The prosaic side of the question was that the country was torn by the factions of Whig and Tory, which were then in the full bloom of party spirit and narrow rancorous animosity. The close of the life of William IV. had presented the singular and disastrous contradiction of a King in something like open opposition to his Ministers. William had begun by being a liberal in politics, but alarmed by the progress of reform, he had hung back resisted, and ended by being dragged along an unwilling tolerator of a Whig _regime_. The Duke of Kent had been liberal in his opinions when liberality was not the fashion. The Duchess was understood to be on the same side; her brother and counsellor, the King of the Belgians, was decidedly so. Accordingly, the Whigs hailed the accession of Queen Victoria as their triumph, likely to secure and prolong their tenure of office. They claimed her as their Queen, with a boasting exultation calculated to wound and exasperate every Tory in the kingdom. Lord Campbell, who, though a zealous Whig, was comparatively cool and cautious, wrote in his journal, after the Queen's first Council, "We basked in the full glare of royal sunshine;" and this tone was generally adopted by his party. They met with some amount of success in their loud assertion, and the consequence was a strain of indignant bitterness in the Tory rejoinder. A clever partisan inscribed on the window-pane of an inn at Huddersfield: "The Queen is with us," Whigs insulting say, "For when she found us in, she let us stay." It may be so; but give me leave to doubt How long she'll keep you _when she finds you out._ There was even some cooling of Tory loyalty to the new Queen. Chroniclers tell us of the ostentatious difference in enthusiasm with which, at Tory dinners, the toasts of the Queen, and the Queen-dowager were received.