In Alice’s last letter – those pages which now enfolded the locks of poor Algie’s hair – she had described a meeting she had attended while up in town, a meeting at which the Member of Parliament for the West Riding of Yorkshire, Mr Cobden, had spoken. The Liberal Cobden had become notorious. In truth, William did not find himself in disagreement with every one of the man’s views, for all that he was himself a traditionalist and, by birth and belief, a Tory. He privately acknowledged that Cobden’s notion that the British should have sent only naval vessels to oppose the Russians and no soldiers whatsoever was not unsound, especially given the parlous conditions in which the men on land had found themselves over the past winter. Cobden’s views on British society and its urgent need of reform were another matter. Gale had hardly known how to respond to Alice’s letter. To think of his wife going out in the evening, unchaperoned; consorting with heaven knew what kind of people! Mercifully this gathering had taken place in Holborn: no one in the Gales’ circle could have seen her there. She was all for Cobden, who, said Alice, had called the British ‘the most sanguinary nation on earth’. The politician had gone on to pronounce that this thirst for blood was fuelled by an irresponsible aristocracy. It was his conviction, furthermore, that the campaign against the Russians should be halted forthwith. He called on Government to cease the war on the grounds that Turkey needed no protection from Russian force. It was in Cobden’s view certain that the Mahometans could not prevail. He was convinced that over time that faith would wither and die, and Turkey would come to be governed once more by Christians. This William Gale did not believe.

Alice wrote that she had lingered, after the Peace meeting, to speak with one or two of those other ladies present. They told her of an occasion in January in Trafalgar Square at which a group of agitators – not all of them males – had borne placards and banners with Stop the War emblazoned upon them. It was thought that some one and a half thousand had participated; and upon a Sunday. A service in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields had had to be halted, because of the commotion without. Snowballs had been thrown at omnibuses and even in the direction of the constabulary. Alice had been told that the ringleaders had appeared before a police magistrate at Bow Street and each had been fined forty shillings, or fourteen days’ imprisonment. Gale considered the punishment woefully insufficient. It was clear to William that such people were little more than rabble. Interrupting worshippers at prayer! Parliament was the proper place for debate, not the public streets and squares of London. And such gatherings were most certainly no place for a woman. For Alice to describe this with evident approval was quite wrong.