channel for their griefs.  They commanded him to dine at the Palace, and, directly the meal was over, “the Queen,” as he described it afterwards, “exploded, and went with the utmost vehemence and bitterness into the whole of Palmerston’s conduct, all the effects produced all over the world, and all her own feelings and sentiments about it.”  When she had finished, the Prince took up the tale, with less excitement, but with equal force.  Lord Clarendon found himself in an awkward situation; he disliked Palmerston’s policy, but he was his colleague, and he disapproved of the attitude of his royal hosts.  In his opinion, they were “wrong in wishing that courtiers rather than Ministers should conduct the affairs of the country,” and he thought that they “laboured under the curious mistake that the Foreign Office was their peculiar department, and that they had the right to control, if not to direct, the foreign policy of England.”  He, therefore, with extreme politeness, gave it to be understood that he would not commit himself in any way.  But Lord John, in reality, needed no pressure.  Attacked by his Sovereign, ignored by his Foreign Secretary, he led a miserable life.  With the advent of the dreadful Schleswig-Holstein question—­the most complex in the whole diplomatic history of Europe—­his position, crushed between the upper and the nether mill-stones, grew positively unbearable.  He became anxious above all things to get Palmerston out of the Foreign Office.  But then—­supposing Palmerston refused to go?

In a memorandum made by the Prince, at about this time, of an interview between himself, the Queen, and the Prime Minister, we catch a curious glimpse of the states of mind of those three high personages—­the anxiety and irritation of Lord John, the vehement acrimony of Victoria, and the reasonable animosity of Albert—­drawn together, as it were, under the shadow of an unseen Presence, the cause of that celestial anger—­the gay, portentous Palmerston.  At one point in the conversation Lord John observed that he believed the Foreign Secretary would consent to a change of offices; Lord Palmerston, he said, realised that he had lost the Queen’s confidence—­though only on public, and not on personal, grounds.  But on that, the Prince noted, “the Queen interrupted Lord John by remarking that she distrusted him on personal grounds also, but I remarked that Lord Palmerston had so far at least seen rightly; that he had become disagreeable to the Queen, not on account of his person, but of his political doings—­to which the Queen assented.”  Then the Prince suggested that there was a danger of the Cabinet breaking up, and of Lord Palmerston returning to office as Prime Minister.  But on that point Lord John was reassuring:  he “thought Lord Palmerston too old to do much in the future (having passed his sixty-fifth year).”  Eventually it was decided that nothing could be done for the present, but that the utmost secrecy must be observed; and so the conclave ended.