Chapter Fifteen

The Queen: Second Phase

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“As the negotiation with the Tories is quite at an end . . .” wrote Queen Victoria gaily to Melbourne on the evening of 10th May, 1839, “the Queen hopes Lord Melbourne will not object to dining with her on Sunday?” Lord Melbourne was very far from objecting. How much he had minded the idea of parting from the Queen can be measured by the extent of his joy when he discovered that after all he would not have to do so. Even though he felt in his heart that he had been wrong to take office again, his error had not been of so heinous a kind as unduly to disturb his robust and good-humoured conscience. He found it all the easier to disregard its voice because his fear lest the Queen should have made herself unpopular by her action had not been realized. On the contrary, the British public seemed to have been as much stirred as was the Cabinet by the spectacle of the young Queen alone and gallantly standing up for her rights against an army of experienced and middle-aged politicians. As she drove to church on Sunday she was greeted by a crowd shouting “Bravo” and “The Queen for ever.” Melbourne arrived to dine at the Palace in an unbridled state of high spirits such as he had not known for months. He laughed louder than ever, twisted his curly locks through his fingers, knit his brows in comical, extravagant frowns and murmured delightedly to himself. “I like what is joyous and agreeable,” he ejaculated, “I hate what is disagreeable and melancholy.” Entranced, the Queen listened to his words and observed his every movement: admired his hair in its picturesque disarray and gazed with amused surprise at his frowns. Melbourne caught her eye fixed on him. He smiled and rubbed his forehead. “Never mind. I was only knitting my brows,” he explained. “I know it looks tremendous! But you should not judge by expression; very susceptible people constantly change expression.” His conversation that evening was at its most fascinating, ranging absorbingly and whimsically from the ballet to medieval troubadours, from the troubadours to the art of cooking, from cooking to the character of King Francis I of France. “He was the first who introduced that gaiety; he was the first King who had that gay liberty which has since been practised,” he said snapping his fingers and laughing.

Melbourne would have been in even higher spirits had he been able to foresee the future. For his reprieve was to last for pretty well two years and with it the old intimacy. Once more we open the Queen’s diary to watch the day to day close-up moving picture of her relationship with him. All seems as before; the daily companionship and daily correspondence, the visits to Windsor, the rides in the Park, the evenings spent looking at prints, the hours of business and of relaxation, the mingling, shimmering, enchanted flow of entertaining instruction and ironical wisdom and delicate sentiment and carefree fanciful fun. Now we see him sitting for his portrait on horseback—very comical he looked, the Queen thought, in a white top hat astride a wooden block—now in the Royal Box at the opera, whither she had inveigled him rather against his will—“That is too bad, rather a bore,” he exclaimed in murmured protest when the audience insisted on an encore—now taking a lesson from her in the game of Cup and Ball; “I do it with perfect steadiness, patience, perseverance and tranquillity, which is the only way to do anything,” he remarked. As before, he is full of information about history and geography; “Catherine of Aragon was a sad, groaning, moaning woman,” he remarked, and that the Spanish were unpopular on account of their sobriety, “Somehow or other sober nations do not get on well with other nations.” As before, he is always startling her agreeably by his unexpected idiosyncrasies and opinions. On smoking, for example, “If I smell tobacco I swear, perhaps for half an hour,” he told her; or on bad habits, “If you have a bad habit the best way to get out of it is to take your fill of it”; or on old people dancing, “I consider when old people begin to dance at a party all propriety is over”; or on early rising, “For recruiting the spirits there is nothing like lying a good while in bed”; or on fires, “I always have a fire when I am worried or annoyed; it’s astonishing how it dissipates trouble!”; or on feminine beauty, “There’s nothing men get so tired of as a continued look of great beauty—very fine eyes for instance, nothing tires men so much as two very fine eyes”; or on foreign travel, “The first time you go to Paris, the Capital of Pleasures, you should spend four thousand pounds, it is not social not to”; or on gardens; it was natural that the Queen should be bored by the garden of Buckingham Palace, “For,” he said, “a garden is a dull thing.” His contempt for gardens did not extend to the flowers that grew in them. Every week there arrived for the Queen from Brocket a carefully chosen bouquet gathered from his own garden there. Their fresh fragrance symbolized the quality of his unchanging feeling for her; that feeling which so often brought the tears to his eyes and compelled him every now and then in the course of a conversation to bend forward and impulsively to kiss her hand.

All seemed as before! But in fact it was only now and again that he recaptured the unalloyed delight of two years earlier. Melbourne’s second phase as Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister was not quite so happy as his first had been. This was largely due to physical causes. The events of the spring had accelerated the decline of his health. Almost all the time he felt ill and tired: he suffered from lumbago and acute attacks of indigestion; the slightest worry kept him awake at night. Moreover, every month that passed he found he could do less. By the end of the year it had become too great an effort for him to give dinner parties or go out riding. Not only in the morning, but also in the evening he did as much of his work as he could in his dressing-room. The moment he got back from the office he would take off his cravat and put on his dressing-gown to ease his exhausted body. Philosophically he found diplomatic advantages in this change of régime. Having to go up so many stairs, he said, left his visitors breathless and thus forced to leave the initiative to him.

People noticed the change in him. He seemed to have aged years in a few months. “Lord Melbourne begins to look picturesquely old,” remarked a Court lady. Nor was it only his appearance that showed a change. His growing weakness betrayed itself in his behaviour. Too fatigued to concentrate, he grew vaguer and more absent-minded than ever. Ladies sitting next to Lord Melbourne for the first time at dinner would be enchanted by the charm of his talk; then it would stop and he would begin murmuring and swearing to himself, or relapse into silent brooding which found vent in a remark wholly unconnected with the conversation round him. “Do you not consider,” he suddenly asked, leaning across to address a shy young man opposite during dinner at Holland House, “that it was a most damnable act of Henry IV to change his religion with a view to securing the Crown?” Members of Brooks’s Club were disconcerted to find Lord Melbourne standing in the hall remarking loudly to himself, “I will be hanged if I will do it for you, my lord.” More than ever he was liable to go to sleep any time, anywhere; in the middle of an important Cabinet meeting, or talking to the Queen. During one evening’s conversation with her he went to sleep three times. Gently, she teased him about it. “It is the sign of a composed mind,” he replied humorously. Alas, this was not true. His health affected his nerves so that occasionally he would be swept by a sudden inexplicable fit of melancholy, during which he could not exert himself to speak, even when he was with his beloved Sovereign.

In fact he was too apathetic to do much about his health. Though he did not feel up to giving dinners himself, he dined out a great deal with other people, tiring himself by sitting up till two or three in the morning at John Russell’s or Holland House, where on occasion he could still enchant the company by the breadth of his learning and the paradoxical wisdom of his discourse. And he ate more injudiciously than ever. “The stomach is the seat of health, strength, thought and life,” he once said to the Queen; but he did not behave as if he thought so. Coming back from the House of Lords at four in the morning, he would consume a four-course meal and drink a whole bottle of Madeira; and the way he stuffed himself with pie and truffles and ices was enough to strain a constitution less impaired than his own. He felt guilty about this. Pork made him ill, he once informed the Queen after a night of indigestion, but he never liked to own it. “What makes you own it now?” asked she. “A fit of conscience,” sighed Melbourne. Conscience, however, was not powerful enough to make him change his habits. This was not primarily because he was too self-indulgent. At heart he did not believe any change of habits would make any difference. It was not illness but mortality, inescapable, omnipotent mortality, this was his enemy. He was like his mother. Magnificently youthful she had remained till late middle-age, he remembered, yet after sixty she had sunk rapidly. So was it happening to him. The Queen pressed him to take advice about his health. “That will not do any good,” he said sadly. “It is age, and that constant care!”

