On 20th June, 1826, Emily Lamb, now Countess Cowper, sat writing the family news to her brother Frederic at Madrid where he was Minister Plenipotentiary. “William,” ran her letter, “looks cheerful and gay, but is much too fat.”
This brief sentence sums up the main changes that were to be observed in him during the years that had elapsed since 1816. William was in better spirits and his figure had begun to fill out; but that was all. The melancholy prognostications of ten years back had been fulfilled; fate had not seen fit to rescue him from the frustrated and stagnant situation in which he had then found himself; at forty-seven his prospects and his position were substantially the same as at thirty-seven.
Politically he was still poised uneasily between Whig and Tory. Those rumours of Canning’s imminent triumph, which had raised his hopes on his re-entry into Parliament, had proved illusory. And William settled down to pursue his usual and lonely middle course. During the anxious years that followed the conclusion of peace, he had sometimes supported Government, sometimes Opposition. The riotings and rick-burnings which had disturbed the countryside roused his fear of revolution; and he agreed in 1816 to become a member of the committee appointed to devise means of repressing disorder. Later he voted both for the suspension of Habeas Corpus and for the Six Acts. On the other hand, unlike the Tories, he had been in favour of an enquiry into the Peterloo massacre and had voted for Mackintosh’s bill for modifying the rigours of the penal code. Moreover in economic matters he had taken the Whig side; arguing vigorously on behalf of economy and no income tax. As regards foreign affairs he was for keeping quiet. Above all, England should not be so silly as to set up as the moral arbiter of Europe, either on the side of authority or freedom. In 1820 public life was diversified by the unedifying farce of Queen Caroline’s divorce. William, along with his fellow Whigs, was against the King, and voted for retaining the Queen’s name in the liturgy. But he was too wordly-wise to persuade himself into any romantic belief in her innocence. It would be better for her, he said, to act magnan-imously; and he took the trouble to write to the virtuous Mr. Wilberforce asking him to come up in order to try and persuade the King to any compromise which might compose the situation, and so avoid the risk of popular tumults. The juxtaposition of two such incongruous characters as William and Wilberforce provides an entertaining spectacle. Wilberforce liked William, but had a horror of getting mixed up in so disreputable an affair; “Oh, the corrupted currents of this world,” he confided to his diary, “oh, for that better world where there is no shuffling!” William for his part, though diplomatically polite to so formidable a pillar of respectability, did not find him sympathetic. “I believe he has good motives,” he said, “but they are very uncomfortable for those he has to act with.” Wilberforce’s inner life as revealed a few years later in his published diary William thought ridiculous; “perpetually vexing himself, because he amused himself too well.”
In 1822 Canning at last got office; but, by bad luck, it was in such circumstances as to make it no advantage to William. What he wanted was a Whig-Tory Coalition. Canning was now the Tory member of an exclusively Tory administration. Nothing had occurred since William had re-entered Parliament to loosen those bonds of personal loyalty which held him to his old Party. And when in 1824 Canning offered him a place, once again he felt bound to refuse. However, though he could not himself join Canning he was all for anyone else doing so. Three years earlier he had strongly urged his friend Ward to accept a similar office. “It would have the effect of supporting and assisting Canning,” he remarked, “at this moment, and it might enable you to be of essential service to the Ministry. At the same time,” he adds characteristically, “do not take it, unless you can make up your mind to bear every species of abuse and misrepresentation and the imputation of the most sordid and interested motives.” Himself, both at home and in the lobbies of the House, he consorted more and more with the Canningites. Huskisson, who followed Canning into the Government, was always coming down to Brocket. He combined profound knowledge of practical affairs with an antipathy to doctrinaire theory. This exactly harmonized with William’s own point of view. His previous respect for Huskisson’s judgment grew to unbounded admiration. “The greatest practical statesman I ever knew,” he said of him in later years; and he set himself to learn all he could from such a wellspring of wisdom. Practical knowledge had always been the weakest part of William’s intellectual equipment. The instruction acquired from Huskisson was to be of great service to him. Meanwhile in Parliament he steadily gave Canning such support as was possible from Whig benches. Apart from the fact that he agreed with him, he thought it important that Tory policy should be modified by more Liberal ideas, lest it should relapse into hopeless obscurantism. Since William admired him so much, it is not surprising that Canning was struck by his talents. Lamb, he declared, was unusually eloquent and able. Nor was Canning William’s only admirer. During the second period of his Parliamentary life his reputation steadily increased. For all that his Canningite sympathies were by now universally recognized, he was accepted as a necessary member of the inner group of Whig leaders; when they met to talk things over at Lansdowne or Holland House, William was always asked. In Tory circles too, he was an object of approbation. Lord Castlereagh was heard to say that “William Lamb could do anything if he shook off carelessness, and set about it”; while George IV, expatiating over the wine at Windsor Castle, went so far as to prophesy that William would one day be Prime Minister.
