this position, but her warning was unheeded; and yet Lord John soon had reason to regret that he did not lay it to heart. After the Session ended he began to give Aberdeen broad hints that it would be well for him to retire, and to indicate that he himself might have to secede, if these hints were not acted on. His secession would have broken up the Coalition, which, Aberdeen knew, the Sovereign had set her heart on keeping together. Hence, every effort was made to conciliate Lord John Russell, and, as he soon became, next to Palmerston, the most zealous member of the War Party in the Cabinet, he was therefore able to exert a baneful influence on the Foreign Policy of the Ministry. This was, indeed, one reason why that policy perpetually alternated between energy and apathy. Still, the Cabinet kept together till Russell’s Reform scheme was thrust upon it. Then, on the 15th of December, the world was startled to find that Palmerston had resigned. This event, occurring as it did immediately after the massacre of Sinope, created a dreadful sensation in the country. The Press declared that Palmerston had been turned out because of the Eastern Question. He was the victim of a Court intrigue. It was whispered that Prince Albert, as a spy of Russia, had persuaded the Queen to get rid of a high-spirited Minister because he was eager to avenge against Russia the insult offered to England at Sinope. The Prince, it was said, had been detected betraying the secrets of the Government to foreign Courts. One day it was actually reported that he had been committed to the Tower on a charge of high treason, and a gaping crowd collected to see him locked up as a traitor. This clamour was raised by the Palmerstonian clique, and it gave infinite pain to the Queen. She knew as well as Lord Palmerston and his friends that these attacks were based on a tissue of falsehoods, for, as a matter of fact, Lord Palmerston had resigned simply on the question of Reform. His idea was that Lord Lansdowne, who also disliked Reform, would resign along with him, and that the public outcry would be so great that the Ministry must be shattered. The outcry _was_ great, but it was too obviously that of a personal _claque_; and Palmerston, astounded to find that the nation did not regard his retirement as an irreparable calamity, immediately begged the Cabinet to let him come back again. This they did, having, however, forced him to swallow ignominiously his objections to Lord John Russell’s Reform Bill. Then the Palmerstonian newspapers suddenly dropped their attacks on the Queen and Prince Albert, though the Tory organs kept them up in the true old crusted Protectionist style. “The best of the joke,” writes the Prince to Stockmar, “is that because he [Palmerston] went out the Opposition journals extolled him to the skies in order to damage the Ministry, and now the Ministerial journals have to do so in order to justify the reconciliation.”