LORD BEJCONSFIELD 137 
 
 he far more closely resembled. Certain 
 it is that his relation to the Queen, 
 though it may have been that of a 
 trusted Minister, was not that of a 
 friend. Mr. Disraeli succeeded, however, 
 in reinspiring sentiments which had for 
 long lain dormant ; and once more in 
 the old place occupied by Lord Mel- 
 bourne in her charming and helpless 
 girlhood, before the days when she could 
 look to her permanent Minister for 
 guidance, there stood a Minister who 
 was at once the Queen's constitutional 
 adviser and her private friend. 
 
 Disraeli's chivalrous devotion to 
 women is abundantly clear from his 
 novels, but it has been made clearer 
 still to those, Mr. Froude among 
 them, who have had access to his 
 unpublished letters to Mrs. Brydges 
 Williams in the library at Tring Park, 
 and who were cognisant of his almost 
 daily correspondence with another lady 
 of great powers of mind and personal 
 charm, who, to the deep sorrow of all 
 who knew her, has recently followed the 
 leader whom she honoured with her 
 friendship. His loyal devotion to Lady 
 
138 THE QUEEN AND v 
 
 Beaconsfield and the adoration he in- 
 spired in her have for long been notori- 
 ous. What wonder, then, that to 
 Disraeli, a romanticist in statecraft, an 
 idealist in politics, and a Provencal in 
 sentiment, his chivalrous regard for the 
 sex should have taken a deeper com- 
 plexion when the personage was not only 
 a woman but a queen ? In trifles Disraeli 
 never forgot the sex of the Sovereign. 
 In great affairs he never appeared to 
 remember it. To this extent the charge 
 of flattery brought against him may be 
 true. He approached the Queen with 
 the supreme tact of a man of the world, 
 than which no form of flattery can be 
 more effective and more dangerous. So 
 far the indictment against him may be 
 upheld. The word " subservience " is 
 the translation of this simple fact into 
 the language of political malice. It has 
 been freely used, and events of such vast 
 import as the Imperial Title and the 
 Congress of Berlin were put down by 
 political adversaries to the flexibility of 
 the courtier rather than to the supreme 
 volition of the statesman. If it was true 
 of Charles Earl Grey that he 
 
V LORD BEJCONSFIELD 139 
 
 Wrought in brave old age what youth had 
 planned, 
 
 it was equally true of Lord Beaconsfield. 
 It was noticed that he had always a fan- 
 tastic taste for the outward and visible 
 side of a cause or of an idea, and the 
 Imperial notion in Tancred readily took 
 the shape of the Imperial Titles Bill. 
 There is a passage in this novel, written 
 thirty years before the Queen assumed 
 the title of Empress of India, before the 
 first use outside India of Indian troops 
 in Imperial interests, and before the hold 
 of England upon Alexandria was ob- 
 tained by the purchase for four millions 
 of the Khedive's shares in the Suez Canal. 
 It runs thus : — 
 
 You must perform the Portuguese scheme 
 on a great scale ; quit a petty and exhausted 
 position for a vast and prolific empire. Let 
 the Queen of the English collect a great fleet, 
 let her stow away all her treasure, bullion, 
 gold plate, and precious arms ; be accompanied 
 by all her Court and chief people, and transfer 
 the seat of her empire from London to Delhi. 
 There she will find an immense empire ready 
 made, a first-rate army, and a large revenue. 
 ... I win take care of Syria and Asia Minor. 
 The only way to manage the Afghans is by 
 
HO THE QUEEN AND v 
 
 Persia and by the Arabs. We will acknow- 
 ledge the Empress of India as our suzerain, 
 and secure for her the Levantine coast. If 
 she like, she shall have Alexandria as she now 
 has Malta: it could be arranged. Your Queen 
 is young ; she has an avenir. Aberdeen 
 and Sir Peel will never give her this advice ; 
 their habits are formed ; they are too old, too 
 ruses. But, you see ! the greatest empire 
 that ever existed 3 besides which she gets rid 
 of the embarrassment of her Chambers ! And 
 quite practicable ; for the only difficult part, 
 the conquest of India, which baffled Alex- 
 ander, is all done ! 
 
 Looking at the dreams of Mr. Disraeli 
 in 1 847, and the achievements of Lord 
 Beaconsfield in 1877, it is scarcely a 
 matter of surprise that the Queen of 
 England, who cannot fail to appreciate, 
 in keen personal degree, the glorification 
 of British authority over the world, 
 should yield willingly her favour and 
 support such a Minister. It was not 
 difficult for the Queen, when she ap- 
 peared to maintain her own will, to be 
 found in reality carrying out that of her 
 Imperial Chancellor. " I had to pre- 
 pare the mind of the country," Mr. 
 Disraeli once said, " to educate — if it be 
 
V LORD BEACONSFIELD 141 
 
 not too arrogant to use such a phrase — 
 to educate our party." He did in truth 
 educate, not only his party but his 
 countrymen at large, and finally the 
 Sovereign. His party he converted to 
 that form of Tory Democracy which 
 sanctioned the Reform Bill of 1867. 
 His countrymen he converted from " a 
 nation of shopkeepers" into Rhodesian 
 Imperialists, and inflicted a mortal wound 
 upon the Manchester School. The 
 Queen he converted from a Whig Sove- 
 reign into the Empress of India. It was 
 the spirit of the age, he would himself 
 have said, which he did no more than 
 interpret. A cool and friendly foreign 
 critic said of England in the early 
 seventies that she had " fallen into dis- 
 repute among nations," and that the fate 
 of Holland was everywhere foretold for 
 her. England with her teeming millions, 
 requiring more than ever an outlet into 
 fresh lands for her people, and new mar- 
 kets for her commerce, may have grown 
 restive under this dangerous and un- 
 worthy suspicion. Lord Beaconsfield 
 may have done no more than follow the 
 example of Sir Robert Peel in 1 846, and 
 
142 THE QUEEN AND v 
 
 gauge accurately the poignant necessities 
 of the epoch over which he was called 
 upon to preside. It is impossible to 
 deny to him the attribute of rare politi- 
 cal insight. When in March 1873 ^^ 
 refused to take office, but declared never- 
 theless that the Tory party then occu- 
 pied the " most satisfactory position 
 which it has held since the days of its 
 greatest statesmen, Mr. Pitt and Lord 
 Grenville"; that it had "divested itself of 
 those excrescences which are not indigen- 
 ous to its native growth, but which in a 
 time of long prosperity were the conse- 
 quence sometimes of negligence, and 
 sometimes, perhaps, in a certain degree, 
 of ignorance " ; although his political 
 adversaries laughed, within a year Mr. 
 Disraeli had the laugh on his side, and 
 what he called the " career of plundering 
 and blundering " on the part of the 
 Liberal party had come to a disastrous 
 end. As the shadows gathered round 
 him, the love of prophecy, deep-seated 
 in his race, often gleamed out. In 1880 
 he said to a friend, " I give myself two 
 years more of life." To the Queen he 
 gave twenty. Not long before he had 
 
V LORD BEJCONSFIELD 143 
 
 penned his famous letter to the Duke of 
 Marlborough. No manifesto was ever 
 more criticised, and even his warmest 
 friends cavilled at the prophetic allusions 
 to the adoption of Home Rule by his 
 political adversaries. It was indeed early 
 days to speak of the party then led by 
 Lord Hartington as being " ready to 
 challenge the imperial character of the 
 realm " ; as a party that, having " failed 
 to enfeeble the colonies by their policy 
 of decomposition, may perhaps now re- 
 cognise in the disintegration of the 
 United Kingdom a mode which will not 
 only accomplish but precipitate their 
 purpose." The phrases are those of a 
 hostile parliamentary critic, but the 
 prescience is that of a statesman or a 
 prophet. 
 
 The Queen parted from her Minister 
 with unfeigned sorrow. On this man 
 who had complained that all existence 
 was an ennui or an anxiety, but who 
 nevertheless said of his dying wife, *'for 
 thirty-three years she has never given 
 me a dull moment," this man who was 
 accused by his friends of taciturnity, who 
 was but twice seen to laugh, and who 
 
144 2^^^ QUEEN AND v 
 
 " kept all his fireworks for when women 
 were present," the Queen had bestowed 
 that strong regard which had not been 
 given to any Prime Minister since Lord 
 Aberdeen. Honours for himself, an 
 earldom, the Garter, honours for his 
 friends, all these things were nothing. 
 They were the due of any Minister who 
 chose to press for them. The " affection 
 and friendship " of the Sovereign could 
 not be claimed as a right. They had no 
 necessary place in a Prime Minister's 
 gazette. If the Queen chose to visit 
 Hughenden, and walk on the south 
 terrace among her Minister's peacocks, 
 much as years before she had visited 
 Drayton, her line of Ministers between 
 Peel and Lord Beaconsfield had no legiti- 
 mate cause of complaint. Like Mordecai, 
 he was the man whom the Sovereign 
 delighted to honour. 
 
