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At long last fortune favoured him. In February 1827 Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, had a stroke. Bereft of his placid and reconciling hand, the Government split into two opposing sections; the Ultra-Tories and the Canningite-Tories. Which of the two was to obtain control depended on the unpredictable caprice of George IV. After the usual hesitations, he asked Canning to form a Government. Rather than serve under him, the Ultras led by the Duke of Wellington, resigned. Canning therefore, in order to fill the gap left by their secession, turned to his Whig followers, notably Palmerston and William Lamb. Even now it seemed as if William’s ironical lazy indifference might lose him his chance. To his sister Emily’s exasperation, he chose to leave London at the very moment the Government was forming. However when the list of candidates for office was placed before the King—“William Lamb!” he exclaimed, his memory aglow with pleasing recollections of old Carlton House convivialities. “William Lamb—put him anywhere you like!” In May he was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland. It was the turning point in William’s life. At last, at forty-six years of age, his luck had changed: and for good. William stepped on to the public stage, an official ruler of England.
It was a very different England from that of his youth. The lucid leisured eighteenth century was vanished; and in its place, to the thunder of a thousand factory wheels, surged forward the murky and tumultuous era which was its successor. All was movement, the industrial movement, the democratic movement, the Romantic movement, the Irish National movement. All was confusion: religious neo-medievalists jostled progressive rationalists; hard-fisted capitalists clashed with enthusiastic humanitarians: destitution and stupendous wealth dwelled side by side: in England the young Mill hailed the dawn of the age of enlightenment, in Scotland the young Carlyle brooded darkly on the imminent eclipse of human virtue. And the spirit that infused the age was of a piece with its preoccupations; earnest, hopeful, strenuous and foggy—pulsating with energy, aglow with hope, tormented by conscience. The smoke and flame of the factories found their counterpart in the smoke and flame that swirled in the hearts of the people who lived under their shadow.
The new spirit showed itself in the world of politics. Signs were visible on every side that the struggle between the old aristocratic landed régime and the new individualist democratic forces could not be delayed much longer. Till 1815 it had been held up by the Napoleonic Wars, in the disturbed years, which followed, by the fear of revolution. But now Europe seemed settled down into steady peace: for the time being the country was prosperous. And the restless discontent of those classes who were shut out from political power began to make itself felt; seeping up from the world of revolutionary agitators to infuse itself into the respectable middle and professional classes. Everywhere the cry was reform; law reform, educational reform, fiscal reform of the laws against Nonconformists and Roman Catholics, Parliamentary reform. Parliamentary reform was the crucial issue. For, by destroying the aristocracy’s monopoly of seats in the House of Commons, it wrested from it at one stroke the control of government. With it, the men of the new age would be in a position to impose any other change they wanted; without it they could move only by permission of their opponents.
Such were the questions canvassed at reunions of provincial kings of industry, at gatherings of serious thinkers, in working men’s clubs. Only in the lordly drawing-rooms of the politicians themselves was the atmosphere less excited. Belonging as they did, Tory and Whig alike, to the old régime, they had no personal interest in a change. However, they could not altogether escape feeling the pressure of the time-spirit. It was becoming clear to them that something new would have to be done; and that, since they alone possessed political power, they would have to do it. Confronted by this new situation, the old party divisions began to lose whatever binding power they still possessed; people began to range themselves into new groups. There were, roughly speaking, three positions that they could take up, that of the Ultra-Tories, that of the Canningite-Tories and that of the large body of opinion who, anticipating the terminology of a later age, we may call the Liberals. The Ultras were against all reform; the Liberals in favour of it in varying degrees; the Canningites stood between them. Strongly against the surrender of aristocratic power, implied in Parliamentary Reform, they yet believed that administration was in need of much modification and improvement; and moreover that by making such practical and executive reform, they would allay the discontent that created the demand for Parliamentary Reform. If, so they contended, people had a better police and poor law and a fairer system of taxation, they would be quite happy to go on being governed by the gentlemen of England.
In 1827 the Canningites got a chance to try their policy. The Ultras, in power for the last thirty odd years, were clearly out of tune with the temper of the times. The Liberals were not yet in a condition to take their place officially. They belonged, most of them, to the Whig Party; and the Whigs were still in confusion. A few like William agreed with Canning; the old orthodox Whigs, led by Lords Grey and Holland, secretly nervous of change and personally distrustful of Canning, shrank from committing them-selves in any direction. The professional politicians, led by the brilliant and changeable Brougham still tacked about in a seething turmoil of intrigue, now to the right, now left, according as either seemed likely to bring them office. Anyway, for the time being, the crucial issue of Parliamentary Reform was in abeyance. The reformers quarrelled among themselves, while the public was not yet completely convinced that reform was necessary. Now, if ever, was the time to try the Canningite middle-way.
It came naturally to William to support it. Not that he was much of a reformer, even in the modified Canningite sense. The spirit of the new age left him singularly unimpressed. He did not like earnestness, he did not like energy, he did not like muddle-headedness. And he had the aristocrat’s antipathy to the middle-classes. “I don’t like the middle-classes,” he once observed, “the higher and lower classes, there’s some good in them; but the middle-class are all affectation and conceit and pretence and concealment.” Further, he thought change always ran the risk of disturbing the security of society; while convinced as he was of the futility of most human effort, he did not believe it ever did the good it intended. On the contrary sensational reforms, like Parliamentary Reform, did positive harm. For by raising hopes that could never be fulfilled they left people more discontented than ever. “I like what is tranquil and stable,” he once remarked. This sentence sums up his political creed.
On the other hand, he recognized that the world, unfortunately, was a changing place: and that political institutions, make-shift affairs at best, must change along with it. Tranquillity and stability can only be preserved by a continuous process of adaptation. If a large section of the people were dissatisfied with the existing system, it meant that it was out of date. And, however silly their demands might be, there would be no peace till they were in some degree conceded. Finally since administrative reforms affected their actual lives the most, they were the kind most likely to pacify them. Holding these views, he could follow Canning if not with enthusiasm yet with an honest conviction that it was the best thing to do.
