[276] Alice Grand Duchess of Hesse, Princess of Great Britain and Ireland. Biographical Sketch and Letters, p. 186, 187.
[277] Willem, who had died a few months before, was a well-known figure at Balmoral. He was given to the Princess Louis by the Baron Schenk-Schmittburg, who brought him from Java. Willem was the offspring of a negro father and a Javanese mother, and was a favourite with the Queen and her daughter.
[278] Life of Bishop Wilberforce, Vol. III., p. 227.
[279] Life of Bishop Wilberforce, Vol. III., p. 242.
[280] Mr. Bernal Osborne had suggested one. It was to cut down the Irish Church establishment to five hundred ministers and four bishops.
[281] Writing to Wilberforce on the 9th of September on the subject, Mr. Disraeli says, “In the great struggle in which I am embarked, it is a matter of great mortification to me that I am daily crossed, and generally opposed by the High Church Party. Only think of Dean Hook opposing Henry Lennox at Chichester.” The Bishop’s answer was that Mr. Disraeli must expect to lose the High Church vote, seeing that he did not, in dispensing ecclesiastical prestige, sufficiently consider the claims of High Churchmen.—Life of Bishop Wilberforce, Vol. II., p. 260.
[282] Memoirs of an Ex-Minister, Vol. II., p 381.
[283] The last had been altered to make it clear that the House merely asked the Crown for leave to discuss a Bill suspending the exercise of its patronage till the 1st of August, 1869. A new one was added by Mr. Whitbread affirming the necessity of discontinuing the Maynooth Grant and the Presbyterian Regium Donum.
[284] This was in his 1844 speech, when he advocated Home Rule for Ireland and the Disestablishment of “an absentee aristocracy and an alien church.” Mr. Disraeli had been taunted with this phrase early in the Session, during the first debate on the Irish Question. His reply was infinitely humorous and audacious. He said of the phrase, with an exquisite touch of mournful reminiscence, “it appeared to me at the time I made it that nobody listened to it. It seemed to me I was pouring water on sand—but it seems now that the water came from a golden goblet.”
[285] In 1864-65 the Government had kept expenditure within the estimates by £370,000. They did so the following year by £92,000. But in 1866-67 the Derby-Disraeli Government let expenditure exceed estimates by £669,000, and in 1867-68 by £537,000. This rather told against Mr. Disraeli in the General Election.