The Young Melbourne & Lord M Read online

  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 fre
edom 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; an
d 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.