with one fundamental principle of the constitution—­the universal responsibility of the ministers.  In denying the right of the incoming ministers to remodel the household (or any other body of offices) in whatever degree they might consider requisite, they were clearly limiting the ministerial authority.  To limit the ministerial authority is to limit the ministerial responsibility; to limit the ministerial responsibility is to impose some portion of responsibility (that portion from which it relieves the minister) on the sovereign himself, a dangerous consequence from which the constitution most carefully protects him.  In fact, that the advice Lord Melbourne gave was indefensible was tacitly confessed by himself, when, on the recurrence of the same emergency two years later, he was compelled to recommend a different course;[248] and the ladies whom Sir Robert had considered it necessary to remove anticipated their dismissal by voluntary resignation.  It may be added that, at the close of this same year, Lord Melbourne himself insisted on nominating the private secretary to the Prince whom the Queen was about to marry, though no one could pretend that offices in his household were as important as those in that of the sovereign; and though, if there was any post in which the Prince might have been supposed to have a right to an unfettered choice, that might have been supposed to have been the office of his private secretary.[249]

Her Majesty’s marriage with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, her first cousin—­one tending as greatly to the happiness of herself and the advantage of the nation as any royal marriage recorded in history—­took place in the beginning of 1840; and in the preparatory arrangements—­ matters of far greater consequence to the Queen’s feelings than any appointments in the household—­the ministry, by singular mismanagement, contrived to force the consideration of other constitutional questions on Parliament in such a way that the conclusions which were adopted, however inevitable, could hardly fail to be mortifying and vexatious to her Majesty, in whose cup of happiness at such a moment special care ought rather to have been taken to prevent the admixture of any such alloy.  In the matter of the annuity to be settled on the young Prince, the Opposition must, indeed, share the blame with the minister.  If it was unpardonable carelessness in the latter to omit the usual practice of previously consulting the leaders of the Opposition on the amount of the grant to be proposed, it was not the less impolitic and unworthy of such men as the Duke and Sir Robert Peel to show their disapproval of the inattention by a curtailment of the grant.  The sum proposed, L50,000 a year, was fairly justified by the fact of its being the same which twenty-four years before had been settled on the Prince’s uncle, Leopold, on his marriage with the Princess Charlotte.  Indeed, if there were to be any difference, the circumstances might have been regarded as warranting an increase