Page:The Letters Of Queen Victoria, vol. 3 (1908).djvu/18

4 from His Royal Highness, he would not hesitate to act according to his own convictions, and a sense of what was due to your Majesty’s service.

The Prince has now been so long before the eyes of the whole country, his conduct so invariably devoted to the public good, and his life so perfectly inattackable, that Lord Aberdeen has not the slightest apprehension of any serious consequences arising from these contemptible exhibitions of malevolence and faction.

Your Majesty will graciously pardon Lord Aberdeen for writing thus plainly; but there are occasions on which he almost forgets your Majesty’s station, and only remembers those feelings which are common to all ranks of mankind.

WINDSOR CASTLE, 9th January 1854. The Queen thanks Lord Clarendon for his letter just received with the enclosures.

As the proposed answer to the Emperor contains perhaps necessarily only a repetition of what the Queen wrote in her former letter, she inclines to the opinion that it will be best to defer any answer for the present—the more so, as a moment might possibly arrive when it would be of advantage to be able to write and to refer to the Emperor’s last letter.

With respect to the Persian Expedition the Queen will not object to it—as the Cabinet appears to have fully considered the matter, but she must say that she does not much like it in a moral point of view. We are just putting the Emperor of Russia under the ban for trying “to bring the Sultan to his senses” by the occupation of part of his territory after a diplomatic rupture, and are now going to do exactly the same thing to the Shah of Persia!

The King of the Belgians to Queen Victoria. LAEKEN, 9th January 1854. My DEAREST Victoria,—I wrote you a most abominable scrawl on Friday, and think myself justified in boring you with a few words to-day.

The plot is thickening in every direction, and we may expect a great confusion. The dear old Duke used to say "You cannot have a little war." The great politicians of the