subject of the approach of a great religious struggle-a kind of Papal-Protestant Armageddon. The Queen, without being giddy, was gay. Lord Melbourne was the last man in the world to inspire her with religious fanaticism. He was genial, easygoing, indifferent. To exchange him for Sir Robert Peel, with all his ill manners, his sombre, serious ways, and his anti-Papal forebodings, was almost more than she could bear. But to have to put up with Peel in the Closet, and Ashley in the Household, was really asking too much. Yet it was this, and nothing short of this, that confronted her when she refused to part with the Ladies of the Bedchamber. But this is anticipating.

When the Queen received Sir Robert Peel she told him that she regretted the outgoing Ministers, and added, "You must not expect me to give up the society of Lord Melbourne." Peel acquiesced, not ungraciously. Then she said she hoped there would be no dissolution of Parliament. Peel demurred, with some surprise: it might be impossible to carry on without a dissolution. Then he began to talk of 'some modification of the Ladies of the Household." "The Queen stopped him at once, and declared she would not part with any of them." But at that first interview Sir Robert Peel failed to realise how keenly the Queen felt on the subject. "She received him," says Greville" (though she dislikes him) extremely well, and he was perfectly satisfied." Next day he sent for Lord Ashley, and from the record of their interview, transcribed from the diary of the latter in Hodder's "Life of the Earl of Shaftesbury," it is evident that he had no idea from that first conversation how determined the Queen was that he should not interfere with her ladies. The extract is as follows:

"On morning of 9th May (Thursday) received letter from Peel desiring my instant attendance. Went thither... he opened conversation by saying that the sense of his responsibility weighed him down. Here am I,' added he, called on to consider the construction of the Queen's Household, and I wish very much to have your free and confidential advice on the subject. I remember that I am to provide the attendants and companions of this young woman, on whose moral and religious character depends the welfare of millions of human beings. What shall I do? I wish to have those around her who will be, to the country and myself, a guarantee that the tone and temper of their character and conversation will tend to her moral improvement. The formation of a Cabinet, the appointment to public offices, is easy enough; it is a trifle compared to the difficulties and necessities of this part of my business. Now,' said he, will you assist me ? Will you take a place in the Queen's household? Your character is such in the country, you are so connected with the religious societies and the religion of the country, you are so well known, and enjoy so high a reputation, that you can do more than any I am ashamed,' he added with emphasis, to ask such a thing of you; I know how unworthy any place about Court is of you; but you see what my position is.”

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Lord Ashley, instead of being complimented at this proposal to make him keeper of the morals and religion of the Court and the Queen, "felt his vanity not a little wounded a life at Court I had ever contemplated with the utmost horror." The offer, in his eyes, "involved the absolute and painful sacrifice of everything I valued in public and private life." . . . " Nevertheless," he told Peel, "that as I believed the interests, temporal and eternal, of many millions to be wrapped up in the success of his Administration, and no man should live for himself alone, but should do his duty in that state of life to which it should please God to call him, I would, if he really and truly thought I could serve his purpose, accept, if he wished it, the office of Chief Scullion." "I thought he would have burst into tears."

Sir Robert Peel with Lord Ashley, the destined custodian of the faith and morals of the Court, then drove off together to Buckingham Palace, and on their way down they talked over the Ladies of the Bedchamber, agreeing to do no more than was absolutely necessary. They parted at the Palace gates. But inside the Palace the statesman found his Sovereign in no mood to submit to his interference with her

women.

F

"Your Majesty," said Peel, "must consider your Ladies in the same light as your Lords."

"No," she answered with quick decisiveness, "I have Lords besides, and these I give up to you."

Peel, dismayed at the resolute refusal, implored her not to be precipitate. Would Her Majesty see the Duke of Wellington?

Certainly. Her Majesty did not shrink from seeing anybody, and having it out with them there and then.

The white-headed Duke came, but this time it was not he who held Hugoumont. It was in vain he laid down the law.

"SUSANNAH AND THE ELDERS.

The Queen riding with Lord Melbourne and Sir Robert Peel. From a picture in the possession of the Hon. Reginald Brett.)

The Queen had made up her mind and stuck to it.

Sir Robert Peel returned. He tried to explain that he would not dream of making sweeping changes. But there were some great ladies of the household who were almost as much political personages as their husbands. Lady Normanton, for instance, was so closely related to the Irish Viceroy and Irish Secretary, that it was necessary that she at least must go. He could not, he said, when accepting office without a majority, at the same time allow the world to see a Court entirely officered by ladies whose husbands were his strongest political opponents. The Queen, however, appeared to think she must take her stand on principle, and not one Woman of the Bedchamber would she give up. Peel begged her not to be precipitate, and withdrew. After leaving her to consider his proposition calmly he returned. "Three successive times did he see her," says Lord Ashley. But Her Majesty stood to her guns, and Peel withdrew.

Then the Queen sat down, and wrote a note to Lord Melbourne:-" Do not fear," she said, "that I was not calm and composed. They wanted to deprive me of my Ladies, and I suppose they would deprive me next of my dressers and housemaids; they wished to treat me like a girl, but I will show them that I am Queen of England."

The Cabinet was hurriedly summoned. Lord Grey recalled a precedent of 1830 when he left the Ladies of the Bedchamber undisturbed. Lord John Russell was anxious and eager to support the Queen. Lord Spencer said that as gentlemen they could not do other than stand by the Queen. Lord Melbourne, "unwilling to abandon his Sovereign in a situation of difficulty and distress," agreed with his colleagues to advise the Queen to inform Sir Robert Peel that—

"The Queen having considered the proposals made to her yesterday by Sir Robert Peel to remove the Ladies of the Bedchamber, cannot consent to a course which she considers to be contrary to usage and is repugnant to her feelings."

