.

rule that the control of foreign policy rests with the Prime Minister, and directing that all despatches submitted for her approval should pass through the hands of Lord John Russell. Whether this was or was not a constitutional rule, Palmerston, although he declared it would reduce his flint gun to a matchlock,' found himself forced to yield, and agreed to alter the existing arrangements in accordance with the Queen's wishes. When the final crisis came, and when after his dismissal from office he had to defend his conduct in Parliament, the Queen's memorandum and his acquiescence in the terms of it were used with damaging effect by Lord John Russell against him. Before, however, the fall of Palmerston, an event had occurred which raised him to the first place in the eyes of his countrymen. This was the attack on his policy in the House of Commons, and his great speech in his own defence. After the Don Pacifico debate, Palmerston became the first of living statesmen in the eyes of the people, a position he never lost till the day of his death fifteen years afterwards. From that time, too, he became more attentive to the wishes of the Queen, although a few months later the old Adam reasserted itself, when over the reception of Kossuth and over the presidential difficulties in France his attitude caused the long-smouldering flame to burst forth. His fall then became inevitable. The coup d'état in France at once approved by him without consultation with his colleagues, or the knowledge of the Queen, was his coup de grâce. 'Palmerston is out,' wrote Charles Greville,' actually, really, and irretrievably out.'

Although the cause was but half guessed at the time, it was known in full to this acute observer and critic. He had watched for some years the widening breach between the Sovereign and her Minister. 'As to Palmerston being corrected or reformed, I don't believe a word of it,' he had written a year before the crash came, and his prognostication was singularly accurate. He was keenly alive to the dislike of the Court: The Queen's favourite aversions are: first and foremost Palmerston, and Disraeli next,' although the commentator may truly lay stress on the 'candid and dispassionate spirit' with which in later years these statesmen were received by their Sovereign. When, however, the tension was greatest, the Queen, acting on the advice of Stockmar, took no active steps to overturn the Foreign Secretary, but allowed the initiative to be taken by Lord John Russell; so that although for one moment Lord Palmerston may have spoken of a 'cabal' against him, his good sense speedily convinced him that he was mistaken, and within a few days of his fall he could speak of the Court without bitterness, and in strong terms could praise the 'sagacity of the Queen.'

Palmerston's tit for tat,' as he termed it, followed very quickly upon his ejection from office, and when the Government fell he could afford to smile. His triumph over Lord John Russell was complete.

Never again was he the subordinate of that statesman in office. The blunders of the Aberdeen Government, of which he was the only popular member, left Lord Palmerston the one indispensable Englishman, and the upshot of his quarrel with the Court and with the leader of the Whigs was to make him the Queen's Prime Minister. Although he was never Foreign Secretary after 1851, his interest in foreign affairs remained undiminished. The Queen has related how when he was Home Secretary in 1853, she, interested in and alarmed about the strikes in the North, put a question to him: Pray, Lord Palmerston, have you any news?' He replied, 'No, madam, I have heard nothing; but it seems certain the Turks have crossed the Danube.' Strikes, responsible as he was for order, were as nothing to him compared with the intricacies of the Eastern Question, about which it was not necessary for him specially to concern himself. In 1855, although a futile attempt was made to form an administration under Lord Granville, in which both Palmerston and Russell were to serve, the universal desire of the nation, supplemented by Lord John's want of tact, placed Lord Palmerston at the head of the Government; and except for a short interval three years later, when his supposed subservience to Napoleon the Third cost him his office, Prime Minister he remained until his death ten years afterwards.

From the moment he became her First Minister his position relative to the Queen underwent a marked change. Lord Aberdeen, who was on friendly terms with the Prince, said to Bishop Wilberforce, a few months after Palmerston's accession to office, that the Queen has not altered at all in her real feelings to him. She behaves perfectly well and truly to him. It has always been her great virtue, but she does not like him a bit better than she did, nor the Prince either.' If this was the case, there is no corroboration of it, and indeed all the evidence points to the gradual arriving at a perfectly good understanding with both the Queen and the Prince. The causes of difference had indeed passed away. No doubt the Prince still found much which was unsympathetic to him in Palmerston's character. Although he could admire, as everyone did, the great physical vigour of a Prime Minister who, when seventy years old, could row on the Thames before breakfast, or swim in the river like an Eton boy, or who, when nearly eighty, was able to ride from London to Harrow and back in one day, yet he shrank from what Lord Houghton called 'Palmerston's ha-ha and laissez-faire.' The Prime Minister's ethical views amused the maids of honour, and made them laugh, but they seemed drearily inadequate to the grave-minded Prince. When, however, the fatal December of 1861 crushed the Queen's life, Lord Palmerston was the first to realise the irreparable loss which, as wife and sovereign, she had sustained, and to appreciate her meaning when she spoke of having to begin a new reign.'

