It is a very odd story: and one of the oddest things about it is the behaviour of Melbourne. Why, when he clearly realized that it was better to do nothing at all, did he not see to it from the start that nothing was done? Why, since he was an experienced man of the world peculiarly equipped, it would have seemed, to deal with delicate situations of this kind, did he defer to the judgment of an excited girl of eighteen and her almost equally excited German governess? The only plausible explanation is that he was powerless to do anything else. The Queen was shocked as only a youthful moralist can be shocked; and the violence of this shock combined with her age-old horror of Conroy to rouse her to a pitch of indignation into which she concentrated the full strength of her personality. Faced by it, Melbourne was too rattled to dare to make a decisive stand. Instead he temporized; while he temporized, the Queen acted. Afterwards he could only passively watch events rushing to their catastrophic end. He was at length forced by the conduct of the Hastings family into taking hasty action in order to conceal the Queen’s responsibility in the affair. But even then, he was still so flustered that he acted with unwise violence and so made matters worse. The Queen’s accounts of her talks with him during these weeks reveal him in a state of mind at once unsettled and fatalistic, typical of a man who knows that, through his own weakness, he has failed to assert himself when he should have done so. Sometimes he seems to be making light of the matter: jokingly he suggests that Lady Flora should be married off to one of his supporters as a way out of the difficulty. “I laughed excessively,” commented the Queen, “for Lady Flora has neither riches nor beauty nor anything!” Most of the time, however, Melbourne appeared subdued and anxious. Well he might. He wanted the Queen to do well more than anything else in life. Now, for the first time, she was doing badly and, as he would have been the first to admit, it was largely through his own fault.
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There was little in the political situation to cheer him up. At first the Queen’s accession had proved slightly to the advantage of the Whigs. It was more comfortable to have an engaging young Queen on their side than a grumpy old King against them. Moreover, some of the general good will that was felt for the Queen extended itself to the Prime Minister with whom she was so closely identified. Otherwise, the position of the Government was unaltered. A weak ministry of the middle way, threatened perpetually by the House of Lords on the one hand and on the other by the Radicals, it still maintained a precarious existence, partly by the favour of O’Connell and his Irish followers who thought they would do worse under the Tories, and partly through the connivance of Peel, who was biding his time till he thought he had the country sufficiently on his side for him to be able to come in at the head of a strong Tory administration. Melbourne, too, continued to pursue his policy of tacking and balancing, making concessions in turn to the right and to the left according as to which seemed likely to be the greater nuisance if thwarted. Himself, he disliked change as much as ever; and always opposed it as far as he could, in small things as much as in big. “Whenever you meddle with these ancient rights and jurisdictions it appears to me that for the sake of remedying comparatively insignificant abuses you create new ones and always produce considerable discontent,” he observed to someone who proposed reforming the financial administration of the Duchy of Cornwall. “Delay” and “postpone” were still his favourite words, if any political project was under discussion. In one respect only was he changed from the year before. His determination to keep in office had grown stiffer than ever. For party loyalty and fear of revolution were now reinforced by a new and more powerful motive. He realized that going out would entail his own separation from the Queen, and in consequence the end of his chief satisfaction in life. He endeavoured to persuade his colleagues that they really had a respectable majority of the country behind them, so that it was positively their duty to go on in office as long as they could. And even if this was not so, he had made up his mind not to budge till he was forced. “I am for standing our ground, even with the majority of one,” he told the Cabinet in the spring of 1838. All the same, he was in reality far too clear-sighted not to recognize that in fact the Government might fall at any time. A crisis on a major issue, and the Peers or the Radicals or the Irish could upset the whole apple-cart in the course of one debate. Besides, there was always the risk that the Government might come to pieces from within. His colleagues had not the same motive as himself for clinging to office: none of them had the luck to be an object of royal hero-worship. On the other hand, there were those among them who did not think that all reforms were nonsense; and so felt it ignominious and frustrating to be continually prevented from carrying them out. Further, this sense of frustration made them quarrelsome. A Government that feels itself ineffective loses its esprit de corps. Melbourne did all he could to keep his ministry a friendly, manageable group. However awkward the Radicals made themselves, he absolutely refused to placate them by giving them office: still more firmly he rejected the proposals that Durham should be admitted to the Government again. “It is impossible to be with him,” he declared, “without perceiving not only that he can do no business, but that no business can be done where he is.”