Himself he had only a minor part to play. The Irish Secretaryship carried with it no seat in the Cabinet; though Ireland, as usual, was in a state of furious unrest, there was nothing much for the time being to be done about it. The Irish were agitating for Catholic Emancipation. Canning was in favour of giving it to them: but the King, reverting in a misguided moment to the ideas of his father, refused. All that Canning could do was to send for William and tell him to go over there and try and convince the Irish of the Government’s good intentions, until such time as the King’s mind might change. In August he arrived in Dublin.
It was a great change from go-ahead England. Under a frail veneer of eighteenth century manners, the country wallowed in bloodstained medieval chaos. The Protestant governing-class divided their time between bullying the natives, wild Hibernian rollickings and killing each other in duels. The mass of the people, savage, superstitious and on the edge of starvation now fawned on their masters in oriental servility, now gathered together in secret societies with fantastic names—Caffees, Bootashees, Whiteboys and Ribbonmen—to plot their overthrow by means of atrocity and assassination. The administration itself was a clotted tangle of corruption and inefficiency. While round the general confusion hovered the Irish nationalist politicians led by the flamboyant O’Connell, seizing every chance to exacerbate the situation. The humane and sophisticated William made an incongruous figure in such a place. But he was not daunted. His commission suited him very well. Catholic Emancipation was one of the few reforms of which he thoroughly approved; both from a deep-seated dislike of religious intolerance and because he thought that discontent in Ireland had grown so widespread as to show, according to his theory of politics, that it was necessary. On the other hand he did not mind its being put off for the moment: temperamentally he was always inclined for inaction. Surveying the scene with calm sardonic detachment he set himself to his task.
The Irish political scene soon began to feel the impact of a new personality. Former Chief-Secretaries, fettered by the conventions of their position, had associated mostly with that Irish Protestant circle who led Dublin Society. Not so William: “The great means by which the Orange gentry have drawn over everyone who has come here,” he writes to a colleague, “was by assuming that their set was the only one worth associating with, quite the first company. You, who know Almacks, know that this is one of the strongest, if not the very strongest passions of the human mind.” Himself he saw everyone; kept open house to a mixed crowd of every party and creed, and took particular pains to make the acquaintance of seditious opponents. Such behaviour shocked the old officials very much. “Mr. Lamb,” lamented one of them, “keeps a lot of bad company!” Indeed William was an unorthodox head of a department in every way. The free and easy habits of the Lamb family, transported into official life produced a surprising spectacle. Every rule of precedent and routine was set aside. Seated in his room with the door open, William would write his letters and interview a deputation at the same time; while around him, a crowd of underlings sauntered through their work amid a hubbub of conversation. If a message was sent in that someone had asked to see him—“Show him in!” he would shout. When the visitor was admitted. “Now,” William would begin genially, “don’t go too fast, don’t ask for impossibilities, and don’t do anything damn foolish.” Even the Irish were surprised by his methods of conducting business; but, unlike the officials, they liked them. Here at any rate was a change from the formal frigid Englishman they had been accustomed to expect. Nor did William just talk pleasantly to them: he went out of his way to treat Catholics on an equality with Protestants, appointed them in preference to posts open to each; openly proclaimed his disgust at the prejudiced way in which Catholics were treated in the law-courts, set himself against all pro-Protestant agitation and shut the door against informers.
He also threw himself into the study of the Irish problems. It was soon clear that all talk of his laziness was nonsense. Given a job, he worked unusually hard. Every post to England carried with it elaborate memoranda from him; on the Tithe question, the local government question, the land question, the Education question. It must be admitted that these were seldom constructive. The upshot of William’s researches was that each problem bristled with difficulties, that most solutions would do more harm than good and that the wisest policy seemed to leave things alone at any rate for the time being. “One is sorry,” he observes with caustic melancholy at the end of one of these dispatches, “to trouble anything that is quiet here!” Anyway his own time was fully occupied in keeping Lord Wellesley, the Lord Lieutenant, in a good humour and warding off the never-slackening throng of persons clamouring angrily to have a job done for them. Sometimes their importunities strained William’s patience to breaking-point. “I can’t give away a place of fifty pounds without making fifty enemies,” he exclaimed: and again, “Lord Clare and Mr. Fitzgibbon want a living for a Mr. Westhorpe whose principal merit is that his is the only family in the county of Limerick that will receive Mrs. Fitzgibbon. Tho’ I have the greatest toleration and even partiality for ladies of that description, yet I cannot go so far as to say that associating with them in compliance with the wishes of a patron is the best possible recommendation for a clergyman . . . that damned little man milliner Clare!—he knows that I promised him nothing: but, like all Irishmen, if you put one single civil word in your communication with them, they immediately construe it into a promise; and charge you with a breach of faith if they don’t get what they have asked.”
On the whole, however, he got a good deal of fun out of the spectacle of human infirmity afforded by the Irish scene. One day a little boy, the son of a subordinate, was brought in to be shown his room at the office. “Is there anything you would like here?” William asked him kindly. The child chose a stick of sealing-wax. “That’s right, my boy,” said William, pressing a bundle of pens as well into his hand, “begin life early. All these things belong to the public; and your business is to get out of the public as much as you can.”
He was not to enjoy Ireland long. By the end of January, 1828, political affairs in England were so unsettled as to bring him back for good. Canning had died the previous August. But the King, incensed at what he considered his desertion by the Duke of Wellington, had kept the Canningites in power under the leadership of Lord Goderich, a fussy, timorous politician, henpecked by his wife, terrified of responsibility and often on the verge of tears. Such a man could not long conduct the government of England through a critical period. In January, after an ignominious scene of resignation, in which he was forced to borrow his royal master’s pocket handkerchief in order to assuage the effects of his own agitation, Lord Goderich disappeared from the scene.
His departure produced a crisis of the first order. It was clear that no government, not confessedly Whig, could now go on without the help of the Duke of Wellington. Accordingly George IV appointed him Prime Minister; and the declared Whig ministers, led by Lord Lansdowne, then resigned. What should the Canningites do? The Duke, in order to keep them, promised to modify his policy to suit their views. After hours of indecision they decided to remain for fear, they said, lest otherwise Canning’s policy might be completely reversed.
