Читать книгу The Life and Times of Queen Victoria (Vol. 1-4) - Robert Thomas Wilson - Страница 17

Table of Contents

The Times Reveals a Secret of State—Mr. Sidney Herbert and Mrs. Norton and the Times—A Court Scandal—Peel’s Resignation—Lord John Russell’s Failure to Form a Ministry—Peel Resumes Office—The Ministry and the Queen—The Duke of Wellington and Peel—Disintegration of the Tory Party—Croker’s Correspondence with Wellington—Peel’s Instructions to the Quarterly Review—A. Betrayed Editor—Peel and the Princess Lieven—Guizot’s Defence of Peel—The Queen’s Conduct in the Great Crisis—How she Strengthened the Position of the Crown—Her Popular Sympathies—Why Peel Changed his Policy—The Potato Rot—Impending Famine—Distress in England—The Campaign of the Free Traders—Scenes at their Meetings—The Protectionist Agitation and the Agricultural Labourers—Sufferings of the Poor—The Duke of Norfolk’s Curry Powder—Meeting at Wootton Bassett—The Queen and the Sufferers.

It was on the 4th of December, 1845, that the Times startled the world by its celebrated leading article, beginning “The doom of the Corn Laws is sealed.” This was the very earliest disclosure of that great act of political renunciation which impending famine in Ireland had forced on Sir Robert Peel. How the Times came to discover, on the 4th of December, that the Cabinet had broken up on the previous day, through the obstinacy of Lord Stanley and the Duke of Buccleuch, was for a long time a political mystery. It inspired what Lord Beaconsfield once called “the babble of the boudoirs,” and the tittle-tattle of many clubs. It was whispered that one very near the Royal person had divulged this profound secret of State, a knowledge of which would have been worth a king’s ransom on the Corn Exchange. Such surmises were entirely wrong. So far as the Court knew, or guessed at the secret, it was kept inviolate. It was understood that Mr. Sidney Herbert, the youngest of Sir Robert Peel’s colleagues, on the evening of the 3rd of December conveyed to Mrs. Norton (afterwards Lady Stirling Maxwell, of Keir) an idea of what had happened in the Cabinet, and that she, in turn, carried her gleanings from Mr. Herbert’s conversation to Mr. Delane, the editor of the Times. The affair, it may be said in passing, has furnished Mr. George Meredith with a striking incident in his story, “Diana of the Crossways,” for the heroine of that romance has much in common with the gifted intrigante, “whose bridal wreath was twined with weeds of strife.” A more prosaic explanation, however, is supplied by Mr. Greville. He asserts that Lord Aberdeen gave Mr. Delane a hint that the Corn Law was doomed, his object being to conciliate America (which was deeply interested in the export of corn) in view of the Oregon dispute, which he was anxious to settle. It is hard to believe that a man of Lord Aberdeen’s high sense of honour would, from such an inadequate motive, violate his Ministerial oath, and betray the secrets of his chief.