 " Attended this week the opening of 
 Parliament," writes Archbishop Tait in 
 his Journal of 1877 — 
 
 the Queen being present and wearing for the 
 first time, some one says, her crown as Empress 
 of India. Lord Beaconsfield was on her left 
 side, holding aloft the sword of state. At five 
 
V LORD BEACONSFIELD 14.5 
 
 the House again crammed to see him take his 
 seat ; and SHngsby Bethell, equal to the occa- 
 sion, read aloud the writ in very distinct tones. 
 All seemed to be founded on the model, 
 " What shall be done to the man whom the 
 king delighteth to honour ? " 
 
 It was exactly forty years, that mystic 
 number of the Jewish race, from the day 
 when the newly -elected member for 
 Shrewsbury had taken his seat for the 
 first time in the House of Commons. 
 Then, despised as a clever, unscrupulous 
 dandy, jeered at as a fop who had mis- 
 taken his vocation, hanging on to the 
 skirts of Lord Lyndhurst with one hand 
 and those of Lady Blessington with the 
 other, he seemed destined to perpetual 
 failure. Now, standing on the left side 
 of the Queen, bearing aloft the sword of 
 state, an Earl and First Minister of the 
 Crown, the most conspicuous figure at 
 that moment in Europe, he had achieved 
 the wildest improbabilities of which his 
 romantic youth had dreamed. A few 
 years more, and he was back at Hughen- 
 den, a broken, dying man, whose web 
 of life was woven at last, spending 
 months in absolute solitude, with only 
 
146 THE QUEEN AND v 
 
 the shadows of the past about him. 
 "'Dreams! dreams! dreams!' he mur- 
 mured as he gazed into the fire," records 
 a visitor to Hughenden, and they had 
 been in truth the staple of his hfe. 
 Mr. Disraeli as a novelist — a dreamer 
 of dreams — had preceded Mr. Disraeli 
 the politician. Lord Beaconsfield as a 
 novelist survived Lord Beaconsfield the 
 statesman. Vivian Grey and Endymion 
 — they mark the beginning and the 
 end. To the " dear and honoured mem- 
 ory " of this extraordinary man his 
 Sovereign inscribed her gratitude and 
 affection. Perhaps to such feelings as 
 these, ever inspired in those nearest to 
 him, may be attributed the secret of his 
 triumph over conditions apparently so 
 hostile. 
 
 That Lord Beaconsfield's character 
 presented aspects repellent to the political 
 purists cannot be questioned ; and that 
 politics were oftener than not to him 
 a gafne or a fine piece of strategy 
 rather than a conflict of ■ principle 
 must be unquestioned. It is perhaps 
 not doubtful that he feigned some 
 sentiments he was far from feeling, 
 
V LORD BEACONSFIELD 147 
 
 and masked others that he felt deeply. 
 The dictum that far-reaching ambition 
 and perfect scrupulousness can hardly 
 coexist in the same mind he perhaps 
 exemplified. By the Queen this incom- 
 patibility was noticed, when it was indeed 
 painfully obvious, and she shrank from 
 the spectacle. As years rolled on, the 
 conflict grew less glaring, and the Queen's 
 attention, together with that of her sub- 
 jects, became fixed on the finer quali- 
 ties of the man. His pertinacity and 
 undaunted courage, his patience under 
 obloquy, his untiring energy, his high 
 conception of the honour and keen re~ 
 gard for the interests of England — all 
 these characteristics were recognised and 
 admired. There was one quaUty, how- 
 ever, which is rare in statesmen, and 
 even if present is not always patent to 
 the world. In a leader of men it is 
 the key to success, and in an aspirant to 
 fame the secret of power. Dizzy, as he 
 was for so long affectionately called, 
 possessed the inestimable quality of per- 
 fect loyalty to his friends. He was 
 never known to forget a kindness or 
 ignore a service. He was never sus- 
 
148 THE QUEEN JND v 
 
 pected of having betrayed a follower or 
 forgotten a partisan. However irritating 
 the blunder, however black the cata- 
 strophe, Mr. Disraeli could be relied on 
 in the hour of need. His personal 
 hatreds were well under control — "I 
 never trouble to be avenged," he once 
 said to the writer ; " when a man injures 
 me I put his name on a slip of paper 
 and lock it up in a drawer. It is 
 marvellous how men I have thus labelled 
 have the knack of disappearing ! " In 
 judging men, though not infallible, he 
 seldom erred. Among his opponents, 
 long before they had made a mark, he 
 noticed Lord Rosebery and Sir William 
 Harcourt. The former he took some 
 pains to attract. Of the latter he said, 
 " He is the only man in the House, ex- 
 cept myself, who knows the history of his 
 country." When Lord Hartington was 
 making his first speech in Parliament, 
 Mr. Disraeli turned to the colleague 
 sitting next him and murmured, " This 
 young man will do." Among his friends 
 he showed equal discrimination. His 
 reliance upon Lord Cairns, the most 
 powerful and courageous intellect in the 
 
LORD BEJCONSFIELD 
 
 49 
 
 Cabinet of 1874, was absolute ; and 
 during his absence at the Congress of 
 Berlin it was to the Chancellor that he 
 very wisely looked to sustain the burden 
 of Government at home. He appointed 
 
 ♦t 
 
150 THE QUEEN AND v 
 
 in superlatives, both in writing and in 
 talk, and they were no exaggeration of 
 the depth of his feeling for those he really- 
 liked. His profound and admiring re- 
 gard for women, and his warm affection 
 for his friends, are the salient points in 
 the domestic character of Lord Beacons- 
 field. That the Queen should, with her 
 sensitive appreciation of these qualities, 
 have come under the charm of her 
 minister's personality was in no way 
 surprising. 
 
 Finally, from his proud loyalty to 
 the Hebrew race he never for a moment 
 swerved. For eighteen centuries that 
 race has been slowly taking possession 
 of the civilised world. Through the 
 martyrdom of individual souls Jewish 
 morality has changed the face of the 
 globe. The conduct of the European 
 peoples — modern civilisation as it is 
 called — is their work ; while in art, in 
 music, and in letters they have more 
 than held their own. Power, of an overt 
 and conspicuous kind, has, however, for 
 eighteen centuries been denied to men of 
 their blood. Disraeli broke the spell. 
 In July 1878, in the capital of the 
 
V LORD BEJCONSFIELD 151 
 
 greatest military nation of our time, 
 among the heroes and statesmen who had 
 created Imperial Germany, among the 
 representatives of the civilised nations 
 of Europe, congregated there to check 
 Russia in her victorious career, and main- 
 tain the equal balance of European 
 authority, the most observed and con- 
 spicuous personage was not Bismarck, 
 nor Moltke, nor Andrassy, nor any prince 
 nor emperor of them all, but the slim 
 and still youthful figure that with pale 
 and haggard face and slow step, leaning 
 on the arm of his private secretary, was 
 seen day by day to cross the square from 
 the Kaiserhof to the Congress, the re- 
 presentative of the Queen of Great 
 Britain and Ireland and Empress of 
 India — the figure of Lord Beaconsfield 
 the Jew. 
 
VI 
 
 THE QUEEN AND MR. GLAD- 
 STONE 
 
 " His friends lived in dread of his 
 virtues," were the words with which, 
 after alluding to the splendour of his 
 eloquence, unaffected piety, and blame- 
 less life, one of the most brilliant of his 
 contemporaries summed up Mr. Glad- 
 stone's character as it appeared to men 
 nearly half-a-century ago. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone, the writer says, was 
 celebrated far and wide for a more than 
 common liveliness of conscience, and 
 " his friends lived in dread of his virtues." 
 This sally, true of him in his political 
 youth, does not inaptly describe the Mr. 
 Gladstone familiar to all who have known 
 him, and contains the secret of his extra- 
 ordinary influence, of his strength and 
 
VI MR. GLADSTONE 153 
 
 weakness, and of his successes and failures. 
 After his retirement from office rather 
 than sanction a grant of public funds to 
 a Catholic college, and his subsequent 
 speech in favour of that very measure, 
 men mocked and marvelled ; but the key- 
 to the riddle was under their hand. 
 Sensitiveness to public criticism there was 
 none. Mr. Gladstone has never regarded 
 the opinion of the world so long as he 
 could justify himself to his own lively 
 conscience. He had held views, and pub- 
 lished them, incompatible with a proposal 
 he was now conscious of approving on 
 grounds previously unconsidered. He 
 was, however, a member of the Govern- 
 ment, and unlike Lord Althorp, who, 
 every morning he awoke, when in office, 
 wished himself dead, to Mr. Gladstone 
 power and responsibilities were a tempta- 
 tion. Was it certain that he was sincere 
 in his approval of this policy } Was it 
 certain that he was unbiassed by his 
 position in the Government, and his 
 desire to retain it } His lively conscience 
 searched him through, and he answered 
 the question by resigning his office. 
 When he was found, as an independent 
 
