He very soon was. In vain the Duke of Wellington pleaded with her. In vain Peel suggested that she should give up just a few ladies; only those whose husbands were actually in Parliament. The Queen was adamant. “The Queen maintains all her ladies,” she wrote to Melbourne, “—and it is her Prime Minister who will cut a sorry figure if he resigns on this.” Melbourne was so agitated by her communications that he came to see her. Passionately she adjured him to back her: she trusted him, she said, to return to her if Peel stood out.
Melbourne felt painfully divided. On the face of it, it seemed his duty alike to his Party and to the Queen herself that he should advise her to give in to Peel. There was no chance of any Whig Government lasting long now: it could not be in the best interests of the Party that it should be dragged back, as the result of a court intrigue, only to submit to a second and more ignominious defeat, within a few months. Further, the Queen’s reputation was likely to suffer if people thought she was taking an arbitrary and partizan political line. But if Melbourne’s conscience told him to go, his heart ardently urged him to stay. It went against his every tender and chivalrous instinct to desert her when she said she needed him: besides, he yearned for her company. It is indeed the measure of his self-sacrificing devotion to her that he had been able to make himself plead for Peel so strongly. Now he hesitated and said he must consult the Cabinet. The result of his consultation was unexpected. Though most of the ministers had wanted to resign more than Melbourne had, yet now they were out, they found they did not like it. Was not Melbourne, they said, going rather far in his efforts to help Peel? When they met, and Melbourne read aloud the Queen’s letter to them, their doubts became certainties. As the assembly of hard-bitten, middle-aged politicians listened to her naive, touching beseechings they were swept by a wave of sentimental loyalty. Never, never, they cried, would they abandon such a Queen and such a woman! All this was too much in tune with Melbourne’s own secret feelings for him to stand out any longer. He told the Queen they would support her. She informed Peel that she would not give in about the ladies, he thereupon declined Office.
Melbourne did not feel very happy; and still less so when he discovered from a memorandum of Peel’s that the Queen, carried away by the frenzy of battle, had failed to give him a complete accurate account of the proceedings. Peel, it appeared, had only asked for the removal of some ladies, not all. Melbourne was sufficiently dismayed by this information to make an effort through a third party to persuade Peel to come back after all. “He must have it, he absolutely must have it,” he exclaimed. However, Perl refused. In a mood mingling apprehension, fatalistic resignation and secret joy, Melbourne found himself in office again. Meanwhile he did what he could to ensure that any blame in the matter might fall on himself rather than on the Queen. He defended his conduct in the House of Lords with an airy flippancy which shocked its more earnest-minded members. He was callous, he said, to accusations that he clung to office from ambition or avarice, “For, my Lords,” he remarked smiling and chuckling, “I don’t altogether deny the truth of any one of them.”
He could have done. The Queen alone had made him return. For the second time, and over a more important issue, it had been demonstrated that if she put forth the full force of her will, she could get her way with Melbourne, even though he knew it was a mistake. In this he was true to his character as it reveals itself throughout his history. Personal obligations had always meant more to him than general principles just because he believed in them more. Moreover, coolly sensible though his judgment usually was, yet when his romantic heart was fully engaged, it ruled his head. The most powerful force in his life was his love for two women, his wife and the Queen. And, as the young Melbourne had disregarded every other consideration in order to stand by Caroline when she asked him to, so now the old Melbourne disregarded every other consideration in order to stand by Queen Victoria.
Chapter Fifteen
The Queen: Second Phase
(1)
“As the negotiation with the Tories is quite at an end . . .” wrote Queen Victoria gaily to Melbourne on the evening of 10th May, 1839, “the Queen hopes Lord Melbourne will not object to dining with her on Sunday?” Lord Melbourne was very far from objecting. How much he had minded the idea of parting from the Queen can be measured by the extent of his joy when he discovered that after all he would not have to do so. Even though he felt in his heart that he had been wrong to take office again, his error had not been of so heinous a kind as unduly to disturb his robust and good-humoured conscience. He found it all the easier to disregard its voice because his fear lest the Queen should have made herself unpopular by her action had not been realized. On the contrary, the British public seemed to have been as much stirred as was the Cabinet by the spectacle of the young Queen alone and gallantly standing up for her rights against an army of experienced and middle-aged politicians. As she drove to church on Sunday she was greeted by a crowd shouting “Bravo” and “The Queen for ever.” Melbourne arrived to dine at the Palace in an unbridled state of high spirits such as he had not known for months. He laughed louder than ever, twisted his curly locks through his fingers, knit his brows in comical, extravagant frowns and murmured delightedly to himself. “I like what is joyous and agreeable,” he ejaculated, “I hate what is disagreeable and melancholy.” Entranced, the Queen listened to his words and observed his every movement: admired his hair in its picturesque disarray and gazed with amused surprise at his frowns. Melbourne caught her eye fixed on him. He smiled and rubbed his forehead. “Never mind. I was only knitting my brows,” he explained. “I know it looks tremendous! But you should not judge by expression; very susceptible people constantly change expression.” His conversation that evening was at its most fascinating, ranging absorbingly and whimsically from the ballet to medieval troubadours, from the troubadours to the art of cooking, from cooking to the character of King Francis I of France. “He was the first who introduced that gaiety; he was the first King who had that gay liberty which has since been practised,” he said snapping his fingers and laughing.