William, out of personal loyalty—always his ruling motive—stayed along with his friends. But he thought it a mistake. He was right. Whatever the Duke might say, he differed fundamentally from the Canningites on every important issue: and they found that in practice they could only work with him by constantly acting against their true opinion. This mattered to William less than to most, for few political views were to him a matter of principle. Only once, when he voted against the repeal of the Test Act excluding nonconformists from government posts, did he go against a strong conviction. But no amount of laxity on his part or that of anyone else could keep so divided a ministry going for long. “The Cabinet,” said Palmerston, the Canningite Minister for War, “has gone on differing about every question of importance that has come under consideration—meeting to debate and dispute and separating without deciding.” Twice in three months the Government came within an inch of splitting. In May the crash came; on the question as to what should be done with the seat left vacant by the disfranchisement of the borough of East Retford. Most of the Canningites, led by Huskisson, were for giving it to a manufacturing town, as a sop to the reformers: the Duke and Peel, fearing this might prove the thin end of the wedge, proposed giving it to a county. After a deplorable exhibition of clumsy vacillation on his own part and unscrupulous strategy on that of the Duke, Huskisson was forced to resign. His followers had to make up their minds whether to go with him. The chief of them were Palmerston, William’s old friend Ward, now Lord Dudley and William himself. On the afternoon of Sunday, 25th May, Palmerston, walking along the Horse Guards, saw Ward beckoning him from the balcony of Melbourne House. He went up to find discussion raging. William was for resignation and Palmerston supported him: but Ward, who passionately enjoyed being in office, hung back, “stroked his chin, counted the squares of the carpet three times down and then went off in the agony of doubt and hesitation.” That night decision could be delayed no longer. The three went to see Huskisson and then, leaving their cabriolets to follow slowly behind them, strolled back through the balmy stillness of the spring night for a final consultation. Ward walked between the two others. “Well,” he began, “now that we are by ourselves in the street and no one but the sentry to hear, let me know right and left what is next to be done—in or out?”
“Out,” said Palmerston and William echoed him. Ward was still reluctant. “There is a rumour,” he said, “that Huskisson’s place is to be filled by a moderate Tory, a young man of promise from a noble Tory family.” “I do not know any young man of Tory family who is a man of promise,” replied William discouragingly; and then went on to point out with chilling good sense that the fact that Huskisson was to be replaced by an official Tory of any kind meant a change in the character of the Government; and that he himself, unable as he was to state his views in Cabinet, could not feel justified in associating himself with it in its new form. Poor Ward made a last try. “There is something in attaching oneself to so great a man as the Duke,” he observed wistfully. “For my part,” retorted William, unmoved, “I do not happen to think he is so great a man. But that is a matter of opinion.” Next day they were all three out.
It was a little hard on William. For, on the East Retford question, he agreed with the Duke. Still there was no question he had to go. In general he had no confidence in the Duke: and anyway the same loyalty that had kept him in now sent him out. “I have always thought,” he once said, “that it is more necessary to stand by my friends when they are in the wrong than when they are in the right.”
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Nevertheless it was a depressing time for him. After years of doing nothing he had at last obtained work; and found that he enjoyed it. Now within a few months it was snatched away with no visible prospect of return. However he had long ago learnt not to cry over spilt milk. Soon he was setting to work to distract himself by corresponding with Lady Holland about Greek poetry and writing reviews of theological works for the Literary Gazette.
His private life too required attention. Since August it had been at least as eventful as his public. All the old ties were breaking. Lady Caroline had died in January, 1828. Their only child, poor Augustus, still lived, a half-witted youth of twenty-one. But William, though still far too solicitous for his welfare to let him leave home, must by now have given up all hope of his becoming normal. In July of the same year Lord Melbourne’s unimpressive life had come to an end at last. It is not to be supposed that this occasioned much sorrow to anyone. But it was a landmark in William’s life. With his father and mother and Caroline gone, the chapter of his youth was completely finished. Moreover he was now head of the family. The Melbourne fortune though still large was somewhat reduced by this time. Melbourne House was sold, as too expensive to keep up; and—taking a new house in South Street, Mayfair—William, or Melbourne as we must now learn to call him, settled down to face the future.
Already, as a matter of fact, his private life was involved in a new disturbance. Feminine society was a necessity to him. And while in Ireland he had made the acquaintance of a certain Lady Branden, the wife of an Irish peer in holy orders. Nothing is known of her, beyond the fact that she was young, lovely, and that she lived apart from her husband. Melbourne spent almost every evening with her when in Dublin: in the following year she settled in London where he continued to visit her. In the summer of 1828, trouble began to raise its head. If scandal was to be believed, the Reverend Lord Branden was not a credit to his cloth. It was rumoured that he had written to Lady Branden, alleging that he had got some compromising evidence about her relations with Melbourne, but that he would overlook the matter, if she would persuade her lover to get him made a bishop. Lady Branden very properly rejected this unseemly proposal. Accordingly in the summer of 1829 Lord Branden brought an action. When it came into court, however, Melbourne turned out to have little to worry about. All the evidence Lord Branden could produce was first, that Lord Melbourne had sent Lady Branden some grapes and pineapples and, secondly, that a gentleman, alleged to be Melbourne, had been seen leaving her house in Lisson Grove in the early hours of the morning. This was not much: it proved to be even less when the only witness who professed to have seen the gentleman in question, said that he was short, whereas Melbourne was unusually tall. “Pray call someone who will prove something to the purpose,” said the judge testily, “you must get him a good deal nearer than this. You have not got him to the lady’s house yet”: while the Attorney-General remarked facetiously that if there was any suspicion, it attached to the short gentleman. The case was dismissed.
The truth about the matter will never be known for certain. Possibly that Lord Branden had more ground for his suspicions than he was able to justify. It is significant that in his will Melbourne left annuities to two ladies with which his name had been connected; Lady Branden and Mrs. Norton. But whereas he categorically stated that there had been no guilty connection between himself and Mrs. Norton, he made no similar statement about his relations with Lady Branden. Anyway the affair does not seem to have engaged Melbourne’s heart deeply. He made Lady Branden an allowance which he arranged to be continued to her after his death: and he kept sufficiently in touch with her to be worried five years later because he had not heard from her for some months. But she had before this ceased to play an important part in his life. With the dismissal of the case, the shadowy figure of Lady Branden vanishes from this history.
