Later historians have not always agreed with him. Melbourne has come in for a good deal of scolding from them because he did not put up a stronger fight for Durham and his ordinance. These strictures are unjustified. Melbourne must indeed be blamed for sending out Durham in the first place. It is not right to appoint a man you distrust to an important public job abroad just because it will ease the political situation at home to get him out of the way. But once the appointment was made Melbourne could not be expected to behave otherwise than he did. After all he did not share Durham’s grandiloquent imperial dreams: so far as we know, Durham had never deigned to expound them to him. On the other hand, he thought that to fight to the death for Durham would almost certainly mean the fall of the Government. Melbourne’s devotion to the Queen and his fear of civil strife united to convince him that his first duty was to keep the Government in. Moreover, as he saw it, Durham had forfeited all claim to extraordinary support from his colleagues by sinning deliberately and repeatedly against what Melbourne had all his life considered the first obligation of a statesman; personal loyalty to his party, his leader; and, in this instance, to his Sovereign as well. It was not from want of warning either. Melbourne had been writing to Durham for months telling him how mistakenly he thought he was behaving: and Durham had paid no attention whatever. Why then should Melbourne imperil the existence of the Government for Durham’s sake? Since he was responsible for his appointment he was prepared to make a speech in the House of Lords saying what he truthfully could in his defence, but after that he would act as seemed best for his Government as a whole. Privately he cursed himself for sending Durham. “The fact is,” he said, “that his mission is the greatest scrape and the greatest blunder we have committed.”
It certainly weakened the little confidence people still had in the Whigs. Up till the middle of 1838 Melbourne had been able to feel fairly cheerful about their position. He even began to wonder if the Government might not be able to totter along indefinitely, as it had under William IV. No doubt it was a bore if they had not a comfortable majority: but they must make the best of it. “Equality of Parties makes government doubtful and difficult,” he said soothingly to John Russell in August, “but it cannot be helped. It is a contingency that may happen, and has happened.” Two months later he was not feeling so sanguine. “I am sure that there are some times of trouble approaching for which Your Majesty must hold yourself prepared,” he wrote to the Queen; “Your Majesty is too well acquainted with the nature of human affairs not to be aware that they cannot very long go on as quietly as they have gone for the last sixteen months.” Indeed, with the coming of autumn things had begun to take a turn for the worse. All the forces making for the downfall of the Government were getting stronger. The Tories were growing more popular, the Radicals more recalcitrant, the Irish more uncertain-tempered, while the members of the Cabinet squabbled more than ever. Sometimes it was about personalities. Glenelg did something stupid, and then Howick and John Russell began saying they would resign if Melbourne did not get rid of him at once. Melbourne, unwilling to be bullied, refused, and the squabbles sputtered on till in February, 1839, Glenelg resigned of his own accord. More often the quarrels were about policy. In order to win back the confidence of the Radicals, somebody proposed a progressive sounding measure; a Bill for educational reform, for instance, or for introducing the secret ballot. Melbourne opposed both, partly because he was always inclined to oppose changes, and partly because he wanted to do nothing that would exacerbate the Tories. As a matter of fact he had always been against educational reform. About the ballot his record had not been so consistent. In principle he was against it. But it was not a matter which he cared much about, and a year or two before he had toyed with the idea of adopting it in order to please the Radicals: at any rate it might be made an open question, on which ministers could vote as they pleased. This device, as a way of avoiding Cabinet quarrels, appealed to Melbourne. In 1839 he came out definitely against the ballot. Equally he resisted a movement inspired by the Evangelicals to enforce the suppression of the slave trade more rigorously. No doubt it was still carried on to some extent but he did not see how this could be helped. “It is impossible,” he remarked in a spirit of chilling realism, “not to feel and to expect that religion, morality, law, eloquence, cruisers, will all be ineffectual when opposed to a profit of a cent per cent and more.”