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He was right about the constant care. Here was another reason for low spirits. It was partly connected with his work. The political situation was more uncomfortable than it had been before the crisis of May. It looked much the same: the Whigs still pursued their trimming, balancing, middle way policy, making concessions now to the Right, now to the Left according as to which seemed likely to threaten its position the most: hedged about the Corn Laws in order to pacify the Radicals, gave way to Peel and the Tories about Jamaica and Ireland. Especially did they seek to placate the Tories because the tide of opinion in the country was now flowing more strongly than ever to the Right. However, this middle way policy now appeared ignominious, as it had not done before. Up till May of 1839 it could claim that it had the country behind it. Now the Government’s position had been shown up as too weak for this to be possible. Furthermore, before May it was easier to justify concession on genuine political grounds. To Melbourne at any rate the Whigs had seemed the only alternative either to a dangerously Radical Government, or to a reactionary Government that might provoke revolutionary opposition. Now even Melbourne thought that there was not much danger of a revolution; most people feared it so little that they took for granted that the Whigs were just clinging to office for selfish reasons, surrendering to each side in turn merely in order to stay in, at whatever sacrifice of principle. As Melbourne wrote to John Russell, “By one set of people we are told that we are ruining ourselves and losing support by allying ourselves with the Radicals and the Roman Catholics: by another that we are producing the same effect by leaning too much to the Tories and Conservatives; probably both statements are true and we are losing credit on both sides.” Himself, he did not much mind if they were. It mattered little to him that his Party’s actions should ultimately be controlled by Peel, for at heart he agreed with Peel’s policy. “I do not dislike the Tories,” he told the Queen, “I think they are very much like the others: I do not care by whom I am supported; I consider them all as one; I do not care by whom I am helped as long as I am helped,” he said laughing. Indeed, he had never been a Whig because he believed in Whig principles. His loyalty to his Party had been a personal loyalty. Now that it had come into conflict with the stronger personal loyalty he felt for the Queen, he threw it over without a tremor.

But, if he did not mind what people said about his Government, his colleagues did. The sense of their ignominious position was destroying what was left of the morale of his Government; with the result that they became increasingly irritable and unmanageable. More often than ever Howick objected; John Russell talked of resignation, Palmerston acted with ostentatious disregard of his colleagues. Nor did Melbourne feel up to managing them in the way he used to. He was too tired. He still went through the motions of being Prime Minister, read the State papers, wrote off innumerable little notes to his ministers. But in fact he exerted his will less and less. He did not give his full mind to affairs, evaded issues, shunned decisions, left the initiative to John Russell. Better make the Ballot an open question if this would help to keep the Cabinet together, he said; better give in to Peel about Jamaica if it would stop him raising the question of Canada! Better continue the old Poor Law Act for another year, rather than stir controversy by discussing a new one! Throughout his political life Melbourne had been accused of laziness—on the whole unjustly. But now he really was growing lazy. Fatigue made him yield to his instinctive desire to turn his back on disagreeable facts. But alas, it was seldom possible. Do what he would, the unending squabbles in his Cabinet worried him. It was not the attacks from outside but the internal dissensions that vexed him, he complained. All he could do was ineffectively to try and forget them and concentrate such energy and attention as remained to him on the Queen.

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And even his hours with her were no longer the source of satisfaction they had been. He felt them too precarious for one thing; with the Government’s position so weak, it seemed as if they might end any day. The sunshine of his happiness was fading to an evening glow over which stretched the ever lengthening shadow of his imminent parting from her. Further, the troubles that had a little clouded them in the early part of the year had not passed away. The Hastings affair was not over yet. Though the populace might cheer the Queen, there was still a good deal of hostility to her in high society. “Mrs. Melbourne,” shouted a gentleman in coarse, mocking tones as the Queen and her Prime Minister stepped forth on to the balcony at Ascot, and as she drove down the Course the sound of hissing made itself heard; two fashionable ladies, the Duchess of Montrose and Lady Sarah Ingestre, were protesting their disapproval. The Queen was furious. “Those two abominable women ought to be flogged!” she burst out to Melbourne. He strove to imbue her with some of his own ironical indifference to public opinion. Popularity is a capricious thing, he was always telling her: he urged her to try and ease the situation by making herself particularly pleasant to Lady Flora. The Queen was reluctant; how could she, she asked, be pleasant to someone she did not like? Worse was to come. In the beginning of June Lady Flora became dangerously ill. The tumour, which had given rise to such unfortunate interpretations, proved to be malignant: within a few weeks it was clear that she was dying. Melbourne was extremely concerned. It is a sign of his obsessed devotion to the Queen that even now he, usually the justest and most sympathetic of men, could not find it in his heart to be fair to those who threatened her peace of mind. Surely too much fuss had been made about the wrong done to Lady Flora, he said; no doubt inchastity was a shocking thing, but such things did happen in families. He was acutely anxious, however, lest the Queen should damage her reputation still further by incurring any accusation of heartlessness. At first she had refused to believe Lady Flora was really seriously ill: but he persuaded her all the same to stop all entertainments at the Palace, to send frequent messages asking how Lady Flora was, and to give orders that everything possible should be done for her comfort. Melbourne also pressed her herself to go and see Lady Flora. Not unnaturally the Queen shrank from this ordeal. But lack of courage was never one of her faults; once Melbourne had convinced her that it was her duty, she agreed—and, characteristically, decided to see her alone. The interview took place on 27th June. The dying woman, now a shadow of her former self, and with the mark of her approaching end written on every haggard feature, gazed at the childish figure of her Sovereign with a ghastly fixed stare and, clutching at her with a fevered hand, gasped out her thanks for the kindness that had been shown her during her illness. In the face of this, her first experience of death, the Queen’s hard-heartedness melted away in a mingled flood of awe, pity and bewilderment. “Poor Lady Flora!” she kept on repeating as she described the scene to Melbourne, “Poor Lady Flora!” When, ten days later, Lady Flora died, the Queen burst into a torrent of tears. Her death was followed by a détente. Conroy left the Duchess of Kent’s service soon afterwards: and, freed from his malignant influence, the Duchess became more friendly towards her daughter. Melbourne’s continuous efforts to reconcile them were at last beginning to bear fruit. Also, thanks to him, the Hastings episode had not ended so badly for the Queen’s good name as at one moment it seemed likely to do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next few months were mainly occupied in settling the legal position of the Prince and making arrangements for the wedding. Both involved some ructions. The Opposition was in a cantankerous humour and sought to embarrass the Government by making every difficulty they could. There was a row because it was not categorically stated in any official document that the Prince was a Protestant: there was a row because the Government, following precedent, asked that he should have an income of £50,000 a year. There was also a row over the question of his precedence. The Queen wanted him to have first place in the kingdom after herself. But her royal uncles, notably the Duke of Sussex, objected to this; and they were supported in their objections by the more factious section of the Tory Party. Melbourne did not show his old skill in dealing with these difficulties. Here we notice that he was losing his grip. Considering the strength of anti-Papal feeling in England, he should have taken more care to do nothing that might stir it up; and rather than run the risk of letting the Queen’s wishes become a Party issue, he ought to have tried to settle the questions of the Prince’s income and precedence in private consultation with the Opposition leaders before bringing it up in Parliament. Instead he let things slide and inertly trusted that all would go right on the day. The result was that they got out of hand. After some public and distressing wrangling, the Prince’s income was reduced to £30,000 and the Bill establishing his precedence looked so likely to be defeated that Melbourne had hurriedly to withdraw it and arrange that the matter should be settled later by an Order in Council.

