The Young Melbourne & Lord M

by The Young Melbourne

  Indeed he seemed to take the whole crisis very lightly: and also the imminent eclipse of his Government which it portended. “Ten to one we shall not be in next year,” he remarked cheerfully: and when Clarendon reported to him that Palmerston was said to be intriguing secretly with the Tories, he received the ominous news with detached ironical amusement. “It can’t last—it’s impossible this Government can go on!” he reflected aloud, chuckling and rubbing his hands. The fact was that he had at last resigned himself to the prospect of going out of office: and thought, characteristically, that it was best to make as little heavy weather over it as possible. After all, politics were not a subject that should be taken very seriously.

  One serious task did however remain to him; to prepare the Queen for his exit. This was not so hard as it would have been once. For no longer was she going to be left alone. Indeed, one of the reasons that Melbourne gave way over the Corn Laws so easily was that his chief motive for staying in had been weakened by the Queen’s marriage. During the last few months he had worked steadily to train the Prince for his future responsibilities as the Queen’s personal adviser. It was not always easy; the Prince was so extremely unlike himself. “This damned morality will ruin everything!” Melbourne exclaimed after the Prince had expressed some view that struck him as peculiarly priggish. But his feelings about the Prince, like so many of his other feelings, were mixed. At the same time as he was irritated by him, he was also impressed by him. And anyway he was careful to hide his irritation. So successfully that the Prince told his uncle that “Good Lord Melbourne” was the only one of his wife’s ministers that he really trusted. Melbourne arranged for him to see all the foreign dispatches; and the Prince would send them back to him accompanied by long and detailed memoranda of his views about them. Melbourne did not answer him in equal detail, in fact he often did not answer him at all. But the Prince was flattered to notice that he often acted as if he had modified his views in consequence of the memoranda. Meanwhile, Melbourne managed to get his own opinions through to the Prince either in direct conversation or—more tactfully—by saying a word to Anson or the Queen with the intention that it should be passed on. He took pains, too, in the course of his talks with the Queen to tell her how intelligent and judicious he thought the Prince was. With good effect: the Queen, as we have seen, had started off with the idea of not allowing the Prince to share in her political work. It was not just that she wanted to keep power in her own hands; she also had an uneasy feeling that political discussions might lead to political disagreement; and that this would dissipate the atmosphere of idyllic rapture which she desired to glow round every moment that she spent in the loved one’s company. The Prince, however, preferred interesting work to idyllic rapture, and complained to her about his exclusion. The Queen rushed off to ask Melbourne’s advice. Was he tempted to back her up in her resolution to keep the Prince out of politics? He might well have been, for politics were the one subject concerning which he kept his old exclusive position with her. But if he was tempted, he resisted. His love was self-sacrificing and unpossessive. Earnestly he pressed her to consult the Prince more: disagreements, he said, were less dangerous to married happiness than secretiveness, for secretiveness led to distrust. At first the Queen demurred; but as time passed she began to come round. It was inevitable she should. By nature she tended always to look up to some man as her chief authority in all matters; and who should it be but her husband? Already he was modifying her outlook in other ways. Fancy the Queen talking about botany and tree-planting! said the Ladies of the Household; before the Prince came she did not know one plant from another! And what about her new-found taste for sacred music? Clearly all these changes came from the Prince. About people, she was not so ready to follow his lead. The Prince wanted to invite learned men and scientists to the Palace in order that he might enjoy the benefit of improving talks with them. This prospect did not appeal to the Queen. She was too ignorant for such talk, she said. She consulted Melbourne, who, for once, found himself baffled. Even he did not know how to make the Queen enjoy the company of scientists. In general, however, she began to defer more and more to the Prince’s opinions. These soon included his political opinions. His influence already showed itself powerful at the time of the Syrian crisis. By the spring of 1841 it had consolidated itself even further.

  It was still not to be compared with Melbourne’s, however. For the time being the Queen still turned to Melbourne before anyone else. This, he realized, was going to be a difficulty if the Government fell. For one thing, the Queen indicated that she wanted to go on keeping in touch with him afterwards. Though he must have longed for her to do so, yet he knew quite well that it was not the custom of the British Constitution for the Sovereign to be in habitual communication with the Leader of the Opposition behind the back of her Prime Minister. Some compromise must be found. Would it be possible for the Queen, if for once in a way she felt particular need of his advice, to tell the Prince who would tell Anson who would tell Melbourne? His advice would then be passed back through the same devious channel. The Prince thought this an excellent idea. Not so the Queen: she said categorically that she must be allowed to communicate with Lord Melbourne directly. Melbourne, who knew her in this mood, bowed to her words. Then there was the vexatious question of the Queen’s Ladies to be settled. By now, Melbourne was convinced that the original quarrel over it had been an error which would have ended disastrously had not Peel agreed to give in rather than to have a public row about it. The same mistake must not be made again, and the best thing would be to get the matter arranged beforehand. Once more with the help of the Prince, a secret negotiation was opened with Peel, by which it was tacitly agreed that he should not demand the dismissal of the Ladies, but that the Queen should ask those few who were most connected with the Whigs to send in their resignations when the Tories came in. Melbourne also asked Anson to try and indicate to Peel the importance of being patient with the Queen. Last time he had been too hasty. “He didn’t give the Queen time to come round,” he said “you should always give people time to come round.”