Lord John Russell had failed, as has been said, to form his Administration when the Cabinet of his rival broke up. Here it may now be convenient to explain the reason of that failure, which he laid before his disappointed Sovereign. On the morning of the 20th of December, when Sir Robert Peel waited on the Queen at Windsor, and was asked to withdraw his resignation, her Majesty had been disturbed by a letter from Lord John Russell, stating that he must abandon all hopes of forming a Ministry, because he had been unable “in one instance” to secure indispensable support from his more prominent followers. Who were the “prominent followers”? and who, “in one instance,” thwarted the Leader of the Opposition in his effort to extricate the Queen, from the difficulty in which she was entangled? The pragmatic “instance” was Lord Grey, and his refusal to serve the country in the hour of need was a matter not of principle but of personal feeling. Writing to Mr. J. F. Macfarlan, Chairman of the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, on the 22nd of December, 1845, Mr. (afterwards Lord) Macaulay told the whole story. “You will have heard,” he says, “of the termination of our attempt to form a Ministry. All our plans were frustrated by Lord Grey.... On my own share in these transactions I reflect with unmixed satisfaction. From the first I told Lord John that I stipulated for one thing only, total and immediate Repeal. I would be as to all other matters absolutely in his hands; that I would take any office, or no office, just as it suited him best; and that he should never be disturbed by any personal pretensions or jealousies on my part. If everybody else had acted thus there would now have been a Liberal Ministry.” We now know that Macaulay was mistaken. It was perfectly well known, not only to the Queen, but to the chiefs of the great parties, that Lord John Russell could never have carried Repeal, for two reasons. He was distrusted by Free Traders like Cobden. It was impossible to expect that the House of Lords, who threatened to revolt against Wellington, would accept Free Trade from the Whigs, many of whom were eager to maintain a small fixed duty on corn. All this was quite well understood at Court, and it partially accounts for the unconcealed delight with which the Queen asked Sir Robert Peel to withdraw his resignation. It was, moreover, suspected at the time that the Court—always distrustful of Lord Palmerston—privily sympathised with the feelings of Lord Grey, who thought that the only office which Lord Palmerston was willing to accept, was precisely the one in which he would do irretrievable mischief. He had been Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and naturally he could not, with self-respect, serve another Whig Government in an inferior capacity. But Lord Grey, though quite ready to serve with Palmerston if he took some other Department, held that, if he went to the Foreign Office, his pugnacity, combined with the hostile animus which he had inspired in France, must, sooner or later, lead to a disturbance of the peace of Europe. Lord Palmerston was, in truth, the Mordecai sitting at the gate of the Whig Oligarchy, and then, as ever, Lord Grey could only co-operate comfortably with a Ministry of Greys.

It was on the 20th December that Sir Robert Peel summoned his late colleagues in Downing Street, to inform them that he had resumed office, and to invite their assistance in abolishing the duties on foreign corn. The conclave was depressed and downcast, for the situation was unique and embarrassing. Lord Stanley, true to his imperious impulses, persisted in resigning. He refused to believe that the destitution in Ireland was so bad as it was painted by Peel, and it is but just to say that his main reason for deserting his leader had no direct connection with the effect of the Corn Laws on the price of food. The real interest of the country, Lord Stanley contended, was to have a flourishing rural population. That could only exist under the shadow of a territorial aristocracy, maintained by a Corn Law which kept up rents, because it kept up prices. No conscious self-interest seems to have tainted Lord Stanley’s motives, and the same may be said of Cobden and the Free Traders, who, on the other hand, believed that the world would gain by the substitution of a commercial for a territorial aristocracy. The aim of the Free Traders, in fact, was to rule the English people by an oligarchy of rich manufacturers, thus “thrusting aside the nobles,” and creating “a new policy specially adapted to the life of a great trading community.”18 Lord Stanley’s idea, however, was that the landed interest had made England; that it gave her social stability and military power; that it had won her battles by sea and land, and built up her mighty fabric of empire. The Corn Laws he believed, quite honestly, to be the

THE IRISH FAMINE: STARVING PEASANTS AT A WORKHOUSE GATE.

outworks of a great system of landlordism which gave the State a solid basis. His firm conviction was that Mr. Cobden and the Leaguers were eager to capture the outworks, that they might the more easily storm the citadel. And this idea, too, was common to the Whigs, who were advocates of a duty on corn, which, though small, was to be fixed. Through Lord Melbourne they had taught the country and the Queen that a man must

LORD GEORGE BENTINCK.

be mad who would dream of abolishing the Corn Laws—and they showed no sign, as a Party, of wavering in that conviction till the 22nd of November, 1845, when Lord John Russell sent the famous “Edinburgh Letter” to his constituents in the City of London, abandoning Protection once and for ever. It is but fair to remind a later generation of the relation in which the two great Parties stood to the Corn Law, because partisan writers often present an inadequate conception of the arduous task which Peel set himself, when he undertook to abolish the Corn Duties, in defiance of beliefs long rooted in the minds not only of the people, but of the governing classes of England.

