Queen Victoria eBook

At the same time his activity was increasing enormously in a more important sphere.  He had become the Queen’s Private Secretary, her confidential adviser, her second self.  He was now always present at her interviews with Ministers.  He took, like the Queen, a special interest in foreign policy; but there was no public question in which his influence was not felt.  A double process was at work; while Victoria fell more and more absolutely under his intellectual predominance, he, simultaneously, grew more and more completely absorbed by the machinery of high politics—­the incessant and multifarious business of a great State.  Nobody any more could call him a dilettante; he was a worker, a public personage, a man of affairs.  Stockmar noted the change with exultation.  “The Prince,” he wrote, “has improved very much lately.  He has evidently a head for politics.  He has become, too, far more independent.  His mental activity is constantly on the increase, and he gives the greater part of his time to business, without complaining.”

“The relations between husband and wife,” added the Baron, “are all one could desire.”

Long before Peel’s ministry came to an end, there had been a complete change in Victoria’s attitude towards him.  His appreciation of the Prince had softened her heart; the sincerity and warmth of his nature, which, in private intercourse with those whom he wished to please, had the power of gradually dissipating the awkwardness of his manners, did the rest.  She came in time to regard him with intense feelings of respect and attachment.  She spoke of “our worthy Peel,” for whom, she said, she had “an extreme admiration” and who had shown himself “a man of unbounded loyalty, courage patriotism, and high-mindedness, and his conduct towards me has been chivalrous almost, I might say.”  She dreaded his removal from office almost as frantically as she had once dreaded that of Lord M. It would be, she declared, a great calamity.  Six years before, what would she have said, if a prophet had told her that the day would come when she would be horrified by the triumph of the Whigs?  Yet there was no escaping it; she had to face the return of her old friends.  In the ministerial crises of 1845 and 1846, the Prince played a dominating part.  Everybody recognised that he was the real centre of the negotiations—­the actual controller of the forces and the functions of the Crown.  The process by which this result was reached had been so gradual as to be almost imperceptible; but it may be said with certainty that, by the close of Peel’s administration, Albert had become, in effect, the King of England.

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