The Young Melbourne & Lord M Page 10

  Such were the ideas that he propounded over the dinner table, or in conversation with his fellow members as they walked home from the House in the early hours of the morning. And he presented them in a sparkling up-to-date style, nicely calculated to take the fancy of the bright young spirits of the day. What a comfort to find that one could be anti-revolutionary without appearing stodgy or old-fashioned! It was no wonder that he soon had a troop of followers. Two of them, Ward and Huskisson, were already well-acquainted with William. Ward was one of his regular boon companions, a handsome young aristocrat, all brilliance and sensibility, and the height of fashion. Huskisson was a relation by marriage. As such he had never appealed to William. Earnest, middle class, and with an unfortunate habit of falling down on the most embarrassing occasions, he was the sort of man whom the Lambs thought a great joke. But he had a massive, well-trained mind and an extraordinary knowledge of finance; and when William saw him at work in Parliament he began to conceive a great respect for him. With such connections, William was quickly admitted into the inner circle of the Canningites. Once there he was captivated.

  For their part the Canningites were only too pleased to have him. In spite of his youthful contradictiousness, and his halting way of speaking, William’s reputation had steadily grown throughout his time in Parliament. Indeed, his speeches were better worth listening to than those of many more accomplished orators. They were continually lit up by flashes of insight, pungent turns of wit. Besides, everybody liked him so much. As at Cambridge and the Bar, people were delighted to work with anyone so good-natured, so intelligent, so patently innocent of any desire to push himself. “I hardly know anyone,” says Ward affectionately, “of whom everybody entertains so favourable an opinion.” And the barometer of fame at Holland House told the same tale. “William Lamb,” writes Lady Holland, “is certainly one of the most rising men in public.”

  Yet his situation was not so comfortable as it looked. Once more his circumstances impeded the true development of his talents. If he really agreed with Canning, he should have thrown in his lot with him whole-heartedly; openly joined him, devoted his every effort to forwarding his cause. But this meant difficulties. Canning was officially a Tory. For one brought up in the inner circle of Whig society, it was an extremely unpleasant step to put himself publicly under Tory leadership. Every prejudice of William’s home, of the houses he visited, of the clubs where he spent his mornings, was against it. Further, though he might think poorly of the Whigs as politicians, personally they were his greatest friends. To leave them, when they were so obviously in a bad way, seemed an odious disloyalty. It would have been easy only to someone with a passionate conviction in the rightness of his cause. William’s upbringing had been such as to make him question every conviction. His sense of personal obligation, on the other hand, was peculiarly strong. In a world of illusion, individual affections, and the loyalties consequent on them, alone seemed solid. Leaving the Whigs was simply one of the things William felt he could not do. He therefore took a temporizing line. In public he never supported his party against Canning; in private he pressed his claims. But he called himself a Whig; and when early in 1812 the Prime Minister, anxious to strengthen his administration by the infusion of young blood, offered William a post in the administration, he refused.

  With an agitated ingenuity he tried to persuade himself that he was fulfilling a moral duty. He could do more good where he was; changing one’s party set a demoralizing example to others; it was subversive of the very principles of loyalty. In the ardour of self-defence he even went so far as to say that a man was only justified in doing it, if he thought that otherwise he would go to Hell. But no amount of argument could alter the fact that William was in a thoroughly false position. All he could do was to wait; uncertainly hoping for some sudden change in the political situation, by which it might be possible for a coalition of moderate men of both sides, led by Canning, to come into power.

  In the spring of 1812 there was a chance that this might occur. The Government had been doing so badly that it looked as if they would not be able to go on much longer. Political London was in a hubbub of excitement; George III had gone mad again, and anything might happen. In the lobbies of the Houses of Parliament, in the drawing-rooms of great houses, people arrived every moment, bursting with new rumours. Canningite hopes grew high. Alas, they were to be disappointed. In the wavering balance of competing factions, the deciding factor was the line taken by the Prince Regent. Since he had always called himself a Whig, the Canningites imagined that he would look with favour on a more liberal administration. This only showed that they did not know the Prince Regent. He did ask Lord Wellesley to form a Coalition; but after days of havering and intrigue, in which the Prince tearfully reiterated his unalterable fidelity to his old friends, he threw them over in favour of their opponents. This turned the scale. On 19th March, 1812, a petition was brought forward in the House of Lords asking for an all-party Government. Late in the evening, amid the gilt and candlelight of Melbourne House, Lady Melbourne and a crowd of Whig ladies waited anxiously to hear the result. At last, long after midnight, William and his friends trailed in, glum and crestfallen; the petition had been decisively defeated. This defeat was confirmed a month or two later in the House of Commons. The extreme Tories were safe for ten years more. The hopes of the Canningites were indefinitely postponed.