The Queen did not make his task any easier. Her engagement, though it had raised her spirits, had not softened her temper. On the contrary, she felt more indignant than ever with the Tories for their impudence in opposing her will. “As long as I live,” she burst out to Melbourne, “I never will forgive those infernal scoundrels with Peel—nasty wretch—at their head;” and she alluded to one of the venerable prelates who had voted for reducing the Prince’s income as “that fiend, the Bishop of Exeter!” On New Year’s Day in her diary she solemnly recorded her thanks to God for delivering her from her enemies during the Government crisis of May. She added a petition; “From the Tories, good Lord deliver us.”

The controversy over the Prince’s precedence especially aroused her wrath. Originally she wanted to make him King Consort by Act of Parliament, “For God’s sake, Ma’am,” exclaimed Melbourne, “let’s have no more of it. If you get the English people into the way of making Kings, you will get them into the way of unmaking them!” With such an idea of what her husband’s position ought to be, she was not likely to be pleased by the proposal that he should yield first place to her uncles. She would rather he had no legal precedence at all, she said, than one so ignominious. “Oh no!” said Melbourne with robust good sense, “That’s the foolishest thing. You should always get what you can.” In spite of his fatigue, he had not lost his skill in dealing with her. Mingling firmness, sympathy and a sort of gay tact, he generally managed to keep her in check. When one Sunday he got a letter from the Duke of Sussex asserting his claim to precedence over the Prince, “I did not show the Duke of Sussex’s letter to Your Majesty before you went to church,” he told her with a smile, “I thought it would discompose you for devotion.” The Queen still responded to Melbourne’s arts. Once again she apologized deeply to him for losing her temper and promised with a touching artlessness not to do it again.

It was not easy for her though. Being engaged is notoriously trying to the nerves; and struggle as she might, the Queen remained irritable. She was annoyed by the Duchess of Kent who had again begun bouncing into her apartments uninvited; she was annoyed by King Leopold who continued to plague her with unasked-for political advice; at times she could even be a little irritated by the Prince himself. Her relations with him at this time show what an extraordinary mixture the Queen was. There was no doubt that she was violently in love with him. In her diary she rapturously records every detail of his caresses, his kisses, his tender words. Yet, even in the full flood of youthful passion, she never forgot that she was Queen and must maintain her position as such, even in relation to the object of her adoration. She disliked the idea of his taking any part in political business. So far as the official organization of his life was concerned, she required him to submit to her will without question. She chose all the officers of his Household without consulting him, including his confidential secretary, a Mr. George Anson, who had once been secretary to Melbourne. The Prince protested. Not only did he object to being ruled in this way, but Anson’s appointment in particular conflicted with his views. He thought the Crown should be a neutral moderating power and that a Royal Household should therefore be composed of people with no marked political affiliations. The Queen reacted sharply and unfavourably to these signs of independence in her future husband. So far as English politics were concerned, she had no confidence in the Prince’s judgment. For all she knew he might, if left to himself, fall, in his ignorance, under the sinister influence of the Tories. He must learn to trust her to know what was best for him in these matters. She spoke her mind to him. Anson was appointed.

The outside world put her insistence down to the influence of Melbourne who was suspected of wishing to get the Prince into his power. It was true that Melbourne did not sympathize with the Prince’s political ideas. The conception of a neutral moderating monarchy was likely, in his view, to lead to the Crown taking an active line independent of the Government; whereas, according to the orthodox English doctrine, it was the King’s duty to back whatever Party was in power. Moreover, Melbourne feared that whatever his intentions the Prince would, in practice, tend to choose Tories as his servants. Foreign princes in his experience had an instinctive bias against English Liberals. “They think our Liberal influence rough and disagreeable,” he told the Queen. All the same, when he heard that the Prince objected strongly to have Anson as his secretary, Melbourne told the Queen she ought to give in to him. It was not a good thing that a wife should domineer over a reluctant husband in this fashion. Further, Melbourne himself did not want to appear responsible for any step that might alienate the Prince from him. From the moment of the Queen’s engagement he made it an important part of his business to get on good terms with the Prince.

At first he had to feel his way, for he knew little about him. “He seems a very agreeable young man,” he wrote to John Russell. “Certainly he is a very good looking one—and as to character, that we must always take our chance of.” It was a safe enough chance had Melbourne known it. The Prince was eminently, even alarmingly, respectable. This did not mean that he would necessarily be easy for Melbourne to get on with. In fact, the two men made a comical contrast to each other; Melbourne a casual, ironical, pleasure-loving Englishman of the eighteenth century world, the Prince a stiff, conscientious, serious-minded German, not above relaxing for an hour’s innocent merriment in the bosom of his family, but with his spirit already shadowed by the anxious earnestness, so typical of the nineteenth century. His affinity with the Queen lay precisely on that side of her nature which had least in common with Melbourne’s. She was sufficiently aware of this to get a little feminine fun by playing off her fiancé against her Prime Minister. The Prince, she said, thought she should not receive anyone at Court whose reputation was doubtful. “The Prince is much severer than me,” she announced to Melbourne. Melbourne could not suppress his surprise and vexation. Not only did the Prince’s views strike him as intolerant, but, considering the free and easy morals of the English aristocracy, they seemed likely to get the Queen into disfavour with some of her most influential subjects. “That is a very bad thing,” he said bluntly. “Albert thinks I should set an example of propriety,” pursued the Queen. Melbourne was still sufficiently ruffled to disclose the worldly-wise nature of his approach to social morality in a manner more frank that prudent. “That is shown by your own conduct,” he blurted out, “character can be attended to when people are of no consequence. But it will not do when people are of a very high rank.” A day or two later the Queen laughingly told Melbourne that she feared he did not like Albert so much as he would, if he were not so strict. By this time Melbourne had recovered his self-command. “Oh no! I highly respect him,” he answered discreetly.

Sometimes it was his turn to tease the Queen. She said triumphantly that Albert did not care for fashionable beauties, indeed that in general he took no interest in women. From what he had seen of royal princes, Melbourne judged this to be improbable. “That Will come later,” he mischievously remarked. The Queen was so outraged by the implication of these words that he hastily withdrew them and later took occasion to reassure her by telling her that from what he had observed of the Prince he seemed in these respects to be a glorious exception to the general run of young men.

When the Prince was actually present, Melbourne seems to have taken more pains to curb his tongue. Even so, now and again a remark slipped out which revealed the gulf between their points of view. One evening in Windsor, they were playing a letter game. Melbourne was given the word “pleasure” to guess. “It is not a common thing,” explained the Prince in order to help him. “Is it truth or honesty?” enquired Melbourne.

