As the weeks of the summer and the early autumn passed, matters only grew worse. Victoria was spoken of most contemptuously, and was even hissed in a public assembly. Mr. Greville wrote in his journal: "The Tories seem not to care one straw for the crown, its dignity or its authority, because the head on which it is placed does not nod with benignity to them." Peel was, of course, above such behavior as that of some of his violent partisans, but he must have been somewhat surprised at developments. He had been afraid that the Queen's opinions and judgment were so weak that she would be influenced by the talk of a few ladies in attendance and would be unable to judge questions fairly and without prejudice; but he had found that, whatever might be the faults of the young lady on the throne, she could never be accused of having no will of her own.
During the first two years of her reign, the friends of the Queen were watching her with much anxiety. She was an unusual girl, with an unusual training, but, after all, she was only a girl, and she had responsibilities to meet from which, as Carlyle said, "an archangel might have shrunk." Her position was all the more dangerous because she was too young to realize her difficulties; and when trouble arose, there was no one in the land of whom she could ask counsel without arousing the enmity of someone else. Everyone who was capable of advising her was prominent in one political party or the other. If she had discussed any of her hard questions with even her own mother, and it had become evident that suggestions had come from the Duchess of Kent, there would have been talk at once of "foreign influence."
Meanwhile, "foreign influence" in the person of the wise King Leopold was busily at work. The young Queen had reigned for more than two years, and the first novelty of her position had passed. At first it had been delightful to her to feel that she was "the Queen," and that she could do precisely as she chose. Even the Bedchamber Plot had resulted in her having her own way, in keeping her ladies and the Whig Cabinet; but so clear-minded a woman as Queen Victoria must have seen--as, indeed, she declared some years later--that she had not behaved like a constitutional monarch, and she knew that thousands of her subjects were indignant with her.