There is no denying the fact that the admirable behaviour of the Queen throughout the epoch-marking Ministerial crisis of 1845-46 did a great deal to restore the influence of the Crown as an operative factor in English politics. Since the death of George IV. that influence had been waning. Under William IV. it had been exercised, but without subtlety of tact or breadth of sympathy; and therefore, when exercised, it was somewhat rudely “abated” by the popular Party. Nothing was further from Lord Melbourne’s heart than to turn the Queen into a Whig, for it is on record that it was he who urged her to conciliate the Tories, and put confidence in Peel, against whom she bore a grudge for opposing the Parliamentary grant to the Prince Consort. Yet, in the early days of the Queen’s reign, the influence of the Crown was not a popular influence, because it was supposed that Melbourne had become a sort of Mayor of the Palace, and had made the Sovereign the tool of Party. In the beginning of 1846, however, we notice a remarkable change in public feeling on this subject. There was then a growing belief, even among the Tories, that their suspicions of Melbourne had been unwarrantable, and the people ceased to fear that the Queen intended to base her Government on a system of favouritism. It is of the utmost importance, says Edmund Burke, “that the discretionary powers which are necessarily vested in the monarch, whether for the execution of the laws or for the nomination to magistracy or office, or for the conducting of the affairs of peace and war, or for ordering the revenue, should all be exercised upon public principles and national grounds, and not on the likings or prejudices, the intrigues or fooleries, of a Court.”19 This was really the sound teaching which Melbourne had impressed on the Queen, and her bearing in the crisis, which ended in Sir Robert Peel’s reassumption of office, showed that she had been an apt pupil.

The Prince Consort was quick to notice the effect which her Majesty’s unswerving fidelity to public interests at this time had produced on the country. It was therefore with pardonable pride that he wrote to Baron Stockmar20 a curious letter, shrewdly pointing out that the crisis now past had been of signal advantage to the Crown. The Queen had been seen to remain calm and unmoved in the fierce and strident strife of factions—the one stable element in the Constitution at a moment when no other rallying point was visible to the nation. Albany Fonblanque, the wittiest of the Radical journalists of that day, ridiculed, to the top of his bent, the chiefs of the two great parties, whose petty rivalries and personal jealousies had thrown public affairs into sad confusion. They were, it must be confessed, rather like Rabelais’ giant, who, though he habitually fed on windmills, choked on a pat of butter swallowed the wrong way. But on behalf of the Radicals, Fonblanque, it is interesting to notice now, had nothing but praise to bestow on the Queen’s behaviour in the midst of the tragi-comedy of politics, which was being enacted before the eyes of a famished people. “In all the pranks and bunglings of the last three weeks,” he wrote, “there is one part which, according to all report, has been played most faultlessly—that of a Constitutional Sovereign. In the pages of history the directness, the sincerity, the scrupulous observance of Constitutional rule, which have marked her Majesty’s conduct in circumstances the most trying, will have their place of honour. However unused as we are to deal in homage to Royalty, we must add that never, we believe, was the heart of a monarch so warmly devoted to the interests of a people, and with so enlightened a sense of their interests.”21 The Continental tour of the Queen in 1845 had suggested to the people that the personal influence of the Sovereign might, if adroitly used, be of great service to the State in conciliating foreign nations, whose goodwill it would be advantageous to secure. Her conduct in the Ministerial crisis of 1845-46, however, convinced them that, if intelligently directed, the personal influence of the Queen, in domestic politics, might also be rendered not less beneficial to her subjects and her empire.

