dismissal of Sir James Clark.  The Queen expressed her regret to Lady Flora, but Sir James Clark was not dismissed.  The tide of opinion turned violently against the Queen and her advisers; high society was disgusted by all this washing of dirty linen in Buckingham Palace; the public at large was indignant at the ill-treatment of Lady Flora.  By the end of March, the popularity, so radiant and so abundant, with which the young Sovereign had begun her reign, had entirely disappeared.

There can be no doubt that a great lack of discretion had been shown by the Court.  Ill-natured tittle-tattle, which should have been instantly nipped in the bud, had been allowed to assume disgraceful proportions; and the Throne itself had become involved in the personal malignities of the palace.  A particularly awkward question had been raised by the position of Sir James Clark.  The Duke of Wellington, upon whom it was customary to fall back, in cases of great difficulty in high places, had been consulted upon this question, and he had given it as his opinion that, as it would be impossible to remove Sir James without a public enquiry, Sir James must certainly stay where he was.  Probably the Duke was right; but the fact that the peccant doctor continued in the Queen’s service made the Hastings family irreconcilable and produced an unpleasant impression of unrepentant error upon the public mind.  As for Victoria, she was very young and quite inexperienced; and she can hardly be blamed for having failed to control an extremely difficult situation.  That was clearly Lord Melbourne’s task; he was a man of the world, and, with vigilance and circumspection, he might have quietly put out the ugly flames while they were still smouldering.  He did not do so; he was lazy and easy-going; the Baroness was persistent, and he let things slide.  But doubtless his position was not an easy one; passions ran high in the palace; and Victoria was not only very young, she was very headstrong, too.  Did he possess the magic bridle which would curb that fiery steed?  He could not be certain.  And then, suddenly, another violent crisis revealed more unmistakably than ever the nature of the mind with which he had to deal.

VII

The Queen had for long been haunted by a terror that the day might come when she would be obliged to part with her Minister.  Ever since the passage of the Reform Bill, the power of the Whig Government had steadily declined.  The General Election of 1837 had left them with a very small majority in the House of Commons; since then, they had been in constant difflculties—­abroad, at home, in Ireland; the Radical group had grown hostile; it became highly doubtful how much longer they could survive.  The Queen watched the development of events in great anxiety.  She was a Whig by birth, by upbringing, by every association, public and private; and, even if those ties had never existed, the mere fact that