He was her social as well as her political tutor. The Queen felt herself in need of one. Both in conversation and in letters she asked his advice about every detail of her social life. Who should she ask to meet Sir Robert Peel? Was the Duke of Sussex likely to get on with Lord and Lady Cowley? Was she to grant Lord Amelius Beauclerk’s request that the aides-de-camps be permitted to wear sashes with their court uniforms? She could not have found anyone who could help her better than Melbourne in solving these thorny problems. Natural talent assisted by a life-time of experience had made him an expert authority on English aristocratic and fashionable life; its traditions and factions and cliques and customs. Moreover, he was prepared to put the whole of his knowledge at her disposal. In the midst of all his other activities he always found time to give full answers to her queries. Lord and Lady Lansdowne, he said, would be very suitable people to meet Sir Robert Peel, but not Lord and Lady Cowley to meet the Duke of Sussex—he disliked Tories too much. As for Lord Amelius and his sash, Melbourne swept the request aside. “It was always refused by the old King as absurd and ridiculous; as it is—particularly considering Lord Amelius’ figure,” he remarked tartly. Sometimes Melbourne proffered advice on his own initiative. The Russian Ambassador, he writes, will be offended if he is not asked to dinner soon, and an official called Skinner may be hurt if his wife does not receive an invitation—“she is, Lord Melbourne understands, a vulgar woman, but it may be as well to keep him in a good humour.”
The Queen was more seriously concerned about her duties as guardian of social morality. Anxiously she asked Melbourne what plays were suitable for her to see, and whether she should allow Mrs. Gore, the fashionable novelist, to dedicate a book to her; and, more generally, should she receive people with bad moral characters at Court. Melbourne was equally fitted to advise her on these subjects. For though easygoing by nature, he had learned by bitter personal experience how foolish it was to disregard the opinion of the world and how important to keep up the right kind of appearance. His advice shows that he had always kept two objects in mind. On the one hand, the Queen should not appear so censorious as to get herself disliked. On the other, she must do nothing that might compromise the dignity of the Crown or tarnish her reputation for virtue. As a matter of fact, there was not much danger of this. Instinctively she leaned to the strict side. On several occasions we are presented with the unusual spectacle of an old gentleman recommending a young lady not to be quite so nervous of doing something improper. The Queen need not fear, Melbourne said, that Sheridan Knowles’ plays were too shocking for her to see, not even one called The Love Chase. On the more general question, he thought anyone should be permitted to go to Court who had not been proved guilty of immorality in a law court; “It is better to go according to what has been determined by a Court of Justice and, if there was nothing against them there, to receive and not enquire what their early lives have been.” On the whole, however, he clearly thought her strictness was a fault on the right side. He will have a look at Mrs. Gore’s book, he tells her, for “Your Majesty is always right to be cautious in such matters.” And he was extremely pleased when she told him she thought that it would be improper for her to dance the waltz. “I think you are quite right,” he said eagerly, “it is quite right!” Indeed, he took some steps of his own to stiffen Court etiquette. The maids of honour complained that Lord Melbourne would not allow them to walk unchaperoned on the terrace of Windsor for fear of making a bad impression on the populace watching them from below, and though Lady Holland was one of his oldest friends, he desired her not to come to Court, as he feared that the presence there of a divorcée, however distinguished and elderly, might be bad for the Queen’s good name.
