He had need of consolation during the next few years. For the political scene was not such as to cheer his foreboding spirit. To anyone, but especially to any member of the governing class, the atmosphere of England after the passing of the Reform Bill was tense, dark and uneasy. It was obscurely realized that the Bill marked the beginning of a completely new epoch; but what that epoch was going to be like, no one could tell. In consequence, those who had anything to lose felt all the time jumpy and apprehensive. The pessimists among them, like the Duke of Wellington, even took the view that they were in for a period of violent revolution, that now, with the citadel of aristocratic power surrendered, it would only be a few years before King, peers and private property were swept away in a storm of bloodshed. Certainly, as Melbourne had expected, extreme parties were already showing themselves angrily disappointed by the results of reform. The Home Office still got reports of secret plots to overthrow the Constitution: from time to time there were still outbreaks of riots and violence. Now loud, now soft, the murmur of popular discontent was ominously audible.
Whether or not it could be quieted depended on Parliament. But Parliament, in its new reformed state, had itself become an unknown quantity. Not only was it largely made up of what Melbourne called “the blackguardly interest”—manufacturers, Nonconformists and other dingy and unpredictable persons—but they and their fellow members were susceptible, as never before, to the pressure of their constituents, who could threaten to turn them out if they did not approve of their actions. Could they be relied on to stand firm, if firmness was likely to be unpopular? Besides, every day that passed revealed the Reform party, which formed the majority of members, as very divided. Reform had been passed by a combination of people who wanted it for widely different reasons. The Radicals looked on it as the first necessary step in a general reform; reform of the Church, reform of local government, reform in Ireland, reform of the House of Lords, reform of the Corn Laws. The old-fashioned Whigs and the Canningites, on the other hand, hoped that by granting Parliamentary Reform, they would pacify discontent sufficiently to stop the demand for any other reforms. In between these two extremes hovered a crowd of people, willing for more reform than the Canningites, though not for so much as the Radicals, but who could not agree as to what particular reforms they each desired. All these different groups had united together to fight for Parliamentary Reform. Now that they had got it, however, their differences began to show. It looked as if these might become so sharp as to break up the party and bring down the Government. And who was to succeed them? Not the Tories; for the time being they were a beaten, punch-drunk rout with no confidence in them-selves and no hope of getting a majority in the country. The result might well be that, for want of an alternative, the Radicals would sweep in and effect by constitutional means changes almost as extreme as those proposed by the agitators for revolution. To avoid this, strong and skilful leadership was needed. It did not look as if this was going to be obtained from the existing Government.
Indeed, they were an odd set of men to be guiding England along the path of progress at this crucial moment. A scratch team of aristocrats gathered hastily together to pass the Reform Bill, they were, for the most part, themselves men of the past; who, whatever their theoretical opinions, were unqualified alike by tradition and experience to envisage the new bourgeois and industrial epoch which it was their fate to inaugurate. Moreover, as much as their followers, they were divided as to what they wanted to happen. They, too, had supported reform for diverse reasons: and now they, too, reacted differently to the prospect of the future. Every shade of opinion except that of the extreme left was represented in their ranks.
So variously-minded a body could only have worked together easily if its individual members had been themselves conciliatory persons. This, however, was far from being the case. Some of them, like Melbourne himself or Lord Holland, were reasonable enough. But there were others who would have been troublesome members of a team at any period. To be born and bred a ruler does not encourage a man to be accommodating; and the high-nosed, be-chokered countenances that gazed down at one so arrogantly from the portraits of the Reform ministers exhibit them as possessed of all the wilful and idiosyncratic independence of their Whig blue blood.
The two most influential members in deciding the course of policy were Lord Grey, the Prime Minister, and Lord Althorp, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Grey was a shy, reserved, formidable grand seigneur of unbending principles and distinguished manners, who had become celebrated in his younger days as a pioneer of reform. Since he would never join an administration not specifically Whig he had kept out of politics for many years. Now, brought back to lend the authority of his name and his character to the Reform Government, he found himself, like Rip Van Winkle, in a world utterly unlike that of his youth. He did not like it. The age of enlightenment and progress, for which he had once fought so ardently, turned out, now it had arrived, to be a vulgar, restless affair. Not a day passed that Grey did not yearn to be back in the quiet and freedom of his country home at Howick Hall, Northumberland, with his books and his grandchildren and his sporting guns: and, though a stern sense of duty kept him at his post, the strain of living in so uncongenial an atmosphere kept him permanently irritable and ill at ease. At the slightest extra friction—and this occurred almost monthly—Grey threatened to resign.
Lord Althorp, though easier-tempered than his chief, was also liable to proffer his resignation on small excuse. He was a curious and lovable character of a peculiarly English type. With his heavy figure and plain red weather-beaten face, he looked like a farmer; and in fact there was a lot of the farmer about him. Country pursuits were the only things he enjoyed; even during the crisis of the Reform Bill, he always opened letters from his bailiff before looking at the rest of his post. Yet beneath this John Bull exterior lurked a quixotic strain of enthusiastic idealism which led him far from the path Nature would seem to have marked out for him. He had loved his wife with so romantic a passion that when she died he gave up fox hunting, which he enjoyed more than anything else in life, for ever; no less a sacrifice could, he felt, express his utter desolation at her loss. He also threw himself into the cause of Reform against all his natural instincts as a landowner, simply because he thought Reform was the cause of justice. The same motive kept him still in office afterwards, though he had no ambition and was as miserable in London as a sporting dog. Not that he could feel that he did much good there. “I am nothing in Cabinet,” he remarked with humorous humility, “I have no great talent nor ill temper, so nobody cares for me.” It was not true. Althorp’s influence with his colleagues was considerable. With the House of Commons it was more. Who could resist so endearing a mixture of honesty and modesty and homeliness? The fact that he was a poor, halting speaker somehow only made members like him more. He could do anything he liked with them. Once when an opponent had raised a point against the Government, Althorp replied that he had some facts with which he was sure he could answer it, but for the moment he had mislaid them. Both sides of the House at once accepted his answer as perfectly satisfactory. Indeed, so far as the management of Parliament was concerned, Althorp was the most important member of the Government. “He is the tortoise,” said Melbourne, “on whose back the world reposes.”
