514 Right Hon. Viscount Esher [March 5, 



and infinite resource, reasoned and debated in daily letters and memo- 

 randa the successive stages of his foreign policy. No one can read 

 those documents without conviction that they were written quite 

 as much for his own enlightenment as for that of the Sovereign. 

 Mr. Gladstone paid even a higher tribute to the value of this invalu- 

 able function of the Crown by the care he bestowed upon the letters 

 written to the Queen, when he was almost overwhelmed by the pressure 

 of a controversy such as that which raged over the Disestablishment 

 of the Irish Church. 



Every reader of the correspondence will, I think, be even more 

 forcibly struck by the effect of this process in the higher sphere of 

 foreign politics, where the interests of the country were vitally con- 

 cerned, as exemplified in the long and grave disputes between the 

 Crown, Lord Palmerston, and Lord John Russell. It would be 

 wearisome to unravel once more these old controversies, even if any- 

 thing was to be gained by attempting to decide upon their merits. 

 It is sometimes asserted that the Queen never carried her point, and 

 that she invariably in the end had to give way. Even if this were 

 true it would be a misleading statement— if the deduction is that the 

 remonstrance was in vain and the time wasted. The discussion was 

 the important thing — discussion in an atmosphere free from political 

 dust-clouds, whichever way the issue was decided. 



The Queen and Lord Palmerston. 



B.eaders of the correspondence cannot fail to notice a certain 

 aristocratic showiness — I was about to say vulgarity — about Lord 

 Palmerston's methods, which in those days captivated his fellow- 

 countrymen. But they lowered him, and the cause of freedom which 

 he finely represented, in the eyes of even his well-wishers abroad. 

 Often the tone of his despatches was softened by the suggestions of 

 the Queen and of the Prince. It was not the advice he gave, in his 

 haughty way, to foreign Governments that moderate men objected 

 to, but his mode of giving it. If the Queen disliked his diplomatic 

 style, she objected more to his studied withdrawal from her on certain 

 occasions of a privilege liighly prized — her right to see despatches on 

 foreign policy before they were sent abroad. 



To read despatches was no perfunctory duty for the Sovereign. 

 It has seemed absurd to superficial observers that venerable statesmen 

 of the highest al)ility — Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Lord 

 Aberdeen — should have been constrained to submit grave State papers 

 upon highly technical matters to a young Sovereign and her husband 

 for criticism and approval. These harassed statesmen, perhaps 

 momentarily irritated, may not have realized so fully as we realize 

 now the importance which attached to a system which, by an indirect 

 and circuitous method, enforced reconsideration rather than control, 

 and obtained an appeal from the Foreign Secretary to the Prime 