The end of 1838 was disturbed by the first mutterings of a more formidable agitation. The price of food had recently gone up with the result that the working class were restive and discontented as they had not been for several years. Liberal-minded people now seized on this discontent as a reason to demand a reform which they had long desired; the repeal, or at any rate the modification, of the laws which controlled the price of corn. The more advanced members of the Cabinet agreed with them. Not so Melbourne: he could hardly be expected to, for the repeal of the Corn Laws involved a change almost as revolutionary as the Reform Bill itself. Indeed, it was its economic counterpart. It meant that the landed gentry of England would lose that economic predominance on which their political influence ultimately rested. The country would be run rather in the interest of the new urban and manufacturing community which was drawn predominantly from the middle and lower classes. For this reason Melbourne, wholly a man of the old régime, was bound to dislike it. “I doubt whether property or the institutions of the country can stand it,” he said. Still more was he against it just because it was a major issue and was, therefore, bound to involve a major conflict. Never, so long as he could help it, was the country to be disturbed by a row like the row over the Reform Bill. “Depend upon it,” he said sharply to John Russell, “any advantage that can be gained is not worth the danger and evil of the struggle, by which alone it can be carried . . . We shall only carry it by the same means as we carried the Reform Bill, and I am not for being the instrument or amongst the instruments of another similar performance!” He employed his usual stonewalling tactics; objected, temporized, procrastinated. His colleagues were not sufficiently united on the question to defeat him. For the moment it too was dropped. Meanwhile he sought to soothe the Corn Law reformers of the country in any way he could; scotched a movement from the Right to check the development of the Trades Union movement, and instructed ministers to use extreme tact in replying to anti-Corn Law propaganda. He says to one who showed him the speech he was going to make on the subject, “I should not consider it very conciliatory. It is reproval and condemnation, and there is in it a good deal of sarcasm. The middle and lower orders are very touchy and, above all things, hate to be sneered at.” For all that his political ideas were old-fashioned, Melbourne’s perception of his countrymen’s characteristic weaknesses was as acute and as up to date as ever.
For the time being then, Melbourne had managed to get his way and keep going. But the effort of doing so made the early months of 1839 a dreadfully wearing and anxious time for him, especially as these political difficulties coincided with the trouble about Lady Flora Hastings. He was less able to stand the strain too, because for the last month he had not been at all well. Physically old before his time, his health had begun to deteriorate. “I am listless and ill and unable to do anything, or think—which does not suit the time,” he said to Lady Holland. He could not sleep, he could not digest easily. His health reacted on his spirits. To his dismay he found that natural buoyancy which had carried him through so much trouble beginning to desert him. Melbourne, who for so long had been the most cheerful member of the Government, was now noticeably the most depressed. “I do not know what the deuce is the matter with me!” he sighed to the Queen.
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In the ordinary course of things all this should have made him want to go out of office. In fact he did consider it. He was always talking about Charles V and Diocletian and other eminent persons who had chosen to retire from places of power to enjoy the peaceful pleasures of private life. After all, he had never been very enthusiastic about being
Prime Minister. He did not like work, and he did not believe in power. Indeed, he would have been thankful to go—had it not been for the Queen. He hated parting from her and he hated giving her pain by doing so. For the very idea of losing him filled her with a sort of panic. It was not just that she minded being deprived of his company. She was convinced that without him she would be plunged back into the dreadful situation in which she had lived before she came to the Throne; alone in a dangerous universe without a soul she could consult and surrounded by secret enemies. The political situation presented itself to her in simple terms. On the one side was a great and good man, Lord Melbourne, who was always right about everything; on the other, a loathsome mixture of sinister Tories, revolutionary Radicals and weak treacherous Whigs. In all the Government quarrels she was his passionate partizan. How could creatures like Howick and John Russell dare to question the will of their noble leader? Melbourne listened to her, soothed her, assured her that he would stay in while it was humanly possible. But he cannot have thought this would be for much longer. In fact his downfall did come in May, 1839. Trouble had arisen in Jamaica in consequence of the emancipation of the slaves there. Some Radicals thought the Government so feeble and illiberal in the matter that they refused to support them, with the result that the Government only avoided being beaten in the House of Commons by five votes. This was the smallest majority it had ever had: clearly its position had deteriorated to a point on which it could no longer deceive itself into thinking that it possessed the confidence of the country sufficiently to continue as its official leaders. Even Melbourne recognized it was time to go out of office.
