Consort’s policy pointed to the ultimate expulsion of the Ottomans from Europe; and that any reconstruction of Turkey such as that which the Prince foreshadowed simply meant “its subjection to Russia, direct or indirect, immediate or for a time delayed.” But Lord Beaconsfield’s policy was simply a reproduction of Lord Palmerston’s, hence it might be inferred that if the Prince Consort’s ideas still prevailed at Court, his policy in 1876 could not have had Royal sanction. On the other hand, there is no proof that Prince Albert’s ideas on the subject--which in the main were those of the great bulk of the English people--were still held as authoritative at Court. In a curious letter, the significance of which is obvious in its relation to the Queen’s personal opinions, written by the Princess Alice to her mother (25th July, 1878) there occurs, after an outburst against the advance of the Russians on Bulgaria, the following passage: “What do the friends of the ‘Atrocity Meetings’ say now? How difficult it has been made for the Government through them, and how blind they have been! All this must be a constant worry and anxiety for you.”[110] As the Princess’s letters, where they touch on English public affairs, invariably reflect the opinions of the Queen, and as it cannot be imagined that in a matter of bitter political controversy she would venture to obtrude on the Queen so contemptuous a view of the “Atrocity Meetings” and of the conduct of the Opposition, had it not been in sympathy with the Queen’s own feelings, we may safely draw one conclusion. Despite the conjectures which have been ingeniously based on the Prince Consort’s Memorandum of 1853, the policy of the Court was identified with that of the Cabinet all through 1876, and if it was changed in 1877, it was changed in deference to the popular hostility to Turkey, which Mr. Gladstone had aroused. Among those persons, however, who were closest in contact with the Court, and who usually reflected Royal ideas most correctly, there was no change of opinion. Mr. Hayward’s correspondence teems with references to the fierce hatred with which Mr. Gladstone and the Opposition were denounced by “the upper ten thousand;”[111] in fact, Society vilipended Mr. Gladstone with the same obloquy that it had bestowed on him for his pamphlet denouncing the Neapolitan atrocities. But Mr. Hayward is at pains to state that, “all that the Government have been doing in the right direction is owing to the flame kindled by him [Mr. Gladstone]”; and the Hayward Correspondence proves that at the different embassies the diplomatists were at one on three points (1), the insulation of England; (2), the necessity of protecting the Bulgarians effectually from Turkish oppression; (3), the necessity of refusing Russia any cession of Turkish territory in Europe; a condition which, says Mr. Hayward in his account of a celebrated diplomatic dinner-party at the Austrian Embassy, Russia accepted.[112]