Page:Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (IA lifeofhermajesty01fawc).pdf/54

 to the young Queen was to be ardently opposed to all the works and ways of the Duke of Cumberland, to be in favor of religious liberty and toleration, to support the Reform Bill and the abolition of slavery. It was Whig to be loyal to the Queen, Tory to be, if not disloyal, full of doubts and fears, imagining that with a young girl at the helm, known to be in sympathy with Whig principles, the ship of State was bound to split on anarchy and popery. These fears very soon disappeared as the Queen showed she had a mind and will of her own, and was no mere puppet in the hands of her Ministers. If at the outset of her reign she showed strong Whig tendencies, she was not long in grasping the fact that, as Sovereign, she was Queen of the whole people, and not the mere head of a party.

There was, however, enough of revolutionary storm in the atmosphere to justify the Times in endeavoring to allay the fears of the ultra-Protestant party by reminding them that for the Queen to turn Papist, "or in any manner to follow the footsteps of the Coburg family" in marrying a Papist, "would involve an immediate forfeiture of the British Crown." This situation of affairs had the rather curious result of making the Irish among the most intensely loyal of the young Queen's subjects. O'Connell's stentorian voice was heard leading the cheers of the crown outside St. James's Palace on the day she was proclaimed Queen. he declared later, in a public speech, that if it were necessary he could get "five hundred thousand brave Irishmen to defend the life, the honor, and the person of the beloved young lady by whom England's throne is now filled." Mr. Harry Grattan, son of the famous orator of the Irish Parliament of 1782-1800, thought the Tories so bent on the Queen's destruction that "If her Majesty were once placed in the hands of the Tories, I would not give an orange-peel for her