entered on an alliance, and that they are on the eve of commencing a sanguinary struggle against Russia.”[135] He would have also found the Tory organs of public opinion vieing with the demagogic Press in denouncing the Queen’s husband as a traitor to his wife and as a servile spy of Russia; from which, if he had been a shrewd man, he would have inferred that the Queen had been again guilty of the atrocious crime of differing from Lord Palmerston, and that Prince Albert had been criticising rather too plainly his bellicose Foreign Policy. During the first few weeks of 1854 society, indeed, could talk of little else than the “treason” of Prince Albert. The Queen’s vexation found frequent expression in letters to Lord Aberdeen, and that amiable Minister did what he could to comfort her. The Prince, however, treated his slanderers with well-simulated contempt, but, in spite of that, their injustice stung him to the quick, and he suffered much both in health and spirits. Yet nothing could be done in his defence till Parliament met, and the Queen was, therefore, fain to believe that the country, as she says in a letter to Stockmar, was “as _loyal_ as ever, only a little mad.” Long and ponderous essays from Stockmar on the Constitutional prerogatives of the Crown, and the political functions of Prince Albert, as her Majesty’s private secretary, did little to dispel the gloom that settled over the Court. The fact is that Stockmar slightly erred in imagining that the hostility to the Prince was really due to wrong ideas on these interesting points. As Prince Albert bluntly put it, one main element in the agitation against him was the hatred of the old High Tory Party towards him, in the first place, because of his friendship with Peel, and, secondly, because of his success with the Great Exhibition.[136] The grumblers of the military clubs, too, joined in the cry against his Royal Highness because, when Adjutant-General Browne resigned, after quarrelling with Lord Hardinge, the Commander-in-Chief, about the weight of the soldier’s knapsack, the Prince was supposed to have taken Lord Hardinge’s side. The masses, too, had never seriously thought out the question of the position which an able man who was husband of a reigning Queen was certain, through the mere dictates of nature, to take in the counsels of the Sovereign. It struck them like a galvanic shock when they discovered that for fourteen years the Prince had been actively helping to govern them, whilst the omniscient flunkeys of the Press were almost daily smothering him with adulation for his “wise abstinence from politics.” Having stupidly deceived themselves as to the precise influence which the Prince wielded, they were in the right state of mind to be deceived by the Prince’s enemies as to the influence which he did not wield, and which he never sought to wield. These reasons, and not the dubiety of the British Constitution as to the political rights of the husband of an