  He had done what he could to smooth the way for the new Government. Late in May the crash came. The Whigs were defeated over the Budget. They did not go out straight away because they could not make up their minds whether to resign or to advise the Queen to dissolve Parliament. If she dissolved Parliament, there would be an election at once and they might have a better chance of winning it: if they resigned, the Queen would send for Peel who would then be in a position to have an election when he thought it suited him best. All the same Melbourne was for resignation. He judged that the Government would be defeated in any case, and he very much disliked the idea of an election fought, as it certainly would be, on the issue of the Corn Laws; for it was likely to be a violent contest which roused popular passions in the way he most disliked. “No terms,” he said, “can express my horror, my detestation, my absolute loathing of the attempt to enlist religious feelings against the Corn Laws.” More important, he thought that the Queen was for the time being so identified with himself and the Whigs that she would be looked on as a partizan in the election and that this would make her unpopular. Melbourne was not going to recommend any policy, whatever its other advantages, that ran the slightest risk of making the Queen unpopular. She did not agree, all she wanted was to help the Whigs. John Russell and others took the same view. For a week or two the question was undecided; people began to wonder if the Whigs were not intending to stick on, in spite of their defeat. “Why is Lord Melbourne like a very serious young lady?” said a wit of the time. “Because he won’t go out at all.” At last after a lot of arguing and letter-writing, Melbourne bowed to the will of his Sovereign and colleagues. Another Government defeat was followed by the dissolution of Parliament; in August an election took place. As Melbourne had prophesied, the Whigs were soundly beaten. Parliament met again at the end of August. The curtain rose on the concluding scene of Melbourne’s premiership.


  He played it in character. Never a parliamentarian, he had neither the will nor the energy to make much of his farewell to the House of Lords. The Tories moved a vote of no confidence in the Government; and the Duke of Wellington attacked Melbourne for changing his mind about the Corn Laws. Looking weary and dispirited, Melbourne rose to make a brief, negligent and flippant reply. Of course he had changed his mind, he said, but so did everybody when circumstances altered; “We are all very much in the habit of taunting one another with having changed our opinions, but the fact is we are always changing our opinions . . . It is nonsense to proceed with measures which it is impossible can succeed.” He was followed by Brougham who took the occasion to pay Melbourne back for turning him out of the Government by making a bitter, malicious and detailed personal onslaught on him. Melbourne seemed a little disturbed; leaning forward he asked one of his colleagues if he thought one particular accusation was in any way justified by the facts. But, whether from lack of heart or from a fundamental indifference, he did not bother to get up and answer Brougham. On 28th August, after they had been defeated in the House of Commons, Melbourne, in a few short sentences, announced the Government’s resignation.

  Meanwhile, up to the very last minute he had gone on doing everything he could to make things easy for the Queen in the new situation she was about to enter. He suggested some final hints to Peel, through the medium of Anson, as how best to gain her confidence; and to the Prince as how best to increase and maintain it. Don’t let him irritate her by talking solemnly at her about religion, “She particularly dislikes what Her Majesty terms a Sunday Face!” To the Queen herself Melbourne once more, and for the last time, earnestly urged the advantages of tact and discretion. The great thing was to avoid an open conflict with her ministers. If she found she disagreed with them, she had better say that she needed time for further consideration, and not let herself be driven into a corner. For the rest, he made a final effort to remove her prejudice against Peel and the Tories. When the Queen complained that the Tory ministers had looked cross at their first interview with her, Melbourne said that most likely they were only shy and embarrassed; “Strange faces,” he explained, “are apt to give the idea of ill humour.” He grew suddenly worried lest he had biased her unduly against some of them. “In the course of this correspondence,” he wrote off to her, “Lord Melbourne has thought it his duty to Your Majesty to express himself with great freedom upon the characters of many individuals . . . but Lord Melbourne thinks it right to say that he may have spoken upon insufficient grounds, that he may have been mistaken and that the persons in question may turn out to be far better than he has been induced to represent them.”

