One of the difficulties with which those responsible for the management of the public ceremonials in which our Queen took part had to deal, was the regulation of the temperature. The enduring of heat was to her as to Marie Theresia, a misery and an impossibility. She could put up with any other discomfort and fatigue; but heat was unbearable. The Emperor Joseph, who did not inherit his mother’s imperviousness to cold, had to visit her in furs. Kaunitz, a privileged minister, was the only person who dared to shut the window. “How do you manage when you go to Balmoral?” I once asked Lord Beaconsfield, who was a chilly mortal. “The Queen is very gracious,” was the answer, “she excuses me from going there.” In dealing with the affairs of State both rulers showed themselves to be women of strong character and indefatigable industry. Their methods, of necessity, differed widely. The one, as I have said above, was an autocrat; the other, a constitutional Sovereign, deeply imbued with the sense of her own limitations, and yet such a mistress of public business, of constitutional law and of precedent, that she often dominated the councils of her ministers, many of whom recognized in her their guide and instructress in cases of difficulty. Nowhere was this more evident than in her treatment of foreign affairs. There she was no more a negligible quantity than Marie Theresia had been; no matter who might be Secretary of State, there was always a very real power in the background, and that power was the Queen. It would be easy to multiply instances, but we need only point to two cases: the Danish Duchies’ question in 1864, where, in obedience to what she believed to be the wishes of her dead husband, she took what is now shown to have been an unfortunate line; and, secondly, the dispute with the United States on the Trent question in 1861, where she, with the assistance of the Prince Consort, used all her influence to hinder what would have been a disastrous war, an unthinkable calamity. The mention of the Prince Consort brings into strong relief two pictures, in which it is difficult to say whether we are more startled by the likeness or puzzled by the violence of the contrasts. In both cases we see a marriage of true love, in each of which a prince of a small reigning family was raised, not for reasons of State, but by pure affection, to share the glories of a vast empire and a throne before which countless peoples bowed. There the likeness between the two husbands comes to an end.