Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  Remember thee! Ay, doubt it not.

  Thy husband too shall think of thee!

  By neither shalt thou be forgot,

  Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!5

  For Melbourne, who loved his wife, the affair was not something which could blow over. As Lady Caroline descended into alcoholism, obesity and lunacy, he spent a wretched existence at Brocket, with an increasingly fat wife being cared for by nurses from the Bedlam hospital, and their backward, possibly autistic, son. Lady Caroline died in 1828.

  Melbourne by then was in his late forties, and he must have assumed that his early political ambitions could never be realized. When Canning became Prime Minister, however, the Ultra Tories such as the Duke of Wellington all resigned, and Canning turned to his Whig friends to fill the vacant ministries. He brought forward Palmerston and Melbourne. When he showed the list of possible Cabinet ministers to old George IV, the King – remembering the convivialities of Carlton House twenty years before, and an enjoyable affair with Melbourne’s mother – said, ‘William Lamb – put him anywhere you like!’6

  Melbourne became Home Secretary, a post he continued to occupy when the Whigs came back into office under the premiership of Earl Grey. For one whose reputation was for languor and inactivity, it is superficially7 surprising that his most famous act, as Home Secretary, was to insist upon the transportation and exile of the Dorset agricultural labourers who formed a trade union and became known – after they were prosecuted for conspiracy and transported with thieves and killers on a prison ship to Australia – as the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

  Superficially surprising for those – like the young Queen – who saw chiefly the benign, witty and seemingly indifferent drawing room Melbourne. There were other sides to his fascinating nature, among which was the flagellant. When it became clear that he and Lady Caroline should not risk another child, after the mental deficiencies of their son became clear, they took to adopting a series of orphan girls. Clearly there was collusion between Melbourne and his ‘victims’, one of whom wrote a letter to him, from the position of a married woman who had named her two children Caroline and William: ‘I remember as though it were yesterday the execution, then being thrown into a corner of a large couch there was at Brocket you used then to leave the room and I remember your coming back one day and saying, “Well, cocky, does it smart still?” at which of course I could not help laughing instead of crying... Does the Queen whip the royal princes, I should like to know.’8

  As the last jokey inquiry shows, we have leapt ahead in time by quoting this letter; but it does reveal one of the many quirky sides to Melbourne’s nature. He and the Queen were once discussing floggings at Eton. When Victoria said she considered it ‘degrading’, Melbourne disagreed. He said his tutor ‘had not flogged me enough, it would have been better if he had flogged me more’. Flogging, he told his monarch, always ‘had an amazing effect on him’.9

  The passionate friendship, or amitié amoureuse, which sprang up at once between the fifty-eight-year-old Prime Minister and the eighteen-year-old Queen was a liberation for them both. Victoria was set free from the constraints of childhood, and the hated Kensington System; Melbourne was liberated from a scarred emotional life, during which he had retreated from the pains of marriage into a series of platonic encounters with aristocratic women, and spanking and whipping sessions with young girls, sometimes prostitutes. There was something of the pain and bittersweet pleasure of the sado-masochist in his last attachment, since he must always have known that the friendship could only end with her growing up, and marrying.

  When one considers the weekly audiences of modern Prime Ministers with the sovereign, it is difficult to imagine the subject of flagellation arising – as it did several times between the Queen and her Lord M. But the relationship between Victoria and Melbourne was an extraordinary one, and they discussed a huge range of subjects which she eagerly Boswellized: Shakespeare, the characters of her three predecessors on the throne (‘spoke of the singular instance of both George III and Queen Charlotte’s being very plain and all their children very handsome’),10 Whig society gossip, Goethe, religion, French history (Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, he informed her, ‘were shocking fellows’)11 and mixed race marriages (‘He thinks that the children of a woman of colour and a white very handsome, “they breed very fine”, he said’).12 Clearly mixed breeding appealed to him, whatever the species, since he commended to the Queen the breed of dogs known as lurchers. ‘Talked of a dog Mrs Lamb’s bred from an Italian grey-hound and a terrier, which he said made a very fine dog; it had all the swiftness and activity of an Italian greyhound with all the strength and sagacity of a Terrier.’13

  In many of the journal’s pages, during the Melbourne phase, the author seems much younger than her eighteen to twenty years: ‘Talked of my having wished to roll in the grass when I was in the garden,’ she wrote in Buckingham Palace, ‘which made him laugh.’14 ‘I said’ – of a Miss Rice – ‘that she wanted to be like an innocent, simple, Irish girl, she being such a tall girl. “A great thumping girl,” he said, which made me laugh very much.’15 Perhaps he never seemed more of the old world than when – one New Year’s Day in the Brighton Pavilion – he ‘Talked of my having taken a bath; his seldom doing so.’16 To judge from the journal, it was Palmerston, more than Melbourne, who spoke to the Queen of politics and foreign affairs, the Prime Minister being content, for hours on end, to go riding with his young pet, to sit discussing whether they preferred Racine to Corneille, or making disobliging remarks about the duller ladies-in-waiting.

