The King’s rudeness annoyed the Ministers. Melbourne then had to soothe them. “It is best not to quarrel with him,” he would remark. “He is evidently in a state of great excitement.” But so, often, were they! Even without Brougham and Durham, they had turned out a difficult team to drive. Palmerston was rash and unmanageable, Glenelg feeble and languid; even John Russell, whom Melbourne looked on as the strong central pillar of his administration, was liable to what the cautious Melbourne considered fits of extreme indiscretion. Without a word of warning, in the Cabinet or, still worse, in public, he might come out with some dogmatic statement about his own opinions that was bound to cause a row. The chance that this might happen made Melbourne nervous. “I hope you have said nothing damn foolish,” he writes to him on one occasion. “I thought you were teeming with some imprudence yesterday.” Besides, if John Russell found himself unable to speak his mind as his principles directed, he was inclined to throw up the sponge. Three times at least, during these years, he threatened to resign: and had to be cajoled by his chief into staying in office. This irritated Melbourne. His irritation grew sharper when John Russell took upon himself to tell him that he ate too much and did not take enough exercise.
The King and his colleagues were not the only people to give Melbourne trouble. There was the Radical wing of his party exploding in righteous wrath every time he made a concession to the Tories: there was the Opposition in the House of Lords, always on their toes to trip the Government up, factious, carping, asking awkward questions and exulting in ugly pleasure over any Whig slip. It was true that Peel, for his own good reasons, did his best to keep them in check. But Melbourne could not feel that this was done in a spirit of sporting goodwill. Peel, in his view, was a cold, ungenerous, ungenial type of man—“Not a horse into whose stable you should go unadvisedly and without speaking to him before!” he warned John Russell; and again “he is cross and sarcastic which I take to be the nature of the man: it is only prudence and calculation which make him otherwise.”
Altogether, being Prime Minister was fully as troublesome as he had feared. Gradually the strain began to tell on his nerves. He slept very badly, and suffered from rheumatic attacks that kept him in bed for days at a time. Every month brought some new abortive crisis: every crisis left the Government a little more discredited. The nadir was reached in the late summer of 1836 after the Government had suffered a series of defeats in the House of Lords and every one—King, Irish, Radicals—seemed in a thoroughly bad temper. “It would try the patience of an ass,” Melbourne broke out one day. For the first time he began to wonder whether it might not be wiser to resign.
Dissatisfaction with his immediate situation merged into a more general sense of sadness and disillusionment. He felt the fleetingness of things mortal more acutely than ever; saw himself more than ever as an alien in the new age. Especially down in the country at Brocket, where he had time to reflect and the atmosphere was soaked in memories of his happy childhood and brilliant youth, regret swept over him like a wave. The golden September sunlight bathing the stretches of turfy parkland seemed only to mock by contrast the sunless autumn of his own prevailing mood.
“Thou bringest the light of pleasure fled,
And hopes long dead.”
So he would be heard murmuring to himself as he gazed out of the window.
(4)
The events of his private life contributed to his depression. He had lost Miss Eden for the time being. In 1835, Miss Eden’s brother, Lord Auckland, was made Governor-General of India; and she went away with him. No longer could Melbourne look forward to calling on her each week, for an entertaining talk on the foibles of his colleagues or the Epistles of St. Paul; no longer could he relax his taut nerves in the pleasant warmth of her kindness and her good sense. “My mother always used to say,” he writes in a note of farewell, “that I was very selfish, both Boy and Man, and I believe she was right—at least I know that I am always anxious to escape from anything of a painful nature, and find every excuse for doing so. Very few events could be more painful to me than your going, and therefore I am not unwilling to avoid wishing you good-bye. Then God bless you—As to health, let us hope for the best. The climate of the East Indies very often re-establishes it. I send you a Milton, which I have had a long time and often read in. I shall be most anxious to hear from you and promise to write. Adieu.”