Four other personalities stand out especially in the history of those years; the Hon. Edward Stanley, Secretary for Ireland; Lord John Russell, the Privy Seal; Lord Durham, the Paymaster General, and Lord Chancellor Brougham. Stanley represented the extreme right wing. Only family tradition put him on the Whig side. By temperament a despotic oligarch, he has been a leading Waverer over Reform; and now ruled Ireland by a policy of ruthless coercion in the interests of the Protestant Ascendancy. For the rest, he was youthful, brilliant and combative with an extraordinary gift for aggressive, effective debating, and off-hand patrician manners which induced a disagreeable sense of social inferiority among the more bourgeois members of his party. They were mystified by the race-course metaphors with which he sprinkled his discourses, and resented his habit of lounging back on the Treasury bench with his feet propped up on the table in front of him, for all the world as if he were taking his ease at Brooks’s Club.
Lord John Russell also lacked the common touch. A small, prim young man, with a large head and a precise, old-fashioned mode of speech, he often failed to recognize a follower of ten years’ standing and conversed in a strain of cold, flat candour that was the reverse of winning. On one occasion he described to a friend how at a party he had left the Duchess of Inverness to talk to the Duchess of Sutherland because she was sitting farther from the fire and he felt too hot. “I hope you told the Duchess of Inverness why you left her,” said the friend. “No,” said John Russell after a pause. “But I did tell the Duchess of Sutherland.” All the same, if John Russell was not loved he was, unlike Stanley, deeply and growingly trusted by his party. This is a little surprising because, in addition to his lack of social charm, there was something depressingly commonplace about John Russell’s mind. Perhaps, though, this was an advantage to him. Intellectual originality does not make for popularity in English politics. What the average member likes is ordinary ideas supported by brains and character stronger than the ordinary. This was just what John Russell possessed. His outlook was the orthodox Whig outlook of the new generation, who believed in adapting old institutions to a new situation by a process of cautious reform. But John Russell did not hold this in a vague, instinctive, amateurish fashion. Intellectual and highly educated, he never rested till he had clarified and ordered his opinions in relation to a system of defined and rigid political principles. He was a doctrinaire of the middle way. With a doctrinaire’s certainty, too; here we come to the final cause of his influence. A strong, narrow character, fortified by the unhesitating self-confidence which was the inheritance of every member of the august house of Russell, he never doubted that he was always in the right about everything. “There is not a better man in England than Lord John Russell,” said Sidney Smith, “but he is utterly ignorant of moral fear: there is nothing he would not undertake. I believe he would perform the operation for the stone—build St. Peter’s—or assume, with or without ten minutes’ notice, the command of the Channel Fleet: and no-one would discover by his manner that the patient had died, the church tumbled down and the Channel Fleet been knocked to atoms.” Self-confidence on this scale, though irritating to his acquaintance, was a great help to John Russell in imposing his will on more hesitant persons.
Black-browed, “Radical Jack” Durham, the champion of left-wing ideas in the Government, was equally sure he was right. But he was less successful at persuading others to share his belief. The rich Radical seldom carries conviction, especially if he is as fantastically rich as Durham. Justly or not, it is hard to accept, as spokesman of the poor, a man who is reported to have spent £900,000 on doing up his house. Besides, Durham’s character was even more paradoxical than his political position. Independent, courageous, and with fitful gleams of political vision, he was also a theatrical, unbalanced egotist whose infirmities of temper had been developed to the highest pitch by bad health, bad nerves and too much money. Accustomed to indulge every changing mood, and follow every impulse, his character was a bundle of inconsistencies. He was an autocrat at home and a democrat abroad, spoiled his children and cuffed his servants, was delightful to his friends one moment and insulted them the next, gave magnificent dinner parties through which he himself sat in sullen silence, risked his reputation to serve the cause of liberty and equality at the same time as he was pulling every string he could lay hands on to get himself made an earl—“shall the richest commoner in England be no more than the last of her barons?” he demanded furiously. As a member of a Cabinet Durham was impossible. Not only did he deliberately provoke his less progressive colleagues by the revolutionary violence of his proposals, but he advocated them with a lack of self-control that made discussion with him impossible. He stormed, he sulked, he made scenes, he burst into tears, he flung out of the room, he squabbled incessantly with Stanley; and he bullied Lord Grey—who, incidentally, was his father-in-law—so unmercifully that the poor gentleman, losing all his patrician poise, cowered in a comer, while kindly Althorp sat with his face buried in his hands out of sheer embarrassment. Outside the Cabinet Durham intrigued with disaffected members of his party against his own leaders and made public speeches of extreme indiscretion. In the autumn of 1832, to the general relief it was arranged he should go on a mission to Russia. Russia sounded comfortably far off. But before many months were over he was back, and the scenes were raging away as intolerably as ever. By 1834 there were few of his colleagues with whom Lord Durham had not personally quarrelled.
All the same it is doubtful if he was quite such a nuisance as Lord Brougham. Durham’s views kept fairly steady, even if his temper did not. Not so Brougham’s. He was the one important Minister who was not an aristocrat; a middle-class Scottish lawyer who, from the time he had entered political life twenty odd years before had, by the sheer brilliance of his personal gifts, established himself in the forefront of the Whig Party. During its long period of eclipse he had done more than any other one man to modernize its appeal and keep up its fighting spirit. By 1830 he was generally considered the most dynamic single force in politics and possibly the cleverest man alive. Certainly Brougham was a phenomenon; as flamboyantly eccentric as a character of Dickens—and as preternaturally vital. The queer, lanky figure with the baleful, restless eyes and twitching, inquisitive nose was never still for an instant. Across the page of history he strides, fidgeting, posturing, scratching his head, picking his nose and incessantly pouring forth a flood of talk in which ideas and scurrility, jokes and voluminous learning were strangely and sparklingly blended. No one could help listening to Brougham when he really got going. “Lord Brougham,” writes a fashionable lady, “kept us spellbound at breakfast talking about the habits of bees, as charming as a fairy tale.” In serious conclave with his colleagues, he was equally riveting: the one member of the Government with expert knowledge of the special problems of the new age—educational problems, legal problems, economic problems—and with projects for solving them all. “This morning,” remarked the sardonic Rogers about him, “Solon, Lycurgus, Demosthenes, Archimedes, Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Chesterfield and a good many others went away in one post-chaise!”
