I told [Lord Melbourne] that, as I read the English Constitution, it meant to assign to _the Sovereign in his functions a deliberative part_--that I was not sure the Queen had the means within herself to execute this deliberative part properly, but I was sure that the only way for her to execute her functions at all was to be strictly honest to those men who at the time being were her Ministers.

That it was chiefly on this account that I had been so very sorry to have found now, on my return from the Continent, that on the change of the Ministry a capital opportunity to read a great Constitutional maxim to the Queen had not only been lost by Lord Melbourne, but that he had himself turned an instrument for working great good into an instrument which must produce mischief and danger.

That I was afraid that, from what Lord Melbourne had been so weak as to have allowed himself to be driven into, _against his own and better conviction_, the Queen must have received a most pernicious bias, which on any future occasion would make her inclined to act in a similar position similarly to that what she does now, being convinced that what she does _now_ must be right on all future occasions, or else Lord Melbourne would not have sanctioned it.

Upon this, Lord Melbourne endeavoured to palliate, to represent the danger, which would arise from his secret correspondence with the Queen as very little, to adduce precedents from history, and to screen his present conduct behind what he imagined Lord Bute's conduct had been under George III.[145] I listened patiently, and replied in the end: All this might be mighty fine and quite calculated to lay a flattering unction on his own soul, or it might suffice to tranquillize the minds of the Prince and Anson, but that I was too old to find the slightest argument in what I had just now heard, nor could it in any way allay my apprehension.

I began then to dissect all that he had produced for his excusation, and showed him--as I thought clearly, and as he admitted convincingly--that it would be impossible to carry on this secret commerce with the Sovereign for any length of time without exposing the Queen's character and creating mighty embarrassments in the quiet and regular working of a Constitutional machine.
My representations seemed to make a very deep impression, and Lord Melbourne became visibly nervous, perplexed, and distressed.