r merely that
between a grateful mistress and a devoted servant: they were friends.
His official letters, in which the personal element had always been
perceptible, developed into racy records of political news and social
gossip, written, as Lord Clarendon said, "in his best novel style."
Victoria was delighted; she had never, she declared, had such letters
in her life, and had never before known EVERYTHING. In return, she sent
him, when the spring came, several bunches of flowers, picked by her own
hands. He despatched to her a set of his novels, for which, she said,
she was "most grateful, and which she values much." She herself had
lately published her "Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the
Highlands," and it was observed that the Prime Minister, in conversing
with Her Majesty at this period, constantly used the words "we authors,
ma'am." Upon political questions, she was his staunch supporter. "Really
there never was such conduct as that of the Opposition," she wrote. And
when the Government was defeated in the House she was "really shocked at
the way in which the House of Commons go on; they really bring discredit
on Constitutional Government." She dreaded the prospect of a change;
she feared that if the Liberals insisted upon disestablishing the Irish
Church, her Coronation Oath might stand in the way. But a change there
had to be, and Victoria vainly tried to console herself for the loss of
her favourite Minister by bestowing a peerage upon Mrs. Disraeli.

Mr. Gladstone was in his shirt-sleeves at Hawarden, cutting down a
tree, when the royal message was brought to him. "Very significant,"
he remarked, when he had read the letter, and went on cutting down his
tree. His secret thoughts on the occasion were more explicit, and were
committed to his diary. "The Almighty," he wrote, "seems to sustain and
spare me for some purpose of His own, deeply unworthy as I know myself
to be. Glory be to His name."

The Queen, however, did not share her new Minister's view of the
Almighty's intentions. She could not believe that there was any divine
purpose to be detected in the programme of sweeping changes which
Mr. Gladstone was determined to carry out. But what could she do? Mr.
Gladstone, with his daemonic energy and his powerful majority in
the House of Commons, was irresistible; and for five years (1869-74)
Victoria found herself condemned to live in an agitating atmosphere
of interminable reform--reform in the Irish