the people impressed with the belief that the King, in the view of the law, is nothing but a mandarin figure, which has to nod its head in assent, or shake it in denial, as his Minister pleases.”  To prevent this from happening, it was of extreme importance, said the Baron, “that no opportunity should be let slip of vindicating the legitimate position of the Crown.”  “And this is not hard to do,” he added, “and can never embarrass a Minister where such straightforward loyal personages as the Queen and the Prince are concerned.”  In his opinion, the very lowest claim of the Royal Prerogative should include “a right on the part of the King to be the permanent President of his Ministerial Council.”  The Sovereign ought to be “in the position of a permanent Premier, who takes rank above the temporary head of the Cabinet, and in matters of discipline exercises supreme authority.”  The Sovereign “may even take a part in the initiation and the maturing of the Government measures; for it would be unreasonable to expect that a king, himself as able, as accomplished, and as patriotic as the best of his Ministers, should be prevented from making use of these qualities at the deliberations of his Council.”  “The judicious exercise of this right,” concluded the Baron, “which certainly requires a master mind, would not only be the best guarantee for Constitutional Monarchy, but would raise it to a height of power, stability, and symmetry, which has never been attained.”

Now it may be that this reading of the Constitution is a possible one, though indeed it is hard to see how it can be made compatible with the fundamental doctrine of ministerial responsibility.  William III presided over his Council, and he was a constitutional monarch; and it seems that Stockmar had in his mind a conception of the Crown which would have given it a place in the Constitution analogous to that which it filled at the time of William III.  But it is clear that such a theory, which would invest the Crown with more power than it possessed even under George III, runs counter to the whole development of English public life since the Revolution; and the fact that it was held by Stockmar, and instilled by him into Albert, was of very serious importance.  For there was good reason to believe not only that these doctrines were held by Albert in theory, but that he was making a deliberate and sustained attempt to give them practical validity.  The history of the struggle between the Crown and Palmerston provided startling evidence that this was the case.  That struggle reached its culmination when, in Stockmar’s memorandum of 1850, the Queen asserted her “constitutional right” to dismiss the Foreign Secretary if he altered a despatch which had received her sanction.  The memorandum was, in fact, a plain declaration that the Crown intended to act independently of the Prime Minister.  Lord John Russell, anxious at all costs to strengthen himself against Palmerston, accepted the memorandum, and thereby implicitly allowed the