154 THE QUEEN AND vi 
 
 member, supporting the policy he had 
 quitted the Ministry rather than sanction, 
 men laughed, and ever after his friends 
 lived in dread of his virtues. At the 
 same time, his uncommon liveliness of 
 conscience became an established article 
 of faith with those classes of his country- 
 men to whom conscience is the voice of 
 God, and they gathered round this young 
 man with a faith in his integrity of 
 character which for two generations has 
 never wavered. "Everybody detests 
 Gladstone," wrote Charles Greville in 
 1857, to whom everybody meant the 
 small coterie of clubmen and drawing- 
 room politicians among whom he habitu- 
 ally moved. London Society, headed 
 by Lord Palmerston, mistrusted Mr. 
 Gladstone, and feared his character. 
 Palmerston "rarely spoke severely of 
 any one," Lord Shaftesbury recorded in 
 his journal : " Bright and Gladstone are 
 the only two of whom he uses strong 
 language." It is a curious commentary 
 upon the tone of Lord Palmerston' s 
 mind and the state of feeling he repre- 
 sented that the two statesmen he excepted 
 from his universal charity should have 
 
VI MR. GLADSTONE 155 
 
 been supreme among those who have 
 estabhshed a claim on the affection of 
 the Enghsh-speaking world. If more 
 than thirty years ago Society could con- 
 ceive of no loftier motive to account for 
 Mr. Gladstone's hostility to the Irish 
 Church Establishment than "greed of 
 office," London Society has remained con- 
 stant to the ideals and judgments of 
 that time, so that Lady Waterford's view, 
 expressed then, would carry to her corre- 
 spondent no stronger conviction than it 
 would to-day, when she exclaimed, " I 
 have known Mr. Gladstone all my life, 
 and believe in his particularly tender 
 conscientiousness (Canning always said 
 this), and in his justice and feeling of 
 right. Only trust." It was this de- 
 mand for ** trust " that people accus- 
 tomed to the parliamentary game, to 
 government based on the corruption of 
 constituencies and parliamentary finesse, 
 found then and have found since so diffi- 
 cult to accord. Yet popular instinct has 
 applied to Mr. Gladstone a very different 
 standard. In early days shrewd observ- 
 ers noted that there never was a man 
 so genuinely admired for his earnestness. 
 
156 THE QUEEN AND vi 
 
 his deep popular sympathies, and his 
 unflinching courage, and never a man 
 more deeply hated, both for his good 
 points and for his undeniable defects and 
 failings. These were admitted by those 
 who knew and loved him to be his fierce- 
 ness, his wrath, his irritability, his want 
 of knowledge of men, and his rashness 
 of speech. They explain how it came 
 to pass that he was " loved much less in 
 the House than out of doors," and why 
 it was that the " heart of all Israel was 
 towards him," beyond and not within 
 the precincts of Westminster and St. 
 James Street. Want of knowledge of 
 men is a defect from which any states- 
 man is bound to suffer much tribulation, 
 and in Mr. Gladstone has never been 
 altogether compensated by his unrivalled 
 knowledge of mankind. The contrast here 
 between him and his great rival was 
 marked, and there seemed an almost 
 curiously providential equalising of forces 
 in " how each was seeing and how each 
 was blind," so that if Lord Beaconsfield 
 " knew not mankind, but keenly knew 
 all men," Mr. Gladstone, if he " knew 
 nought of men, yet knew and loved 
 
VI MR. GLADSTONE 157 
 
 mankind." If knowledge of men is often 
 little more than a clear perception of 
 their weakness, knowledge of mankind 
 is the capacity to feel and evoke their 
 nobler aspirations. It is this latter power 
 which has given Mr. Gladstone his enor- 
 mous personal influence over the sober- 
 minded and sincerely religious masses of 
 his countrymen, and which would have 
 prompted them to applaud the late Dean 
 of St. Paul's, who, when some clergyman 
 happened to assert in his presence that 
 Mr. Gladstone was a thoroughly insin- 
 cere man, rose from his chair, pale 
 with emotion, exclaiming, evidently with 
 the strongest suppression of personal 
 feeling, *' Insincere! Sir, I tell you that 
 to my knowledge Mr. Gladstone goes 
 from communion with God to the great 
 aifairs of State." 
 
 It is difficult to realise, at this period 
 of the Queen's long reign, that Mr. 
 Gladstone alone among living servants 
 of the Crown can carry memory and 
 experience back before the days of her 
 accession. Of the relatives and courtiers 
 grouped about the throne in 1837 all 
 have passed away ; of the Privy Coun- 
 
158 THE QUEEN AND vi 
 
 cillors before whom she took the Oath 
 of her high office not one remains. He 
 is the one Uving man whose political 
 experience stretches beyond that of the 
 Queen. His is the one figure that for a 
 longer period than that of the Queen 
 has filled the political stage. Sixty-three 
 years have passed since King William, 
 writing to the Leader of the House of 
 Commons, rejoiced " that a young mem- 
 ber has come forward in so promising a 
 manner, as Viscount Althorp states Mr. 
 W. E. Gladstone to have done." The 
 Queen was then a child of fourteen, but 
 already, in the not unfriendly eyes of a 
 political opponent, the figure of Mr. 
 Gladstone loomed sufficiently large to 
 form a topic of correspondence between 
 the King and his Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer, while during the whole of 
 the intervening period, for two genera- 
 tions, that figure has loomed larger in 
 the eyes of his countrymen, until his 
 personality at last bade fair to destroy the 
 balance of political life. No one, with 
 the exception of George the Third, has 
 ever been for so long a period reckoned 
 a political force in England. Of pre- 
 
VI 
 
 MR. GLADSTONE 159 
 
 cedents in government and of experience 
 in administration, the Queen and Mr. 
 Gladstone alone hold the living record. 
 His retirement has left her supreme in 
 these respects. To her authority and 
 recollection no Minister is able now 
 effectually to oppose the weight of his 
 own ; and although she may receive 
 their constitutionally -tendered advice, 
 the Queen must inevitably in future 
 assume towards her Ministers an attitude 
 not unlike that which a mother assumes 
 towards her children. 
 
 In all the manifold changes of her 
 reign Mr. Gladstone has borne a part, 
 and not a few he has himself assisted to 
 promote. Alone, among conspicuous 
 Englishmen, he can accompany the 
 Queen back to days when her subjects 
 wore beaver hats and travelled in post- 
 chaises, when Australia was as bleak as 
 Mashonaland, and the Indian Empire a 
 Chartered Company. Should the sus- 
 picion, not altogether groundless, that 
 Mr. Gladstone's desire has been to 
 restrict Imperial growth, and to limit 
 the responsibilities of Englishmen to 
 these islands, ever have penetrated the 
 
[6o THE QUEEN AND 
 
 VI 
 
 mind of the Queen, she cannot avoid 
 remembering that for over sixty years he 
 has served the Crown, that he has held 
 high office longer than any statesman of 
 her reign, and that within the margin 
 of his career Great Britain has more 
 than doubled in extent, population, and 
 wealth. 
 
 When the Queen stepped from her 
 schoolroom at Kensington to the throne, 
 Mr. Gladstone was not only a tried 
 politician but had already served the 
 Crown as a Minister. He had witnessed 
 the last use of a monarch's prerogative 
 to dismiss and replace Ministers. By 
 that act he himself had profited, and 
 had been initiated into the mysteries of 
 office. By the side of this girl Sovereign 
 he must have felt old and experienced. 
 It seemed to him years since he had 
 walked from the Christopher at Eton to 
 the corner of Keat's Lane, with the hand 
 of Canning resting on his shoulder ; for 
 Mr. Canning had been Prime Minister 
 since that time, and for ten years had 
 lain in Westminster Abbey. Arthur 
 Hallam, his friend and Eton messmate, 
 was dead too, and already boyhood 
 
VI MR. GLADSTONE i6i 
 
 seemed far behind. While the Queen 
 was learning the alphabet of statecraft 
 under the kindly tutelage of Lord Mel- 
 bourne, the young man who was to be 
 for many years her Minister had been 
 already remarked by Bunsen as "the 
 first man in England in intellectual 
 power," had attracted the notice of 
 Carlyle as "a certain Mr. Gladstone, 
 an Oxford prize scholar, Tory M.P., 
 and devout Churchman of great talent 
 and hope," and had been described by 
 Macaulay in words which are familiar to 
 every schoolboy. While the mind of 
 the Queen was broadening under the 
 influence and liberal teaching of Peel 
 and Prince Albert, Mr. Gladstone was 
 rapidly shelling off the Tory husk, with 
 which he had found himself by birth 
 and education encased. Already he had 
 begun to discover that he was moving 
 fast away from the associates of his first 
 youth. His critics noticed that he was 
 allied with men who felt differently, 
 thought differently, and spoke differently 
 from him on questions of the highest 
 moment, and proffered the well-worn 
 explanation that he continued to act 
 