As a matter of fact Melbourne found his existing Ministers troublesome enough. Nothing could make Glenelg competent, Palmerston prudent, or John Russell flexible and tactful. As in William IV’s days, it was John Russell who especially minded having to compromise with the Tories. Apart from the fact that he genuinely believed in a policy of moderate reform, his priggish, doctrinaire habit of mind made him morbidly sensitive to any accusation of inconsistency. He could hardly bear it if he heard that the Radicals were saying he was not true to liberal principles. The Secretary at War, Lord Howick, son of the famous Earl Grey, had also begun to be a cause of trouble. Angular, high-minded, energetic, and with a perverse propensity to look for faults in his own side, he was always interfering with his colleagues’ business; scolding Melbourne for inertia, or protesting against the inefficiency of Glenelg. If his protests were unheeded, he threatened to resign. His natural intransigence was increased by the fact that he was religious in the new-fangled earnest, strenuous fashion, much deplored by Melbourne in his conversations with Queen Victoria. Many others of his generation were too. It was something to which Melbourne was so unaccustomed in young men that it bewildered him. “All young people are growing mad about religion,” he lamented. What, he asked, was he to think of Hobhouse who distrusted a man’s political opinions because he lived a loose life? The more the Victorian age got into its swing, the less comfortable did Melbourne feel in it.
However, in spite of these difficulties, political affairs jogged along for the next year or so without running into any fatal trouble. A certain amount of legislation was put forward, notably three Bills dealing with Ireland. Like similar Bills in the past, they all came in for some drastic modification in the House of Lords. But only one, the Irish Corporation Bill, had to be dropped. The Poor Law Act and the Tithe Bill passed, though the Government found itself forced at last to give up the idea of appropriating any of the Irish Church revenues for secular purposes. This did not bother Melbourne who, for some time past, had been against it. He was a little more worried by John Russell who, in the autumn of 1838, decided that the Reform Bill of 1832 represented the furthest final limit in the extension of the franchise which his principles permitted him to accept, and insisted on declaring this in public. The Radicals who looked on the 1832 Bill as a mere first step on the golden road to full democracy protested violently; and John Russell was nicknamed “Finality Jack.”
The end of the year was troubled by the first rumblings of a more formidable threat to Melbourne’s peace of mind. This time it was Radical not Finality Jack who was the cause of disturbance. For some time past trouble had been brewing in Canada. It was split into two provinces, Upper and Lower Canada. In neither did the Colonists consider that they had enough to say in governing their own country. In Lower Canada feeling was
made worse by the fact that the majority of the inhabitants were agricultural French Catholics who violently resented being ruled as they thought in the interests of mercantile English Protestants. The only cure for these evils was a drastic change in the constitutional system. If the Canadians were to be prevented from leaving the Empire, as the United States had done, they must be given some sort of self-government. A far-sighted English Government should have realized this and begun to think out a scheme by which it might be achieved. The existing English Government had not thought out such a scheme. It was altogether too big a job for the ineffective Glenelg; nor was Melbourne the man to supply the deficiencies of his Colonial Secretary. Such energy as he possessed was fully occupied in keeping the Cabinet quiet and the Queen happy. Moreover, he was in these matters, as in so many others, a figure from the past; a survivor from the eighteenth century when people did not bother much about the Empire. When it came to the point, he did in fact boggle at the idea of losing Canada; but he had no vision of the glories of a future British Commonwealth to inspire him to devise plans for preventing it. It is likely, too, that the failure of Catholic emancipation to pacify the Irish made him sceptical about the good which there was to be gained from making concessions to the Canadians. Anyway, for whatever reason, nothing was done and the situation in Canada steadily deteriorated, till early in 1838 both provinces rebelled. The rebellion in the Upper province was put down fairly easily by the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Francis Head. His methods of doing so, however, were thought indefensibly unconventional, and when he came home, he went to see the Prime Minister in order to complain that he had not been thanked for his success as he thought he deserved to be. He found Melbourne shaving. “I saved the Colony!” cried Head. “And so