30 NOVEMBER 1951, Page 22

Queen and Minister

MR. FULFORD'S book is short and straightforward, in accordance with the aim of the series in which it appears, but it is on the level both of the importance and of the complexity of its subject. That the young Queen to whom Lord Conyngham knelt in the early morning hours of June 20th, 1837, meant to take her responsibilities seriously is touchingly shown in her journal entry for the day. " I shall do my utmost to fulfil my duty to my country ; I am very young and perhaps in many, though not in all things inexperienced, but I am sure few have more real good-will and more real desire to do what is right and proper than L have." Melbourne began the Queen's political education, but it was with the Prince Consort, acting, as Mr. Fulford has elsewhere pointed out, very largely as Peel's " political pupil and heir," that it got really under way. Mar- riage provided the climate of growth for her personality. The Prince brought to their partnership a sense of duty as strong as her own, and perhaps the deeper for his more cultivated and disciplined mind. Twenty years of unbroken happiness, of unresting public work in deepest intimacy with him, and of unceasing child-bearing, be it also said, wrought her nature for the burden it was to bear— the 40 years of lonely work and lonely eminence which were increasingly to enlarge her place in history, and in the deep and affectionate regard of her people. Monarchy had more to do, in the nineteenth-century scheme of things, than merely to act the " dignified parts " of government on which Bagehot laid such stress. It was the first check in the system of constitutional checks and balances, the initial sanction of political responsibility. Convention required that statesmen should present their proposals to the Crown before they threw them into the arena of parliamentary strife in which their fate was ultimately decided. The Queen and the Prince used the opportunities thus presented to them to give their views and advice on policy in the capacity of authorities standing outside party, and representing the permanent interests of the nation.

It was a role Melbourne could not have taught, since it had lain outside the Whigs' ideas as long ago as 1782. Here lay the inward- ness of the long struggle with Palmerston, though, as Mr. Fulford points out, there is more to be said for the Queen on the issues of foreign policy actually in dispute than is always acknowledged. That the Queen was often a nuisance to ministers, unfair to some, notably Gladstone, and partial to others, nobody will deny. There is a feminine vehemence in her judgement of persons, and some- times a feminine shrillness in her patriotism, but of the patriotism there is never a doubt. The robust and unconventional sense of much of her advice, and the great.value of some of her interventions, are equally not to 6e gainsaid. On the whole, perhaps, she was justified in the limits she sought to set to the audacity of elected persons. Mr. Fulford aptly compares her " probing, sometimes encouraging letters " to the war minutes of Mr. Churchill. , In the broad -page of history Disraeli's great service was to the conception of party, which, in its full development, was to attenuate the functions of monarchy. Mr. Hesketh Pearson's admiration for his hero enables him to do justice to the combined romanticism and realism of Disraeli's character—the detachment of the eternal sojourner, the self-identification with the magnificent and the generous in our social tradition, the odd, and oddly attractive, marriage, the poetised but fundamentally practical and responsible relationship with the Queen. He throws only broken lights on the statesman, however. He hardly refers to politics without an expres- sion of contempt, and seems unduly influenced by one of Disraeli's less sagacious aphorisms: " Read no history, only biography, for that is life without theory." He-remarks that it is a pity that, in writing his Lord Georg; Bentinck, Disraeli did not follow his own advice. " The only thing that brings old movements, far-off politics and battles long ago to life, is the participation in them of a remarkable personality." Those who do not share this view may well feel that its adoption hampers even this skilful presentation of Disraeli's remarkable personality. W. D. HANDCoCIc.