everything, his views about every thing are to be my law!  And no human power will make me swerve from what he decided and wished.”  She grew fierce, she grew furious, at the thought of any possible intrusion between her and her desire.  Her uncle was coming to visit her, and it flashed upon her that he might try to interfere with her and seek to “rule the roost” as of old.  She would give him a hint.  “I am also determined,” she wrote, “that no one person—­may he be ever so good, ever so devoted among my servants—­is to lead or guide or dictate to me.  I know how he would disapprove it...  Though miserably weak and utterly shattered, my spirit rises when I think any wish or plan of his is to be touched or changed, or I am to be made to do anything.”  She ended her letter in grief and affection.  She was, she said, his “ever wretched but devoted child, Victoria R.”  And then she looked at the date:  it was the 24th of December.  An agonising pang assailed her, and she dashed down a postcript—­“What a Xmas!  I won’t think of it.”

At first, in the tumult of her distresses, she declared that she could not see her Ministers, and the Princess Alice, assisted by Sir Charles Phipps, the keeper of the Privy Purse, performed, to the best of her ability, the functions of an intermediary.  After a few weeks, however, the Cabinet, through Lord John Russell, ventured to warn the Queen that this could not continue.  She realised that they were right:  Albert would have agreed with them; and so she sent for the Prime Minister.  But when Lord Palmerston arrived at Osborne, in the pink of health, brisk, with his whiskers freshly dyed, and dressed in a brown overcoat, light grey trousers, green gloves, and blue studs, he did not create a very good impression.

Nevertheless, she had grown attached to her old enemy, and the thought of a political change filled her with agitated apprehensions.  The Government, she knew, might fall at any moment; she felt she could not face such an eventuality; and therefore, six months after the death of the Prince, she took the unprecedented step of sending a private message to Lord Derby, the leader of the Opposition, to tell him that she was not in a fit state of mind or body to undergo the anxiety of a change of Government, and that if he turned the present Ministers out of office it would be at the risk of sacrificing her life—­or her reason.  When this message reached Lord Derby he was considerably surprised.  “Dear me!” was his cynical comment.  “I didn’t think she was so fond of them as that.”