Next morning (Sunday) the Queen, her family, and her guests attended service in the private chapel, where the Bishop of Oxford preached from the text “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.” Wilberforce had to handle his theme with great delicacy and tact, because the Queen had been sadly annoyed by the carping criticism of some zealots of the High Church Party. They had taken offence because her Majesty had permitted her son to be married in Lent, and they even threatened to absent themselves from all the national festivities that were to mark the event. The Queen had invoked Wilberforce’s aid in pacifying these persons, and in a letter to the Bishop of Salisbury he writes as follows:--“I am _very_ sorry for the time of the marriage, but everything possible has been done to get it changed, and in vain. I _think_ the best thing now possible would be for the Archbishop to write a letter saying that for high State reasons, that time having been thought necessary, he, as Archbishop, thinks it his duty to express that he, so far as it is lawful for him to do so, dispenses for that day with the Church’s ordinary rule, or add that all may, without scruple, legally devote it to rejoicing.”[152] This advice, however, was not acted on. But Wilberforce issued a letter to each of his Archdeacons for the guidance of the clergy in his diocese, in which he said that “any rejoicing, to be real, must be on the day of the marriage.” He held that the Archbishop’s Episcopal authority gave him the right to abrogate the Lenten Fast for such an occasion, and he added that from communications he had received he considered “that the Primate had exercised his dispensing power.”[153] Wilberforce’s sermon, however, pleased and impressed his illustrious audience. In his “Diary,” and in that of Dr. Macleod, some interesting facts of the Queen’s life at this period are disclosed. After referring to the sermon on the 8th of March, Wilberforce writes: “Saw the Queen in the afternoon, and had much talk with her; always the Prince--expecting him in old places. Large dinner; after, presented to the Princess Alexandra; she very pleasing--such a countenance, mien, demeanour, and conversation!” Some days previously Dr. Macleod had visited her Majesty at Windsor, and she took him, with Lady Augusta Bruce and the Princess Alice, to the Mausoleum at Frogmore. “She (the Queen),” writes Dr. Macleod, “had the key, and opened it herself, undoing the bolts, and alone we entered and stood in silence beside Marochetti’s beautiful statue of the Prince. I was very much overcome. She was calm and quiet.... I had a private interview at night with the Queen. She is so true, so genuine, I wonder not at her sorrow. To me it is quite natural, and has not a bit of morbid feeling in it. It but expresses the greatest loss that a Sovereign and wife could sustain.”[154] The bridal festivities of the Princess were overcast to