Melbourne would have been in even higher spirits had he been able to foresee the future. For his reprieve was to last for pretty well two years and with it the old intimacy. Once more we open the Queen’s diary to watch the day to day close-up moving picture of her relationship with him. All seems as before; the daily companionship and daily correspondence, the visits to Windsor, the rides in the Park, the evenings spent looking at prints, the hours of business and of relaxation, the mingling, shimmering, enchanted flow of entertaining instruction and ironical wisdom and delicate sentiment and carefree fanciful fun. Now we see him sitting for his portrait on horseback—very comical he looked, the Queen thought, in a white top hat astride a wooden block—now in the Royal Box at the opera, whither she had inveigled him rather against his will—“That is too bad, rather a bore,” he exclaimed in murmured protest when the audience insisted on an encore—now taking a lesson from her in the game of Cup and Ball; “I do it with perfect steadiness, patience, perseverance and tranquillity, which is the only way to do anything,” he remarked. As before, he is full of information about history and geography; “Catherine of Aragon was a sad, groaning, moaning woman,” he remarked, and that the Spanish were unpopular on account of their sobriety, “Somehow or other sober nations do not get on well with other nations.” As before, he is always startling her agreeably by his unexpected idiosyncrasies and opinions. On smoking, for example, “If I smell tobacco I swear, perhaps for half an hour,” he told her; or on bad habits, “If you have a bad habit the best way to get out of it is to take your fill of it”; or on old people dancing, “I consider when old people begin to dance at a party all propriety is over”; or on early rising, “For recruiting the spirits there is nothing like lying a good while in bed”; or on fires, “I always have a fire when I am worried or annoyed; it’s astonishing how it dissipates trouble!”; or on feminine beauty, “There’s nothing men get so tired
of as a continued look of great beauty—very fine eyes for instance, nothing tires men so much as two very fine eyes”; or on foreign travel, “The first time you go to Paris, the Capital of Pleasures, you should spend four thousand pounds, it is not social not to”; or on gardens; it was natural that the Queen should be bored by the garden of Buckingham Palace, “For,” he said, “a garden is a dull thing.” His contempt for gardens did not extend to the flowers that grew in them. Every week there arrived for the Queen from Brocket a carefully chosen bouquet gathered from his own garden there. Their fresh fragrance symbolized the quality of his unchanging feeling for her; that feeling which so often brought the tears to his eyes and compelled him every now and then in the course of a conversation to bend forward and impulsively to kiss her hand.
All seemed as before! But in fact it was only now and again that he recaptured the unalloyed delight of two years earlier. Melbourne’s second phase as Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister was not quite so happy as his first had been. This was largely due to physical causes. The events of the spring had accelerated the decline of his health. Almost all the time he felt ill and tired: he suffered from lumbago and acute attacks of indigestion; the slightest worry kept him awake at night. Moreover, every month that passed he found he could do less. By the end of the year it had become too great an effort for him to give dinner parties or go out riding. Not only in the morning, but also in the evening he did as much of his work as he could in his dressing-room. The moment he got back from the office he would take off his cravat and put on his dressing-gown to ease his exhausted body. Philosophically he found diplomatic advantages in this change of régime. Having to go up so many stairs, he said, left his visitors breathless and thus forced to leave the initiative to him.
