The Young Melbourne & Lord M

by The Young Melbourne

  The Queen’s political reputation was another worry to him. The events of May had given him a fright, for they revealed what an unbridled partizan she was. Since the Tories might come in at any time, it was vital that she should be ready to accept them in a spirit of good will. It would never do for her to be thought of as a Whig Queen. Rather late in the day, therefore, Melbourne set to work to implant in her the impartial and non-party point of view appropriate to a constitutional monarch. He also spent a good deal of time trying to make her like the Tories better, more especially Peel himself. Peel, he said, was reported to speak very highly of her; and his faults of manner were due to awkwardness and inexperience. “You must remember that he is a man not accustomed to talk to Kings . . . it is not like me; I have been brought up with Kings and Princes.” The Queen was not placated. Peel, in her view, had been rude and presumptuous, and the Duke of Wellington not much better. She would rather have a Radical Government than the Tories, she told Melbourne. Horrified, he explained to her that, quite apart from their faults, the Radicals had not a chance of getting into power. They had little support in the country, and their Leader was the intolerable Durham. Besides, the Tories were not so bad. Personally, he had found them reasonable enough to do business with. Were not they always altering the Government Bills in the House of Lords? asked the Queen. “I do not know that those alterations did not do them good,” answered Melbourne laughing. Moreover, he pointed out that it was not politic to quarrel with the Tories; how could she hope to exert any influence on them if she treated them as declared enemies? He strove to persuade her to be polite to the Tory ladies and now and again to ask important Tories to dinner. She did not want them, she replied, at least, not this year. “If you do that, you, as it were, cut them off,” he said. “Flies are caught with honey, not with vinegar.” These efforts to soften her were unsuccessful. Causes to her were indistinguishable from the people who supported them. Whigism meant Melbourne, whom she liked, Toryism meant Peel, whom she disliked. Patiently, throughout 1839 Melbourne went on trying to weaken her hostility. In vain: nine months later we find her telling him that the Opposition was to blame for everything that went wrong.

  It was not the only thing that she was obstinate about. Greville, meeting Melbourne, congratulated him on his skill in keeping the Queen straight. “By God, I am at it morning, noon and night!” he exclaimed with feeling. Indeed, the strain of the last months had affected the Queen’s nerves as well as his, making her moody, on edge and more self-willed than ever. Her rumpus with Peel had left her extremely touchy about her royal position. At the slightest suspicion that she was not being consulted about a political appointment or a matter of State, she rushed to her writing table to indict a long, heavily underlined letter, indignantly proclaiming her royal rights and demanding an explanation. “The Queen has been a good deal annoyed this evening,” she wrote in August, “on Normanby’s telling her that John Russell was coming to Town next Monday in order to change with him. Lord Melbourne never told the Queen that this was definitely settled; on the contrary, he said it would ‘remain in our hands,’ to use Lord Melbourne’s own words, and only to be settled during the Vacation; considering all that the Queen has said on the subject to Lord Melbourne, and considering the great confidence the Queen has in Lord Melbourne, she thinks and feels he ought to have told her that this was settled, and not let the Queen be the last person to hear what is settled and done in her own name; Lord Melbourne will excuse the Queen’s being a little eager about this, but it has happened once before that she learned from other people what had been decided on.” Any criticism of herself, too, in Parliament or the Press roused her wrath. It ought to be stopped by law, she told Melbourne furiously.

  At the same time that she grew more jealous of her privileges, she began to rebel against such obligations as bored her. Why must she have ministers down to stay at Windsor when it was more agreeable to be there alone with Melbourne? Sometimes she said she could hardly bear the tedium of her official duties. Melbourne dealt with her moods with characteristic skill, apologized for any oversight and took care to keep her more closely informed than before about the details of affairs: more than ever he speaks to her as to an equal in these matters. He was extremely sympathetic, too, about her boredom. After all, he himself was often bored by politics; how much more a girl of her age! “You lead rather an unnatural life for a young person,” he said, “it is the life of a man.”

  But if he was sympathetic, he was also firm. The Queen must get used to being criticised, he told her, and still more must she simply force herself not to show temper. “I cannot help it,” objected the Queen mutinously. “But you must,” he insisted kindly, “I am sorry to be so peremptory.” Nor was boredom, however natural, a justification for neglecting her duties. No doubt being a constitutional monarch was a tricky, troublesome job but “you must bear it, it is the lot that has been cast upon you; you have drawn that ticket.” Anyway, he said soothingly, her irritation was most likely due to the summer heat; he recommended her to drink more wine in order to calm her nerves.

