And the course of his life too. His philosophy hampered his power of action. It was not that he was weak, as his friends, from Emily down, were always complaining. On the contrary, no one could act more vigorously once he was convinced he was right. The trouble was that he was seldom so convinced. He saw every question from so many sides, most problems seemed to him so hopeless of solution, that he was generally for doing nothing at all. Still less could he direct his various actions to a chosen end: he had never made up his mind as to whether any end was worth achieving. If circumstances should happen to push him into a position of power, he was perfectly ready to take it on: for men and their affairs inspired him with far too little respect for him to shrink from assuming responsibility for them. But, on the other hand, he did not think it worth while stirring a finger to mould circumstances to his will. Smiling, indolent, and inscrutable he lay, a pawn in the hands of fortune.
Part IV
Chapter Ten
In Office
(1)
At long last fortune favoured him. In February 1827 Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, had a stroke. Bereft of his placid and reconciling hand, the Government split into two opposing sections; the Ultra-Tories and the Canningite-Tories. Which of the two was to obtain control depended on the unpredictable caprice of George IV. After the usual hesitations, he asked Canning to form a Government. Rather than serve under him, the Ultras led by the Duke of Wellington, resigned. Canning therefore, in order to fill the gap left by their secession, turned to his Whig followers, notably Palmerston and William Lamb. Even now it seemed as if William’s ironical lazy indifference might lose him his chance. To his sister Emily’s exasperation, he chose to leave London at the very moment the Government was forming. However when the list of candidates for office was placed before the King—“William Lamb!” he exclaimed, his memory aglow with pleasing recollections of old Carlton House convivialities. “William Lamb—put him anywhere you like!” In May he was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland. It was the turning point in William’s life. At last, at forty-six years of age, his luck had changed: and for good. William stepped on to the public stage, an official ruler of England.
It was a very different England from that of his youth. The lucid leisured eighteenth century was vanished; and in its place, to the thunder of a thousand factory wheels, surged forward the murky and tumultuous era which was its successor. All was movement, the industrial movement, the democratic movement, the Romantic movement, the Irish National movement. All was confusion: religious neo-medievalists jostled progressive rationalists; hard-fisted capitalists clashed with enthusiastic humanitarians: destitution and stupendous wealth dwelled side by side: in England the young Mill hailed the dawn of the age of enlightenment, in Scotland the young Carlyle brooded darkly on the imminent eclipse of human virtue. And the spirit that infused the age was of a piece with its preoccupations; earnest, hopeful, strenuous and foggy—pulsating with energy, aglow with hope, tormented by conscience. The smoke and flame of the factories found their counterpart in the smoke and flame that swirled in the hearts of the people who lived under their shadow.
The new spirit showed itself in the world of politics. Signs were visible on every side that the struggle between the old aristocratic landed régime and the new individualist democratic forces could not be delayed much longer. Till 1815 it had been held up by the Napoleonic Wars, in the disturbed years, which followed, by the fear of revolution. But now Europe seemed settled down into steady peace: for the time being the country was prosperous. And the restless discontent of those classes who were shut out from political power began to make itself felt; seeping up from the world of revolutionary agitators to infuse itself into the respectable middle and professional classes. Everywhere the cry was reform; law reform, educational reform, fiscal reform of the laws against Nonconformists and Roman Catholics, Parliamentary reform. Parliamentary reform was the crucial issue. For, by destroying the aristocracy’s monopoly of seats in the House of Commons, it wrested from it at one stroke the control of government. With it, the men of the new age would be in a position to impose any other change they wanted; without it they could move only by permission of their opponents.
Such were the questions canvassed at reunions of provincial kings of industry, at gatherings of serious thinkers, in working men’s clubs. Only in the lordly drawing-rooms of the politicians themselves was the atmosphere less excited. Belonging as they did, Tory and Whig alike, to the old régime, they had no personal interest in a change. However, they could not altogether escape feeling the pressure of the time-spirit. It was becoming clear to them that something new would have to be done; and that, since they alone possessed political power, they would have to do it. Confronted by this new situation, the old party divisions began to lose whatever binding power they still possessed; people began to range themselves into new groups. There were, roughly speaking, three positions that they could take up, that of the Ultra-Tories, that of the Canningite-Tories and that of the large body of opinion who, anticipating the terminology of a later age, we may call the Liberals. The Ultras were against all reform; the Liberals in favour of it in varying degrees; the Canningites stood between them. Strongly against the surrender of aristocratic power, implied in Parliamentary Reform, they yet believed that administration was in need of much modification and improvement; and moreover that by making such practical and executive reform, they would allay the discontent that created the demand for Parliamentary Reform. If, so they contended, people had a better police and poor law and a fairer system of taxation, they would be quite happy to go on being governed by the gentlemen of England.
