When the bargain was struck France and Sweden recognised it. The Czar, as usual, “answered” for Prussia and Austria, and it was embodied in the Protocol of the 4th of July, 1850. The Queen, however, objected most strenuously to the whole arrangement. She warned her Ministers that it arbitrarily set aside the legal rights of nineteen agnates nearer in succession to the childless Frederick VII. than Christian of Sleswig-Holstein-Glücksburg. The Prince Consort declared in one of his letters to Stockmar that it violated law, equity, and honour, and predicted that trouble would spring from it. “But,” writes Count Vitzthum, “though he alone saw through the Russian game, he shrank from bringing the direct pressure of his influence to bear on the English Ministry in a matter which might expose him to the charge of sympathising too strongly with his Fatherland.” Yet he seems to have taken very strong means privately to neutralise the policy of Palmerston and Brunnow. He advised the Prince of Noër, one of the nineteen agnates who were set aside, to protest formally against the settlement of the Danish succession, so that the idea of challenging it was at all events kept alive in [Illustration: THE HARBOUR, COPENHAGEN.] Germany. The Prince of Noër warned the Powers that he would only acquiesce in the new order of succession on condition of its being stipulated by an International Treaty, similar in principle to that of Utrecht, that the Czar of Russia should in no case be permitted to wear the Danish Crown. After the intrigue between Palmerston and the Russian Minister, it was of course impossible to put this condition, which would alone have protected British interests, into the Protocol, which was subsequently expanded into the Treaty of 1852 and signed by Lord Malmesbury. This Treaty was known as the Treaty of London (8th of May, 1852), and so completely did Palmerston in 1863-64 feel that his policy and prestige were bound up with it, that he dragged the country to the verge of war to uphold its provisions. When the Treaty of London was signed, an inexplicable blunder was made by the Tory Government. The document was legally worthless unless ratified by the German Diet. But Lord Malmesbury permitted himself to believe that Austria and Prussia signed it as mandatories of the Diet, whereas, as a matter of fact, they took care merely to sign it in their individual capacities, as independent States. Other German States afterwards gave their sanction to it, but most of them with the reservation that the ratification of the Diet--that is, of Germany in her corporate capacity--should be obtained. Thus Palmerston’s settlement of the Danish succession was a Treaty which settled nothing, because he and Lord Malmesbury had been reckless enough to take it for granted that Austria and Prussia, in signing it, acted on a mandate from Germany, which they had neither sought nor obtained.