  The rapport between the pair established itself instantaneously, so that the political convention, whereby a General Election followed the accession of a new sovereign, was painful to her. The Whigs, with their radical Liberal supporters (whom Melbourne deplored), won it, but not comfortably; and the years that he and Victoria spent together – 1837 to 1841 – could never have lasted: a fact which adds to their poignant quality of holiday romance. Even if, like Queen Elizabeth I, she had never married, the electoral system would one day remove her Lord M. It was some holiday, however, while it lasted.

  The defining fact in Victoria’s personal mythology would seem to have been her marriage to Prince Albert; but there is no finished truth about a human being, and to see her as the besotted spouse and grief-stricken widow of the German prince is only one truth about the Queen. She lived for eighty years, and was married for a mere quarter of that time. In many ways, we can say that we see her most clearly being herself in those platonic male friendships which were based on shared humour: with Lord Melbourne, with Disraeli and to a smaller extent with Dean Davidson and Lord Salisbury. The elements of humour and independence are present in her more mysterious relationship with John Brown. One sees her at her vigorous, independent and humorously selfish best in these friendships. The first, and in some ways the sweetest, was that with Lord Melbourne.

  It was he who groomed her for her role as Head of State. It was he who prepared her for the ceremonial initiation of the Coronation. Secularist as he may have been (for all his expertise in New Testament Greek and the early Fathers of the Church), Melbourne was a traditionalist, too, who was determined that his protégée should be crowned in the appropriate manner. When Lord Fitzwilliam wrote to him ‘a characteristic letter saying it was quite unnecessary to have a Coronation . . . that did very well in the twelfth century but that in the nineteenth it was quite useless’, Lord M. dismissed such talk and proceeded with the arrangements. It was not to be an affair on the lavish scale of George IV’s Coronation, which had cost £240,000; but nor need it be the pared-down, almost hole-in-corner arrangement of William IV, who had spent a mere £30,000. Victoria’s Coronation cost £79,000 – a fairly modest sum, compared with her extravagant uncle George. (Military expenditure for 1835 was £12.1 million.17)

  Coronation Day, Thursday, 28 June 1838, began for Victoria at 4 am when she was woken by the guns in the park, �
�and could not get much sleep afterwards on account of the noise of the people, bands &c, &c’.18 The crowds were huge. Railways had brought unprecedented numbers into the capital, and for the previous week, as she had seen during carriage drives, there were ‘swarms of people’.19 Feodore and the German relations had come, so there was a sizeable royal procession through the streets from Buckingham Palace. The Queen was overwhelmed by the ‘multitudes, the millions of my loyal subjects who were assembled in every spot to witness the Procession . . . How proud I felt to be the Queen of such a Nation.’

  Melbourne, no churchman he, had stage-managed the ceremonies. It was therefore unsurprising that so little attention had been given to the liturgical arrangements. (‘Lord M. said he always went to his parish church in London, which made me laugh excessively, as I know he never goes to church in London, never having the time to do so: he laughed very much and could not deny that.’20) He had plainly done some research – for instance, discovering that Queen Anne’s train had been borne by the daughters of four dukes. The clergy had not rehearsed the ceremony. ‘The Bishop of Durham stood on one side near me,’ she recalled, ‘but he was, as Lord Melbourne told me, remarkably “maladroit” and never could tell me what was to take place.’21 She herself was no ritualist, but she had managed to learn the names for the various esoteric robes – ‘I took off the Dalmatic robe Supertunica &c and put on the Purple Velvet Kirtle & Mantle, & proceeded again to the Throne.’ There were certain moments of near-farce, as when she entered St Edward’s Chapel, ‘as it is called, but which, as Lord Melbourne said, was more unlike a Chapel than anything he had ever seen; for what was called an Altar, was covered with sandwiches, bottles of wine, etc etc. The Archbishop came in and ought to have delivered the Orb to me, but I had already got it, and he (as usual) was so confused and puzzled and knew nothing; – and went away.’22

  But those who came to witness the ceremonies were no better informed about coronation rituals than the bishops, and so they were less aware of the blunders than were the central participants. The French Ambassador, Count Sebastiani, she noted with amusement, ‘had been surprised “que les Cérémonies Protestantes fussent aussi belles”’. The dean had fetched out of the wardrobe the very copes worn at the Coronation of James I. The choir was in good voice. And the very sight of so young, and so solitary, a figure on the throne, receiving the homage and oblation of the tottering old peers, was itself impressive.

  When the crown was placed on her head, all the peers and peeresses donned their coronets. ‘My excellent Lord Melbourne who stood very close to me throughout the ceremony was completely overcome at this moment and very much affected. He gave me such a kind (and I may say fatherly) look.’ When the moment came to do homage, ‘he knelt down and kissed my hand, he pressed my hand, and I grasped his with all my heart, at which he looked up with his eyes filled with tears and seemed much touched.’

  The love – for it was much more than friendship – between Melbourne and Victoria is one of the most touching of all the relationships in her life. She called forth in the cynical worldly Whig reserves of tenderness which he had needed to seal up during the humiliations of his marriage. He, like a gentle tutor platonically in love with his pupil, taught her much, not only about the political process, but about life itself.