But what lay behind this astonishing display? Not profound thought. Examined today and unassisted by the magnetic light of Brougham’s personal presence, his learning shows up as superficial and his ideas as no more than commonplace. Morally he was even less impressive—undignified, boastful, drunken, and directed by no consistent principles whatsoever. His days passed in a turmoil of plot and counter-plot, trickery and double-dealing in which he tacked about so often and so quick from section to section of his Party, according as to which seemed most likely to further his career of self-advancement, that it was impossible to be sure at any one moment which side he was on. To complete the confusion he created, there was a streak in him of sheer irresponsibility. Out of jealousy or temper, or just from an impish delight in stirring up trouble, he was always liable to do or say something which set everyone by the ears. Indeed, the more Brougham is studied, the more surprising it becomes that he should have succeeded in getting where he did. For there was nothing constant in him, but an unsleeping egotism and a wonderful skill in showing off. Upwards rushed the rocket, deafening the ears with its roar and lighting up the whole sky with a shower of stars. But when they had faded, all that remained was a bit of charred stick and a faint ominous whiff of sulphur.
His contemporaries were dazzled by the stars, but they smelt the sulphur all right. “Beelzebub,” “the Arch-Fiend,” “old Wickedshifts”—such were his nicknames. None of the Whig leaders trusted him enough to want him in the Government; but they feared he might be more dangerous outside it. So Grey made him Lord Chancellor. He soon regretted it. Perhaps in an unusually disciplined and united Ministry Brougham’s energy and brains might have been subdued to serve some useful purpose; but not in the Whig Ministry of 1831! The Arch-Fiend used his great position only as a platform from which to make his personality felt by his own characteristic methods, which included meddling in other Ministers’ business behind their backs, and conducting his own without any reference to the lines of policy laid down by his leaders. Like an elderly and malignant Puck, incongruously clothed in Lord Chancellor’s robes and wig, Brougham flitted about leaving a trail of bad faith and bad blood wherever he went.
With such a team to drive it is no wonder that poor Grey longed to be back at Howick Hall. He himself did not feel inclined for further reforms; only as much of them as would keep the Radicals quiet without annoying the old Whigs so much that they withdrew their support from him. Helped by Althorp and in a less degree by John Russell, he managed to pursue this middle course more successfully than might have been expected. Some substantial measures were passed in those years, notably those dealing with banking, legal, factory and poor law reform. But the Government was too divided to settle down into any kind of stability. Hardly two months went by without someone threatening to resign; Durham and Brougham from temper, Stanley and John Russell from principle, Althorp and Grey from the simple desire for a quiet life. The Cabinet lurched on from dangerous crisis to dangerous crisis; and, though for a time catastrophe was averted by a succession of hastily patched-up compromises, yet each crisis left the Government weaker in itself and more discredited in the eyes of the world. At last the left and right extremes broke off. Durham went in the spring of 1833; Stanley followed him in May, 1834. It was clear that one more rumpus, and the whole thing would fall to pieces.
From his customary position of detachment Melbourne surveyed its decline and approaching fall. Himself he was in favour of Grey’s middle-way policy. It was not that he liked reforms any better than he had done: or that he was less apprehensive about the future. So far as he could judge from the reports that came into the Home Office, popular feeling was still very disturbed. He was appalled, so he told Greville, driving up with him to London from a country house visit in the autumn of 1832, by the desire for change and general restlessness which prevailed, and he judged violent revolution to be likely enough to insist on the Commander-in-Chief being a non-party appointment. If it came to fighting he thought, it was essential that the forces of order should have the confidence of all respectable people behind them. Melbourne’s very fear of disorder, however, modified his instinctive conservatism. Better concession than civil war, he would agree after some grumbling. It might pacify people for a bit at any rate; and it would help to keep the Government united. As much as ever he felt its unity to be more important than anything else; and did all he could to promote it. “I was always exhorting different sections of Lord Grey’s Government to shuffle over differences,” he related later. Personally he always took care to avoid rows and tried to get on with everyone: so successfully that he was the only Minister whom all the others liked. This did not mean that he liked them. Coolly and silently, he observed his colleagues and drew conclusions about their characters for future use. As politicians, he esteemed them only in so far as their conduct encouraged what was tranquil and stable. By this test Grey and Althorp, along with some old friends like Lord Holland, came out not too badly—though Melbourne mocked at Grey’s reluctance to make the best of anything. “Lord Grey,” he said, “in or out, successful or unsuccessful, was never satisfied with anything, least of all with himself.” Melbourne got on also with John Russell well enough. Of course John Russell worried too much about his principles, but his views were moderate, his word was to be trusted; and anyway Melbourne had known him all his life. The others were not so satisfactory. Stanley was the best of them. Melbourne sympathized with his dislike of reform and was enthusiastic about his oratory. “He rose like a young eagle above them all,” he cried, after listening to one of his star performances in the House of Commons. But Stanley could not be described as a tranquillizer. “He has about him both the faults of great spirit, haste and rashness, and those of being discontented and disgusted,” Melbourne told Fred. So also had Brougham and Durham without any of Stanley’s compensating virtues. Durham was everything that irritated Melbourne most—idealistic, vain and rude. Besides, it was impossible to believe a word he said. All that fuss about his ill health for instance!—Melbourne noticed that he was only ill when he wanted to get out of doing something. He could not bear Durham. About Brougham, he was not able to bring himself to feel so strongly. Melbourne always had a soft spot for amusing ruffians, and all the more if they were eccentric. He even went so far as to say that Brougham had a good heart lurking about him somewhere. This did not mean that he liked having him in the Government. As early as the autumn of 1832 he had made up his mind that he was an untrustworthy nuisance. Three years later he declared, “Brougham is mad and will one day, by sacrificing everything to his personal whim, end by sacrificing himself.” Melbourne thought that the sooner this happened the better.
