Oddly enough, he did not come from an aristocratic family. By the stringent standards of the age the Lambs were parvenus. Their fortunes had been founded three generations before, by Peniston Lamb, an attorney of humble origin in Nottinghamshire, who died leaving a fortune of £100,000. His heir, a nephew called Matthew, was even more successful. With the help of his legacy he married an heiress, bought a country place, entered the House of Commons, and eventually acquired a baronetcy. Here the family progress seemed likely to stop: his son, Sir Peniston Lamb, was a less effective personality. He makes his first appearance on the stage of history as a young man of fashion writing to his mistress, the notorious Mrs. Sophia Baddeley. “I send you a million kissis, remember I love you Satterday, Sunday, every day . . . I hope you will get the horsis, but I beg you will not be so ventersum, as there are bad horsis, but will get one quite quiet . . . pray destroy all letters lest anyone should find them by axcedent.” Mrs. Baddeley found the author of these artless communications child’s play. She deceived him often and flagrantly; but he always believed her protestations of innocence, and seldom visited her without bringing a £200 bill in his pocket as a present. Indeed his only noticeable characteristic seems to have been a capacity for getting rid of money. Handsome, festive and foolish, his main occupation was to squander the guineas laboriously accumulated for him by his forefathers. His money raised him to the peerage of Ireland as first Baron Melbourne, and procured him a seat in Parliament. But during the forty years he spent there, he only opened his mouth once. Such energy as he possessed was fully employed in drinking port, following the hounds, and playing faro at Almack’s Club.
However, any deficiencies on his part were more than made up for by his wife. Elizabeth Milbanke, Lady Melbourne, was one of the most remarkable women of her age. Not that she was original. On the contrary, she was a typical eighteenth-century woman of the world: but with all the qualities of her type intensified to the highest degree. She was very beautiful in the style approved by her contemporaries; “a fine woman,” with a clear-cut mouth, challenging dark eyes, and a figure moulded in the shapely contours which stirred the full-blooded desires of the gentlemen of Brooks’s Club. Nor did they find her a disappointment on closer acquaintance. Her temperament was as full-blooded as their own; and she was even more satisfactory as a companion than she was as a lover. It was not exactly that she had charm: there was nothing appealing about her, nothing intoxicating, nothing mysterious. The cool, astringent atmosphere exhaled by her personality suggested prose rather than poetry. But it was singularly agreeable prose, at once soothing and stimulating. She could be amusing in a direct, caustic way; and she understood the art of getting on with men completely. Level-tempered and rational, she found scenes and caprices as tiresome as they did. After the unaccountable moods of stormier sirens, it was infinitely delightful to find oneself “laughing away an hour” on the sofa of her sitting-room in Melbourne House, with Lady Melbourne—Lady Melbourne, who could be depended upon never to be touchy, or exacting, or shocked, or low-spirited, who did not expect men to be monogamous, and who never asked an awkward question. She seemed to combine the social merits of both sexes, to possess, at the same time, male robustness and feminine tact, a woman’s voluptuousness and a man’s judgment. Moreover, she had an unusual power of entering into a man’s interests. She disliked talking about herself: “no man is safe with another’s secrets, no woman with her own,” she once remarked. But she threw herself whole-heartedly into other people’s problems; was always ready to listen sympathetically to a man’s complaints about wives and political leaders, to advise him about how to manage a mistress, or an estate agent. And excellent advice it was too: Lady Melbourne’s masculine point of view was the product of a masculine intelligence. By choice it showed itself in practical affairs; her friends noted with irritation that she was the only woman who made her garden a paying concern. But if she did turn her attention to other matters—to politics, for instance—her opinion was always shrewd and judicious. In a positive, plain-sailing way she was a very able woman. And, within the limits of her experience, she had an uncommon knowledge of life. No one had a clearer understanding of the social machine, no one could give a man a more accurate idea of the forces to be reckoned with in planning a career; no one could tell one better how to satisfy one’s desires without offending convention. Deliberately to defy it was, in her eyes, as silly as deliberately to defy the law of gravity. “Anyone who braves the opinion of the world,” she used to say, “sooner or later feels the consequences of it.”