People noticed the change in him. He seemed to have aged years in a few months. “Lord Melbourne begins to look picturesquely old,” remarked a Court lady. Nor was it only his appearance that showed a change. His growing weakness betrayed itself in his behaviour. Too fatigued to concentrate, he grew vaguer and more absent-minded than ever. Ladies sitting next to Lord Melbourne for the first time at dinner would be enchanted by the charm of his talk; then it would stop and he would begin murmuring and swearing to himself, or relapse into silent brooding which found vent in a remark wholly unconnected with the conversation round him. “Do you not consider,” he suddenly asked, leaning across to address a shy young man opposite during dinner at Holland House, “that it was a most damnable act of Henry IV to change his religion with a view to securing the Crown?” Members of Brooks’s Club were disconcerted to find Lord Melbourne standing in the hall remarking loudly to himself, “I will be hanged if I will do it for you, my lord.” More than ever he was liable to go to sleep any time, anywhere; in the middle of an important Cabinet meeting, or talking to the Queen. During one evening’s conversation with her he went to sleep three times. Gently, she teased him about it. “It is the sign of a composed mind,” he replied humorously. Alas, this was not true. His health affected his nerves so that occasionally he would be swept by a sudden inexplicable fit of melancholy, during which he could not exert himself to speak, even when he was with his beloved Sovereign.
In fact he was too apathetic to do much about his health. Though he did not feel up to giving dinners himself, he dined out a great deal with other people, tiring himself by sitting up till two or three in the morning at John Russell’s or Holland House, where on occasion he could still enchant the company by the breadth of his learning and the paradoxical wisdom of his discourse. And he ate more injudiciously than ever. “The stomach is the seat of health, strength, thought and life,” he once said to the Queen; but he did not behave as if he thought so. Coming back from the House of Lords at four in the morning, he would consume a four-course meal and drink a whole bottle of Madeira; and the way he stuffed himself with pie and truffles and ices was enough to strain a constitution less impaired than his own. He felt guilty about this. Pork made him ill, he once informed the Queen after a night of indigestion, but he never liked to own it. “What makes you own it now?” asked she. “A fit of conscience,” sighed Melbourne. Conscience, however, was not powerful enough to make him change his habits. This was not primarily because he was too self-indulgent. At heart he did not believe any change of habits would make any difference. It was not illness but mortality, inescapable, omnipotent mortality, this was his enemy. He was like his mother. Magnificently youthful she had remained till late middle-age, he remembered, yet after sixty she had sunk rapidly. So was it happening to him. The Queen pressed him to take advice about his health. “That will not do any good,” he said sadly. “It is age, and that constant care!”
(2)
He was right about the constant care. Here was another reason for low spirits. It was partly connected with his work. The political situation was more uncomfortable than it had been before the crisis of May. It looked much the same: the Whigs still pursued their trimming, balancing, middle way policy, making concessions now to the Right, now to the Left according as to which seemed likely to threaten its position the most: hedged about the Corn Laws in order to pacify the Radicals, gave way to Peel and the Tories about Jamaica and Ireland. Especially did they seek to placate the Tories because the tide of opinion in the country was now flowing more strongly than ever to the Right. However, this middle way policy now appeared ignominious, as it had not done before. Up till May of 1839 it could claim that it had the country behind it. Now the Government’s position had been shown up as too weak for this to be possible. Furthermore, before May it was easier to justify concession on genuine political grounds. To Melbourne at any rate the Whigs had seemed the only alternative either to a dangerously Radical Government, or to a reactionary Government that might provoke revolutionary opposition. Now even Melbourne thought that there was not much danger of a revolution; most people feared it so little that they took for granted that the Whigs were just clinging to office for selfish reasons, surrendering to each side in turn merely in order to stay in, at whatever sacrifice of principle. As Melbourne wrote to John Russell, “By one set of people we are told that we are ruining ourselves and losing support by allying ourselves with the Radicals and the Roman Catholics: by another that we are producing the same effect by leaning too much to the Tories and Conservatives; probably both statements are true and we are losing credit on both sides.” Himself, he did not much mind if they were. It mattered little to him that his Party’s actions should ultimately be controlled by Peel, for at heart he agreed with Peel’s policy. “I do not dislike the Tories,” he told the Queen, “I think they are very much like the others: I do not care by whom I am supported; I consider them all as one; I do not care by whom I am helped as long as I am helped,” he said laughing. Indeed, he had never been a Whig because he believed in Whig principles. His loyalty to his Party had been a personal loyalty. Now that it had come into conflict with the stronger personal loyalty he felt for the Queen, he threw it over without a tremor.
