But the issue and publication of the Slave Circular was not the only blunder at the Admiralty that rendered the Government unpopular during the Recess. They were guilty of one which gave the Queen the utmost annoyance. When she was crossing the Solent from Osborne to Gosport on the 18th of August her yacht ran down another yacht called the _Mistletoe_. The owner (Mr. Heywood) and his sisters-in-law, Miss Annie Peel and Miss Eleanor Peel, were on board, and, though the last-named was rescued, Miss Annie Peel and the sailing-master were drowned. The Queen happened to be on deck, and her emotion during the scene was painful to witness. The Prince of Leiningen, as commander of the Royal yacht, was blamed by the people for the catastrophe, and unfortunately the Admiralty not only refused to try him by court-martial, but, after a secret inquiry, condemned the navigating officer. This roused public wrath, and it was ungenerously alleged that the Queen had forced a servile Minister to protect her nephew from just punishment. The fact is, as a subsequent case showed, the Admiralty merely followed the stereotyped rule, which, in those days, was to punish subordinate officers for the blunders of their superiors. It used to be asked, What was a navigating officer on board a Queen’s ship for, unless to take his captain’s punishment? Unfortunately for the Prince of Leiningen, there was a tribunal from which he could not escape--the coroner’s inquest on the bodies of those for whose death he was morally responsible. The evidence given before the coroner still further exasperated the ill-feeling which had been roused. Yachtsmen--proverbially a loyal body of men--were irritated at the tone of a letter addressed to the president of the Cowes Yacht Club (the Marquis of Exeter), in which General Ponsonby expressed the Queen’s wish that in future members of the Club would not approach too closely to the Royal yacht when the Queen was on board. The insinuation contained in this document and assumption that no blame rested on the officers of the _Alberta_, provoked yachtsmen in every club in Great Britain to retort that, in their painful experience, the Queen’s yachts were navigated in the Solent with a disregard of the “rules of the road” which rendered them a constituted nuisance.