Page:Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (IA lifeofhermajesty01fawc).pdf/180

 Disraeli's Budget was defeated, the Government resigned, and Lord Aberdeen became the head of a Coalition Government formed by a union of the Whigs with the Peelites. In this Government, Lord Palmerston was Home Secretary. Greville mentions that when the Queen went to Scotland in 1853, she desired that Lord Granville should be the Minister-in-Attendance, because she did not wish for the presence of the Home Secretary at Balmoral. But this feeling was not of long duration. Lord Clarendon, the new Foreign Secretary, labored diligently to change it. He told the Queen everything he could likely to make her regard Palmerston in a more favorable light, and showed her notes and memoranda by him calculated to please her. Lord Aberdeen also used his influence in the same direction. The Queen is never implacable, and always ready to recognize good service, and before the autumn was out Palmerston took his turn as Minister-in-Attendance on the Queen at Balmoral. An anecdote is told, illustrate of his continued absorption in foreign politics, although he was no Home Secretary. The Queen was much interested in some strikes and labor troubles that were taking place in the North of England, and asked Palmerston for details about them which, as Home Secretary, he might be expected to know. However, she found him absolutely without information. "One morning, after previous inquiries, she said to him, 'Pray, Lord Palmerston, have you any news?' To which he replied, 'No, Madam, I have heard nothing; but it seems certain that the Turks have crossed the Danube!'" Palmerston was at the Home Office during the outbreak of cholera in 1854. His measures against it were said to have been conceived in the spirit of treating Heaven as if it were a Foreign Power.

Palmerston really directed the foreign policy of