The Young Melbourne & Lord M

by The Young Melbourne

  It was even more interesting and delightful when they got on to more recent times and he talked about what he remembered himself, the social and political history of the last fifty years; about George III and his sons, and Mrs. Fitzherbert and Pitt—“a tall, thin man with a red face who drank amazingly”—and Fox and the Hollands and Madame de Stael with her square countenance and “fine full arms which she was fond of showing,” and Byron and the lovely Duchess of Rutland, and the rest of the statesmen and wits and beauties who had made brilliant the distant past of his youth. As the Queen listened, the florid ghosts of the dead world of the Regency rose for a brief hour before her mental eye, to haunt the decorous salons of early Victorian Buckingham Palace. Through the midst of them moved the ghost of the young Melbourne himself. His reminiscences of social life turned often into personal reminiscences; of his childhood and his schooldays at Eton, where he wore his hair long—“How handsome he must have looked!” thought the Queen—of Cambridge, Brocket and Melbourne House. The Queen was inquisitive about everything connected with him, asked him endlessly about his home, his mother, his brothers and sisters. Above all, she was extremely inquisitive about the woman he had loved, his wife. She could not very well ask him about her directly; but she picked up any information she could from others; notably the Duchess of Sutherland, who told her some such strange and shocking stories about Caroline Lamb, as to arouse all her royal indignation on behalf of her hero. “What a dreadful thing that his wife should have embittered his life, which it should have been her pride to render a happy one,” she exclaimed, “. . . he has now the greatest horror of any woman who is in any way eccentric or extraordinary, which shows how very much he must have suffered from such a wife!”

  Indeed he had. An incident which occurred about this time recalls to us how acute his suffering had been. Melbourne’s cousin, who was also Byron’s widow, came to live in Windsor in the first months of 1838, and he went to call on her. They had not met for many years, not, so far as we know, since the anguished period of his married life, with which Byron had been so intimately connected: so that the sight of her brought it all fresh back to his mind. In spite of the fact that Caroline had been dead for years and that Melbourne’s own heart was now absorbed in another object, he was, so Lady Byron noted, throughout the interview, in an uncontrollable state of emotion.

  Melbourne’s conversations with the Queen during their leisure hours were only instructive intermittently and, as it were, by chance. Much of the time, delighted for a blessed instant to forget the cares and boredom of public life, he talked simply to please; allowed his mind to saunter irresponsibly in whatever direction the changing mood of the moment might suggest; modulating at every turn from fact to fancy, the playful to the pensive, the serious to the trivial, from cooking to history, from religion to feminine fashions. Even on this last subject he amazed the Queen by the unexpected extent of his knowledge. “Lord M. was very funny about caps and bonnets, he looked round the table and said, ‘There is an amazing cargo of bonnets and things come from Paris I fancy . . .’ He spoke of Mademoiselle Laure; we laughed very much and asked him how he knew about her; ‘They tell me of her,’ he added, ‘and I fancy she has beautiful things’.” Melbourne’s taste in clothes was fanciful, he told the Queen; he disliked dresses made of shot silk—“like chameleons, it looks so faithless.” Fanciful or not, his opinions on dress inspired as much respect in the Queen as did all his other opinions. “He is so natural and funny and nice about toilette, and has very good taste I think,” she writes. She notes his reaction to any change she might make in her appearance. “Lord M. observed my sleeves, which were very long, with astonishment and said, ‘Amazing sleeves!’ ” She was also interested to hear what he thought of her pets. The grey parrot seems to have pleased him most. One day the Queen found him talking to it alone. “It is a sociable bird,” he explained. About her dogs he was less appreciative: so little that for once she actually felt annoyed with him. “Lord M. said that Islay was a dull dog, which really makes me quite angry, for Islay is such a darling!” and she refused to agree that Dashy had crooked legs. Together they lifted Dashy on to the table and watched him lap up a saucer of tea. “I wonder if lapping is a pleasant sensation,” mused Melbourne. “It is a thing we have never felt.”

