Four other personalities stand out especially in the history of those years; the Hon. Edward Stanley, Secretary for Ireland; Lord John Russell, the Privy Seal; Lord Durham, the Paymaster General, and Lord Chancellor Brougham. Stanley represented the extreme right wing. Only family tradition put him on the Whig side. By temperament a despotic oligarch, he has been a leading Waverer over Reform; and now ruled Ireland by a policy of ruthless coercion in the interests of the Protestant Ascendancy. For the rest, he was youthful, brilliant and combative with an extraordinary gift for aggressive, effective debating, and off-hand patrician manners which induced a disagreeable sense of social inferiority among the more bourgeois members of his party. They were mystified by the race-course metaphors with which he sprinkled his discourses, and resented his habit of lounging back on the Treasury bench with his feet propped up on the table in front of him, for all the world as if he were taking his ease at Brooks’s Club.
Lord John Russell also lacked the common touch. A small, prim young man, with a large head and a precise, old-fashioned mode of speech, he often failed to recognize a follower of ten years’ standing and conversed in a strain of cold, flat candour that was the reverse of winning. On one occasion he described to a friend how at a party he had left the Duchess of Inverness to talk to the Duchess of Sutherland because she was sitting farther from the fire and he felt too hot. “I hope you told the Duchess of Inverness why you left her,” said the friend. “No,” said John Russell after a pause. “But I did tell the Duchess of Sutherland.” All the same, if John Russell was not loved he was, unlike Stanley, deeply and growingly trusted by his party. This is a little surprising because, in addition to his lack of social charm, there was something depressingly commonplace about John Russell’s mind. Perhaps, though, this was an advantage to him. Intellectual originality does not make for popularity in English politics. What the average member likes is ordinary ideas supported by brains and character stronger than the ordinary. This was just what John Russell possessed. His outlook was the orthodox Whig outlook of the new generation, who believed in adapting old institutions to a new situation by a process of cautious reform. But John Russell did not hold this in a vague, instinctive, amateurish fashion. Intellectual and highly educated, he never rested till he had clarified and ordered his opinions in relation to a system of defined and rigid political principles. He was a doctrinaire of the middle way. With a doctrinaire’s certainty, too; here we come to the final cause of his influence. A strong, narrow character, fortified by the unhesitating self-confidence which was the inheritance of every member of the august house of Russell, he never doubted that he was always in the right about everything. “There is not a better man in England than Lord John Russell,” said Sidney Smith, “but he is utterly ignorant of moral fear: there is nothing he would not undertake. I believe he would perform the operation for the stone—build St. Peter’s—or assume, with or without ten minutes’ notice, the command of the Channel Fleet: and no-one would discover by his manner that the patient had died, the church tumbled down and the Channel Fleet been knocked to atoms.” Self-confidence on this scale, though irritating to his acquaintance, was a great help to John Russell in imposing his will on more hesitant persons.
Black-browed, “Radical Jack” Durham, the champion of left-wing ideas in the Government, was equally sure he was right. But he was less successful at persuading others to share his belief. The rich Radical seldom carries conviction, especially if he is as fantastically rich as Durham. Justly or not, it is hard to accept, as spokesman of the poor, a man who is reported to have spent £900,000 on doing up his house. Besides, Durham’s character was even more paradoxical than his political position. Independent, courageous, and with fitful gleams of political vision, he was also a theatrical, unbalanced egotist whose infirmities of temper had been developed to the highest pitch by bad health, bad nerves and too much money. Accustomed to indulge every changing mood, and follow every impulse, his character was a bundle of inconsistencies. He was an autocrat at home and a democrat abroad, spoiled his children and cuffed his servants, was delightful to his friends one moment and insulted them the next, gave magnificent dinner parties through which he himself sat in sullen silence, risked his reputation to serve the cause of liberty and equality at the same time as he was pulling every string he could lay hands on to get himself made an earl—“shall the richest commoner in England be no more than the last of her barons?” he demanded furiously. As a member of a Cabinet Durham was impossible. Not only did he deliberately provoke his less progressive colleagues by the revolutionary violence of his proposals, but he advocated them with a lack of self-control that made discussion with him impossible. He stormed, he sulked, he made scenes, he burst into tears, he flung out of the room, he squabbled incessantly with Stanley; and he bullied Lord Grey—who, incidentally, was his father-in-law—so unmercifully that the poor gentleman, losing all his patrician poise, cowered in a comer, while kindly Althorp sat with his face buried in his hands out of sheer embarrassment. Outside the Cabinet Durham intrigued with disaffected members of his party against his own leaders and made public speeches of extreme indiscretion. In the autumn of 1832, to the general relief it was arranged he should go on a mission to Russia. Russia sounded comfortably far off. But before many months were over he was back, and the scenes were raging away as intolerably as ever. By 1834 there were few of his colleagues with whom Lord Durham had not personally quarrelled.
