en Regent, the lady who for the last twenty years of
her consort's reign, when his wavering mind had failed him, had ruled
her ministers with a rod which was not of iron, but which, none the
less, they had feared, and sought by many devious ways to evade. Out of
some book of memoirs a vision of something that had taken place in that
very room rose up before him. Around her a ring of Bishops, crowding the
royal hearth-rug, each standing defenseless with deferential stoop,
tea-cup in hand; and she, seated before them with plump hands folded in
her lap upon a lace kerchief, or tapping now and again upon the arms of
her chair to give emphasis, was laying down her word of law, and putting
an end to revolt in the Church.

"I won't have it!" she cried. "I won't have it! This nonsense has got to
be put down!"

And what could a Bishop do with a tea-cup in his hand? There she had got
them, six or eight chosen Prelates, every one of them in a defenseless
position; how could they argue an affair of State so? What could they do
but assent to the incontrovertible statement that "nonsense" must and
certainly should be put down--though knowing all the time that the
particular "nonsense" in question, being a thing inbred in the minds of
men, could not be put down by any act of Parliament and would persist
even to the breaking-up of Church unity? And so a perfectly ineffective
Church Government Act had passed into law, causing its honest opponents
to secede, while its far more numerous dishonest opponents had remained;
and the Queen Regent, having for the time being asserted her authority
in the Church, had passed on the actual solution of the problem to later
times.

Later times: the King's brain ceased to visualize, he came back to
himself and to the accumulated problems now pressing for solution. Yes;
for the monarchy, not only as she had made it, but as it had now become,
that great little lady was almost equally responsible. Her genius had
only arrested its decay by bottling it up in the clear preservative of
her own virtues. It now stood out more conspicuously than ever, a
survival from the past: it had not really moved on. Had it, under that
preserving process, become more brittle? With a more open mind he was
beginning to suspect that the ancient institution was crumbling in his
hands; that a creeping paralysis had seized hold of it. Why? What had he
done? Was simple honesty the last and fatal touch that had called these
sympt