No politician had such curious adventures as an aspirant to office, and certainly no one has confessed so freely the bitterness of his disappointments, as Shaftesbury, whose name is so honourably associated with legislation for the protection of women and children employed in factories. In 1839 Peel was again engaged in making a Government. Queen Victoria had hardly been two years on the Throne, and was only twenty years of age. Peel invited Lord Ashley to accept a post in the Royal Household, urging that he desired to have around “this young woman, on whose moral and religious character depends the welfare of millions of human beings,” persons whose conversation would tend to her moral improvement. Lord Ashley acknowledges that he was “thunderstruck” when he received Peel’s letter, as he expected a far higher position than what he describes as “a mere Court puppet.” But in his reply he said, somewhat sarcastically, that if Peel desired it, he was willing to take “the office of chief scullion to the Court.” However, this Administration was not constituted. It was wrecked on what is known as “the Bedchamber question.” As one of the ladies of the Bedchamber, the Mistress of the Robes, who was most closely in attendance upon Queen Victoria, was related to some of the outgoing Whig Ministers, by whom she had been appointed—the office being at the time political, and its occupant bound to go out on a change of Government—Peel insisted upon her resignation. The Queen refused to consent to such a course, as one repugnant to her feelings, and Peel, thereupon refusing to form an Administration, the Melbourne Ministry were recalled to office. Two years later Peel was engaged once more in making a Government—this time Queen Victoria raised no objection to the Mistress of the Robes being changed—and again he offered Lord Ashley a place in the Royal Household, as a man who was deeply religious and moral. Lord Ashley now believed that Peel simply wanted to muzzle him, the leader of the growing humanitarian movement for the State regulation of factories. He refused the office. “I told Peel,” he wrote, “the case was altered; the Court was no longer the same; the Queen was two years older, had a child, and a husband to take care of her.” So he declined to devote himself to ordering dinners and carrying a white wand. He discovered subsequently, to his deep mortification, that Peel had already offered the post of Vice-Chamberlain of the Household to Lord —— (“the hero of Madame Grisi,” as Ashley describes him); and that Lord —— exclaimed: “Thank God, my character is too bad for a Household place!” Lord Ashley argued that “morality, therefore, was not the reason for putting me at Court.” 2