All the same it is doubtful if he was quite such a nuisance as Lord Brougham. Durham’s views kept fairly steady, even if his temper did not. Not so Brougham’s. He was the one important Minister who was not an aristocrat; a middle-class Scottish lawyer who, from the time he had entered political life twenty odd years before had, by the sheer brilliance of his personal gifts, established himself in the forefront of the Whig Party. During its long period of eclipse he had done more than any other one man to modernize its appeal and keep up its fighting spirit. By 1830 he was generally considered the most dynamic single force in politics and possibly the cleverest man alive. Certainly Brougham was a phenomenon; as flamboyantly eccentric as a character of Dickens—and as preternaturally vital. The queer, lanky figure with the baleful, restless eyes and twitching, inquisitive nose was never still for an instant. Across the page of history he strides, fidgeting, posturing, scratching his head, picking his nose and incessantly pouring forth a flood of talk in which ideas and scurrility, jokes and voluminous learning were strangely and sparklingly blended. No one could help listening to Brougham when he really got going. “Lord Brougham,” writes a fashionable lady, “kept us spellbound at breakfast talking about the habits of bees, as charming as a fairy tale.” In serious conclave with his colleagues, he was equally riveting: the one member of the Government with expert knowledge of the special problems of the new age—educational problems, legal problems, economic problems—and with projects for solving them all. “This morning,” remarked the sardonic Rogers about him, “Solon, Lycurgus, Demosthenes, Archimedes, Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Chesterfield and a good many others went away in one post-chaise!”
But what lay behind this astonishing display? Not profound thought. Examined today and unassisted by the magnetic light of Brougham’s personal presence, his learning shows up as superficial and his ideas as no more than commonplace. Morally he was even less impressive—undignified, boastful, drunken, and directed by no consistent principles whatsoever. His days passed in a turmoil of plot and counter-plot, trickery and double-dealing in which he tacked about so often and so quick from section to section of his Party, according as to which seemed most likely to further his career of self-advancement, that it was impossible to be sure at any one moment which side he was on. To complete the confusion he created, there was a streak in him of sheer irresponsibility. Out of jealousy or temper, or just from an impish delight in stirring up trouble, he was always liable to do or say something which set everyone by the ears. Indeed, the more Brougham is studied, the more s
urprising it becomes that he should have succeeded in getting where he did. For there was nothing constant in him, but an unsleeping egotism and a wonderful skill in showing off. Upwards rushed the rocket, deafening the ears with its roar and lighting up the whole sky with a shower of stars. But when they had faded, all that remained was a bit of charred stick and a faint ominous whiff of sulphur.
His contemporaries were dazzled by the stars, but they smelt the sulphur all right. “Beelzebub,” “the Arch-Fiend,” “old Wickedshifts”—such were his nicknames. None of the Whig leaders trusted him enough to want him in the Government; but they feared he might be more dangerous outside it. So Grey made him Lord Chancellor. He soon regretted it. Perhaps in an unusually disciplined and united Ministry Brougham’s energy and brains might have been subdued to serve some useful purpose; but not in the Whig Ministry of 1831! The Arch-Fiend used his great position only as a platform from which to make his personality felt by his own characteristic methods, which included meddling in other Ministers’ business behind their backs, and conducting his own without any reference to the lines of policy laid down by his leaders. Like an elderly and malignant Puck, incongruously clothed in Lord Chancellor’s robes and wig, Brougham flitted about leaving a trail of bad faith and bad blood wherever he went.
With such a team to drive it is no wonder that poor Grey longed to be back at Howick Hall. He himself did not feel inclined for further reforms; only as much of them as would keep the Radicals quiet without annoying the old Whigs so much that they withdrew their support from him. Helped by Althorp and in a less degree by John Russell, he managed to pursue this middle course more successfully than might have been expected. Some substantial measures were passed in those years, notably those dealing with banking, legal, factory and poor law reform. But the Government was too divided to settle down into any kind of stability. Hardly two months went by without someone threatening to resign; Durham and Brougham from temper, Stanley and John Russell from principle, Althorp and Grey from the simple desire for a quiet life. The Cabinet lurched on from dangerous crisis to dangerous crisis; and, though for a time catastrophe was averted by a succession of hastily patched-up compromises, yet each crisis left the Government weaker in itself and more discredited in the eyes of the world. At last the left and right extremes broke off. Durham went in the spring of 1833; Stanley followed him in May, 1834. It was clear that one more rumpus, and the whole thing would fall to pieces.