“This made us all laugh,” says the Queen relating the incident: and, in fact, whatever fundamental difference there might be between them, Melbourne and the Prince during these months contrived to get on pleasantly enough together. Melbourne’s manner to the Prince was remarked on as perfect in its blending of respectful politeness with informal ease. The Prince responded to it: he speaks of Melbourne always as a kindly distinguished old gentleman devoted to the Queen’s service. Melbourne reciprocated his goodwill. The difficulty of the Prince’s position as a young foreigner suddenly pitchforked into the intricate hurly-burly of English public life stirred his sympathy: and he took pains to give him hints as how best to conduct himself in it. As he got to know him better, too, his opinion of him steadily improved. Melbourne meant what he said when he told the Queen that he respected the Prince. No doubt he was a bit of a prig like most Germans, but he was clearly a good young man who could be trusted to make the Queen happy. Since her happiness mattered to Melbourne more than anything else in the world, he felt growingly friendly towards the Prince.

This confidence in her future happiness may have helped him to keep up an appearance of good spirits. Certainly he managed wonderfully to do so. The accounts of him during the last weeks of her engagement are all sparkling and sunshiny. It was as though he was determined to extract every ounce of pleasure from his last days with her as an unmarried woman. Her diary is as full as ever of his conversation, and though once or twice he refers to his fatigue and depression, for the most part he is at his most delighted and delightful. He cajoled her into asking the Duke of Wellington to her wedding in spite of the shameful way she considered he had behaved over the Prince’s precedence: he gave her his views on Scottish history—“There are too many Jameses and all murdered, the Scottish are a dreadful people;” he gaily gossiped to her about the appearance of her ladies, “Miss Montague,” he observed, “has a peculiar way of carrying her nose;” he expatiated on the splendour of the new coat he was having made for the wedding. “I expect it will be the thing most observed,” remarked Melbourne humorously.

One evening three days before the wedding he allowed his deeper feelings a little more play. The Queen noticed that his manner was unusually affectionate, even for him. She told him that she felt nervous. He comforted and encouraged her. “Depend upon it, it’s right to marry,” he said; “if ever there was a situation that formed an exception, it was yours; it’s in human nature, it’s natural to marry; the other is a very unnatural state of things; it’s a great change—it has its inconveniences . . . After all,” he continued, “how anybody in your situation can have a moment’s tranquillity!—a young person cast in this situation is very unnatural. There was a beautiful account in a Scotch paper of your first going to prorogue Parliament; ‘I stood close to her, to see a young person surrounded by Ministers and Judges and rendered prematurely grave was almost melancholy’; a large searching eye, an open anxious nostril, and a firm mouth’ . . . a very true representation,” he said, “can’t be a finer physiognomy.” The Queen smiled at his earnestness. “I am sure none of your friends are as fond of you as I am,” she said. “I believe it,” he answered. He spoke with deep emotion.

On 11th February the great day came. The Prime Minister was observed to be much affected, as he stood in his smart new coat watching the ceremony. Afterwards, at Buckingham Palace, when she had changed her dress, she sent for him for a final private interview. He kissed her hand. They remained a moment or two talking of how well everything had gone off. “You look very tired,” said the Queen anxiously. Once more he gave her a long, loving look. His hand clasped in hers, “God bless you Ma’am,” he said. Then the Prince appeared. Together he and the Queen went downstairs and drove away.

(5)

Meanwhile the Government muddled its way ineffectively and uncomfortably along, frustrated by the Tories, sniped at by the Radicals and disturbed by the wranglings of its own members, notably Howick. At last in June he was so exasperated that he resigned. Melbourne accepted his resignation with easy indifference and made Macaulay minister in his stead. This made for a more peaceful atmosphere: for Macaulay was not temperamental. But neither was he restful. Brilliant, dogmatic, voluble and tireless, he at once dazed and dazzled his colleagues by the uninterrupted flow of his discourse. “I wish I was as cocksure about anything,” said Melbourne, “as Macaulay is about everything!” However, he was not bored by Macaulay. On the contrary he sat listening to him “with an air of complacency and as if for instruction.” Melbourne was unusually ready to tolerate monologists, so long as there was something original about them. This propensity got him into trouble about this time. In the summer, Robert Owen, celebrated in history as a pioneer of socialism, had persuaded him to present him officially at Court. It was surprising that Melbourne should have agreed because Owen, in addition to being universally recognized as one of the greatest bores alive, was a militant Left Wing atheist who had taken a leading part in attacking Melbourne for his treatment of the Dorset labourers. However, Melbourne never disliked anyone for attacking him, and had a strong objection to punishing a man, otherwise harmless, simply because he held unorthodox opinions. His respectable contemporaries did not share this view: presentation at Court, in their view, implied approval of a man’s ideas. Melbourne was violently criticised for his action by important people at Court and by his opponents in the House of Lords. Though professing himself sorry if he had acted without due consideration, he took these attacks very lightly. “I beg to assure you,” he wrote to a correspondent, “that you may most safely and in the most decisive manner contradict the notion that there may be any approbation on my part of Mr. Owen’s opinions . . . I have more than once heard Mr. Owen’s statements and I have always told him that his doctrines appeared to be the most absurd, and he himself one of the most foolish men I ever conversed with. I always considered that his principles were too ridiculous to be dangerous.” In Parliament, after a few perfunctory words of explanation and apology, he proceeded to air his views on the subject of free speech in general. It was no good advocating it, he said, on the ground that it led in the end to truth prevailing: mankind was far too foolish for that. But on the other hand he thought repression equally useless, for it was impossible to make it effective.

These characteristic and inconclusive reflections showed that Melbourne had not lost his taste for speculation. However, less than ever did this influence his practical activities as a statesman. These were solely directed to keeping the Government together until such time as he judged the Queen had learned to manage without his help. To achieve this end he employed his old tactics of combined obstruction and concession. Two important new measures were introduced during the latter part of 1839; one for an Education Bill and one for establishing the Penny Post. Melbourne did not believe in either. The Penny Post would do no good, he told the Queen: but he thought it sufficiently uncontroversial to be ready to back it in order to please his colleagues. There is an amusing account of Rowland Hill, the chief promoter of the measure, coming to coach him for his speech in the debate on the subject. He found Melbourne in his dressing room; and, running through the chief points, mentioned a Mr. Warburton who had views on the matter. “Warburton, Warburton,” said Melbourne, “he is one of your moral force men isn’t he? I can understand your physical force man, but as to your moral force men I’ll be damned if I know what they mean!” A few minutes later Hill was shown into another room while Melbourne interviewed Lord Lichfield, the Postmaster General who opposed the Bill because, oddly, he thought that the Post Office buildings would collapse under the weight of letters likely to be put in them, if postage became so cheap. Melbourne soothed him. “Lichfield has been here,” he remarked to Hill after ushering the excited Postmaster General out of the room. “I cannot think why a man cannot talk of Penny Postage without going into a passion!”

Melbourne made more difficulties about the Education Bill. Not only did he disbelieve in educational schemes as such, but he rightly thought that they always raised trouble with the Church, who considered that no one else should have any control over them. Howick was still in the Government when the question was first discussed. “Thank God there are some things which even you cannot stop, and this is one of them!” he broke out furiously to Melbourne. Melbourne merely smiled and went on making objections. As he expected, the Church, supported by the Tory Party, did oppose the Government Bill violently. In the end a compromise was reached which left the control of education in Church hands.

