e and in the
distribution of honours she is known to have taken a great interest,
and to have exercised a considerable influence.

The one subject on which the Queen was not always in harmony with her
people was that of foreign politics. She and the Prince Consort took a
keen interest in them, and during his lifetime she followed very
implicitly his guidance. The strong German sympathies she imbued from
her own marriage were much intensified by the marriages of her
children, and especially by that of her eldest daughter to the heir of
the Prussian throne. The influence also of Stockmar, who was the
closest adviser of her early married life, was not wholly for good,
and the theory which the Prince held that the direction of foreign
affairs is in a peculiar degree under the care of the Sovereign, and
that the Prince, her husband, should be regarded as 'her permanent
Minister,' created during many years much friction. In a
constitutional country, where the responsibility of affairs rests
wholly on the Minister, who is doubly responsible to the Cabinet and
to the Parliament, such a theory can only be maintained with great
qualifications.

On the other hand, the government of the country was carried on in the
name of the Queen. Foreign despatches were addressed to her and could
only be answered with her sanction. The right of the English
Sovereigns to be present at the Cabinet Councils of their Ministers
was abdicated when George I. came to the throne, but every important
departure in policy was submitted to the Queen and required her
assent. The testimony of Ministers of all shades of policy supports
the belief that this was no idle form. The Queen, though always open
to argument and tolerant of contradiction, had her own decided
opinions; she exercised her undoubted right of expressing and
defending them, and even apart from her royal position, her great
experience and her singular clearness and rectitude of judgment made
her opinion well worth listening to.

The claim put forward by the Queen in her famous memorandum of August
1850, can, I think, hardly be pronounced excessive. She demanded only
that before a line of policy was adopted and brought before her she
should be distinctly informed of the facts of the case and of the
motives that inspired it; that when she had given her sanction to a
measure it should not be arbitrarily altered or modified by the
Minister; that she must be kept acquainted with all important