Lord hardinge retired after the Peace of Paris, which brought the war to an end in 1856. His successor was George, Duke of Cambridge, the Queen's cousin. He was thirty-seven years of age, and had served in the recent campaign in Russia. Appointed as General Commanding-in-Chief, he was promoted Commander-in- Chief at the time of the Queen's Jubilee in 1887. Imbued with a strong sense of the desirability of upholding the royal prerogative, he had written a memorandum, during the previous year, supporting the point of view that finance and administration were the field of the Secretary of State, while discipline and command were matters for the Commander-in-Chief. He was tenacious of his opinions on such questions as length of service and promotion by seniority, and loved parades and set field days. He made submissions direct to the Queen, which ought to have passed through the hands of the ministers in the first place. The Queen considered his appointment as the only one it was possible to make, “though in some respects it may be a weakness for the Crown, it is a great strength for the army”. His conservatism in military matters, and his firm belief in the efficacy of his own ideas about the army, increased the difficulty of carrying out desirable and necessary reforms. In the course of his long tenure of office, he agreed to a great reorganisation of the army, to the abolition of purchase, and to certain other less sweeping changes, which followed as the logical development of Lord Cardwell's reforms.