The Young Melbourne & Lord M

by The Young Melbourne

  As he felt, so he appeared. “I have seen the Queen with her Prime Minister,” reported the sharp-eyed Princess Lieven in July. “When he is with her he looks loving, contented, a little pleased with himself; respectful, at his ease, as if accustomed to take first place in the circle, and dreamy and gay—all mixed up together.” Other people made similar observations. So intimate an association between monarch and first Minister was too unusual not to stir comment. But the comments were kindly. The relationship was too obviously and too charmingly innocent for people to want to be malicious about it. They made jokes, but they were good-natured jokes. “I hope you are amused at the report of Lord Melbourne being likely to marry the Queen,” writes Lady Grey laughingly to Creevey. “For my part I have no objection.”

  It was the climax of Melbourne’s career. Never had he been so eminent; and never had he been so admired. It was right this should be so. For it was the first and only time that the public and private strains in him were working to harmony at one end. As we have seen, he was not primarily a public character. In spite of the fact that he became Prime Minister of England, he remained to the end of his days a detached spectator, a little outside the political scene. His nature fulfilled itself most significantly and most profoundly in personal relationships; and especially with women. Now fate had willed that his duty as Prime Minister should involve him in a close personal relationship with a woman: so that at last he was able to put his whole self into his professional and official work.

  It also happened to be the phase of his life in which we know most about him. The Queen kept a diary. With typical self-command she managed, in spite of all the distractions of her new life, to spend time every evening meticulously recording the happenings of the day. The most important happening was always her hours with Melbourne: with the consequence that we find in her pages an intimate day-to-day account of him, such as we get nowhere else. It is a wonderfully vivid account too. For the Queen was a born reporter. Her untiring interest in life and her taste for detail made her notice so much; while her literalness, her candour and her careful accuracy stopped her from colouring or altering what she noticed, in any way. When she came to describe Lord M.—so she always referred to him—the intensity of her feeling increased her natural powers. She observed him with the closeness of a Boswell. Indeed, there are moments when the Queen does oddly remind us of Boswell; an innocent schoolgirl Boswell, but with the same surprising mixture of naiveté and perceptiveness, unselfconscious enthusiasm and native shrewdness. Inevitably her picture has its limitations. She does not give us the whole Melbourne; but, rather, the bowdlerized version of him, which was all he was able, with propriety, to present to her view. Melbourne could not swear or lounge about, or put his feet up on the sofa at Buckingham Palace as he could at Brooks’s Club. Instead, seated upright on a stiff little chair, he listened and replied to her quietly and in terms which he took care to keep strictly decorous. The matter of his talk was similarly modified. His “dashing opinions,” his paradoxes and audacities appear in softened form. Nor could he exhibit to her either the depths of his scepticism, or the full freedom of his moral views. “He is so truly excellent and moral,” exclaims the Queen in lyrical approval, “he has such a strong feeling against immorality and wickedness!”

  All this meant his imposing such a change on his habits and manners that people both then and since have wondered that he did not feel himself intolerably irked and cramped. How could he, they ask, after the sophisticated ease of social life at Holland and Devonshire House, put up with the mixture of nursery simplicity and court stiffness which surrounded the Queen? In point of fact, he does not seem to have minded it a bit. He had had enough of Holland and Devonshire Houses to last him a life-time. He was glad of a change. The nursery atmosphere soothed and refreshed his spirit inexpressibly. As for the court stiffness, Melbourne was so practised a man of the world, so supple to respond to an alteration in social atmosphere, that he adapted himself to it without difficulty or effort.

  Nor, in fact, did he have to suppress any essential characteristics of his personality. Shakespeare is unmistakably Shakespeare, even in Bowdler’s version: Melbourne is unmistakably Melbourne, even when seen through the eyes of the eighteen-year-old Queen Victoria. Some important aspects of his nature, indeed, found scope to show themselves in her company as they did not find it at Holland House. Mankind relaxes in the nursery: Melbourne could give rein there to his sensitive tenderness, his taste for gay, whimsical nonsense, and his playful interest in little things in a way that is not revealed in any other descriptions of him. These things were just as characteristic of him, as his oaths and his paradoxes. Moreover, the basic attitude to life that came out in his talks with the Queen is the same as that in his letters to his colleagues, though it is less trenchantly expressed. Even the moralism she noticed in him was not an inconsistency. No doubt he thought it right to impress orthodox moral views upon her: for experience under George IV and William IV had taught him that it was much better for the monarchy that it should be respectable. Besides he appreciated the charm of her innocence so affectionately that he shrank from the idea of its being tarnished. Yet when it came to advising her as to what she ought to think or do in particular and practical issues, he did not take an uncomfortably moral line. She disliked Lord Lyndhurst, she once said to him, because he was a bad man. “Do you dislike all bad men?” said Melbourne, amused, “for that comprises a large number!” He was always for tolerance: always he warned her against expecting too much from anyone or anything. While, over the whole texture of his talk sparkled, though with a tempered gleam, the light of his irrepressible irony.