Altogether the spectacle of cabinet life served to confirm him in his general sense of the infirmity of human beings and their institutions. “A Cabinet is a delicate and fragile machine,” he writes tartly in the summer of 1834, “this is still more the case when it has recently been shaken and broken, and repaired with new materials. Those who remain are anxious not to have to concede anything to their new allies: those who join are equally desirous of obtaining as much concession as possible, in order to justify themselves for having accepted office . . . Such a body is not to be approached without the utmost care and even alarm!” For the rest, his colleagues provided abundant food for his sense of comedy. He was especially entertained by the way they—like Ministers in all periods—insisted on believing themselves to be both indispensable and popular. “They think themselves fixtures,” he exclaimed in comic wonderment, “I cannot think why!” Yet, he reflected, his irony taking another turn, they might be right. When did unpopularity ever bring a Government down? Perhaps, on the contrary, it kept it in! “Now we are as unpopular as the Tories,” he remarked after the passing of the Bank Bill, “we may stay in as long as they did.” Certainly he got a lot of fun out of being a Minister, in spite of his gloomy views. By a characteristic paradox, he was at once the most pessimistic and the most cheerful member of the Government. During the next three years every glimpse we get of his figure reveals him in some joyous attitude; writing to Miss Eden “in tearing spirits,” lounging back with a look of arch amusement at a Guildhall banquet, swilling wine joyfully with John Russell, giving jocose infectious grunts of pleasure as he browses in the Holland House library, genially relaxing with his feet up on Lady Holland’s elegant drawing-room chairs; and everywhere loudly laughing. “Lord Melbourne,” said Tom Moore, “laughs more and at less than ever.”
We get a more extended view of him in those moments of relaxation through the eyes of Benjamin Haydon, diarist and painter. Haydon, naive, acute, egotistic, idealistic and preposterous, made Melbourne’s acquaintance in the autumn of 1832. After a lifetime’s unsuccessful struggle to persuade the public and the Royal Academy that he was a great artist, his luck had turned. He was commissioned to paint a picture of the official banquet to celebrate the triumph of reform. The Ministers came down to his studio to sit for their likenesses. Their patrician grace of manner appealed alike to Haydon’s snobbishness and his aesthetic sense. He was enchanted by them all, but especially by Melbourne. “A fine head,” he noted, “a delightfully frank, easy unaffected man of fashion. There is nothing like them when they add intelligence to breeding.”
Melbourne, on his side, was very much entertained by Haydon—here was a new type to be added to his collection of human oddities—and he encouraged him to display his eccentricities to the full. He asked him questions about himself and his queer friends, Keats, Shelley, Hazlitt and so on; and in his turn regaled Haydon with anecdotes about Charles Fox and Sir Joshua Reynolds. “Reynolds was a hard working old dog,” he said. “He worked too hard to be happy.” The two also had long discussions on politics, art and religion, in which Melbourne listened with apparent gravity to Haydon’s exalted rhapsodizings. Now and again he pulled him up by a shrewd well informed comment; but never in such a way as to make him ill at ease. On the contrary—“I am always brilliant with him,” Haydon noted complacently. Indeed, he found Melbourne so sympathetic that he was soon trying to enlist his help in what was the most cherished object of his heart, namely to persuade the State to become an active patron of historical paintings and more especially of the historical painting of Benjamin Haydon. Alas, he had mistaken his man! Melbourne was against the State taking on any task that was not a necessity; he did not look on historical painting as a necessity. Moreover, it is likely that he realized that Haydon was far from being the great artist he fancied himself. Accordingly, when Haydon mentioned the subject of State patronage, Melbourne gazed at him with a mischievous look and answered evasively. A dreadful doubt began to steal into Haydon’s mind. Could it be that Lord Melbourne did not take him seriously? “His manner suggested that I was a disappointed enthusiast,” he noted, “whom he found it amusing to listen to, however absurd it might be to adopt my plans.”
This was pretty near the truth. But Haydon had never been one to let truth get in the way of his dreams, without a struggle. In 1834 he returned to the charge and called on Melbourne at his house. Melbourne, just out of bed, appeared delighted to see him. But the up-shot of this, and of subsequent interviews, was to confirm Haydon in his disillusionment. Not that he ceased to respond to Melbourne’s charm. How graceful his gestures were, he noticed, how infectious his laugh, how like an antique statue’s was his neck revealed by the open collar of his grey dressing-gown! All the same, his attitude to Historical Art was, so far as Haydon could see, nothing short of lamentable. “God help the Minister that meddles with art!” he had remarked shockingly. Indeed, he seemed to take a positive pleasure in bantering and tantalizing Haydon on the subject. One day he would be maintaining perversely that State patronage was harmful to painters; on another that the Government was against paintings in public buildings because they wanted to emulate “the simplicity of the ancients.” Sometimes he did not even bother to answer Haydon’s eloquent adjurations; but merely rubbed his hands, burst out laughing, and turning to the looking glass, began to brush his hair.
Haydon’s patience was finally exhausted when the question of decorating the new House of Lords came up; and Melbourne, simply to tease, suggested employing the academician Callcott, a noted enemy of Haydon’s. A man who could make such a proposal even as a joke, reflected Haydon, was, it was clear, hopelessly frivolous. Sadly he decided that talking to Melbourne, seductive though it might be, was a waste of time. This did not prevent him from writing to Melbourne a year later to ask for some money. Melbourne sent a cheque for seventy pounds at once, adding, kindly but firmly, that Haydon must not expect any more. After this, we notice, communication between them seems to have ceased.
Laughing at Holland House and listening to Haydon, however, only occupied Melbourne’s leisure hours. These were more limited than he liked. He still had plenty of work. His main duties were two-fold; answering for the Government in the House of Lords and performing his functions as Home Secretary. In the House of Lords he was only moderately effective. Since he was shrewd and tactful he could be trusted not to let the Government down; but no amount of practice could make him an orator. The last thing he felt inclined to do was to cajole other people into adopting his opinions, let alone those of his party. All too well he realized how doubtfully right these were. Moreover he never learned to concentrate his thoughts in a purposive flow. Now and again, provoked by some unusually foolish or unjust remark from the other side, he would gather his wits together to make a sharp-edged effective reply; but for the most part he let himself wander along, now and again touching on the practical point at issue, but soon drifting off to pursue some curious train of generalizing thought, the upshot of which was always that since no one really knew anything about the matter, it was better to take no action on it, beyond allowing people to do what they liked. The only measures he enthusiastically approved were those for removing restrictions. Certainly let the Jews be relieved from their civil disabilities—“all disabilities ate injurious,” he declared, “and most are ineffectual.” He was also against stopping Trades Unions from holding meetings on Sundays, and poured scorn on the idea that you could make people more law-abiding by controlling the sale of drink. Indeed, all new-fangled schemes for checking crime struck him as futile. Perhaps some good might be done by insisting that convicts should keep themselves clean—they would be sure to dislike that. But do not try to educate them. “Recollect that crime has existed in all ages,” he remarked, “all attempts at eradication have hitherto proved useless. Education will not help, for education is knowledge . . . which can be good or bad.” Indeed he once suggested that the criminal law involved issues so obscure and deep as to be a subject for the philosopher rather than the statesman. It was part of the science of man; and “the science of man, if it is a science,” he said, “is one of the most unsettling and at the same time most curious lines presented for our investigation.” Such speculations led the peers of England into mental regions in which they were not at home. Melbourne’s speeches left them more bewildered than impressed.
