The Young Melbourne & Lord M

by The Young Melbourne

  Melbourne drew comfort from this too. The weak Whig Government was weaker than ever now. Not only was it bereft of some of its most distinguished members, but it looked as though the time for an emergency Government of this kind was over. If the people wanted reform, they wanted it more radical than the old Whigs offered. If—and this seemed more like the truth—they were reacting against reform, they inclined to the Tories. Melbourne himself did not mind this. Privately, he said that he hoped the Tories would come in. The King agreed with him: so much so, that he suggested Melbourne should try to form a Tory-Whig coalition. The feelings of the Whig Party, however, put this out of the question. All Melbourne could do was, for the time being, to try and carry on as before. With the help of Althorp, who reluctantly agreed to rejoin the Government, he patched up a new administration out of the remnants of the old: and unhopefully set himself to his task.

  It proved as thankless as he could possibly have feared. All the same questions began making trouble again; and all the same people. William IV, now convinced that England was on the slippery slope to an atheistic republic, wanted Melbourne to pledge himself first never to give a Radical office; and secondly not in any way to suggest altering the existing constitution of the Irish Protestant Church. Melbourne managed to parry both these attacks, but only after many letters and some painful interviews, each of which lasted several hours. Hardly less trying than the King, were his colleagues. There was Lord Lansdowne, nearly resigning in a pet because two protégés of his had not been given jobs; and there was John Russell who chose this of all moments to suggest that O’Connell should be given office in order to drive a wedge between him and his Irish supporters. Apart from the fact that the very idea of such an appointment was certain to throw both the King and the more cautious Whigs into a panic, Melbourne thought it would obviously fail of its object, “Taking office would not shake O’Connell’s influence with the people of Ireland one jot,” he wrote sharply. “The people of Ireland are not such damn fools as the people of England. When they place confidence, they don’t withdraw it the next instant.” A new stormy petrel too had appeared on Melbourne’s horizon in the shape of Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary. Personally, Melbourne got on with him well enough. For Palmerston—jaunty, plain-spoken and unchaste—was also a survival from the Regency. But he was a vulgar version of the Regency type, marked, as Melbourne was not, by its characteristic blemishes of arrogance and insensitiveness. Melbourne learnt with dismay that he seemed likely to antagonize every foreign diplomat in London by the casual bluntness of his words and manners. Palmerston’s manners were not his only defect; Melbourne was also suspicious of his policy. Europe during this period was divided by what, for want of a more agreeable phrase, must be called an ideological split. On one side lay the autocratic Eastern powers, Russia, Austria, Prussia, who wished to suppress within their own and other people’s countries that Liberal Movement which was the child of the French Revolution. On the other there were the Western powers, France and England, who were its supporters, so long at any rate as it showed no signs of growing dangerously revolutionary. Palmerston vigorously espoused the Liberal cause. His steady aim, pursued sometimes in action and always in words, was to make England its active leader. This came partly from the fact that he was a man of adventurous and domineering temperament whose instinct it was to intervene in other people’s disputes and partly because he thought that Liberalism, and those middle classes, who everywhere were its chief supporters, was far more likely than despotism to produce governments stable, pacific, and friendly to England and English trade. This was not a point of view to commend itself to Melbourne. His attitude to foreign affairs was of a piece with his attitude to home affairs. As at home, tranquillity was his first object; and, as at home, his sense of reality taught him that Liberalism was now so strong a force that refusal to meet its claims in some degree could only end in disturbance. On the other hand he never could like Liberal progressives of any nationality, nor did he see any reason to suppose that they would be more friendly to England than the autocrats were. “All these chambers and free presses in other countries are very fine things,” he said, “but depend upon it they are still as hostile to England as the old governments.” Let not Palmerston think that they would be grateful to him for intervening on their behalf. “The case with all foreign powers,” he remarked crisply to him, “is that they never take our advice on any of their previous steps; they treat us with the utmost contempt; they take every measure hostile to our interests; they are anxious to prove that we have not the least influence on them. And then when by their misconduct they have got themselves into an inextricable difficulty, they throw themselves upon our mercy and say, ‘For God’s sake re-establish us . . . that we may run again the same course of domestic error and hostility to England’.” Melbourne, too, did not share Palmerston’s belief in the middle classes as a bulwark against revolution. “The bourgeois are timid always,” he said, “I should have some fear, if difficult times were to arrive, of our own boasted middle classes.” Finally, his temperamental dislike of adventurous courses in general was as strong as Palmerston’s liking for them. The world was quite full enough of trouble as it was; why stir up more? As Melbourne watched Palmerston bombarding foreign powers with scoldings and unasked-for advice he felt sceptical, irritable, anxious.