  Thus whimsically and gaily their conversations wandered on. Now Melbourne would be telling her of his feelings towards children; how he liked their company if he could talk to them in his own way, but found it a bore when they were brought in to be made much of; now he was admitting that he had never finished Wordsworth’s Excursion—“But I have bought the book,” he said, “it is amazing when you leave a book on the table, how much you know what is in it without reading it;” now describing how he often interviewed people when he was in bed in the morning, because he got up late and thought that they would rather see him in bed than not at all; now he was explaining why he avoided having much to do with artists, “a waspish set of people”; now giving his reason for taking two apples at dessert, even if he did not think he was likely to eat more than one, “I like to have the power of doing so.” Did not he have the power equally when the apples were in the dish, asked the Queen with characteristic and literal simplicity? “Not the full power,” he replied humorously. Or they compared their views on Christian names—“Louisa is a fastidious name,” said Melbourne; or on faces with large features—“I like large features,” he told her—“People with small features and squeeny noses never do anything;” or on the song of birds, which Melbourne thought overrated; “I can never admire the singing of birds. There is no melody in it. It is so shrill. That is all humbug: it is mere poetry.” Unexpectedly, however, he liked the noise of rooks. “The rooks are my delight,” he observed gazing dreamily out of the windows at them as they swooped and hovered and multitudinously cawed amid the yellowing October trees. Was it some Proustian memory of childhood days in the Brocket fields that spoke to him in the sound? Or something romantically poignant and haunting in its wild harshness? For, as always, romantic sentiment mingled strangely in Melbourne with sceptical good sense and, even while he mocked at it, disturbed his heart. The Queen scolded him on one occasion for risking his life by standing under a tree during a thunderstorm. His answer to her sums up both this fundamental duality in his nature, and his ironical awareness of it. “It is a hundred to one that you are not struck,” he said rationally, but then—his mind moving to contemplate the contingency in the light of imagination, “It’s a sublime death!” he added.

  He said the words with a smile; but it might have been with a tear. The heightened key of feeling in which he now lived kept his emotions always close to the surface, so that at the slightest touch they welled over. Easily and often the unbidden tears would fill his eyes; at an act of generosity, a word of gratitude, a tale of bereavement, at the pathos of old age, at the Duke of Wellington’s chivalrous friendliness to an old opponent, at the sight of the Queen taking affectionate farewell of her uncle or her thoughtful kindness to the veterans of Waterloo. For, of course, he was most easily touched if she was involved. When she had a fall from her horse riding in the Park, Melbourne was thrown into an extraordinary agitation. He grew dead-white and “Are you sure you are not hurt?” he asked her again and again, as they rode home, “Are you really not the worse?” Most deeply and significantly was he moved during her Coronation when it came to his turn to go through the ceremony of paying homage. It was indeed, in a very special sense, a sacramental act for him; the eloquent symbol of that tender and sacred relationship which was now the centre of his existence. Beneath the immemorial arches of the Abbey the girl-Queen sat on her throne, her brows surmounted by the great gleaming Crown of State. Melbourne approached to kneel and kiss her hand. His fingers lingered on hers in an involuntary pressure. She returned it; he looked up: she saw his dark eyes shining with tears.

  (2)

  Tears of devotion; tears of joy too! For Melbourne’s feeling for the Queen ha
d released his emotional nature, so long frustrated of proper fulfilment, in such a way as to flood his spirit with a dreamlike happiness unknown to him since his far away youth; and which was all the more intoxicating because it came so unexpectedly and in the evening of his life, many years after he must have given up hoping for anything of the kind.