As Home Secretary he was also bewildering. Strangers continued to be startled by Tom Young’s manners, and disconcerted to find themselves being interviewed by Melbourne shaving in his dressing-room at midday. Even when he did get down to the Office he carried his own atmosphere of eccentric informality with him. This was especially startling to deputations—those deputations of public-spirited persons keen to advocate some cause, which were a new and characteristic phenomenon of the age of reform. What were they to make of a Minister who received them lounging back nursing a sofa cushion; who, while they ponderously delivered their carefully prepared recitals of cogent argument and authenticated fact, pulled a feather out of the cushion and began blowing it about the room; and who after they had finished, answered briefly and with a bland smile that he was afraid he could not help them as he knew nothing about the matter in question. Was the Home Secretary an irresponsible ignoramus, they wondered?
Of course Melbourne was nothing of the kind. Anyone who worked for him could have told the deputation that most likely he had sat up half the night before, reading up the subject of their discourse. But he had no intention of letting them know this. This was partly out of mischief. Earnest well-informed persons with liberal ideals and nonconformist consciences are always powerful stimulants to the comic spirit. Melbourne could not resist the temptation to tease them. But there were more sober motives for his behaviour. Often he did not wish to commit the Government; to pretend ignorance was an easy way of doing this. There was generally a method in Melbourne’s madness. Queer and haphazard though his way of doing things might seem, his work got finished and his ends achieved. If efficiency is the art of getting what one wants, Melbourne was an efficient man.
As far as the Home Office was concerned his efficiency was limited by his political views. These were not constructive; for them to be so would have involved his taking an interest in social reform. Social reform bored Melbourne and he did not think it did any good. During his long period of leisure he had read some economics. His reading had converted him to the new doctrine of laissez-faire. It seemed to him proved beyond doubt that the problems of poverty could only be solved by allowing the forces of supply and demand to take their course. He realized that this process involved considerable suffering for the poor: and since even the study of economics could not transform Melbourne into a hard-hearted man, this disposed him more than ever to avert his mind from the subject. Here was yet another painful aspect of existence which he preferred not to think about.
His point of view appears vividly in an account of some conversations a few years earlier. In November, 1830, Lord Suffield, an enthusiastic peer of humane ideals, approached the Government with a scheme for relieving distressed agricultural labourers by settling them on waste lands as smallholders. In vain: to the orthodox opinion of the period all such schemes were cranky nonsense. So they were to Melbourne. He told Suffield he could have nothing to do with his plans. “I fear you have not devoted much attention to the subject,” said Suffield. “I understand it perfectly,” replied Melbourne crisply, “and that is my reason for saying nothing about it.” “How is this to be explained?” asked Suffield. “Because I consider it hopeless,” retorted Melbourne. Suffield said hotly that he supposed Melbourne agreed with Malthus that vice and misery were the only cure for the evils of poverty. Melbourne shrank from accepting so harsh and bald a version of his opinions. “No,” he said, “the evil is in numbers and the competition that ensues, etc.” “Well then,” said Suffield, “I have means to propose to meet that difficulty.” “Of that I know nothing,” said Melbourne, and changed the subject. Suffield could get nothing more out of him.
The same mixed uneasy state of feeling showed itself in his attitude towards the new reform measures. The Poor Law for instance; in so far as it was grounded on sound economic theory, he was in its favour. But both as a conservative and a man of heart he disliked it. The fact that it put power into the hand of commissioners to act without the permission of the Secretary of State, struck him as a dangerous bureaucratic innovation; and he was repelled by the idea of dragooning the poor into thrift and industry by stopping the old easy-going system of outdoor relief. The consequence was that he defended it in a lukewarm speech, and was heard swearing in a loud, angry undertone as he gave his vote for it. His mind was similarly divided over the Factory Acts for the protection of working children. He felt sorry enough for the children to sponsor the Bill in the House of Lords. On the other hand, in his view any legislation of this kind meant interfering with the action of economic laws; and as such was futile. The result was he could not throw himself into the fight for it with the enthusiasm which is born of faith. One afternoon, a member called Denison stopped him, just as he was getting on his horse outside the Home Office about to start home, and proposed some improvements in the Bill. Irritably Melbourne told him to go and see his brother George Lamb, who was working out the details for him. “I have been with him half-an-hour,” said Denison, “but I could get no way with him; he damned me, damned the clauses and damned the Bill.” “Well, damn it all,” said the exasperated Melbourne, “what more could he say?” Then an impulse of compunction swept over him. “But I will see what I can do about it,” he added. No doubt he did; he was a man of his word. But the story shows that he was not at heart a believer in social reform. On the contrary. “The whole duty of government,” he said, “is to prevent crime and to preserve contracts.”
