Foreign Office and promising that the extraordinary improvement which Lord Salisbury's short term of office had brought about in our relations with Foreign Powers should not be destroyed by any reversal of his policy. She thus secured herself comparative peace in the field of foreign affairs, which was what specially interested her. But, in spite of that, the first half of 1886 must have been spent by her in explosions of disgust and anger. And those who feel for a woman of very strong personal feelings and public convictions placed after a reign of fifty years in a position of extraordinary difficulty will be glad to remember that after July 1886 she had comparative rest and comfort for her remaining fifteen years. No doubt she did not like everything done by her Conservative Ministers, but they at least shared her faith in the greatness of England and the British Empire, and they were sure to preserve her from such fundamental changes in the social and political conditions of England as were always being threatened by their opponents, and were naturally dreaded and disliked by an old Sovereign full of the Royal instinct for continuity and order. In their hands the land had rest for nearly twenty years, and the Queen, one may almost say, for all the years she had yet to live; for the last Ministry of Gladstone, though it must have been a great annoyance to her, was too weak and too short-lived to be more than an unimportant interruption of the long peace. Even those who most disagree with her may well indulge in a kindly rejoicing that the policies, both foreign and domestic, which she most disliked were in abeyance or defeat during the last chapter of her reign. But mention of that is an anticipation of volumes which we may, or may not, be privileged to see later. For the present we are concerned only with the six years, 1879-1885. It will be evident, from what has been already said, that we are here dealing with a woman and a Queen who was, in Arnold's phrase, more and more abounding in her own sense. The immediate cause of that was, of course, Disraeli. The Throne was the first article in Disraeli's political faith, and, naturally enough, he made no quicker or easier convert than its occupant. He always talked to the Queen of her Empire and her Army and her servants, and even of her policy. All that was wholly true in law, and much truer in theory and in desirability than had been understood during the long rule of the Whigs. But it was new and naturally pleasant to the Royal ears; and it made her believe in herself and assert herself with a new courage and confidence. Nature had given her at her birth an exceptionally strong physical constitution, a very forceful will, and a mind which, because extremely clear, extremely untiring, and at the same time not at all subtle, was just the mind to reinforce a strong will. In her, as in George III, these qualities were reinforced by an honest consciousness of daily desire to do a Sovereign's duty to her people, and the combination was one which in both cases Ministers found very formidable. Victoria began her reign under the stimulating protection of Melbourne. Even before she had begun to feel that protection, within the first dozen hours of her reign, she had shown the courage and will that was in her by dismissing from her presence, at once and for ever, her mother's favourite, Sir John Conroy. And how rapidly her self-confidence grew, under the double delight of the Crown on her head and Melbourne at her side, may be seen in her defeat of Peel over the Bedchamber affair. Then came her husband, and with him a long period of something like obedience, first to tuition, and then to memory, though her natural self was always there and could even break out violently at times, as in the dismissal of Palmerston. Still, between Melbourne and Disraeli she had no Minister who was temperamentally congenial to her. With Disraeli she took new life; and, with the privileges of age now reinforcing those of rank and sex, she became the passionate, determined, and, to opponents, very difficult woman whom we see in these pages. About a woman in so great a position as Queen Victoria people naturally ask two questions: What was she like as a woman? What was she like as a Queen? So far as those two questions can be separated, it is only the second of them to which these letters provide an answer. In what we have here the woman appears almost exclusively as the Queen. She is, indeed, as far as possible from being lost or concealed in the Queen. Her letters have nothing of the official colourless ב ness of the 'Queen's Speech' about them. They are the letters of an eager, excitable, prejudiced, and passionate woman. No man could have struck the note whether of indignation or of sorrow, which comes out in all she writes about her soldiers, whether in victory or in defeat, or about such tragedies as the deaths of Lord Frederick Cavendish and the Prince Imperial, above all, about the supreme tragedy of the death of Gordon. No man could have written such petulant letters as she wrote to Gladstone, and no man would have received such patient and respectful replies. Never for a moment does she forget, or allow any one else to forget, that she is woman as well as Queen. But neither in the letters themselves nor in the useful and admirable introductions with which Mr Buckle has prefaced each chapter, is the woman apart from the Queen much in evidence. There are a certain number of appearances of the mother, the grandmother, and the cousin. Unlike the four women who had preceded her on the throne of England, of whom one was unmarried and none had children, Queen Victoria had a large family and a whole clan of relations, and was eager