 M 
 
1 62 THE QUEEN AND vi 
 
 with them in order to retain office. 
 " His pubhc life " appeared to Lord 
 Shaftesbury, who was opposed to him 
 on many high questions of politics and 
 dogma, " a prolonged effort to retain his 
 principles and yet not lose his position." 
 The truth was, however, that Mr. 
 Gladstone was coming to see that every 
 sound politician and conscientious thinker 
 must sooner or later subject himself to 
 the imputation of inconsistency ; that a 
 statesmanlike mind, as Lowell once said, 
 is like a navigable river, making noble 
 bends of concession, seeking ever the 
 broad levels of opinion, and that " the 
 foolish and the dead alone never change 
 their opinion.'' The young man, who 
 lived in the Albany, and used to ride in 
 the Row on a gray mare, with a " hat, 
 narrow brimmed, high up in the centre 
 of his head, sustained by a crop of thick 
 curly hair," in appearance, according to 
 Lord Malmesbury, not unlike a Roman 
 ecclesiastic, the public advocate of tran- 
 scendental Erastianism in a militant form, 
 had much to learn and unlearn. " That 
 young man will ruin his fine political 
 career if he persists in writing trash like 
 
VI MR, GLADSTONE 163 
 
 this," Sir Robert Peel had observed 
 when glancing through Mr. Gladstone's 
 book on Church and State ; and it was 
 from Sir Robert Peel that Mr. Gladstone, 
 teachable and progressive, then as since, 
 acquired the prescience of Prince Bis- 
 marck's maxim that a statesman should 
 serve his country as circumstances require, 
 and not as his own opinions, which are 
 often prejudices, dictate. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone's long political career 
 may be roughly divided into two nearly 
 equal portions. It was said of Canning 
 that he was a statesman of conservative 
 opinions and liberal sympathies ; and 
 when Bishop Wilberforce, reversing the 
 epigram, wrote of Mr. Gladstone that 
 his sympathies were with the Conserva- 
 tives and his opinions with the Liberals, 
 it certainly would seem, as the two 
 halves of his life fall into historical per- 
 spective, that for the first thirty years 
 and odd, his opinions were constantly 
 struggling to obtain the mastery of his 
 sympathies, whereas in the latter half his 
 sympathies were allowed their proper 
 function of tempering his opinions. 
 The well-remembered opening phrase of 
 
1 64 THE QUEEN AND vi 
 
 his speech at Manchester, after Oxford 
 had discarded him, " At last I am come 
 among you, and am come among you 
 unmuzzled,'' seems to mark the point 
 at which Mr. Gladstone ceased to be a 
 Peelite, and attained his completeness as 
 the leader of the Liberal party. At the 
 moment, so severe was the wrench from 
 old associations, his career seemed to 
 him to lie behind rather than before 
 him. He had "followed to the grave 
 almost all the friends abreast of whom 
 he had started from the University," 
 and when he laid stress on the fact that 
 " it was hard to find in our whole 
 history a single man who had been 
 permitted to reach the fortieth year of 
 a course of labour similar to his own 
 within the walls of the House of Com- 
 mons," he little foresaw that he had still 
 before him thirty years of arduous 
 polemics, the most fruitful and the most 
 distinguished years of his long political 
 life. 
 
 It was as a trusted lieutenant of Sir 
 Robert Peel that Mr. Gladstone had first 
 come in contact with the Queen, and 
 he cannot have failed in the early days 
 
VI MR. GLADSTONE 165 
 
 of her married life to have attracted the 
 attention of both herself and Prince 
 Albert. Half -a- century ago Mr. 
 Gladstone was at Windsor Castle on 
 a visit, and "all the ladies were quar- 
 relling for who would have him as a 
 neighbour," while the lady who noted 
 the fact was " envied when it fell to my 
 lot, by the Queen's kind order." That 
 Prince Albert should have been attracted 
 by Mr. Gladstone's earnest and compre- 
 hensive mind was natural, for there was 
 much in common between the two men. 
 "It would be difficult to find," Mr. 
 Gladstone said of the Prince, "anywhere 
 a model of life more highly organised, 
 more thoroughly and compactly ordered." 
 If any such life could be found, it would 
 not improbably be Mr. Gladstone's own, 
 of which not many hours, or even half- 
 hours, have been wasted or lost. Om- 
 nivorous earnestness in what to others 
 appeared trivialities was a characteristic 
 they possessed in common. 
 
 " There seemed to be no branch of 
 human knowledge, no subject of human 
 interest, on which he did not lay his 
 hand ; his life was in truth one sustained 
 
1 66 THE QUEEN AND vi 
 
 and perpetual effort to realise the great 
 law of duty to God, and to discharge 
 the heavy debt which he seemed to ftd. 
 was laid upon him by his high station," 
 are words which, if they describe the 
 Prince, recall quite as vividly their 
 author. And again, when Mr. Glad- 
 stone refers to the ''secret reconciling of 
 the discharge of incessant and wearing 
 public duty with the cultivation of the 
 inner and domestic life," and declares 
 that " among happy marriages this mar- 
 riage was exceptional, so nearly did the 
 union of thought, heart, and action both 
 fulfil the ideal, and bring duality near to 
 the borders of identity," it is difficult to 
 think that in thus describing the married 
 life of the Queen, he was not prompted in 
 his use of language bythoughtsof his own. 
 In appreciation of music and art, in 
 love of literature, in " energetic tendency 
 towards social improvement in every 
 form," there was common ground be- 
 tween Mr. Gladstone and the Prince ; 
 but there were causes of difference too, 
 and after the death of Sir Robert Peel 
 they assumed larger proportions. Both 
 deeply religious, no two minds could 
 
VI MR, GLADSTONE 167 
 
 have been theologically further apart. 
 As his intimate friends, the late Cardinal 
 Manning and Mr. Hope Scott, passed 
 over to the Roman faith, a breath of 
 suspicion clung about Mr. Gladstone. 
 Then came the Crimean winter, and the 
 flounderings and fall of Lord Aberdeen's 
 Government. No one knew what course 
 the Peehtes would pursue ; and uncer- 
 tainty of political action is anathema in 
 the eyes of constitutional monarchy. 
 Mr. Gladstone, acknowledged to be the 
 ablest man in Parliament, was a " dark 
 horse " in the view of his contemporaries. 
 No one felt sure, after he quitted Lord 
 Palmerston's Government in 1855, where 
 he would find refuge ; whether with Mr. 
 Disraeli and Lord Derby, or in the 
 bosom of the Church of Rome. That 
 for some years the Queen had been 
 prejudiced strongly against him was 
 known, but the prejudice had yielded 
 before the pressure exerted by the com- 
 mon friendship of Lord Aberdeen. He, 
 at any rate, appreciated the qualities 
 of his Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
 That Mr. Gladstone would rise to the 
 first place he did not doubt, though it 
 
1 68 THE QUEEN AND vi 
 
 might be gradually and after an interval, 
 when he had turned the hatred of many 
 into affection. *' He will turn it if he 
 has the opportunity given him ; but he 
 must get over his obstinacy, for he is 
 too honest, if a man can be too honest ; 
 and he must attend more to what men 
 think, and as his brother said of him, he 
 must learn to look out of the window." 
 Still he was even then, and it is forty 
 years ago, supreme in the House of 
 Commons ; and Lord Aberdeen added, 
 with the right that his intimacy with 
 the Court gave him to speak — "The 
 Queen has quite got over her feeling 
 against him, and likes him much." It 
 is easy to understand that a constitutional 
 Sovereign who, from a position removed 
 from partisanship, surveys the struggle 
 for power between conflicting factions, 
 sees the good and the bad of both sides, 
 minimising the points of difference 
 in principle between them, should be 
 inclined to side with the Minister whose 
 daily effort to act for the best is vividly 
 brought home to her, rather than with 
 the critic whose opposition appears too 
 constant to be sincere. Mr. Gladstone 
 
VI MR. GLADSTONE 169 
 
 had tried many a fall with Lord Palmer- 
 ston, and their points of difference were 
 vividly present to the mind of the Queen. 
 It seemed to her that Mr. Gladstone, 
 opposed as he was to the Palmerstonian 
 " civis Romanus sum," or as it has in later 
 years been vulgarly called, a "Jingo" 
 policy, raising objections, as he did, to 
 panic, expenditure on fortifications and 
 armaments, was in reality opposed to the 
 expansion of England within her proper 
 sphere, and hesitated to secure to her the 
 full advantages of her maritime position. 
 He may have been then, as since, too 
 eager a critic, too grasping a custodian 
 of the public funds. Whether this was 
 the case or not, Lord Palmerston fanned 
 the flame : — 
 
 Viscount Palmerston hopes to be able to 
 overcome his objections -, but, if that should 
 prove impossible, however great the loss to the 
 Government by the retirement of Mr. Glad- 
 stone, it would be better to lose Mr. Gladstone 
 than to run the risk of losing Portsmouth and 
 Plymouth. 
 
