The Young Melbourne & Lord M

by The Young Melbourne

  “Out,” said Palmerston and William echoed him. Ward was still reluctant. “There is a rumour,” he said, “that Huskisson’s place is to be filled by a moderate Tory, a young man of promise from a noble Tory family.” “I do not know any young man of Tory family who is a man of promise,” replied William discouragingly; and then went on to point out with chilling good sense that the fact that Huskisson was to be replaced by an official Tory of any kind meant a change in the character of the Government; and that he himself, unable as he was to state his views in Cabinet, could not feel justified in associating himself with it in its new form. Poor Ward made a last try. “There is something in attaching oneself to so great a man as the Duke,” he observed wistfully. “For my part,” retorted William, unmoved, “I do not happen to think he is so great a man. But that is a matter of opinion.” Next day they were all three out.

  It was a little hard on William. For, on the East Retford question, he agreed with the Duke. Still there was no question he had to go. In general he had no confidence in the Duke: and anyway the same loyalty that had kept him in now sent him out. “I have always thought,” he once said, “that it is more necessary to stand by my friends when they are in the wrong than when they are in the right.”

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  Nevertheless it was a depressing time for him. After years of doing nothing he had at last obtained work; and found that he enjoyed it. Now within a few months it was snatched away with no visible prospect of return. However he had long ago learnt not to cry over spilt milk. Soon he was setting to work to distract himself by corresponding with Lady Holland about Greek poetry and writing reviews of theological works for the Literary Gazette.

  His private life too required attention. Since August it had been at least as eventful as his public. All the old ties were breaking. Lady Caroline had died in January, 1828. Their only child, poor Augustus, still lived, a half-witted youth of twenty-one. But William, though still far too solicitous for his welfare to let him leave home, must by now have given up all hope of his becoming normal. In July of the same year Lord Melbourne’s unimpressive life had come to an end at last. It is not to be supposed that this occasioned much sorrow to anyone. But it was a landmark in William’s life. With his father and mother and Caroline gone, the chapter of his youth was completely finished. Moreover he was now head of the family. The Melbourne fortune though still large was somewhat reduced by this time. Melbourne House was sold, as too expensive to keep up; and—taking a new house in South Street, Mayfair—William, or Melbourne as we must now learn to call him, settled down to face the future.

  Already, as a matter of fact, his private life was involved in a new disturbance. Feminine society was a necessity to him. And while in Ireland he had made the acquaintance of a certain Lady Branden, the wife of an Irish peer in holy orders. Nothing is known of her, beyond the fact that she was young, lovely, and that she lived apart from her husband. Melbourne spent almost every evening with her when in Dublin: in the following year she settled in London where he continued to visit her. In the summer of 1828, trouble began to raise its head. If scandal was to be believed, the Reverend Lord Branden was not a credit to his cloth. It was rumoured that he had written to Lady Branden, alleging that he had got some compromising evidence about her relations with Melbourne, but that he would overlook the matter, if she would persuade her lover to get him made a bishop. Lady Branden very properly rejected this unseemly proposal. Accordingly in the summer of 1829 Lord Branden brought an action. When it came into court, however, Melbourne turned out to have little to worry about. All the evidence Lord Branden could produce was first, that Lord Melbourne had sent Lady Branden some grapes and pineapples and, secondly, that a gentleman, alleged to be Melbourne, had been seen leaving her house in Lisson Grove in the early hours of the morning. This was not much: it proved to be even less when the only witness who professed to have seen the gentleman in question, said that he was short, whereas Melbourne was unusually tall. “Pray call someone who will prove something to the purpose,” said the judge testily, “you must get him a good deal nearer than this. You have not got him to the lady’s house yet”: while the Attorney-General remarked facetiously that if there was any suspicion, it attached to the short gentleman. The case was dismissed.