Then in the spring of 1836 he found himself in serious trouble over Mrs. Norton. She had been the central figure in his private life for the last five years. Either in his house or hers, they saw each other nearly every day; often for three hours at a time and often alone. She talked or listened to him about his political work; when he wanted to forget politics, they read poetry together, or flirted and gossiped. Such a relationship, innocent though in fact it might be, was bound to excite censorious comment. One man can steal a horse, says the proverb, while another cannot look over the hedge. Melbourne and Caroline belonged conspicuously to the second category. Both lived in the public eye: Melbourne because he was Prime Minister, Caroline because it was her nature so to do. Moreover, what with Lady Branden and the general amorous reputation of his family, Melbourne could not pay marked attention to a woman without people suspecting the worst. Nor was Caroline the type of woman to disarm their suspicions. She was showily beautiful, her conversation was the opposite of prudish and she had no sense of decorum. “Met Mrs. Norton at the French Ambassador’s,” notes the correct Lord Malmesbury in 1835. “She talked in a most extraordinary manner and kicked Lord Melbourne’s hat over her head. The whole corps diplomatique were amazed.” The world in general reacted to such exhibitions in the same way as the corps diplomatique: and disapproval mingled with their amazement. Indeed, Caroline had only maintained her precarious footing in respectable society in virtue of the fact that she had not broken its first fundamental law of conduct: she still lived under the same roof as her husband. As time passed, she found this growingly difficult.
The marriage had always been a dog-fight. Neither husband nor wife had the self-control to keep their wrongs to themselves. Gradually, parties were formed on each side. They interfered and made things worse. Caroline’s supporters were the first to enter the fray. One evening in 1833, the Nortons had a worse row than usual. George Norton insisted on smoking a cigar in the drawing-room, though Caroline objected to the smell. Accordingly, she flounced upstairs and locked herself in her bedroom. Norton pursued after her, broke down the door, and, after blowing out the candle, proceeded to throw her and the furniture about in an alarming fashion. The next day she took refuge with her family who vehemently espoused her cause. However, things were patched up sufficiently for the Nortons and the Sheridan family—Caroline’s sisters and her brother Brinsley—to go on a foreign tour together in the following year. As might have been expected, this only led to more trouble. Once again the worst explosion was occasioned by George Norton’s smoking. One day, when driving with his wife in a small closed carriage, he puffed away at a hookah regardless of her entreaties. She tore the mouth-piece from his lips and flung it out of the window; he clutched her so violently by the throat that, in fear of her life, she jumped from the carriage and ran back to her relations. Outraged to see their sister treated in this way, they returned to England, George Norton’s implacable enemies who never lost a chance of working up Caroline against him. Now it was his turn to seek for sympathy among his relations. He found it, and especially from Miss Vaughan, an elderly spinster connection of his, to whom he had always taken pains to make himself pleasant as he hoped she might leave him her fortune. Stirred up by Miss Vaughan on the one hand and the Sheridans on the other, the feeling between husband and wife began to increase to a bitterness that made rupture inevitable. It did not come at once only because George Norton was too unstable easily to take decisive action about anything; and because Caroline, partly out of concern for her reputation and her children, and partly out of genuine softheartedness, shrank when it
came to the point, from pushing matters to their extreme conclusion. Some uneasy months followed of recurrent quarrels, apologies, and reconciliations. Each time the quarrel was sharper and the reconciliation more half-hearted. In April, 1836, the final break came. Its occasion—a dispute as to whether or not the children should be allowed to pay a visit to Caroline’s brother—seems trivial enough. Perhaps George Norton had already thought of the plan by which he hoped he might at once disembarrass himself of his wife and also improve his wretched financial position. Why not take advantage of Caroline’s notorious indiscretion to get a divorce and make the co-respondent pay him large damages? He therefore turned her out of the house, packed his children off to his relations, and set about looking for a likely co-respondent. Several celebrated names occurred to him as possible candidates for this important role. For a time his mind wavered between Shelley’s corsair friend Trelawny, Harrison Ainsworth, the novelist, and the young Duke of Devonshire. Then an even more spectacular alternative presented itself to his mind; the Prime Minister himself. It is doubtful whether this was George Norton’s own idea or—as was commonly rumoured—it was suggested to him by wire-pullers from the underworld of the Tory Party, who saw in the divorce case a means of discrediting the Whig Government. How George Norton thought he was going to get away with it is hard to imagine. For, up till the very day Caroline left him, he had taken pains to keep on particularly good terms with Melbourne—even better than with Caroline’s other rich admirers. So far from objecting to the intimacy, he had ushered Melbourne up to visit her in her bedroom when she was ill and escorted her to South Street when she was going to pay a call there. However, he was intoxicated by the prospect of the fortune he was likely to get if he did contrive to win his case; alternatively, he thought Melbourne, for the sake of avoiding a public scandal, might pay up handsomely in order to persuade him to withdraw it. In either case he fancied he stood to win. He proceeded, therefore, to file a petition, accusing him of criminal connection with his wife.