 And again — 
 
 Mr. Gladstone told Viscount Palmerston 
 this evening that he wished it to be under- 
 
1 70 THE QUEEN AND vi 
 
 stood that though acquiescing in the step now 
 taken about the fortifications, he kept himself 
 free to take such course as he may think fit 
 upon that subject next year ; to which Vis- 
 count Palmerston entirely assented. That 
 course will probably be the same which Mr. 
 Gladstone has taken this year — namely, 
 ineffectual opposition and ultimate acqui- 
 escence. 
 
 Although Lord Palmerston never 
 stood in the estimation of the Queen in 
 the place of Peel, he was nevertheless 
 Prime Minister, and his words carried 
 weight, and his satire told. 
 
 For ten years Mr. Gladstone's position 
 was curious and unique. He was called, 
 in spite of Lord Palmerston's presence 
 and popularity, the first man in Parlia- 
 ment, although he was not the leader 
 of the House. He was acknowledged 
 to be supreme in debate, and to be the 
 highest authority on finance. He was 
 hated by the aristocracy on account of 
 his democratic budgets. He was mis- 
 trusted by many because of his High 
 Church sympathies, and even "his friends 
 lived in dread of his virtues." In the 
 eyes of the Sovereign he represented a 
 turbulent and critical element within the 
 
VI MR, GLADSTONE 171 
 
 Ministry itself, a Ministry upon which 
 the Queen, together with the large 
 majority of her people, relied as the 
 only administration likely to be safe and 
 durable. 
 
 He was, in short, an enfant terrible 
 in the world of politics, and as it became 
 clear to every one that a time was rapidly 
 approaching when he must become the 
 Leader of the House of Commons, if 
 not of the Government, no one, from 
 the Queen to the Tadpoles and Tapers 
 of the Liberal Party, looked forward to 
 that time without a feeling of dismay. 
 
 With the Oxford election and the 
 death of Lord Palmerston in 1865, the 
 first half of Mr. Gladstone's political 
 career closed, and henceforward he took 
 his place at the head of the Liberal party 
 unfettered, and, as he himself expressed 
 it, unmuzzled. Driven from Oxford — 
 Oxford that he had " loved with a deep 
 and passionate love" — he felt himself 
 free ; and from that moment his suprem- 
 acy over the Party, to which at last, after 
 many years of doubt and hesitation, he 
 finally belonged, was unquestioned. When 
 " old Palmerston was seen to be break- 
 
172 THE QUEEN AND vi 
 
 ing," it was almost universally believed 
 that his successor would be Mr. Gladstone, 
 although some doubts and fears prevailed 
 that, "having gone a certain way with 
 the Radicals, he would on some Church 
 measure wheel round and break wholly 
 with them." 
 
 The Queen had been slowly recover- 
 ing from the great catastrophe of her 
 life. The Palmerstonian rule, accepted 
 by Parliament and the country as a sort 
 of pax Victoriana, had been of much 
 service to the Queen. Lord Palmerston's 
 great age and long experience soothed 
 the first years of bitter loss. The distrust 
 — to use a mild word — felt by Lord 
 Palmerston for his Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer could not fail to bias the 
 mind of the Queen. That office was 
 one which brought the holder of it into 
 slight contact with the Sovereign, so that 
 the opportunity vouchsafed to Mr. Glad- 
 stone of counteracting by personal influ- 
 ence the hostility of the Prime Minister 
 was small. It cannot, therefore, be a 
 matter of surprise that when the long 
 truce came to an end, in view of the 
 pent-up democratic flood at home and 
 
VI MR, GLADSTONE 173 
 
 lowering clouds abroad, the Queen should 
 have turned, not to Mr. Gladstone, but 
 " to no other than Lord Russell, an old 
 and tried friend of hers, to undertake 
 the arduous duties of Prime Minister, 
 and to carry on the Government." 
 
 Mr. Gladstone had anticipated the 
 Queen's decision, and had taken the 
 unusual step of writing to Lord Russell, 
 offering, though sore with conflict, to 
 continue to serve in the capacity of 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was a 
 kindly and thoughtful offer, smoothing 
 the way for an administration, which he 
 felt could not be wholly a continuation, 
 but inevitably a fresh commencement. 
 The centre of gravity in the new Govern- 
 ment was misplaced, and it was without 
 the elements of stability. The Prime 
 Minister was a peer, old and frail, while 
 the Leader of the House of Commons 
 was, in the words of the Prime Minister 
 himself, " in eloquence equal to Canning, 
 and in integrity fit to be compared with 
 Lord Althorp," In power of develop- 
 ing the most abstruse proposition, and 
 embracing at once, in his large capacity, 
 the most logical demonstrations, with 
 
174 THE QUEEN AND vi 
 
 the most captivating and dazzling rhe- 
 toric, Lord Russell's lieutenant had never 
 possessed a superior. If the elder states- 
 man could not then refuse the appeal, 
 pathetic and tempting, once more to 
 take the first place among the Queen's 
 advisers, he knew well that the day was 
 only postponed for a short time when 
 the younger, already the first man in 
 Parliament, would become the First Min- 
 ister of the Crown. 
 
 I felt, said Lord Russell, when the time 
 came, that boldness, which, according to Lord 
 Bacon, is the first quality of a statesman, was 
 required as the primary quality for dealing 
 with the Irish Church, and that no man could 
 dispute the pre-eminence in that quality of 
 Mr. Gladstone. 
 
 Even so faithful a friend as Bishop 
 Wilberforce believed that Mr. Gladstone 
 had been ^' drawn into" his attack on 
 the Irish Church by personal hatred of 
 Mr. Disraeli, and desire to eject him 
 from office ; yet it should have been 
 obvious to him, at any rate, that Mr. 
 Gladstone's conversion to the whole body 
 of Liberal opinion was no arbitrary act, 
 but, as he himself described it, the " slow 
 
VI MR. GLADSTONE 175 
 
 and resistless force " of growing convic- 
 tion. The process had certainly been 
 slow. It was fourteen years from the 
 death of Peel before Mr. Gladstone finally 
 threw in his lot with the party he was 
 destined to lead in triumph and storm 
 for a generation. It is on this very 
 question of the Irish Church that the 
 relation between the Queen and Mr. 
 Gladstone can best be exemplified ; an 
 object-lesson in constitutional govern- 
 ment to her successors, and to those 
 rulers who preside over constitutions 
 modelled upon ours. Of her own feel- 
 ing in regard to the Irish Church we 
 have a record in the words of the Queen 
 herself. Bishop Wilberforce had accom- 
 panied Mr. Gladstone to Windsor, when 
 he went to kiss hands on his appointment 
 as Prime Minister. 
 
 " Mr. Gladstone is a friend of yours," 
 the Queen said to him in colloquial 
 phrase. '' I am sorry he has started this 
 about the Irish Church." The great 
 policy on behalf of which her Prime 
 Minister had fought the General Election, 
 and to carry out which he had been given 
 a majority in Parliament by the people, 
 
176 THE QUEEN AND vi 
 
 was clearly not a policy which com- 
 mended itself to the Queen, who — 
 although the most constitutional Sove- 
 reign this country has ever known, liberal 
 in sympathy, and loyal to her Ministers, 
 whatever their party — has claimed for 
 herself, and cannot be denied, the human 
 right of private judgment, and has never 
 forgotten that she is the granddaughter of 
 George the Third. Mr. Gladstone, how- 
 ever, fared better than Mr. Pitt. On ist 
 March 1 869 he introduced the first of his 
 great Irish measures to the House of 
 Commons. Already in the early part of 
 February the Queen had been made 
 acquainted with the lines of the Bill. She 
 was aware of the strong and hostile feel- 
 ing of the English prelates and of the 
 Conservative party in the House of Lords. 
 The Primacy had recently passed under 
 the auspices of Mr. Disraeli into the 
 hands of a statesman endowed with 
 prudence and courage almost as high as 
 those of Mr. Gladstone himself. To 
 Archbishop Tait the Queen appealed in 
 a letter full of care for the lofty interests 
 she had sworn by her coronation oath to 
 guard. 
 
VI MR. GLADSTONE 177 
 
 Osborne, 15M February 1869. 
 
 "The Queen must write a few lines to 
 the Archbishop of Canterbury on the subject 
 of the Irish Church, which makes her very- 
 anxious. 
 
