Page:Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (IA lifeofhermajesty01fawc).pdf/87

 said, to accentuate the Queen's dislike of them as a party, and he also felt that it was ungracious to give the Prince so uncordial a reception. It will render him, he said, "as ironical to them [the Tories] as she is already." In this prediction events proved him to have been mistaken. Both the Queen and the Prince were hurt at what had taken place, but neither of them was imbittered. He first heard of the cutting down of his annuity in the House of Commons, and the lapsing of the Precedence Clauses in the Lords accidentally on taking up a newspaper at Aix, where he stopped for a few hours on his way to England for his marriage. "We came upon it," he wrote to the Queen, February 1st, 1840, "in a newspaper at Aix, where we dined. In the House of Lords, too, people have made themselves needlessly disagreeable. All I have time to say is, that, while I possess your love, they cannot make me unhappy."

The events just narrated received an importance they did not in themselves deserve, from the fact that they showed a weakening and disintegration of the monarchical principle in the party most bound by their professions to maintain it. Revolutionary doctrines were almost everywhere making way; a few years later, in 1848, they shook almost every throne in Europe. Aided by the experience and foresight of their friend and mentor, Baron Stockmar, the young Queen and her husband set themselves definitely, consciously, and earnestly to the task of strengthening the hold of the monarchy by basing it on the affections of the people, and also by making the crown a real power, above all party, seeking only to increase the welfare of the masses of the people, and uphold the power and dignity of the Empire. This object is expressed over and over again in the numerous letters and memoranda which passed between the Prince and