From his customary position of detachment Melbourne surveyed its decline and approaching fall. Himself he was in favour of Grey’s middle-way policy. It was not that he liked reforms any better than he had done: or that he was less apprehensive about the future. So far as he could judge from the reports that came into the Home Office, popular feeling was still very disturbed. He was appalled, so he told Greville, driving up with him to London from a country house visit in the autumn of 1832, by the desire for change and general restlessness which prevailed, and he judged violent revolution to be likely enough to insist on the Commander-in-Chief being a non-party appointment. If it came to fighting he thought, it was essential that the forces of order should have the confidence of all respectable people behind them. Melbourne’s very fear of disorder, however, modified his instinctive conservatism. Better concession than civil war, he would agree after some grumbling. It might pacify people for a bit at any rate; and it would help to keep the Government united. As much as ever he felt its unity to be more important than anything else; and did all he could to promote it. “I was always exhorting different sections of Lord Grey’s Government to shuffle over differences,” he related later. Personally he always took care to avoid rows and tried to get on with everyone: so successfully that he was the only Minister whom all the others liked. This did not mean that he liked them. Coolly and silently, he observed his colleagues and drew conclusions about their characters for future use. As politicians, he esteemed them only in so far as their conduct encouraged what was tranquil and stable. By this test Grey and Althorp, along with some old friends like Lord Holland, came out not too badly—though Melbourne mocked at Grey’s reluctance to make the best of anything. “Lord Grey,” he said, “in or out, successful or unsuccessful, was never satisfied with anything, least of all with himself.” Melbourne got on also with John Russell well enough. Of course John Russell worried too much about his principles, but his views were moderate, his word was to be trusted; and anyway Melbourne had known him all his life. The others were not so satisfactory. Stanley was the best of them. Melbourne sympathized with his dislike of reform and was enthusiastic about his oratory. “He rose like a young eagle above them all,” he cried, after listening to one of his star performances in the House of Commons. But Stanley could not be described as a tranquillizer. “He has about him both the faults of great spirit, haste and rashness, and those of being discontented and disgusted,” Melbourne told Fred. So also had Brougham and Durham without any of Stanley’s compensating virtues. Durham was everything that irritated Melbourne most—idealistic, vain and rude. Besides, it was impossible to believe a word he said. All that fuss about his ill health for instance!—Melbourne noticed that he was only ill when he wanted to get out of doing something. He could not bear Durham. About Brougham, he was not able to bring himself to feel so strongly. Melbourne always had a soft spot for amusing ruffians, and all the more if they were eccentric. He even went so far as to say that Brougham had a good heart lurking about him somewhere. This did not mean that he liked having him in the Government. As early as the autumn of 1832 he had made up his mind that he was an untrustworthy nuisance. Three years later he declared, “Brougham is mad and will one day, by sacrificing everything to his personal whim, end by sacrificing himself.” Melbourne thought that the sooner this happened the better.
Altogether the spectacle of cabinet life served to confirm him in his general sense of the infirmity of human beings and their institutions. “A Cabinet is a delicate and fragile machine,” he writes tartly in the summer of 1834, “this is still more the case when it has recently been shaken and broken, and repaired with new materials. Those who remain are anxious not to have to concede anything to their new allies: those who join are equally desirous of obtaining as much concession as possible, in order to justify themselves for having accepted office . . . Such a body is not to be approached without the utmost care and even alarm!” For the rest, his colleagues provided abundant food for his sense of comedy. He was especially entertained by the way they—like Ministers in all periods—insisted on believing themselves to be both indispensable and popular. “They think themselves fixtures,” he exclaimed in comic wonderment, “I cannot think why!” Yet, he reflected, his irony taking another turn, they might be right. When did unpopularity ever bring a Government down? Perhaps, on the contrary, it kept it in! “Now we are as unpopular as the Tories,” he remarked after the passing of the Bank Bill, “we may stay in as long as they did.” Certainly he got a lot of fun out of being a Minister, in spite of his gloomy views. By a characteristic paradox, he was at once the most pessimistic and the most cheerful member of the Government. During the next three years every glimpse we get of his figure reveals him in some joyous attitude; writing to Miss Eden “in tearing spirits,” lounging back with a look of arch amusement at a Guildhall banquet, swilling wine joyfully with John Russell, giving jocose infectious grunts of pleasure as he browses in the Holland House library, genially relaxing with his feet up on Lady Holland’s elegant drawing-room chairs; and everywhere loudly laughing. “Lord Melbourne,” said Tom Moore, “laughs more and at less than ever.”
We get a more extended view of him in those moments of relaxation through the eyes of Benjamin Haydon, diarist and painter. Haydon, naive, acute, egotistic, idealistic and preposterous, made Melbourne’s acquaintance in the autumn of 1832. After a lifetime’s unsuccessful struggle to persuade the public and the Royal Academy that he was a great artist, his luck had turned. He was commissioned to paint a picture of the official banqu
et to celebrate the triumph of reform. The Ministers came down to his studio to sit for their likenesses. Their patrician grace of manner appealed alike to Haydon’s snobbishness and his aesthetic sense. He was enchanted by them all, but especially by Melbourne. “A fine head,” he noted, “a delightfully frank, easy unaffected man of fashion. There is nothing like them when they add intelligence to breeding.”
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