But, if he did not mind what people said about his Government, his colleagues did. The sense of their ignominious position was destroying what was left of the morale of his Government; with the result that they became increasingly irritable and unmanageable. More often than ever Howick objected; John Russell talked of resignation, Palmerston acted with ostentatious disregard of his colleagues. Nor did Melbourne feel up to managing them in the way he used to. He was too tired. He still went through the motions of being Prime Minister, read the State papers, wrote off innumerable little notes to his ministers. But in fact he exerted his will less and less. He did not give his full mind to affairs, evaded issues, shunned decisions, left the initiative to John Russell. Better make the Ballot an open question if this would help to keep the Cabinet together, he said; better give in to Peel about Jamaica if it would stop him raising the question of Canada! Better continue the old Poor Law Act for another year, rather than stir controversy by discussing a new one! Throughout his political life Melb
ourne had been accused of laziness—on the whole unjustly. But now he really was growing lazy. Fatigue made him yield to his instinctive desire to turn his back on disagreeable facts. But alas, it was seldom possible. Do what he would, the unending squabbles in his Cabinet worried him. It was not the attacks from outside but the internal dissensions that vexed him, he complained. All he could do was ineffectively to try and forget them and concentrate such energy and attention as remained to him on the Queen.
(3)
And even his hours with her were no longer the source of satisfaction they had been. He felt them too precarious for one thing; with the Government’s position so weak, it seemed as if they might end any day. The sunshine of his happiness was fading to an evening glow over which stretched the ever lengthening shadow of his imminent parting from her. Further, the troubles that had a little clouded them in the early part of the year had not passed away. The Hastings affair was not over yet. Though the populace might cheer the Queen, there was still a good deal of hostility to her in high society. “Mrs. Melbourne,” shouted a gentleman in coarse, mocking tones as the Queen and her Prime Minister stepped forth on to the balcony at Ascot, and as she drove down the Course the sound of hissing made itself heard; two fashionable ladies, the Duchess of Montrose and Lady Sarah Ingestre, were protesting their disapproval. The Queen was furious. “Those two abominable women ought to be flogged!” she burst out to Melbourne. He strove to imbue her with some of his own ironical indifference to public opinion. Popularity is a capricious thing, he was always telling her: he urged her to try and ease the situation by making herself particularly pleasant to Lady Flora. The Queen was reluctant; how could she, she asked, be pleasant to someone she did not like? Worse was to come. In the beginning of June Lady Flora became dangerously ill. The tumour, which had given rise to such unfortunate interpretations, proved to be malignant: within a few weeks it was clear that she was dying. Melbourne was extremely concerned. It is a sign of his obsessed devotion to the Queen that even now he, usually the justest and most sympathetic of men, could not find it in his heart to be fair to those who threatened her peace of mind. Surely too much fuss had been made about the wrong done to Lady Flora, he said; no doubt inchastity was a shocking thing, but such things did happen in families. He was acutely anxious, however, lest the Queen should damage her reputation still further by incurring any accusation of heartlessness. At first she had refused to believe Lady Flora was really seriously ill: but he persuaded her all the same to stop all entertainments at the Palace, to send frequent messages asking how Lady Flora was, and to give orders that everything possible should be done for her comfort. Melbourne also pressed her herself to go and see Lady Flora. Not unnaturally the Queen shrank from this ordeal. But lack of courage was never one of her faults; once Melbourne had convinced her that it was her duty, she agreed—and, characteristically, decided to see her alone. The interview took place on 27th June. The dying woman, now a shadow of her former self, and with the mark of her approaching end written on every haggard feature, gazed at the childish figure of her Sovereign with a ghastly fixed stare and, clutching at her with a fevered hand, gasped out her thanks for the kindness that had been shown her during her illness. In the face of this, her first experience of death, the Queen’s hard-heartedness melted away in a mingled flood of awe, pity and bewilderment. “Poor Lady Flora!” she kept on repeating as she described the scene to Melbourne, “Poor Lady Flora!” When, ten days later, Lady Flora died, the Queen burst into a torrent of tears. Her death was followed by a détente. Conroy left the Duchess of Kent’s service soon afterwards: and, freed from his malignant influence, the Duchess became more friendly towards her daughter. Melbourne’s continuous efforts to reconcile them were at last beginning to bear fruit. Also, thanks to him, the Hastings episode had not ended so badly for the Queen’s good name as at one moment it seemed likely to do.
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