 . . . The Queen has seen Mr. Gladstone, 
 who shows the most conciliatory disposition. 
 He seems to be really moderate in his views, 
 and anxious, so far as he can properly and 
 consistently do so, to meet the objections of 
 those who would maintain the Irish Church. 
 He at once assured the Queen of his readiness 
 — indeed, his anxiety — to meet the Arch- 
 bishop and to communicate freely with him 
 on the subject of this important question, and 
 the Queen must express her earnest hope that 
 the Archbishop will meet him in the same 
 spirit. The Government can do nothing that 
 would tend to raise a suspicion of their sin- 
 cerity in proposing to disestablish the Irish 
 Church, and to withdraw all State endow- 
 ments from all religious communions in 
 Ireland ; but, were these conditions accepted, 
 all other matters connected with the question 
 might, the Queen thinks, become the subject 
 of discussion and negotiation. The Arch- 
 bishop had best now communicate with Mr, 
 Gladstone direct as to when he can see him. 
 
 To the Archbishop the request to 
 act as mediator was not unwelcome. 
 
 N 
 
178 THE QUEEN AND vi 
 
 He immediately sought an interview 
 with Mr. Gladstone. The Prime 
 Minister explained that he had not felt 
 warranted in approaching the Primate 
 or others of whom he knew nothing, 
 except the adverse opinions declared and 
 acted upon by them in the preceding 
 summer. This lack on his part the 
 Queen had kindly undertaken to remove, 
 and he would call at Lambeth Palace on 
 the morrow. It was a memorable inter- 
 view between two men, either of whom 
 was well qualified by natural aptitudes 
 and congenial tastes to stand in the place 
 of the other. It led ultimately to the 
 passing of the Irish Church Bill through 
 both Houses of Parliament ; although 
 the Queen had yet once again to appeal 
 to the Archbishop for assistance, before 
 the House of Lords yielded an assent to 
 the measure. General Grey wrote by 
 the Queen's command. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone is not ignorant (indeed the 
 Queen has never concealed her feelings on 
 the subject) how deeply H.M. deplores the 
 necessity under which he conceived himself to 
 lie of raising the question as he has done, or 
 of the apprehensions, of which she cannot 
 
VI MR. GLADSTONE ijc) 
 
 divest herself, as to the possible consequences 
 of the measure which he has introduced. 
 
 These apprehensions, H.M. is bound to 
 say, still exist in full force. But considering 
 the circumstances under which the measure 
 has come to the House of Lords, the Queen 
 cannot regard, without the greatest alarm, 
 the probable effect of its absolute rejection in 
 that House. 
 
 The Archbishop's task was far from 
 easy. He appealed to Mr. Disraeli, and 
 in the Queen's name expressed a strong 
 hope that the Bill might be read a second 
 time in the House of Lords. Successful 
 at this stage, an embittered controversy 
 over the Lords' amendments threatened 
 to wreck the measure. Once more the 
 Queen intervened. 
 
 Windsor Castle, nth July 1869. 
 
 The Queen thanks the Archbishop very 
 much for his letter. She is very sensible of 
 the prudence and at the same time the anxiety 
 for the welfare of the Irish Establishment 
 which the Archbishop has manifested in his 
 conduct throughout the debates, and she will 
 be very glad if the amendments which have 
 been adopted at his suggestion lead to the 
 settlement of the question ; but to effect this. 
 
i8o J HE QUEEN AND vi 
 
 concessions, the Queen believes, will still have 
 to be made on both sides. The Queen must 
 say that she cannot viev^ without alarm the 
 possible consequences of another year of agita- 
 tion on the Irish Church, and she would ask 
 the Archbishop seriously to consider, in case 
 the concessions to which the Government 
 may agree should not go so far as he may 
 himself wish, whether the postponement of 
 the settlement for another year would not be 
 likely to result in worse rather than in better 
 terms for the Church. The Queen trusts, 
 therefore, that the Archbishop will himself 
 consider, and, as far as he can, endeavour 
 to induce others to consider, any concessions 
 that may be offered by the House of 
 Commons, in the most conciHatory spirit. . . . 
 
 The compromise was, however, finally 
 settled, and when the Bill passed, the 
 Primate records with gratitude in his 
 Journal the " great blessing " which the 
 Queen's interest in the welfare of her 
 people ever confers upon the nation ; for 
 whatever has been done to secure a fair 
 compromise between conflicting interests, 
 and to avoid a great parliamentary crisis, 
 " thanks to the Queen " are due. The 
 episode depicts in striking colours the 
 bright function of a constitutional 
 
VI MR, GLADSTONE i8i 
 
 Sovereign. The right of private opinion 
 neither denied nor concealed ; perfect 
 loyalty to a Minister whose policy is un- 
 congenial; no attempt at intrigue with 
 the Opposition in Parliament ; but an 
 open and successful mediation between 
 the Minister and his opponents, smooth- 
 ing the path of a great measure of 
 popular change, which, although disliked 
 by her, was approved by the majority of 
 the nation. No object-lesson in demo- 
 cratic monarchy could be more con- 
 clusive than this, nor a stronger proof 
 given of prudence in a Monarch and of 
 self-control in a Minister. 
 
 It is typical too of the relation for 
 many years between the Queen and the 
 first of her subjects in power and 
 authority. The instance could be 
 varied, but the lesson would read in 
 much the same terms. A Greville might 
 in these later years have heard much 
 with which to fill a gossip's record of 
 the chit-chat of the lobby and the Palace. 
 There were moments of storm in Mr. 
 Gladstone's life, when the popular favour 
 seemed as little secured to him as the 
 smiles of the Court. Driven from the 
 
1 82 THE QUEEN AND vi 
 
 University he loved, rejected in Lanca- 
 shire, humiliated at Greenwich, it re- 
 quired all the manly courage and racial 
 pluck of the best type of Englishman to 
 face on a wild autumn afternoon over 
 20,000 disaffected constituents on Black- 
 heath, and to beat down by force of 
 earnest eloquence their murmurs and 
 threats ; it required also the dignity of 
 character and tradition inherited from a 
 long line of predecessors in office silently 
 to accept the rebuke, possibly not un- 
 merited, conveyed by the Queen to her 
 Minister in the letter published by Miss 
 Gordon at the commencement of her 
 brother's correspondence. If the Queen 
 was reluctant in 1880 to accept as her 
 First Minister the statesman who had 
 been designated, only a few months before, 
 by earnest Liberals as a " comet got loose 
 and dashing about the political firma- 
 ment," it must be remembered that six 
 years earlier that same statesman, grown 
 old in the service of the people, had 
 been ignominiously driven by them from 
 power. If the Queen ever said in a 
 moment of wrath, "I am no longer 
 Queen ; Mr. Gladstone is King," it 
 
VI MR, GLADSTONE 183 
 
 must not be forgotten that the people 
 for whose sake he had given up the 
 peace of his days broke his windows in 
 Harley Street. If in that hour of up- 
 heaval in 1886, the Queen wept at part- 
 ing from her Tory Ministers, and shrank 
 from the meeting with ;Mr. Gladstone, 
 she only reflected the feelings of those 
 who a few months afterwards hurled 
 him, as he himself expressed it, with con- 
 tumely from office. 
 
 Loyalty within the lines of the con- 
 stitution is required from a Sovereign ; 
 but even a Queen may be permitted to 
 hold if not to express opinions, and to 
 feel if not to show preferences. 
 
 Human nature is weak at times, in 
 Monarchs as well as in Democracies, and 
 if the Queen ultimately parted without 
 poignant regret from the Minister who 
 had served the Crown more effectually 
 than any other statesman of the century, 
 it may be remembered with what a sigh 
 of contentment and relief on the retire- 
 ment of Mr. Pitt George the Third threw 
 himself into the arms of Addington. 
 
 The personal service rendered by Mr. 
 Gladstone to the Crown has been grate- 
 
1 84 THE QUEEN JND vi 
 
 fully credited to him by his opponents 
 as a redeeming virtue, and admitted 
 laughingly as an amiable vice by his 
 friends. Never by word in public or in 
 private has he been known to reflect on 
 the Throne or on the Sovereign. Brought 
 up under the "shadow of the great 
 name '' of Canning, he remembered the 
 example of that statesman. Possibly he 
 recalls how on a summer's day nearly 
 seventy years ago Canning rode down to 
 Eton from the Cottage in Windsor 
 Park, where he was staying with the 
 King, found his son Carlo " staying out " 
 and gossiping with Hallam and Glad- 
 stone — three notable figures — over a 
 division in " Pop " in which the Morning 
 Chronicle had been retained for that 
 assembly, " in spite of reporting Prize 
 Fights," by the casting vote of Gladstone, 
 and had told the boys that he " could not 
 stay for Ascot races, as he did not think 
 it right that a subject should be cheered 
 in the presence of his Sovereign." 
 
