Lord Palmerston himself, submitted to be overruled.  We read there that on one occasion, when “Count Persigny sought the active intervention of England by the way of ‘moral support’ to a demand” which France proposed to address to Austria, “Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell (then Foreign Secretary) were disposed to accede; but a different view was taken both by her Majesty and by the cabinet, and Count Persigny’s request was accordingly declined."[281] On this occasion, it is true, he was yielding to an overwhelming majority of his colleagues (her Majesty’s approval must, of course, have been expressed subsequently to their decision).  But in another instance we find the same Prime-minister consenting to the introduction of a bill by one of his colleagues, Mr. Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, of which he disapproved so highly that, after it had been passed by a very slender majority of the House of Commons,[282] he expressed to the Queen a hope that the closeness of the division “might encourage the House of Lords to throw out the bill when it should come to their House, and that he was bound in duty to say that, if they should do so, they would perform a good public service;” and after they had rejected it by a majority of eighty-nine, he pronounced that “they had done a right and useful thing,” reporting to her Majesty, as a corroboration of this opinion, and as a proof that it was largely shared by the public out-of-doors, that “the people in the gallery of the House of Lords are said to have joined in the cheers which broke out when the numbers of the division were announced."[283] And on a third occasion also he bore with the same colleague’s opposition to a measure which he and all the rest of the cabinet justly thought of vital importance to the best interests of the country, the fortification of our great seaports, allowing him to object for a time in private, and even to threaten public opposition to it the next year, since he felt assured that his opposition, if carried out, which he doubted, would be wholly ineffectual.[284]

The personal interest in politics which this laudable habit of judging of everything for herself naturally engendered in the Queen’s mind led, however, to the adoption by her Majesty, in more than one instance, of a course at variance not only with all historical precedent, but, with deference be it said, with constitutional principle, sanctioned though it was by more than one ministry.  When the First Napoleon, after his elevation to the head of the French government as First Consul, proposed, by an autograph letter to George III., to treat with that sovereign for the conclusion of peace between the two nations, Pitt, to whom his Majesty communicated the letter, had no difficulty in deciding that it would be unseasonable for the King “to depart from the forms long established in Europe for transacting business with foreign states,"[285] and, under his guidance, the cabinet instructed Lord Grenville, as Foreign Secretary, to address the reply to the First Consul’s letter to the French Foreign Secretary, M. de Talleyrand.