  This set-back to his friends need not have been a check to William’s own career. His reputation was now so high that the Prince of Wales wrote himself in the most pressing way, to offer him a place in the Cabinet. But William felt he could not accept it. The failure of Canning had hit him particularly hard. For it meant that he felt himself condemned to a false position for ever. Since he disagreed with his own Party, but yet could not bring himself to leave it, all his hopes had been pinned on the chance of Coalition. Now that this proved impossible, there seemed no place for him in politics. A deep discouragement spread over his spirit; which swelled into a wider disillusionment with public life as a whole. Surveying his Parliamentary career in the clear sunless light of his present disappointment, he wondered if he was not essentially unsuited to the career of statesman. He could not speak as he wished in the House, he could not even think there. The ideas which stirred in him at home, found there no channel for expression. His profession had turned out as great a disappointment as his marriage:

  “Sir Edward Coke says, somewhere or another,” he noted in his journal, “that he is certain that God enlarges and enlightens the understanding of men when they are sitting in Courts of Justice. Such is the difference between a man who by his habits and feelings is formed for public affairs, and one who is unfitted for them. The former finds himself encouraged, invigorated, and strengthened by the consciousness that he is acting upon the spur of the occasion before the eyes of men, subject to their censure in his failure, but sure to reap their approbation by his success. All these circumstances oppress and overwhelm the latter, and deprive him of the use of those powers which perhaps he possesses in an eminent degree. By this (Sir E. Coke’s saying) we must of course, understand that he found in that situation his own mental perceptions more quick and clear, and his judgment more settled and distinct, than upon other occasions. For myself, I must own the House of Commons has upon me quite a different effect. I can walk in the shrubbery here at Brocket Hall and reason and enlarge upon almost any topic; but in the House of Commons, whether it be from apprehension, or heat, or long waiting, or the tediousness of much of what I hear, a torpor of all my faculties almost always comes upon me, and I feel as if I had neither ideas nor opinions, even upon the subjects which interest me the most deeply.”

  And now more sordid cares arose to complete his discouragement with his profession. £2,000 a year was not much on which to keep up the position of a man of fashion and a member of Parliament; especially for the husband of Caroline. The young Lambs consistently overspent themselves. If there was a General Election—electio
ns in those pre-Reform days cost anything up to £50,000—William did not see what he was going to do. He was resolved not to go to his parents for money. What with Lady Melbourne’s parties, Lord Melbourne’s card debts, and the joyous expenses of their children, the family income was nothing like as big as it had been. From every point of view, William’s immediate political prospects looked black. When in July, 1812, the Government did declare for an election, William reluctantly decided not to stand. Lady Melbourne, deeply distressed at this set-back to her ambitions for him, besought him to reconsider his position, and offered him all the money he would want. But it was one of the occasions when she found herself up against a force in him that she could not move. In August, William was, for the first time for fourteen years, a man of leisure.

