A non-gambling, non-drinking, pure-hearted, and clean-living young couple would have against them much that had enjoyed the sunshine of Court favor under the son of George III. The hounds of the “Great Goddess Lubricity” were in full cry against the Court. The undeserved humiliation suffered by poor Lady Flora Hastings gave them an advantage they were not slow to make the most of; it gave them the cover they run best in. Added to this source of unpopularity which had in it nothing of a party character, there was another of a strictly party nature. The Bedchamber question, the Queen’s dislike of Peel, and her desire to keep Lord Melbourne in office, still further aggravated the situation, and, towards the end of 1839, Tory members of Parliament broke out into speeches containing violent personal attacks upon the Queen. One of these, “_Victorippicks_,” delivered at a Conservative dinner at Canterbury, Greville describes as “violent and indecent,” “a tissue of folly and impertinence;” it was, however, received by the assembled company with shouts of applause. The chief offender on this occasion, Mr. Bradshaw, was called out by Mr. Horsman, a strong Whig and M.P. for Cockermouth; but matters were made worse, as far as the Tory party were concerned, by the fact that Bradshaw’s second was Colonel Gurwood, the confidential friend and secretary of the Duke of Wellington. Another striking manifestation of Tory disloyalty was given about the same time at Shrewsbury, when at a public dinner the company present refused to drink the health of the newly appointed Lord Lieutenant because he was the husband of one of the Ladies of the Bedchamber, the Duchess of Sutherland, with whom the Queen had refused to part when Sir Robert Peel was endeavoring to form a Government in 1839. Stockmar, Greville, and other observers of the current of English politics marked with alarm the decay of loyalty in the party whose traditional principles led them in an exactly contrary direction.