LORD LANSDOWNE
Piccadilly, 31st August 1857.
... Viscount Palmerston would beg to submit for your Majesty's consideration whether he might be authorised by your Majesty to offer to Lord Lansdowne promotion to the title of Duke. Your Majesty may possibly not have in the course of your Majesty's reign, long as it is to be hoped that reign will be, any subject whose private and public character will during so long a course of years as those which have been the period of Lord Lansdowne's career, have more entitled him to the esteem and respect of his fellow-countrymen, and to the approbation of his Sovereign.
Lord Lansdowne has now for several years given your Majesty's Government the great and valuable support of his advice in council, his assistance in debate, and the weight of his character in the country, without any office. His health and strength, Viscount Palmerston cannot disguise from himself, have not been this year such as they had been; and if your Majesty should contemplate marking at any time your Majesty's sense of Lord Lansdowne's public services, there could not be a better moment for doing so than the present; and Viscount Palmerston has reason to believe that such an act of grace would be very gratifying to the Liberal Party, and would be deemed well bestowed even by those who are of opposite politics.35
Mr Macaulay accepts the Peerage with much gratitude to your Majesty.
Footnote 35: Lord Lansdowne declined the honour.
Queen Victoria to the King of the Belgians.
THE INDIAN MUTINY
Balmoral Castle, 2nd September 1857.
Dearest Uncle,—... We are in sad anxiety about India, which engrosses all our attention.36 Troops cannot be raised fast or largely enough. And the horrors committed on the poor ladies—women and children—are unknown in these ages, and make one's blood run cold. Altogether, the whole is so much more distressing than the Crimea—where there was glory and honourable warfare, and where the poor women and children were safe. Then the distance and the difficulty of communication is such an additional suffering to us all. I know you will feel much for us all. There is not a family hardly who is not in sorrow and anxiety about their children, and in all ranks—India being the place where every one was anxious to place a son!