Such passages, however, are rare. Most of these letters show the Prince's sterling political judgment, and he did not often make such a gaffe as he made in 1845, when he wrote to Wilberforce on his appointment to: the Bishopric of Oxford, giving him detailed instructions as to how a Bishop of the State Church should comport himself in the House of Lords, on what subjects he should vote and on_which refrain, After the anxieties of the Revolutionary year (1848), when his friend Prince William of Prussia, grandfather of the Kaiser, was for a time an exile in London, the Prince Consort advocated a cautious policy of non-intervention in Continental affairs.
However differently, he wrote in 1850, parties here may judge the facts of Continental happenings, all agree absolutely in desiring that England's interests and welfare shall not be dragged into the whirlpool. This desire only strengthens the general determination against any Continental war and against taking any part in one.
In face of this national feeling no minister could dare pledge England's name to a measure involving a like-linood of participation in a fresh Con: tinental war—without consent of Parliament. Such consent would never be granted, even if it were made clear to Parliament that great interests were at stake.
Yet the events even then were already in train Which produced the Crimean war, when the Prince Consort was highly incensed by what he and the Queen considered the "moral cowardice" of Prussia in refusing to join England and France in their war against Russia for the protection of Turkey.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.