  The Queen did not always perceive its presence. But that only adds to the reader’s fun. It is impossible not to smile at the contrast between the joyous ambiguity of some of Melbourne’s remarks and the artless gravity with which they are recorded. The subject of the new railroads comes up. “People who talk much of railroads and bridges are generally Liberals,” says Melbourne: conscientiously the Queen notes down this valuable item of political information. Or the conversation turned on the Irvingite sect who proclaimed that they had been vouchsafed a divine revelation; “People should be quite sure,” said Melbourne, “when they have any of these revelations from what quarter they come!” Once again the Queen wrote his words down as an important point to be remembered. Or, “I observed to Lord Melbourne,” she writes, “that there were not many good preachers. He replied in the affirmative and added, ‘But there are not many good anything’, which is very true!” One day she asked him if she ought to go to church twice on Sunday, and he answered that it was unnecessary. “George III, Lord M. says, never went twice though a strict man, and was not at all for these puritanical notions; and he is the man, Lord M. says, to look to in all these matters.”

  More often, however, the Queen realizes when Melbourne is saying something amusing and laughs delightedly in response. But she is not always clear as to what exactly she is laughing at. All she knows for certain is that Lord M. is being “funny”: “Spoke of my having got a letter from Feodore”—her cousin who had just returned home after paying the Queen a visit—“Lord M. said funnily, ‘When these people get back among their children they do not dress, and there is nothing so bad for a woman’;” or, discussing young Lord Douro’s engagement, “They said Lord Douro had been out shopping with the young lady; Lord M. said, ‘Shopping is very demonstrative’, which made us all laugh”: or, “He examined my bouquet and talked of forcing flowers, and said in his funny way, ‘Forcing flowers is questionable’.”

  One is tempted to go on quoting for ever. Indeed, the story of Melbourne’s relation with the Queen confronts his biographer with a peculiar difficulty. Up till then he has had to construct his image of his subject’s personality from scraps of information scattered few and far between, over political diaries, reports of public speeches and the records of ministerial negotiations. Now, suddenly, he is presented with a document, ev
ery paragraph of which contains something to enrich and amplify his portrait. He longs to put everything in. But to do so would mean including so much that the proportion of his general design would be fatally distorted. All he can do is, as it were, to let the reader look over his shoulder while, pausing now and again, he turns the pages of the Queen’s diary.

  There the idyllic tale of their first years together unfolds itself. For idyllic it is. There is something tranquil and garden-like about its atmosphere; and fresh too. Melbourne at this stage of his history has been aptly and beautifully described as an “Autumn rose”. But he is an autumn rose blooming miraculously in springtime, the green, budding springtime of the new Victorian epoch, all ribbons and muslin frills and girlish smiles and tears and blushes and propriety. Vernal sunshine softly irradiates the stately background of court ceremonial, against which move the two figures entrancedly absorbed in each other; the distinguished elderly gentleman bending forward in respectful devotion and the child Queen gazing rapt and eager up at him; and now her brows are knit with the effort of concentration as she tries to grasp some point in the British Constitution which he is explaining to her, and now she breaks into a peal of laughter, showing her little rosy gums, as he makes one of his unexpected comical remarks, and he responding, throws back his head in one of his own rollicking laughs. Sometimes the scene is Buckingham Palace, sometimes battlemented Windsor: for a week or two in October, 1837, it is the incongruously exotic flamboyance of George IV’s pavilion at Brighton. We see the pair in the morning alone in her little sitting-room—she in a chair, he in another “or on a sofa close to me”; we see them cantering together through the turfy glades of Richmond or Windsor Parks; we see them in the evening bent over the chessboard or seated at a lamp-lit table beneath the shadows of the high palace ceiling, looking at albums of prints representing historical figures, or after paintings by Old Masters. There were the great public occasions too; the Military Review at Windsor Park where from a carriage he watched her riding in flowing habit and with bright, proud glance down the red-coated lines of troops; and the Eton festival of Montem when they drove down together to be welcomed by the boys gallantly tricked out in military uniform and Cavalier fancy dress; and the opening of Parliament when she read her speech from the throne and he stood at its steps listening; and, above all, the Coronation. Melbourne carried the Sword of State in the procession. “He looked awkward and uncouth,” said the young Disraeli, satirically observing the scene, “with his coronet cocked over his nose and his robes under his feet, holding the Sword of State like a butcher.” But not thus did the Queen see him. “My excellent Lord Melbourne who stood very close to me during the whole ceremony was completely overcome . . . he gave me such a kind, and I may say, fatherly look.” For however crowded and official the scene she is describing, he is always in the picture, and more often than not in its centre. She noticed every fleeting nuance of his moods, every typical detail of his appearance, habits and manner; the odd, comical grimaces he made expressive of disgust or amusement; the size of his appetite, “He has eaten three chops and a grouse for breakfast,” she relates on one occasion; his description of his room, “all wax and ink, where I sit up to my neck in books”; the fact that he is wearing a new olive-green velvet waistcoat; how absent-minded he became when tired and overworked—suddenly going off to sleep in company, or talking to himself in an unintelligible murmur so that at first she finds herself looking round, thinking that he is addressing her; his old-fashioned way of pronouncing his words, “goold” and “Room” for gold and Rome. Above all, she notices what he says. Nine-tenths of the diary is a record of Melbourne’s conversation.