The year 1839 also saw a slight revival of these civil disturbances which had marked the Reform period. That same economic distress that had led to the anti-Corn Law agitation also gave birth to the semi-revolutionary Chartist Movement. During May there was serious rioting in Birmingham, and at Newport in November. Melbourne dealt with the new disturbances as he had with the old: he advocated vigorous repression but only within the limits of the existing law. The ringleaders of the riots ought to be hanged, he said. On the other hand he was against John Russell’s proposal that the Government should be given extraordinary powers to seize arms, etc. On the whole, however, he took the whole affair much more calmly than in 1831. When, on 10th August, the Cabinet was told that the Chartists were organizing a mass protest movement in support of their demands and that it was scheduled to start on 12th August, “God bless my soul,” said Melbourne breezily, “that is the day after tomorrow! It is time for us to be looking about us.” Clearly he had at last come to the conclusion that there was not much danger of bloody revolution breaking out in England. He was quite right. Lawlessness was easily stamped out. But the deterioration in the economic situation continued: and Melbourne did worry about this, especially as he thought it was likely to get worse and saw no way of stopping it. However, he still was determined to try and stay in office. Apart from anything else, the Queen was always asking him to: and he had told her he would. He preferred, however, that the outside world should not know this, for fear they might blame her for it. Let it be thought, rather, that he was doing it to please those members of his Party who were enjoying the sweets of office. “No one supposes I want to go on,” he said, “but I must think of those poor fellows who would have to put down their broughams.” By the spring of 1840 there did not seem any immediate danger that they would have to. The disturbances were over, the Radicals were losing heart. For the time being, at any rate, it looked as if things were settling down.

However, Melbourne was not fated to feel easy for long. In the summer a new crisis loomed up. This time it was over foreign affairs. These had never been one of Melbourne’s major preoccupations up till now. Not that he neglected them. The subject interested him—he was the only member of the Cabinet except Palmerston who really understood it, said a foreign observer—and anyway he was not allowed to forget about it by his brother Fred Lamb, now British Representative in Vienna, and who distrusted Palmerston even more than he did himself. Both brothers were against his militant pro-Liberalism: they wanted to combine with Austria to create a middle force that might hold the balance between Russia and France. However, Melbourne was not prepared to try and enforce this view on his obstreperous Foreign Secretary. Once he had resigned himself to taking Palmerston back in 1835, he seems to have come to the conclusion that he had better let him run foreign policy as he wanted. For one thing, he knew he could not stop him, and for another it was a great saving of trouble. All he could do was to keep a vigilant eye on him and intervene from time to time to check his more perilous extravagances of word and action. Breezy and combative, Palmerston continued to pursue his liberalizing policy; backed the Constitutional Party in Spain and Portugal, encouraged Liberal Movements in Central Europe, hauled foreign monarchs and statesmen over the coals when he caught them doing anything that struck him as unusually tyrannical. None of this was much to Melbourne’s liking. Palmerston did not seem to realize that “the worst thing in the world was to be troublesome.” Besides, trouble abroad meant trouble at home, and trouble at home might easily lead to that downfall of the Government which it was Melbourne’s chief aim to avoid. The situation at home always conditioned his view of the situation abroad. His first reaction to any proposal of Palmerston’s is to ask him how it is to be defended in the House of Lords. His own advice to him was always on the side of caution. It is extraordinary how many sentences in his frequent letters began with the phrase, “For God’s sake don’t . . .” He stopped Palmerston seizing the island of Goa from the Portuguese in 1839 because they had not kept their promise to put down the slave trade; in 1836 he warned him about getting entangled in grandiose schemes for moulding the future of Asia. “The Black Sea and the Caucasus and those great empires enflame the imagination wonderfully,” he remarked ironically. He was also always suspicious of coming to any international agreement which committed England to some definite course of action in the future. “It may be necessary to defend Turkey,” he says on one occasion, “but I should not like to be bound to defend her. Our policy is to have our hands free . . .” And again when commenting on the French proposal for a comprehensive treaty of mutual defence, “Treaties of this comprehensive character are very dangerous transactions. They rarely answer the purpose for which they were formed and they often involve consequences which are in no respect foreseen.” Melbourne realized, as Palmerston did not, that the English, however progressive and idealistic, liked their foreign policy to be cheap. They might cheer the spectacle of a foreign people rightly struggling to be free; the last thing they wanted was to spend money or soldiers in helping them to win the struggle. Melbourne, therefore, objected to Palmerston’s tendency to speak strongly, because he knew he seldom had the power to enforce his words by strong action. What was the good of scolding the Czar for addressing his Polish subjects in offensive terms; much the Czar would care! And why promise to see that the Spanish gave generous terms to the Basques when there was no means of ensuring that they carried out these terms? Why encourage the Circassians and the Serbs to resist their oppressors when England had neither the intention nor the means actively to help them in their fight? The only consequence of such conduct was to irritate England’s enemies without alarming them, and to leave her friends with the impression that she was either perfidious or ineffective.

All the same, in spite of these causes of disagreement, Palmerston and Melbourne did not get on so badly. For one thing, personal relations between them were easy. They had a family connection: Palmerston, who for many years it was suspected, had been Emily Cowper’s lover, married her in 1839. Further, he and Melbourne were natives of the same fashionable Whig world, both talked the same blunt, flippant, male Whig language. Plain-spoken though their letters to each other are, they are also good-humoured. Neither was offended by the other’s frankness. Further, each respected the other enough to make concessions. More often than not Palmerston listened to Melbourne’s advice and modified his policy accordingly. On his side Melbourne, whatever he might say to Palmerston in private, loyally supported him in public. He always refused to hold any communication with foreign representatives who tried to negotiate with him behind Palmerston’s back, and when Holland or John Russell grumbled to him about Palmerston, Melbourne replied that he thought he was doing well. He meant it, too. Melbourne had the open-mindedness of his scepticism. So long as Palmerston’s risky-seeming policy did not get the Government into serious trouble, Melbourne was willing enough to give it his approval.

Altogether Melbourne had not found much to worry about in foreign affairs during the first five years of his Premiership. Alas, in the summer of 1840 he did. Trouble arose in the Middle East. It had been brewing some time. Early in the ’thirties Mehemet Ali, the powerful Pasha of Egypt, rebelled against His Suzerain, the corrupt and feeble Sultan of Turkey. The consequence was a long drawn out conflict between them which seemed likely to end in the victory of Mehemet Ali and the break up of the Turkish Empire. Palmerston was horrified at such a prospect. For he saw the Turkish Empire as a necessary bulwark against the rival ambitions of France and Russia to dominate the Eastern Mediterranean.