In consequence his activities as Home Secretary were confined to the same object as in 1830: namely to maintaining order without infringing existing traditional liberties. This meant that he had to fight on two fronts. On the one hand he must see that the law was in fact properly enforced: on the other he had to resist proposals to introduce new and tyrannical legislation which was still urged on him by a large number of people, including the King and the Duke of Wellington. Of these the King was the most tiresome. Since the passage of the Reform Bill he had become yet another source of bother to an already harassed Government. William IV was a classic example of a man not up to his job. As a prince he had been merely harmless and comical; a bustling, chattering old buffoon of a sailor, with a head shaped like a pineapple, and a large troop of illegitimate children. As a King he made a more disturbing impression. On the throne of England a buffoon is no laughing matter. The glory of his position is likely to turn his head; it also gives him greater scope for displaying his folly unchecked. So it was with William IV. The mere prospect of becoming King began to throw him off his balance. When he heard George IV was dying and the crown within his grasp, he took to wearing overshoes and gargling every morning in front of an open window, for fear he might be carried off by a sudden chill before the splendid prize was actually his. Once King, he took steps to make his personality felt. At first he set up as a democratic monarch suitable to the new democratic age; and dismayed his subjects by spitting in a plebeian manner out of the window of the State Coach, and by walking about the streets unattended and followed by a crowd who jostled and pushed him with unseemly familiarity. His democratic sympathies, however, were not deeply grounded enough to survive the disturbances of the Reform Bill period. These left him so frightened that he turned into a panicky reactionary who smelt bloody revolution in every breath of popular feeling. His nerves were further irritated by a justified suspicion that his Ministers did not take him very seriously. Altogether he found that being King was not the pleasure he had hoped it was going to be: with the result that the jolly old buffoon became a surly, touchy, bewildered old buffoon who sought to compensate for a sense of impotence by bombarding his Ministers with reams of futile complainings and inept advice. Since his chief worry was popular unrest, the brunt of his agitation fell on the Home Secretary. Melbourne dealt dexterously with him. To his communications he replied with a judicious blend of respectfulness, firmness and good humour. Now and again he allowed himself a note of irony, too discreetly worded to penetrate the intelligence of his royal correspondent. When William clamoured for legislation to stop workmen combining, Melbourne replied by sending him a list of thirty-six Acts beginning in Edward I’s time that had been passed for this very purpose—all of which, he added gravely, had been since repealed as ineffective. “Upon the whole,” he concluded, “Viscount Melbourne humbly trusts that Your Majesty will rest assured that the subject will be considered by His Majesty’s servants with that circumspection which is suggested by its evident difficulty, and at the same time with the firmness and determination which are required by its dangerous and formidable character.” Such replies did not stop the King from writing. Nor did they make him like Melbourne very much. He had grown incurably suspicious of all Whigs by this time. Moreover, Melbourne’s mind was too subtle, and his personality too aristocratically confident and stylish, for the silly, homely old sailor King to feel really at home in his company. Melbourne said of him, “He hasn’t the feelings of a gentleman; he knows what they are, but he hasn’t them.” However, the King found Melbourne more genial than most of his other ministers; and he was quite incapable of standing up to his diplomatic skill. Melbourne was always able to manage him in the end: he was also able to manage the Duke of Wellington and other complaining correspondents. With them his tone was different. He was not so respectful, he let himself go a little more. But his terse, caustic notes generally succeeded in quietening them.
The most important topic of these different correspondences was the rise of the Trades Union Movement. As Melbourne had expected, the working-class found themselves no better off as the result of the Reform Bill. In order to improve their conditions, therefore, they turned to industrial agitation. Trades Unions were the means by which they hoped to achieve their ends. Unions of the workers in individual trades were already in existence, when the Reform Government came in. After 1832 they increased by leaps and bounds. Towards the end of 1833 Robert Owen started a scheme for still further strengthening their bargaining power by uniting them into one organization entitled the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union. The aims of this body were political as well as economic. Not only was it to be concerned with practical day-to-day questions of wages and hours, but it declared itself out to establish “a different order of things, in which the really useful and intelligent part of society only shall have the direction of its affairs; in which industry and virtue shall meet their just distinction and reward, and vicious idleness its merited contempt and destruction.” The Grand National Consolidated Trade Union caught on even more quickly than had the individual Trades Unions. Within a few months an enormous number of town labourers belonged to it. Early in 1834 it began to gain adherents in the country districts as well.
The middle and upper classes viewed these events with growing alarm. The name Trades Union, we must remember, did not suggest to them the established and respectable bodies that it does to us, but rather dangerous and sinister secret societies of a kind happily unknown in England before, round which hovered a murky atmosphere of violence and conspiracy. Admission to them, it was reported, was accompanied by all sorts of melodramatic initiation ceremonies involving skulls and oaths of silence and names signed in human blood. Nor did the middle classes in the least sympathize with their aims. In so far as the Trades Unions tried to modify labour conditions they were interfering with what was thought by the best opinion to be the natural and healthy working of economic law, while their political professions had an ominous whiff of revolution about them. It was enough to make the prosperous citizens’ flesh creep to think of “a different order of things,” in which property was apparently to be redistributed in accordance with what the more discontented members of the working-class happened to think morally just.
Melbourne shared the general disapproval of Trades Unions. How could he do otherwise considering his fear of disorder and his belief in laissez-faire? So far from benefiting the oppressed poor, he thought they would only make their lot worse. Trades Unions, he told a manufacturer in 1833, were “inconsistent, impossible and contrary to the law of nature.” From the time he took office he had been sufficiently worried about them to appoint a commission under Nassau Senior, the Professor of Economics at Oxford, to investigate their activities. However, his anxieties were not strong enough to modify his natural bias towards liberty and inertia. And, when the commission came out with a report recommending drastic legislation to put the Trades Unions down, Melbourne opposed it. Apart from the fact that he was sure the House of Commons would never be persuaded to pass such a measure, he himself thought it unnecessary. He had already remarked to an anxious correspondent on the subject, “I recommend above all not being above measure disturbed by new evils and dangers, to which human society is always liable.” Trying to tamper with the inevitable working of economic law was so futile, he said, that it could not be long before even the stupidest working man would realize it; and then the Trades Union movement would collapse of itself.
When, however, it showed signs of spreading to rural England Melbourne’s mood began to change. His fear of revolution grew stronger, and his dislike of doing anything weakened. Men of his age could never forget that the French Revolution had started in the country. Though he was still against new legislation he began to wonder if everything possible was being done within the existing law to put the Unions down; and he consulted the crown lawyers on the subject. After foraging about, they discovered an Act passed at the time of the Nore Mutiny in 1799, but since pretty well forgotten, making it an offence to administer secret oaths. Trades Union Societies often took secret oaths: here was a new weapon against them. Melbourne instructed magistrates to take every opportunity to use it. “Perhaps you will be able to make an example by such means,” he wrote.