you did,” answered Melbourne placably; and went on shaving. After a minute or two he put down his razor and turned round. “But, you see, you’re such a damned odd fellow!” he commented. Head’s outraged feelings were not soothed by this reception. However, since Upper Canada was now quiet this was not, from Melbourne’s point of view, of much consequence. The trouble in Lower Canada was more serious, and needed more drastic treatment. Accordingly the Government suspended its constitution and decided to send out a Minister armed with special and dictatorial powers to deal with it. Who should it be? After a vain attempt to persuade Spencer to come out of his retirement, Melbourne turned to Durham. This was a very different kind of choice. Not that it was a bad one. Autocratic and independent, Durham was far better suited to be a dictator than a Cabinet Minister. What was more important, he was, unlike Melbourne, a man of the new age with a vision, rare among his contemporaries, of England’s possibilities as an imperial power. This, however, was not why Melbourne chose him. He had always had a low opinion of Durham. Now he told the Queen that he thought him a man of not even second-rate ability. The fact was that, as usual, Durham had been making trouble. Frustrated once more of a post in the Government, Radical Jack had begun to foment discontent among his Radical followers. Yet again, Melbourne thought the best way to deal with him was to get him out of the country. Another reason for sending him to Canada was that his mission there was certain to involve arbitrary and despotic actions of a kind likely to annoy the democratically-minded Radicals. They would be more ready, Melbourne considered, to swallow these if the despot in question was their hero Durham. The fact that he thought Durham third-rate does not seem to have worried him. Colonial affairs were not important enough in Melbourne’s eyes to require a first-rate man.
Altogether the appointment was an ill-considered affair, and reveals where Melbourne was weak as a statesman. He was soon punished for his weakness. For, though Durham’s appointment turned out to be to the advantage of Canada in the long run, it brought nothing but trouble to the Prime Minister. As might have been expected, Durham proved to be just as tiresome to him on the one side of the Atlantic as he had been on the other. From the moment he landed he behaved with a lordly disregard alike of the feelings of his party and the opinion of his countrymen. Every despatch that arrived from Canada after he had got there contained something to worry Melbourne. To begin with, in order to impress the Canadians and please himself Durham arranged that his first official appearance among them should be marked by an unexampled and spectacular magnificence. He took so much luggage that it took two days to get it on shore; then, attended by a huge retinue, he made his entry in an elaborate silver-laced uniform and riding on a superb white charger. All this, as Melbourne expected, shocked the English who thought that they would have to pay for it out of taxes. They were still more shocked when they learned that Durham appointed to important posts two men, Turton and Gibbon Wakefield, of notoriously bad private character. Wakefield had been in prison for three years for abducting a young girl, while Turton had been involved in a peculiarly sordid divorce case. Melbourne, who had specially asked Durham not to bring them into public prominence, was furious. “Considering feeling here, it is really inconceivable that Durham should think it necessary to compose his Council of two such men,” he lamented to the Queen, clasping his hands and casting his eyes to heaven. He wrote, and in his most trenchant style, told Durham what he thought of him. “It is incredible that a man of common sense should show such an ignorance or such a disregard of public feeling and opinion as you have done in the selection of these gentlemen. If their abilities and powers were superhuman they would not counterbalance the discredit of their characters. They will materially weaken us; they will cause every act of your Government to be viewed with a jealousy and suspicion to which they would not otherwise have been exposed. I rely, therefore, upon your assurance that you will not give Mr. Wakefield any public appointment whatever, that his name will not appear in any public documents; and that you will not put forward Mr. Turton in any more prominent situation, or place him in any other post of trust or dignity . . . Only consider how you injure your own private character by the association of such men with yourself and your family. Only consider how you injure the Queen, whose age and character demand some respect and reverence.” This last sentence reveals the true cause of Melbourne’s agitation. For him the one dominating consideration in deciding any course of action was how it might affect the position of the Queen. Durham, in neglecting this, had committed the sin for which there was no forgiveness.