Her character was in keeping with the rest of her. She had the virtues of her common sense and her full-bloodedness. Though pleasure-loving she was not shallow. Her vigour of spirit showed itself also in her feelings. She cared for few people; but these she loved with a strong, unegotistic affection that could be absolutely depended upon. No effort was too great that might advance their interests. Yet, her feelings were always controlled by her judgment. In the most vertiginous complications of intrigue and dissipation, Lady Melbourne could be relied on to remain dignified and collected. And reasonable; her philosophy taught her that the world must be kept going. And to ensure its smooth working she was always prepared to make sacrifices. She had strong dislikes, but could suppress them in the cause of common peace: even though a woman might have lovers, it was no excuse, in her view, for her neglecting her duty to her family, or acting in such a way as to outrage social standards.
All the same it is impossible to approve of Lady Melbourne. Her outlook was both low and limited. To her the great world of rank and fashion was the only world; and she saw it as a battle ground in which most people fought for their own ends. Nor was hers an amiable cynicism. She was good-tempered, not good-natured; suave, but not soft. Her laughter was satirical and unfeeling, she could not resist a wounding thrust. And, on the rare occasions she judged it wise to lose her temper, she was both relentless and brutal. Indeed, in spite of her polish, there was something essentially coarse-fibred about her. She cared little what others did so long as they kept up appearances. And herself, if she found it convenient, would plot and make use of people without compunction.
But all her qualities, good and bad, were subordinated to one presiding motive, ambition. Since to her this world was the only one, its prizes seemed to her the only objects worth having. And her whole life was given up to getting them for herself and for her family. To this end she dedicated her beauty, her brains and her energy: it was for this she learned to be sagacious and smiling, tactful and dignified, ruthless and cunning. A single purpose united every element in her personality. Here we come to the secret of her eminence. It was not that she was more gifted than many of her rivals, but that her gifts were more concentrated. Amid a humanity frustrated by conflicting aspirations and divided desires, Lady Melbourne stood out all of a piece; her character, her talents, moved steadily and together, towards the same goal. One might suspect her, but one could not withstand her will. And so smoothly did life move under her sway, her judgment evinced so rational a grasp of reality, that in the end she generally brought one round to her view.
From the first she was successful. Her birth was higher than her husband’s; Sir Ralph Milbanke, her father, was the head of an old Yorkshire county family. But it was early clear that his daughter was marked for a more brilliant destiny than could be achieved in provincial Yorkshire. Before she was seventeen she had married Lord Melbourne and his fortune, had established herself in his splendid family mansion in Piccadilly—it occupied the site where the Albany stands now—had re-decorated it in white and gold, and had begun her siege of London. Her chief weapon, naturally enough, was her power over men. She could not, indeed, make much of Lord Melbourne. “I am tired to death,” he writes to Mrs. Baddeley, “with prancing about with my Betsy a-shopping.” And shopping was about all he was good for. When he had bought her some diamonds and paid for the gold paint, he had done all that a reasonable woman could expect of him. However there were other men in the world; and Lady Melbourne lost no time in making their acquaintance. Characteristically she contrived that those she selected for peculiar favours should be both agreeable and useful. During the course of her career her name was to be coupled with the fashionable Lord Coleraine and the powerful Duke of Bedford. But the most important man in her life was Lord Egremont. He was a worthy counterpart to her. Except that he did not care for politics, George Wyndham, third Baron Egremont, was the pattern grand seigneur of his time. At once distinguished and unceremonious, rustic and scholarly, he spent most of his time at his palace of Petworth in a life of magnificent hedonism, breeding horses, collecting works of art, and keeping open house for a crowd of friends and dependants. He had the eccentricities of his type. Too restless to remain in any one place for more than five minutes, he would suddenly appear in the room where his guests were sitting, smiling benevolently and with his hat on; would make a few genial remarks often revealing considerable erudition, and then go away; an hour or two later he would reappear, continue the conversation just where he had left it off, and after another few minutes, vanish again. He had a number of children by various mistresses; but he never married, largely, it was thought, owing to the influence of Lady Melbourne. How their connection arose is not known. Scandal had it that he bought her from Lord Coleraine for £13,000, of which she took a share. It is an unlikely story; he was attractive enough to win her on his own merits and she seems to have been genuinely devoted to him. All we know for certain is that by 1779 Lord Egremont was established as her most trusted adviser and chief lover. What Lord Melbourne thought of his Betsy’s amorous activities is also obscure. People noticed that he did not seem to like his wife’s friends. But he was not the man to make an effective protest; moreover, Lady Melbourne always took particular care never to put him in an awkward position.