and active in promoting their interests all over the world. It is amusing to find Lord Salisbury obliged to remind her that in her passionate championship of her favourite Alexander of Bulgaria's annexation of Eastern Roumelia she was trying to upset the very cornerstone of the policy of her beloved Beaconsfield. To any one else he probably would have enjoyed adding that it was a new doctrine to him that a popular revolution was a proper guide to the policy of the statesmen of Europe. But the woman in Victoria had a great liking for Alexander, who was her daughter's brother-in-law: and in his interest the Queen was quite prepared to forget her legalism and Conservatism, and even her adored Disraeli. This action was, however, of a public nature, though founded on private affections. Of strictly private life, tastes and feelings, there is almost nothing here. His Majesty the King has been free and generous, some will think surprisingly so, in permitting the publication of the Queen's political and ministerial correspondence. He has allowed Mr Buckle to make the two volumes an historical record of the first importance. And, as every one would expect beforehand, Mr Buckle has carried through what must have been the very laborious as well as very responsible task of editing the letters, with admirable judgment, as well as with his usual self-effacement and his usual well-informed accuracy. He gives us no private opinions or private information of his own. He is content to supply us with all the political information we need for understanding the matters discussed between the Queen and her correspondents. This he does by means of brief and businesslike footnotes with a few pages of introduction placed at the opening of each chapter. These, between them, serve to tell us who the personages mentioned are and how the political situation at home and abroad was developing at the time. For the book is, almost exclusively, a selection from the Queen's official correspondence. It is in no sense a biography. There are indeed a few letters, but very few, addressed to private friends, and dealing with private matters, such as marriages or deaths in the Queen's family or among her intimates. These show once more her quickness of sympathy, her intimate affection for her trusted servants (she addresses Dean Wellesley's widow as 'Dearest Lily'), and the terrible loneliness which after 1861 never passed away. 'I am a poor desolate old woman,' she writes after Prince Leopold's death, 'and my cup of sorrow overflows.' Of smaller personal matters there is almost nothing. The only items I have noticed are a snub to a silly Miss McGregor who wanted all mention of drinking of healths omitted from the 'Life of the Prince Consort' for fear of offending the total abstinence party, and a curious account of getting wet at Holyrood, which shows there is not more comfort in a multitude of servants than wisdom in a multitude of counsellors. The Queen comes home very wet from a review during which she had 'sat in a pool of water'; and yet she had 'great difficulty' in getting a fire lit, had herself to 'run down and look after Beatrice and Marie,' the latter of whom had no change of clothes with her and had to borrow some while her own were being dried! But these are isolated trifles. The book is a book of the Queen. Perhaps one who had become a Sovereign so very young found it hard even for a moment to be anything else. Even to her own children, whom she so devotedly loved and who so loved her, she was always Queen as well as mother. Anyhow, neither of that relation nor of any other, if there was any other, in which she could dream of forgetting her Queenship, do we see more than the scantiest glimpses here. No doubt there was no room for more, independent of the fact that the subject of the book is the Queen's public life. Already the volume is a large one; and its seven hundred pages have enough to do in showing how from day to day a nearly always absent Queen, by an incessant stream of letters, discharged her function as the Sovereign of this country without whose ultimate consent almost nothing could, in law and theory, be done by her Ministers, and not a very great deal in fact and practice. And yet it is the irony and sometimes the tragedy of the position of a Constitutional Monarch-the greater the issue the less possible is it for that consent to be permanently withheld. The government of this country can only be carried on by Ministers possessing the support of the House of Commons, for no others can obtain supplies. The Sovereign must therefore accept Ministers who command that support: and no statesman will take office except with the power of carrying out his own policy, at least in matters of importance. When that is a policy which, as in 1880 and 1886, was one which the Queen disapproved and disliked, friction inevitably resulted. The letters printed in this volume are an almost continuous record of such friction, which was worse during the years 1880-1885 than at any other period of the reign. This was largely due to the personality of the Prime Minister, which was more antipathetic to the Queen than that of any of his predecessors or successors. He was, indeed, never jaunty, impertinent or vulgar like that 'dreadful old man 'Lord Palmerston, being as exactly the reverse of Palmerston in his treatment of the Queen as in everything else. She never had a more deferential Minister. All the traditionalism, all the clinging to custom and precedent, all the social Conservatism, which were so strong in him to the very last (and one may note so conspicuously absent in Lord Salisbury), made him treat his Sovereign with a respect at once ceremonial and sincere. No Conservative was |