But writing, though it filled her pocket, did not satisfy her dreams. It was as a woman, a queen of fashion and the salons, that she aspired to shine. What with her looks and her wit, she found it easy. By the time Melbourne got to know her, we find her name in every social record of the day; at dinners, at balls, notably at a masquerade where she dazzled all beholders in the costume of a Greek slave. In fact, her position in society was not as good as it looked to an outsider. Most of the great ladies who were its rulers thought her altogether too flashy and theatrical—Miss Eden, we note with interest, did not take to her—and they never admitted her into the inner circle of their acquaintance. The gentlemen, however, were less particular. “A superb lump of flesh,” said one of them, “looking as if made of precious stones, diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires.” When they discovered that her talk was as scintillating as her beauty, they gathered round her.
They also went to her house. The little drawing-room in Storey’s Gate—so conveniently close to the Houses of Parliament—became a centre where the cream of masculine London, statesmen and authors, artists and journalists, distinguished old gentlemen and rising young ones, met to relax and converse and sparkle. Caroline was well able to hold her own with them. Indeed she was not a woman to be trifled with. If interrupted while telling a story, or if anyone dared to raise a laugh at her expense, she was liable to lose her temper. But more often she sat on her sofa making animated contributions to a political or literary discussion: and when discussion lapsed, she would rise to entertain the company with an improvisation on the piano or a humorous song in the Irish brogue.
It was a delightful place for Melbourne to spend his evenings. There, forgetful for a blessed moment of bloodthirsty trade unionists and irascible Cabinet Ministers, he sat observing with amused curiosity the clever young men. Now and again his hostess would bring one up to be introduced and he would say a friendly word to him. “Well now, tell me—what do you want to be?” he asked the youthful Disraeli, flamboyant in satin trousers and ornate black ringlets. “I want to be Prime Minister,” replied Disraeli gravely. Melbourne was taken aback; odd as he realized that the new England was likely to be, he could not conceive of it being so odd as to make such an eventuality at all possible. Genially he tried to warn the queer entertaining young man not to place his ambitions quite so high.
Often there were no young men; and he saw Caroline tête à tête. She also visited him alone at South Street. Soon the relationship was a feature of importance in both their lives. It was natural. Intelligent, ambitious, at sea in a difficult world, Caroline was the sort of woman who always feels drawn to clever and older men. She delighted to learn from Melbourne’s knowledge and civilized wisdom; and she turned to his experience for advice. Soon he had heard the whole story of George Norton’s misdemeanours. These had not ceased with the improvement of his fortunes. He seems to have been one of those men who think that the best way to accept favours without incurring loss of self-respect, is to receive them with a bad grace. He did not cut much of a figure at his wife’s parties: when he did speak, he was truculent and uneasy. In the Spring of 1831 he caused a new trouble by insisting on having his sister to stay for a few months. Miss Augusta Norton was an unpleasing person of eccentric manners who wore her hair cropped short, and dressed in bloomers. Poor Caroline felt her social position too insecure for her to be able to face appearing in public with so unpresentable a companion. She refused to take Miss Norton about with her. Thereupon her brother said that she too must stay at home; otherwise, he declared, he would cut the traces of her carriage. The house rang with rows of ever-growing intensity, until the time came for Miss Norton and her bloomers to take their departure.
Politics too were a source of dispute between husband and wife. Caroline was a Whig; temperament and family tradition alike disposed her to take the progressive adventurous side. So also did the fact that the Norton family was Tory. She threw herself actively into the campaign for reform, talking, writing and canvassing Members of Parliament. Norton stormed at her for publicly acting against his opinions. All these troubles were poured out to Melbourne, who was amused and sympathetic and counselled patience.
Caroline felt the more warmly towards him because she was sorry for him. Lonely, burdened with responsibilities and with no home life of his own, he was not, she soon perceived, as happy as he looked. There was a strongly maternal streak in her emotional nature and she particularly sympathized with his anxieties about Augustus. The doctors had ordered that he should never be left alone for long and Melbourne was never sure whether his attendants obeyed this command when he himself was not there. In the middle of a conversation with her at South Street, he would suddenly become silent and inattentive; she realized he was listening tensely to hear if there was any ominous sound from Augustus’s room. Her impulsive heart welled out in pity.
