The resignation of Sir Robert Peel and his colleagues was a mournful incident in the Queen’s life. She had learned to respect and trust the Prime Minister and his colleagues, one of whom, Lord Aberdeen, had, by his gentle manners and cultured companionship, won the hearts of the Queen and the Prince Consort. The country, in the opinion of the Queen, was in a critical condition. One of the great political parties was shattered as a governing organisation, and her Majesty and her husband both knew how safe and valuable was the pilotage of those with whom, says Sir Theodore Martin, “they had grown familiar, not merely in the anxious counsels of State, but in the intimacies of friendship.”
There can be no doubt that the feeling of the Queen and of the country alike ran in favour of retaining Sir Robert Peel at the head of affairs. After he resigned, and the Whig Administration, headed by Lord John Russell, took his place, the sentiments of the Sovereign were, curiously enough, reproduced unconsciously by Mr. Wakley in the House of Commons. Referring to the change of Government, he said, “I am utterly at a loss to understand why it was that Sir Robert Peel left his place in the Cabinet, and gave up his situation to others who are scarcely prepared to carry out the Liberal principles which the Right Honourable Baronet professed in the last speech that he delivered to this House.... At this moment Sir Robert Peel is the most popular man in the kingdom. He is believed in, he is almost adored by the masses, who believe that no Minister before him ever made such sacrifices as he has made in their behalf.” _Punch_ had, however, anticipated Mr. Wakley as an exponent of popular feeling when Sir Robert Peel tendered his resignation in December, 1845. The great comic journal then gave its readers a picture, showing Peel and Lord John Russell as rival candidates for the office of page to the Queen, and her Majesty settling the claims of one by saying, “I’m afraid you’re not strong enough for the place, John.” This was also the feeling even of the Whig gentry, who thought Lord John needlessly bold in forcing on such a disagreeable question as the Repeal of the Corn Laws in his letter to the electors of London. “I hear,” wrote Lord Clarendon, to Lord Lyndhurst, on the 17th of December, 1845, “Lord John has gone down to Windsor to-night; and I can assure you that the most acceptable news he can bring back _to his whole party_ would be that he had not considered himself justified in undertaking the task proposed to him by the Queen.”[45] That the Queen was still desirous of retaining her Ministers in office after they again resigned in June, 1846, is expressly taken for granted in a letter addressed by the Duke of Wellington to Peel on the 21st of June.[46] It is put beyond all doubt by a letter dated the 7th of July from her Majesty to the King of the Belgians, in which she says:--“Yesterday (6th of July) was a very hard day for me. I had to part from Sir Robert Peel and Lord Aberdeen, who are irreparable losses to us and to the country. They were both _so_ much overcome that it quite upset me, and we have in them two devoted friends. We felt _so_ safe with them.” At Court it was thought that Sir Robert should dissolve, or coalesce with the more moderate Whigs. The Duke of Wellington was for dissolution, and, by a curious coincidence, for the same reason which Mr. Cobden seems to have given in a private letter which he wrote to the fallen Minister recommending that step. Peel’s public services, and the confidence which the industrial classes had in his policy, would, he thought, induce the country to give him a working majority.[47] On the other hand, Sir Robert Peel thought that to dissolve on a Coercion Bill for Ireland “would shake the foundations of the legislative union,” and ensure “a worse return of Irish Members--rendered more desperate, more determined to obstruct, by every artifice, the passing of a Coercion Bill in the new Parliament.” In fact, he was at pains to impress on the Queen the tradition which she is understood to have handed down to a later generation of statesmen that, with the exception of “No Popery,” the most dangerous of all election cries is “Coercion for Ireland.”[48] There was another cogent reason which had weight with the Queen. Her Majesty has ever regarded the power to dissolve Parliament as a sacred trust vested in her for the protection of the country, and the Crown, against factious Parliaments. But it is a power like the talisman in