As the Queen and he got to know each other better, her reserve began gradually to thaw, and she found herself consulting him about intimate and private difficulties. She found the complexities of religious dogma very bewildering. Did Lord Melbourne think this mattered? For herself she felt that one could get oneself inextricably puzzled about such questions and thought it wrong to let this happen. Melbourne agreed: “It is best to believe what is in the Scriptures without considering what Christ’s nature was. For that is not comprehensible; the Trinity is not comprehensible.” The Queen was relieved. “This is all just as I feel . . . Lord M’s feeling is so right, just and enlightened.” She felt all the more wholeheartedly comforted because Melbourne, whatever his own doubts, never showed any sign of wishing to weaken her faith. On the contrary he told her that a good Christian did not allow himself to brood on insoluble problems, such, for instance, as how was the existence of evil to be reconciled with the idea of a good and omnipotent God. Melbourne had grown into a very different man from the clever and iconoclastic youth who had taken an impish pleasure in undermining Caroline’s beliefs during the first years of his marriage. It was not only that he would now have felt it cruel to disillusion the Queen, but also that his love for her stirred the depths of his heart and imagination in such a way as to set vibrating within him that mystical strain that no doubts could ever completely eradicate. We find him reminding her to remember to make her private devotions before her Coronation: and, at one of their early interviews, he read earnestly aloud to her a passage of scripture about the young Solomon, which he thought might bring home to her mind the spiritual significance of her royal position: “And now, O Lord my God, thou hast made thy servant king instead of David my father; and I am but a little child: I know not how to go out or come in. And thy servant is in the midst of thy people which thou hast chosen, a great people, that cannot be numbered nor counted for multitude. Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this thy so great people?”
The ancient solemn words roused an echo in the Queen’s heart. Strong character though she was, there were moments when her confidence failed her at the thought of the magnitude of her responsibilities. Sometimes she felt utterly unfit for her station, she told Melbourne. “Never think that,” he answered reassuringly. “Try to do your best and leave the rest to fate . . . it never does when people think of what they ought to do and of what they do do.”
She consulted him about other personal problems too. Her shyness for instance: she felt so nervous in company, she confided to him, and did not know what to say to people. Melbourne said that the longer one stood thinking, the worse it was. Better to say something commonplace and foolish than nothing at all! He was equally understanding about her difficulties with her mother. These had not ceased with her accession. The Duchess of Kent, indeed, soon lost any hope she may ever have entertained of exercising political influence over her daughter. The Queen’s treatment of her made it too painfully clear that such hopes were vain. The Duchess still remained at Court for appearances sake: but she was assigned apartments far away from the Queen’s; mother and daughter met, as a rule, only in public, at dinner or in the drawing-room; if the Duchess wanted to see her alone she had first to send a message requesting an interview. All these arrangements showed the Queen’s prudence. But the Duchess not unnaturally felt herself deeply injured by them. Her ample bosom seethed with wounded pride, disappointed ambition and furious jealousy of the two people, Melbourne and Lehzen, whom she considered responsible for her exclusion. And since, unlike her daughter, she was not self-controlled, these emotions found vent in word and action. To have the prestige of her position, if not its power, might be some consolation. She therefore wrote a letter, addressed for some confused reason of her own to the Speaker of the House of Commons, demanding to be given the rank and precedence of the Queen Mother. In time this request reached the Queen who refused it point blank. “It would do my mother no good,” she said coldly, “and offend my aunts.” The Duchess also relieved her outraged feelings when she was in her daughter’s company by saying offensive things to her, disguised as words of warning and advice. One evening she would tell her she thought she had got into the habit of
drinking too much wine; on another that she was letting down her dignity by going so often to the theatre. “Mama is always plaguing me,” exclaimed the Queen irritably. Meanwhile, the Duchess proclaimed her wrongs to anyone who would listen to her. “There is no future for me, I no longer count for anything,” she lamented frantically to Princess Lieven. “For eighteen years this child has been the sole object of my life, and now she is taken from me.” Her friends joined their voices to hers. Conroy, in particular, went round London announcing that the Queen had broken her mother’s heart by her cruelty. These remarks were repeated to the Queen and added yet further to her annoyance. It was not made less by the news that the Duchess had, by irresponsibly overspending, got herself into financial difficulties which might involve her in a lawsuit extremely discreditable to the reputation of the royal family. The Queen poured this, and the rest of the long tale of her mother’s misdoings, into Melbourne’s ears, beseeching his advice and clamouring for his sympathy.
