It had nearly, however, been another ministry on whom the task of quelling these riots had fallen. Though, as has been already said, Lord Melbourne's cabinet derived a momentary strength from the accession of a young Queen, the support it thus acquired did not last; and in May, 1839, having been defeated on a measure of colonial policy, which will be mentioned hereafter, the cabinet resigned. The Queen intrusted the task of forming a new administration to Sir Robert Peel, who undertook it with a reasonable confidence that he should be able to hold his ground better than formerly, now that the retirement of his predecessors was their own act, and admitted by them to have been caused by a consciousness of the divisions among their supporters and their own consequent weakness. He had the greater reason for such confidence, since two of the colleagues of Lord Grey who had refused his offers in 1834, Lord Stanley and Sir James Graham, were now willing to unite with him; and he had almost completed his arrangements, when he was stopped by an unexpected, though not altogether unprecedented, impediment. It will be recollected that, in 1812, some of the arrangements for the formation of a new administration on the death of Mr. Perceval were impeded by a doubt which was felt in some quarters whether the new ministers would be allowed to remove one or two officers of the household, to whom the Regent was generally understood to be greatly attached, but who were hostile to the party which hoped to come into power, though it was afterward known that these officers had felt themselves bound to retire as soon as the arrangements in contemplation should be completed.[246] Sir Robert Peel was now met by a difficulty of the same kind, but one which the retiring ministers had the address to convert into a real obstacle. The Queen, who had warm affections, but who could not possibly have yet acquired any great knowledge of business, had become attached to the ladies whom Lord Melbourne had appointed to the chief places in her household. It had never occurred to her to regard their offices in a political light; and, consequently, when she found that Sir Robert considered it indispensable that some changes should be made in those appointments, she at once refused her consent, terming his proposal one "contrary to usage and repugnant to her feelings." Sir Robert, however, felt bound to adhere to his request for the removal of some of the ladies in question; for, in fact, they were the wives and sisters of his predecessors, and a continuance of their daily intercourse with the Queen might reasonably be expected to have some influence over her Majesty's judgment of the measures which he might feel it his duty to propose. Such a difficulty could not have arisen under a male sovereign; but Lord Melbourne himself had departed from the ordinary practice when he surrounded his royal mistress with ladies so closely identified with his cabinet. It is very possible that he had originally made the appointments without any such design, from the careless indifference which was his most marked characteristic; but he cannot be so easily acquitted when, in reply to the Queen's application to him for advice on the subject, he, being joined in his assertion by Lord John Russell, assured her that Sir Robert Peel's demand was unjustifiable and unprecedented. Supported by the positive dictum of the ministers on whose judgment she had hitherto been bound to rely, the Queen naturally adhered to her decision of refusing to permit the removal of the ladies in question, and the result was that Sir Robert Peel declined to take office under circumstances of difficulty beyond those to which every new minister must of necessity be exposed, and Lord Melbourne and his colleagues resumed their posts. The transaction was, of course, canvassed in both Houses of Parliament. Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington, who was the spokesman of the party in the House of Lords, defended their refusal to undertake the government on any other condition than that for which they had stipulated, on the ground that the authority to make such changes in the household as they had proposed was indispensable, as a proof of their possession of her Majesty's confidence; while Lord Melbourne, with a strange exaggeration, defended the advice which he had given her Majesty by the assertion that to have complied with Sir Robert Peel's proposal would have been "inconsistent with her personal honor." Other arguments on the same side were based on the alleged cruelty of separating her Majesty "from the society of her earliest friends, her old and constant companions;" an argument which was disposed of by Lord Brougham's remark, that till she had become Queen (not yet two years before) she had had no acquaintance with them whatever.[247]
But it is needless to dwell at any length on the case, in which all subsequent historians and political critics, however generally prepossessed in favor of the Liberal ministers, have given up their position as untenable. Her Majesty herself kept strictly on the path of the constitution in guiding herself by the counsels of those who, till their successors were appointed, were still her responsible advisers. But the course which they recommended was absolutely irreconcilable with one fundamental principle of the constitution-the universal responsibility of the ministers. In denying the right of the incoming ministers to remodel the household (or any other body of offices) in whatever degree they might consider requisite, they were clearly limiting the ministerial authority. To limit the ministerial authority is to limit the ministerial responsibility; to limit the ministerial responsibility is to impose some portion of responsibility (that portion from which it relieves the minister) on the sovereign himself, a dangerous consequence from which the constitution most carefully protects him. In fact, that the advice Lord Melbourne gave was indefensible was tacitly confessed by himself, when, on the recurrence of the same emergency two years later, he was compelled to recommend a different course;[248] and the ladies whom Sir Robert had considered it necessary to remove anticipated their dismissal by voluntary resignation. It may be added that, at the close of this same year, Lord Melbourne himself insisted on nominating the private secretary to the Prince whom the Queen was about to marry, though no one could pretend that offices in his household were as important as those in that of the sovereign; and though, if there was any post in which the Prince might have been supposed to have a right to an unfettered choice, that might have been supposed to have been the office of his private secretary.[249]