However, she did not look exclusively to men for her advancement. It is the measure of her perspicacity that she realized that the security of a woman’s social position depends on the support given her by her own sex. And she set her wits to get it. So successfully, that within a few years of coming to London she had become a close friend of the most famous fashionable leader of the day, the ravishing Duchess of Devonshire. It was an unnatural intimacy. For one thing Lady Melbourne was essentially a man’s woman; it was only with men that she felt sufficiently sure of her ground to be her robust self; with women she was at best no more than smooth and pleasant. Further, the Duchess was her opposite in every respect, refined, imprudent and emotional. But affinity of the spirit is not so necessary for friendship in the rush of fashionable life, as in soberer circles. It is enough to be agreeable and to enjoy the same pleasures. Lady Melbourne passed both these tests easily: besides, her discretion combined with her interest in other people’s doings to make her the perfect confidante of the poor Duchess’s tangled romances. When the outraged Duke banished her for some months to France, it was Lady Melbourne whom she chose to keep her in touch with her disconsolate lover, Mr. Grey.
What with the Duchess and Lord Egremont, Lady Melbourne’s path was now easy. From the records of the day we catch glimpses of her during her dazzling progress; driving surrounded by gentlemen on horseback amid the shelving glades of her country home at Brocket; piquant in the costume of a macaroni at a masquerade at the Pantheon; adjusting her feathers before the glass while she discusses stocks and shares with Horace Walpole; dancing, “to his great delight, though in rather a cow-like style,” with the Prince of Wales. For in 1784 she made her most distinguished conquest; she captured the affections of the future George IV. It was not for long—it never was with him. But Lady Melbourne saw to it that, even when all was over, they remained firm friends. In the meantime she took the opportunity to get Lord Melbourne made a Lord of the Bedchamber. Already in 1781 he had, by her efforts, been raised to a Viscounty. Even in the flush of her triumphs, she never forgot to use them for the acquisition of more lasting benefits. By 1785 she was securely fixed in that social position for which she had worked so hard.
It was not, it was never going to be, the best sort of social position. There was always a section of the beau monde who looked askance at Lady Melbourne as an upstart, and a shady upstart at that. Gentlemen still joked about Lord Coleraine and his £13,000; rival beauties alleged that Lady Melbourne could not see a happy marriage without wanting to break it up. But eighteenth-century society accepted people, whatever their sins, as long as they kept its rules of decorum. Lady Melbourne was an expert at these rules. Audacious but completely in control, she knew just how close she could sail to the wind without disaster. And if she was not the most respected woman in society, she was among the very smartest. Melbourne House was recognized as one of the liveliest social centres in London. Day after day the great doors opened and shut to admit the cleverest men and the most fascinating women in the town; untidy delightful Fox; Sheridan sparkling and a little drunk; the dark Adonis of diplomacy, Lord Granville Leveson-Gower; the Duchess of Devonshire and her sister Lady Bessborough; the witty Mr. Hare; the artistic Mrs. Damer. While every few weeks at one in the morning the tables were spread and the candles lit for a supper party to the Prince of Wales.
