At the end of July, 1847, Metternich resolved to inquire of the different Powers, which were parties to the treaties of 1815, whether they, as "the principal guardians of the political peace,"[908] intended to maintain the territorial divisions of the Italian peninsula as settled by the Congress of Vienna. The revolution, he told Lord Ponsonby, must now be considered as complete in the Roman States and in Tuscany. A revolution, he explained, was accomplished, once a government had been deprived of all power. But the real object of the party which had triumphed at Rome was to create a united Italy. The Emperor, however, while studiously respecting the independence of the sovereign States of the Peninsula, was determined to preserve his own Italian kingdom.[909] The British government, wrote Palmerston in reply, holds that the stipulations of treaties must everywhere be observed, and that no changes in an agreement can properly be effected, except with the concurrence of all the Powers which are parties to it. But Her Majesty's government, at the same time, is no less strongly of opinion that the right to carry out internal reforms is a right inherent to independent sovereignty.[910] A month later, on September 11, when the threatening communications made by Count Buol to the Court of Turin, and the proceedings of the military commander at Ferrara suggested that Austria might be contemplating some act of aggression against the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Papal dominions, Palmerston reverted to this subject. "The crowns of Great Britain and of Sardinia," he warned Metternich, "had long been bound together by the ties of an intimate and faithful alliance, and Great Britain could neither forget nor repudiate claims founded upon such honourable grounds." The Papal States were an essential element in the political independence of the Italian Peninsula, and no invasion of them could take place "without leading to consequences of great gravity and importance."[911]