and wrote affectionate letters to
Victoria; but it was useless. News arrived that the Duchess of Kent,
sailing in the Solent, had insisted that whenever her yacht appeared it
should be received by royal salutes from all the men-of-war and all the
forts. The King declared that these continual poppings must cease; the
Premier and the First Lord of the Admiralty were consulted; and they
wrote privately to the Duchess, begging her to waive her rights. But
she would not hear of it; Sir John Conroy was adamant. "As her Royal
Highness's CONFIDENTIAL ADVISER," he said, "I cannot recommend her
to give way on this point." Eventually the King, in a great state of
excitement, issued a special Order in Council, prohibiting the firing
of royal salutes to any ships except those which carried the reigning
sovereign or his consort on board.

When King William quarrelled with his Whig Ministers the situation grew
still more embittered, for now the Duchess, in addition to her other
shortcomings, was the political partisan of his enemies. In 1836 he
made an attempt to prepare the ground for a match between the Princess
Victoria and one of the sons of the Prince of Orange, and at the same
time did his best to prevent the visit of the young Coburg princes to
Kensington. He failed in both these objects; and the only result of
his efforts was to raise the anger of the King of the Belgians, who,
forgetting for a moment his royal reserve, addressed an indignant letter
on the subject to his niece. "I am really ASTONISHED," he wrote, "at
the conduct of your old Uncle the King; this invitation of the Prince
of Orange and his sons, this forcing him on others, is very
extraordinary... Not later than yesterday I got a half-official
communication from England, insinuating that it would be HIGHLY
desirable that the visit of YOUR relatives SHOULD NOT TAKE PLACE
THIS YEAR--qu'en dites-vous? The relations of the Queen and the King,
therefore, to the God-knows-what degree, are to come in shoals and rule
the land, when YOUR RELATIONS are to be FORBIDDEN the country, and
that when, as you know, the whole of your relations have ever been very
dutiful and kind to the King. Really and truly I never heard or saw
anything like it, and I hope it will a LITTLE ROUSE YOUR SPIRIT;
now that slavery is even abolished in the British Colonies, I do not
comprehend WHY YOUR LOT ALONE SHOULD BE TO BE KEPT A WHITE LITTLE SLAVEY
IN ENGLAND, for the pleasure of the Court, who