The Prince Consort was quick to notice the effect which her Majesty’s unswerving fidelity to public interests at this time had produced on the country. It was therefore with pardonable pride that he wrote to Baron Stockmar[20] a curious letter, shrewdly pointing out that the crisis now past had been of signal advantage to the Crown. The Queen had been seen to remain calm and unmoved in the fierce and strident strife of factions--the one stable element in the Constitution at a moment when no other rallying point was visible to the nation. Albany Fonblanque, the wittiest of the Radical journalists of that day, ridiculed, to the top of his bent, the chiefs of the two great parties, whose petty rivalries and personal jealousies had thrown public affairs into sad confusion. They were, it must be confessed, rather like Rabelais’ giant, who, though he habitually fed on windmills, choked on a pat of butter swallowed the wrong way. But on behalf of the Radicals, Fonblanque, it is interesting to notice now, had nothing but praise to bestow on the Queen’s behaviour in the midst of the tragi-comedy of politics, which was being enacted before the eyes of a famished people. “In all the pranks and bunglings of the last three weeks,” he wrote, “there is one part which, according to all report, has been played most faultlessly--that of a Constitutional Sovereign. In the pages of history the directness, the sincerity, the scrupulous observance of Constitutional rule, which have marked her Majesty’s conduct in circumstances the most trying, will have their place of honour. However unused as we are to deal in homage to Royalty, we must add that never, we believe, was the heart of a monarch so warmly devoted to the interests of a people, and with so enlightened a sense of their interests.”[21] The Continental tour of the Queen in 1845 had suggested to the people that the personal influence of the Sovereign might, if adroitly used, be of great service to the State in conciliating foreign nations, whose goodwill it would be advantageous to secure. Her conduct in the Ministerial crisis of 1845-46, however, convinced them that, if intelligently directed, the personal influence of the Queen, in domestic politics, might also be rendered not less beneficial to her subjects and her empire.