The result of his words was an episode which was to become famous in history. In March, 1834, it was discovered that a new Trades Union at Tolpuddle in Dorset had administered secret oaths, as part of its ceremony of admission. Accordingly several of its members were arrested. A Commission was sent down to try them, and they were condemned to the maximum penalty of seven years transportation. Before confirming the sentence, Melbourne asked the local magistrates what sort of men the prisoners were. They told him that they were thoroughly bad characters. Relieved that he could carry out his policy of making an example without doing any injustice to individuals, Melbourne confirmed the sentence. Meanwhile he told the local authorities not to penalise the prisoners’ families in any way; nor, he said, should employers take advantage of the sentence to dismiss workmen just because they belong to a Trades Union. Trades Unions remained perfectly legal if they did not administer secret oaths. Finally he warned farmers against trying to reduce wages below their just economic level.
In spite of these conciliatory gestures, however, the trial of the Dorset labourers produced a storm. Seven years transportation did seem a very severe punishment for breaking a law of which many people had forgotten the very existence. The whole working-class movement broke out in furious protest; it was supported by the radical intelligentsia and by an important section of the Press. Melbourne paid no attention. He would have been disinclined to do so, even if he had felt himself in the wrong; for he thought it in the last degree contemptible to yield to popular clamour. In fact he had never felt more in the right. It was the plain duty of any Government to discourage Trades Unions so far as it could do so legally. From all over the country he got letters telling him that agricultural workers were waiting to see what penalty was inflicted in Dorset before deciding whether or not to join a Union. Clearly it was a crucial moment. Now or never was the time to make an example. Melbourne’s firmness did not at first stop the protests. A petition demanding pardon for the labourers was signed by a quarter of a million people. On 21st April a crowd, thirty thousand strong, headed by a clergyman in full canonicals, marched down with it to Whitehall. Melbourne, smiling and unperturbed, watched them from the window of the Home Office. When the leaders asked leave to present the petition to him he refused to see them. If it were brought by a reasonable number of persons, he said, he would be willing to read it; but he was going to do nothing that might give the impression that he was overawed by a display of force. The procession dispersed and soon the violence of the agitation began to die down. More important, the Trades Union Movement received a check from which it took years to recover. Melbourne’s policy had proved triumphantly right. The existing law as it manifested itself in the trial of the Dorset labourers, turned out to be strong enough to make any further legislation unnecessary. Once again, as after the disturbances of 1830, the large majority of educated Englishmen united to congratulate the Home Secretary on the quiet effectiveness with which he had maintained the cause of order.
Once again posterity has not shared that satisfaction. As in 1830, one finds oneself brought up with a jarring shock against the contradictions of the period, the discrepancy between the civilized humanity of upper class private life, and the blood and iron harshness which was accepted as a necessary feature of the criminal law. What makes the story of the Dorset labourers especially distressing is that the victims themselves seem to have been undeserving of their fate. Prejudice or panic had led the local authorities to mislead Melbourne about their characters. So far from being criminals and revolutionaries, they were sober, respectable men enough, driven into lawless courses largely by ignorance and hunger and by the struggle to bring up their families on wages lately reduced to seven shillings a week. Melbourne was not to blame for not realizing their true characters. He was not there, and he had to trust to the reports of his subordinates. Moreover, all along he had done his best to follow his usual course of combining firmness with moderation. But it is true that the affair, like so many of his dealings with working class agitation, does curiously reveal his limitations. For all his superior breadth of vision, he did not see further into the lives of the poor than the average intelligent man of his circle, especially when his fear of revolution was aroused. The same fear united with his dislike of unnecessary trouble to move him from his characteristic attitude of impartial detachment. His letters show him a little over-ready impatiently to brush aside anything that might be urged on the labourers’ behalf. Further, his moral scepticism led him to adopt too exclusively a deterrent view of punishment. For some obscure reason retributive punishment is often looked upon as likely to be crueller than deterrent. The reverse is the truth. According to the retributive theory a man can only be punished as much as he deserves; which, unless he is accused of some unusually heinous crime, does not mean anything unbearably severe. The exponent of deterrent punishment, on the other hand, regards himself as justified in going to any lengths required to deter effectively: and in fact the most notorious persecutors ancient and modern have sought to justify their actions on deterrent grounds. Poor Melbourne was far from being a persecutor. All the same he did look on himself as the guardian of order rather than the instrument of ideal justice; and was too dominated by the determination to get the law obeyed at all costs to consider sufficiently whether he was in fact being morally just to the labourers.
However, it was not a matter about which he felt strongly, as subsequent events showed. For the story of the Dorset labourers did not end with the procession of April, 1834. As time passed and tempers cooled, more and more people began to doubt the justice of the sentence. A year later John Russell wrote to Melbourne asking him to pardon the labourers. Melbourne’s first impulse was to resist. He was sure the labourers deserved all they got, he said. Anyway, the matter was settled; why, oh why bring it up again? John Russell, however, his conscientiously held principles now vigorously in operation, returned to the attack. Melbourne began to think that resistance would involve more trouble than concession. Immediately he gave in. “I myself do not care what is done about the labourers,” he remarked with cheerful impatience.
As a matter of fact the affair occupied his mind very little. To him it was at worst a disagreeable episode in the ordinary routine of his Home Office work. Besides he had other and to him more important things to think about. The Reform Government tottering for so long, was now on the point of final collapse. It was the Irish question that finished it. Ever since 1830 it had threatened to do so. There had been a hope that Catholic Emancipation would pacify the Irish. And it is just possible that it might have done so, had it been followed by a policy of bold conciliation designed to satisfy the national and religious aspirations of the Irish people. But the Government were too frightened and too prejudiced to risk such a policy. Protestants, not Catholics, were still given the important jobs in Ireland; and they used them to maintain their ascendancy. The Irish, therefore, as discontented as ever, entered under the guidance of O’Connell on a fresh campaign; this time for the repeal of the Act of Union. They were able to do this the more effectively because they were now represented in the English Parliament; and were thus in a position to make difficulties for any Government there, if they were not given their way.