But at the meeting in Downing Street which terminated this momentous crisis, Lord Stanley, whose place was on his resignation promptly filled by Mr. Gladstone, was the only ex-Minister who had the courage of his opinions. The Duke of Buccleuch ceased to resist the logic of facts. The Duke of Wellington, who had wavered very much, finally cast in his lot with Peel—to the amazement of all his old friends, especially of Mr. John Wilson Croker. Mr. Croker had been induced by Sir Robert Peel, whilst on a visit to Drayton Manor in September, 1845, to attack the Anti-Corn-Law League in the Quarterly Review, and, angry at what he deemed his betrayal, he somewhat peremptorily demanded explanations from the Duke. His Grace simply wrote to him saying that he felt it his duty to stand by the Queen. This, in his view, implied that he must support the Minister who alone seemed able to carry on her Majesty’s Government, which he (Wellington), as “a retained servant of the Crown,” could not bring himself to hand over to “the League and the Radicals.”22 Croker, however, retorted, in a letter to Sir Henry Hardwicke, that Peel had done something quite as bad as that: “he has,” wrote the indignant reviewer, “broken up the old interests, divided the great families, and commenced just such a revolution as the Noailles and Montmorencies did in 1789.” But the Iron Duke was proof against all such appeals. He entrenched himself behind his favourite doctrine that he was primarily a servant of her Majesty. Her interests, he told the House of Lords, were of more importance than the opinion of any individual about the Corn Law or any other law. At the same time, he did not pretend to relish the situation. As he said—with a rough soldier’s oath—to Lord Beaumont, “it is a —— mess, but I must look to the peace of the country and the Queen.”23 In private he told Lord Stanley that he was against the policy which Peel had adopted. In public, however, referring to Peel’s conversion, he said, in the House of Lords:—“I applauded the conduct of my right hon. friend. I was delighted with it. It was exactly the course I should have followed under similar circumstances, and I therefore determined to stand by him.” The Duke’s strong personal loyalty to his young Queen had, in fact, first transformed him into a Conservative Opportunist, and then his own common sense led him to recognise the necessity for abandoning laws that made bread dear to an enfranchised but starving populace.

From the sketch now given of the ferment of public opinion, produced by a war between two powerful classes for political predominance in 1846, one thing must be self-evident. In view of the authority and influence of the Duke of Wellington in the House of Lords, it was fortunate for Sir Robert Peel that the quick and generous sympathies of the Queen, whose tender heart was touched by the sufferings of the poor, were entirely with him all through this trying time. Her Majesty may therefore claim some share in the great work that crowned her Minister’s career with honour—for she strengthened his hands by the confidence she displayed in his judgment, when his oldest friends forsook him. The Queen knew well that it was with no light heart, and for no trivial cause, that Peel abandoned, not the creed—for, like Mr. Huskisson, he had always been a Free Trader in principle24—but the policy of levying exceptional duties on foreign corn. Much blame has been cast on Sir Robert Peel for giving up that policy almost immediately after he had won place and power by pledging himself to maintain it. Certainly, after the revelations made in the Croker Papers, it is difficult in some respects to justify his conduct. It is indeed regrettable that those to whom his memory ought to be precious, have not deemed it expedient to explain away the instructions which he gave Mr. Croker, as editor of the Quarterly, in September, 1845. M. Guizot25 has, however, defended Peel from the charges of base tergiversation which, to the annoyance of the Queen, were pressed against him in the fierce and fiery invectives of Mr. Disraeli, and in the passionate but somewhat incoherent harangues of Lord George Bentinck. As the French statesman was on terms of intimacy not only with Peel, but with many of his colleagues, his opinion must be received with respect. According to M. Guizot, all through 1845 Sir Robert Peel was in a condition of painful and “touching perplexity” as to his duty in view of the spread of destitution. This perplexity, M. Guizot contends, was that not of a sordid placeman, but of “a sincere and conscientious mind carried forward in the direction of its own inclination by a great flood of public opinion and passion, and struggling painfully against its adversaries, its friends, and itself.” When the Queen met Sir Robert Peel with a smile on the 20th of December, and said “she was glad to be able to ask him to withdraw his resignation,” she was, according to this theory, really lifting a cloud of gloom from his anxious head, and congratulating him on the ending of that state of suspense in which his troubled mind had been painfully poised. It may be a

