Filling the household offices became an increasingly difficult task for Gladstone, who had to contend, not only with the alienation of the aristocracy from his policies, but also with a queen who both encouraged potential appointees to decline to serve under Gladstone and at the same time harangued the prime minister for his lack of concern for her comfort and failure to compose an acceptable household for her: she congratulated the Dowager Duchess of Roxburghe on her son's 'patriotic and loyal' refusal of office for his wife under Gladstone, 'which I consider more loyal to me, and of far more importance than if he supported this (incredible) government'.*****

Thus it was that during the last third of Victoria's reign, the language of patriotism, of the disinterested service of the interests of the country rather than political faction, became, ironically, the preserve of a political party, the Conservatives, with the full support of the queen. But, unlike her previous foray into political partisanship, in the 1830s, this time Victoria's actions were kept from public knowledge, through a combination of the veneration which Gladstone felt for the institution of the monarchy, the widespread acceptance of Walter Bagehot's idealisation of constitutional monarchy in The English Constitution (1867) as a description of present reality, and the carefully cultivated public image of the queen.

Victoria's court has been remarkably little considered by historians; indeed, until recently, even the nineteenth-century monarchy itself has been neglected by scholars anxious to distance themselves from traditional historiographical imperatives. Victorian monarchy is widely viewed as an irrelevance; a declining mode of governance on the verge of replacement by democratic institutions; a triumph of style over substance, form over content.

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