communications between foreign Ministers and her own Foreign
Secretary, and that the drafts of foreign despatches must be sent to
her for her approval in sufficient time for her to make herself
acquainted with them. She complained that Lord Palmerston was
accustomed to send despatches to the Continent without submitting
them, in their last revise, to the Sovereign; that in one case he
retained without her knowledge a passage which the Prince Consort had
deleted; that he paid little or no attention to the numerous memoranda
which were drawn up by the Prince for his instruction; that he of his
own will and without any consultation committed his Government, in a
conversation with the French Ambassador, to an approbation of the
_coup d'etat_ of Napoleon III. If the general line of his policy had
been in accordance with the royal wishes, indiscretions of detail
could probably have been overlooked, but the Queen and Prince were
both undoubtedly on many occasions--and especially in 1848 and
1849--strongly opposed to the policy of Lord Palmerston. In the
interests of peace they objected to the remarkably provocative
character of his despatches, which excited a degree of animosity and
resentment among the Governments of the Continent that has rarely been
paralleled--on two, if not three, occasions it brought England into
grave danger of a war with France--and which aroused a very widespread
indignation among statesmen of his own party at home.

The widely different tone which was adopted by Lord Clarendon and Lord
Granville, the open breach between Palmerston and Lord John Russell on
account of the way in which the former conducted his foreign policy
without consultation with the Cabinet, and the refusal of Lord Grey,
in a most critical moment, to take office in a Government in which
Lord Palmerston held the seals of the Foreign Office, show how fully
in this respect the sentiments of the Queen accorded with those of
many of Lord Palmerston's own colleagues. But in addition to mere
questions of manner and procedure, there was much in the substance of
the policy of Palmerston to which the Queen objected. Her dislike to
the Revolutionary element on the Continent, which Lord Palmerston
either encouraged or viewed with indifference, her sympathy with the
old governments and dynasties, that were so gravely shaken in the year
of the Revolution, were very marked. In the disputes between Germany
and Denmark on the Schleswig-Holstein qu