Of all the indignities I have experienced, this is one which, minute as it may seem, has affected me as much as all the rest. But if it were minute, it was not so to my agonising sensibility.’ But she observed in her reply to the Barnard Castle address: ‘My conscience is without a pang--and what have I to fear?’ Her Majesty at the same time seldom allowed an opportunity to escape of placing the King in, if the phrase may be allowed, a metaphorical pillory. ‘To pretend,’ she thus spoke to the Bethnal Green deputation, ‘that his Majesty is not a party, and the sole complaining party, in this great question, is to render the whole business a mere mockery. His Majesty either does or does not desire the divorce which the bill of Pains and Penalties proposes to accomplish. If his Majesty does not desire the divorce, it is certain that the State does not desire it in his stead; and if the divorce is the desire of his Majesty, his Majesty ought to seek it on the same terms as his subjects; for in a limited monarchy the law is one and the same for all.’ In the answer to the people of Sheffield the same spirit is manifested. ‘It would have been well for me,’ she exclaims, ‘and perhaps not ill for the country, if my oppressor had been as far from malice as myself; for what is it but malice of the most unmixed nature and the most unrelenting character which has infested my path and waylaid my steps during a long period of twenty-five years?’ Her complaint was, that during that quarter of a century her adversaries had treated her as if she had been insensible to the value of character. ‘For why else,’ she asks, in addressing the Reading deputation, ‘why else should they have invited me to bring it to market, and let it be estimated by gold? But--a good name is better than riches. I do not dread poverty, but I loathe turpitude, and I think death preferable to shame.’ Finally, she flattered the popular ear by placing all the authorities in the realm below that of the sovereign people. In her reply to one of the City Ward addresses occurs the assertion that, ‘If the power of king, lords, and commons is limited by the fundamental laws of the realm, their acts are not binding when they exceed those limitations. If it be asked: “What then?--are kings, lords, and commons answerable to any higher authority?” I distinctly answer, _yes_. “To what higher authority?” “To that of God and of the people.”’ Lord John Russell, too, told the King that the crown was held at the will and pleasure of the parliament; and the Queen, speaking on that hint, now maintained that crown and parliament were, under certain contingencies, beneath the heel of the _peuple souverain_.