Meanwhile in Ireland O’Connell encouraged a new outbreak of violence and disorder. The Irish began burning, pillaging and rioting as merrily as in the days before Emancipation. Clearly any English Government must make up its mind to do something about Ireland. Either it must subdue her by force or try to win her over by concession. Here was yet another issue for the ministers to quarrel about. Quarrel they did—and far more bitterly than over home affairs! For Ireland raised, as home affairs did not, questions of religion and patriotism; two topics about which mankind has always been peculiarly unreasonable. Stanley and Grey both thought that the dignity of England would be fatally outraged if concessions were made, before law and order was restored. To Althorp and Durham, on the other hand, coercion unaccompanied by concession seemed an act of indefensible tyranny. The question of appropriating Church endowments raised another issue of principle. Since the Irish were overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, John Russell considered that they ought not to be made to pay high taxes, for keeping up the Protestant Church: some of the money should surely be appropriated for secular purposes. Stanley, an ardent Protestant, looked on such a proposal as a direct attack on the cause of true religion. With ministers thus divided and angry it was clear that the Irish question was a perpetual danger to the stability of the Government. At first Grey tried to tide things over by never mentioning it himself, and changing the subject if anybody else did. His efforts were vain. Inevitably Ireland cropped up. Whenever this happened, someone felt it their duty to make a conscientious stand on one side or the other. The result was a major political crisis. It was over Ireland that first Durham and then Stanley had in turn resigned.
Now in the spring of 1834, a new crisis loomed up. Stanley’s Coercion Act had run its course. Since Ireland was still unsettled, Wellesley the Lord Lieutenant wrote to Grey pressing that it should be re-enacted in toto, including some clauses forbidding public meetings, which were especially hated by the Irish. At this Brougham made one of his fatal interventions. The Arch-Fiend had begun to notice that he was unpopular. He fancied he might win some of the progressive Whigs to him, by setting up as a friend of Irish freedom. He therefore embarked on a secret intrigue with the new Irish Secretary Littleton, by which Wellesley was persuaded to write a second letter to Grey asking that the obnoxious clauses should be, after all, omitted from the Coercion Act. Brougham also arranged that O’Connell should be told of his services to the Irish in this matter; and by concocting some false version of the negotiations, tricked Althorp into giving his approval of his part in them. He had reckoned without Grey, who flatly refused to have the clauses touched. The Act was therefore introduced unchanged into the House of Commons. O’Connell rose and publicly accused Brougham, Littleton and Althorp of cheating him. The upright Althorp sat listening to this attack on his honour. “The pig is killed,” he said to John Russell; and he resigned. Overjoyed at last to find a decent excuse for retiring to Howick, Grey said he could not carry on the Government without him, and resigned too.
Though Irish affairs in those days were under the Home Office, Melbourne had taken little part in all these manoeuvres. His mind was even more divided over Ireland than over most things. His belief in tolerance had united with his own experience as Chief Secretary to make him for once genuinely in favour of a reform policy. But the results of Catholic Emancipation, though they had not exactly reversed his views, had cooled his enthusiasm. In spite of the fact that the Irish had been given what they asked for, there did not seem much prospect of tranquillity and stability in Ireland. “What all the wise promised has not happened,” he said, “and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.” He found this thought more depressing than surprising. Only too well did it harmonize with his general sense of the baffling irony of human affairs. Perhaps giving men what they wanted was the best way to make them discontented! If the men were Irishmen, he was pretty sure this was so. In dispassionate mood he meditated on the root causes of Irish discontent. “The dependencies and provinces of great monarchies,” he concluded, “have always been apt to grow too great and too strong to be governed by the mother state; and that, perhaps, exactly in proportion to the degree in which their true interest has been consulted and their prosperity has been allowed to develop itself.” This reflection reveals a far more searching vision into the nature of the forces governing political affairs than is vouchsafed to many professional statesmen. But it was a vision that left Melbourne—so far as Ireland was concerned—passive and fatalistic.
Over the immediate crisis preceding the collapse of the Government, Melbourne with occasional hesitations, backed Grey. After the troubles of the Reform Bill years, he was all against seditious persons being allowed to hold public meetings. Besides, he was very much annoyed with Brougham and Wellesley for trying to manage Irish affairs behind the Home Secretary’s back. He was not, however, so upset by the affair to be moved from his customary detachment. On the day the Government fell, an observer noticed that Lord Melbourne, going off to join a party of ladies on the river, wore an air of philosophical calm.
All the same, it turned out to be one of the most important days of his life. The departure of Grey did not mean the departure of the Whigs. For the Tories, though gaining in power, were not yet strong enough in the country to take on the Government. Much against his will, therefore, William IV had to find another Whig Prime Minister. Clearly, it had to be someone sufficiently on good terms with the differing sections of the party to have some hope of holding it together. This excluded Brougham and John Russell. Althorp would have done, or a great Whig magnate like Lord Lansdowne. But Lansdowne refused, and the King distrusted Althorp as too radical for his taste. Melbourne, on the other hand, was known to be on the right of the party: and the King, though he did not like him much, liked him better than he did his rivals. Accordingly on the following morning, when the Cabinet met to take formal leave of one another, Grey handed Melbourne a sealed letter. In it was a letter from the King asking him to come and see him to discuss the formation of a government under his leadership. True to form in this, the supreme decision of his career, Melbourne hesitated. He thought himself unlikely to enjoy being Prime Minister. It meant more work and responsibility and committees and deputations; it meant humouring the King and keeping Brougham in order; it meant less time than ever to read the early Christian Fathers and flirt with Mrs. Norton. And to what end? Melbourne had long ago given up the idea that governments could do much good. On the other hand he did not like to let down his friends and his party by refusing. Wavering and doubtful, he spoke his thoughts aloud to Tom Young. “I think it’s a damned bore,” he said. “I am in many minds as to what to do.” “Why, damn it all,” answered Young, “such a position was never held by any Greek or Roman: and if it only lasts three months, it will be worth while to have been Prime Minister of England.” There are moments when a hair will turn the balance; “By God, that’s true,” exclaimed Melbourne. “I’ll go!”8
Thus casually, unexpectedly, through a transient combination of circumstances—a chance turn of the political wheel, a whim of William IV, an unconsidered remark of Tom Young, and without effort or inclination on his part—Melbourne at the age of fifty-five became ruler of England. The year before he had copied, into his commonplace book, a couplet of Voltaire’s.
“Mais Henri s’avançait à sa grandeur suprême
Par des chemins cachés, inconnus à lui-même!”
“The case with every great man,” Melbourne commented, “much of what is attributed to design is accident; the unknown cause leading to the unknown end.” As he wrote the words, was he peering into the dark mirror of the future to discern his own destiny?
8 We have this story second-hand from Greville. Hayward, who claimed to know Melbourne well, does not believe it. But it is in character.