 The lesson and the queer punctilio of 
 it may have made an indelible impression, 
 for although ardent in competing for 
 popular favour against political rivals, 
 
VI MR. GLADSTONE 185 
 
 Mr. Gladstone has never attempted to 
 overshadow the popularity of the Crown. 
 Acting with Peel, by timely concession 
 in the great Corn Law quarrel, Mr. 
 Gladstone saved the Throne from the 
 conflicts, possibly from the disasters, of 
 the year 1848. When in recent years 
 of stress and trouble, a word from him 
 would have rallied all the forces of his 
 party against unpopular grants to the 
 Queen s children and relatives, Mr. 
 Gladstone has been found placing his 
 most fervid and impassioned eloquence 
 at the service of the Crown. His feeling 
 towards the Monarchy is described by 
 himself in a letter which reads with 
 peculiar sadness now, written to Prince 
 Albert Victor on attaining his majority 
 in January 1885. 
 
 There lies before your Royal Highness in 
 prospect the occupation, I trust at a distant 
 date, of a throne which, to me at least, 
 appears the most illustrious in the world, 
 from its history and associations, from its 
 legal basis, from the weight of the cares it 
 brings, from the loyal love of the people, and 
 from the unparalleled opportunities it gives, 
 in so many ways and in so many regions, of 
 doing good to the almost countless numbers 
 
1 86 THE QUEEN JND vi 
 
 whom the Almighty has placed beneath the 
 sceptre of England. 
 
 Not the most loud-mouthed Im- 
 perialism could express in more trenchant 
 and telling words respect for the throne 
 of Elizabeth and the England of Mr. 
 Pitt. As a man but one judgment can 
 be formed by posterity of Mr. Gladstone ; 
 as a Minister there may be many. Like 
 Mr. Pitt he was a peace Minister, and war 
 was to both men a cause of disaster and 
 failure. Like Mr. Pitt he conceived a 
 great and noble policy for Ireland ; and 
 while Mr. Pitt allowed his complete 
 scheme to be wrecked by the scruples 
 of the crowned King of England, Mr. 
 Gladstone permitted his to be maimed by 
 the frailty of the uncrowned King of 
 Ireland. 
 
 Neither concession appears to have 
 been necessary, but it must have required 
 all Mr. Gladstone's Homeric lore and 
 reverence to enable him to bear up against 
 the ill-luck of his failure and the dis- 
 appointment of his hopes. Pluck, how- 
 ever, is a quality which has never failed 
 him. On the 4th December 18 90, in 
 
VI MR. GLADSTONE 187 
 
 the middle of the crisis that was destined 
 to wreck his great policy, he was seen 
 sitting quietly in the Library of the House 
 of Commons reading the Bride of Lam- 
 mermoor. To some this might seem 
 the calm of indifference, but not to those 
 who heard the deep pathos with which 
 he said, " For the past five years I have 
 rolled this stone patiently uphill, and it 
 has now rolled to the bottom again ; and 
 I am eighty-one years old." 
 
 In relation to those who have had 
 personal intercourse with him a peculiar- 
 ity of his must never be forgotten. 
 There is a certain transcendental aloof- 
 ness about Mr. Gladstone's manner 
 with individual men, which creates an 
 impression, probably well founded, that 
 he regards the matter of speech as of far 
 more importance than the speaker him- 
 self. Very few can have watched him 
 closely without arriving at the unflattering 
 conclusion that, within limits, his opinion 
 equalises more or less all men. If he 
 has been considered an indifferent judge 
 of men's capacities ; and . if patronage — 
 which was not ecclesiastical — he has 
 ignored with the lofty coldness of superior 
 
1 88 THE QUEEN AND vi 
 
 minds, to his friends, at any rate to those 
 who had served him, he was loyal ; and 
 he never swerved from selecting for ofBce 
 those whom he knew, in preference to 
 those of whom he was personally ignorant. 
 In 1880, when a strong effort was made 
 to induce him to admit into the Cabinet 
 *' new blood " as it was called, his reluct- 
 ance to part with old colleagues was only 
 in one instance with the greatest difficulty 
 overcome. " The next most serious 
 thing to admitting a man into the 
 Cabinet," he said, "is to leave out a 
 man who has once been a member of 
 that body." He had as little idea of 
 cheapening the office as he had of the 
 claims of younger men, because they 
 happened to make clever speeches, or 
 were written up in the Press. 
 
 These traits are possibly the leaven of 
 early associations, and the outcome of his 
 Conservative sympathies, but if — as Lord 
 Randolph Churchill said — Mr. Gladstone 
 is found to be in his prime somewhere 
 about the middle of the next century, he 
 will still without doubt exhibit prefer- 
 ences for old friends rather than for new 
 ones, still lament the laxity of costume 
 
VI MR. GLADSTONE 189 
 
 in the House of Commons, and denounce 
 Speaker Abercromby for permitting 
 members to dine with him in plain 
 evening dress, and still hold Sir Walter 
 Scott to be the superior of all novelists. 
 Whatever their differences on questions of 
 high policy, Mr. Gladstone's prejudices 
 — if the word describes them — must 
 have met with friendly recognition by 
 the Queen. To the throne of England, 
 the most illustrious throne in the world, 
 as he called it — his Conservative sym- 
 pathies have clung ; and the occupant of 
 that throne would have been false to her 
 own record had she not appreciated the 
 extent of the loss to the Sovereign and 
 to the nation when Mr. Gladstone for 
 the last time left Windsor Castle. 
 
 At the final Cabinet at which he pre- 
 sided, after Lord Kimberley and Sir 
 William Harcourt had attempted to 
 express what all present felt, as his 
 colleagues left the room, Mr. Gladstone's 
 last words, '' God bless you all," spoken 
 in that strong, deep, well -remembered 
 voice, rang in their ears. That blessing, 
 delivered with all the fervour of a mind 
 accustomed to give to every word a full 
 
190 MR. GLADSTONE vi 
 
 value, was not, we may believe, limited 
 to the Council he was about to quit, but 
 extended beyond the room in Downing 
 Street, to the poorest of the wretched 
 peasantry in whose interest he had 
 laboured throughout his long public 
 life, as well as to the Sovereign, whose 
 reign he must to the end of time be con- 
 sidered to adorn, by his prolonged and 
 strenuous efforts on behalf of popular 
 happiness, by the unaffected simplicity 
 of his life, by his dazzling and splendid 
 eloquence, and by his unswerving fidelity 
 to conscience and to God. 
 
VII 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 The best history has been said to be 
 like the art of Rembrandt, casting a 
 vivid light on certain selected causes, 
 and leaving all the rest in shadow. To 
 illustrate a principle, to point the moral 
 of a character, these are the really effective 
 aims of the historian. In the most 
 famous of his sermons Cardinal Newman 
 explained that men are guided by type, 
 not by argument ; that the majority are 
 swayed not so much by the logic of facts 
 as by the idol of the moment ; that men 
 are earnest, economical, and pacific when 
 Mr. Gladstone is the most prominent 
 figure in politics, and frivolous, blatant, 
 and careless when the leader of Parlia- 
 ment chanced to be Lord Palmerston ; 
 and finally, that the truth cannot be so 
 
192 CONCLUSION vii 
 
 effectually propagated by any known 
 means as by personal influence. It is 
 from this point of view that the reign of 
 Queen Victoria, and her relation to her 
 Ministers, become of first-rate import- 
 ance. An exhaustive examination of the 
 character of the Queen, a minute exposi- 
 tion of the policy of her Ministers, are 
 not essential or even necessary for the 
 purpose of explaining this relation, and 
 drawing from it the inference so valuable 
 to students of British Government. Nor 
 is it important nor desirable to attempt 
 to lift the veil of mystery which to a 
 large extent, even in our prying times, 
 conceals from vulgar eyes the influence 
 of the Sovereign. In a great degree 
 mystery and secrecy are vital to the 
 maintenance of royal authority. A mon- 
 archy to be stable should subsist in 
 twilight ; and an Emperor of China 
 possesses a stronger hold on the imagin- 
 ation of his subjects than a bon bourgeois 
 like Louis Philippe of France. Some 
 instinct of this kind has guided the steps 
 of the Queen throughout her reign ; so 
 that, in spite of her simple tastes of sym- 
 pathy more freely given to the poor than 
 
VII CONCLUSION 193 
 
 to the mighty, and of the light which by 
 her own pubhshed books she has thrown 
 on the domestic life of the Court, she 
 has nevertheless contrived to conceal 
 from the public the nature of the power 
 wielded for so many years over her 
 Ministers, as well as the influence she 
 has exercised over social and political 
 events. The Queen has unconsciously 
 managed by her daily life and by her 
 publications to pique rather than to satisfy 
 curiosity ; and this is one of the secrets 
 of the regard for her felt not only by 
 her subjects, but by the peoples of both 
 hemispheres. No living Sovereign exer- 
 cises over the minds of men and women 
 of diverse races so powerful a sway. Not 
 only her own subjects, but the children of 
 every clime have yielded respect to the 
 character of the Queen. Thus it happens 
 that her reign has established precedents 
 for her successors to which they will 
 have as far as possible to conform. To 
 use a modern phrase, the necessity will 
 be enforced upon them of living up to 
 her example. This will be no easy 
 matter ; for the Queen has been singu- 
 larly true to herself, and her life, regu- 
 o 
 