  But, as might have been expected, the greatest nuisance among his colleagues was Brougham. Rage that he had not been made Prime Minister swept away any vestige of self-control that may have remained with him. To soothe his vanity he gave out that Melbourne was his creature, who, for some mysterious reason of his own, he had chosen to put in office: he introduced a highly controversial Bill about a judicial matter in the House of Lords without mentioning a word about it to his colleagues: and he besieged the King—who detested him—with impertinent and unasked-for letters of advice. His most sensational performance, however, took place during the August Recess when he embarked on a sort of public progress round Scotland, making speeches in which he openly attacked his colleagues, and infuriated the King still further by representing himself as his only confidential friend among his ministers. In his intervals of relaxation he created scandal by playing Hunt the Thimble with the Great Seal in an Edinburgh lady’s drawing-room, and arriving at the local races dressed in the full regalia of Lord Chancellor’s wig and gown and roaring drunk.

  To outward appearance Melbourne was unperturbed by all these disturbing events. He still ate enormously, saw a great deal of Miss Eden and Mrs. Norton, and found time to spend pleasant evenings at Holland House; where he awed the unwilling Greville by the breadth of his learning—he seemed equally conversant with Greek history, etymology, and the details of the texts of Shakespeare’s plays—and dazzled him by the lively boldness of his views. “Henry VIII was the greatest man that ever lived,” he asserted with a cheerful oath. “Melbourne loves dashing opinions,” noted Greville.

  But beneath his smiling exterior, Melbourne during these months, was apprehensive and despondent. He did not see how he was to keep the Government going. He was also depressed by the general mental atmosphere of the age. On the night of 16th October, the Houses of Parliament were burnt down. Melbourne watched the huge conflagration as it reflected itself in the dark waters of the Thames. He looked cool and jocose, but in reality his heart was filled with strange and mournful emotions. The spectacle was symbolic. Thus also was the England he had always known being destroyed before his eyes. And no one seemed to mind: even The Times shocked him by the practical and utilitarian tone in which it spoke of the event. It seemed nothing to the men of today that the time-hallowed scene of so much of England’s past and England’s glory, the place where in the hopeful ardour of his youth—now alas so irrevocably distant—his heart had thrilled to the eloquence of Pitt and of Fox, should be a heap of ashes. In so alien a world, he felt little spirit to proceed with his anxious and thankless task, even had he thought that there was much prospect of his making a s
uccess of it.