  Chapter Six

  Byron

  As a matter of fact, if he had stayed in politics, he would have found it hard to give his mind to them. Since 1809 the disturbing elements in his married life had steadily intensified, till now in 1812 they had burst out in a storm that was deafening London. While William was hobnobbing with the Canningites, Caroline had also found new interests. Since the role of wife had proved an inadequate vehicle for her dreams, she turned to other fields. Her first activities were social; it might be pleasant to be the centre of an intellectual circle. She never had any difficulty in attracting people, when she wanted to. Within a short time she was the friend of most of those men of letters who were sufficiently presentable socially to have achieved the entrance to the best houses. Rogers, Monk Lewis, Tom Moore, any or all of them might be found of an afternoon in her sitting-room, reading aloud their works to her while she sketched their portraits. She also made some new female friends. These were of a less desirable kind. Partly in order to annoy her relations-in-law, partly from a desire to impress the world by her emancipation of mind, she struck up with two of the few women of position who had contrived to put themselves outside the lax limits of Whig convention, Lady Wellesley and Lady Oxford. Neither can have been very attractive in herself, to one brought up at Devonshire House. Lady Wellesley was a Frenchwoman of very shady reputation, who had borne her husband several children before she married him; Lady Oxford, a tarnished siren of uncertain age, who pursued a life of promiscuous amours on the fringes of society, in an atmosphere of tawdry eroticism and tawdrier culture. Reclining on a sofa, with ringlets disposed about her neck in seductive disarray, she would rhapsodize to her lovers on the beauties of Pindar and the hypocrisy of the world. Caroline laughed at her affectations: her aristocratic eye also noted that Lady Oxford was a trifle common. But there was something in Caroline that responded to her luscious sentimentalizings. It was undeniably agreeable to a person of sensibility to receive a letter beginning, “Let us, my sweetest friend, improve the passing hour and with its help turn to the contemplation of true wisdom . . . We will defy the censorious”; or inviting her opinion as to whether learning Greek purified or inflamed the passions. “Caroline seems to have more faith in theory than in practice,” remarked her caustic cousin Harriet, “to judge, at least, by those she consults on these nice points of morality.”

  Indeed, her new friends did not please her relations. William himself implored her not to risk her good name by mixing in such worthless company; Lady Bessborough was distressed; and Lady Melbourne perfectly furious. Whatever the failings of her own friends, they had always been delightful, interesting people, and duchesses as well. “As you love singularity,” she wrote to Caroline, “it may be some satisfaction to you to know you are the only woman who has any pretensions to character whoever courted Lady Wellesley’s acquaintance, that I never saw anyone sup in her party . . . A married woman should consider that by such laxity she not only compromises her own honour and character but also that of her husband—but you seek only to please yourself.”

  Nor, as Lady Melbourne had already discovered, was having supper with Lady Wellesley the worst of Caroline’s indiscretions. Social success did not satisfy her ambitions. A heroine’s life, as she conceived it, included drama as well as admiration; and drama to Caroline meant love affairs. In 1810 her name began to be mentioned in connection with Lady Holland’s son by her first marriage, Sir Godfrey Webster. Personally he had even less to recommend him than Lady Oxford; a coarse, handsome young rake, whose chief boast it was that he never went to bed till nine in the morning, and whose sporting reputation was so dingy, that even the Whips Club—a very easy-going body—would have nothing to do with him. Caroline, however, chose to regard him as a fine example of dashing manliness, unpopular only on account of his admirable contempt for vulgar opinion. Looked at in such a light, he made an adequate, if not an ideal hero for her purposes. She flung herself into a violent flirtation with him, which she took care to make as public as possible. They went everywhere together. Ward, calling one afternoon at Melbourne House to see William, was surprised to find himself taken up to Lady Caroline’s room; where, pacing the floor in theatrical agitation, she poured forth the story of her unfortunate passion.

  It was not surprising that she soon had Lady Bessborough and Lady Melbourne on her track again, this time reinforced by Lady Holland. As usual, when faced with disapproval, Caroline lost her nerve. She deluged Lady Holland with a flood of incoherent and unpunctuated letters, in which she alternately denied with scorn, and penitently admitted, that there was anything between her and Sir Godfrey. Lady Holland was not impressed. However, she told Caroline she was willing to believe that the whole thing was a pretence, worked up to attract attention. These were not at all the sort of grounds on which Caroline wished to be acquitted. Lady Holland’s words, so she picturesquely expressed it, lay “like a weight on her stomach,” and she performed the most prodigious feats of intellectual contortionism, in her efforts to prove that she was at the same time a blameless and adoring wife to William and the victim of an irresistible infatuation for Sir Godfrey.

