Free Sons, Servants and Statesmen by John Van der Kiste

these initial good impressions were to count for little against an episode which occurred at one point during Melbourne’s administration. On a winter’s night in 1839, Palmerston disgraced himself while staying at Windsor Castle by blundering into the bedroom of Mrs Brand, one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. As Charles Greville discreetly put it, the bold minister’s ‘tender temerity met with an invincible resistance’. 15 Once in the bedroom, Palmerston locked one door behind him and blocked the other with a piece of furniture. Finding him advancing on her in the middle of the night, Mrs Brand jumped out of bed and called for help, leaving him to retreat disappointed, if not chastened. Next day, Mrs Brand complained to Melbourne, who feared that the ensuing scandal would damage the Queen further and perhaps bring down the government. He ordered Palmerston to write an immediate letter of apology to Mrs Brand, which she accepted, but the Queen had already heard the news. It may have simply been a mistake on Palmerston’s part, and that he was wandering around the long, ill-lit corridors in search of the bedroom of Lady Cowper, to whom he was still only engaged at the time. While the Queen was soon pacified by Melbourne’s assurances that no harm had been intended, she neither forgot nor forgave her Foreign Secretary for such behaviour.

    During the same year, 1839, the influence of Melbourne on Queen Victoria was beginning to fade. This was partly due to her growing maturity and her need for different counsel as well as company, but several events helped to weaken his authority.
    The first was the ‘bedchamber crisis’. Melbourne had repeatedly urged Victoria that if he should be defeated in parliament he would have to resign, and in that case, as it was her duty to work with all parties, she would have to accept that it might be necessary to ask one of the opposition leaders to lead the government. On 6 May the government’s majority on a Bill to suspend the Jamaican Assembly was defeated by five votes. Next day he informed her that he would probably have to resign his position, and she should ask Peel or Wellington to form the next administration. She summoned the latter, who begged to be excused from forming an administration as he felt that, at seventy, he was too old. He recommended that she should send for Peel, who could be sure of securing support in the House.
    With some reluctance she did so. On Peel’s audience at the Palace with her, she told him that she would not agree to a dissolution of parliament; that she wanted the Duke of Wellington to be a member of the new government; and that whatever happened she intended to continue her friendship with her outgoing Prime Minister. Peel agreed to all this but told her respectfully of the difficulties of his parliamentary position. He asked her if she would be prepared to show confidence in her new ministers by changing he composition of her ladies of the bedchamber. As a result of Melbourne’s partisanship, many female members of her household were wives or close relations of the Whig ministers, and he trusted that some of them would be replaced. As an incoming prime minister he had every right to do so, for the new government could hardly be expected to function properly if the monarch was still surrounded by his political opponents. Victoria refused to permit any changes at all, and when he told her regretfully that he could not, therefore, assume office, she triumphantly recalled Melbourne.
    It was a short-term but hollow victory for the Queen, who was too inexperienced to realise that she had brought the Crown into disrepute by openly identifying it with one political party, and thus inadvertently brought into question her ability to perform a correct constitutional role of remaining above party. The Tories could argue with some justification that she was not their Queen, as the kingdom was still governed by a ministry which, as the Leader in the