She also entered into his other difficulties; listened if he was worried about what was happening to Lady Branden and took an interest in his political future. Since with her interest meant action, she also did what she could to help him. She brought him into contact with people who might be useful to him and tried to pick up information he might want to hear; so efficiently that he began to make use of her as a go-between when he wanted to get into unofficial communication with a member of the opposition. She also gave him advice herself. “Don’t dine with Ellice,6 and drink and say Damn Politics!” she writes on one occasion. “It hurts your Government and your reputation.” These were wise words. When her judgment was not clouded by her egotism Caroline Norton was both sharp-eyed and clear-sighted. It did not take her long to grasp the main facts about Melbourne’s character and the English political scene. Indeed she was unusually suited to satisfy his imperative need for a woman in his life. The difference of age did not matter. He had always enjoyed the role of mentor to the young; now more than ever when he was growing older and could drink in from his pupil some of the invigorating freshness of her youth. Caroline also knew just how to amuse him. How entertaining it was when she was away on a visit at a country house to open a letter from her describing gay evenings when “Mrs. Heneage was never out of Lord Edward Thynne’s arms and Lady Augusta Baring never off Mr. Heneage’s knee,” and Lord Edward said something to Caroline at which George Norton took offence so that everyone thought they were going to fight a duel on the spot; or giving a racy account of young Lord Ossulston bursting into her own bedroom in the middle of the night “with his large blue eyes opening and shutting like the wings of a Cashmere butterfly,” and so aflame with dishonourable intentions that it took her some time and all her tact to get rid of him without anybody hearing. In these lively communications Melbourne breathed once more the scandalous delightful atmosphere of that Regency world in which he had grown up.
But there was a more intimate reason why he was drawn to her. She possessed the one quality common to all the women he cared for most in his life; the zestful positiveness of nature, blending spontaneous joy in living with an inability to doubt or hesitate about anything, which was the antidote to his own sad questioning scepticism. It was this partly he had loved in that other Caroline who was his wife. Indeed the two women were not unlike. Caroline Norton was, in every sense of the word, a less uncommon phenomenon. She was not exquisite or elfin or mad. But she also loved the limelight; she also was dynamic and restless; she also was an incurable self-dramatist in the high romantic style. And in her, as in her namesake, these qualities exhilarated Melbourne and made him laugh and touched him.
Did they do more? Did he love her? Not certainly as he had loved Caroline Lamb. He was not young enough for one thing. And moreover with so much that appealed to him, Caroline Norton lacked the untarnished childlike quality that was needed to kindle his heart and his imagination into full flame. And the refinement. “All the Sheridans are a little vulgar,” he said to Queen Victoria some years later, in an unguarded moment. We remember that the Sheridan he knew best was Caroline Norton.
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He grew very fond of her though, and there was something of the lover in his feeling. He was too much a man for it to be otherwise. The relationship between them was pitched in a slightly raised emotional key: it had its flirtatious gaiety, its moments of tender sweetness, and its spasms of jealousy. “You, I suppose, will be happy at Panshanger with the virtuous Stanhope and the virgin Eden,” she writes tartly to him. He equally could not help complaining a little when Caroline seemed to be enjoying herself wholeheartedly, away from him. She hastened to reassure him.
“My dear Lord,
Do not be angry with me if I say that it is selfish to be discontented with me for being amused here—you talk of my romping and flirting—and forgetting everything else. I have not forgotten anything. I am sure your name is always on my lips and there is hardly anything they can say or do that does not bring back some of your opinions or expressions. If I could be always with you, if you were with me in any country house you would find that you would seem the one person to talk to. But I cannot be with you always and therefore I amuse myself as I can—or rather I amuse others—for they come and coax me out of my room if I attempt to write there or sit by myself and they will do nothing without me . . . I can assure you I should much rather sit by your sofa in South Street than be Queen of the Revels here. You won’t believe me and yet it is true. God bless you.
Your affectionate,
Caroline.”
The tone of this letter, though light, is not that of a mere sensible sexless friendship.