Nor was Melbourne House merely a modish meeting-place. Social life there was a creation, with its own particular charm, its own particular flavour. It was the flavour of its mistress’s personality; virile, easy-going, astringent. Manners were casual; elaborate banquets, huge rooms frescoed by Bartolozzi went along with unpunctualness and informality. “That great ocean,” says the orderly Lady Granville in a moment of exasperation, “where a person is forced to shift for himself without clue; they wander about all day and sleep about all the evening; no meal is at a given hour, but drops upon them as an unexpected pleasure.” And the mental atmosphere, too, was not fastidious. The spirit of Melbourne House offered no welcome to the new romanticism. It was plain-spoken, it laughed uproariously at fancifulness and fine feelings, it enjoyed bold opinions calculated to shock the prudish and the over-sensitive, it loved derisively to strip a character of its ideal pretensions. From mischief though, rather than from bitterness; an unflagging good humour was one of its two distinguishing attractions. The other was its intellectual vigour. The inhabitants of Melbourne House were always ready for an argument; about Whig policy or the character of the royal family or Miss Burney’s new novel or Mr. Godwin’s curious theories; shrewd, hard-hitting arguments full of assertion and contradiction, but kept light by the flash of wit and the accomplishment of men of the world.
The creator of such a circle might well feel justified in sitting back to rest on her laurels. Not so Lady Melbourne; her vitality only matured with years. Though a little fatter than she had been, she was still able to attract men and still willing to do so. But she was far too sensible to let herself lapse into the deplorable role of a fading siren. From the age of thirty-five or so the energy of her ambition centred itself on her children. In this, it followed natural inclination. The instincts of her normal dominating nature made her strongly maternal; it was on her children that she expended the major force of her narrow and powerful affections. Lord Melbourne took the same secondary part in their lives as he did elsewhere. As a matter of fact he was only doubtfully related to them. They were six in number: Peniston, born 1770, William, born 1779, Frederic, born 1782, George, born 1784, Emily, born 1787, and another daughter, Harriet, who died before she grew up. Of these, William was universally supposed to be Lord Egremont’s son, George, the Prince of Wales’s, while Emily’s birth was shrouded in mystery. Nor had Lord Melbourne the character to achieve by force of personality that authority with which he had not been endowed by nature. On two occasions only is he recorded to have expressed his will with regard to his children. He rebuked William when he first grew up for following the new-fangled fashion of short hair: and he was very much annoyed with Harriette Wilson for refusing to become Frederic’s mistress. “Not have my son, indeed,” he said, “six foot high and a fine strong handsome able young fellow. I wonder what she would have.” And meeting Miss Wilson, taking a morning walk on the Steyne at Brighton, he told her what he thought of her.2 Such efforts were not of a kind to win him any exaggerated respect from his children. They regarded him with kindly contempt, varied by moments of irritation. “Although Papa only drinks a glass of negus,” writes his daughter Emily some years later, “somehow or other he contrives to be drunkish,” and again, “by some fatality Papa is always wrong and I pass my life in trying to set him right.”
They viewed Lady Melbourne with different feelings. Indeed, she was a better mother than many more estimable persons. To the task of her children’s education she brought all her intelligence and all her knowledge of life. In the first place she saw to it that they had a good time. For the most part they lived at Brocket—Brocket, that perfect example of the smaller country house of the period, with its rosy, grey-pilastered façade, its urbane sunny sitting-rooms, its charming park like a landscape by Wilson, where, backed by woods, the turf sweeps down to a stream spanned by a graceful bridge of cut stone. Here the little Lambs played, and rode, and had reading lessons from their Jersey bonne. They were to be met at Melbourne House, too, running round the courtyard, or off to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s or Mr. Hoppner’s studio to sit for their portraits. And all round them, now loud, now muffled by nursery doors, but so continuous that it seemed like the rumour of life itself, sounded ever the huge confused hum of the great world. Often they caught an actual glimpse of it. Playing on the stairs, a child’s eye would be arrested by the shapely silken legs of the Prince of Wales as he walked, “fit to leap out of his skin” with spirits, from Lady Melbourne’s sitting-room. “Have you had your dinner yet?” he would ask, for he was fond of children and took notice of them. Sometimes they would be taken down for a visit to Petworth to gaze on