Such tributes were extremely gratifying. But they did not give much cause for encouragement. To be Prime Minister, to be a Minister of any kind, William required a party with which he could associate himself. And the prospect of any such party coming into power looked small indeed. The Tories seemed more safely in the saddle than ever. For the country, terrified by the ominous threat of revolution that muttered round the horizon, were more than ever suspicious of any administration likely to embark on a forward policy. And anyway the Whigs were in no condition to take office. Till they were prepared to adopt a progressive programme publicly they had no alternative to offer to the existing government. And so far from agreeing on such a policy, they were more divided than ever. The Grenvillites, now merely a fossilized remnant of eighteenth-century aristocratic domination, were against all reform. The Foxites, at heart nervous of change, said they must wait till the respectable classes of the community showed themselves anxious for it; headed by Lord Grey, they had pretty well retired from politics. The more active younger group had disintegrated into a rout of quarrelling factions. Some rushed to the extreme left; others, led by Brougham, bustled agitatedly about, now flirting with the extremists, now devising elaborate programmes of moderate change, now courting Canning’s favour—all in vain effort to find some effective cry with which to rally party and country to their support. As for a Canningite Coalition, there seemed little chance of that. The Government was mainly composed of die-hard Tories like Lord Eldon and the Duke of Wellington. And they felt themselves too strong to need to concede anything to the more liberalizing elements in public life.
What was poor William to do? With an ironical smile and a despondent heart, he did as little as he could. Frustration and disappointment found expression in a prevailing mood of inertia. He was lax in his attendance at the House; when he was there he seldom made a speech. It was pleasanter and more profitable to stay at Brocket looking through old family letters, walking out with a gun after duck, and reading Sophocles in the library. As the years passed and no prospect of political influence appeared, his indolence grew stronger. Hope deferred maketh the heart lazy. He now sat for the local borough of Hertford: by the election of 1825, he found himself almost unable to face the effort required to ingratiate himself anew with his constituency. “William,” said the irritated Emily, “canvasses very idly and says constantly that it won’t do; sees everything in the light of his adversaries so that he disheartens all his own friends; and yet does not make up his mind to give up, but is always shilly shally.” It was thought at first that the seat would be uncontested. But suddenly the opposition put up a disreputable young rake called Duncombe, who plunged into the fray, scattering guineas on all sides, accusing William in a striking metaphor, drawn from the racecourse, of “being unsound in both forelegs,” and seeking to discredit his personal character by raking up the hoary scandals of his married life. With relief William seized the opportunity to retire from the fight. In the summer of 1826 London saw him once more a man of leisure. “In very good spirits,” it was noted, “at being out of things again.”
It might have been expected that his frustrated energy would have found some other outlet. And in fact he did toy with the idea of literary composition. He contributed an occasional review to the Literary Gazette; and when in 1819 it was proposed to him to write the life of Sheridan, he accepted; began studying documents, making notes, and sketching out preliminary plans for chapters. However, within a year he had resigned the task to Tom Moore. History gives no reason. It seems likely to have been self-distrust. “I have read too much and too little,” he notes in his commonplace book somewhere about this time, “so much, that it has extinguished all the original fire of my genius, and yet not enough, to furnish me with the power of writing works of mature thinking and solid instruction.” Moreover, it was late for a man of his indolent temperament to set himself to learn a new profession. Politics might not be the occupation that best suited him; but he had been immersed in them for fifteen years. By now it needed the pressure of public life to make him concentrate on a given task. To keep his mind to the effort of sustained literary composition sufficiently to achieve anything like the standard required by his exacting taste, was perhaps beyond him. At all events, after giving up Sheridan’s biography he attempted nothing more. The period is as barren of literary achievement as it is of political.
Meanwhile his private life pursued a grey and unprofitable course. Here indeed there had been changes. But time had made them, not William. The eighteenth century was a memory by now: and by 1826 the last of the figures which had irradiated its setting with so incomparable a splendour, had followed it into the shadow. Lady Bessborough had died suddenly in 1821, from a chill caught while travelling in Italy. Worn out by a life of tempest and disillusion, she was glad enough to quit the world; and though racked with pain, met her end with a gentle serenity, only ruffled a little by anxiety, lest her departure might distress those whom she loved. Three years before, she had been preceded to the grave by Lady Melbourne. Her end was melancholy and unlooked for. Up till 1816 her matchless vitality had shown no signs of flagging: indomitable as ever she continued to direct her household, entertain her friends, and plot her children’s advancement. Then suddenly a change came. She, who had triumphed relentlessly over so many enemies, fell herself a victim to the relentless force of mortality. Miserable, horribly fat, and doped with laudanum, she lay, at last deaf to the enticements of the world, in the clutches of a fatal disease. Only on her deathbed did the clouds lift to reveal a glimmer of her old self. She summoned Emily, now launched on a career of romance as varied as her own, to her bedside; and besought her as a last request to be true—not to her husband Lord Cowper, Lady Melbourne had too much sense to expect that—but to her first and most distinguished admirer, Lord Palmerston. And with her last breath she sought to fire William with the energy needed to achieve the great position for which from childhood she had designed him. What were his feelings, as he looked on her features, fixed in the enigmatic stillness of death? What ironical epitaph, mingling love and regret and disenchantment, rose to his lips as he took a last farewell of her who had played the chief part in moulding his disillusioning destiny? . . . No expression of his thoughts is recorded at the time; probably they were of a kind best kept to himself. Only as a very old man at Brocket, he was once found, lost in meditation, before her portrait. “A remarkable woman,” he murmured to himself, “a devoted mother, an excellent wife—but not chaste, not chaste.”