Accordingly, in the autumn of 1839, he set to work to persuade the great powers to agree to a treaty by which they pledged themselves to help the Sultan, by force if need be, to defeat Mehemet Ali. This proposal produced a new alignment of powers in Europe. Russia, Austria and Prussia agreed to it, but the French, who saw a chance of getting Egypt on her side if Mehemet Ali won, hung back. Undismayed Palmerston set to work to bully them into acquiescence. Here he found himself at odds with some of his colleagues. Two in particular, Holland and Clarendon, the new Lord Privy Seal, shrank from any idea of quarrelling with progressive France, more especially as they feared that Palmerston’s policy might lead to increasing the power of the arch-reactionary, Russia. They wanted Palmerston to drop his plan. Melbourne, as so often, felt divided on the question. Though he diplomatically denied it to Holland, on the whole he thought Palmerston right; for Egypt dominated by France would be a danger to England; and as for Russia, Melbourne had come to the conclusion that she was bound to get control of Turkey sooner or later. On the other hand, he wanted above all things to avoid a split in his own Government. He therefore took up his usual middle-way position and pleaded rather ineffectively with his colleagues for compromise. To the outside world he adopted his old tactics of agreeable evasiveness. In March, 1840, Guizot, the new French Ambassador, went to see him and expatiated with Gallic eloquence on the strength of his country’s case. Melbourne, stretched out comfortably in an armchair, listened and laughed and seemed friendly and interested, and refused to commit himself in any way. In July, alarmed by Mehemet Ali’s continued successes, Palmerston decided to force the issue. Since the French would not agree, he proposed making a treaty with the other powers, leaving them out. At once Holland and Clarendon said they would resign if such a proposal was accepted. Palmerston replied that he would resign if it was not accepted. “For God’s sake,” cried Melbourne, “let nobody resign or we’ll have everybody resigning;” and he proceeded to try and persuade one side or the other to yield. In the end, Holland and Clarendon gave way and the Treaty was signed.

It was far from being the end of the trouble. The French were furious. Their excitable Prime Minister, Thiers—“he is a strange quicksilver man, this Thiers, he puts me in mind of Brougham,” said Melbourne—fulminated threats of reprisal. It seemed possible that if the other powers went to the Sultan’s help, France might go to the help of Mehemet Ali. For the first time for many years the shadow of a possible general war rose to brood darkly over the European scene. The result was an explosion in the English Cabinet. The pro-French party became frantic; and, what mattered much more, John Russell who had agreed to the Treaty, was now so frightened by the idea of war that he changed his mind. He wrote clamouring for some compromise with France before it was too late. So also did those respected grand old men of the Whig Party, Lord Spencer and the Duke of Bedford. Melbourne communicated their agitated expostulations to Palmerston who paid no attention whatever. The French were merely bluffing, he said cheerfully, they were not such fools as to embark on a war in which they were bound to do badly. Melbourne was unable to feel so confident. Hitherto he had managed to stop himself worrying; now he became seriously disturbed. It was all very well for Palmerston to say that the French would be silly to go on standing out, but people often were silly. “You calculate a little too much upon nations and individuals feeling reason, right and a just view of their own interest,” he said crisply. Even if Palmerston were right about the French, the defeat of Mehemet Ali was likely to be a long job; and meanwhile the English Government might fall. However, Melbourne reflected gloomily, it was too late for England to back out now without disastrous loss of face. Besides, to do so would mean Palmerston’s resignation and that also would bring about the downfall of the Government. No—there was nothing to do but go on as they had begun; and his own particular task was to hold country and Government together in the hope that the situation might improve. The country in general added little to his difficulties for the public was not fully awake to the crisis; and Melbourne safeguarded himself against any attack from the official opposition by going to see the Duke of Wellington and persuading him to promise his support. It was his own colleagues who were the trouble; Holland, John Russell who had begun again to talk of resigning, and, of course, Palmerston. In order to deal with them Melbourne pulled himself together to give such an exhibition of his diplomatic skill as had not been seen since the days of his prime. There was no longer any sign of his having lost his grip. Outwardly his old lazy, ironical self, he proceeded during two tense months to evade and temporize and pour oil, and now and again, genially but firmly, to read the riot act. Of course Palmerston was indiscreet, he told John Russell, but for John Russell to resign would only increase Palmerston’s power. Of course John Russell and Holland were tiresome, he said to Palmerston—“Friends are generally more troublesome and often more hostile than adversaries,” he remarked sardonically—but that was all the more reason for being cautious and circumspect. To both parties Melbourne insisted on the folly of doing anything that might break up the Government. If it fell, neither, he pointed out, would have a chance of getting their way in foreign affairs.

At first all his efforts appeared vain. Mehemet Ali did better and better, the French got angrier and angrier, John Russell went on threatening his resignation, Palmerston became more arrogantly intransigent than ever. Keeping him in order was the hardest part of Melbourne’s task; and secretly he found himself turning more and more against him. Why, oh why had Palmerston ever embarked on so dangerous a policy? “Never,” he wrote sharply to him, “was a great measure undertaken upon a basis of support so slender and uncertain.” Not that Palmerston was much more of a nuisance than Lord and Lady Holland, who, it was reported, were now repeating every Cabinet secret at their parties in Holland House, even when the French Ambassador was present.

Certainly it was a wearing time, especially for a frail and ageing man like Melbourne. The strain began to tell on him. He suffered continually from indigestion and lumbago; he lost his appetite and could hardly sleep at all. He kept awake, it was noticed, even during Cabinet meetings! In mid-September, a new element insinuated itself into the situation, to disturb him still further. The Queen intervened. Prompted by the Prince, who in turn was prompted by King Leopold, she became extremely suspicious of Palmerston’s policy and began to bombard Melbourne with excited letters complaining that she was not consulted and pressing for accommodation with France before things came to a crisis. “The Queen really could not go through that now,” she protested, “and it might make her seriously ill if she were to be kept in a state of agitation and excitement.” Melbourne was extremely distressed. The Queen, as he knew to his cost, was likely to be just as unmanageable as Palmerston. Besides, the last thing he wanted to do was to upset her at the present moment, she was now several months gone with child. However, he kept his head, soothed her down with his usual skill and made use of her delicate condition as an argument to impose his will on Palmerston and John Russell. If they had an ounce of consideration for the Queen they simply must try to be moderate. Meanwhile, with light tact he suggested to the Hollands that they should cultivate discretion. “I know not what can be done except to take care that as little of political affairs transpires in conversation as possible;” he wrote to Lord Holland, “but this is inconsistent with a salon—which has many advantages and some disadvantages.”

At last, his patience reaped its reward. The situation took a turn for the better. Helped by the British Fleet, the Sultan began to prevail over Mehemet Ali, and in France there were signs that Thiers, the leader of resistance to England, was losing support. Melbourne judged that the need for procrastinating was over. Now was the moment for strong action. Without consulting anyone, he therefore wrote off to King Leopold, who had constituted himself a sort of unofficial intermediary between England and the French King, Louis Philippe, a letter written in his most trenchant style, in which he said that if Thiers called up the army he, Melbourne, would summon Parliament and demand that England should take effective counter-measures. He assumed that this letter would be shown to Louis Philippe. It was: and the effect produced was instantaneous. The terrified Louis Philippe dismissed Thiers. Soon after news came that Acre, a principal fortress in Mehemet Ali’s defences, had fallen to the Sultan. The danger of war was over. By the end of October the crisis was at an end.