He found it was easy to give. He had already had a lot of trouble with the Duchess himself. It had begun during William IV’s reign. Her political intrigues were a nuisance to him, so was her extravagance. The Duchess never seemed to have enough money for her needs and had no scruple in asking for more. She also demanded furniture for her house and jobs and honours for her friends, especially, of course, for Conroy. When she was not bothering Melbourne to do something for her, she was quarrelling with him. William IV she looked on as her active enemy, and Melbourne, as his Prime Minister, came in for a share of her hostility. If she was peculiarly annoyed with her brother-in-law she would refuse to receive communications from Melbourne on the ground that he, too, must be working against her. Melbourne did not allow himself to be moved by her goings on. Rows between members of the royal family in his view were as undesirable as were every other sort of row. He pursued his usual policy of pacification and strove both to bring the Duchess on to better terms with the King, and to keep on good terms with her himself. When William IV proposed forcibly removing the Princess from the care of her rebellious mother, Melbourne persuaded him to give up the scheme. And he discouraged the King from proposing any suitor for the Princess who was likely to be displeasing to the Duchess. Himself, he presented a front of urbane courtesy to her attacks and caprices and, though he generally found himself compelled to refuse her requests, tried to soften his refusals by presenting them agreeably clothed in a cloud of respectful compliment. On one occasion, for example, we find the Duchess asking that Conroy should be given a job at the Treasury. Melbourne answered that he feared Conroy had not sufficient experience, but added, “I lament this. But from my knowledge of your Highness’s exalted character and patriotic feelings I cannot but anticipate with some confidence that your Royal Highness will appreciate the motives by which I have been actuated.” It is unlikely that he felt quite so confident as he professed himself. Finally, during the last months of William IV’s life, the Duchess increased his poor opinion of her by her intrigues to get herself appointed Regent. Ineffectively she tried to deceive him into thinking that it was the Princess’s wish that this should be done.
Such experience disposed him to listen sympathetically to the Queen’s complaints. He began to think that he had been mistaken, he told her, in persuading William IV not to remove her from the Duchess’s protection. Indeed he did not try to disguise his opinion of her mother from the Queen. So far from objecting to this, the Queen seems to have found it an exhilarating relief. Together they discussed the Duchess’s defects with zest and a startling candour. “Talked of my dislike of Mama,” runs one entry. “Lord M. said that she was a liar and a hypocrite.” “I never saw so foolish a woman,” said Melbourne on another occasion; “Which,” comments the Queen, “is very true, and we both laughed!” Melbourne also pointed out that the Duchess felt no shame in changing her mind and contradicting one day what she had said another. “This is, alas, too true, and a sad reality it is!” noted the Queen in a tone of melancholy satisfaction. Melbourne agreed that it would be a great mistake for the Duchess to be involved in a lawsuit; but he did not think that this would stop her embarking on it or appearing in court to give evidence. For as he remarked, “Ladies are very fond of law and of appearing in courts of justice and before magistrates.” As for her pretensions to higher rank and precedence, he thought them, he said, a parcel of nonsense. The Queen told him that her mother publicly signalized the varying degrees of favour in which she held the Baroness Lehzen by sometimes bowing to her and sometimes refusing to do so. “As if her doing so or not were such a great thing!” observed Melbourne with amusement. “It is too absurd!”
All the same, he always worked to improve relations between mother and daughter. The Duchess, he used to say, was not primarily to blame for her worst indiscretions. Always they could be traced back to Conroy’s influence. Moreover, he said that it would make a very bad impression on the public if the Queen was known to be openly at war with her mother. He urged her, however much she might be provoked, to behave to her with studious civility. And if she did shows signs of softening and made a friendly gesture to the Duchess—sent her a special invitation to a party or dinner—Melbourne hastened to tell her how much it pleased him.
These gestures occurred rarely. Even Melbourne could not persuade the Queen habitually to act so much against the grain of her feeling. But his talks with her about her mother, the sympathetic understanding he showed over this long-hidden and central trouble of her life, bound her to him with an added closeness. “As for the confidence of the Crown,” she exclaims, “God knows! No Minister, no friend EVER possessed it so entirely as this truly excellent Lord Melbourne possesses mine!”