THE DEPUTATION FROM LONDON AND DUBLIN CORPORATIONS BEFORE THE QUEEN. (See p. 216.)

coincidence, but in corroboration of M. Guizot’s view we must note that a sigh of relief echoes through the letter in which the careworn Minister, six days after he resumed office, informed the Princess Lieven of the fact. “However unexpected is the turn which affairs have taken, it is,” he writes, “for the best. I resume power with greater means of rendering public service than I should have had if I had relinquished it. But it is a strange dream!”26

Yet, if one considers for a moment the great process of political evolution over which the Queen was from her girlhood called on to preside, one finds nothing really miraculous in the dream. It was merely a phase of the beatific vision of a partially enfranchised democracy, which for the moment dazed all sorts and conditions of men. The late Lord Dalling, who lived through this stirring epoch of bloodless revolution, says that “previous to the Reform Bill and the Municipality Bills, everybody in England looked up: the ambitious young man looked up to the great nobleman for a seat in Parliament; the ambitious townsman to the chief men in his borough for a place in the Corporation. Subsequently to these measures, men desirous to elevate their position looked down. The aristocratic tendency of other days had thus become almost suddenly a democratic one. This democratic tendency, which has gone on increasing, had made itself already visible at the period when the Corn Law agitation began. It had been natural until then to consider this subject relative to the interests of the upper classes; it was now becoming natural to consider it in relation to the interests of the lower classes. The question presented itself in a perfectly different point of view, and politicians found, somewhat to their surprise, that all former arguments had lost their force. It was this change in the spirit of the times which had occasioned within such a very few years a total change in the manner of looking at matters affected by the Legislature.”27 Lord Beaconsfield’s apologists sometimes say that what embittered him against the capitalists of the Anti-Corn-Law League, was his conviction that though they had the cry of cheap bread on their lips, the whisper of low wages was at their hearts. The wage-rate, no doubt, had a potent influence in recasting public opinion at this time. But it did not recast it in the Disraelitish mould. The working classes discovered, through the lucid teaching of Cobden, that wages did not fall because the Corn duty was low, and that they did not rise because it was high. When they made that discovery, the only argument that could protect Protection in a reformed Parliament vanished from the minds of men who were not partisans of the patrician order. Politicians of calm and enlightened judgment felt, as they felt the air they breathed, that public opinion in 1845-46 was becoming more and more hostile to the Corn Laws. The Queen and the entourage of the Court, then greatly under the influence of Baron Stockmar, who was in constant communication with Prince Albert, were evidently among the first to become sensitive to the change, but like Peel, Wellington, and Russell, they frankly acknowledged what must follow from it.