In 1827 the Canningites got a chance to try their policy. The Ultras, in power for the last thirty odd years, were clearly out of tune with the temper of the times. The Liberals were not yet in a condition to take their place officially. They belonged, most of them, to the Whig Party; and the Whigs were still in confusion. A few like William agreed with Canning; the old orthodox Whigs, led by Lords Grey and Holland, secretly nervous of change and personally distrustful of Canning, shrank from committing them-selves in any direction. The professional politicians, led by the brilliant and changeable Brougham still tacked about in a seething turmoil of intrigue, now to the right, now left, according as either seemed likely to bring them office. Anyway, for the time being, the crucial issue of Parliamentary Reform was in abeyance. The reformers quarrelled among themselves, while the public was not yet completely convinced that reform was necessary. Now, if ever, was the time to try the Canningite middle-way.
It came naturally to William to support it. Not that he was much of a reformer, even in the modified Canningite sense. The spirit of the new age left him singularly unimpressed. He did not like earnestness, he did not like energy, he did not like muddle-headedness. And he had the aristocrat’s antipathy to the middle-classes. “I don’t like the middle-classes,” he once observed, “the higher and lower classes, there’s some good in them; but the middle-class are all affectation and conceit and pretence and concealment.” Further, he thought change always ran the risk of disturbing the security of society; while convinced as he was of the futility of most human effort, he did not believe it ever did the good it intended. On the contrary sensational reforms, like Parliamentary Reform, did positive harm. For by raising hopes that could never be fulfilled they left people more discontented than ever. “I like what is tranquil and stable,” he once remarked. This sentence sums up his political creed.
On the other hand, he recognized that the world, unfortunately, was a changing place: and that political institutions, make-shift affairs at best, must change along with it. Tranquillity and stability can only be preserved by a continuous process of adaptation. If a large section of the people were dissatisfied with the existing system, it meant that it was out of date. And, however silly their demands might be, there would be no peace till they were in some degree conceded. Finally since administrative reforms affected the
ir actual lives the most, they were the kind most likely to pacify them. Holding these views, he could follow Canning if not with enthusiasm yet with an honest conviction that it was the best thing to do.
Himself he had only a minor part to play. The Irish Secretaryship carried with it no seat in the Cabinet; though Ireland, as usual, was in a state of furious unrest, there was nothing much for the time being to be done about it. The Irish were agitating for Catholic Emancipation. Canning was in favour of giving it to them: but the King, reverting in a misguided moment to the ideas of his father, refused. All that Canning could do was to send for William and tell him to go over there and try and convince the Irish of the Government’s good intentions, until such time as the King’s mind might change. In August he arrived in Dublin.
It was a great change from go-ahead England. Under a frail veneer of eighteenth century manners, the country wallowed in bloodstained medieval chaos. The Protestant governing-class divided their time between bullying the natives, wild Hibernian rollickings and killing each other in duels. The mass of the people, savage, superstitious and on the edge of starvation now fawned on their masters in oriental servility, now gathered together in secret societies with fantastic names—Caffees, Bootashees, Whiteboys and Ribbonmen—to plot their overthrow by means of atrocity and assassination. The administration itself was a clotted tangle of corruption and inefficiency. While round the general confusion hovered the Irish nationalist politicians led by the flamboyant O’Connell, seizing every chance to exacerbate the situation. The humane and sophisticated William made an incongruous figure in such a place. But he was not daunted. His commission suited him very well. Catholic Emancipation was one of the few reforms of which he thoroughly approved; both from a deep-seated dislike of religious intolerance and because he thought that discontent in Ireland had grown so widespread as to show, according to his theory of politics, that it was necessary. On the other hand he did not mind its being put off for the moment: temperamentally he was always inclined for inaction. Surveying the scene with calm sardonic detachment he set himself to his task.
The Irish political scene soon began to feel the impact of a new personality. Former Chief-Secretaries, fettered by the conventions of their position, had associated mostly with that Irish Protestant circle who led Dublin Society. Not so William: “The great means by which the Orange gentry have drawn over everyone who has come here,” he writes to a colleague, “was by assuming that their set was the only one worth associating with, quite the first company. You, who know Almacks, know that this is one of the strongest, if not the very strongest passions of the human mind.” Himself he saw everyone; kept open house to a mixed crowd of every party and creed, and took particular pains to make the acquaintance of seditious opponents. Such behaviour shocked the old officials very much. “Mr. Lamb,” lamented one of them, “keeps a lot of bad company!” Indeed William was an unorthodox head of a department in every way. The free and easy habits of the Lamb family, transported into official life produced a surprising spectacle. Every rule of precedent and routine was set aside. Seated in his room with the door open, William would write his letters and interview a deputation at the same time; while around him, a crowd of underlings sauntered through their work amid a hubbub of conversation. If a message was sent in that someone had asked to see him—“Show him in!” he would shout. When the visitor was admitted. “Now,” William would begin genially, “don’t go too fast, don’t ask for impossibilities, and don’t do anything damn foolish.” Even the Irish were surprised by his methods of conducting business; but, unlike the officials, they liked them. Here at any rate was a change from the formal frigid Englishman they had been accustomed to expect. Nor did William just talk pleasantly to them: he went out of his way to treat Catholics on an equality with Protestants, appointed them in preference to posts open to each; openly proclaimed his disgust at the prejudiced way in which Catholics were treated in the law-courts, set himself against all pro-Protestant agitation and shut the door against informers.