Melbourne’s lessons in statesmanship and in personal and social behaviour took place mainly during his official morning visits. At other times the Queen and he talked for pleasure and about every sort of subject. Even then Melbourne was often educating her, though not deliberately. He discoursed to her about literature. The authors he singled out for special mention throw a revealing light on his own taste. As might have been expected, he admired Dr. Johnson’s works. “They have deep feeling,” he said, “and deep knowledge of human nature.” Among poets he put Racine first for beauty of taste and sentiment. It was characteristic of the classic and cosmopolitan nature of Whig culture that Melbourne, unlike the Victorians who followed him, could appreciate Racine. This same Augustan purity of taste qualified his admiration of Shakespeare, though he enjoyed him so intensely. Hamlet was one of the finest of Shakespeare’s plays, he told the Queen, but he thought its end awkward and horrid. As for King Lear, “I have always thought Lear a foolish old man,” said Lord M.
They talked about the other arts as well. The Queen was fond of music, Melbourne not so much so. He had never cultivated a taste for it when he was young, he said regretfully. However, she noticed that he listened to her own singing with absorbed attention—this perhaps was evidence of his interest in her rather than his interest in music—and that he venerated Mozart. When the Queen said that she found the music of Don Giovanni old-fashioned, Melbourne clasped his hands and cast up his eyes in astonishment. Indeed he had far too much native aesthetic sensibility not to realize what music could mean to people, even if he did not respond to it intensely himself. “She has not much feeling for the beautiful,” he remarked to the Queen about some lady of their acquaintance, “she praises the opera without feeling.” He was more at home with pictures. In harmony with his liking for Racine and Mozart, he preferred the classic and ideal nobility of the High Renaissance Italian artists to the realism of Flanders. It did not surprise him that the Italians should never tire of painting the Holy Family. “After all,” he said, “a woman and child is the most beautiful subject one could have.”
Foreign nations, their characters and habits, were another subject of their talks. The Queen picked up some curious information from Melbourne about them. The fact that the Indians burned their widows, for instance—“not a
good custom,” Melbourne said: and he explained that the natives in New Zealand, though a fine race, had one unfortunate fault. “They eat men; and they say it is impossible to break them of it; they say it is the best thing!” The Queen was a little worried because Melbourne laughed so much at the Germans, to whom she felt bound by the tie of kinship. She told him she thought he disliked them. Laughing more than ever, he denied it. “I have a great opinion of their talents, but not of their beauty,” he explained. Melbourne’s favourite theme of instruction, however, was history. Here it was that he blended useful information and entertainment most brilliantly. He conveyed to her easily and tersely the essential facts she ought to know about the Conquest of Canada or the Civil War, or whatever other famous events came up in the conversation, and made them live for her by the vivid way he described the characters involved. His view of these was characteristic. As always, he spoke up for Henry VIII; “those women bothered him so,” he remarked surprisingly when speaking of Henry VIII’s treatment of his wives. But he condemned the cruelty of Edward III; and deplored religious bigotry, alike in Protestant Edward VI, Popish Mary and the rationalist Spanish statesmen who had lately suppressed the monasteries and turned the monks out to earn their living on the land: “To those accustomed to pass their lives in prayer, to be told to dig is hard,” Melbourne observed with an ironical common-sense. Among foreign statesmen he praised the moderate Sully, but spoke disapprovingly of Richelieu and Mazarin: “Shocking fellows!” said Melbourne. He also made the past alive by his knowledge of the manners of past periods. Conditions at the Court of Queen Elizabeth were so primitive, he related, that gentlemen and Maids of Honour slept in the same room only divided from each other by a partition that did not reach the ceiling. The Queen was much amused to hear that the Maids of Honour petitioned that it should be made higher in order to stop the gentlemen climbing up and looking over. “It was a very right feeling of the Maids of Honour!” said Melbourne with his usual laugh. One evening he looked through a volume of Lodge’s portraits with her. These gave him an opportunity of telling her about Raleigh and Hobbes, and Leibniz, and Addison, and other eminent persons. The Queen was enthralled. “I wish I had time to write down all the clever observations about all. It is quite a delight for me to hear him speak about these things; he has such stores of knowledge; such a wonderful memory; he knows about everybody and everything; who they were, and what they did; and he imparts his knowledge in such a kind and agreeable manner; it does me a world of good; and his conversations always improve one greatly.”
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