  The truth about the matter will never be known for certain. Possibly that Lord Branden had more ground for his suspicions than he was able to justify. It is significant that in his will Melbourne left annuities to two ladies with which his name had been connected; Lady Branden and Mrs. Norton. But whereas he categorically stated that there had been no guilty connection between himself and Mrs. Norton, he made no similar statement about his relations with Lady Branden. Anyway the affair does not seem to have engaged Melbourne’s heart deeply. He made Lady Branden an allowance which he arranged to be continued to her after his death: and he kept sufficiently in touch with her to be worried five years later because he had not heard from her for some months. But she had before this ceased to play an important part in his life. With the dismissal of the case, the shadowy figure of Lady Branden vanishes from this history.

  Meanwhile in the political world, momentous events were crowding thick on one another. Freed from the incubus of the Canningites, the old régime, under the Duke’s leadership, made a last bid to assure and maintain its domination. It failed. The first blow came from Ireland. By 1829 the agitation for Catholic Emancipation had swelled to a pitch of violence which, it seemed, must explode in open rebellion. Rather than face such a disaster, the Duke threw over the principles of a life-time and himself repealed the Anti-Catholic laws. The consequence was that he lost another section of his supporters, the irreconcilable anti-papists of the extreme right. However, weak as his position had now become, the Duke was preparing to carry on, apparently unperturbed when he was again assailed by a new and even more formidable popular agitation. An industrial depression had made people discontented again: and now that the Canningite middle way had been tried and had failed, they turned to drastic change as the only alternative to blind reaction. At the beginning of 1830, the movement for Parliamentary Reform flared up with new and extraordinary fury.

  At Birmingham, Thomas Attwood organized a huge association for Reform: his example was followed in other great towns: meetings were held all over England: the most celebrated of contemporary agitators, Cobbett, rode round the country on a cob exhorting people to take action. As the year advanced, so did the Cause. George IV’s death removed a powerful obstacle to reform: while in Paris, the bloodless revolution of July showed timid reformers that drastic change could be accomplished without catastrophe. By the end of the summer, feeling in the country was stirred to a pitch of excitement unknown since the days of the Long Parliament 190 years before. In the houses of the great and the clubs of St. James, an atmosphere as before a thunderstorm tense with ominous expectancy, hung heavy over the political scene. Everybody felt something tremendous was going to happen, nobody quite knew what. Obsessed by their youthful memories of the French Revolution, people murmured nervously to one another of the ruin and bloodshed that must ensue, unless popular discontent was conciliated. “It was just like France in 1789,” said an elderly French visitor.

  In August it seemed as if rebellion was already starting. The poverty-stricken labourers of Southern England, roused to frenzy by Cobbett’s eloquence, broke out in riot and outrage. Night after night, respectable householders looked out of their windows to see the quiet Kentish countryside lurid in the light of blazing ricks: bands of men roamed the lanes, breaking machines and manhandling the agents of the great landlords; placid Mr. Eltons and Mr. Collinses in sequestered rural vicarages found letters thrust under their doors threatening them with assassination unless they remitted tithes; a party of rioters broke into a duke’s house and had to be dispersed by force.

  Fear increased the strength of the reforming party. Some people who had wavered, turned to it as the one means of avoiding disaster. The que
stion was whether the Duke of Wellington would once more forswear his principles and go with them. In November when Parliament met, he gave his answer. Our existing constitution, he said, was so perfect that he could never take the responsibility of tampering with it. Within a fortnight his Government had fallen; and a Whig ministry under Lord Grey, pledged to bring in Reform, had taken its place.

  It was the crisis of the century. At last that decisive battle between the old order and the new, imminent for the last forty years, was openly joined: and all the varied strains of political opinion, for so long indefinite and fluctuating, rushed to range themselves on one side or the other. The anti-reformers were a solid block of the Tory landed interest and the Established church. The reformers were a more heterogeneous body. There were the radical democrats, the political theorists, the dissenters and the bulk of the manufacturers: all those believed in reform and liked it. There were also a number of people who disliked it, but thought it inevitable. Among these were the Canningites.