Lady Melbourne’s place in the family was taken by Emily. Her personality was less compelling than her mother’s. Bewitchingly pretty in a soft dark style, she was a charming sunshiny worldling, born with an instinctive shrewdness and social accomplishment, but spontaneous and warm-hearted, moved by no fiercer ambition than to make life as pleasant as possible for herself and everyone else. As a hostess, however, she was equally successful. Panshanger, her country seat, was as famous a fashionable centre as Melbourne House had been: and life there carried on the same tradition, disorderly and elegant, brilliant and unedifying, “full,” says a visitor, “of vice and agreeableness, foreigners and roués.” Emily had also inherited her mother’s family sense. It was natural to her to gather her brothers round her, to keep an eye on their healths, their careers, and their affairs of the heart. William, she did find a little hard to manage; he was, she complained, so lazy and undecided—besides he ate too much. But she was devoted to him, and delighted in his company. He on his side took great pleasure in her; the beauty and success of “that little devil Emily” remained, all through life, his pride and joy. Even when he was sixty-one and she fifty-three he could not forbear asking Queen Victoria if she did not think Emily was wearing “a very dashing gown.” And when the Queen expressed her admiration, “she beats any of them now,” he broke out, “she was always like a pale rose.” After his mother died, he spent much of his time at Panshanger: lounging, arguing and being late for meals, as in a second home.
He needed one. There was little domestic amenity to be enjoyed at his own house. Glenarvon and Lady Heathcote’s ball between them had done for Caroline. Admiration had grown to be as necessary to her as air; nothing had any interest to her except in so far as it helped her to make an impression on other people. The fact that she was now an outcast dependent solely on solitary and impersonal interests for her satisfaction meant that the backbone of her life was broken. There was nothing for her to do but disintegrate into oblivion.
Alas, it was a slow and painful process. For she was too vital to accept defeat. Instead, with the fitful energy of despair, she cast about for any means by which she might once more compel the attention and applause of mankind. Like an actress who has outlived her popularity, she continued, with unquenchable hope, again and again to try her luck before the footlights. Sometimes she appeared as a woman of intellect. During this period she published two novels and a number of poems, notably one to her husband which opened with the surprising couplet
“Oh, I adore thee, William Lamb,
But hate to hear thee say God damn.”
She also presented herself to the public as a sportswoman. At the time of George IV’s Coronation she wrote offering her services as riding master to the official champion, whose task it was to ride into Westminster Hall, and fling down a challenge to anyone who might dispute the King’s right to his throne. At home, Caroline sought to make an impression by playing the more modest role of efficient housewife. Fashionable visitors to Brighton one spring were astonished to see Lady Caroline Lamb on horseback in the public street spiritedly haggling with the grocer about the price of cheese: her table at Brocket was piled with elaborately worked-out schemes for the economical regulation of her household. The elections of 1819 gave her a chance to blossom forth in yet another character, that of political woman. George Lamb was standing for Westminster; and Caroline, though protesting that she was at death’s door, at once drove up to London and invaded the local taverns, where she diced and drank with the voters in order to win them to the good cause. One day driving through the streets in her carriage, she was assaulted with a volley of stones by a mob of angry opponents. Here was an opportunity indeed for a heroine to display her quality. Stepping out with head held high, “I am not afraid of you,” cried Caroline magnificently, “I know you will not hurt a woman—for you are Englishmen!”
In other moods she studied less to discover effective roles, than to collect an appreciative audience. Within a few months of the publication of Glenarvon we find her inviting her cousin Harriet Granville to pay her a visit of reconciliation at Melbourne House. “I went yesterday to Whitehall,” writes Harriet, “and followed the page through the dark and winding passages and staircases. I was received with rapturous joy, embraces and tremendous spirits. I expected she would put on an appearance of something, but to do her justice she only displayed a total want of shame and consummate impudence, which whatever they may be in themselves are at least better or rather less disgusting than pretending or acting a more interesting part. I was dragged to the unresisting William and dismissed with a repetition of embrassades and professions. And this is the guilty broken-hearted Calantha who could only expiate her crimes with her death!”
In later years Caroline made sporadic attempts to recover her place in London society; wrote beseeching the Duke of Wellington to use his influence to get her re-admitted to Almack’s, suddenly sent out invitations for an evening party at Brocket. But for the most part she fought shy of her old friends. And, like many other people who have failed to obtain a footing in fashionable society, she fell back on intellectual. It was not the great world that was deserting her, so she put it to herself, it was she who was leaving the great world, in pursuit of the higher satisfactions of the spirit. Accordingly, she made friends with Godwin, the philosopher, with Lady Morgan, the novelist, and Miss Benger, the historian: and was to be found, an exotic figure, at little reunions up three pairs of stairs, where, refreshed by cups of tea carried in by the solitary maidservant, the genteel intelligentsia of the Metropolis discoursed to one another on Truth and Beauty. In return she took the opportunity to display herself in the agreeable character of fairy god-mother; showered her new friends with unexpected gifts of fruit and opera tickets, and invited them to Melbourne House. There on her sofa she would lie, swathed in becoming folds of muslin and surrounded by souvenirs of Lord Byron, talking by the hour of the great people she had known, and the ardours and endurances of her life of passion.
Sometimes she asked her new friends to meet her old. There is a comical account of a dinner she gave in 1820 consisting of a number of artists and writers—notably William Blake and Sir Thomas Lawrence—some humble country acquaintances and a few persons of ton, whom she had managed to entice into her house. It was not a success. Naïve Blake, it is true, was happy enough. “There is a great deal of kindness in that lady,” he said looking at Caroline. But the ambitious Lawrence was not at all pleased at being seen by his fashionable patrons in such dingy-looking company: while the grandees, after taking one look at the extraordinary people they had been asked to meet, relapsed into disgusted silence. Caroline herself added to the general awkwardness by commenting loudly and unfavourably on the rest of her guests, to whichever one of them she happened to be talking to.
