Page:History of the Radical Party in Parliament.djvu/297

 1841.] Accession of the Queen to Fall of Melbourne. 283 was called, for it did not seem probable for many years that he would succeed to the Crown. The consequence was, that when he did ascend the throne he had neither a definite policy to pursue, nor the habits of consecutive application either in thought or action. Such a character was peculiarly liable to receive impressions, but little capable of retain- ing them. The changes in his policy thus occasioned could not be understood and appreciated by the people, who naturally attached moral blame to what was really intellectual weak- ness. When, in the early part of his reign, he seemed heartily in favour of Parliamentary reform, he was everywhere hailed as a patriot king. Later on, when under the influence of members of his family, he shrank from the consequences of his own actions, and endeavoured to check his ministers in the course of practical Liberalism which the Reform Act was thought to have rendered possible, the reaction of popular feeling was equally sudden and violent, since he was supposed to have deliberately deserted principles which, in fact, he never understood. To the Tory party, and especially to that section of it which felt most deeply on ecclesiastical questions, the later conduct of the monarch was most welcome, and it gave additional strength to their resistance to the Govern- ment measures. The antagonism to the ministerial policy developed at last into personal dislike and disrespect to the ministers themselves, and added to the other causes of weakness from which they were suffering. During the present reign the relations between the Crown and the Cabinet have been different. No one who has read Sir Theodore Martin's " Life of the Prince Consort " and the " Memoirs of Baron Stockmar," will think that personal pre- rogative is, or is assumed to be, extinct, or that it does not sometimes render the duties of ministers most onerous and difficult. Some of them have been subjected to a pressure which they could not resist, nor even explain, and which was the more embarrassing because it was not sufficiently urgent to justify resignation. There are, however, two features in