Page:Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (IA lifeofhermajesty01fawc).pdf/72

 defending the principle that the will of the Sovereign is paramount over the advice of her Ministers and public considerations; while the Tories were defending the opposite doctrine. Angry discussions took place in both Houses; Lord Brougham in the House of Lords opening the sluice-gates in a three hours' speech that Greville calls "a boiling torrent of rage, disdain, and hatred." The end of it was that Sir Robert Peel declined to undertake to form a Government, and Lord Melbourne was recalled; he had been in a very weak position before; but he was still further weakened by the events that had just taken place.

In after years the Queen, with her accustomed generosity, took the whole blame upon herself. Curiously enough, it was Lord John Russell, who had, in 1839, encouraged the Queen in the line she took on the Bedchamber question, who asked her in 1854, if she had not been advised by some one else in the matter. "She replied with great candor and naïveté, 'No, it was entirely my own foolishness.'"

These events excited the whole country to an extraordinary degree, and it is not astonishing that they were intensely absorbing to the Queen, and that she therefore, for the time, dismissed from her mind all thoughts of marriage. Indeed, she wrote to her uncle Leopold in July, 1839, stating very strongly her intention to defer her marriage for some years. To Stockmar also the Queen expressed the same intention. These diplomatists do not appear to have argued the matter with Her Majesty; but they thought they knew how to shake her resolution. She had only once seen her cousin Albert, when he had come over to England with his father and his elder brother Ernest, for a few weeks' visit to the Duchess of Kent, in 1836. He was then a boy, very stout, as the Queen