their objects. And the Queen, in consequence, above a year before,[277] had drawn up a memorandum, in which she expressed with great distinctness her desire to have every step which the Foreign Secretary might recommend to be taken laid clearly before her, with sufficient time for consideration, 'that she might know distinctly to what she had given her royal sanction;' and 'to be kept informed of what passed between him and the Foreign Ministers before important decisions are taken,' etc., etc. And, after such an intimation of her wish, she not unnaturally felt great annoyance at learning that in a transaction so important as this coup d'etat (to give it the name by which from the first it was described in every country) Lord Palmerston had taken upon himself to hold language to the French Ambassador 'in complete contradiction to the line of strict neutrality and passiveness which she had expressed her desire to see followed with regard to the late convulsions at Paris, and which was approved by the cabinet.'[278] The Prime-minister seems to have taken the same view of the act, and remonstrated with Lord Palmerston, who treated the matter very lightly, and justified his right to hold such a conversation, which he characterized as 'unofficial,' in such a tone and on such grounds that Lord John considered he left him no alternative 'but to advise the Queen to place the Foreign Office in other hands.'
A careful and generally impartial political critic has recently expressed an opinion 'that Lord Palmerston made good his case;'[279] but his argument on the transaction seems to overlook the most material point in it. Lord Palmerston's own defence of his conduct was, that 'his conversation with Walewski was of an unofficial description; that he had said nothing to him which would in any degree or way fetter the action of the government; and that, if it was to be held that a Secretary of State could never express any opinion to a foreign minister on passing events except as the organ of a previously consulted cabinet, there would be an end of that easy and familiar intercourse which tends essentially to promote good understanding between ministers and government;' and he even added, as a personal justification of himself as against the Prime-minister, that three days afterward Lord John Russell himself, Lord Lansdowne (the President of the Council), and Sir Charles Wood (the Chancellor of the Exchequer) had all discussed the transaction with M. de Walewski at a dinner-party, 'and their opinions were, if anything, rather more strongly favorable than his had been.'
This personal aspect of the case it is impossible to discuss, since there are no means of knowing whether the ministers mentioned would have admitted the correctness of this report of their language. If it were confessed to be accurate, it would only show them to have been guilty of equal impropriety, and to a great extent justify him as against the Prime-minister, whose condemnation of his language, if he were conscious that he had held the same himself, would be inexplicable. But it certainly does not justify him in respect of her Majesty or the cabinet collectively, since the Queen's complaint was, not that he held unofficial conversations as a private individual, and not as 'the organ of a previously consulted cabinet,' but that the tenor of the conversation which he had held was in direct contradiction to the tone which the cabinet had decided should be taken on the subject; that his language was calculated to draw the government into a course of action which it had been deliberately resolved to avoid. And, in spite of the deference due to Lord Palmerston's great experience, it is hard to see how a conversation between our Foreign Secretary and the French Ambassador on an action, the result of which is as yet undecided, can be wholly unofficial, in the sense of having no influence on the conduct of affairs, or, as he expressed it, 'in no degree or way fettering the action of the government.'
