Queen Victoria to Viscount Palmerston

Windsor Castle, 11th February 1860.

The Queen acknowledges the receipt of Lord Palmerston's two letters of yesterday evening. She willingly accepts Lord John Russell's expressions of regret, and certainly was led to read that one passage which Lord Palmerston explains in the sense which he supposed.

The Queen has received the draft to Lord Cowley, and has written her observations upon it to Lord John, who will communicate them to him. She thinks that the omissions which she has pointed out can be very well supplied consistently with that international courtesy which Lord Palmerston truly says ought to be observed.

Footnote 11: In this despatch, Lord John wrote that the Government could not believe that a country in the circumstances of France could be endangered by the existence, "on the other side of the Alps, of a State of 11,000,000 of people lately joined by a cement not yet dry, threatened, on the side of Lombardy, by Austria, and not very certain of its own independence."