  Since their resignation their position had been an uncomfortable one. The Tories thought them too Whig; the Whigs thought them too Tory. Now, however, Lord Grey anxious for all the support he could find in his formidable task, pressed them to join his administration. The Canningites hesitated. They had no one to direct them: for their recognized leader, Huskisson, notorious all his life for his physical clumsiness, had recently let himself be run over by a railway train going twelve miles an hour. Further, the Canningites had hitherto opposed reform. It made a great difference to them though that it now appeared the only alternative to revolution and as such the lesser of two evils. After a long consultation, they agreed to join. Melbourne joined with them. Since he had resigned he had taken no prominent part in politics. Once early in 1829 he had spoken against an Irish Coercion Act: he said very sensibly that, until the Irish were conciliated by Catholic Emancipation, coercion would do more harm than good. Later, and more unfortunately he had, out of affection for his brother Frederick, addressed the House of Lords in favour of a more adventurous policy in Portugal. It was against his better judgment, adventurous policies always were: and he made a very bad speech. Otherwise he had kept discreetly quiet. His reputation had grown in consequence. Twice the Duke had tried to inveigle him back into the Government; in 1829 too he was asked to Windsor, where he was amused to note that George IV took particular pains to be attentive to him. On the other hand the Whig leaders felt friendlier to him than they did to most Canningites. He had always kept himself a little detached. When he had joined the Wellington ministry he took care to declare that he did it “purely as an individual,” and so could not be accused of compromising the Whig party by his action. Nor did it in fact stop him throughout the next two years from spending as much time as ever at Holland House and Lansdowne House with his old friends. His personality it was that gave him his position. People liked him so much that they wanted him in the Government, whatever his opinions. Further, during his short period of office he had acquired a good name as a colleague. Then as now it was rare to find a minister who got on with everyone and was always in a good humour. So precious indeed did these qualifications appear to a harassed Prime Minister, that on Melbourne’s very first entry into a Cabinet, he was given the important post of Home Secretary.

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  Those, however, who did not move in Cabinet circles, found the appointment astonishing. By the world in general he was still looked on as an agreeable idle man of fashion—far too inconsiderable for the job, said Greville the Clerk of the Council. He was wide of the mark. Though Melbourne presented a less professional appearance than most of his colleagues, his mind was more penetrating and more original than theirs. And he was only lazy as long as he had nothing to do. All the same it cannot be denied that the world had something to be surprised at. Fortune, to whom Melbourne had resigned the direction of his life, had become infected with his own irony when she made him a Cabinet Minister. Whimsical, speculative and pessimistic, he had never, for all he had been so long mixed up in them, been able to bring himself to take political affairs wholly seriously: and to the end of his life, he remained an alien element in them. He had learnt to play the political game with practised skill; but like a grown-up person playing hide-and-seek with children, he never entered completely into the spirit of the thing. His thought moved from a different centre and on different lines. And he was much too candid not to show it.

  Ordinary people, bewildered by him at all times, were still more bewildered when he talked politics—when the Home Secretary commented on the policy of his Government with a mischievous and philosophic detachment, as of a spectator himself unconnected with it and out to get as much fun from watching as he could. Still less was Melbourne in place in a reforming Government. Temperamentally an eighteenth century aristocrat and profoundly sceptical as to the value of human activity of any kind, politics most of all, he seemed the last man one would expect to find assisting in the inauguration of a golden age of progressive legislation. As to Parliamentary Reform itself, he was unenthusiastic about it, even for a Canningite. Early in his career he had noted down his reasons for disapproving of it. One of these was unusual. “I anticipate the total destruction of freedom of speech from a reformation of the Parliament, and for this reason. The present House, knowing that there are popular, plausible and prima facie objections to its formation, will endure to hear its conduct arraigned and condemned because it does not wish to stir dangerous questions, but a House of Commons elected according to what is called theory and principle will never bear to hear itself freely and violently censured, though its acts may possibly be such as to deserve the most acrimonious censure.” His other objections to Reform were less paradoxical. As an aristocrat, he did not think the country was likely to be well governed by a Parliament of middle-class commercial persons, such as were likely to be elected under a reformed system. As a student of history he had no confidence in the will of the majority. And as a man of prudence, he feared Reform might lead to disaster. For since it would inevitably fail to produce all the benefits hoped from it, its disappointed supporters would insist on more and more drastic changes, till the whole constitution collapsed in ruins; to be succeeded, as the recent history of France indicated, by a Napoleonic despotism, in which the liberty and tolerance which Melbourne valued more than anything else in the world, would be extinguished. However, it was one of his fundamental principles not to stand out against a widespread popular movement. And as early as 1821 we find him saying that Reform might turn out to be unavoidable. Now in 1830 he was sure it was. His realistic commonsense also told him that unless reform was fairly extreme, it would not satisfy people enough to be worth while. “I am for a low figure,” he said at a preliminary Cabinet held on the subject, “unless we have a large basis to work on, we shall do nothing.” All the same at heart he still disliked it thoroughly.

