In midsummer the queen moved to Buckingham Palace, and on July seventeenth she took part in her first elaborate public ceremony--that is, she drove in state to dissolve Parliament. All were impressed with the manner in which she read her speech, and one distinguished observer said to another, "How beautifully she performs!" A pleasant story is told of the young queen shortly after her accession. The Duke of Wellington, whom Victoria greatly admired, brought to her for signature a court-martial death sentence. The queen, horrified, and feeling that she could not sign her name to such a document, begged the Duke to tell her whether there was not some excuse for the offender. "None," said the Iron Duke; "he has deserted three times." "Oh, think, your Grace," Victoria replied, "whether there be not something in his favor." "Well," said the Duke, "I am certain that he is a very bad soldier, but he may, for aught I know, be a very good man. In fact, I remember hearing some one speak for him." "Oh, thank you!" exclaimed the queen, as she joyously wrote the word "Pardoned" across the document. It soon became evident that the tender-hearted queen would never be able to deal with questions of this sort--that there was danger of all offenders being pardoned; and a commission was finally appointed to attend to such matters. On June twenty-eighth, 1838, after she had been queen for over a year, Victoria was formally crowned at Westminster Abbey. The crown worn by her predecessors was far too large for her, so a new crown was made at a cost of over five hundred thousand dollars. The spectacle was a most impressive and inspiring one, and the queen went through her part in it, as she had gone through her part at all ceremonies in which she had participated, in a manner which roused anew the enthusiasm of her subjects. When the prime minister finally placed the crown on Victoria's head, all the peers and peeresses placed their coronets on their heads and shouted _God Save the Queen_. Carlyle said of her at that time, "Poor little Queen! She is at an age at which a girl can hardly be trusted to choose a bonnet for herself, yet a task is laid upon her from which an archangel might shrink." Another writer, however, said, "I consider that it would be impossible to exaggerate the enthusiasm of the English people on the accession of Victoria to the throne." And it was this enthusiasm on the part of her subjects, joined with her own extraordinary common sense, which enabled her to bear up under circumstances which might well have daunted an older and a wiser sovereign.