It was remarked of him that "the desk
was his place of peril, his pen ran away with him. His speech never
made an enemy, his writing has left many festering sores. The charm
of manner and urbanity which so served him in Parliament and in
society was sometimes wanting on paper, and good counsels were dashed
with asperity."
Lord Palmerston, the Queen complained, did not obey instructions,
and she declared that before important dispatches were sent abroad
the Sovereign should be consulted. Further, alterations were
sometimes made by him when they had been neither suggested nor
approved by the Crown.
Such proceedings caused England, in the Queen's own words, to be
"generally detested, mistrusted, and treated with indignity by even
the smallest Powers."
In the Memorandum the Queen requires:
"(1) That he will distinctly state what he proposes in a given case,
in order that the Queen may know as distinctly to what she has given
her royal sanction.
"(2) Having once given her sanction to a measure, that it be not
arbitrarily altered or modified by the Minister. Such an act she must
consider as a failure in sincerity towards the Crown, and justly to
be visited by the exercise of her Constitutional right of dismissing
that Minister. She expects to be kept informed of what passes between
him and the Foreign Ministers, before important decisions are taken,
based upon that intercourse; to receive the Foreign dispatches in
good time and to have the drafts for her approval sent to her in
sufficient time to make herself acquainted with their contents
before they must be sent off.
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