change.  In a later dispatch to Lord Normanby, which had not been shown either to the Queen or to the Prime Minister, Palmerston repeated his own opinion.  Now this was precisely the kind of conduct for which he had been reproved:  in consequence he was asked to resign.  When it came to explanations before Parliament, Palmerston, to the surprise of everybody, made a meek, halting defence of his independent conduct.  But he bided his time, and when the Government brought in a Militia Bill, intended to quiet the invasion scare which the appearance of another Napoleon on the throne of France had started, he proposed an amendment which they could not accept, and carried it against them.  Lord John Russell resigned and Lord Derby undertook to form a Government.

Lady John wrote afterwards the following recollections of this crisis: 

The breach between John and Lord Palmerston was a calamity to the country, to the Whig party, and to themselves.  And although it had for some months been a threatening danger on the horizon, I cannot but feel that there was accident in its actual occurrence.  Had we been in London, or at Pembroke Lodge, and not at Woburn Abbey at the time, they would have met and talked over the subjects of their difference.  Words spoken might have been equally strong, but would have been less cutting than words written, and conciliatory expressions on John’s part would have led the way to promises on Lord Palmerston’s to avoid committing his colleagues in future, as he had done in the case of the coup d’etat, and also to avoid any needless risk of irritating the Queen by neglect in sending dispatches to the Palace.  It was characteristic of my husband to bear patiently for a long while with difficulties, opposition, perplexities, doubts raised by those with whom he acted, listening to them with candour and good temper, and only meeting their arguments with his own; but, at last, if he failed to convince them, to take a sudden resolution—­either yielding to them entirely or breaking with them altogether—­from which nothing could shake him, but which, on looking back in after years, did not always seem to him the best course.  My father, who knew him well, once said to me, half in joke and half in earnest:  “Your husband is never so determined as when he is in the wrong.”  It was a relief to him to have done with hesitation and be resolved on any step which this very anxiety to have done with hesitation led him to believe a right one at the moment.  This habit of mind showed itself in private as in public matters, and his children and I were often startled by abrupt decisions on home affairs announced very often by letter.

In the case of the dismissal of Lord Palmerston, there was but Lord Palmerston himself who found fault.  The rest of the Cabinet were unanimous in approbation.  But there was not one of them whose opinions on foreign policy were, in John’s mind, worth weighing against those of Lord Palmerston.  He and John were always in cordial agreement on the great lines of foreign policy, so far as I remember, except on Lord Palmerston’s unlucky and unworthy sanction of the coup d’etat.