to make her regard Palmerston in a more favorable light, and showed her notes and memoranda by him calculated to please her. Lord Aberdeen also used his influence in the same direction. The Queen is never implacable, and always ready to recognize good service, and before the autumn was out Palmerston took his turn as Minister-in-Attendance on the Queen at Balmoral. An anecdote is told, illustrative of his continued absorption in foreign politics, although he was now Home Secretary. The Queen was much interested in some strikes and labor troubles that were taking place in the North of England, and asked Palmerston for details about them which, as Home Secretary, he might be expected to know. However, she found him absolutely without information. “One morning, after previous inquiries, she said to him, ‘Pray, Lord Palmerston, have you any news?’ To which he replied, ‘No, Madam, I have heard nothing; but it seems certain _that the Turks have crossed the Danube_!’” Palmerston was at the Home Office during the outbreak of cholera in 1854. His measures against it were said to have been conceived in the spirit of treating Heaven as if it were a Foreign Power. Palmerston really directed the foreign policy of England from the Home Office during the year which led up to the Crimean War. When the Government refused to take his view, he resigned, ostensibly because he did not like Lord John Russell’s Reform Bill; really because when the Turks refused to accept the Vienna note, the majority of the Cabinet wished to leave them to their fall. Palmerston took an exactly opposite line, and urged the entry of the allied French and English fleets into the Black Sea, which really amounted to an act of war. As soon as he got his own way he rejoined the Government. As some excuse was necessary to the outer world, he had said he was not prepared to sit out debates on the Reform Bill in the House of Commons at “_his time of life_.” Clarendon said that no one had ever before heard him acknowledge that he had a time of life. The Queen went heartily with Palmerston in his war policy. She was convinced of the justice of the Russian War, and that it could not have been avoided. Her intense interest in its progress will be described in the coming chapter. It is sufficient here to say that her former feeling of hostility to Palmerston was very much softened by seeing the whole-hearted devotion with which he threw himself into the success of the British arms. As is well known, the events of the war made Palmerston Prime Minister. She gave him her entire confidence in that capacity. On the signing of the Treaty of Peace in April, 1856, she bestowed upon him the Order of the Garter, as a special and public token of her appreciation of his zealous and able services to his country.