Meanwhile in the political world, momentous events were crowding thick on one another. Freed from the incubus of the Canningites, the old régime, under the Duke’s leadership, made a last bid to assure and maintain its domination. It failed. The first blow came from Ireland. By 1829 the agitation for Catholic Emancipation had swelled to a pitch of violence which, it seemed, must explode in open rebellion. Rather than face such a disaster, the Duke threw over the principles of a life-time and himself repealed the Anti-Catholic laws. The consequence was that he lost another section of his supporters, the irreconcilable anti-papists of the extreme right. However, weak as his position had now become, the Duke was preparing to carry on, apparently unperturbed when he was again assailed by a new and even more formidable popular agitation. An industrial depression had made people discontented again: and now that the Canningite middle way had been tried and had failed, they turned to drastic change as the only alternative to blind reaction. At the beginning of 1830, the movement for Parliamentary Reform flared up with new and extraordinary fury.
At Birmingham, Thomas Attwood organized a huge association for Reform: his example was followed in other great towns: meetings were held all over England: the most celebrated of contemporary agitators, Cobbett, rode round the country on a cob exhorting people to take action. As the year advanced, so did the Cause. George IV’s death removed a powerful obstacle to reform: while in Paris, the bloodless revolution of July showed timid reformers that drastic change could be accomplished without catastrophe. By the end of the summer, feeling in the country was stirred to a pitch of excitement unknown since the days of the Long Parliament 190 years before. In the houses of the great and the clubs of St. James, an atmosphere as before a thunderstorm tense with ominous expectancy, hung heavy over the political scene. Everybody felt something tremendous was going to happen, nobody quite knew what. Obsessed by their youthful memories of the French Revolution, people murmured nervously to one another of the ruin and bloodshed that must ensue, unless popular discontent was conciliated. “It was just like France in 1789,” said an elderly French visitor.
In August it seemed as if rebellion was already starting. The poverty-stricken labourers of Southern England, roused to frenzy by Cobbett’s eloquence, broke out in riot and outrage. Night after night, respectable householders looked out of their windows to see the quiet Kentish countryside lurid in the light of blazing ricks: bands of men roamed the lanes, breaking machines and manhandling the agents of the great landlords; placid Mr. Eltons and Mr. Collinses in sequestered rural vicarages found letters thrust under their doors threatening them with assassination unless they remitted tithes; a party of rioters broke into a duke’s house and had to be dispersed by force.
Fear increased the strength of the reforming party. Some people who had wavered, turned to it as the one means of avoiding disaster. The question was whether the Duke of Wellington would once more forswear his principles and go with them. In November when Parliament met, he gave his answer. Our existing constitution, he said, was so perfect that he could never take the responsibility of tampering with it. Within a fortnight his Government had fallen; and a Whig ministry under Lord Grey, pledged to bring in Reform, had taken its place.
It was the crisis of the century. At last that decisive battle between the old order and the new, imminent for the last forty years, was openly joined: and all the varied strains of political opinion, for so long indefinite and fluctuating, rushed to range themselves on one side or the other. The anti-reformers were a solid block of the Tory landed interest and the Established church. The reformers were a more heterogeneous body. There were the radical democrats, the political theorists, the dissenters and the bulk of the manufacturers: all those believed in reform and liked it. There were also a number of people who disliked it, but thought it inevitable. Among these were the Canningites.
Since their resignation their position had been an uncomfortable one. The Tories thought them too Whig; the Whigs thought them too Tory. Now, however, Lord Grey anxious for all the support he could find in his formidable task, pressed them to join his administration. The Canningites hesitated. They had no one to direct them: for their recognized leader, Huskisson, notorious all his life for his physical clumsiness, had recently let himself be run over by a railway train going twelve miles an hour. Further, the Canningites had hitherto opposed reform. It made a great difference to them though that it now appeared the only alternative to revolution and as such the lesser of two evils. After a long consultation, they agreed to join. Melbourne joined with them. Since he had resigned he had taken no prominent part in politics. Once early in 1829 he had spoken against an Irish Coercion Act: he said very sensibly that, until the Irish were conciliated by Catholic Emancipation, coercion would do more harm than good. Later, and more unfortunately he had, out of affection for his brother Frederick, addressed the House of Lords in favour of a more adventurous policy in Portugal. It was against his better judgment, adventurous policies always were: and he made a very bad speech. Otherwise he had kept discreetly quiet. His reputation had grown in consequence. Twice the Duke had tried to inveigle him back into the Government; in 1829 too he was asked to Windsor, where he was amused to note that George IV took particular pains to be attentive to him. On the other hand the Whig leaders felt friendlier to him than they did to most Canningites. He had always kept himself a little detached. When he had joined the Wellington ministry he took care to declare that he did it “purely as an individual,” and so could not be accused of compromising the Whig party by his action. Nor did it in fact stop him throughout the next two years from spending as much time as ever at Holland House and Lansdowne House with his old friends. His personality it was that gave him his position. People liked him so much that they wanted him in the Government, whatever his opinions. Further, during his short period of office he had acquired a good name as a colleague. Then as now it was rare to find a minister who got on with everyone and was always in a good humour. So precious indeed did these qualifications appear to a harassed Prime Minister, that on Melbourne’s very first entry into a Cabinet, he was given the important post of Home Secretary.
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Those, however, who did not move in Cabinet circles, found the appointment astonishing. By the world in general he was still looked on as an agreeable idle man of fashion—far too inconsiderable for the job, said Greville the Clerk of the Council. He was wide of the mark. Though Melbourne presented a less professional appearance than most of his colleagues, his mind was more penetrating and more original than theirs. And he was only lazy as long as he had nothing to do. All the same it cannot be denied that the world had something to be surprised at. Fortune, to whom Melbourne had resigned the direction of his life, had become infected with his own irony when she made him a Cabinet Minister. Whimsical, speculative and pessimistic, he had never, for all he had been so long mixed up in them, been able to bring himself to take political affairs wholly seriously: and to the end of his life, he remained an alien element in them. He had learnt to play the political game with practised skill; but like a grown-up person playing hide-and-seek with children, he never entered completely into the spirit of the thing. His thought moved from a different centre and on different lines. And he was much too candid not to show it.