  Like the relationship between tutor and pupil, however, it could not last forever. And from a political point of view, it had almost no significance. Melbourne was too languid, too oblique, too bored and sceptical to wish to hang on to office, and he was utterly out of sympathy with his times.

  The questions facing Britain in the opening years of the Queen’s reign were ones in which Melbourne took no interest. While her journals reflect the pair riding together, laughing together, jesting, not always kindly, about their shared acquaintances, it is almost as if the ‘condition of England’, which meant so much to serious politicians and writers of the day, were little more than ‘noises off’. While she notes that ‘great riots had broke out at Birmingham again; houses burnt and others plundered, which he [Lord M.] feared was to be expected’,23 the monarch’s role in a changing, turbulent nation seemed difficult to define. ‘Dawdled about,’ she wrote. ‘Wrote to Lord Palmerston and Lord Melbourne &c. Dawdled.’24

  Palmerston, who had been in politics all his grown-up life, was in no doubt about what needed to be done. Much the most dynamic of the Whigs, and one of the biggest players on the political stage for the first half of Victoria’s reign, Palmerston believed that he was born to rule, and he was determined to hold on to the power base of the great Whig houses and families – whatever strange political alliances this took. He stood, in foreign policy, for a belligerent, interventionist Liberalism, asserting Britain’s influence and power in different parts of the world. At home, he believed in maintaining the notion of Parliament as a representative, not a democratic, body; but if this meant alliances with aspirant radical Liberals, or with disillusioned Tories, that was no difficulty for this, the least doctrinaire of politicians. The 1837 cartoon by John Doyle (‘HB’) shows the young Queen playing chess with Palmerston. Melbourne, hands behind his back, peeps over her shoulder. The caption is ‘The Queen in Danger!’ Clearly the impish suggestion of the cartoonist is that the virginal young woman is not safe in the company of these two old rakes – who were, in effect, brothers-in-common-law. (It was generally recognized that Palmerston was the father of three of the five children of Melbourne’s sister, Emily Cowper.)

  The actual ‘danger’ was that both Melbourne and Palmerston – but particularly Palmerston – were happy to neuter her sense of party politics, and to emphasize her sympathies with the Whigs. ‘Lord M. and I are quite of the same opinion; these Tories are too vile and monstrous.’25

  Given the passionate hero-worship which she bestowed on Melbourne, and the Tory Leader Sir Robert Peel’s shyness and awkwardness with women, it was not surprising that she should have failed to build up any relationship with the Leader of the Opposition. In July 1839, she ‘talked of my having seen Peel coming down the same street I was, and that the moment he saw me he dashed down another street to avoid me, which I thought very rude. “I don’t think he meant that,” said Lord M. I observed he always formerly looked cross when he met me. “That’s his clumsiness,” said Lord M.’26

  Peel was Leader of the Tory Party at a crucial period of its history. Like all parties, it was a coalition, and in the 1820s, it had been a coalition between the Canningites, or liberal Tories, of whom Peel had been one, and the diehards such as the Duke of Wellington. 1829 had seen the first volte-face by the diehards when Wellington decided to support Catholic Emancipation. The 1840s, with Peel as the Leader, would see an even more divisive issue than whether Roman Catholics should be allowed to stand for Parliament, or enter the universities or the professions. This was the question of Free Trade, and the issue on which the matter came to a head was the preservation or abolition of the Corn Laws, which imposed a tariff on the import of cheap grain.

  This was a matter as basic as the price of a loaf of bread, the matter which, symbolically at least – though not in fact – had undone the French monarchy in 1789. Whether or not Marie Antoinette ever did say ‘Let them eat cake’, and whatever she meant by it, Victoria in the first three years of her reign was every bit as detached from the realities of her subjects’ lives as Marie Antoinette had been from hers.

  No doubt some of the agricultural labourers who set fire to hayricks and farm buildings in the Captain Swing riots, and some of the Chartists causing disturbances in Monmouth, Bristol and Birmingham, would have favoured a republic. But the broad stream of political opinion wanted to maintain the Queen in her position, and the main political groups wanted the sovereign either to give them her support, or, if that were emotionally beyond her reach, to recognize their place in the political scale of things.

  While Palmerston and Melbourne cocooned the Queen in what was, in effect, a three-year Whig country-house par
ty of plays, balls, rides, gossip and laughter, there were others, in Parliament and in the country, who, ‘vile and monstrous’ as they might be, had a different perspective on ‘the condition of England’ question. There were the Liberals, who ranged from economic Liberals, wanting the abolition of the Corn Laws and Free Trade, to those who wanted a much more radical programme of extending the franchise and reforming Parliament much further than it had been reformed in 1832.

  There were the diehard Tories, the landed class who wished to protect their incomes from arable land by imposing tariffs on imported corn and driving up the price of bread.

  There were Peelite Tories, who knew that this state of things could not long continue and who would eventually look for different political allies.

  And there was the monarchy. Everyone agreed that it was a vital, central part of the British political system, but no one could be sure – since it had never been tested to its limits since 1688 – exactly what the nature of royal power and prerogative was, nor how much anyone wished it to be seen as exercising power.