the troops of Arab horses and the queer looking people, artists and antiquaries, with which Lord Egremont filled his house. Time passed; the elder boys went to school, first with a clergyman near Brocket, and then at nine years old to Eton, each of them with ten guineas in his pocket, and five shillings a week more to be supplied by a servant at the local inn. Eton was an easy-going place then: unhampered by the virtuous discipline of organized games, the boys spent their leisure rabbit-snaring, attending dog fights, stuffing at the pastry cooks when they were small, and getting tipsy on beer when they were bigger; while after Peniston had left he would come down and take one of his brothers over to Ascot for a week’s racing. In between whiles came holidays; riding and shooting and theatricals, and now and again a visit to the professional playhouse. It was a very pleasant life. But Lady Melbourne did more than just amuse her children. In the most hectic whirl of her social engagements, she found time to exert a persistent and purposeful influence on them. Her great carriage was always carrying her down to Eton: where, with characteristic efficiency, she combined her visit with a dinner to the Prince of Wales, if he happened to be at Windsor. Sedulously she studied her children’s characters, promoted their tastes, encouraged their ambitions. She read with them, wrote to them, she talked things over with them with a light and artful frankness that kept them always at their ease. Her diligence met with its reward. They had a profound respect for her judgment, and they were devoted to her. Further, they were devoted to each other. By the time they were grown up Lady Melbourne had contrived to weld them together into that strongest of social units, a compact family group; with its own standards, its own idiom of thought and speech, its own jokes; confronting the world with the cheerful confidence that, where it differed from others, it was right and the others were wrong.
This corporate personality was the appropriate product of its parentage and environment. Strikingly handsome, with their tall, well-made figures, firmly-cut countenances and dark eyes brilliant with animation, the Lambs were alike vital, sensual, clever, positive, and unidealistic. People did not always take to them. They complained that they were hard and mocking, unappreciative of delicacy and romance; they were scandalized by the freedom alike of their morals and their conversation; and they disliked their manners. The boys, especially, ate greedily and were liable suddenly to go to sleep and snore; they asserted their opinions with arrogance, interlarded their speech with oaths, and laughed very loud. Yet they attracted more than they repelled. It was difficult to dislike people with such a splendid talent for living. Love, sport, wine, food, they entered with zest into every pleasure. And their minds were equally responsive; alert to note and assess character and event with quick perspicacity. Born and bred citizens of the world, they knew their way about it by a sort of infallible instinct. And they had an instinctive mastery of its social arts. Their negligence was never boorish; it arose from the fact that they felt so much at home in life that they were careless of its conventions. Superficial brusqueness masked an unfailing adroitness in the management of situations: their talk was as dexterous as it was unaffected; its bluntness was made delightful by their peculiar brand of jovial incisive humour. For they possessed—it was their chief charm—in the highest degree, the high spirits of their home. A lazy sunshine of good humour shone round them, softening the edge of their sharpest sayings. Though they thought poorly of the world, they enjoyed every moment of it: not to do so seemed to them the last confession of failure. “What stuff people are made of,” said one of them, “who find life and society tiresome when they are in good health and have neither liver nor spleen affected; and have spirits enough to enjoy, instead of being vexed by, the ordinary little tracasseries of life.” This sentence might have stood for the family motto.
Within the frame of this common character, individual differences revealed themselves. Beautiful Peniston, the eldest, was the only one with a touch of Lord Melbourne: he had brains but used them mainly on the turf. Frederic, on the other hand, was a finished man of the world; combining lively intellectual interests and a life of many loves by means of a tact that was later to make him a distinguished diplomat. Did he not read Shakespeare to his mistress: and, what was more, persuade her to enjoy it? George’s character, riotous, hasty-tempered, and a trifle vulgar, gave colour to the report that he was the son of the Prince of Wales. An excellent comedian, he spent his spare time scribbling farces, and hobnobbing with the actors in the green-room of Drury Lane. Emily was a milder edition of her mother, with the same social gifts, the same amorous propensities; but softer, more easygoing, not so clever. The second son, William, was less typical.
