She drew many comparisons across time. Thus, as early as 1885 she told her private secretary Sir Henry Ponsonby that while Gladstone was keeping her "in the dark" about what was going on in the Cabinet, Melbourne had always told her everything, including "the different views that were held by different ministers". Melbourne, her first prime minister, who had done much in the most agreeable of fashions to introduce her to the duties and responsibilities of a monarch was a frequent point of reference. For example, in one of the many anecdotes told about her Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, a future Liberal prime minister, recalled how when he was once seeking in the mid-1890s to persuade the Queen to withdraw an objection to a proposed Liberal measure she told him that she remembered Melbourne using the same argument as he was using "many years ago, but it was not true then and it is not true now. Campbell-Bannerman felt like "a little boy talking to his grandmother".

In 1894 she told Lord Rosebery, Liberal prime minister by her own choice, "to bear in mind that 57 years ago the constitution was delivered into her keeping and that, right or wrong, she has her views [on] the fulfilment of her trust". The constitution that had been delivered into her keeping was not contained in a sacred ark of the covenant. Even before 1837, when Victoria was young and many of her ministers, like Melbourne, were old, the Reform Act of 1832 had changed the composition of parliament, giving a voice in it to the middle classes of the new industrial towns and cities, and even before 1832 -- and preparing the way for it -- the Civil emancipation of the Roman Catholics, carried through parliament by the conservative Duke of Wellington in 1829, had alarmed defenders of the "traditional" constitution in Church and State. it was a Tory radical editor/proprietor of a Birmingham newspaper who on the day of emancipation gave it a black border and included an obituary lamenting the death of "Mr. Constitution ... at the House of the Incurables", the House of commons. In addition to promising in 1837 to respect and to love "the constitution of my native country" Victoria in the same speech declared her commitment to maintaining "the Reformed Religion, as by law established", while "securing at the same time to all [her subjects] the full enjoyment of religious liberty".