[Illustration: CHRISTIANSBORG CASTLE, COPENHAGEN.] Only one question provoked anything resembling a party division during the Session, and that was the Prison Ministers Bill. The object of the measure was to allow prisoners to be attended by clergy of their own denominations and persuasions. As the Roman Catholics would derive most benefit from the Bill, it was opposed warmly by a powerful body of the Tory Party. The Liberals naturally supported the measure, and on this occasion they were joined by a few of the more enlightened Conservatives, such as Lord Derby, Mr. Disraeli, Mr. Henley, and Sir John Pakington. As Mr. Disraeli was at the time favouring an intrigue for detaching the Roman Catholic Party from the Liberals, it was with ill-concealed chagrin that he listened to the bigoted attacks of his followers on the Bill, which was, however, passed. The suspension of amicable relations with Brazil,[170] the vote for the purchase of the Exhibition Buildings, the reorganisation of the London police, and the attitude of the Government to the belligerents in the American Civil War, were the only other topics that created serious or practical Parliamentary discussion. The vote for the purchase of the Exhibition Building of 1862 was extremely unpopular, and but for the Queen’s influence it would probably have been rejected by the House of Commons. The country even then viewed with strong suspicion the tendency to centralise all National collections in the distant Court suburb of Kensington. It was also insinuated that the Royal Family had pecuniary interests in building land, the value of which would be enhanced by creating a Science and Art Department in this quarter. That insinuation is contradicted by Sir Theodore Martin, who asserts that Prince Albert never was able to save any money out of his private income to purchase such lands for his heirs.[171] This perhaps accounts for what has long been a popular mystery--the fact that his will was never submitted to Probate. As a matter of course, if he had no money to leave to his heirs, the Prince must have left no will that was worth proving. But in 1863 these insinuations had sunk deep in the public mind, and the manner in which Lord Palmerston managed the question gave colour to them. He knew that the proposal to buy the Exhibition Building of 1862 was hateful to the taxpayers. The edifice was architecturally unfit for the reception of a permanent national collection of paintings, and its distance from London rendered all schemes for transferring to it the pictures from the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square objectionable in the extreme. Palmerston, however, at the outset disarmed his critics by proposing merely to buy from the Exhibition Commissioners, for £67,000, the site of the Exhibition, and it was tolerably cheap for a metropolitan site, in days when land in the City fetched £119,000 an acre. This site, he said, was wanted for a building to house the new Patent Office, some