England was in truth all through 1845 moving fast to that “total and immediate repeal” of the Corn Laws which Cobden demanded, and the county gentry, Whig as well as Tory, equally dreaded. When Russell and Peel were in fact waiting for what Prince Bismarck calls “the psychological moment” to proclaim the new departure, the “psychological moment” came with the terrible incident which caused the spectre of famine to stalk over Ireland. That incident was the failure of the potato crop, and it removed the question of the Corn Laws far away from the battle-ground of rival political or economic theories. The problem was no longer one of maintaining or abandoning a territorial system. At the beginning of 1846 it became a question of deciding whether so many hundred thousand of our fellow-creatures in Ireland should perish in the agonies of hunger, or whether, by removing the Corn duty, her Majesty’s Government at one blow would strike down the barrier that prevented bread from reaching the lips of a starving peasantry. For the wretched cotters in Ireland the winter of 1845-46 was, truly, one of extreme privation. “Those who had savings,” writes Mr. Greg,28 “lived off them, but among the really poor there was widespread destitution.” Forced to sell their clothes for food, the Irish peasantry refused to pay rent, and when rent was extorted by harsh process of law, retaliatory outrages immediately followed. The ghastly outlook in Ireland gave the Anti-Corn-Law agitators welcome leverage for their movement in England, and they increased their activity every day. Lord John Russell, on the 22nd of November, 1845, wrote the Edinburgh Letter to the electors of the City of London, warning them that the Whig Party, in view of the state of the country, were ready to put an end to a system which had been proved to be the blight of commerce and the bane of agriculture. This, we have seen, forced Peel’s hands. As Mr. Bright said to Lord John, whom he met, after the issue of his manifesto, on the platform of a railway station in Yorkshire, “Your letter has made total and immediate repeal inevitable; nothing can save it” (the Corn Law).29 Peel himself did not conceal from the Queen that he could perhaps keep the Whigs at bay for three years, and shortly before his death he told Cobden the same thing. But neither the monarch nor her Minister dared to procrastinate in the face of popular destitution, and they felt compelled to obey, no matter at what cost or sacrifice, the dictates of reason and humanity. For it was not from Ireland only that the moan of a suffering people broke upon the ear of a sorrowing Queen. It is true that the venal and factious press of that country at first attempted to deceive the world by denying the existence of wide-spreading potato-rot in the island. With the cries of the dying ringing in their ears, Irish journalists disputed with each other as to whether there actually was any famine in the land. But the facts could not long be concealed, either from the people or from the Queen. At the end of September, 1845, it had to be generally admitted that the staple food of Ireland had suddenly disappeared, and that even in England only the northern counties had escaped from the potato-disease. To such an extent did the rest of England suffer, that Professor Lindley declared there was hardly a sound potato to be found in Covent Garden Market.30 As Lord Beaconsfield has observed, “This mysterious but universal sickness of a single root changed the history of the world.”31

The Corporations of London and Dublin, on the 3rd of January, 1846, memorialised the Queen on the subject. Their deputations, who waited on her at Windsor, received from her a gracious and sympathetic reply to their statements, which she heard with manifest interest. The Anti-Corn-Law League felt that it would be good policy to turn the prevailing distress to account, and it immediately renewed, with redoubled vigour, its agitation against the duties that kept up the price of bread. Its leaders organised a series of meetings all over England and Scotland, and although the Chartists rather held aloof from them, the Free Trade speakers at last fairly touched the heart of the nation. Extraordinary scenes of enthusiasm took place at these meetings. In the last week of 1845, at a meeting in Manchester, it was suggested to raise a quarter of a million pounds sterling to help the agitation that must strengthen Peel’s hands,32 and Mr. John Morley has described how men jumped up from their seats and cried out, one after the other, “A thousand pounds for me!” “A thousand pounds for us!” and so on, till in less than two hours £60,000 were subscribed on the spot.33 Of course, all this fervour provoked a movement on the other side. The Protectionists organised a counter agitation, but it was very badly managed. The speakers selected were persons, of high rank and ample fortune. But they lacked sympathy and sense, and this defect was fatal to their cause. Their favourite argument was that there was no famine at all to fear, and they revelled in demonstrating to people who had nothing to eat, that their continued prosperity depended on the maintenance of a Corn Law which made bread dear. The Duke of Norfolk covered the Protectionist agitation with odium and ridicule, by suggesting that if haply here and there a labouring man felt hungry, he might derive great benefit by taking at night, just before bed-time, a pinch of curry-powder as a comforting stomachic. The satirists of the Radical party made affluent use of this egregious imbecility, and the Examiner34 promptly printed a poem headed “Comfort and Curry,” in which the Duke and Duchess were cruelly quizzed.