  Alas! It did not remain long unclouded. It could not. For it depended on circumstances of their nature transitory. The Queen was growing more confident every month: as she gained confidence, she revealed herself more freely. With the result that Melbourne began to discover that she could be a source of anxiety as well as pleasure. She had the defects of her qualities. Feminine devotedness went along with feminine prejudice, regal dignity with regal imperiousness, moral strictness with intolerance, a child’s simplicity with a child’s unreasonableness. Further, force of character together with violence of feeling disposed her to be on occasion self-willed and headstrong. Her accession to the Throne strengthened these tendencies in her. It is hard not to grow a little headstrong and imperious if you are treated by everyone you meet as the most important person alive. Altogether by the summer of 1838 the Queen’s character was beginning to display itself in a manner incompatible with an atmosphere of perfect ease and serenity.

  Her change of temper was visible in her appearance: she was looking bolder and more discontented people said. It was also apparent in her growing sense of what was due to her royal position. The etiquette of the Court, fairly slack at the start of her reign, was now tightened up by the Queen’s especial desire. If anyone deviated from it, even in some detail, she noticed it at once and signified her displeasure by a sharp, irate glance. What did the Duchess of Cambridge mean, she asked angrily, by asking her to her ball and then not coming down to meet her at the door? She was indignant, too, with anyone who showed signs of trying to thwart or manage her. Her Uncle Leopold had gone on writing to her about politics. Now he was dismayed to find that his careful, tactful, considered advice met, as often as not, with a decided snub from the Queen. More sharply did she snub her mother. “I told Lord Melbourne,” she writes, “that I had carried my point with Mama about coming up to my room without asking. She was angry at first. I had to remind her who I was!” Melbourne was a little alarmed by so formidable a display of royal character. “Quite right,” he replied nervously. “But it is very disagreeable doing so.” The triumphant tone in which the Queen relates the incident suggests that she had not found it so disagreeable. On another occasion Melbourne had difficulty in persuading her from formally rebuking the Duchess of Sutherland for asking Conroy to her house. He often found himself trying to curb her. “For God’s sake don’t do that Ma’am!” people would hear him saying in agitated tones. Sometimes she obeyed him: often she did not. Indeed he sometimes incurred her displeasure himself. Not that she liked him less. But her very affection for him made her more and more exacting in her demands on his time and attention. She hated him to be away from her. “He ought to be near me, it is his place,” she wrote in her diary. She commanded him—he was indeed willing enough to obey her in this—to join her four or five minutes after she left the dinner table, instead of lingering for half-an-hour’s relaxation over the port wine; she scolded him for being late in his visits; if he failed to come owing to the pressure of public work, she was seriously annoyed. One evening he excused himself for not having looked in at a party at Buckingham Palace because he had been working till eleven o’clock and thought it too late. The Queen did not accept this as a reasonable excuse. “He could have come perfectly well,” she said. The harassed Melbourne tried to make up for such lapses by patient reasonable letters of apologetic explanation. “Lord Melbourne presents his humble duty to Your Majesty, and cannot express how deeply concerned he is to find himself restrained from obeying Your Majesty’s commands, and repairing without delay to Brighton. Both his duty and his inclination would prompt him to do this without a moment’s delay, if he did not find it incumbent upon him to represent to Your Majesty the very important circumstances which require his presence for two or three days longer in London. The Session of Parliament approaches; the questions which are to be considered and prepared are of the most appalling magnitude, and of the greatest difficulty. Many of Your Majesty’s servants, who fill the most important offices, are compelled by domestic calamity to be absent, and it is absolutely necessary that there should be some general superintendence of the measures to be proposed, and some consideration of the arrangements to be made. Lord Melbourne assures Your Majesty that he would not delay in London if he did not feel it to be absolutely necessary to Your Majesty’s service . . .”

