those to which every new minister must of necessity be exposed,
and Lord Melbourne and his colleagues resumed their posts. The
transaction was, of course, canvassed in both Houses of Parliament. Sir
Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington, who was the spokesman of the
party in the House of Lords, defended their refusal to undertake the
government on any other condition than that for which they had
stipulated, on the ground that the authority to make such changes in the
household as they had proposed was indispensable, as a proof of their
possession of her Majesty's confidence; while Lord Melbourne, with a
strange exaggeration, defended the advice which he had given her Majesty
by the assertion that to have complied with Sir Robert Peel's proposal
would have been "inconsistent with her personal honor." Other arguments
on the same side were based on the alleged cruelty of separating her
Majesty "from the society of her earliest friends, her old and constant
companions;" an argument which was disposed of by Lord Brougham's
remark, that till she had become Queen (not yet two years before) she
had had no acquaintance with them whatever.[247]

But it is needless to dwell at any length on the case, in which all
subsequent historians and political critics, however generally
prepossessed in favor of the Liberal ministers, have given up their
position as untenable. Her Majesty herself kept strictly on the path of
the constitution in guiding herself by the counsels of those who, till
their successors were appointed, were still her responsible advisers.
But the course which they recommended was absolutely irreconcilable with
one fundamental principle of the constitution--the universal
responsibility of the ministers. In denying the right of the incoming
ministers to remodel the household (or any other body of offices) in
whatever degree they might consider requisite, they were clearly
limiting the ministerial authority. To limit the ministerial authority
is to limit the ministerial responsibility; to limit the ministerial
responsibility is to impose some portion of responsibility (that portion
from which it relieves the minister) on the sovereign himself, a
dangerous consequence from which the constitution most carefully
protects him. In fact, that the advice Lord Melbourne gave was
indefensible was tacitly confessed by himself, when, on the recurrence
of the same emergency two years later, he was compelled to recommend a
different