was suffering from great poverty, and that L30,000 was the whole revenue of Coburg; but her uncle Leopold had been given L50,000, and it would be monstrous to give Albert less.  Sir Robert Peel—­it might have been expected—­had had the effrontery to speak and vote for the smaller sum.  She was very angry; and determined to revenge herself by omitting to invite a single Tory to her wedding.  She would make an exception in favour of old Lord Liverpool, but even the Duke of Wellington she refused to ask.  When it was represented to her that it would amount to a national scandal if the Duke were absent from her wedding, she was angrier than ever.  “What!  That old rebel!  I won’t have him:”  she was reported to have said.  Eventually she was induced to send him an invitation; but she made no attempt to conceal the bitterness of her feelings, and the Duke himself was only too well aware of all that had passed.

Nor was it only against the Tories that her irritation rose.  As the time for her wedding approached, her temper grew steadily sharper and more arbitrary.  Queen Adelaide annoyed her.  King Leopold, too, was “ungracious” in his correspondence; “Dear Uncle,” she told Albert, “is given to believe that he must rule the roost everywhere.  However,” she added with asperity, “that is not a necessity.”  Even Albert himself was not impeccable.  Engulfed in Coburgs, he failed to appreciate the complexity of English affairs.  There were difficulties about his household.  He had a notion that he ought not to be surrounded by violent Whigs; very likely, but he would not understand that the only alternatives to violent Whigs were violent Tories; and it would be preposterous if his Lords and Gentlemen were to be found voting against the Queen’s.  He wanted to appoint his own Private Secretary.  But how could he choose the right person?  Lord M. was obviously best qualified to make the appointment; and Lord M. had decided that the Prince should take over his own Private Secretary—­George Anson, a staunch Whig.  Albert protested, but it was useless; Victoria simply announced that Anson was appointed, and instructed Lehzen to send the Prince an explanation of the details of the case.

Then, again, he had written anxiously upon the necessity of maintaining unspotted the moral purity of the Court.  Lord M’s pupil considered that dear Albert was strait-laced, and, in a brisk Anglo-German missive, set forth her own views.  “I like Lady A. very much,” she told him, “only she is a little strict awl particular, and too severe towards others, which is not right; for I think one ought always to be indulgent towards other people, as I always think, if we had not been well taken care of, we might also have gone astray.  That is always my feeling.  Yet it is always right to show that one does not like to see what is obviously wrong; but it is very dangerous to be too severe, and I am certain that as a rule such people always greatly regret that in their youth they have not been so careful as they ought to have been.  I have explained this so badly and written it so badly, that I fear you will hardly be able to make it out.”