  Whether the Queen took his advice is unknown. If she did it failed to have the desired effect. Her temper remained uncertain even with Melbourne himself. Outwardly in fun, but with a glint of irritation showing through, she would scold him for his sleeping and snoring, his fits of apathetic silence, his tendency to overeat. “I said to Lord Melbourne that I could not bear to hear that he thought so much of eating and drinking—that it is low to think of such things,” she writes. And she made as much fuss as ever if she thought he was neglecting her; more often, too, because ill-health and pressure of work was making it harder for him to see as much of her as in the past. Why did he only spend two days a week at Windsor instead of five as he had in the previous year, she complained. Why did he leave her so early in the evening? What did he mean by writing to say that after all he would be unable to dine with her? “The Queen has received both Lord Melbourne’s notes; she was a good deal vexed at his not coming as she had begged him herself to do so, and as he wrote to say he would, and also as she thinks it right and of importance that Lord Melbourne should be here at large dinners; the Queen insists upon his coming to dinner tomorrow.” Could it be that he did not enjoy dining with her, that he preferred dining at Holland House? She had grown jealous of any woman who was reported to be his friend, and particularly so of Lady Holland who, from what she heard, sounded the sort of woman of whom she strongly disapproved. Melbourne teased her by telling her that Lady Holland had criticised her for trying to make her ministers more religious. “A very good thing!” retorted the Queen, “she must be a bad person to think so.” “She is a great enemy of religion, but one hopes she may be converted in her last hours,” said Melbourne demurely. “That is too late!” asserted the Queen severely.

  Nor was she altogether happy about Melbourne’s own religious tone. Now that he knew her so well, he was not quite so careful as at first to keep up appearances in her presence; so that she began to wonder if he was, in fact, so pious as her first impressions had led her to suppose. Certainly he always seemed to find an excuse for not going to church; and why, she asked, when he did deign to come, did he fidget and sigh so much? Melbourne was amused. “It is right to sigh in church,” he said, “He who despises not the sighing of a contrite heart . . .” The Queen was a little shocked to hear the Liturgy quoted in this flippant fashion. “It is wrong to jest about such things,” she protested. Melbourne denied that he jested about them. About other things he knew he did, perhaps too much—but never about religion. And he strenuously maintained that her first impressions of him were right, that there was nothing dubious about his view of religion. He admitted he did not like going to church, but this was for a highly creditable reason; “It is against my creed,” he said with a twinkle, “I am a quietist; it is the creed which Fénélon embraced and which Madame Guyon taught. You are so perfect that you are exempt from all external ordinances.” One wonders what the Queen c
an have made of this blissful account of Melbourne’s spiritual state. But she was still too much under his spell to be anything but reassured.

  All the same, their sparrings over religion were a symptom. As the Queen grew up she began to reveal herself as possessed of a point of view profoundly different from that of her Prime Minister: and now and again hints of this difference cast a fleeting shadow over the bright surface of their intercourse. The easygoing eighteenth century in the person of Melbourne found itself brought up with a bump against the stricter age of which the Queen was the representative. One day, for instance, he happened to say that people were not gay any more, they were too religious. “But that is quite right,” said the Queen, “how can they be too much so?” “I think there will be a great deal of persecution in this country before long,” explained Melbourne, “people interfering with one another about going to church, and so on.” “The world is very bad,” said the Queen sternly. “I do not see anything so very bad,” Melbourne protested. Another time he told her that his nephew Spencer Cowper was rather a rake, “which is quite refreshing to see.” “It is melancholy,” answered the Queen; and she spoke with shocked horror of the hard-drinking days of the Regency, and the scandalous dissipations of her royal uncles. Wistfully recalling the days of his easygoing youth Melbourne sought to soften the harshness of her judgment. “But they were jolly fellows . . .” he pleaded, “times have changed, but I do not know if they have improved.”

  Such moments of dissonance between them were slight and they did not last long. The Queen was so devoted to her Prime Minister that she felt overcome with remorse the instant after she had been the least disagreeable to him. “I fear I was sadly cross with Lord Melbourne,” she wrote the evening after one of these small moments of friction. “It is shameful, I fear he felt it, for he did not sit down for himself as he generally does, but waited until I had told him to do so. I cannot think what possessed me for I love the dear, excellent man . . . and he is so kind and never minds my peevishness, but is so amiable and forgiving.” Indeed he was. When she apologized for plaguing him, “That’s a good thing,” he said, “it keeps people from being ill.” His good humour bound her for the time being yet closer to him. Again and again in the Diary she reproaches herself for her ill temper, again and again protests her gratitude and love for him. To all appearances Melbourne possessed her heart as much as ever.