(6)

A wave of relief swept over Melbourne. For a week or two he was like a boy escaped from school, bubbling over with laughter and high spirits. He had reason to be exhilarated as well as relieved, for England’s success was partly due to him. The policy had been Palmerston’s: but unless Melbourne, in spite of his own inner misgivings, had backed it so loyally and kept Queen and Cabinet in check, Palmerston would never have been able to carry it out. It had been a very trying time for Melbourne though, and left him—once the first exhilaration had worn off—frailer and older than ever: “Lord Melbourne is looking as old as the hills,” said a court lady. He felt it too. Clearly he would not be up to going on with the work of a Prime Minister for much longer. In fact he did not have to. The year 1841 saw the final collapse of the Whig Government. The economic situation was its undoing. This got no better: with the result that the agitation to get rid of protective duties, more especially the Corn Laws, revived and intensified. More and more Government supporters went over to the anti-Corn Law side: more and more did ministers press that the Corn Laws should be modified if not repealed. Melbourne was still against this. He thought modification must lead ultimately to complete abolition: and he recognized—as some of his colleagues did not—that abolition must fatally undermine the rule of the English landed gentry. Melbourne continued to favour the rule of the English landed gentry. Further, he realized that raising the Corn Law issue also meant the end of the Whig Government. It was bound to start a major political row: and the precarious balance which kept the Whigs in power could only be maintained, so long as it was not shaken by a major political row. Up till now Melbourne had tried to stave things off by suggesting that the Corn Laws, like the secret ballot, should be treated as an open question on which ministers could vote as they pleased. But this was no longer a possible way out; the question had become so important that the Government must make up its mind to give the country a definite united lead about it. Melbourne thought the matter over, listened to his colleagues’ arguments—and gave way to the anti-Corn Law party. Airily he explained his position in the matter to the Queen. “I do not,” he said, “go the length of those people who think the Corn Laws are against the Gospel and the spirit of Jesus Christ! I am against the political principles of many in this way. But I have always kept it open for me to change, if I should think it necessary.” Indeed, his change over about the Corn Laws was not an inconsistency on his part. It had always been one of his principles that a wise statesman compromised with a movement once it had become too strong and too widespread to be checked without an explosion. He behaved over the Corn Laws as he had over the Reform Bill. All the same he could not bring himself to feel much interested in how they should be modified. It was the sort of practical subject that bored him to tears. Absent-minded and indifferent, he sat through one Cabinet meeting after another while his colleagues wrangled interminably about fixed duties and sliding scales. At last, in March, they came to an agreement and took their leave. As they went downstairs they heard the Prime Minister’s voice calling to them: looking up they saw him leaning over the banisters: “Stop a bit,” he said, “what did we decide? Is it to lower the price of bread, or isn’t it? It doesn’t matter which, but we must all say the same thing.”

Indeed he seemed to take the whole crisis very lightly: and also the imminent eclipse of his Government which it portended. “Ten to one we shall not be in next year,” he remarked cheerfully: and when Clarendon reported to him that Palmerston was said to be intriguing secretly with the Tories, he received the ominous news with detached ironical amusement. “It can’t last—it’s impossible this Government can go on!” he reflected aloud, chuckling and rubbing his hands. The fact was that he had at last resigned himself to the prospect of going out of office: and thought, characteristically, that it was best to make as little heavy weather over it as possible. After all, politics were not a subject that should be taken very seriously.

One serious task did however remain to him; to prepare the Queen for his exit. This was not so hard as it would have been once. For no longer was she going to be left alone. Indeed, one of the reasons that Melbourne gave way over the Corn Laws so easily was that his chief motive for staying in had been weakened by the Queen’s marriage. During the last few months he had worked steadily to train the Prince for his future responsibilities as the Queen’s personal adviser. It was not always easy; the Prince was so extremely unlike himself. “This damned morality will ruin everything!” Melbourne exclaimed after the Prince had expressed some view that struck him as peculiarly priggish. But his feelings about the Prince, like so many of his other feelings, were mixed. At the same time as he was irritated by him, he was also impressed by him. And anyway he was careful to hide his irritation. So successfully that the Prince told his uncle that “Good Lord Melbourne” was the only one of his wife’s ministers that he really trusted. Melbourne arranged for him to see all the foreign dispatches; and the Prince would send them back to him accompanied by long and detailed memoranda of his views about them. Melbourne did not answer him in equal detail, in fact he often did not answer him at all. But the Prince was flattered to notice that he often acted as if he had modified his views in consequence of the memoranda. Meanwhile, Melbourne managed to get his own opinions through to the Prince either in direct conversation or—more tactfully—by saying a word to Anson or the Queen with the intention that it should be passed on. He took pains, too, in the course of his talks with the Queen to tell her how intelligent and judicious he thought the Prince was. With good effect: the Queen, as we have seen, had started off with the idea of not allowing the Prince to share in her political work. It was not just that she wanted to keep power in her own hands; she also had an uneasy feeling that political discussions might lead to political disagreement; and that this would dissipate the atmosphere of idyllic rapture which she desired to glow round every moment that she spent in the loved one’s company. The Prince, however, preferred interesting work to idyllic rapture, and complained to her about his exclusion. The Queen rushed off to ask Melbourne’s advice. Was he tempted to back her up in her resolution to keep the Prince out of politics? He might well have been, for politics were the one subject concerning which he kept his old exclusive position with her. But if he was tempted, he resisted. His love was self-sacrificing and unpossessive. Earnestly he pressed her to consult the Prince more: disagreements, he said, were less dangerous to married happiness than secretiveness, for secretiveness led to distrust. At first the Queen demurred; but as time passed she began to come round. It was inevitable she should. By nature she tended always to look up to some man as her chief authority in all matters; and who should it be but her husband? Already he was modifying her outlook in other ways. Fancy the Queen talking about botany and tree-planting! said the Ladies of the Household; before the Prince came she did not know one plant from another! And what about her new-found taste for sacred music? Clearly all these changes came from the Prince. About people, she was not so ready to follow his lead. The Prince wanted to invite learned men and scientists to the Palace in order that he might enjoy the benefit of improving talks with them. This prospect did not appeal to the Queen. She was too ignorant for such talk, she said. She consulted Melbourne, who, for once, found himself baffled. Even he did not know how to make the Queen enjoy the company of scientists. In general, however, she began to defer more and more to the Prince’s opinions. These soon included his political opinions. His influence already showed itself powerful at the time of the Syrian crisis. By the spring of 1841 it had consolidated itself even further.

It was still not to be compared with Melbourne’s, however. For the time being the Queen still turned to Melbourne before anyone else. This, he realized, was going to be a difficulty if the Government fell. For one thing, the Queen indicated that she wanted to go on keeping in touch with him afterwards. Though he must have longed for her to do so, yet he knew quite well that it was not the custom of the British Constitution for the Sovereign to be in habitual communication with the Leader of the Opposition behind the back of her Prime Minister. Some compromise must be found. Would it be possible for the Queen, if for once in a way she felt particular need of his advice, to tell the Prince who would tell Anson who would tell Melbourne? His advice would then be passed back through the same devious channel. The Prince thought this an excellent idea. Not so the Queen: she said categorically that she must be allowed to communicate with Lord Melbourne directly. Melbourne, who knew her in this mood, bowed to her words. Then there was the vexatious question of the Queen’s Ladies to be settled. By now, Melbourne was convinced that the original quarrel over it had been an error which would have ended disastrously had not Peel agreed to give in rather than to have a public row about it. The same mistake must not be made again, and the best thing would be to get the matter arranged beforehand. Once more with the help of the Prince, a secret negotiation was opened with Peel, by which it was tacitly agreed that he should not demand the dismissal of the Ladies, but that the Queen should ask those few who were most connected with the Whigs to send in their resignations when the Tories came in. Melbourne also asked Anson to try and indicate to Peel the importance of being patient with the Queen. Last time he had been too hasty. “He didn’t give the Queen time to come round,” he said “you should always give people time to come round.”