In spite of Melbourne’s words he continued to neglect it. He kept on Wakefield and Turton and did not answer Melbourne’s letters. Instead, without informing anyone in England of his purpose, he proceeded to break the law. The rebellion had now been suppressed; what then should be done with the ringleaders? To try them for treason in the ordinary way would be unwise, for no Canadian jury could be trusted to convict them. Durham, therefore, had them transported by his own arbitrary ordinance to the Bermudas, a region outside his jurisdiction. There was something to be said for his action, but it was technically illegal. As such, it gave an opportunity to the enemies of the Government for which they had been waiting. The Tory lawyers leapt to the attack. Their protests were reinforced by a formidable assistant. For the last year or two Brougham had been bursting to avenge himself on the Whigs for having turned him out. During the last two sessions of Parliament he had quarrelled incessantly with Melbourne in debate. Now he came forward as champion of the age-old and lawful liberties of British subjects, and delivered a terrific philippic in his finest manner in the House of Lords demanding that Durham’s ordinance should be disallowed. Melbourne listened to him with an expression of contemptuous calm on his countenance. “If I had said anything,” he remarked later, “the fellow would have gone stark staring mad.” Afterwards he rose to make the official reply for the Government. Durham, he said, was in an extremely difficult situation and the House should wait for more information before taking action. But he himself was too annoyed with Durham to put up a very strong fight; all the more because Durham had issued his ordinance without consulting him and had not condescended to answer his request for a full explanation after he had done it. The Duke of Welli
ngton and the rest of the Tories rallied to Brougham’s support. In face of their representations the Government gave in and disallowed the ordinance. When he got the news Durham resigned in a rage; but before he left he relieved his feelings by issuing a public declaration in which he denounced the Government for betraying him and pointed out to the Canadians how much they were losing in being deprived of the only British statesman, namely himself, who had their interests at heart. He must have secretly hoped, said Melbourne irritably, to create so much bad feeling that rebellion would break out again as soon as he left.
The Government awaited his return with trepidation. If this was the sort of thing he said in Canada, what was he not going to say when he got to England? Their fears turned out to be unjustified. The strain of idealism which was intermingled so strangely with Durham’s egotism and ill temper rose for once to dominate his actions. His imagination had been fired by a new conception of the relations between England and her dependents; and with the help of the disreputable Turton and Wakefield he was evolving a bold and brilliant scheme for giving self-government to Canada. By the time he reached England his temper was sufficiently under control to realize that the success of this scheme depended on making up his quarrel with Melbourne. He did not behave in an actively friendly manner to him—this could hardly be expected—but neither did he start a campaign of vengeance. Melbourne was not the man to refuse an overture of peace, however guarded. Moreover, he had now begun to discover more about Durham’s conduct in Canada: and he realized that intolerably though he had conducted himself to the Government at home, in Canada he had done pretty well. Melbourne, therefore, did all he could to persuade his infuriated colleagues not to exacerbate Durham’s wrath by telling him what they thought of him. “Whether Durham’s resignation was right or wrong is a question which may be viewed in different lights and upon which there may fairly be much difference of opinion,” he said. “His provocation was great, and though I think he brought it upon himself by his rash and imprudent manner of doing things in themselves right, it required much patience and forbearance to submit to it.” Melbourne had been the more able to recover his temper with Durham because, though he disliked him thoroughly, he was not afraid of him. “It is very odd to see the terror that Durham inspires,” he said. Hysterical prima donnas, however gifted, were to the placid and worldly-wise Melbourne always a trifle ridiculous. When all was said and done, he could not bring himself to respect Durham. “What he did was often right, but always so done as to be totally indefensible”; thus he sums up his final judgment on the episode.
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