He could imagine his own father opposing over a considerable period the weight of his personal prestige to the importunacy of ministers, saying with stately ease: "We will speak of that, gentlemen, some other day," and so calmly turning from the subject in dispute--not solving it, but at least imposing delay as the penalty which ministers must pay for a difference of opinion. That policy of quiet procrastination no minister of his time would have dared to withstand without first making for it a certain time-allowance. So much at least would have been secured, not of right, but through the weight of a stronger personality. And what about others before him? Slowly there dawned upon the King's vision--clear as though he had seen her but yesterday, the regal presence of a certain ancestress who more than any other had made the monarchy what it now was--an almost miraculous survival from the past. It was the old Queen Regent, the lady who for the last twenty years of her consort's reign, when his wavering mind had failed him, had ruled her ministers with a rod which was not of iron, but which, none the less, they had feared, and sought by many devious ways to evade. Out of some book of memoirs a vision of something that had taken place in that very room rose up before him. Around her a ring of Bishops, crowding the royal hearth-rug, each standing defenseless with deferential stoop, tea-cup in hand; and she, seated before them with plump hands folded in her lap upon a lace kerchief, or tapping now and again upon the arms of her chair to give emphasis, was laying down her word of law, and putting an end to revolt in the Church. "I won't have it!" she cried. "I won't have it! This nonsense has got to be put down!" And what could a Bishop do with a tea-cup in his hand? There she had got them, six or eight chosen Prelates, every one of them in a defenseless position; how could they argue an affair of State so? What could they do but assent to the incontrovertible statement that "nonsense" must and certainly should be put down--though knowing all the time that the particular "nonsense" in question, being a thing inbred in the minds of men, could not be put down by any act of Parliament and would persist even to the breaking-up of Church unity? And so a perfectly ineffective Church Government Act had passed into law, causing its honest opponents to secede, while its far more numerous dishonest opponents had remained; and the Queen Regent, having for the time being asserted her authority in the Church, had passed on the actual solution of the problem to later times.