And for five weeks he was the cabinet, holding all the high offices--Treasury, Home, Foreign, and Colonial--himself, so as not to embarrass his successor by making appointments. The Whigs raised a great outcry against this one- man power, but the people rather admired the industry of the veteran who rose at six o'clock in the morning and went the rounds of the departments performing the routine duties with the greatest industry and fidelity and steadily refusing to use his enormous power and patronage for personal or factional rule. Sir Herbert Maxwell, the Duke's latest biographer, has attempted to describe the Duke's political creed by coining a term. He was not "an impracticable Tory," as the Reformers would name him, nor yet a mere "Tory opportunist," as sterner Tories would have it. "He was a possiblist rather than an opportunist, prepared to resist change as long as possible, but to give way rather than throw the power into the hands of those (Radicals) who, he honestly believed, would wreck the realm." Wellington was foreign secretary in Peel's first cabinet (1834- 35), and commander-in-chief in the second (1841-46). His lifelong political theory is well exemplified by his words when notified by the Prime Minister, in November, 1845, of his intention to suspend the Corn Laws, an act most offensive to his party and social class. "My only object in public life is to support Sir Robert Peel's administration of the government for the Queen. A good government for the country is more important than Corn Laws." In much the same words the aged leader addressed the House of Lords in behalf of Peel's Corn Bill, and though bitterly opposed to the measure, they accepted his guidance and gave the bill their assent. In 1848 there were many who believed that the country was on the brink of a revolution. The Chartist agitation was culminating in the presentation of the great petition to Parliament, and half a million men were to escort it from Kennington to Westminster. Wellington was nearing his seventy- ninth birthday, but the government turned to him to organize the defense of the capital against mob violence. The old warrior- blood warmed in his veins, and he amazed the ministers by the clearness of his plans and the energy and decision with which he carried them out. Though the affair passed off without disturbance, being at all times under police control, so thorough were the Duke's preparations as to have made a successful revolution impossible.