He had reckoned without the Queen, however. On 7th May she got a letter from him announcing his resignation in terms whose restrained formality could not conceal the passionate regret that filled his heart. “Lord Melbourne is certain that Your Majesty will not deem him too presuming if he expresses his fear that this decision will be both painful and embarrassing to Your Majesty, but Your Majesty will meet this crisis with that firmness which belongs to your character, and with that rectitude and sincerity which will carry Your Majesty through all difficulties. It will also be greatly painful for Lord Melbourne to quit the service of a Mistress who has treated him with such unvarying kindness and unlimited confidence, but in whatever station he may be placed he will always feel the deepest anxiety for Your Majesty’s interests and happiness and will do the utmost in his power to promote and secure them.” A few hours later he came to say good-bye. The interview was extremely distressing. It was a moment before they could trust themselves to speak. Overcome with emotion the Queen kept his hand clasped in hers. Then, “You will not forsake me?” she sobbed out at last. Melbourne, his eyes brimming with tears, gave her a long, pitying, loving look. “Oh no,” he replied. Within a few minutes she was in such floods of tears that for the time being all he could do was to speak any words of sympathy that occurred to him and leave her to collect herself, returning later in the day in order to discuss details of her future. In the interim he wrote recommending her to send for the Duke of Wellington and, if he refused office, to accept Sir Robert Peel instead. He added that he feared he must give up dining with her while negotiations were proceeding lest she should be suspected of intriguing against her new ministers. “Lord Melbourne,” he ended, “felt his attendance upon Your Majesty to be at once the greatest honour and pleasure of his life, and Your Majesty may believe that he will most severely and deeply feel the change.” The Duke of Wellington arrived the next day and, as Melbourne expected, recommended that the Queen should send for Peel. Peel came the same afternoon. He made a bad impression. A stiff, male, professional person, ill at ease in the company alike of royalty and of young girls, he gazed awkwardly at the ground, and replied to the Queen’s questions with cold formality. “Oh!” wrote the Queen, “how different, how dreadfully different to that frank, open, natural and most kind warm manner of Lord Melbourne!” Nor were his words more reassuring than his manner. At the close of the interview he suggested that the Queen should change some of the appointments in the Royal Household in order to show her confidence in the new Government. This stirred her besetting fear. Was he meaning to set spies upon her? She demurred. Peel took his leave. The Queen wrote off to Melbourne describing what had happened and asking his advice. Melbourne read what she said about the Household appointments with anxious feelings. His sole aim was to make things easy for her: and indeed, for this very reason, he had already told her that a new Government should not mean a complete change in her Household; her Ladies at any rate would most likely be left alone. She need not be frightened lest she should be left without any old friends. But equally he did not want her to get on the wrong side of her new ministers by making demands on them which they might think unreasonable. Accordingly, he wrote her a long letter saying that though he thought her in the right about her Household, it was not a matter of the first importance; she had better compromise over it rather than risk an open break with Peel. He was all the more anxious to avoid this because of his old fear of political impasse. If a hitch occurred which made it impossible for either of the great Parties to form a Government, then a situation might be created in which, for want of an alternative, a Radical revolutionary movement might sweep the country and gain control. Meanwhile, in the last part of his letter he did his best to bring round the Queen to a more favourable view of Peel. Though he did not care for him personally, he knew it was vital the Queen should learn to get on with him as, sometime or other, he was almost certain to become her First Minister. Melbourne had tried to bring them together before now. Once at a royal party he had vainly tried to persuade Peel to come up and talk to her. Now he told her, “Lord Melbourne earnestly entreats Your Majesty not to suffer yourself to be affected by any faultiness of manner which you may observe. Depend upon it, there is no personal hostility to Lord Melbourne nor any bitter feelings against him. Sir Robert is the most cautious and reserved of mankind. Nobody seems to Lord Melbourne to know him, but he is not therefore deceitful or dishonest. Many a very false man has a very open sincere manner, and vice versa . . .” The Queen wrote back thanking him warmly for his letter, saying that he was a father to her and that she would follow his advice in every respect.
She may have meant to; but in fact she did nothing of the kind. As over Lady Flora, she had got the bit between her teeth. When Peel arrived the next morning, trouble broke out at once. It was over the question of the Court Ladies. The Queen said that she was willing that the male members of her Court should be changed, but not the ladies. Peel was taken aback. The Court Ladies were all married to Whigs. As the head of a minority Government, he felt, not unnaturally, that he could not afford to take the risk of having the Court against him. If the Queen stuck to her point, he said, he was not at all sure he could take office; he must talk the matter over with the Duke of Wellington. His words had an electrifying affect upon the Queen. Who was he to think he could bully the ruler of England in this fashion! The wrath of outraged majesty rose to reinforce the will to resist already implanted in her by her fear of spies. Nor was this all. As she listened to his chilly protests an unexpected gleam of hope flashed through her mind. If Sir Robert Peel refused to take office, why then, Lord Melbourne might come back! Afire with mingled fury and exultation, she rushed to the writing table to pour forth to him an account of her interview with Peel. So beside herself was she that, forgetful alike of royal etiquette and of the rules of English composition, she burst out suddenly after a line or two from the third into the first person. “The Queen writes one line to prepare Lord Melbourne for what may happen in a very few hours. Sir Robert Peel has behaved very ill, and has insisted on my giving up my Ladies, to which I replied that I never would consent, and I never saw a man so frightened. He said he must go to the Duke of Wellington and consult with him, when both would return, and he said this must suspend all further proceedings, and he asked whether I should be ready to receive a decision, which I said I should; he was qui
te perturbed—but this is infamous. I said, besides many other things, that if he or the Duke of Wellington had been at the head of the Government when I came to the Throne, perhaps there might have been a few more Tory Ladies, but that then if you had come into Office you would never have dreamt of changing them. I was calm but very decided, and I think you would have been pleased to see my composure and great firmness; the Queen of England will not submit to such trickery. Keep yourself in readiness, for you may soon be wanted.”
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