The result was, as has been mentioned before, that the Prime-minister recommended the removal of Lord Palmerston from his office, and that he was removed accordingly. And this conclusion of the case seems to show that the statement of the position of the Prime-minister in the cabinet is rather understated by Mr. Gladstone in one of his essays,[280] where he says: 'The head of the British government is not a Grand Vizier. He has no powers, properly so called, over his colleagues; on the rare occasions when a cabinet determines its course by the votes of its members, his vote only counts as one of theirs.' He admits at the same time that 'they are appointed and dismissed by the sovereign on his advice.' And surely to have the right of giving this advice is to have the greatest possible power over his colleagues; not power, perhaps, to change their opinions (though it possibly at times has had power to prevent the expression of them), but power to compass their immediate removal from the administration, as was exercised in this instance, and as had been exercised by Pitt with regard to Lord Thurlow. That a difference of opinion, even on an important subject, is not always regarded as a sufficient cause for such a dismissal; that a Prime-minister, especially if conscious of his strength, occasionally consents to retain colleagues who differ from him on some one subject, the same work to which we are partly indebted for our knowledge of the details of this affair-the 'Life of the Prince Consort'-furnishes two remarkable instances in which the Prime-minister, then Lord Palmerston himself, submitted to be overruled. We read there that on one occasion, when 'Count Persigny sought the active intervention of England by the way of 'moral support' to a demand' which France proposed to address to Austria, 'Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell (then Foreign Secretary) were disposed to accede; but a different view was taken both by her Majesty and by the cabinet, and Count Persigny's request was accordingly declined.'[281] On this occasion, it is true, he was yielding to an overwhelming majority of his colleagues (her Majesty's approval must, of course, have been expressed subsequently to their decision). But in another instance we find the same Prime-minister consenting to the introduction of a bill by one of his colleagues, Mr. Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, of which he disapproved so highly that, after it had been passed by a very slender majority of the House of Commons,[282] he expressed to the Queen a hope that the closeness of the division 'might encourage the House of Lords to throw out the bill when it should come to their House, and that he was bound in duty to say that, if they should do so, they would perform a good public service;' and after they had rejected it by a majority of eighty-nine, he pronounced that 'they had done a right and useful thing,' reporting to her Majesty, as a corroboration of this opinion, and as a proof that it was largely shared by the public out-of- doors, that 'the people in the gallery of the House of Lords are said to have joined in the cheers which broke out when the numbers of the division were announced.'[283] And on a third occasion also he bore with the same colleague's opposition to a measure which he and all the rest of the cabinet justly thought of vital importance to the best interests of the country, the fortification of our great seaports, allowing him to object for a time in private, and even to threaten public opposition to it the next year, since he felt assured that his opposition, if carried out, which he doubted, would be wholly ineffectual.[284]
The personal interest in politics which this laudable habit of judging of everything for herself naturally engendered in the Queen's mind led, however, to the adoption by her Majesty, in more than one instance, of a course at variance not only with all historical precedent, but, with deference be it said, with constitutional principle, sanctioned though it was by more than one ministry. When the First Napoleon, after his elevation to the head of the French government as First Consul, proposed, by an autograph letter to George III., to treat with that sovereign for the conclusion of peace between the two nations, Pitt, to whom his Majesty communicated the letter, had no difficulty in deciding that it would be unseasonable for the King 'to depart from the forms long established in Europe for transacting business with foreign states,'[285] and, under his guidance, the cabinet instructed Lord Grenville, as Foreign Secretary, to address the reply to the First Consul's letter to the French Foreign Secretary, M. de Talleyrand.
But this reign has witnessed several departures from the old and convenient rule. Its violation was not begun by her Majesty, but by the Emperor Nicholas of Russia in the year preceding the Crimean war. He wrote to the Queen herself to discuss some of the points in dispute, and she answered his letter with her own hand.[286] The outbreak of war which soon ensued prevented any continuation of that correspondence; but the close alliance which that war for a time produced between England and France, strengthened as it was by an interchange of visits between the royal and imperial families, which led to the establishment of a strong mutual friendliness and regard, led also to an occasional interchange of letters on some of the gravest questions affecting the policy of the two nations. The correspondence was sanctioned by successive English cabinets, every letter which the Queen either received from, or sent to, any foreign prince on political affairs being invariably communicated by her either to the Prime-minister or to the Foreign Secretary; and they, in one instance, even suggesting to her Majesty to write to Louis Napoleon[287] with an object so delicate as that of influencing the language with which he was about to open his Chambers.
But we must think the line recommended by Pitt to George III. both more constitutional and more safe. A letter from one sovereign to another on political subjects cannot be divested of the character of a state-paper, and for every state-paper some one must be responsible. The sovereign cannot be, but for every one of his actions the ministers are. And it follows, therefore, that they are thus made responsible for documents of which they have not been the original authors; of which, were it not for the courtesy of the sovereign, they might by possibility be wholly ignorant; and with parts of which, even with the knowledge which that courtesy has afforded them, they may not fully coincide, since they could hardly venture to subject a composition of their royal mistress to a vigorous criticism.