Friends, however, had never been enough for her; to be a queen of hearts remained her most cherished aspiration; and she snatched at the slightest chance of a love affair. They were not glorious chances. She was now too notorious and eccentric to attract anyone much worth attracting. The wife of William Lamb, the lover of Byron, had to make do with hardened roués, ready to take up with any woman, or callow youths, glad to have their names connected with so celebrated a personality. However, beggars cannot be choosers. And Caroline set all her powers to the task of making the best of a bad job; represented the most trivial intrigue to herself as a passionate romantic drama; and threw herself into it with an extravagance of melodramatic gesture all the more preposterous by contrast with the ignominious unreality of the emotions involved. Every few months saw the repetition in caricature of the Byron love affair. The old limelight was switched on: the old tricks played out: she swooned, she rhapsodized, she pounded the organ all night; she made scenes of jealousy and scenes of reconciliation. Each lover, during the period of his reign, was awarded the privilege of wearing a ring, given her by Byron. For the most presentable of her conquests, the twenty-one year old Bulwer Lytton, she even staged a death scene, summoning him to her bedside, where with pathetic faltering accents she sought to move him by a last declaration of love.
Such exhibitions could not be kept secret. Caroline did not wish them to be; besides, the sort of men she was now entangled with liked to brag of their conquest. By 1821 her reputation had sunk so low that she was suspected of an intrigue with any man she was seen with, down to her son’s tutor and the family doctor, Mr. Walker. One of her stockings, so ran scandalous rumour, had been found at the end of Mr. Walker’s bed. This seems to have been a libel; but London society was only too pleased to accept any evidence justifying their hostility towards her. While the Lamb family believed everything against her, and were proportionately disgusted. “It is such a low-lived thing to take a Scotch doctor for a lover,” commented Emily viciously.
Nor did her affairs afford Caroline herself much compensating satisfaction. The old romantic properties were grown dreadfully faded by this time; in the hands of inferior players, the Byronic drama showed fustian indeed. She pursued her quarries with the effrontery of desperation. But try as she might she could not recapture the thrill of the past; and she quickly tired of the chase. Within a short time she dropped it; and, restless and disappointed, turned in search of some new victim to persecute with her feverish attentions.
But indeed, poor Caroline, any effort she made to mend her broken life ended equally in disaster. Each new part she appeared in was a failure. Her later novels made no hit: the Coronation champion preferred to employ a more conventional instructor: and her electioneering vagaries merely made her the laughing-stock of London. Her housewifely activities were also unsuccessful—“What is the use of saving on the one hand, if you squander all away on the other?” exclaimed William in despair. While the only effect of her intricate domestic schemes was to make the servants leave. “The servants at Brocket,” says Emily, “still continue to pass through, like figures in a magic lantern. A new cook whom Haggard,5 was delighted to secure from her great character and fifty guineas wages, stopped only a week . . . Haggard, talking of Caroline, is so good. He says she cannot get any worse, so one hopes she may get better.”
Caroline did not succeed in making friends either. The beau monde had done with her for good. Emily, out of affection for William, got her readmitted to Almack’s: but the doors of the great houses remained closed. As for her evening party at Brocket, it was a fiasco. The rooms shone with a galaxy of candles; the tables were spread with supper for eighty people; Caroline sent her own carriage to fetch those guests who lived far off. But only ten people came. Her excursions into other social spheres were less openly disastrous. Then, as always, the intelligentsia were susceptible to the charms of rank and fashion; while Caroline was delighted at first to find people who gazed at her with awe, and believed every word she said. All the same there was a gulf between them and her that no amount of snobbery on their part, or vanity on hers, could overspan. Serious, stiff and middle class, they were bewildered alike by the splendour of her surroundings, the candour of her confidences and the modish effusiveness of her manners. She was equally at sea with them. That Lady Morgan should not be able to afford to keep a groom of the chambers!—Caroline had not imagined that such sordid poverty was possible. And she con-sternated Miss Benger, by suddenly bursting in on her one morning, while she was occupied in the plebeian task of counting the washing. Poor Miss Benger! she thought she would die of shame when Lady Caroline’s dog pulled out a heap of dirty handkerchiefs and stockings from under the sofa, where she had hastily shoved them on the arrival of her distinguished visitor. Moreover, after the first fun of impressing them was over, Caroline was bored with her new friends. Intellectual persons for the most part are less socially accomplished than fashionable ones; their conversation may have more stuff in it, but it is not so graceful. Caroline, accustomed to Devonshire House, grew conscious of this. “These sort of people,” she confided to a friend, “are not always agreeable, but vulgar, quaint and formal. Still I feel indebted to them, for they have one and all treated me with kindness . . . when I was turned out.” In plain words she only associated with them, because those she liked better would have nothing to do with her. It was the devastating truth, and she recognized it.