He did not appear so on first acquaintance. With his manly, black-browed handsomeness, his scornful smile, his lounging manners, his careless perfection of dress—“no one,” it was said, “ever happened to have coats that fitted better”—he looked the Lamb spirit incarnate. No less than his brothers he was genial and sensible, guzzled, swore and went to sleep, in argument he was the most arrogantly assertive of the lot. Yet, talking to him for any length of time, one became aware of a strain that did not harmonize with the Lamb atmosphere. When a subject arose peculiarly interesting to him, suddenly his smile would give place to an expression of ardent excitement; a pathetic tale brought the tears starting to his eyes; at other moments he would lapse unaccountably into a musing melancholy: then in a twinkling his old smiling nonchalance would reappear, as surprisingly as it had vanished. Indeed—it was to be the dominating factor in his subsequent history—there was a discord in the fundamental elements of his composition. Much of him was pure Lamb or rather pure Milbanke. He had the family zest for life, their common sense, their animal temperament. But some chance of heredity—it may well have been Egremont blood—had infused into this another strain, finer, and more unaccountable. His mind showed it. It was not just that he was cleverer than his brothers and sisters: but his intelligence worked on different lines, imaginative, disinterested, questioning. It enjoyed thought for its own sake, it was given to curious speculations, that had no reference to practical results. He could absorb himself in points of pure scholarship, sit up for hours studying history and poetry. Along with this cast of mind went a vein of acute sensibility. Affection was necessary to him, he loathed to give pain, he responded with swift sympathy to the appeal of the noble and the delicate. At his first school, he would sit gazing out of the window at the labourers at work in the placid Hertfordshire landscape, and long to be one of them. And though this came no doubt mainly from a normal dislike of lessons, it was in keeping with an inborn appreciation of the charm of innocence and the pleasures of contemplation. Across the substantial, clear-coloured fabric of the man of the world, were discernible incongruous streaks of the philosopher and the romantic.
So strangely-blended a disposition portended a complex and dissonant character. At odds with himself, he was bound also to be at odds with any world with which he came into contact. Certainly there was a great deal in him out of harmony with the earthy spirit of Melbourne House. Obscurely conscious of this perhaps, he was as a little boy stormier and more self-willed than his brothers and sisters. However, very soon any such outward signs of conflict passed away. The growing William appeared unconcerned by the discrepancy between his nature and his environment—if, indeed, he was aware that it existed. His very desire to please made him adaptable. And circumstances encouraged his adaptability. Children brought up in gay and patrician surroundings seldom react against them with the violence common in more circumscribed lives. If their tastes differ from those of the people round them, they have the leisure and money to follow them up in some degree: and anyway their ordinary mode of living is too agreeable for them to conceive any strong aversion to it. Further, the Milbanke half of William’s nature was perfectly suited by his home. He loved the parties and the sport and the gossip, he felt at home in the great world. Nor was his other side starved at Melbourne House. He had all the books he liked, he could listen enthralled to the clever men cleverly disputing. While his native tenderness bloomed in the steady sunshine of the family affection. His brothers and sisters were as fond of him as of each other. And, in the half-laughing, unsentimental way approved by Lamb standards, they showed their feelings. He returned them. His brothers were always his closest men friends, his favourite boon companions. What could be better fun than acting with George, arguing with Frederic, racing with Peniston. He was equally attached to his sisters, especially “that little devil Emily.” Like many persons of a philosophical turn, he enjoyed giving instruction; would spend hours of his holidays superintending his sisters’ pleasures, hearing them their lessons: when they were at Brocket and he in London, he wrote them long letters about the plays he had seen. But as might have been expected, his most important relationship was with his mother. He was the type of character that is always most susceptible to feminine influence. Men were excellent companions for a riotous evening or a rational talk. But it was only with women that he could get that intensely personal contact, that concentrated and intimate sympathy, of which his sensibility was in need. As a matter of fact, Lady Melbourne would have attracted him apart from her femininity. Her realism roused an answering chord in his own, her single-minded certainty was reassuring to his divided spirit. He pleased her as much as she pleased him. Was he not like Lord Egremont? Besides, her practised eye soon discerned that he was the cleverest of her children; and therefore the one most likely to realize her ambitions. William’s happiness, William’s success, became the chief interest of her later life. To mould his character and win his heart, she brought out every tested and glittering weapon in her armoury. She studied his disposition, fostered his talents, applauded his triumphs, kept up with his interests: read books with him; with him discussed the characters of his friends—all in the free-and-easy terms, the amused unshockable tone she employed with her mature men friends. This sometimes led to awkward consequences. Once when he was ten, he told her of a school fellow called Irby, the son of a family acquaintance. “Every Irby is a fool,” remarked Lady Melbourne trenchantly. William thought it very true of this particular Irby: when he went back to Eton he told him so. He in his turn repeated it to his family; and a row ensued which must have needed all Lady Melbourne’s celebrated tact to smooth over. But the incident had taught William his first lesson in discretion. And he never forgot it. Under her purposeful hands his character began to take form; a form in which his Milbanke side was uppermost. By twelve years old he was already equable, controlled, and possessed of a precocious capacity for adjusting himself to facts. His stormy temper was suppressed; as for any deeper sources of discontent with his environment, life was too full and amusing to worry about them.