  Lady Holland remained sceptical; Caroline then lost her temper. “As to the gnats and mites that dare to peck at me,” she fulminated, “let them look to themselves. If I choose, you shall see them lick the dust I tread on. Lady Holland, if this is the case, I shall be courted by you . . . I remain more sincerely than you deserve, Caroline Lamb.”

  To Lady Melbourne she defended herself by saying that the whole thing was William’s fault: his cynicism had destroyed her moral sense. This was the last excuse likely to mollify Lady Melbourne, already seething with indignation on William’s behalf. They continued to wrangle till May, when Lady Melbourne got a letter from Caroline saying all was at an end. She had been sitting in her morning-room—so ran her story—with her child, “on the brink of perdition,” when suddenly her dog, a present from Sir Godfrey, snapped at the baby and shortly afterwards fell down foaming at the mouth. It flashed upon her that as a judgment for her sins it had gone mad and was going to bite the baby. So dreadful an idea brought her to her senses. Tearing from her arm a bracelet made of Sir Godfrey’s hair, she rushed to her writing table and wrote off to William, confessing all and imploring forgiveness. Whether there was a word of truth in this sensational piece of autobiography, it is impossible to say. Certainly, if there was, it produced a less decisive effect than might have been anticipated. The flirtation lingered on until the end of the summer, and then it was Sir Godfrey who called it off. Caroline seems to have taken his defection with unexpected calm. Her mood had changed: she was absorbed in social life, in reading, in the new dance, the Waltz. Its pulsing lilt was exquisitely in tune with her spirit: and during the early part of 1812 she might have been found any morning along with the rest of the smart set of the period, the gentlemen in swathed neckcloths, the ladies in their filmy, high-waisted dresses, practising her steps in the painted ballroom of Melbourne House, to the sprightly strains of Ah du lieber Augustin. In the intoxication of these whirling delights, Sir Godfrey and his virile charms were forgotten.

  But her passage with him had left a mark on her life that no amount of
forgetfulness on her part could efface. Her reputation was seriously damaged by her choice of a lover, and still more by the way she had advertised her relationship with him. She had overstepped, as Lady Melbourne for instance had never done, the subtle line which separates what society condemned from what it condoned. From this time she could no longer afford to take any risk with her good name. More serious, she had widened the gulf between herself and William. William does not seem to have been jealous; he knew her well enough by this time to realize, like Lady Holland, that the whole thing was most likely a pretence and would soon pass. But even if her actual infidelity was fictitious, his sensitive spirit was deeply wounded to discover that she now had so little regard for his feelings as to be willing to flaunt it publicly. Once—it was at a ball on the evening of 11th July—his pent-up emotions broke forth. Caroline would not go home: and as William was turning to leave alone, he reminded her that it was the anniversary of their wedding-day, passionately recalled to her the thousand vows of constancy she had then made—now to all appearances utterly forgotten. For the moment Caroline was unmoved; but driving home by herself in the grey light of the summer dawn, her naturally generous heart was overcome by an agonizing wave of self-reproach; lying sleepless on her bed, she resolved to reform. She was sincere—only she could not keep it up. Within a few days William watched her behaving as impossibly as ever. And though even now he could not help loving her, for the first time a strain of hard bitterness began to enter his disillusioned heart.

  It was to grow stronger during the years that followed. The Webster episode was only the rehearsal of a far more distressing exhibition. In March, 1812, the first part of Childe Harold was published to the world. Its success was instantaneous and colossal. The sweep of its rhetoric, its full-blooded romantic pessimism, its glowing Turneresque landscapes, all torrents and ruins, and patches of picturesque foreign colour, alike hit the taste of the time. And so still more did the personality behind them; the figure of the author who, melancholy, detached and scornful, his heart turned to marble by a career of sin and sightseeing in every part of Europe, stood out in melodramatic silhouette against the sublimities of nature and the wreckage of empires. Besides, he was a lord, and, it was rumoured, as beautiful as an angel: such a lion had not appeared in London within living memory. His book became the fashion as no poem ever has before or since. Listening at the dinner table one heard the words “Childe Harold” coming from every mouth; in St. James’s Street, where its author lived, the traffic was held up by the press of carriages bearing notes of invitation for him; before a month had passed, the doors of every modish house in the capital had been flung open to announce—“Lord Byron.”