For this was the most distressing feature of her predicament. She realized her failures even though she refused to accept them. Her natural acuteness was always at war with her power of self-deception. Though she could persuade herself of anything, it was never for long. In consequence, the logic of facts forced her gradually, reluctantly, agonizingly, to relinquish her illusions; step by step she found herself compelled to recognize that her literary powers were small, that the intelligentsia bored her, that her lovers were a poor lot. At last she actually admitted that her misfortunes were mainly her own fault. Even then it was impossible for her to regard herself in an unsympathetic light. And she fell back on a last desperate pose of pitiful victim; a fragile butterfly, worthless and shallow perhaps, but punished far beyond her deserts by the harsh decrees of destiny. “I am like the wreck of a little boat,” she wrote to Godwin, “for I never come up to the sublime and beautiful—merely a little gay merry boat which perhaps stranded itself at Vauxhall or London Bridge; or wounded without killing itself, as a butterfly does in a tallow candle. There is nothing marked sentimental or interesting in my career; all I know is that I was happy, well, rich, surrounded by friends. I have now one faithful friend in William Lamb, two more in my father, brother, but health, spirits and all else is gone—gone how? O assuredly not by the visitation of God but slowly gradually by my own fault.” And again, “It were all very well one died at the end of a tragic scene, after playing a desperate part, but if one lives and instead of growing wiser remains the same victim of every folly and passion, without the excuse of youth and inexperience what then? There is no particular reason I should exist, it conduces to no one’s happiness and on the contrary I stand in the way of many. Besides I seem to have lived a thousand years and feel I am neither wiser, better nor worse than when I began . . . this is probably the case of millions but that does not mend the matter; and while a fly exists, it seeks to save itself.” The appropriate end of such a character was clearly to die. And, in order to squeeze the last tear of pity from her audience, Caroline now took every few weeks or so to announcing her speedily approaching death.
In 1821 the spectre of her tumultuous past rose, in a succession of dramatic events, to trouble her distracted spirit still further. “I was taken ill in March,” she told a friend, “in the middle of the night, I fancied I saw Lord Byron—I screamed, jumped out of bed . . . he looked horrible, and ground his teeth at me, he did not speak; his hair was straight; he was fatter than when I knew him and not near so handsome . . . I am glad to think that it occurred before his death, as I never did and hope I never shall see a ghost. I even avoided enquiring about the exact day for fear I should believe it—it made enough impression as it was . . . Judge what my horror was as well as grief when long after, the news came of his death; it was conveyed to me in two or three words—‘Caroline behave properly, I know it will shock you, Lord Byron is dead.’ This letter I received, when laughing at Brocket Hall.”
As a consequence she took to her bed with a serious attack of hysterical fever. Three months later when she was just beginning to recover, she went out driving. As her carriage emerged through the park gates it was met by a funeral cortege, grim with all the murky pageantry of plumes and mourning coaches, wending its way through the serene summer landscape. William, who was riding beside her, trotted on to ask whose it was. “Lord Byron’s,” was the answer. Fearful of the effect of the sudden shock on Caroline, he did not tell her at the time: but when she heard it that night, once more she collapsed.
Such a collapse was only the intensification of what was now a chronic condition. Caroline was not the woman to rise superior to misfortune. Her self-respect was broken, and under the repeated batterings of fate her character gradually went to pieces. She began to exhibit all the painful, pitiable traits of the déclassée person; thrusting herself defiantly forward when she was not wanted, yet on edge, all the time, to take offence at insults real or imagined. Blinding herself to her present situation, she talked continually of the famous people she had known, with an embarrassing and unsuccessful pretence that she was as intimate with them as ever. Meanwhile her nerves were now permanently at the same pitch of irritability as at the height of the Byron episode. Not a week passed without some dreadful scene when she sobbed and kicked and screamed insane abuse at anyone who came near her. As for breaking things, it had become a habit: it was computed on one occasion that she had destroyed £200 worth of china in a morning. Rather than face the torture of her solitary thoughts, she took to galloping frantically round the park all day, and sitting up all night, holding forth to anyone who could be persuaded to listen. When all else failed she sought oblivion in laudanum and brandy. Loss of self-respect also showed itself in the ordering of her life. Unequal to the discipline of regular meals, she had food placed about the house that she might snatch a bite when and where she felt inclined: she grew squalid and careless in her person; while her bedroom presented a curious image of moral and mental disintegration. It was decked out with every fantastic caprice of the romantic fancy. An altar cloth, a portrait of Byron, and “an elegant crucifix” hung conspicuous on the walls. But the curtains were in holes: the furniture was scattered with half-finished plates of cake and pickles. While on the dressing table, flanked by a prayer-book on one side and on the other by a flask of lavender water, stood shamelessly the brandy bottle.
It was not an auspicious setting for domestic happiness. William’s married life after 1816 was even more disagreeable than before. In a sense he was better equipped to bear it. For he entered on it with open eyes. He recognized himself as the lunatic’s guardian, which in fact he was; and strove to approach his task with the firm but kindly detachment suitable to it. There was no question of his pretending, either to Caroline or to anyone else, that he thought marriage a pleasant state. One day when the family were gathered round the Brocket dinner table the conversation turned on matrimony. Caroline opined that husband and wife should live in separate houses; while William, though admitting that people had better marry, said that only the very rich could expect to be happier by so doing. “People who are forced to live together,” he declared, “and are confined to the same rooms and the same bed are like two pigeons under a basket, who must fight.” He was also completely hardened by now, to Caroline’s making a public exhibition of herself. Emily was outraged when, at the height of the Mr. Walker scandal, she saw William at a concert in company with Caroline and her reputed lover. “William looked such a fool arriving with them,” she said, “and looking as pleased as Punch, and she looking so disgusting with her white cross and dirty gown as if she had been rolled in a kennel.” As a matter of fact, so far from her lovers annoying him, he looked on them as fellow victims for whose sufferings he could feel nothing but sympathy. “William Lamb was particularly kind to me,” said Bulwer Lytton after describing an appalling series of scenes with Caroline, while staying at Brocket. “I think he saw my feelings. He is a singularly fine character for a man of the world.”
At the same time William still felt a responsibility towards her: and did all he could to alleviate her unhappiness. Such of her activities as seemed comparatively harmless had all his encouragement. He was always pressing Emily to try and get her asked about in London society; at Caroline’s request he assisted Godwin in his career. And he took an immense amount of trouble to help her in her novels; going over every sentence with her, and himself sending the finished manuscript to the publisher with a covering letter. Consistent with his new attitude to her, he made no attempt to recommend them above their merits.
