Sir,—After the Committee of the Cabinet on the Reform Bill, which sat this morning for five hours, Lord Stanley expressed a wish to have some private conversation with me.
Although I would willingly have deferred the interview till a moment when I was less exhausted, I did not think it wise, with a person of his temperament, to baulk an occasion, and therefore assented at once.
I give your Royal Highness faithfully, but feebly, and not completely, the results of our conversation.
1. With respect to the relations between his office and Her Majesty, he said he was conscious that they had been conducted with great deficiency of form, and, in many respects, in an unsatisfactory manner; but he attributed all this to the inexperience and "sheer ignorance" of a Department which had not been accustomed to direct communication with the Crown. Some portion of this, he said, he had already remedied, and he wished to remedy all, though he experienced difficulties, on some of which he consulted me.
He accepted, without reserve, and cordially, my position, that he must act always as the Minister of the Queen, and not of the Council, but he said I took an exaggerated view of his relations with that body; that he thoroughly knew their respective places, and should be vigilant that they did [? not] overstep their limits; that he had never been, of which he reminded me, an admirer of the East India Company, and had no intention of reviving their system; that the incident of submitting the legal case to the Council, etc., had originated in a demand on the part of the Commander-in-Chief, which involved, if complied with, a grant of money, and that, under these circumstances, an appeal to the Council was inevitable.
2. He agreed with me, that, on all military matters, he would habitually communicate with the Commander-in-Chief, and take His Royal Highness's advice on all such points; and that copies of all military papers, as I understood Lord Stanley, should be furnished to His Royal Highness.
3. Having arrived at this point, I laid before him the views respecting military unity, which formed the subject matter of recent conversations. Lord Stanley assented to the principles which I attempted to enforce; and in reply to my reminding him that the old military system of India had entirely broken down, he said he contemplated terminating the independent authority of the Commander-in-Chief at the inferior Presidencies, and of establishing the absolute and complete authority of Her Majesty's Commander-in-Chief in India. He did not seem to see his way to any further step at present, and I did not think it judicious on this occasion to press the subject further.
Throughout this interview, Lord Stanley's manner was candid, very conciliatory, and, for him, even soft. He was pleased to say that it was a source of great satisfaction to him that your Royal Highness had deigned to confer confidentially with me on the subject, and make me, as it were, a "Mediator" on matters which, he assured me with great emphasis, had occasioned him an amount of anxiety almost intolerable.
SUGGESTED RESIGNATION
He had recurred, in the course of this interview, to a suggestion which he had thrown out on Tuesday, viz. that the difficulties of the position might be removed, or greatly mitigated, by his retirement from the office, and accepting, if his continuance in the Government was desirable, another post. I therefore thought it best at once to point out to him that such a course of proceeding would only aggravate all the inconveniences and annoyances at present existing; that his retirement would be the signal for exaggerated rumours and factious machinations, and would have the most baneful effect on the discussion in Parliament generally of all those military topics with which we were threatened; that, far from being satisfactory to Her Majesty and your Royal Highness, I was convinced that the Queen and yourself would hear of such an intention with regret.