THE "QUARTERLY REVIEW" ON QUEEN VICTORIA.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,-Iu reading your interesting article on " The Quarterly Review on Queen Victoria" in the Spectator of April 27th I was greatly struck by the statement that the late Queen believed " that the source of her power and the justification of her position were divine, and that even had she been as bad as she was good, it would still have been her subjects' duty to obey her•." Can this really be proved for a fact ? Surely the late Queen was neither so ignorant nor so oblivious of English history as to be unaware that she herself and her Gnelphic predecessors on the throne were the actual product and result of the explosion of the Divine Right fable in 1688, and that thereby they ruled solely at and by the pleasure of the British people as represented in the Houses of Parliament ? That so great and clear-sighted a Monarch as our dead lamented Queen could have held this antique and extravagant theory will indeed be a surprise to many.-4 am, Sir, &c.,
Previous page
