It is, at any rate, certain that the Queen’s enthusiasm for the sacred cause of peace was short-lived.  Within a few months her mind had completely altered.  Her eyes were opened to the true nature of Prussia, whose designs upon Austria were about to culminate in the Seven Weeks’ War.  Veering precipitately from one extreme to the other, she now urged her Ministers to interfere by force of arms in support of Austria.  But she urged in vain.

Her political activity, no more than her social seclusion, was approved by the public.  As the years passed, and the royal mourning remained as unrelieved as ever, the animadversions grew more general and more severe.  It was observed that the Queen’s protracted privacy not only cast a gloom over high society, not only deprived the populace of its pageantry, but also exercised a highly deleterious effect upon the dressmaking, millinery, and hosiery trades.  This latter consideration carried great weight.  At last, early in 1864, the rumour spread that Her Majesty was about to go out of mourning, and there was much rejoicing in the newspapers; but unfortunately it turned out that the rumour was quite without foundation.  Victoria, with her own hand, wrote a letter to The Times to say so.  “This idea,” she declared, “cannot be too explicitly contradicted.  The Queen,” the letter continued, “heartily appreciates the desire of her subjects to see her, and whatever she can do to gratify them in this loyal and affectionate wish, she will do...  But there are other and higher duties than those of mere representation which are now thrown upon the Queen, alone and unassisted—­duties which she cannot neglect without injury to the public service, which weigh unceasingly upon her, overwhelming her with work and anxiety.”  The justification might have been considered more cogent had it not been known that those “other and higher duties” emphasised by the Queen consisted for the most part of an attempt to counteract the foreign policy of Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell.  A large section—­perhaps a majority—­of the nation were violent partisans of Denmark in the Schleswig-Holstein quarrel; and Victoria’s support of Prussia was widely denounced.  A wave of unpopularity, which reminded old observers of the period preceding the Queen’s marriage more than twenty-five years before, was beginning to rise.  The press was rude; Lord Ellenborough attacked the Queen in the House of Lords; there were curious whispers in high quarters that she had had thoughts of abdicating—­whispers followed by regrets that she had not done so.  Victoria, outraged and injured, felt that she was misunderstood.  She was profoundly unhappy.  After Lord Ellenborough’s speech, General Grey declared that he “had never seen the Queen so completely upset.”  “Oh, how fearful it is,” she herself wrote to Lord Granville, “to be suspected—­uncheered—­unguided and unadvised—­and how alone the poor Queen feels!” Nevertheless, suffer as she might, she was as resolute as ever; she would not move by a hair’s breadth from the course that a supreme obligation marked out for her; she would be faithful to the end.