What contributed most to strengthen Sir Robert Peel was the agitation among the agricultural labourers. It was very difficult to resist such an appeal as theirs, when they pointed to their gaunt forms, and wan and haggard faces, and said, “Behold this is the result of the Protection that is kept up for our benefit.” They held meetings, in the beginning of 1846, in various parts of the country, and from the speeches at these we get a vivid idea of the sad condition of the English people at this time. One gathering may be cited as typical. It was held by some two hundred starvelings, who met in fear—for the gentry frowned upon the movement—on a bleak winter’s night, by the light of a clouded moon and a few flaring candles at a cross-road near Wootton Bassett. The chairman said he had six shillings a week, on which he

MEETING OF AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS AT WOOTTON BASSETT. (See p. 216.)

had to keep his wife and two children, and he complained that it was not half enough for them to live on. Another speaker, one William Burchall, said, “that though their wages had risen within the last few months a shilling a week, bread had risen two shillings, so that the difference was against them. He was past forty years of age, and he could say that he had never purchased a pound of good slaughtered beef fit to be carried into the market. As to mutton, he had purchased a little of that, but never as much as would average a pound a year in forty years. He knew what veal was, but never had any at all.” Another man said that, during thirty-nine weeks, ending 10th of June, 1844, he had earned only £5 19s. 8d., or 3s. 1d. a week; and that but for getting a little land to rent from Lord Carnarvon, he and his wife and eight children would have starved. His house rent came to £4 a year, and his bread bill alone came to from 7s. 7d. to 8s. 8d. a week. Another man said that he had so little bread to eat that he got weak, and was then discharged as unfit for service. James Pegler complained he had been “hunted down” under the Poor Laws, having been, with his wife and family, forced into the workhouse, and separated from them for eleven months. At last, he was turned away to get work, and because he went out of the district to find it, he was taken before the magistrate, charged with desertion, and sent to prison for a month. “God bless my heart and life,” exclaimed this poor creature, “I never see’d such a go, to be sure, as how I was served. I know enough of starvation and misery to make me say ‘God send us Free Trade.’” At this meeting the labourers declared they were thankful that Providence had put it out of the power of Government “to write taxation on the bosom of the streams and rivulets that were so bountifully spread around their neighbourhood.”35 They were unconsciously illustrating the wisdom of Paul Louis Courier, who once said that the rich are grateful to Providence for what it gives—the poor, for what it leaves them.

The Queen, it has been reported, was deeply affected by these demonstrations of suffering. It is said that she will never forget, as long as she lives, that she began her reign when the wealth and power of England were waning. She was, on her accession to the throne, the object of the most chivalrous devotion that any Queen could inspire. Yet, when crowned, the tears fell from her eyes, as she thought of her own responsibility in the midst of a nation sinking deeper and deeper into destitution, and plunging deeper and deeper into debt. Mrs. Browning, when she read the account of her Majesty’s coronation, gave apt expression to the popular hopes that were raised by the significance which the people instinctively attached to this incident of the ceremony.

“God save thee, weeping Queen!

Thou shalt be well beloved;

The tyrant’s sceptre cannot move

As those pure tears have moved!

The nature in thy eyes we see

Which tyrants cannot own;

The love that guardeth liberties,

Strange blessing on the nation lies,

Whose Sovereign wept;

Yea, wept to wear a crown.”

As if in fulfilment of the hopes which the Queen’s conduct and bearing since her accession had inspired, a happier day was now dawning. There was every prospect that content would now gladden the reign that began in sorrow and in tears. The partial relaxation of the Protective tariff during the last three years had brought hope to the heart of the Sovereign, for it was certainly followed by some amelioration in the lot of her subjects. Her Majesty was profoundly impressed by Sir Robert Peel’s inferences from the success of this experimental loosening of the shackles on commerce. She was, therefore, naturally inclined to give the weight of her artless sympathies and “sweet counsel” to a new departure in fiscal policy, that promised to “make Plenty smile on the cheek of Toil.” The opening of the Parliamentary Session of 1846 was, therefore, to the Queen no mere formal or ordinary ceremony of State. It was, in her opinion, and in the opinion of the Prince Consort, the initiation of a “bloodless revolution,” and the closing of a distinct epoch in the history of Party Government.

DOG’S HEAD.

(Drawn and Etched by the Prince Consort.)