Ordinary people, bewildered by him at all times, were still more bewildered when he talked politics—when the Home Secretary commented on the policy of his Government with a mischievous and philosophic detachment, as of a spectator himself unconnected with it and out to get as much fun from watching as he could. Still less was Melbourne in place in a reforming Government. Temperamentally an eighteenth century aristocrat and profoundly sceptical as to the value of human activity of any kind, politics most of all, he seemed the last man one would expect to find assisting in the inauguration of a golden age of progressive legislation. As to Parliamentary Reform itself, he was unenthusiastic about it, even for a Canningite. Early in his career he had noted down his reasons for disapproving of it. One of these was unusual. “I anticipate the total destruction of freedom of speech from a reformation of the Parliament, and for this reason. The present House, knowing that there are popular, plausible and prima facie objections to its formation, will endure to hear its conduct arraigned and condemned because it does not wish to stir dangerous questions, but a House of Commons elected according to what is called theory and principle will never bear to hear itself freely and violently censured, though its acts may possibly be such as to deserve the most acrimonious censure.” His other objections to Reform were less paradoxical. As an aristocrat, he did not think the country was likely to be well governed by a Parliament of middle-class commercial persons, such as were likely to be elected under a reformed system. As a student of history he had no confidence in the will of the majority. And as a man of prudence, he feared Reform might lead to disaster. For since it would inevitably fail to produce all the benefits hoped from it, its disappointed supporters would insist on more and more drastic changes, till the whole constitution collapsed in ruins; to be succeeded, as the recent history of France indicated, by a Napoleonic despotism, in which the liberty and tolerance which Melbourne valued more than anything else in the world, would be extinguished. However, it was one of his fundamental principles not to stand out against a widespread popular movement. And as early as 1821 we find him saying that Reform might turn out to be unavoidable. Now in 1830 he was sure it was. His realistic commonsense also told him that unless reform was fairly extreme, it would not satisfy people enough to be worth while. “I am for a low figure,” he said at a preliminary Cabinet held on the subject, “unless we have a large basis to work on, we shall do nothing.” All the same at heart he still disliked it thoroughly.
In fact he was not called upon to play much part in passing the Bill. The Home Secretary’s role was rather to keep the country calm and orderly, while it was going through. This was a heavy enough task for one man. The accession of the Whigs had not eased the tension of the last few months. In the South the ricks still burst into flames nightly: and hordes of marauders marched about carrying banners ominously inscribed “Bread or Blood.” Moreover unrest had now spread to the North: the hungry workers of the industrial towns were, it was reported, forming themselves into sinister communal organizations called Trades Unions, who spent their nights secretly drilling and who had the purpose of ousting employers from the rightful command of their labour. Strikes and riots broke out in which one employer was actually murdered. What made the situation especially alarming was that outside London there was as yet no regular police force, and that the army which alone filled its place was a mere handful of men. To the propertied classes it seemed as if the very foundations of civilized life were crumbling beneath their feet. A wave of panic swept over them. Every day Melbourne’s post bag at the Home Office arrived heavy with fantastic alarmist tales; that the disturbances were part of a deep-laid Jesuit plot, that they had been worked up by the French preparatory to invasion, that the ricks were set alight by fireballs, projected from a great distance by guns cunningly disguised as umbrellas. Melbourne preserved his calm in face of these dreadful suggestions: but he threw himself into his task with unexpected energy. For once he felt no hesitation. To preserve order had always, in his view, been the first function of government. And he acted with a vigour and decision that left his critics gasping. Within a month people were heard saying that Lord Melbourne was the one strong man in the Government.
The trouble in the South was the most urgent. Melbourne posted in soldiers in the most disturbed areas: gingered up the magistrates to act firmly: and in order to enforce the law more quickly appointed a special commission of judges to go down and immediately try such persons as had been arrested. The effect of these measures was instantaneous. Order was restored in three months.
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At a cost though: the tale of the repression of the labourers’ revolt of 1830 is dark and terrible; a stark Hardy-like tragedy of elemental blood and anguish and man’s inhumanity to helpless man, all the more shocking to the imagination when we find it occurring in the cheerful, urbane England of Brooks’s Club and Holland House. The law, which the judges were called upon to enforce, was so appallingly harsh for one thing. A man could be hanged for setting fire to a rick or for demanding food with menaces: he could be transported for life for writing a threatening letter, and for seven years for breaking up a piece of agricultural machinery. And the cruelty of this code seems intensified when we consider who were some of its victims; ignorant, illiterate rustics, struggling to support ten children on six shillings a week, misled by crude agitators and their own despair, into striking out blindly at those whom they were told were the authors of their misery and starvation. In fact the law was not carried out in its full rigour; of several hundred men condemned to death only a handful were actually executed. But what happened was sufficiently dreadful. The reader’s blood runs cold at the reports of the scenes outside the Court rooms at Salisbury and Winchester; the ragged, wailing wives and mothers watching boys of nineteen dragged to the gallows, fathers of young families, manacled and hustled into the carts that were to take them to the grim hulks in which they were to be transported to a lifetime of slavery in the convict settlements of Australia.