“The incongruity of, and objection to, the story of ‘Ada Reis’ can only be got over by power of writing, beauty of sentiment, striking and effective situation, etc. If Mr. Gifford thinks there is in the first two volumes anything of excellence sufficient to over-balance their manifest faults, I still hope that he will press upon Lady Caroline the absolute necessity of carefully reconsidering and revising the third volume, and particularly the conclusion of the novel . . . I think, if it were thought that anything could be done with the novel, and that the fault of its design and structure can be got over, that I could put her in the way of writing up this part a little, and giving it something of strength, spirit, and novelty, and of making it at once more moral and more interesting. I wish you would communicate these my hasty suggestions to Mr. Gifford, and he will see the propriety of pressing Lady Caroline to take a little more time to this part of the novel. She will be guided by his authority, and her fault at present is to be too hasty and too impatient of the trouble of correcting and recasting what is faulty.”
He also did his best to soothe her nerves. It was to William that everyone turned, if Caroline became more than usually unmanageable. One day she was making arrangements for a dinner party at Brocket. Exasperated at what she considered the stupidity of the butler in failing to grasp her ideas of decoration, she suddenly leapt on to the dinner table, and fixed herself in a fantastic attitude which she requested him to take as the model from which to arrange the centrepiece. The poor man, terrified by her extraordinary appearance, ran to William for help. He came immediately. “Caroline, Caroline,” he said in tranquillizing tones, and gently lifting her from the table carried her from the room.
Caroline was not his only care at Brocket. He also concerned himself with his son. Augustus was now in his teens; but mentally he remained a child of seven. A strong well-grown boy, he caused dismay by romping half-dressed into the drawing-room when the housekeeper was setting it to rights, tumbling her over and sitting on her. But William never faced the fact that his deficiency was incurable. Despairing of his wife, he clung all the more desperately to the hope that something might be made of his child. No stone was left unturned; he consulted every kind of doctor and psychological expert, and procured a special tutor, for whom he had prepared an elaborate scheme of education, including lessons in logic, moral philosophy and metaphysics. All of course in vain; it was as much as the tutor could do to teach Augustus to read and write. But William obstinately, pathetically, refused to despair.
About Caroline he showed less fortitude. In spite of all his resolution he was unable to make even a modified success of his relationship with her. For he was in a false position. It was all very well to try and behave as the guardian of a lunatic. But William had neither the taste nor the talent for such a part. He had embarked on it mainly from weakness; because he could not face the unpleasantness of breaking with her. In consequence he was not supported in his ordeal by any conviction that he was doing right. And he could not stand the strain. As the years went by his patience progressively crumbled. He went away from Brocket as often as he could. During the time he spent there, he lived in a state of nervous tension, morbidly apprehensive of an outburst; when it came, he flew out into a violent passion; and then in the end gave way to her completely for the sake of peace. Such a situation could not last. By 1825 William at last admitted he had made a mistake in trying to settle down with her again. Once more he decided on a separation.
The process of its accomplishment was a caricature of all the least admirable features in their relationship. Never had he been weaker or she more intolerable. He was still too frightened to face breaking the news to her in person; so in March he went off to Brighton, where he wrote to her saying he was never coming back. This provoked the storm that might have been expected. However, by May her letters had grown so much calmer that he decided to go down to Brocket to discuss the necessary arrangements. It was a mad risk to take. To begin with Caroline was all right; quiet, sensible, and at moments so entertaining that she kept William in fits of laughter. But, when he began to talk business, the other Caroline appeared. She wanted an allowance of £3,000 a year: he, though his family offered to help him, could not see his way to giving her more than the £2,000 on which they had lived up till then. In the twinkling of an eye she had become a fury, “relapsed,” he said bitterly, “into her usual course of abuse, invective and the most unrestrained violence.” She wrote round to her relations alleging that he beat her; and accusing him in the same breath of ruining her character by over-indulgence and driving her to desperation by his cruelty. She was the more unbridled, because for once she had a supporter. Her brother, William Ponsonby, “reckoned an ass and a jackanapes by everybody” said Emily tartly, was sufficiently convinced by Caroline’s reports to write off to William in the strain of Lady Catherine de Bourgh; saying that he could not allow his sister to be trampled on by William, who owed her a great deal for deigning to marry someone of such inferior social position. Not trusting himself to answer such a communication with discretion, William went away and left the affair in Emily’s hands. She, to use her own words, “bullied the bully” by telling Caroline that rather than give way William would take the whole thing into court. Caroline was always ready for publicity, even of an undesirable kind: but her relations were more reasonable. In the end the matter was referred to the arbitration of her cousins Lord Althorp and the Duke of Devonshire, who proposed a compromise of £2,500 a year. Both parties accepted the settlement; neither was pleased with it. William thought he would never be able to afford so large a sum; Caroline, on the other hand, informed her friends that she was going to be so poor, as to be in danger of dying of starvation. Indeed the version of this particular passage in her history, which she published to the world, had even less relation to the truth than usual. At the same time that she was squabbling with William over money and accusing him of every vice under heaven, she told Lady Morgan that she loved him more than anyone in the world, and that he was being forced away from her against his will by the machinations of his family. Her letter ended with the usual announcement of her imminent demise. “If I would but sign a paper,” she said, with bitter sarcasm, “all my rich relations will protect me, and I shall no doubt go with an Almack’s ticket to heaven.”
