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 endeavoured to obtain from Gladstone some definite promise of parliamentary support during the few months that remained before the dissolution of parliament in November, in accordance with the provisions of the recent reform bill. Gladstone replied evasively, but the queen persuaded Lord Salisbury to rest content with his assurances, and to take office (24 June). With Lord Salisbury's she was at once on good terms. It was therefore disappointing to her that his first tenure of office should be threatened by the result of the general elections in November, when 250 conservative members were returned against 334 liberals and 86 Irish nationalists. The nationalists, by joining the liberals, would leave the government in a hopeless minority. The queen gave public proof of her sympathy with her conservative ministers by opening parliament in person, as it proved, for the last time (21 Jan. 1886). Five days later Lord Salisbury's government was outvoted. The queen accepted their resignation and boldly faced the inevitable invitation to Gladstone to assume power for the third time.

The session that followed was the stormiest the queen had watched since Peel abolished the corn laws in 1846. But her attitude to Gladstone through the later session was the antithesis of her attitude to Peel in the earlier. Peel had changed front in 1846, and the queen had encouraged him with all her youthful enthusiasm to persevere in his new path. Gladstone suddenly resolved to grant home rule to Ireland, after having, as it was generally understood, long treated the proposal as a dangerous chimera. To Gladstone's change of front she offered a strenuous resistance. To the bestowal of home rule on Ireland she was uncompromisingly opposed, and she freely spoke her mind to all who came into intercourse with her. The grant of home rule appeared to her to be a concession to the forces of disorder. She felt that it amounted to a practical separation between England and Ireland, and that to sanction the disunion was to break the oath that she had taken at her coronation to maintain the union of the two kingdoms. She complained that Gladstone had sprung the subject on her and on the country without giving either due notice. The voters, whom she believed to be opposed to it, had had no opportunity of expressing their opinion. Gladstone and his friends replied that the establishment of a home rule parliament in Ireland increased rather than diminished the dignity of the crown by making it the strongest link which would henceforth bind the two countries together. But the queen was unconvinced. To her immense relief Gladstone was deserted by a large number of his followers, and his home rule bill was decisively rejected by the House of Commons (7 June). With that result the queen was content ; she desired the question to sleep ; and, although she did not fear the issue, she deprecated an immediate appeal to the country; she deemed it a needless disturbance of her own and of the country's peace to involve the people in the excitement of a general election twice within nine months. But Gladstone was resolute, and parliament was dissolved. To the queen's satisfaction the ministry was heavily defeated.

Gladstone resigned without meeting the new parliament, and in July Lord Salisbury The queen or the second time was entrusted and Lord by the queen with the formation Salisbury. of a government. The queen's political anxieties were at once diminished. Although the unexpected resignation on 20 Dec. 1886 of the new leader of the House of Commons, Lord Randolph Churchill, roused in her doubts of the stability of the government, and caused her to scan the chances of yet another dissolution, the crisis passed, and Lord Salisbury's second ministry retained office for a full term of years. Indeed, with an interval of less than three (1892-5), Lord Salisbury now remained her prime minister until her death, fourteen and a half years later, and thus his length of service far exceeded that of any of her previous prime ministers. Her relations with him were uniformly cordial. She knew him of old as the colleague of Lord Beaconsfield. With his general views of policy she was in accord. She especially appreciated his deep interest in, and full knowledge of, foreign affairs. She felt confidence in his judgment and admired his sturdy common sense. Hence there was none of that tension between him and the queen which was inevitable between her and Gladstone. Lord Salisbury's second and third governments gave her a sense of security to which Gladstone had made her a stranger. She soon placed a portrait of Lord Salisbury in the vestibule of her private apartments at Windsor face to face with one of Lord Beaconsfield.

Within a few days of the laying of the spectre of home rule, the queen began the fiftieth year of her reign (20 June The entrance on her year of jubilee, and the coming close of a quarter of a century of widowhood, conquered something of her reluctance to figure in public life, and she resumed much of her earlier public