It is painful and disturbing to think of the tender-hearted Melbourne as involved in such events at all, let alone as responsible for setting them in motion. But in fact his conduct in the matter is not so uncharacteristic or so unjustifiable as might at first be supposed. After all it was not he who had made the laws. Or who tried the cases; that was the judges’ affair. And he had no reason to suppose that the judges did not carry out their duties correctly and conscientiously. Melbourne’s concern was with general policy. That policy was in harmony with his whole political outlook. He had always thought civil disorder the worst of all evils. “To force,” he said, “nothing but force can be successfully opposed. It is evident that all legislation is impotent and ridiculous, unless the public peace can be preserved and the liberty and property of individuals saved from outrage and invasion.” If this were true at any time, it was especially true in 1830. Melbourne, in common with most responsible people in England, was sure the country was tottering on the edge of bloodstained chaos. Not unnaturally, when they woke every morning to hear of mobs burning down houses and robbing harmless citizens, without anyone being able, apparently, to stop them! What made these events more ominous was that the men who composed the mobs were no worse off than they had often been during recent years; yet never before had they broken out in this sinister fashion. It looked as if these disturbances must be deliberately provoked by some revolutionary plot. Now if ever, Melbourne felt, was the time for a Government to act strongly. Above all, a reforming Government! He thought reform a risky business at best: the risk was only justified if the country was kept under iron control while it was going through. The surest, and ultimately the most humane way to do this, was to stamp hard and at once on the first stirrings of rebellion. People needed a fright. Even when he did not intend that a prisoner should be executed, Melbourne approved of sentencing him to death. “The death sentence,” he remarked, “is an example more strict.”
In all this he showed thorough good sense. Only too often have Governments of moderate change brought catastrophe on a nation by a weak, timid inability to control the disruptive forces which they themselves have let loose. Melbourne deserves some of the credit for the fact that England, alone of European countries in the nineteenth century, succeeded in getting rid of the old régime without a revolution. Nor indeed, by the standards of his age, was he unusually severe. On the contrary, many people thought he was not nearly severe enough. William IV in particular was always writing him endless agitated letters urging him to forbid trades unions, to increase the legal penalties for rioting, to call out the military. And many persons more intelligent than William IV said the same things. To their excited urgings, Melbourne remained blandly impervious. The existing law, he said with truth, was quite severe enough if it was properly enforced. Trades unions were no doubt undesirable institutions; but to suppress them was illegal and a dangerous blow at liberty. Calling out the soldiers was an hysterical, tyrannous proposal. And when one of his colleagues suggested employing spies and agent provocateurs in order to discover the ringleaders of revolt, Melbourne sent him away with a polite flea in his ear. “I am sure you must feel,” he wrote, “that in our anxiety to discover the perpetrators of these most dangerous and atrocious acts we should run as little risk as possible of involving innocent persons in accusations, and still less of adopting measures which may encourage the seduction of persons now innocent, into the commission of crime.” Firmly and unsentimentally, he chose as usual to follow a rational and middle way.
All the same, it is disconcerting to find him so very unhesitating and unruffled about it all. Surely so kind a man should have had more qualms about applying, however moderately, a criminal code of this ferocity. There are moments when an air of philosophic detachment is out of place. Here we come up against the limitations alike of Melbourne’s circumstances and his outlook. A man born in 1779 was all too used to people being hanged and transported for small offences: if, in addition, his life moved on the Olympian heights of Melbourne House and Brooks’s Club, he was unlikely to enter imaginatively into the sufferings of agricultural labourers, unless he made a considerable effort. Melbourne did not make the effort. No doubt this was partly due to his good sense. He knew that all statesmen had to do disagreeable things sometimes; having decided a disagreeable thing was necessary, why make it worse by fruitless worrying? But his apparent imperturbability was also, paradoxically, the defect of his very soft-heartedness. Just because he hated the painful so much, he tended to shut his eyes to it. He shrank from imagining the labourers’ feelings for the same reasons that he was later to shrink from reading Oliver Twist. And of course his sympathies were further frozen by secret fear: that stab of uncontrollable fear which always attacked him at a serious threat to the tranquillity and stability which he valued more than anything else in the world.
Anyway, if he had felt a qualm, it might well have been stifled by the chorus of congratulations with which his policy was greeted. Everyone whose opinion he could possibly be expected to value, thought he had done admirably. The Tories were profoundly relieved to discover that a Whig Minister could be as firm against revolution as they were: Liberals were delighted the country should realize that reform could be carried through without disorder. Macaulay, the typical man of the new progressive middle-class, asserted that the sins of reactionary landlords were no excuse for Jacobin outrage. Even Miss Harriet Martineau, stern pioneer of feminism and popular economics—though in general she disapproved of Melbourne as a reprehensible example of aristocratic frivolity—felt bound to praise him for the mingled firmness and moderation with which, in her view, he had dealt with the disturbances of 1830. His colleagues backed him to a man. And when the Radical Hunt proposed a general pardon for offenders in the House of Commons, his motion was rejected by a huge majority. Melbourne’s reputation as a statesman was growing steadily higher.
Besides putting down disorders, he also took steps to see they should not break out. Highly characteristic steps; into the Home Office in London he imported the free and easy methods of conducting business which surprised the officials of Dublin. He was ready to see people at the most unconventional times and places—notably in his dressing-room when he was getting up in the morning. His eyes concentrated on his shaving glass and his chin white with soap, he would listen inscrutably to what his visitor had to say. From time to time he jerked out a brusque, acute question. After he had found out what he wanted to know, genially he brought the interview to a close. People were disconcerted too by the men he employed. What were they to think, for instance, of his secretary Tom Young, a sharp vulgarian of dubious connections and breezy over-familiar manners, whom Melbourne had somehow managed to pick up when he, Young, was acting as Purser on the Duke of Devonshire’s yacht. Melbourne, however, was too sure of his own dignity to mind his familiarities; while Young’s doubtful connections he found a positive advantage. “He’s my weather gauge,” Melbourne remarked, “through him I am able to look down below; which is for me more important than all I can learn from the fine gentlemen clerks about me.”
He had special need of information from below at this period. The revolutionary movement was not confined to the countryside. Beneath a smooth and orderly surface, London was seething with unrest, murmurous with discontent. Every evening that autumn when dusk had fallen on the great city, groups radical and revolutionary, would meet in shops and obscure upper rooms, to discuss schemes, sometimes legal, sometimes illegal, by which the defeat of the anti-reformers might be assured. Melbourne wanted some first-hand information about these people; to find out what they were really plotting and, if possible, to influence them towards lawful courses. As at Dublin, he saw that it was hopeless to try and do this through official channels and by means of decorous civil servants. What he wanted was a man like Tom Young, accustomed to knocking about in all sorts of queer company and who did not take no for an answer.