In these circumstances it is not surprising that his childhood was happy. He loved Brocket; he did not mind his first school, though he preferred it when his parents were in London and he was not tantalized by the thought of the pleasures of home only a few miles away: Eton he enjoyed enormously. It was a little unnerving at first for one who, up till then, had not moved a step unattended by nurses or tutors, to find himself at nine years old alone in a crowd of seven hundred boys, all rampaging in the uproarious barbarity of the unreformed public school. But William was himself sufficiently uproarious soon to feel at home there: while his perspicacity, improved by Lady Melbourne’s training, showed him how to adapt himself to school life in such a way as to suffer as little as possible from its inevitable drawbacks. He managed never to become a regular fag, and to be flogged very seldom. If he was, he did not repine, but forgot it as quickly as he could. The bloody duels of fisticuffs which were at that time the approved method of settling schoolboy quarrels, presented a greater problem. William did not like fighting. However, here too, he found a way to make it as little disagreeable as possible. Soon after he went to Eton he had to fight a boy bigger than himself. “He pummelled me amazingly,” he related, “and I saw I should never beat him; I stood and reflected a little and thought to myself and then gave it up. I thought it one of the most prudent acts, but it was reckoned very dastardly.” However he remained blandly impervious to criticism so obviously inconsistent with common sense: from this time forward, he made it his sensible rule never to fight with anyone likely to beat him. “After the first round if I found I could not lick the fellow, I said, ‘come this won’t do, I will go away; it is no use standing here to be knocked to pieces’.” So early did he evince that capacity for compromising genially with circumstances, which was to distinguish his later career.
For the rest he enjoyed everything; the drinking, the rabbit hunting, the jam tarts, the weeks with Peniston at Ascot, the Festival of Montem, when, gaudy in cavalier plumes and Hussar uniforms, the boys stood about in the streets dunning distinguished visitors for guineas. Naturally gregarious, he also got pleasure out of his school fellows. They were sometimes a little ridiculous: Brummell, for instance, with his drawling speech and dandified appearance, especially preposterous to William whose locks were always in a tangle. But ridiculous people added to the amusement of life; besides Brummell was an entertaining fellow, if you set yourself to get the best out of him. Nor was school life without more glorious sources of satisfaction. William did not work hard, at least after his first two years; but early grounding and a natural gift for scholarship kept him in a high place. By the time he left, he was one of the acknowledged kings of the school. Even the holidays seemed a little flat, back at Brocket with no fag to run clattering at his call, no clusters of sycophants to gaze admiringly at him and his co-monarchs as, in careless lordliness, they strolled the Eton streets. There was no doubt that Eton, indolent, high-spirited, undisciplined Eton, was the school for him. During the rest of his life it was to linger in his memory, tinged with a golden sentiment; so that, forty years later, as a grey-headed statesman disillusioned by a lifetime of glory and agitation, he could never hear a clock like the Eton clock without a lift of happiness at his heart.
2 This, like all Harriette Wilson’s stories, must be taken as only doubtfully authoritive.