Yet their relationship remained platonic.7 Nor, in the circumstances, was this so curious as a censorious world may suppose. Caroline had always professed a strict regard for virtue. “Adultery is a crime not a recreation”—thus she had firmly repulsed the attentions of the blue-eyed Lord Ossulston. Moreover she always maintained that it was friendship, not love, she wanted from men. “The saddest moment for me,” she confided to a friend, “is when a man seems uneasy at being left alone with me, when his voice lowers and he draws his chair nearer; I know then that I am about to lose a friend I love and to get a lover I don’t want.”
This remark does not ring absolutely true. In it, Caroline shows herself a little too obviously anxious to appear superior to the petty vanity of commonplace women and also to prove that she was not so fast as the malicious world liked to make out. But there is something in what she said. For all her temperament, she was not the amorous type. Prima donnas dream first of influence and admiration, not of love.
If she was unwilling, Melbourne on his side, was not the man to compel her inclinations. Thirty years older than her and scrupulously honourable and considerate in personal relations, he might well hesitate before involving her in the possibility of a scandal which, with a husband and a reputation like hers, would have meant her certain ruin. There was a streak too of the paternal in his sentiment for one young enough to be his daughter, inconsistent with violent passion: and after all, sympathy of spirit, not sensual satisfaction had always been what he wanted most from the other sex. Now in the cooler calm of his middle age, he was contented to ask no more of fate than pleasant evenings alone with beautiful Caroline in her drawing-room; evenings of lively talk, of easy laughter, of warm confidential intimacy; and caressed deliciously at moments by a light breath of romance.
* * *
6 Edward Ellice was a Government Whip in the Grey Administration.
7 Cynical persons have questioned this—not unnaturally in view of the character of the parties concerned. But for once cynicism appears unjustified. Mrs. Norton in a self-justifying pamphlet on English Laws for Women, published in 1854, quotes a letter from Melbourne, written in April, 1836, when her husband’s action against her was pending, in which he tells her she need have no fear since she is innocent. As the context shows this to be a private informal letter in which Melbourne has no need to disguise the truth, this would seem to settle the question. This conclusion is further confirmed by the fact, alluded to on page 31, that at his death Melbourne left a note asking his brother to continue the allowances he made to Lady Branden and Mrs. Norton, and reasserting his innocence in regard to Mrs. Norton.
Chapter Twelve
After Reform
He had need of consolation during the next few years. For the political scene was not such as to cheer his foreboding spirit. To anyone, but especially to any member of the governing class, the atmosphere of England after the passing of the Reform Bill was tense, dark and uneasy. It was obscurely realized that the Bill marked the beginning of a completely new epoch; but what that epoch was going to be like, no one could tell. In consequence, those who had anything to lose felt all the time jumpy and apprehensive. The pessimists among them, like the Duke of Wellington, even took the view that they were in for a period of violent revolution, that now, with the citadel of aristocratic power surrendered, it would only be a few years before King, peers and private property were swept away in a storm of bloodshed. Certainly, as Melbourne had expected, extreme parties were already showing themselves angrily disappointed by the results of reform. The Home Office still got reports of secret plots to overthrow the Constitution: from time to time there were still outbreaks of riots and violence. Now loud, now soft, the murmur of popular discontent was ominously audible.
Whether or not it could be quieted depended on Parliament. But Parliament, in its new reformed state, had itself become an unknown quantity. Not only was it largely made up of what Melbourne called “the blackguardly interest”—manufacturers, Nonconformists and other dingy and unpredictable persons—but they and their fellow members were susceptible, as never before, to the pressure of their constituents, who could threaten to turn them out if they did not approve of their actions. Could they be relied on to stand firm, if firmness was likely to be unpopular? Besides, every day that passed revealed the Reform party, which formed the majority of members, as very divided. Reform had been passed by a combination of people who wanted it for widely different reasons. The Radicals looked on it as the first necessary step in a general reform; reform of the Church, reform of local government, reform in Ireland, reform of the House of Lords, reform of the Corn Laws. The old-fashioned Whigs and the Canningites, on the other hand, hoped that by granting Parliamentary Reform, they would pacify discontent sufficiently to stop the demand for any other reforms. In between these two extremes hovered a crowd of people, willing for more reform than the Canningites, though not for so much as the Radicals, but who could not agree as to what particular reforms they each desired. All these different groups had united together to fight for Parliamentary Reform. Now that they had got it, however, their differences began to show. It looked as if these might become so sharp as to break up the party and bring down the Government. And who was to succeed them? Not the Tories; for the time being they were a beaten, punch-drunk rout with no confidence in them-selves and no hope of getting a majority in the country. The result might well be that, for want of an alternative, the Radicals would sweep in and effect by constitutional means changes almost as extreme as those proposed by the agitators for revolution. To avoid this, strong and skilful leadership was needed. It did not look as if this was going to be obtained from the existing Government.