For many years before the Prince's death, he and Palmerston had

worked well together. Their struggle had ended in 1855, when Palmerston became Prime Minister. While the Prince had contended for a constitutional punctilio, Palmerston had fought for his own hand. It was not on principle that he objected to the control by the Prime Minister and the Crown over the Foreign Secretary; his objections were founded on the circumstance that he himself was the Foreign Secretary it was proposed to control. Of late years, owing to the accident of Lord Salisbury combining the office of Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, the desirability of having two heads instead of one to manage the foreign relations of the country has been erected into a principle. The afterthought sprang in the usual way from the spirit of opposition, and not from any rational or careful consideration of the question based on experience. Those, however, who denounced Lord Salisbury must recognise the force of the Queen's contention in her struggle with Palmerston, and her celebrated memorandum must to them appear the charter of Foreign Office subservience. In reality the temper of the Foreign Secretary is the key of the situation. Given a man full of restless activity and hasty enthusiasms, then the mere time involved in sending despatches in red boxes to the Queen is so much gained for reflection. Given a minister of a calmer type, control or supervision is only a work of supererogation, and frequently a fatal loss of the psychological moment. When the Queen was engaged in endeavouring to check the youthful ardour of Lord Palmerston, she was little more than a girl in years, while he was well beyond the farthest limit of middle age. Yet in many ways he was incomparably the younger of the two. To the Queen supreme responsibility came early in life, and, as usual, it aged her; while to Palmerston supreme responsibility came late, and found him still a boy in mind. He was fifty years in the House of Commons before he led that assembly; and during that half-century, although constantly in office, he had not been a regular speaker or even a regular attendant in the House. 'I can't get that three-decker Palmerston to bear down,' Mr. Canning used to say; and Palmerston always hesitated to formulate views upon any subject which was not his special care at the moment. He refused to set his mind to work on hypotheses. In fact, he was a typical man of the world, and, as it has been often said, a man of the world is not an imaginative animal. When Lord Houghton found himself next to Mr. Gladstone at dinner half a century ago, he found him excited about China and the cattle plague, and half a dozen other things;' when he found himself next to Lord Palmerston he could get no farther than the inevitable ha-ha and laissez-faire. What was admirable, however, in Lord Palmerston, was his everpresent sense of the dignity of England. Tell M. Guizot from me,' said Metternich, that one does not with impunity play little tricks with great countries.' Lord Palmerston never stooped to little tricks

himself, and would not tolerate them in others. This attitude, together with his firmness about the military forces of the Crown, and his cheerful confidence in the fortune and stamina of his countrymen in 1853 and 1857, were thoroughly appreciated by the Queen; so that when the end came she could look back and mourn honestly at the breaking of another link with the past,' and feel sincerely and 'deeply in her desolate and isolated condition how one by one those tried servants and advisers are taken from her.' As befitted him, Lord Palmerston died in harness. Realistic and Hellenic in spirit as he was, like his prototype of old who kept a bow which he strung daily to test his failing strength, the Prime Minister within a few weeks of his death was seen to come out of the house at Brocket, look lest he was observed, and then slowly and deliberately climb an iron railing as a test of his bodily vigour. He was over fourscore, and death took him quickly and kindly while still in full possession of his faculties and still in the plenitude of power. Four years

before he died, the Queen must have felt that her life had ended. Yet it is now a generation since Lord Palmerston's death, and the Queen, to whose sagacity he bore witness so long ago, still sagaciously rules the nation that he helped to make great. As the first portion of her reign may be said to have synchronised with the fall of Peel, so the second portion ended with the death of Palmerston. Henceforth she was destined to be thrown with a new generation of public servants, men well known to her by name and fame, some of whom had already served her in positions of responsibility, but none of whom had passed in close relation with her through the excitements of her Queenship, and the joys and sorrows of her married life. In spite of differences and quarrels, the Queen had always extended to Lord Palmerston that straightforward support of the lack of which none of her Ministers have ever complained, and when he died she could not help feeling that her youth had passed away with him, and that she was left a lonely woman face to face with the awful responsibilities of her great office without one human being in the world whom she could call an old friend.

REGINALD B. BRETT.

VOL. XXXV-No. 208

3 Q

PEDIGREES OF

BRITISH AND AMERICAN HORSES

AT the early invasion of England by the Romans, horses were brought to this country, but their type is not mentioned. King Alfred imposed laws for the improvement of indigenous breeds, and was the first monarch to appoint a Master of the Horse, who was called Horsethane. Athelstane, the son of Alfred, followed the footsteps of his father, by prohibiting the exportation and encouraging the importation of horses, such imports when sent as presents by foreign potentates always being most acceptable to him. We read:

sent him rich presents,

Sundry princes sought his alliance and friendship and the finest horses with golden furniture, perfumes, &c. These are said to have been running horses.' They were nags of moderate size, useful for the purposes of parade and chariot racing, one of the pastimes of this period. When William the Conqueror landed on these shores we learn that he was opposed by numerous chariots and horses which were most dexterously handled by the natives,' but they were met by a superior force of cavalry, which contributed largely to the Norman success at the battle of Hastings. On this occasion history records the exact equine types that were imported; all the nobles had their war or great horse, and the Bayeux tapestry depicts the boats of the invading army full of horses.

Every knight has a small pony on which he rides without armour, whilst the great war horse is led by a squire.

The Normans were great lovers of horses, and we know that the Conqueror laid many villages waste in order to secure large open plains for his favourite pastime of hunting. At this period Roger de Belesme, Earl of Shrewsbury, in order to improve the existing type of horse then in this country, introduced Spanish stallions into his Welsh dominions, and throughout the periods of the Plantagenet dynasty small horses from the East and great horses from Lombardy found their way to these shores. Bérenger describes these horses as being adapted

For war purposes and exhibitions of public assemblies, of which horses are always an essential and ornamental part.

Fitz-Stephen, who lived during Henry the Second's reign, gives us