Conspicuous among these radical groups was one which gathered at a sort of combined bookshop and political club called the Charing Cross Library and was dominated by Francis Place, a maker of leather breeches who has left his name in history as a pioneer of democratic radicalism. A dour-faced, bristle-haired person, capable, aggressive, self-educated and self-satisfied, he represented that important middle section of his party which combined a bitter hostility to lords and landowners with an equally bitter contempt for unpractical extremists on his own side. In the days of his festive youth, Melbourne had bought his breeches from him; in fact Place had once dunned him for an unpaid bill. This inauspicious circumstance, however, did not now stop Melbourne from picking him out to be the means by which he might get into contact with the working-class movement. Accordingly in November he sent his brother George Lamb to ask Place to appeal publicly to the agricultural labourers to stop rioting; he also set up regular communications with him through the medium of Tom Young. Place received these overtures with shrewdness and suspicion; he refused to have anything to do with George Lamb’s proposals and was not taken in by Young’s false joviality; “A cleverish sort of fellow who has a vulgar air of frankness which may put some people off their guard,” he noted caustically. On his side, Melbourne did not put much confidence in Place. That type of man in his experience was always, in fact, ready to break the law, whatever he may say to the contrary beforehand. He also noted that Place’s information always seemed to support the policy Place wanted the Government to adopt. However, each felt he had something to gain from the other. On a healthy basis of mutual distrust, the connection established itself.
Meanwhile, the battle for reform thundered on. After passing its Second Reading in the House of Commons by one vote, it was beaten in Committee. Clearly the Whigs would never get it through without a larger Parliamentary representation. Prompted by Lord Grey, William IV therefore hurried down to Westminster and cramming his crown hastily on to one side of his head, entered the Chamber and dissolved Parliament. A stormy general election followed in which the Whigs got their increased majority. Once again, the Bill was brought in: this time it passed the Commons and proceeded to the House of Lords. Its first appearance there was the occasion of a memorable full-dress debate. The outstanding speakers were Lord Grey, who revived for the wonder and delight of a new generation the stately splendours of eighteenth century oratory; and Lord Chancellor Brougham, a master of the more trenchant modern style. His speech culminated in a peroration in which, falling on his knees and with outstretched hands, he implored the peers not to throw out the Bill. Unluckily, in order to stimulate his eloquence, he had during his speech drunk a whole bottle of mulled port, with the result that once on his knees he found he was unable to get up until assisted to do so by his embarrassed colleagues.
Melbourne did not emulate the rhetorical feats of his leaders. But he supported the Bill in a characteristic speech, full of detachment and digression and apt quotations from Livy and Lord Bacon; and in which he frankly explained the reasons for his changed attitude to reform. He did not believe in it any more than before, he said, certainly its results were likely to disappoint its more enthusiastic advocates. But the popular demand for it had become so widespread that, according to his theory of statesmanship, there was less danger in passing it than in turning it down.
These cool and prudent reflections did not succeed in converting their Tory-minded lordships. On the morning of 9th October, the pro-reform papers announced, in an edition specially printed on black-edged paper, the House of Lords had thrown the Reform Bill out. The effect of this news on the country seemed to justify Melbourne’s reading of the public mind; and his belief in the danger of revolution as well. Riot and outrage broke out even more violently than the year before; and this was not only in the country, but also in the great centres of population. Towns blazed as well as ricks. In Derby the jail was broken into and several people killed; Nottingham Castle was destroyed; Bristol was a scene of spectacular destruction with the red-coated soldiers firing on the crowd and the Bishop’s palace in flames against the dim November dawn.
More alarming to those in power, because more generally formidable, were the signs of organized revolution which were beginning to show themselves. The Political Unions for instance; they protested that their only function was to maintain law and order while Reform was going through. But they were disciplined, they had the advantage of efficient middle-class leadership, and their moving spirit, Attwood, was as bitter a radical as Place himself. What purpose might not he turn them to, if he began to think that the cause of Reform was in danger! Moreover, in the North workingmen’s unions had sprung up, whose aims were openly revolutionary. There were the usual sinister rumours of secret drilling and arms practice after dark. Civil War looked close. In the polite circles of London feeling reached a new height of tension. Ladies in drawing-rooms repeated to each other horrific reports of respectable squires’ wives torn brutally from their beds by savage mobs, who broke up their furniture and made merry in their cellars; in clubs gentlemen had it on good authority that a rebellious army was at that very instance marching on the capital. The King’s letters to his ministers grew more and more frantic. Even Lord Grey wondered if the Government had taken the trades union movement seriously enough. Indeed almost alone among Ministers Melbourne appeared his ordinary smiling self. People were even more struck by his coolness than they had been the year before.
This was the more remarkable because the times were more anxious. Once more it was his responsibility to repress disorder. Once more he rose to the occasion. London was the chief danger spot; the seat of government must at all costs not be allowed to get out of hand. Nonchalantly, unconventionally, effectively Melbourne took his steps. Troops and private negotiations were his means. He posted soldiers at strategic points, forbade public meetings and sent Young off to see Place. Within a week or two all danger of disturbances in London had passed. In the country with equally successful results, he got into touch with Attwood and dispatched military detachments to especially unruly districts. For the rest, his time was taken up with soothing down the King and his colleagues and with dealing with his official correspondence. Panic had started a new flood of letters to the Home Office, passionately adjuring the Minister to do something drastic and to do it at once. Melbourne noticed they seldom said what. He was not impressed. “When in doubt what should be done,” he reflected, “do nothing.”