The general sensation stirred can be imagined. It is not every day that the Prime Minister of England is publicly accused of adultery with a reigning beauty. The gutter-press of the day resounded with articles in which spicy scandalous rumours were nicely blended with pious reflections on the deplorable prevalence of vice in high places. All this was more agreeable for the newspaper reader than for the parties concerned. Caroline was consternated. It looked like the end of all her ambitions. In those days, divorce meant complete social ruin for a woman. Even if she were exonerated, her good name would be tarnished. Her children, whom she loved with all the unbridled force of her emotional nature, were cut off from her, and in the hands of the odious Nortons. Reports reached her that they ill-treated them. Her dramatic imagination exaggerated these reports till she was nearly out of her mind. Alas, misfortune did not make her prudent! Indeed, it served still further to weaken her self-control and provide a new channel for the expression of her instinct for theatrical gesture. She proclaimed her wrongs at the top of her voice; she did her best to put herself in the wrong with George Norton by writing him letters imploring his forgiveness if he would take her back; she even rushed down to the country house where her children were confined, only to have them torn screaming from her arms and herself thrust ignominiously from the gates. At the same time, she failed to take the opportunity to mend her broken reputation by adopting a soberer and more retired style of living. Instead—either from pride or a desperate longing to forget her troubles—she shocked people by continuing to dine out and to go to parties, gorgeously dressed in pink satin and black lace, and laughing and talking with feverish vivacity.
The one person she could not risk being seen with was Melbourne. However, she communicated with him in a series of letters in which cries of anguish, denunciations of the Nortons, and appeals for comfort and advice were frantically mingled. Poor Melbourne, he must have rued the day he first called at her house! No pleasure he had found there could compensate for the trouble it was now causing him. He had chiefly enjoyed his relationship to Caroline as a delightful distraction from the disturbances of his political life. Now it turned out to be involving him in disturbance itself. And a much more disagreeable kind of disturbance. For it was one that stirred his sense of guilt. Through his own indiscretion, he had done harm to the reputation of his Government and brought acute distress upon a woman he was very fond of. He did not, indeed, look on himself as primarily to blame for the failure of the Norton marriage. To his shrewd and worldly-wise eyes it seemed to have been grossly mismanaged from the start. No doubt George Norton was the villain of the piece. Melbourne’s personal experience of him made him certain of this. Norton had proved shockingly unsatisfactory at his job; quarrelsome, shifty, grossly unpunctual and conceitedly imperious to any word of correction. “I know very well that a man of that description,” Melbourne told Caroline, “who is fully persuaded that he is about to do something extremely well is on the point of committing some irretrievable error or of falling into some most ridiculous absurdity.” As to Norton’s behaviour at home, Melbourne saw quite enough of it to realize that all Caroline’s complaints were justified. All the same, he did not think she went the right way about dealing with him. Not thus would his mother have tackled a troublesome husband. Caroline was at once too violent and too weak; lost her temper too quickly and too readily forgave an injury. “The fact is he is a stupid brute,” he said to Lord Holland, “and she has not the temper nor the dissimulation needed to manage him.” Further, he thought that living with Norton had lowered her standards of behaviour so that she had grown content to let her marriage degenerate into a condition of continuous sordid squabble that must end in catastrophe. For he had no doubt that a breach was a catastrophe. Far more clearly than Caroline he recognized how fatal it would be for her reputation openly to be separated from her husband. All along Melbourne had urged her to put up with anything in order to keep the home together. As he wrote to her in his first letter after the final quarrel. “I hardly know what to write to you, or what comfort to offer. You know as well as I do, that the best course is to keep yourself tranquil, and not to give way to feelings of passion which, God knows, are too natural to be easily resisted. This conduct upon his part seems perfectly unaccountable, and, depend upon it, being as you are, in the right, it will be made ultimately to appear, whatever temporary misrepresentations may prevail. You cannot have better or more affectionate advisers than you have with you upon the spot, who are well acquainted with the circumstances of the case and with the characters of those with whom they have to deal. You know that I have always counselled you to bear everything and remain to the last. I thought it for the best.”
