Queen Victoria to Viscount Palmerston

13th June 1859.

Lord Clarendon has just left the Queen. She had a long and full conversation with him. Nothing could be more friendly than his language, and he expressed himself ready to do anything for the Queen's service. But he positively declines entering the Cabinet or taking any other office. He says, as Foreign Secretary, he should be ready to join the Government should there be a vacancy; but that he has never directed his attention much to general politics, and his taking any other office, after having held the Foreign Seals during a long and important time, would be of no use to the Government, and would only injure himself. The Queen told him that he might have any office almost (naming several of those which Lord Palmerston discussed with her), but she could not urge nor press him to do what he felt would injure him, and indeed she found him quite determined in his purpose.

His absence from the Cabinet the Queen sincerely deplores, and she knows that Lord Palmerston will feel it a serious loss.