Sardinia Quotes
This is an interesting historical quotation because it shows the role of the Queen in the English Government at the middle of the 19th century. What the quotation shows is that the drafts of significant foreign policies were sent to the young 29 year old Queen for approval. However, her review was not perfunctory, In {630732} it showed how she analyzed proposed policies and pointed out flaws and shortcomings. In this quotation she not only criticized a part of the draft policy but actually wrote her own copy to be included. War was then raging in Lombardy between the Austrians under Marshal Radetzky and the Piedmontese under the King of Sardinia and she believed the Palmerston draft did not do enough to make the Austrians see England as an objective party. And she wanted to be much more proactive and have the British Foreign Ministry mediate the conflict. This would be like a President of the United States taking a draft of a foreign policy from the State Department, instead of either approving or disapproving it, redrafts it to add some additional elements and make the language more comfortable for the parties. And she did this when by U. S. standards she was not old enough to even run for Congress. (And women in the United Kingdom could not even vote.) Note that the formality of the time required that the Queen refer to herself in the third person and not the first.