  Now an event took place which rendered success more unlikely than ever. On the 10th November Lord Spencer died. This meant that his heir, Althorp, was translated to the House of Lords; and the Whig Party lost its leader and most influential member in the Commons. Melbourne did not want to carry on in these reduced circumstances; he pretty well told William IV so in a letter. But he felt that he owed it to his party to agree to stay if required, and went down to Brighton where the King was at that time residing, to talk the matter over with him. After a lengthy dinner, in which William IV regaled his Prime Minister with naval anecdotes and did not mention politics at all, he suddenly said: “By the way, Lord Spencer is dead I hear. So is the Government, of course: where the head is dead, the body cannot go on at all. Therefore there is no help for it, you must all resign. Here, my Lord, is a letter I have written to the Duke of Wellington, directing him to form a Government. Be sure you give it to him directly you arrive in town.” Melbourne suggested John Russell as a possible successor to Althorp. The King repudiated the proposal violently. “That young man”—it was in this disparaging phrase that he always referred to John Russell—was associated in his mind with those alterations in the Irish Church which had become to him a symbol of all that it was his royal duty to resist. Indeed it was his feeling about the Irish Church, coupled with his dislike of Brougham, which had just decided him to get rid of the Whigs. After more fruitless and interminable conversations both that night and the next day, Melbourne arrived in London late in the evening. Just before he went to bed, Brougham burst in asking for news. Melbourne told him what had happened: but asked him not to say anything about it till he had had time to inform the rest of the Ministers. Brougham promised: but on leaving the house hurried off as fast as he could to give the news to The Times. Most of the Ministers woke up to learn of their dismissal from the morning paper.

  They were extremely indignant at the King’s behaviour; and surprised that Melbourne was not more so. They could hardly believe their ears when they heard that he had been seen at the theatre the very next night laughing heartily at a farce about the dismissal of a minister. As a matter of fact, though he was a little nettled by William IV’s brusqueness and high-handedness, Melbourne was relieved to be out. He had conducted the whole negotiation in a detached, take-it-or-leave-it tone, which was not calculated to persuade the King to change his mind. But he did not choose to risk undermining his party’s confidence in his loyalty to their cause by admitting his true feelings even to his intimate friends. Rather let them think that his calm was the expression of a proper pride that scorned to parade its injuries in public. “I have always considered complaints of ill usage contemptible,” he told Miss Eden, “whether from a seduced, disappointed girl or a turned-out Prime Minister.” Once more we note that Melbourne was a good deal more discreet than he appeared.9

  He needed all his discretion during the months that followed. The left wing of his party—in order to revive that reforming enthusiasm in the nation which had swept them to victory four years before—wanted the Whigs to come out at once with a provocative programme of bold drastic reform. Melbourne was against this. Apart from the fact that he thoroughly disliked drastic reforms, he thought, with reason, that they were the last thing to appeal to an electorate obviously swinging to the right. On the other hand he had to avoid revealing himself as so unsympathetic with his party’s aspirations as to shake their faith in him. Accordingly he made a couple of vague, moderate-sounding, reassuring public speeches, and then, retiring to the country where no one could get at him, refused to make any definite statement about future policy at all. In January there was a general election. The Tories under Peel returned considerably stronger, but not in sufficient numbers to have a majority over the combined votes of Whigs, Radicals and Irish. After a month or two of minority government Peel was beaten on the crucial question of what was to be done with the revenues of the Irish Church. In March the Whigs were in office again. Melbourne was not surprised: he had doubted whether the pendulum had swung far enough yet to bring the Tories back. But he was far from pleased. He had resisted any proposal to turn the Government out till a question of fundamental principle like that of the Irish Church had arisen. And even then he did his best to avoid taking on the full responsibility of the Government himself. First he made some secret enquiries, using Mrs. Norton as go-between to find out if there was any possibility of arranging a coalition with some of the more moderate Tories. Then he tried to persuade Grey to take his place once more as leader of the Whig Party. It was only after both these attempts had failed, that Melbourne reluctantly resigned himself to taking up his burden again.

  (2)

  One can understand why he was unwilling. The prospect facing the Prime Minister in the second Melbourne Government was not an inviting one. The party’s position could hardly have seemed worse. It was virtually in a minority. The King and the House of Lords were solidly against it. In the House of Commons it held its majority largely by favour of the Irish: this was a very uncertain quantity. Further, the Whig Party itself was more acrimoniously divided than ever. Its right wing had been weakened by the loss of Grey and Stanley, with the result that the Radicals had become more confident, more unmanageable, and more unwilling than ever to submit to what they considered the reactionary tendencies of their official leaders. All this meant that the life of the Government was perpetually in danger from three sides. If the Radicals or the Irish felt they were not getting what they wanted, they could either of them vote it out of office: if, on the other hand, the Tories considered that the Government was giving in too much to the Irish and the Radicals, they were able, with the help of the House of Lords, to make themselves so obstructive as to render the Government’s continued existence impossible. Melbourne’s only hope of carrying on, therefore, lay in a balancing, trimming, procrastinating policy, yielding a little to the left here and to the right there, according to which happened at the moment to be the greatest threat to him: and also in creating a generally relaxed and reassuring personal atmosphere in which differences of opinion lost their sharpness.

