Now, undoubtedly the period to which these words refer was one when certain Whig leaders contemplated an oligarchical republic, and wished to compass their aim by an undue exaltation of the Lower House, as, in 1718, Sunderland had wished to attain the same end by that of the Upper. No student of the Croker Papers can fail to recognise the fact, and undoubtedly Disraeli thought--and Sir Robert Peel thought so too--that the times were ripe for reviving those constitutional prerogatives, those kingly privileges which form the Crown’s sole direct representative faculty in the constitution, of which the Crown had long been robbed, first by its own alternate abuse or incapacity to use them, afterwards by faction itself often imitating the royal errors. And so the executive power had passed almost wholly into ministerial hands. After 1830 the prerogatives which, as I shall show, Mr. Gladstone champions, seemed falling into entire abeyance. In 1836, before he had entered Parliament, Disraeli had, in the _Runnymede Letters_, where he spoke of “the people of England sighing once more to be a nation,” called on Sir Robert Peel to achieve “a great task in a great spirit”--“_rescue your Sovereign from an unconstitutional thraldom_; rescue an august Senate which has already fought the battle of the people; rescue our National Church which our opponents hate, our venerable constitution at which they scoff; but, above all, rescue that mighty body of which all these great classes and institutions are but one of the constituent and essential parts--rescue the _nation_.” In 1837, “our young Queen and our old Institutions” were no mere catchwords. And it seems unquestionable, also, that the subsequent interferences of Baron Stockmar, the late Queen’s early tutelage to Lord Melbourne, the circumstances attendant on her happy marriage, the peculiar treatment of Prince Consort by her first ministers, and the long retirement due to private grief, contributed in successive combination towards that invisibility, so to speak, of her royal office, which prevailed, though it did not, however, eventually preclude her very real and valuable exercise of it. In England the only true blemish of our party system, which Disraeli vehemently fought to uphold, is, as he more than once urged, that it tends to “warp the intelligence.” To this fault the wisdom of a constitutional and popular monarch, above and beyond party, offers an antidote. Sir Robert Peel, in the very year of Queen Victoria’s accession, writes to Croker as follows:--