Trouble was not yet at an end. It was one thing to persuade Caroline to sign; it was another to get her out of the house. She refused to move till she had decided what to do. “Shall I go abroad?” she asks Lady Morgan. “Shall I throw myself upon those who no longer want me, or shall I live a good sort of half kind of life in some cheap street a little way off, the City Road, Shoreditch, Camberwell or upon the top of a shop—or shall I give lectures to little children, and keep a seminary and thus earn my bread? Or shall I write a kind of quiet everyday sort of novel full of wholesome truths, or shall I attempt to be poetical, and failing beg my friends for a guinea a-piece, and their name, to sell my work upon the best foolscap paper; or shall I fret, fret and die; or shall I be dignified and fancy myself as Richard the Second did when he picked the nettle up—upon a thorn?”
Faced with such variety of sensational alternatives to choose from, there seemed no reason she should ever make up her mind. And William, exhausted by the unnatural energy of purpose he had exerted during the first part of the year, now reacted into a listless indolence, in which he refused to put any pressure on her. On the contrary, to his family’s irritation, he was always paying her visits in order to keep her in a good humour. At last in August Caroline decided that she wanted to go to Paris. A tremendous farewell scene was staged at Brocket, in which Caroline played her part so affectingly that even the butler—so she noted with satisfaction—was bathed in tears. By the 14th she was over the Channel. It was a very bad crossing: “She will, I trust,” writes Emily, “have been so sick as to feel little anxiety to cross the water again directly.”
This pious hope proved vain. Within two months her relations-in-law were dismayed to learn that Caroline had reappeared at an inn in Dover; whence she wrote to all and sundry giving a heart-rending picture of the poverty-stricken state to which she was reduced; “in a little dreary apartment,” made drearier by the peals of heartless laughter that rose from the neighbouring smoking-room, destitute, she complained, of such necessities of life as pages, carriages, horses and fine rooms; and accusing the Lambs, with a wild disregard for truth, of conspiring with her doctor to say that she was mad, in order that they might withhold from her her meagre allowance. “William,” she asserted, “is enchanted at the prospect of giving me nothing.” The plain fact was that she was far too unbalanced to be able to manage life on her own. And there was no knowing the trouble in which she would involve herself and everyone else, unless she was looked after. Since no one else offered, the Lambs reluctantly took on the task again. Just three months after taking a last farewell of Brocket, she was settled there once more. William, clinging to the outward form of separation, still had his official home in London. But since he felt himself obliged to pay her frequent visits in order to see how she was getting on, his situation, with regard to her, was not essentially altered. It seemed as if, in personal life as in public, all his efforts to free himself ended equally in frustration.
In reality, however, the long drawn-out drama was near its close. Unknown alike to William and to Caroline, the fates had decided to cut the coil which for so many years had bound them, one to another, in wretched conjunction. The ordeal of the separation marked an epoch in Caroline’s life. For the agitations it involved had put a fatal final strain on her already worn-out constitution. At last her amazing vitality began to ebb. From this time on, in a dying fall, a strange muted tranquillity, her storm-tossed career declined swiftly to its period. Once, during the first few months after her return to Brocket, a glimpse of the old Caroline showed itself. Bulwer had become engaged to a Miss Wheeler. And Caroline, partly from pique at his fickleness, partly because she saw the theatrical possibilities inherent in the situation, invited Miss Wheeler to Brocket, where she staged a little scene: Caroline, an experienced woman of the world, with kindly wisdom warns Miss Wheeler, an innocent girl, against the perfidy of men. “Don’t let Edward Bulwer let you down,” she adjured her ominously, “they are a bad set.” This piece of sentimental comedy, however, was a faint echo indeed of the thundering melodramas of Caroline’s prime. And it was the last echo. After this her days passed in eventless rural monotony. “How can I write,” she tells a friend, “even imagination must have some material on which to work. I have none. Passion might produce sentiment of some sort. But mine are all calmed or extinct . . . Memory—a waste with nothing in it worth recording! Happy, healthy, contented, quiet, I get up at half past four, ride about with Hazard, see harvesters at work in the pretty green confined country; read a few old books, see no one, hear from no one.” No longer did her spirit leap out at the call of fame; no longer did she combat hostile fate in baffled rage, or seek to forget it in the brandy bottle. Instead, profoundly weary, she lay back clinging to the comfort of safe homely innocent things, conscious only of a numbed longing to be at peace. So great a change in the direction of her desires brought with it an equal change in her character. The fury of her egotism dwindled with the vitality of which it was the expression. A child always, she was now a tired child, gentle and submissive, pathetically terrified of annoying people, stretching out her arms to be soothed and cherished. Frederic and Emily, driving over from Panshanger to pay her a visit, found all their age-old hostility towards her melting away: Caroline appeared so sincerely, so touchingly anxious to behave as they wanted. Still more did she want to behave as William wanted. For, as the fever of her maturity left her, so also did the memory of its preoccupations. Bulwer, Webster, Byron himself were as though they had never been: and the old first love, fresh and single as in honeymoon days, brimmed back into her heart. By this time William’s life had begun to change; in April, 1827, he was given an official appointment in Ireland. While he was there she wrote to him continually, naïve careful letters, asking him assiduously about his life, detailing the little facts of hers, and without a word about her own feelings. Alas, he had suffered too deeply at her hands to be able to respond with the same ardour. She had broken something in him that could never be mended. But when he saw the change in her, a generous tenderness welled up in his spirit that washed away any trace of bitterness that might lurk there. He answered her letters with affectionate kindness, saved up such scraps of news as he thought might entertain her, encouraged any plan of hers that seemed likely to give her pleasure.