  Indeed, he could not find it in his heart to feel annoyed with her even for a moment. It was her stomach, he told her comfortingly, which made her feel out of temper—that and the strain of the life she was living, so unnatural for a young girl. She hoped he was right. Certainly she did feel nervous, as never before. It was this, she told him, that made her need him so much; this was why she was so unreasonably cross if he did not come. “I am so very sorry,” he replied. “I will take care and come another time.” Did she not worry him dreadfully, she would ask him? “Oh no, never!” he would hasten to assure her with earnest, affectionate kindness. As a matter of fact, she worried him a good deal: and, what mattered more, he was beginning to be a little frightened of her. Rightly; that extraordinary and tameless force of personality which was going to make her a great Queen of England was something Melbourne could not in the long run control. Already the ignorant eighteen-year-old girl was gaining the upper hand over the elderly statesman, in spite of all his charm and diplomatic skill and the prestige of his experience. She might listen to him and love him: but once she had made up her mind to do something, she did it—whether he wanted her to or not.

  This became dramatically apparent in the early months of 1839. The Duchess of Kent had a Maid of Honour called Lady Flora Hastings. The Queen had never liked her, partly for the simple reason that she was her mother’s Maid of Honour, and still more because she knew her to be an intimate friend of Conroy’s. So intimate indeed that at this very time there were some scandalous and light-hearted jokes going round the Court, arising from the fact that the two had travelled down together from Scotland in the same carriage. Whether the Queen had heard these jokes is unknown. But it is likely that she had for, in February, she and Baroness Lehzen were interested to notice that Lady Flora’s figure was changing shape: and immediately their minds leaped forward to suspect a very discreditable cause for this phenomenon. When the Queen discovered that these suspicions were shared both by two of the Court ladies and by the Court physician, Sir James Clarke, she was convinced they were justified. “We have no doubt that she is—to use the plain words—with child!” she wrote in her diary in a blaze of righteous wrath: “the horrid cause of all this is the monster and demon incarnate, whose name I forbear to mention.” With the Queen, to feel was to act. Such goings on must not be condoned: something must be done. Melbourne was consulted as to what it should be. As might have been expected, he recommended doing nothing at all. Whether Lady Flora was guilty or not—and Melbourne had no special reason for believing her innocent—the situation was clearly an extremely awkward one: and it would be better to wait and see what happened. But the Queen and her ladies were in far too militant a mood to be checked in this manner. The sight of Lady Flora flaunting it shamelessly about the Court in a condition more interesting than reputable was more than they could bear. “Mama is here with her amiable and virtuous lady!” the Queen wrote in her diary with bitter sarcasm after an evening party at the Palace. Accounts are somewhat confused as to what happened next, but the upshot was that Lady Flora was reluctantly forced to submit to a medical examination by Clarke and another doctor. The examination proved that the alteration in her figure was due to other causes and her character was completely exonerated.

  Events, however, did not end here. By this time the story had reached the ears of Lady Flor
a’s brother, Lord Hastings, who, not unnaturally, was furious at the insulting way his sister had been treated. Supported by his mother, the Dowager Lady Hastings, he besieged Melbourne with a demand for redress. The scandal, he said, must be traced back to its source and its author exposed. Meanwhile, Clarke should be dismissed. Melbourne was in a very uncomfortable position. As a just and generous man he could not but understand Lord Hastings’s anger on his injured sister’s behalf. On the other hand, he knew that closer investigation might well disclose that a prime instigator of the whole proceedings had been the Queen herself. To save her from annoyance and to maintain the good reputation of the Crown, he was prepared to sacrifice Lady Flora or anyone else. He therefore wrote off to the Hastings family in a curt, snubbing tone, saying that the incident was closed and that there could be no question of opening it again. Beside himself with frustrated rage, Lord Hastings resolved to make the whole matter public and sent the correspondence to the newspaper. The fat was now in the fire. The more scurrilous journals made the most of the story; disaffected politicians did all they could to make the scandal resound more loudly; and a wave of public indignation surged up in favour of Lady Flora. It was not until the Duke of Wellington intervened to lend all the weight of his venerable reputation to the cause of pacification that the outcry began to die down. But irretrievable harm had been done. Though the Queen’s full responsibility in the matter was not known, yet she had been enough implicated to get a bad name. In the space of a week or two, her early popularity had vanished.