  Luckily such a policy had more chance of success than might have appeared on the surface. For one thing none of the three potential sources of danger really wanted the Government to fall. The Radicals and Irish both knew that the alternative to the Whigs was the Tories, under whom they would fare far worse. Peel, for his part, did not want to come in until such time as he could be sure of having a solid majority of the country on his side. Moreover, Melbourne was admirably equipped for his particular task. It is paradoxical that the most suitable head for a supposedly progressive Government should have been a man who disbelieved in progress. But in fact Melbourne’s scepticism was a help to him. For it meant that his conscience was not upset if he had to make concessions to the Tories. As a matter of fact he often agreed with Peel more than with most of his own colleagues. Yet scepticism equally prevented him from being too dogmatically unprogressive. He was quite willing to agree to a reform if it seemed likely to stop a row and was thus the lesser of two evils. On the other hand, just because he feared unrest so much, he was not at all sceptical as to the importance of keeping the Government together. And he knew just how to do it. Friendly and easy-going, he easily liked people and easily made them like him. Yet no one could dominate him and no one could take him in. With negligent mastery he maintained his detachment amid the clamouring crowd of idealists, careerists and wire-pullers by whom he was surrounded. And, if he felt it necessary, he could put his foot down unhesitatingly and very hard.

  This appears in his choice of his Cabinet. Four years of keen observation and harsh experience had taught him that this was a matter of critical importance. Never again, if he could help it, was he going to make a hard task harder by saddling himself with troublesome colleagues. What he wanted from them first of all was loyalty; he must be able to depend on them to back him up. “I will support you as long as you are in the right,” sa
id a politician to him on one occasion. “That is no use at all,” replied Melbourne, “what I want is men who will support me when I am in the wrong.” A whole team of such self-sacrificing persons was, he realized, too much to hope for in an imperfect world. But certainly he was determined to have ministers who could be trusted not to work actively against him, or without consulting his aims and feelings. He would not have any avowed Radicals. Most of them were doctrinaire Benthamites, and, said Melbourne, “Benthamites are all fools.” No—let Radicals join deputations and sit on Royal Commissions if they wished: deputations and Royal Commissions, thank God, seldom accomplished anything. But there must be no Radical ministers. There were certain individuals also whom Melbourne meant to keep out if he could. He did not want to have Durham, or Wellesley, or Brougham—at any rate, not in positions of influence. And he wanted to keep Palmerston out of the Foreign Office. These were bold decisions, for, if they were offended, all these men could give a great deal of trouble. Lords Grey, Holland and Spencer agitatedly implored him not to take the risk of antagonizing them. Smiling and immovable, Melbourne disregarded their warnings. Over Palmerston he was beaten. Palmerston said if he could not be Foreign Secretary he would not join the Government at all: and Melbourne thought him too important to be prepared to lose him. Back to the Foreign Office, therefore, stepped Palmerston, jaunty as ever. But Melbourne got his way about all the others. Durham was packed off to Russia again; Wellesley was fobbed off with a Court appointment; and Brougham was not offered a job at all. The last two protested violently. Wellesley even talked of challenging Melbourne to a duel. Melbourne went to see him. “His language,” related the outraged Wellesley afterwards, “was rough, vulgar and such as has never been employed from a person in his station to one in mine.” However, in spite of this, there was no more talk of a duel; nor was Lord Wellesley promoted.