He still thought it for the best. Soon he was pressing her to try and make things up again—even after he got the news that George Norton was trying to find grounds for a divorce. “Never, to be sure, was there such conduct. To set on foot that sort of inquiry without the slightest real ground for it! But it does not surprise me. I have always known that there was a mixture of folly and violence which might lead to any absurdity or injustice. You know so well my opinion that it is unnecessary for me to repeat it. I have always told you that a woman should never part from her husband whilst she can remain with him. This is generally the case; particularly in such a case as yours, that is, in the case of a young, handsome woman of lively imagination, fond of company and conversation, and whose celebrity and superiority has necessarily created many enemies. Depend upon it, if a reconciliation is feasible there can be no doubt of the prudence of it.” In spite of all, to make it up would be the best for Caroline, best for her children—and of course best both for Melbourne himself and for the Whig Party.
When all hope of reconciliation was over, Melbourne concentrated on comforting Caroline and trying to persuade her to keep her head. “I hope you will not take it ill,” he said, “if I implore you to try at least to be calm under these trials. You know that whatever is alleged (if it be alleged) i
s utterly false, and what is false can rarely be made to appear true.” And again, “Keep up your spirits; agitate yourself as little as possible; do not be too anxious about rumours and the opinion of the world.” Alas, such advice, sensible though it was, had no effect on a woman like Caroline. Rather, it roused her exasperated nerves, to an outburst of irritation. To her his whole tone only showed that he was cold and selfish and did not enter into her feelings. How could he expect her to be calm? Nor did she like it when he said that other people agreed with him. What did he mean by talking of her concerns to other people. Was it not shockingly disloyal of him? Gently, and with the patience born of long experience of similar temperamental explosions in his own home, he defended himself. “You describe me very truly when you say that I am always more annoyed that there is a row than sorry for the persons engaged in it. But, after all, you know you can count on me.” Indeed, Caroline was wildly mistaken in thinking that he did not feel for her. On the contrary, as the time for the trial approached, the matter began to prey on his mind till he became actually ill from disgust and apprehension. The idea of any woman he was fond of being involved in the squalor of a public lawsuit on such a subject was almost unbearable to his chivalrous heart. Caroline wrote describing an interview with her lawyers. She had found it odious: they had been so cold-blooded about the affair, so obviously ready under an air of superficial politeness to believe her guilty, and, she cried once more, Melbourne did not realize her sufferings! He was feeling so worked up by now that this time he burst out in reply, “I have received your letter,” he said, “and given such instruction as I trust will be for the best. I do not wonder at the impression made upon you. I knew it would be so, and therefore I was most unwilling to have the interview take place at all. All the attorneys I have ever seen have the same manner: hard, cold, incredulous, distrustful, sarcastic, sneering. They are said to be conversant in the worst part of human nature, and with the most discreditable transactions. They have so many falsehoods told them, that they place confidence in none.
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