But he was not as calm as he looked. How should he be, when the strife and chaos he dreaded loomed apparently ever nearer! Underneath his indolent surface, throbbed a growing nervous tension. Once for an instant it betrayed itself. There was in September a debate in the House of Lords about the spring-guns which some landowners had set up in their fields to keep off rick burners. Melbourne defended them in a speech marked by a strange and uncharacteristic note of hysteria. “Rick burning,” he cried, “seems to have no object or motive; but to arise from a pure unmixed and diabolical feeling of senseless malignity.” His heightened state of emotion also showed itself in a change of attitude towards the Reform Bill. What with the House of Lords on the one side and the Political Unions on the other, it was clear that it was not going through as easily as the Government had once hoped. A crisis was approaching in which Ministers would have to decide whether to pacify the Lords by modifying the Bill or satisfy the reformers by creating enough peers to force it through. They began to divide themselves into two groups according as to how far at heart they really wanted to reform. Melbourne inevitably inclined to that group which did not want it. Indeed the effect of his anxiety was to bring out all his latent prejudice against it. What nonsense it all was! What a nuisance that anyone should ever have raised the question! Secretly he would not have been sorry to see the Government go out and the whole issue drop. He found himself feeling suddenly exacerbated by those of his colleagues who clamoured that the Bill be put through at all costs. The excitable Lord Durham in particular, shouting abuse at Lord Grey in Cabinet for what he considered his weakness in hesitating to create peers at once—“If I’d been Lord Grey,” said Melbourne, “I’d have knocked him down.” And again when Durham fulminated against any proposals to alter the Bill in order to conciliate its opponents. “I doubt if he knows what the alterations are,” commented Melbourne tartly, “as he will not let anyone tell him.”
On the other hand Melbourne’s emotions were not so out of control as to silence the voice of that good sense which had previously brought him round to agree to reform. In some ways it had been reinforced by the disturbances in the autumn. Melbourne had been quite right in thinking that the popular demand for reform was now so strong as to make it risky to refuse it. More risky than before as their hopes had now been raised! “It is a very dangerous way of dealing to retract what you have once offered to concede,” he said.
In the end these considerations triumphed; good sense generally did with Melbourne. The proposals for modifying the Bill came from a group of moderate Tory peers—the Waverers, they were nicknamed. These wanted the recall of Parliament put off in order to give time for their plans to be thoroughly considered. Melbourne was against this: a delay would rouse public suspicion. Riots and rick burning would begin again, and he would have to put them down. Besides, though he sympathized with the Waverers’ intentions, he did not think their policy likely to do any good. Rather would it lead to the break up of the Government, he told Palmerston, and to a general exacerbation of feeling. The Ministers’ chief aim should be to keep things together until people had a chance to cool down. Besides, it would be letting down Lord Grey to assist in breaking up his Government. As often before in Melbourne’s history, he felt strongly about personal obligations because he was so uncertain about any others.
Doubtfully, reluctantly, resignedly he reverted to his old acceptance of reform. The complex contradiction of his sentiments on the subject showed in his demeanour. The tone of his talk became even more bewildering than usual to simple-minded persons. By turns flippant and pessimistic, frank and enigmatic he seemed wholely detached from the Government of which he was a member. Of course reform was folly, he would say. Yet, when anyone suggested resisting it, he would burst out laughing, rub his hands and turn the subject. One observer was especially mystified by him. Charles Greville, the Clerk of the Council, had constituted himself an unofficial intermediary between the Waverers and the Ministers. He was always buttonholing Melbourne, in the Park, in South Street, at the Home Office, in order to extract from him some statement of his views. Greville was ingratiating, persistent and conceited—“The most conceited man I ever met,” said Disraeli, “though I have read Cicero and known Bulwer Lytton”—the very type Melbourne most enjoyed teasing. Sometimes he set out to shock Greville by openly mocking the whole idea of reform, sometimes he tantalized his curiosity with half confidences about his colleagues, sometimes he lounged back “in his lazy, listening, silent humour, disposed to hear everything and to say very little.” Never though, did he quite commit himself. Greville found these interviews extremely unsatisfactory. What a pity it was, he reflected, that at this important moment in English history, one of His Majesty’s chief Ministers should be no better than a frivolous cynic; and a dissipated spendthrift into the bargain. Leaving South Street one morning he noticed with a pleasurable sense of moral disapproval, a Jew waiting in the hall and a valet de chambre sweeping away a bonnet and shawl.
With the new year events began to move towards their culmination. It became obvious that the Whigs would not get the Bill through without at any rate pledging themselves to make peers. Were they prepared to do this? Many hated the idea, Melbourne most of all. What a dangerous precedent would it provide for forcing all sorts of other odious reforms through Parliament in the future! For a moment he was moved from his attitude of detached resignation; and protested so strongly that in January it was thought he might resign. In the end, however, common sense and loyalty once more prevailed. When the final crisis came in May, Melbourne in Cabinet voted for demanding from the King the power to make peers. But up to the last he was in a queer uncertain mood. Greville met him in April at a ball at the French Embassy. Melbourne suddenly said to him, “I don’t believe there is a strong feeling in the country for the measure . . . might it not be thrown out?” “Do your colleagues agree?” asked the astonished Greville. “No,” said Melbourne. Greville said that he ought to persuade them. “What difficulty can they have in swallowing the rest?” replied Melbourne, “After they have given up the rotten boroughs . . . I don’t see how the Government is to be carried on without them. Some means may be found; a remedy may possibly present itself but I am not aware of any.” No doubt he was still teasing Greville by a display of cynicism. But he was also giving voice to his secret convictions. When it came, the glorious triumph of the reform cause left Melbourne noticeably unexhilarated. Reluctantly he had supported it as the only means of pacifying popular discontent. Now he began to wonder if it would produce the desired effect. After all they had been led to hope, the people would certainly be disappointed by the results of reform; with the consequence that they would get more angrily discontented than ever. One day soon after the Bill had passed, he met Attwood. “If the people don’t get their belly-full after this,” Attwood said, “I shall be torn in pieces.” “And so much the better, you deserve it,” retorted Melbourne with unwonted bitterness. Moreover, even if by a stroke of luck, the people did stay quiet, the new Parliament would not. Gloomily Melbourne envisaged the prospect of a House of Commons full of earnest, strenuous middle-class persons insatiably clamouring for more and more reforms; and with the power to get them. One thing he was sure of: they were not easily going to persuade him to help them again. “There is no knowing to what one may be led by circumstance,” he wrote to his brother Fred, “but at present I am determined to make my stand here and not to advance any further.”
However, it was not in him to give way to depression. Perhaps things were not as bad as he feared; anyway it was never any use worrying. Ruefully and philosophically he shrugged his shoulders at the future and went off to dine at Holland House.