He also threw himself into the study of the Irish problems. It was soon clear that all talk of his laziness was nonsense. Given a job, he worked unusually hard. Every post to England carried with it elaborate memoranda from him; on the Tithe question, the local government question, the land question, the Education question. It must be admitted that these were seldom constructive. The upshot of William’s researches was that each problem bristled with difficulties, that most solutions would do more harm than good and that the wisest policy seemed to leave things alone at any rate for the time being. “One is sorry,” he observes with caustic melancholy at the end of one of these dispatches, “to trouble anything that is quiet here!” Anyway his own time was fully occupied in keeping Lord Wellesley, the Lord Lieutenant, in a good humour and warding off the never-slackening throng of persons clamouring angrily to have a job done for them. Sometimes their importunities strained William’s patience to breaking-point. “I can’t give away a place of fifty pounds without making fifty enemies,” he exclaimed: and again, “Lord Clare and Mr. Fitzgibbon want a living for a Mr. Westhorpe whose principal merit is that his is the only family in the county of Limerick that will receive Mrs. Fitzgibbon. Tho’ I have the greatest toleration and even partiality for ladies of that description, yet I cannot go so far as to say that associating with them in compliance with the wishes of a patron is the best possible recommendation for a clergyman . . . that damned little man milliner Clare!—he knows that I promised him nothing: but, like all Irishmen, if you put one single civil word in your communication with them, they immediately construe it into a promise; and charge you with a breach of faith if they don’t get what they have asked.”
On the whole, however, he got a good deal of fun out of the spectacle of human infirmity afforded by the Irish scene. One day a little boy, the son of a subordinate, was brought in to be shown his room at the office. “Is there anything you would like here?” William asked him kindly. The child chose a stick of sealing-wax. “That’s right, my boy,” said William, pressing a bundle of pens as well into his hand, “begin life early. All these things belong to the public; and your business is to get out of the public as much as you can.”
He was not to enjoy Ireland long. By the end of January, 1828, political affairs in England were so unsettled as to bring him back for good. Canning had died the previous August. But the King, incensed at what he considered his desertion by the Duke of Wellington, had kept the Canningites in power under the leadership of Lord Goderich, a fussy, timorous politician, henpecked by his wife, terrified of responsibility and often on the verge of tears. Such a man could not long conduct the government of England through a critical period. In January, after an ignominious scene of resignation, in which he was forced to borrow his royal master’s pocket handkerchief in order to assuage the effects of his own agitation, Lord Goderich disappeared from the scene.
His departure produced a crisis of the first order. It was clear that no government, not confessedly Whig, could now go on without the help of the Duke of Wellington. Accordingly George IV appointed him Prime Minister; and the declared Whig ministers, led by Lord Lansdowne, then resigned. What should the Canningites do? The Duke, in order to keep them, promised to modify his policy to suit their views. After hours of indecision they decided to remain for fear, they said, lest otherwise Canning’s policy might be completely reversed.
William, out of personal loyalty—always his ruling motive—stayed along with his friends. But he thought it a mistake. He was right. Whatever the Duke might say, he differed fundamentally from the Canningites on every important issue: and they found that in practice they could only work with him by constantly acting against their true opinion. This mattered to William less than to most, for few political views were to him a matter of principle. Only once, when he voted against the repeal of the Test Act excluding nonconformists from government posts, did he go against a strong conviction. But no amount of laxity on his part or that o
f anyone else could keep so divided a ministry going for long. “The Cabinet,” said Palmerston, the Canningite Minister for War, “has gone on differing about every question of importance that has come under consideration—meeting to debate and dispute and separating without deciding.” Twice in three months the Government came within an inch of splitting. In May the crash came; on the question as to what should be done with the seat left vacant by the disfranchisement of the borough of East Retford. Most of the Canningites, led by Huskisson, were for giving it to a manufacturing town, as a sop to the reformers: the Duke and Peel, fearing this might prove the thin end of the wedge, proposed giving it to a county. After a deplorable exhibition of clumsy vacillation on his own part and unscrupulous strategy on that of the Duke, Huskisson was forced to resign. His followers had to make up their minds whether to go with him. The chief of them were Palmerston, William’s old friend Ward, now Lord Dudley and William himself. On the afternoon of Sunday, 25th May, Palmerston, walking along the Horse Guards, saw Ward beckoning him from the balcony of Melbourne House. He went up to find discussion raging. William was for resignation and Palmerston supported him: but Ward, who passionately enjoyed being in office, hung back, “stroked his chin, counted the squares of the carpet three times down and then went off in the agony of doubt and hesitation.” That night decision could be delayed no longer. The three went to see Huskisson and then, leaving their cabriolets to follow slowly behind them, strolled back through the balmy stillness of the spring night for a final consultation. Ward walked between the two others. “Well,” he began, “now that we are by ourselves in the street and no one but the sentry to hear, let me know right and left what is next to be done—in or out?”
The Young Melbourne & Lord M Page 19