  And yet . . . there are signs that his company was not quite the ecstatic unfailing delight to her that it had been. It could even disappoint her. One evening in June she was actually forced to admit that she had found an evening spent in Lord Melbourne’s company had been dull! This was partly due to his infirmities. On the evening in question Melbourne had been feeling too ill to talk much. But there were deeper and more powerful forces working within the Queen to make her dissatisfied. She was very normal; and normal girls do not find all the pleasure they want in life can be provided by talks with elderly statesmen, however delightful. Now that the first excitement of being Queen had worn off, she longed instinctively for fun and gaiety in the society of her own contemporaries. Further—and this lay at the root of her restlessness and moodiness—she was growing up. The stage of schoolgirl hero-worship was passing; and there had begun to stir uneasily within her the desire for a more mature emotional fulfilment. She was hardly conscious of it but, in fact, when any attractive young man appeared her spirits rose. At the end of May the youthful Grand Duke of Russia paid a visit to the English Court and was entertained with appropriate celebrations. The Red Drawing Room at Windsor shone with the light of a myriad candles as, to the seductive lilt of the violins, the Grand Duke and his retinue of dashing young nobles, their shapely figures resplendent in glittering uniforms, twirled and leapt and clicked their heels through the dance, with all the exuberance of their Slav temperaments. The Queen enjoyed herself wildly. How delightful it was to be whirled round in the Mazurka by the Grand Duke’s strong arms, she noted. How they both laughed as he strove to guide her through the figures of a new German dance, the Gross Vater—and how dreadfully flat and dull it seemed the evening after he left! “I felt so sad to take leave of the dear amiable young man whom (talking jokingly) I was a little in love with . . .” she wrote in her diary. She confided her feeling of flatness to Melbourne. “A young person like me must sometimes have young people to laugh with,” she said. “Nothing so natural,” replied Melbourne with tears in his eyes.

  The Grand Duke was only a forerunner. Early in October two other young foreign princes arrived in England; the Queen’s cousins Ernest and Albert of Coburg. King Leopold of the Belgians had for some years past been working for a marriage between the Queen and his nephew Albert. Three years earlier, while William IV was still alive, Albert had been sent over for her inspection. She had found him attractive enough at any rate not to turn him down. Her accession to the Throne, however, had put her off marriage for the time being; and, with a comical assumption of maturity, she had sought to delay making up her mind on the question by telling her uncle that she did not think Albert was sufficiently experienced and grown up for her to be able to judge whether he was likely to be a fit mate for the Queen of England. Accordingly he had been sent on an educative tour of Europe under the tutelage of Leopold’s confidential adviser, Baron Stockmar. Now in 1839 it was proposed he should return in order to give the Queen a chance of making a decision. She still felt reluctant. Dancing with the Grand Duke was one thing, surrendering her independence to her husband was another. Albert could come if he liked, she said, but he must realize that she did not regard herself as in any way committed. Certainly, she insisted, there could be no question of her marrying anyone for two or three years.

  One sight of Albert, however, and these maidenly hesitations vanished. “It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert—who is beautiful!” she wrote in her diary on the evening of his arrival; and in subsequent entries she proceeded with growing enthusiasm to enumerate the catalogue of his perfections; “His beautiful blue eyes and exquisite nose and such a pretty mouth with delicate moustaches and slight, very slight, whiskers.” Two days in the company of such an Adonis and she was head over ears in love! On 13th October she told Melbourne that she had made up her mind to marry Albert. “You have?” said he. “I am very glad of it . . . you will be much more comfortable; for a woman can’t stand alone for long in whatever situation she is,” and he proceeded to discuss what steps should be taken to make the engagement public.

  Throughout the interview his tone, though tender, was calm. This was remarkable seeing how readily as a rule he showed emotion. For now, if ever, he had reason to do so. Her words meant the end of that close intimate relationship which had become the centre and sunshine of his whole existence. Even if he stayed in office, even if he remained her chief confidential adviser, he was no longer the first man in her heart. But Melbourne loved the Queen so selflessly that he did not want her newfound happiness to be shadowed, though but for an instant, by any regret he might himself be feeling. Indeed, to see her so happy did, in a sense, make him happy too.

  Reason as well as affection strengthened him to resign himself to the situation. The disturbances of the last year had left him with no doubt at all that it was for the Queen’s good that she should marry. She had to have a guide: and he himself was not going to be able to fulfil the role much longer. He was getting too old. Besides, his Government might fall any day. Melbourne had never been one to shut his eyes to painful facts: tenderhearted though he was, his heart did not rule his head to the extent of making him sentimentally self-deceived. He might, against his better judgment, give in to someone he loved, but he always realized that he was going against his better judgment, if he did so. Now he judged that the time had come when it was inevitable and right that he should lose the young Queen to a husband. Rigidly suppressing any indulgence in self-pity, he threw all his mind and energy into seeing that the transaction was effected as pleasantly and with as little fuss as possible.<
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