Indeed, they were an odd set of men to be guiding England along the path of progress at this crucial moment. A scratch team of aristocrats gathered hastily together to pass the Reform Bill, they were, for the most part, themselves men of the past; who, whatever their theoretical opinions, were unqualified alike by tradition and experience to envisage the new bourgeois and industrial epoch which it was their fate to inaugurate. Moreover, as much as their followers, they were divided as to what they wanted to happen. They, too, had supported reform for diverse reasons: and now they, too, reacted differently to the prospect of the future. Every shade of opinion except that of the extreme left was represented in their ranks.
So variously-minded a body could only have worked toge
ther easily if its individual members had been themselves conciliatory persons. This, however, was far from being the case. Some of them, like Melbourne himself or Lord Holland, were reasonable enough. But there were others who would have been troublesome members of a team at any period. To be born and bred a ruler does not encourage a man to be accommodating; and the high-nosed, be-chokered countenances that gazed down at one so arrogantly from the portraits of the Reform ministers exhibit them as possessed of all the wilful and idiosyncratic independence of their Whig blue blood.
The two most influential members in deciding the course of policy were Lord Grey, the Prime Minister, and Lord Althorp, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Grey was a shy, reserved, formidable grand seigneur of unbending principles and distinguished manners, who had become celebrated in his younger days as a pioneer of reform. Since he would never join an administration not specifically Whig he had kept out of politics for many years. Now, brought back to lend the authority of his name and his character to the Reform Government, he found himself, like Rip Van Winkle, in a world utterly unlike that of his youth. He did not like it. The age of enlightenment and progress, for which he had once fought so ardently, turned out, now it had arrived, to be a vulgar, restless affair. Not a day passed that Grey did not yearn to be back in the quiet and freedom of his country home at Howick Hall, Northumberland, with his books and his grandchildren and his sporting guns: and, though a stern sense of duty kept him at his post, the strain of living in so uncongenial an atmosphere kept him permanently irritable and ill at ease. At the slightest extra friction—and this occurred almost monthly—Grey threatened to resign.
Lord Althorp, though easier-tempered than his chief, was also liable to proffer his resignation on small excuse. He was a curious and lovable character of a peculiarly English type. With his heavy figure and plain red weather-beaten face, he looked like a farmer; and in fact there was a lot of the farmer about him. Country pursuits were the only things he enjoyed; even during the crisis of the Reform Bill, he always opened letters from his bailiff before looking at the rest of his post. Yet beneath this John Bull exterior lurked a quixotic strain of enthusiastic idealism which led him far from the path Nature would seem to have marked out for him. He had loved his wife with so romantic a passion that when she died he gave up fox hunting, which he enjoyed more than anything else in life, for ever; no less a sacrifice could, he felt, express his utter desolation at her loss. He also threw himself into the cause of Reform against all his natural instincts as a landowner, simply because he thought Reform was the cause of justice. The same motive kept him still in office afterwards, though he had no ambition and was as miserable in London as a sporting dog. Not that he could feel that he did much good there. “I am nothing in Cabinet,” he remarked with humorous humility, “I have no great talent nor ill temper, so nobody cares for me.” It was not true. Althorp’s influence with his colleagues was considerable. With the House of Commons it was more. Who could resist so endearing a mixture of honesty and modesty and homeliness? The fact that he was a poor, halting speaker somehow only made members like him more. He could do anything he liked with them. Once when an opponent had raised a point against the Government, Althorp replied that he had some facts with which he was sure he could answer it, but for the moment he had mislaid them. Both sides of the House at once accepted his answer as perfectly satisfactory. Indeed, so far as the management of Parliament was concerned, Althorp was the most important member of the Government. “He is the tortoise,” said Melbourne, “on whose back the world reposes.”
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