On This Day
03 December 1868
W.E. Gladstone has his first audience with Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle
After kissing hands on being appointed Prime Minister, Gladstone and the Queen had a long conversation. Gladstone found the Queen ‘kind, cheerful, even playful’. Much of the conversation was taken up with who might be in the government. Victoria had taken exception to Lord Clarendon, Gladstone’s choice for Foreign Secretary, who had taken to referring to the Queen as ‘the Missus’ which had not gone down well with Her Majesty. Gladstone undertook to remind all ministers that they should consider the Queen’s feelings. The conversation eventually got round to the role of the Irish Church but only when ‘the time for the train was fast approaching’.