  The Queen listened to his words more calmly than in the previous year. She still said that losing him was the saddest event of her life, she still complained that she found Peel’s manner disagreeably stiff. But when she and Melbourne met there were none of the passionate protests and emotional storms of May, 1839. She shed tears, but they were the gentle nostalgic tears of one who regrets the irretrievable past but is resigned to accept the inevitable future. Melbourne encouraged her spirit of resignation. This was for his own comfort as well as hers. He recognized the fact that even if the Tories fell, he himself was unlikely to be up to taking office again; and so was determined that for neither of them should his last hours with the Queen leave any needlessly painful memories behind them. He strove studiously to keep the tone of their intercourse as normal and even cheerful as possible. On the last evening he dined at the Palace as Prime Minister he actually managed to appear unusually merry. Not that he repressed sentiment altogether. Melbourne was the last man to cultivate an unnaturally stiff upper lip. He knew what she was going through, he told her, how the expectation of a dreaded event could cast its shadow over every pleasure, how hard it was to concentrate on work with a troubled mind. But, he said, work did dissipate trouble if one persevered with it; and he trusted that when the time came she would find she did not miss him as much as she had feared. He did not think she would because she now had the Prince to advise her. “The Prince understands everything so well,” he said, “he has such a clear, able head . . . When you married him,” Melbourne added with a twinkle, “you said that he was perfection, which I thought a little overrated, but I really think now that it is in some degree realized.”

  For himself he admitted he was going to feel the separation deeply—“It is painful for me,” he confessed to her on their last evening together, standing on the terrace in the starlight. “For four years I have seen you daily and liked it better every day.” He noticed too, he told her, that he was beginning to wake earlier which, with him, was always a sign of depression and anxiety. All the same she must not worry about him, he slept well until he woke: indeed he was well altogether. The Queen tried to persuade him to accept the Garter as a token of the honour and love in which she held him. Melbourne refused it. This was not from any quixotic disinterestedness, he hastened to say; if he had been poor and she had offered him a pension, he would have taken it gratefully. But he had always refused honours, and—he hoped this showed no false pride—he would like to keep intact his reputation for refusing them. However, he was delighted to accept a present of some etchings which the Queen sent to him. “They will certainly,” he wrote, “recall to recollection a melancholy day but Lord Melbourne hopes and trusts that with the divine blessing it still will hereafter be looked upon with less grief and bitterness of feeling than it must be regarded at present.” In these words, while he professes to look forward to happier times, Melbourne does allow his grief to reveal itself a little more explicitly. And in a note on practical matters, written soon after his resignation, he took occasion to declare, though in plain and formal terms, his full sense of what his relation to her meant to him. “Lord Melbourne will ever consider the time during which Your Majesty is good enough to think that he has been of service to Her Majesty the proudest as well as the happiest part of his life.”

  Thus, quietly, gracefully, composedly, Melbourne took leave of Queen Victoria.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Last Years

  (1)

  Composedly, too, he settled down to the new phase of his life. Poor Lord Melbourne was going to feel the change dreadfully, said the gossips of the town to one another with gloomy relish. What was he going to do with himself? Melbourne seemed determined to show that he could do very well. On the 3rd September, the members of the Carlton Club looked out of the window to see him strolling idly and smiling down to the House of Lords for the first time since his resignation. As he passed them, he moderated his walk to a saunter as though purposely to exhibit his carefree demeanour to his Tory supplanters. He entered the House, too, with an air of easy composure which astonished his fellow peers. In private life he appeared equally cheerful. Indeed some people were shocked at his frivolity. “Lord Melbourne did not appear to advantage,” complained the serious-minded Lady John Russell meeting him at Woburn a week or two after his resignation. “He showed little wish for conversation with anybody but seemed trying to banish the thought of his reverse by talking nonsense with some of the ladies.”

  So far as outward circumstances were concerned indeed, there were considerable compensations in his new form of life. No more State papers, no more Cabinet quarrels, no more speeches in Parliament, except when he felt inclined! Plenty of time for dining out, for lounging at Brooks’s, for staying with his friends in their spacious country houses, for musing over French novels and patristic folios in the library at Brocket! Philosophically, Melbourne set to work to take advantage of these new-found opportunities for the life of pleasure. He dressed later than ever—people now found him shaving at half-past five in the evening—he pulled down his theological books from the shelves with the idea of writing a commentary on St. Chrysostom; he paid a special visit to the country in the spring, that he might savour at leisure for the first time for many years, the fresh beauty of bluebells and apple-blosso
m. He also went out a great deal in society. We hear of him staying with Lord Leicester and the Duke of Bedford and the Palmerstons, and dining often at Holland House and with Mrs. Norton.