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 monarchy and the reign are constructedis 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 :

"He was complete master in his house, and the active centre of an Empire whose power extends to every quarter of the globe. It was a gigantic task for a young German Prince to think and act for all these millions of British subjects. All the threads were gathered together in his hands. For twentyone years not a single despatch was ever sent from the Foreign Office which the Prince had not seen, studied, and if necessary altered. Not a single report of any importance from an Ambassador was allowed to be kept from him. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Secretary for War, the Home Secretary, the First Lord of the Admiralty, all handed to him every day just as large bundles of papers as did the Foreign Office. Everything was read, commented upon, and discussed. In addition to all this, the Prince kept up private correspondences with foreign Sovereigns, with British Ambassadors and Envoys, with the Governor-General of India, and with the Governors of the various Colonies. No appointment in Church and State, in the Army or the Navy, was ever made without his approbation. At Court not the smallest thing was done without his order."

There is some exaggeration here. It was not until the fifties that the Prince acquired the full control of the Foreign Office despatches, but no one can read Sir Theodore Martin's biography of the Prince Consort without b.ing compelled to admit the substantial accuracy of Count Vitzthum's picture.

For twenty years of the sixty, although the Queen was on the throne, the power behind the throne was her husband. Prince Albert took his position as Permanent Editor very much au serieux, and for the most part, making the necessary allowances for his hereditary bias, he did his Editing extremely well. The battle about the right to appoint had been fought and won by his wife before she married. It is the first step that counts. The Girl-Queen took that first step. Her famous fight for her Bedchamber Women taught Sir Robert Peel a lesson which he never forgot. We have seen how heedlessly he challenged the conflict with the Queen, intent on moralising the Court by the aid of Lord Shaftesbury. He was then in a minority. Very different was his tone and his conduct two years later, when with a majority of ninety-one at his back he received the Royal command to form an Administration. "Peel told me,” wrote Greville in 1841, "that the Queen had behaved perfectly to him, and that he had responded by laying down the rules upon which he, the head of the temporary staff, would act in the appointment of his colleagues":

"He had said to her that he considered it his first and greatest duty to consult her happiness and comfort, that no person should be proposed to her who could be disagreeable to her, and that whatever claims or pretensions might be put forward on the score of Parliamentary or political influence, nothing should induce him to listen to them, and he would take upon himself the whole responsibility of putting an extinguisher on such claims in any case in which they were inconsistent with her comfort or opposed to her inclination."

That is pretty explicit. We live in more democratic days than those of 1841; but it is probable that Mr. Gladstone, the pupil and successor of Sir Robert Peel, was equally deferential to the wishes of the Sovereign, even in the formation of his last Cabinet.

Lord Melbourne, who had the training of the Queen, gave his successor a straight tip as to the best way of getting on with the Sovereign. He said to Greville :

"Don't let him suffer any appointment he is going to make to be talked about, and don't let her hear it through anybody but himself; and whenever he does anything, or has anything to propose, let him explain to her clearly his reasons. The Queen likes to have things explained to her elementarily, not at length and in detail, but shortly and clearly."

There you have the Permanent Editor exactly. No appointment to be made or talked of till it has been settled with the Permanent Chief. Nothing to be done and no change to be made until it has first of all been explained elementarily, clearly, and shortly by the Temporary Chief of Staff. As to the Household, Sir Robert Peel's capitulation was complete. "She should have no one forced on her contrary to her own inclination. He hoped she would take Conservatives, but he begged her to make her own selection." So the Wedded Woman harvested the fruits of the battle which the Girl-Queen had fought and won. It is improbable that the Prince Consort allowed the value of these concessions of Sir Robert Peel to be impaired during the subsequent years of her reign.

The Permanent Editor has no fewer than twenty-two times been confronted with the resignation of her Temporary Assistant. The resignation of the Prime Minister is an event which has occurred rather oftener than once every three years since the Queen came to the throne. On each of these occasions she has exercised her privilege as a Sovereign to summon to her councils whom she pleased. It is interesting to see who would have been Prime Minister if the Queen's first choice had prevailed. In 1839 the Duke of Wellington would have been Prime Minister; in 1851 Lord Stanley, and failing him Lord Aberdeen; in 1855 Lord Derby, and failing him Lord John Russell; in 1859 Lord Granville; and in 1880 Lord Hartington, and failing him Lord Granville. The Queen twice endeavoured to avert the dire necessity of commissioning

Lord Palmerston to form an Administration, and once to evade the equally unpleasant alternative of a Gladstonian Premiership. As a rule the nomination of a successor to a retiring Premier is so clear that the man in the street could say who must be sent for as well as the Queen herself. But it is when parties are evenly balanced, when the merits of contending claimants are difficult to decide, that the Monarch exercises a real choice. In the making of Cabinets, the Queen's influence has been chiefly perceptible in inducing Lord Melbourne in 1839, and Sir Robert Peel in 1845, to resume office when they were out of it and wanted to be out of it; in making objections to Disraeli in 1851, which is said to have so embarrassed Lord Stanley that he allowed Lord John Russell to return to office; and in dismissing Lord Palmerston in 1852, and in the same year vetoing his leadership of the House of Commons. The chief piece of Cabinet-making that stands to her credit was the success with which she brought about the formation of the Aberdeen Coalition Government of 1852, the only serious attempt that has ever been made to establish a really National Administration resting upon both political parties.

During these periods of crisis the Sovereign stands conspicuous as the real centre of the Government and pivot of the Constitution. Sometimes these periods extend for days, during which there is never for a moment any disturbance of order or confidence. In 1845 a crisis lasted fourteen days, in 1851 nine, in 1885 twelve. We may possibly average the crisis period at a week, and if we add another ten days as the time necessary for Cabinet-making, it follows that for nearly one whole year, and that by far the most exciting year of the sixty, the Queen has practically reigned alone, discharging her duties without the aid of Ministers who have fallen and those who have yet to be fully created. It is obvious what an advantage the Permanent Editor has over the fleeting members of the temporary staff. During the sixty years of her reign she has had ten Premiers, each enjoying an average six years of office, divided into two innings of three years each. On each of the fifteen occasions during which the whole Administration has been changed, she has had a voice, and a potent one, in the promotion of individuals and the allocation of offices. The position of the Sovereign enables her to get politicians to do things which they would otherwise not attempt.

The crisis at the end of 1845, when Lord John Russell was sent for on the defeat of Peel, afforded the Queen an opportunity of showing not only that during the fourteen days that England had no Government she was capable of holding the balance even, and of preserving one institution at least free from the heat and passion of party strife, but that her personal appeal was the decisive element in deciding the issues of a crisis. After Lord John had tried his utmost and failed, the Queen's appeal to Sir Robert Peel to resume office was responded to by Peel with chivalrous devotion. "Sir Robert Peel," said the Prince, "is very much agitated, but declares that he will not desert the Queen, and will undertake the Government." The advantage of being able to reinforce the general considerations of patriotic duty by the closer and more intimate appeal of personal loyalty made itselt felt in 1845, neither for the first nor the last time.

The action of the Monarchy during the reign of the Prince Consort was chiefly felt in the long-continued, laborious effort to control the Jingo policy of Lord Palmerston, and bring it more into accordance with the sane, sober Imperialism of the present day. The story of the struggle between the King and "Old Pam" is much too long to be told here. It was fought from behind the petticoats of the Queen, which gave the reigning Sovereign no mean advantage. But there are few who read the story to-day who will not feel that, with the one exception of Italy, where Lord Palmerston was always a genial Raider of Rhodesian or Jamesonian proclivities, the Prince was.