He had done what he could to smooth the way for the new Government. Late in May the crash came. The Whigs were defeated over the Budget. They did not go out straight away because they could not make up their minds whether to resign or to advise the Queen to dissolve Parliament. If she dissolved Parliament, there would be an election at once and they might have a better chance of winning it: if they resigned, the Queen would send for Peel who would then be in a position to have an election when he thought it suited him best. All the same Melbourne was for resignation. He judged that the Government would be defeated in any case, and he very much disliked the idea of an election fought, as it certainly would be, on the issue of the Corn Laws; for it was likely to be a violent contest which roused popular passions in the way he most disliked. “No terms,” he said, “can express my horror, my detestation, my absolute loathing of the attempt to enlist religious feelings against the Corn Laws.” More important, he thought that the Queen was for the time being so identified with himself and the Whigs that she would be looked on as a partizan in the election and that this would make her unpopular. Melbourne was not going to recommend any policy, whatever its other advantages, that ran the slightest risk of making the Queen unpopular. She did not agree, all she wanted was to help the Whigs. John Russell and others took the same view. For a week or two the question was undecided; people began to wonder if the Whigs were not intending to stick on, in spite of their defeat. “Why is Lord Melbourne like a very serious young lady?” said a wit of the time. “Because he won’t go out at all.” At last after a lot of arguing and letter-writing, Melbourne bowed to the will of his Sovereign and colleagues. Another Government defeat was followed by the dissolution of Parliament; in August an election took place. As Melbourne had prophesied, the Whigs were soundly beaten. Parliament met again at the end of August. The curtain rose on the concluding scene of Melbourne’s premiership.

He played it in character. Never a parliamentarian, he had neither the will nor the energy to make much of his farewell to the House of Lords. The Tories moved a vote of no confidence in the Government; and the Duke of Wellington attacked Melbourne for changing his mind about the Corn Laws. Looking weary and dispirited, Melbourne rose to make a brief, negligent and flippant reply. Of course he had changed his mind, he said, but so did everybody when circumstances altered; “We are all very much in the habit of taunting one another with having changed our opinions, but the fact is we are always changing our opinions . . . It is nonsense to proceed with measures which it is impossible can succeed.” He was followed by Brougham who took the occasion to pay Melbourne back for turning him out of the Government by making a bitter, malicious and detailed personal onslaught on him. Melbourne seemed a little disturbed; leaning forward he asked one of his colleagues if he thought one particular accusation was in any way justified by the facts. But, whether from lack of heart or from a fundamental indifference, he did not bother to get up and answer Brougham. On 28th August, after they had been defeated in the House of Commons, Melbourne, in a few short sentences, announced the Government’s resignation.

Meanwhile, up to the very last minute he had gone on doing everything he could to make things easy for the Queen in the new situation she was about to enter. He suggested some final hints to Peel, through the medium of Anson, as how best to gain her confidence; and to the Prince as how best to increase and maintain it. Don’t let him irritate her by talking solemnly at her about religion, “She particularly dislikes what Her Majesty terms a Sunday Face!” To the Queen herself Melbourne once more, and for the last time, earnestly urged the advantages of tact and discretion. The great thing was to avoid an open conflict with her ministers. If she found she disagreed with them, she had better say that she needed time for further consideration, and not let herself be driven into a corner. For the rest, he made a final effort to remove her prejudice against Peel and the Tories. When the Queen complained that the Tory ministers had looked cross at their first interview with her, Melbourne said that most likely they were only shy and embarrassed; “Strange faces,” he explained, “are apt to give the idea of ill humour.” He grew suddenly worried lest he had biased her unduly against some of them. “In the course of this correspondence,” he wrote off to her, “Lord Melbourne has thought it his duty to Your Majesty to express himself with great freedom upon the characters of many individuals . . . but Lord Melbourne thinks it right to say that he may have spoken upon insufficient grounds, that he may have been mistaken and that the persons in question may turn out to be far better than he has been induced to represent them.”

The Queen listened to his words more calmly than in the previous year. She still said that losing him was the saddest event of her life, she still complained that she found Peel’s manner disagreeably stiff. But when she and Melbourne met there were none of the passionate protests and emotional storms of May, 1839. She shed tears, but they were the gentle nostalgic tears of one who regrets the irretrievable past but is resigned to accept the inevitable future. Melbourne encouraged her spirit of resignation. This was for his own comfort as well as hers. He recognized the fact that even if the Tories fell, he himself was unlikely to be up to taking office again; and so was determined that for neither of them should his last hours with the Queen leave any needlessly painful memories behind them. He strove studiously to keep the tone of their intercourse as normal and even cheerful as possible. On the last evening he dined at the Palace as Prime Minister he actually managed to appear unusually merry. Not that he repressed sentiment altogether. Melbourne was the last man to cultivate an unnaturally stiff upper lip. He knew what she was going through, he told her, how the expectation of a dreaded event could cast its shadow over every pleasure, how hard it was to concentrate on work with a troubled mind. But, he said, work did dissipate trouble if one persevered with it; and he trusted that when the time came she would find she did not miss him as much as she had feared. He did not think she would because she now had the Prince to advise her. “The Prince understands everything so well,” he said, “he has such a clear, able head . . . When you married him,” Melbourne added with a twinkle, “you said that he was perfection, which I thought a little overrated, but I really think now that it is in some degree realized.”

For himself he admitted he was going to feel the separation deeply—“It is painful for me,” he confessed to her on their last evening together, standing on the terrace in the starlight. “For four years I have seen you daily and liked it better every day.” He noticed too, he told her, that he was beginning to wake earlier which, with him, was always a sign of depression and anxiety. All the same she must not worry about him, he slept well until he woke: indeed he was well altogether. The Queen tried to persuade him to accept the Garter as a token of the honour and love in which she held him. Melbourne refused it. This was not from any quixotic disinterestedness, he hastened to say; if he had been poor and she had offered him a pension, he would have taken it gratefully. But he had always refused honours, and—he hoped this showed no false pride—he would like to keep intact his reputation for refusing them. However, he was delighted to accept a present of some etchings which the Queen sent to him. “They will certainly,” he wrote, “recall to recollection a melancholy day but Lord Melbourne hopes and trusts that with the divine blessing it still will hereafter be looked upon with less grief and bitterness of feeling than it must be regarded at present.” In these words, while he professes to look forward to happier times, Melbourne does allow his grief to reveal itself a little more explicitly. And in a note on practical matters, written soon after his resignation, he took occasion to declare, though in plain and formal terms, his full sense of what his relation to her meant to him. “Lord Melbourne will ever consider the time during which Your Majesty is good enough to think that he has been of service to Her Majesty the proudest as well as the happiest part of his life.”

Thus, quietly, gracefully, composedly, Melbourne took leave of Queen Victoria.