course;[248] and the ladies whom Sir Robert had considered it
necessary to remove anticipated their dismissal by voluntary
resignation. It may be added that, at the close of this same year, Lord
Melbourne himself insisted on nominating the private secretary to the
Prince whom the Queen was about to marry, though no one could pretend
that offices in his household were as important as those in that of the
sovereign; and though, if there was any post in which the Prince might
have been supposed to have a right to an unfettered choice, that might
have been supposed to have been the office of his private
secretary.[249]

Her Majesty's marriage with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, her first
cousin--one tending as greatly to the happiness of herself and the
advantage of the nation as any royal marriage recorded in history--took
place in the beginning of 1840; and in the preparatory arrangements--
matters of far greater consequence to the Queen's feelings than any
appointments in the household--the ministry, by singular mismanagement,
contrived to force the consideration of other constitutional questions
on Parliament in such a way that the conclusions which were adopted,
however inevitable, could hardly fail to be mortifying and vexatious to
her Majesty, in whose cup of happiness at such a moment special care
ought rather to have been taken to prevent the admixture of any such
alloy. In the matter of the annuity to be settled on the young Prince,
the Opposition must, indeed, share the blame with the minister. If it
was unpardonable carelessness in the latter to omit the usual practice
of previously consulting the leaders of the Opposition on the amount of
the grant to be proposed, it was not the less impolitic and unworthy of
such men as the Duke and Sir Robert Peel to show their disapproval of
the inattention by a curtailment of the grant. The sum proposed, L50,000
a year, was fairly justified by the fact of its being the same which
twenty-four years before had been settled on the Prince's uncle,
Leopold, on his marriage with the Princess Charlotte. Indeed, if there
were to be any difference, the circumstances might have been regarded as
warranting an increase rather than a diminution of it. Money was
certainly more plentiful in 1840 than in 1816, and the husband of an
actual Queen occupied, beyond all question, a higher position than the
husband of the heiress-presumptive, who might never become Queen, and
who, in fact, never