  In fact he was not called upon to play much part in passing the Bill. The Home Secretary’s role was rather to keep the country calm and orderly, while it was going through. This was a heavy enough task for one man. The accession of the Whigs had not eased the tension of the last few months. In the South the ricks still burst into flames nightly: and hordes of marauders marched about carrying banners ominously inscribed “Bread or Blood.” Moreover unrest had now spread to the North: the hungry workers of the industrial towns were, it was reported, forming themselves into sinister communal organizations called Trades Unions, who spent their nights secretly drilling and who had the purpose of ousting employers from the rightful command of their labour. Strikes and riots broke out in which one employer was actually murdered. What made the situation especially alarming was that outside London there was as yet no regular police force, and that the army which alone filled its place was a mere handful of men. To the propertied classes it seemed as if the very foundations of civilized life were crumbling beneath their feet. A wave of panic swept over them. Every day Melbourne’s post bag at the Home Office arrived h
eavy with fantastic alarmist tales; that the disturbances were part of a deep-laid Jesuit plot, that they had been worked up by the French preparatory to invasion, that the ricks were set alight by fireballs, projected from a great distance by guns cunningly disguised as umbrellas. Melbourne preserved his calm in face of these dreadful suggestions: but he threw himself into his task with unexpected energy. For once he felt no hesitation. To preserve order had always, in his view, been the first function of government. And he acted with a vigour and decision that left his critics gasping. Within a month people were heard saying that Lord Melbourne was the one strong man in the Government.

  The trouble in the South was the most urgent. Melbourne posted in soldiers in the most disturbed areas: gingered up the magistrates to act firmly: and in order to enforce the law more quickly appointed a special commission of judges to go down and immediately try such persons as had been arrested. The effect of these measures was instantaneous. Order was restored in three months.

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  At a cost though: the tale of the repression of the labourers’ revolt of 1830 is dark and terrible; a stark Hardy-like tragedy of elemental blood and anguish and man’s inhumanity to helpless man, all the more shocking to the imagination when we find it occurring in the cheerful, urbane England of Brooks’s Club and Holland House. The law, which the judges were called upon to enforce, was so appallingly harsh for one thing. A man could be hanged for setting fire to a rick or for demanding food with menaces: he could be transported for life for writing a threatening letter, and for seven years for breaking up a piece of agricultural machinery. And the cruelty of this code seems intensified when we consider who were some of its victims; ignorant, illiterate rustics, struggling to support ten children on six shillings a week, misled by crude agitators and their own despair, into striking out blindly at those whom they were told were the authors of their misery and starvation. In fact the law was not carried out in its full rigour; of several hundred men condemned to death only a handful were actually executed. But what happened was sufficiently dreadful. The reader’s blood runs cold at the reports of the scenes outside the Court rooms at Salisbury and Winchester; the ragged, wailing wives and mothers watching boys of nineteen dragged to the gallows, fathers of young families, manacled and hustled into the carts that were to take them to the grim hulks in which they were to be transported to a lifetime of slavery in the convict settlements of Australia.