Lord Melbourne, 1779-1848 (review)

William Lamb, second Viscount Melbourne, is best known as a safe pair of hands, the Prime Minister who steered the Whig government of the late 1830s in a safe direction after the reform program of the Grey ministry had made its way onto the statute book. L. G. Mitchell does not wish to alter this impression of Melbourne, but to explain how personal tumult shaped the values that he sought to uphold as a politician: moderation, civility, and passive governance. He does so admirably in a thoroughly researched and gracefully written book that does a better job of linking the private with the public Melbourne than the other modern biographies by Lord David Cecil (1955) and Philip Ziegler (1976). Mitchell’s is the absorbing tale of a man whose distressingly eventful private life taught him to cherish uneventfulness as the greatest of all political virtues.

Virtually all of Melbourne’s private distress stemmed from his marriage to Lady Caroline Ponsonby. Several factors made it a disaster: the volatile reaction of Caroline Lamb’s highly strung nature to Melbourne’s self-protective passivity; the Lamb family’s clannish disapproval of Caroline; money troubles; failure to produce healthy children; Caroline’s ungovernable temper, which once led her to destroy Melbourne’s favorite painting; her exhibitionism; finally, her serial adultery. The most infamous of her several affairs was a brief one with Lord Byron that ended very badly indeed, with Caroline trying to slash her wrists in the middle of a ballroom, Byron calling her “an adder in my path” (71), and Caroline countering with the publication of Glenarvon (1816), the tale of an innocent woman abused by her malicious in-laws (the Lambs), let down by her loving but pathetically weak husband (Melbourne), and finally ruined by a transparently Byronic anti-hero. His marriage was undeniably the “determining, and possibly deforming, experience of Melbourne’s life” (91). His seeming inability to govern his wayward wife led London society to question his manhood and write him off as a cuckold. This notoriety deeply wounded Melbourne, who was as constitutionally averse to personal publicity as he was to taking decisive action on his own behalf. After endless coaxing from his family, Melbourne finally separated from Caroline in 1825. Descending ever deeper into her own inner turmoil, she died a little over two years later. While Melbourne put up with far more from Caroline than most men of his time and station would have done, it seems almost as plain that Melbourne was too reticent a man to give her the kind of love that she needed. In any case, the torture of his marriage clearly added to his emotional frigidity. With the important exception of the young Queen Victoria, for whom he developed a warm and indeed fatherly affection (which in his jealous mind she betrayed when she fell for Prince Albert), the women who came into his life thereafter were simply to provide amusement or distraction, and they were dropped the moment they threatened to cause him embarrassment or undue strain.

Mitchell compellingly argues that, while the end of Melbourne’s marriage made it possible for him to pursue a political career, there were nevertheless important political consequences to the memory of it. For by the time Melbourne entered his first public office, he “had been so injured that he could not believe that political action would heal. The role of government was limited to regulating the worst excesses of men and women who could never ultimately trust each other” (93). The main point was to try to preserve tranquility and safeguard Britain’s ruling institutions, making the strategic concession when necessary, using the iron fist when needed, but avoiding partisan zeal at all costs. Mitchell points out that this dispassionate moderation made him an effective Chief Secretary of Ireland under the Canning coalition, where he showed a surprising ability to work hard in trying to strike a balance between Catholics and Protestants. It also made him an...