VII CONCLUSION 195 
 
 legislative chamber, are the terrestrial 
 ideals of these people ; and the Queen, by 
 her personal example and in her political 
 capacity, has fulfilled them. If from 
 the Reform Bill of 1832 to the retire- 
 ment of Mr. Gladstone in 1894 the 
 Puritan middle classes have governed 
 England, they have certainly no cause 
 to complain of the sympathetic response 
 of the Sovereign to their views and de- 
 mands. A high standard of virtue had 
 not been hitherto characteristic of the 
 British Hanoverian Court. George the 
 Third had, it is true, endeared himself 
 to the people by his simple domestic 
 life, but the conduct of the Prince Regent 
 altogether destroyed the use of the Court 
 as an example for the people. The two 
 first Georges flaunted their mistresses as 
 openly as any Stuart, while William the 
 Fourth had fathered and ennobled a tribe 
 of illegitimate children. Although in their 
 vices the Guelphs have never displayed 
 the picturesque gallantry of the Stuarts 
 — a family in which political virtue ever 
 varied in inverse ratio to moral conduct, 
 — England, in spite of cheap satire, owes 
 a large debt to the solid virtues of the 
 o 2 
 
196 CONCLUSION VII 
 
 Hanoverian House which has presided 
 over the making of the Empire, and 
 culminated in the reign of Queen Vic-, 
 toria. Hanover, under auspicious Provi- 
 dence, gave England a king who could 
 not speak a word of English, and laid 
 firmly in royal unintelligibility the found- 
 ation of popular rule. Walpole governed 
 while George the First reigned, and after 
 Walpole came Pitt, and after the father 
 came the son, and after Mr. Pitt came 
 the Reformed Parliament, and the govern- 
 ment of England by the English people. 
 No man, not even a king, can give 
 to the problems of Statecraft more under- 
 standing than he possesses, so that the 
 conduct of this line of monarchs should 
 be judged reasonably ; and then, after 
 due consideration, fair minds will accord 
 to them a high place in the service roll 
 of English ruling families. Just as 
 Elizabeth rounded off and set a seal on 
 the fame of that Tudor race under which 
 England became one of the first Euro- 
 pean powers, so Queen Victoria has 
 rounded off and set a seal on the line 
 under which England has become a 
 world-wide Empire. Just as the char- 
 
VII CONCLUSION 197 
 
 acter and rule of Elizabeth would have 
 made impossible the rule of Mary of 
 Scotland, so the character and rule of 
 Queen Victoria have set a high standard 
 below which it will be impossible for 
 a monarch to fall without personal 
 disaster. The example of Elizabeth 
 led by clear and well-defined steps to the 
 fatal scene in Whitehall, and Charles the 
 First was both victim and example of the 
 sense of contrast in the eyes of a people 
 prone to idealise. The men who led the 
 great rebellion had been taught in boy- 
 hood to venerate the figure of the Tudor 
 Queen under whom England had become 
 a mighty power, whose word could be 
 trusted, and who guarded jealously the 
 Protestant faith. In Charles the First they 
 unwillingly admitted to themselves that 
 the antithesis was to be found of these 
 qualities, a discovery fatal both to his 
 authority and to his rule. In like manner 
 future monarchs will have to beware of 
 the example of Queen Victoria. 
 
 Out of the slough of the Regency 
 the Queen and Prince Albert raised the 
 Court of England to the first place 
 among nations. For twenty years the 
 
198 CONCLUSION VII 
 
 loftiest example of domestic and public 
 virtue was conspicuous on the Throne. 
 Upon society the effect was instant- 
 aneous, and the decorous behaviour of 
 the Court led, if not to virtue, at any 
 rate to the concealment of vices which 
 had been previously openly flaunted. 
 Paternity was no longer a matter of 
 speculation. Among men and women 
 of noble birth born during the first thirty 
 years of the century, a considerable 
 proportion were illegitimate or notori- 
 ously of doubtful parentage. During 
 the next generation the mysteries of 
 the "alcove" were a well-kept secret, 
 and suspicions — if they existed — never 
 degenerated into common gossip ; so 
 that men and women now living in 
 high society between the ages of thirty 
 and sixty are conspicuous by their 
 assumption of legitimacy, and by their 
 freedom from suspicion of ambiguous 
 fatherhood. Of the succeeding genera- 
 tion it is too early to express an opinion. 
 Possibly the study of statistics would 
 not expose any great divergence in the 
 morals of the people at large judged 
 by the test of the bar sinister ; but 
 
VII CONCLUSION 199 
 
 statistics deal with humanity in masses 
 and with the great forces which govern 
 civilised and barbarous mankind, among 
 which the example of a Court occupies 
 a trifling place. So that between the 
 acts and pretences of Britons a wide 
 gulf lies open, and statistics count for 
 very little in the eyes of writers in 
 newspapers, or of speakers at public 
 meetings. Popular opinion stereotyped 
 in mob oratory and the morning papers 
 has decided that the Victorian type is 
 essential to kingship, and under the 
 fiercer light which beats nowadays on 
 every step of the throne, no departure 
 from that type could be undertaken with 
 impunity. It was said of George the 
 Third and his Court that they were not in 
 Society, and the same remark might by 
 cavillers be applied to the Court of 
 Queen Victoria since December 1861 ; 
 but unlike George the Third, whose late 
 life sank into Shakespearian gloom, the 
 Queen has ever conspicuously main- 
 tained her high moral attitude of bene- 
 volence, of personal sympathy in sorrow, 
 of tender gratitude for public service, 
 of tender regard for misfortune, pain, 
 
200 CONCLUSION vn 
 
 or death in the meanest of her subjects. 
 To the English-speaking peoples all 
 over the world she has stood in the 
 relation of a mother to her children. 
 Queen Elizabeth, even in old age, to 
 use the suggestive language of romance, 
 was the mistress of every one of her 
 subjects ; Queen Victoria has been and 
 is the veritable mother of her people. 
 
 If in the domain of moral conduct 
 a notable example has been set by the 
 Queen, her constitutional behaviour has 
 established a series of precedents which 
 cannot fail to guide her successors. 
 These resolve themselves naturally 
 under two heads, into her exercise of 
 the royal prerogative, and into her 
 personal relation to her Ministers. 
 
 It is a common mistake to assume 
 that because the prerogatives of the 
 Crown have apparently lain dormant 
 for over half- a -century, they have 
 ceased to be reckoned a factor of the 
 constitution. No experienced Minister 
 would be guilty of ignoring this silent 
 force imperceptibly swaying the tides of 
 political life. The Queen has never 
 once during her long reign exercised 
 
VII CONCLUSION 201 
 
 her prerogative in a coercive or revolu- 
 tionary spirit. She has never dissolved 
 Parliament except in accordance with the 
 advice of her Ministers, or dismissed from 
 her counsels advisers who commanded 
 a majority in the House of Commons. 
 
 The dismissal of the Whig Govern- 
 ment in 1834 by William the Fourth, an 
 act futile of consequences, has not been 
 imitated by the Queen ; nor has she, 
 like her uncle, threatened to overcome 
 the resistance of one branch of the 
 legislature and to redress the balance 
 of parties by the creation of Peers. 
 On all occasions when parties have 
 clashed, or the Houses of Parliament 
 have differed, the present Sovereign has 
 been content to exercise the influence 
 of reason in the direction of compro- 
 mise, and where this was impossible, 
 has left the arbitration to the electorate. 
 
 It is impossible at the present time, 
 with however light a hand, to touch 
 upon the relation of the Queen to the 
 present Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, 
 or to discuss the short period of Lord 
 Rosebery's rule. That the influence 
 of the Sovereign upon her Ministers 
 
202 CONCLUSION 
 
 VII 
 
 has diminished, neither of them would 
 probably assert, nor has the loyalty 
 with which the support of the Crown 
 was accorded to them in turn been in 
 any degree lessened from that which 
 supported Peel through the troublous 
 Corn Law days. 
 
 Queen Victoria's rule has extended 
 over a longer period, day for day, than 
 that of any British Sovereign ; and dur- 
 ing the whole of that long reign she has 
 exhibited to her people qualities hitherto 
 unassociated with the name of King or 
 Queen — qualities of heart which have 
 endeared her not only to her own 
 people, but to millions to whom her 
 name stands for every womanly virtue, 
 and qualities of mind which not only 
 have enabled her to guide and sustain 
 a long series of the ablest Englishmen 
 engaged in the task of ruling, but 
 have set such a mark upon the history 
 of her country, that constitutional 
 Monarchy must be for ever associated 
 with her reign, and mainly founded 
 upon her example. 
 
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