Nor was this the only instance which can be adduced of mistaken interference on the part of the Court. When Palmerston succeeded in forming his Government, he pledged himself to follow out the foreign policy of Lord Aberdeen. Aberdeen’s friends had publicly declared that the terms which we sought to impose on Russia were needlessly humiliating, and that in the Austrian compromise there was an ample basis for a fair settlement, and a good reason for continuing negotiations at Vienna. It was a matter of notoriety that Aberdeen himself shared these views, and there were many who complained querulously that if they had not destroyed his Ministry, the Vienna Conference would not have been abortive. In these circumstances Prince Albert, knowing Aberdeen’s devotion to the Queen, wrote to him complaining especially about Mr. Gladstone’s speech on Mr. Disraeli’s motion of the 24th of May. For the rejection of that motion had not ended the controversy. Sir F. Baring’s amendment, which was finally carried, was coming up for discussion on the 4th of June, and the Court evidently did not desire a repetition of speeches containing unanswerable arguments against abandoning negotiations for peace.[214] Aberdeen, in fact, is summoned in this letter to the Palace to be lectured. He is warned that the conduct of his party has displeased the Queen, and he is warned in a tone only to be justified by the close relations of personal friendship, which bound him to the Court, and the Court to him. The Queen and Prince Albert, however, utterly failed to gag the Peelites in the debate, or browbeat them into approving of the continuance of a bloody and wasteful war, when an honourable peace could be obtained by patient diplomacy. To his honour it must be stated that Sir James Graham,[215] Lord Aberdeen’s representative in the House of Commons, delivered a speech which was even much more damaging and convincing than Mr. Gladstone’s. Nobody attempted to answer it except Mr. Roebuck. His tirade of invective sprang from a delusion that Graham was willing to be satisfied with paltry concessions as the result of a great war. As he afterwards confessed, he was completely misled by the ferocity with which Lord John Russell in this debate condemned as worthless the very settlement which he had vainly urged his colleagues to accept as satisfactory. In truth, there is some reason to suspect that the harassing toil of winter, the prolonged and exhausting anxieties of a sad and pitiless war, had temporarily blunted Prince Albert’s keen perceptions. Had this not been the case he would hardly have delivered at the Trinity House banquet in June, the famous speech in which he said that “Constitutional Government is under a heavy trial”--as if the failure of obsolete leaders in the field, or the stupid bigotries and moral cowardice of place-hunters in council, proved that Constitutional Government was a dubious experiment. At a moment when the Queen’s