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 late. Turkey endeavoured to suppress the insurrection in the Balkans with great barbarity, notably in Bulgaria ; and in the autumn of 1876 Gladstone, who had lately announced his retirement from public life, suddenly emerged from his seclusion in order to stir the people of the United Kingdom by the energy of his eloquence to resist the bestowal on Turkey of any English favour or support. One effect of Gladstone's vehemence was to tighten the bond between Beaconsfield and the queen. She accepted unhesitatingly Lord Beaconsfield's view that England was bound to protect Turkey from permanent injury at Russia's hands, and she bitterly resented the embarrassments that Gladstone caused her minister. But she did not readily abandon hope that Russia might be persuaded to abstain from interference in the Balkans. The occupants of the thrones of Russia and Germany were her personal friends, and she believed her private influence with them

might keep the peace. Princess Alice met the tsar at Darmstadt in July 1876, and he assured the queen through her daughter that he had no wish for a conflict with England. Thus encouraged, she wrote to him direct, and then appealed to the German emperor to use his influence with him. She even twice addressed herself to Bismarck in the same sense (, Conversations with Bismarck, ii. 277). But her efforts failed. Russia declared war on Turkey on 24 April 1877, and before the end of the year had won a decisive victory.

All the queen's sympathy with Russia thereupon vanished, and she, no less than Lord Beaconsfield, was resolved that England should regulate the fruits of Russia's success. Twice did she openly indicate her sympathy with her minister in the course of 1877 first by opening parliament in person in February, and secondly by paying him a visit in circumstances of much publicity at his country seat, Hughenden Manor, Buckinghamshire. On 21 Dec. 1877 she, with Princess Beatrice, travelled by rail from Windsor to High Wycombe station, where Beaconsfield and his secretary, Mr. Montagu Corry, met her. The mayor presented an address of welcome. Driving with her host to Hughenden, she stayed there two hours, and on leaving planted a tree on the lawn. A poem in 'Punch' on 29 Dec. 1877, illustrating a sketch by Mr. Linley Sambourne, humorously suggested the powerful impression that the incident created both in England and in Europe.

At the beginning of 1878 the sultan made a personal appeal to the queen to induce the tsar to accept lenient terms of peace. She telegraphed to the tsar an entreaty to accelerate negotiations ; but when the tsar forced on Turkey conditions which gave him a preponderating influence within the sultan's dominions, she supported Lord Beaconsfield in demanding that the whole setttlement should be referred to a congress of the European powers. Through the storms that succeeded no minister received stauncher support from his sovereign than Lord Beaconsfield from the queen. The diplomatic struggle brought the two countries to the brink of war, but the queen deprecated retreat. Before the congress of Berlin met in June 1878, Beaconsfield warned the queen that his determination to prevent Russia from getting a foothold south of the Danube might abruptly end in active hostilities. The queen declared herself ready to face the risk. When, therefore, at an early session of the congress, a deadlock arose between Lord Beaconsfield, who acted as the English envoy, and Prince Gortschakoff, the Russian envoy, and Lord Beaconsfield threatened departure from Berlin so that the dispute might be settled by 'other means,' he made no empty boast, but acted in accord with an understanding which he had previously reached with the queen. Russia yielded the specific point at Bismarck's persuasion ; and although both the material and moral advantages that England derived from her intervention were long questioned, the queen welcomed Lord Beaconsfield with unstinted eulogy when he returned from Berlin, bringing, in his own phrase, 'peace with honour.' On 22 July 1878 she invested him at Osborne with the order of the garter. War preparations had meantime been in active progress with the queen's full approval. On 13 May 1878 she had held a review on a great scale at Aldershot in company with the crown prince and princess of Prussia, who were her guests ; and on 13 Aug. she reviewed at Spithead in inauspicious weather a strong fleet designed for 'special service.'

The situation revived at all stages the queen's memory of the earlier conflict with Russia, the course of which had been largely guided by her husband's resolution. She had lately re-studied closely the incidents of the Crimean war in connection with the 'Life' of the prince consort, on which Sir Theodore Martin was engaged under her supervision. At the end of 1877 there appeared the third volume of the biography,