... Viscount Palmerston would beg to submit for your Majesty's
consideration whether he might be authorised by your Majesty to offer
to Lord Lansdowne promotion to the title of Duke. Your Majesty may
possibly not have in the course of your Majesty's reign, long as it is
to be hoped that reign will be, any subject whose private and public
character will during so long a course of years as those which have
been the period of Lord Lansdowne's career, have more entitled him
to the esteem and respect of his fellow-countrymen, and to the
approbation of his Sovereign.

Lord Lansdowne has now for several years given your Majesty's
Government the great and valuable support of his advice in council,
his assistance in debate, and the weight of his character in the
country, without any office. His health and strength, Viscount
Palmerston cannot disguise from himself, have not been this year such
as they had been; and if your Majesty should contemplate marking at
any time your Majesty's sense of Lord Lansdowne's public services,
there could not be a better moment for doing so than the present; and
Viscount Palmerston has reason to believe that such an act of grace
would be very gratifying to the Liberal Party, and would be deemed
well bestowed even by those who are of opposite politics.[35]

Mr Macaulay accepts the Peerage with much gratitude to your Majesty.

[Footnote 35: Lord Lansdowne declined the honour.]

[Pageheading: THE INDIAN MUTINY]

_Queen Victoria to the King of the Belgians._

BALMORAL CASTLE, _2nd September 1857_.

DEAREST UNCLE,--... We are in sad anxiety about India, which engrosses
all our attention.[36] Troops cannot be raised fast or largely enough.
And the horrors committed on the poor ladies--women and children--are
unknown in these ages, and make one's blood run cold. Altogether, the
whole is so much more distressing than the Crimea--where there was
_glory_ and honourable warfare, and where the poor women and children
were safe. Then the distance and the difficulty of communication is
such an additional suffering to us all. I know you will feel much for
us all. There is not a family hardly who is not in sorrow and anxiety
about their children, and in all ranks--India being _the_ place where
every one was anxious to place a son!

We hear from _our_ people (not Fritz) from Berlin, that the King is in
a very unsatisfactory state. _What_ have you heard?...

Now, with Albert's love, ever yo