“My dear Caroline,” runs a typical letter, “I am very much obliged to you for your letters—and much pleased with them—I never knew you more rational or quiet, and you say nothing which doesn’t give me great pleasure—Matters are a little uncertain in the political world, but at any rate I think a tour to Paris would do you good, provided you can avoid making scamps of acquaintance, which is your great fault and danger—I went down to dine at Bellevue; where I saw Mr. Peter La Touche, 94 years old past—he dined with us. Mrs. La Touche had tried to persuade him not, but he was determined upon it. They keep him on a strict regimen of sherry and water, but if he can get at a bottle of wine now he drinks it off in a crack—there is a fine old cod for you.” . . .
It is significant of the strength of the bond that bound him to her, that now Caroline was no longer provoking him, he began at once to try and excuse her to himself on the old plea. Other people, not she, were responsible for her errors: Let her avoid making friends with scamps, and he was only too anxious for her to go herself to Paris or anywhere else if she fancied it might make her happy. But there was to be no more travelling for her in this world. As the year advanced, her health began to exhibit alarming symptoms. In October, 1827, the doctors reported her to be dangerously ill of dropsy. From the first Caroline was sure her case was hopeless. But the conviction did not disperse her calm. On the contrary, her spirit rose to meet its stern ordeal; and, face to face with death, that streak of genuine nobility, which a lifetime of folly had not succeeded in wholly eradicating from her nature, showed itself as never before. She did not, indeed, give up dramatizing herself; she would not have been Caroline if she had. Appreciating to the full the pathos of her situation, she rallied all her strength in the effort to stage a death scene which should do her credit. Still, there is something heroic in a sense of the stage that is unquelled by the presence of death itself; and moreover the role, in which Caroline chose to make her last appearance before the world, was for once worthy of the heroine she had so long aspired to be. She showed no fear; she sought refuge neither in self-deception nor self-pity. Though racked with suffering, she lay hour by hour through the darkening autumn days, quiet and unmurmuring; her chief concern to convince others, in the short time that remained to her, how sorry she was for the needless suffering she had brought on them. “Dearest Maria,” she writes to Lady Duncannon, her eldest brother’s wife, “as I cannot sit up, I am obliged to use a pencil . . . I consider my painful illness as a great blessing—I feel returned to my God and duty and my dearest husband: and my heart which was so proud and insensible is quite overcome with the great kindness I receive—I have brought myself to be quite another person and broke that hard spell which prevented me saying my prayers; so that if I were better, I would go with you and your dear children to church. I say all this, dearest Maria, lest you should think I flew to Religion because I was in danger—it is no such thing, my heart is softened, I see how good and kind others are, and I am quite resigned to die. I do not myself think there is a chance for me.” And to Lady Morgan, with a flash of her old bewitching whimsicality, she says, “I am on my death-bed: say I might have died by a diamond, I die now by a brickbat: but remember the only noble fellow I ever met with is William Lamb. He is to me what Shore was to Jane Shore.” For, now at this final crisis of her troubled history, it was William who more than ever filled her thoughts. His name was always on her lips; she still wrote to him regularly and with no word of complaint—she who was used to complain so often and so groundlessly—and she besought the doctors not to tell him of her condition lest it might be a worry to him. There was no concealing it however. Lady Morgan, visiting Ireland, saw him one evening sunk in black depression at the news. A day or two later, he sent her the doctor’s report with a covering note. “It is with great pain I send you the enclosed. It is some consolation that she is now relieved from pain: but illness is a terrible thing.” To Caroline herself, when she rallied a little, he wrote with an emotion all the more poignant for the reserve with which it is expressed. “My dear C, I received your little line yesterday; and later received with great pleasure Dr. Goddard’s account that you were a little better. My heart is almost broken that I cannot come over directly: but your brother, to whom I have written, will explain to you the difficult situation in which I am placed. How unfortunate and melancholy that you should be so ill now, and that it should be at a time when I, who have had so many years of idleness, am so fixed and held down by circumstances.”
His ordeal was not to be protracted. In December Caroline, now removed by medical advice to London, was visibly sinking. It was noticed that she spoke with difficulty and that she seemed unable to take in what was going on round her. By the middle of January, it became clear that the end was near. Then only “Send for William,” she whispered with a last effort of her spent forces, “he is the only person who has never failed me.” He did not fail her now. Within a few days he had arrived at Melbourne House. And alone behind closed doors, they spoke to one another for the last time. It was for this only she had waited. A day or two later, her sister-in-law, Mrs. George Lamb, watching by her still form, heard a little sigh. She looked more closely: Caroline was dead.
William was out of the room at the time. When he was told the news he was sunk for a day or two in grief. Then, to all appearance his usual self, he went back to work. But this was no sign of insensibility. Sad experience had taught him that no purpose is served by unavailing lamentation: “solitude and retirement cherish grief,” he once wrote to a bereaved friend, “employment and exertion are the only means of dissipating it.” In reality Caroline’s death affected him profoundly. Detached from her as he had learnt to make himself, painful and frustrated as his feeling towards her had grown to be, it yet remained different in kind from what he felt towards anyone else. “In spite of all,” he was to say in later days, “she was more to me than anyone ever was, or ever will be.” For years afterward the mere mention of her name brought tears into his eyes; and plunged him into melancholy reverie. “Shall we meet?” he would be heard murmuring to himself, “shall we meet in another world?”
5 The agent at Brocket.