This message was promptly transmitted to Sir Robert Peel, who there and then threw up the task of forming a Governmeut. When Lord Melbourne and Lord John went to see the Queen, she told them her whole story. The narrative lasted an hour, and at its close the Queen said, "I have stood by you; you must now stand by me."

And stand by her they did. They said frankly that the principle for which the Queen contended was not maintainable, but they were bound as gentlemen, when the Queen had recourse to them, to support her.

So Lord Melbourne came back to office to remain Prime Minister two years longer; years during which was accomplished the most momentous event of his administration, the marrying the Queen to Prince Albert. That was a supremely important task; much more important than the accession of Sir Robert Peel to power in 1839 instead of 1841.

The Queen was constitutionally in the wrong. She afterwards frankly admitted it. "No one was to blame," she said, "but myself. It was my own foolishness." But considering that Sir Robert Peel intended to put her Court in charge of Lord Ashley, was she not justified by the event?

Lord Ashley was an excellent man, but in his eyes the Prince Consort would have been unacceptable as a German Rationalist. A man who in his old age could publicly declare that so innocent a book as Professor Secley's "Ecce Homo" was the worst book vomited from the mouth of Hell, would have decidedly been in the wrong place when the important business of the wooing of the Neologian was on the carpet. Read what Lord Ashley wrote a week after the crisis was over, and say whether it was not a premonitory instinct of self-preservation which led the Queen to ward off this Hot

Gospeller as major domo and Ministerial representative on the eve of her courtship and

marriage :

"Dined last night at the Palace. I cannot but love the Queen, she is so kind and good to me and mine; I do love her and will serve her; it is a duty and a pleasure-a duty to her and to God. Poor soul! she was low-spirited; I do deeply feel for her. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.' Oh, that she knew what alone makes a yoke easy and a burden light.”

Implying, of course, that that "young woman" did not know. Whatever we may think of it, the result is unmistakable. The Permanent Editor, even when she took up an untenable position, was able to keep in office for two years the temporary chief whom she liked, and doom to the cold shades of Opposition the statesman who but for her intervention would have been Prime Minister. Greville growled, "It is a high trial to our institutions when the wishes of a Princess of nineteen can overturn a great Ministerial combination." But our institutions stood the strainwere perhaps, on the whole, the better for it.

III. THE REIGN OF THE PRINCE CONSORT.

The fashion is to speak of the reign of Queen Victoria as if it were a unit-one and indivisible. That is misleading. In the sixty years of the Victorian era there have been in fact three reigns: the first was the reign of the Girl, under the tutelage of Lord Melbourne; the second that of the Wife, under the authority of her husband, who, from the birth of her first child till his death, was virtually King of England; while it is only since 1861 that we have had the real reign of the Widow of Windsor. The discussion of the action taken by the Prince Consort during the time when he was regnant, although interesting extremely from the point of view of the Monarchy, only indirectly concerns the Queen. During these years she was bearing children, and the task is sufficiently arduous to occupy the most of the time and thought of the mother. Indirectly the cares of childbed added to the anxieties of the father. There is a typical cry of distress in one of the Prince's letters to Baron Stockmar :

"The posture of affairs is bad. European war is at our doors. France is ablaze in every quarter: Louis Philippe is wandering about in disguise. The Republic is declared; the incorporation of Belgium and the Rhenish provinces proclaimed. Here they refuse to pay the Income Tax and attack the Ministry. Victoria will be confined in a few days.”

What a climax! If he felt it so, how much more must it have weighed upon the Queen! It was only natural, therefore, that from the day after her first confinement the keys of the despatch boxes should have been handed over to the Prince, and not less natural that the husband should have practically undertaken the duties of the Crown while the wife attended to the needs of the nursery. While the Queen was always the Queen, she was more or less an echo of the Prince Consort. "The Life of the Prince Consort"-the great mine from which is quarried most of the material from which historical and constitutional treatises on menarchy and the reign are constructed— is the history of a reign marked off very distinctly from the reign of the Girl which preceded it, and that of the Widow which followed it. The Permanent Editorship of the Realm passed into the hands of the Prince Consort, who seems to have indifferently sent to the temporary staff memoranda in his own name and in that of the Queen.

In one of the best known of the Border ballads, King James of Scotland exclaimed on seeing the almost regal state of a famous Border riever

"What lacks that knave that a King should have?"

There was nothing of the knave in either sense of that degraded word about Prince Albert, but if we vary the question so as to make it read :

"What lacked that Prince that a King should have ?"

the inquiry is pertinent and apt. For the Consort of the Queen was King of Britain in all but in name. No crown sat on his handsome brow, but his hand wielded the sceptre; his wife sat alone on the throne, but he was Lord and Master of the Queen.

"In Prince Albert," said Disraeli immediately after the Prince Consort's death, "we have buried our Sovereign. This German Prince has governed England for twenty-one years with a wisdom and energy such as none of our Kings have ever shown. He was the permanent private secretary, the permanent Prime Minister of the

(From an engraving in the possession of Lady Henry Somerset.)

Queen. If he had outlived some of our old stagers, he would have given us, while retaining all constitutional guarantees, the blessings of absolute government. Of us younger men who are qualified to enter the Cabinet, there is not one who would not willingly have bowed to his experience." Count Vitzthum, himself an acute and interested observer, not content with chronicling Disraeli's tribute to "our Sovereign," added some observations of his own. After speaking of the Queen's submissive veneration, which she invariably showed the Prince Consort in great as well as small affairs, the Saxon Minister proceeded :