hose whom he had dismissed--the Tories could not
with any consistency deny to the Queen the exercise of the same
authority sanctioned by the support of the House of Commons,
which they claimed for King William even against the declared
opinion of the House. Nothing is left for them, therefore, but a
sulky acquiescence in the present state of things; but they
indemnify themselves by placing the House of Lords in the new
position of an assailant of the Queen's Government, and the
Peers, without daring to assert any co-ordinate authority with
the House of Commons as to the choice of Ministers, evince their
disapprobation of that choice by frequently thwarting their most
important measures. It is curious that none of them--not even
Lyndhurst himself, perhaps not the Duke of Wellington--seems to
perceive that in the midst of their horror of innovation and
dread of great constitutional changes, they have themselves made
a great practical change in the constitutional functions of the
House of Lords; that it is a departure from the character and
proper province of that House to array itself in permanent and
often bitter hostility to the Government, and to persist in
continually rejecting measures recommended by the Crown and
passed by the Commons. When the House of Lords opposed and
thwarted the Ministers during the last two years of King
William's reign, they may have justified themselves on their own
Tory principle, and (assuming as a fact that the King was in the
hands of a faction, from whose bondage he could not release
himself), that they were only supporting the Crown when they
opposed the Ministers whom the House of Commons had forced upon
him, and therefore, both as Tories and as Conservatives, they
were taking a consistent, constitutional, and prudent course; but
even if this was true then, it is certainly not true now, and it
is, I believe, the first time that there is no party in the House
of Lords supporting the Crown, nor any individual acting upon
that principle, but all are either Whigs or Tories arrayed
against each other and battling for power.

CHAPTER IV.

The Queen and Lord Melbourne--The Battersea Schools--A Council at
Windsor--A Humble Hero--Lord Durham's Resignation--Duke of
Wellington's Campaigns--The Grange--Lord Durham's Return--Death
of Lord Sefton--Lord Durham's Arrival--His Reception in the
Country--Position of the Radicals--A Visit to Windsor Castle--