  It was of a very varied kind. Much of it was necessarily about business. Every day he brought her the news of what was happening in Cabinet and Parliament; how John Russell was making difficulties about the ballot question, or Brougham trying to trip up the Government in debate in the House of Lords. There was the foreign news too: a hitch was occurring in our relations with Portugal, or there was trouble arising in our Jamaican and Canadian Colonies. To make these things clear, generally entailed some account of previous events, and explanation of the wider issues involved. Melbourne found himself giving informal instruction to the Queen about the working of the English political system, or the recent history of the Continent. He also put her in the know about the characters of the public men, English and foreign, she might have to deal with. “John Russell,” he said, “has feeling but he don’t show it, his manner is rather short”; Lord Grey had not a bad temper but flew into a passion when you first told him anything; “The Duke of Wellington is amazingly sensible to attention. Nothing pleases him so much as when one asks his opinion about anything”; “Lord Stanley is a man of great abilities but says things out of place and just what he ought not to say”; “Lord Howick has a fretful, uneasy temper, but is better than he used to be”; M. Sebastiani, the French Ambassador, “slow and pompous, but clear and clever”; Don Migual di Alava, the Spanish General, had “that very open, honest manner which is never to be trusted”.

  Melbourne was, in fact, giving her a thorough political education. He did it very well, explaining things in a brief, colloquial, simple way which was easy for her to understand and not at all boring; and often illuminating his point by some lively anecdote which helped her to remember it. He was also careful not to appear to condescend to her ignorance. Alike in his talk and his letters, he addresses her on terms of equality and with an implied respect for her judgment. The substance of what he said was also adapted to suit her special requirements. He did not try to give her a political philosophy; there is nothing in the diaries about the theory of constitutional monarchy, or the trend and deeper significance of world events. The Queen’s mind, Melbourne realized, was too concrete to grasp such things and besides, though he much enjoyed speculating about them himself, he had long ago given up thinking it served any useful purpose. What the Queen needed, in his view, was practical guidance as to what line she ought to pursue in the conduct of day to day business. This mainly meant for Melbourne any line which kept things running smoothly. To help her achieve this end he sought all the time to cultivate two qualities in her. The first was good will. If the Queen could be persuaded to like a man or, at any rate, to see his point of view, she would find him easier to get on with. In consequence, though Melbourne always told her frankly what he thought about people, his tone in speaking of them, except in a few instances like that of Don Migual di Alava, was friendly. He says what he can in their favour. And the few general maxims that do fall from his lips are on the side of sympathetic tolerance. “If people are made to do what they dislike, you must allow for a little ill-humour”; and “everything works for the best, even the worst intentions”; and “it is idle to talk to people of their faults, for, if they knew them, they wouldn’t commit them”; and “if you want to influence a person you must not begin by reprimanding him”. This last also illustrates the second quality he sought to instil into her, which was tact—this all the more perhaps because he realized that it is rarely found in young and truthful people. Clumsiness, he thought, was often as fatal as ill will. Emphatically he quotes to her the French saying, “C’est les maladroits qui sont malheureux.”

  He does allow his tone to grow sharper when he talks about doctrinaires and doctrinaire schemes, especially radical ones. Wilberforce, he told her, was actuated by good opinions, “but they were very uncomfortable opinions for those he acted with,” and he could not bear the proposal to establish Normal schools for educating schoolmasters. “You will see, they will breed the most conceited set of blockheads ever known,” he exclaimed, “and will be of no use whatever . . . Walter Scott was quite right when he said ‘Why bother the poor? Leave them alone’.” Even these caustic remarks, however, went along with his wish to impress upon her the necessity to make things easier for other people. The type of schoolmaster likely to be produced by the Normal schools would only create quarrelling and discontent;
the poor should not be bothered because it was of the first importance that nobody should be bothered: it was mistaken of Wilberforce to insist on his principles, if this involved disregarding the difficulty in which they might involve his colleagues. For, as he told the Queen, “Nobody should be troublesome: they should be made to realize that it is the worst thing there is.”