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 family into far closer relations with her own. Before the tsarevitch's marriage, the death of his father, Tsar Alexander III, on 1 Nov. 1894, placed him on the Russian throne. His marriage followed on 23 Nov. The queen gave an appropriated elaborate banquet at Windsor in honour of the event, and made the new Tsar Nicholas II now the husband of her granddaughter colonel-in-chief of the second dragoons (Royal Scots Greys). Meanwhile, on 23 June 1894, the birth of a first son (Edward) to the Duke and Duchess of York added a new heir in the fourth generation to the direct succession to her throne. The queen was present at the christening at White Lodge, Richmond, on 16 July. A year later she gave a hearty welcome to a foreign kinsman in the third generation, Carlos, king of Portugal, friendship with whose father and grand- parents (Queen Maria II and her consort, Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg) she had warmly cherished. She celebrated King Carlos's visit by conferring on him the order of the Garter (9 Nov. 1895).

Politics at home had once more drifted in the direction which she dreaded. At the June 1892 the twelfth parliament of the reign was dissolved after a life of just six years, and a majority of home rulers was returned (355 to 315). Lord Salisbury waited for the meeting of parliament before resigning, but a vote of want of confidence was at once carried against him and he retired (12 Aug.) The queen had no choice but to summon Gladstone for a fourth time to fill the post of prime minister, and with the legislation that his new government prepared the queen found herself in no greater sympathy than on former occasions. Her objections to home rule for Ireland were rooted and permanent ; but, though she was depressed by the passage of Gladstone's home rule bill through the House of Commons (27 July 1893), she rejoiced at its rejection by the House of Lords on 8 Sept. by the decisive majority of 378. As far as her reign was concerned the scheme then received its death-blow. She was spared further anxieties in regard to it, and the political horizon brightened for her. On 2 March 1894 Gladstone went farewell of to Windsor to resign his office Gladstone. owing to his age and failing health, and the queen accepted his resignation with a coldness that distressed him and friends. She did not meet him again. On 19 May 1898 he died, and though she felt sympathy with his relatives, and was grateful for the proofs he had given of attachment to the monarchy, she honestly refrained from any unequivocal expression of admiration for his public labours. She was fully alive to the exalted view of his achievements which was shared by a large number of her subjects, and in a telegram to Mrs. Gladstone on the day of his funeral in Westminster Abbey she wrote with much adroitness of the gratification with which his widow must 'see the respect and regret evinced by the nation for the memory of one whose character and intellectual abilities marked him as one of the most distinguished statesmen of my reign.' But she did not commit herself to any personal appreciation beyond the concluding remark : 'I shall ever gratefully remember his devotion and zeal in all that concerned my personal welfare and that of my family.'

On Gladstone's resignation in 1894, the queen, by her own act and without seeking any advice, chose the Earl of Rosebery to succeed him (3 March). She had long known him and his family (his mother had been one of her bridesmaids), and she admired his abilities. But the government's policy under-went small change. The Welsh disestablishment bill, which was read a second time in the House of Commons on 1 April 1895, ran directly counter to her personal devotion to church establishments. Nor did she welcome the changes at the war office, which relieved her cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, of the commandership-in-chief of the army, and by strictly limiting the future tenure of the post to a period of five years gave the deathblow to the cherished fiction that the commander-in-chief was the sovereign's permanent personal deputy. But Lord Rosebery's government fell in June, and Lord Salisbury, to the queen's satisfaction, resumed power on the understanding that he would be permitted an early appeal to the country. In the new ministry the conservative leaders coalesced with the leaders of liberal unionists. The dissolution of parliament was followed by the return of the unionists in a strong majority, and the unionist party under Lord Salisbury's leadership retained power till her death. With Lord Salisbury and his unionist colleagues her relations were to the last harmonious. Her sympathy with the imperialist sentiments, which Mr. Chamberlain's control of the colonial office conspicously fostered, was whole-hearted. As in the case of Peel and Disraeli, her first knowledge of him had not prepossessed her in his favour. When he was a leader of a radical section of the