The Young Melbourne & Lord M Page 4

  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.

  Chapter Two

  The Beau Monde

  For Cambridge, where he went at seventeen, he could never feel the same affection. He was even less industrious there than at Eton. Rich young men always find it hard to work at a university, especially if they have the Lamb gift for pleasure. It is only the poor-spirited or the morbidly conscientious, who can go on doing lessons, in the flush of their first appearance in the world as mature young men, able to do whatever they please. William did not even trouble to follow the regular course; along with the rest of the gilded youth at Cambridge he spent the next four years revelling, talking and making friends; sauntering the streets by day, and sitting up over the port at night. However, he was too active-minded to live without any intellectual occupation. He read a good deal in a desultory kind of way. And it is likely that he profited more by so doing than if he had kept himself to the narrow path of academic study. His strong young brain, rejoicing in its own activity, ranged over an enormous variety of subjects. Mathematics, indeed, he never cared for. They were too inhuman a science. But he read widely in the classics, ancient and modern, he devoured history books, he delved into the mysterious problems of ethical philosophy. With this intellectual development came a growing interest in public affairs. His realism had not yet learnt to apply itself to subjects outside his own experience; like other clever young men he was attracted to the idealistic, the daring, and the impractical; sentiments that roused a glow in the generous breast; opinions calculated to send a shiver down the spine of the timid and the conventional. His hero was Fox, his party the extreme Whigs. With a gloomy satisfaction he prophesied the ruin of his country under the sway of the contemptible Tories. “We have been for a long time the first nation in Europe,” he remarked to his mother, “We have now lost our sovereignty and shall shortly be the last.” As far as he could see the best thing for England would be to be defeated by the French under the enlightened Buonaparte. How dreadful it was to think that our arms might drive him out of Egypt. “I was in despair at hearing of the intentions of the French to evacuate Egypt. I was in hopes they would have been able to maintain themselves there in spite of Canning’s wit and Sir Sidney’s valour.” Canning, now at the height of his polemical brilliance, was castigating his opponents in the Anti-Jacobin. But William could not think much of his intelligence. He supported the Tories, he must be a fool.

  The more theoretical aspect of William’s political ideas found expression in an oration he composed in competition for the university declamation prize. The subject was the progressive improvement of mankind. William treated it in a lofty vein. “Crime is a curse,” so runs his peroration, “only to the period in which it is successful; but virtue, whether fortunate or otherwise, blesses not only its own age but remotest posterity.” These edifying reflections met with a most gratifying reception. Not only did William win the prize, but the great Fox himself selected the passage in question to quote in the House of Commons. Nor was this William’s only public success. He wrote poetry as well as reading it; translations from the classics, and occasional verses, in the orthodox Augustan manner, full of classical allusions and noble commonplaces. In 1798 he blossomed forth in print as a satirist, crossing swords with Canning in a reply to some verses in the Anti-Jacobin. His poem was passed round the clubs and drawing-rooms of the Metropolis, to the general approbation. It was not very good. But, then as now, London society was disposed to look kindly on the literary efforts of handsome young men of good family.

  In addition to applauding his writing, they asked him out to dinner. His intellectual debut coincided with his social: in the vacations he made his first entry into the beau monde as a grown-up man. No one could have done it in more advantageous circumstances. Born in the centre of its most entertaining circle, he found himself, without any effort on his part, elected to its best clubs, invited to its most brilliant parties. And he had the talents to make the most of his advantages. It was true that he did not always make a good first impression. He had some of the conceit of his time of life, and more of its shyness. Even Lady Melbourne’s training had not been able to free him from that self-consciousness which afflicts clever young men at nineteen years old: the thought of making a fool of himself in public haunted him. To escape it, he assumed an exaggeration of the family manner, adopted a contemptuous pose, as of one who disdained to compete in a world which he despised. Introduced to someone with whom he felt himself likely to be out of sympathy, an Anti-Jacobin, for instance, he turned away; now and again he would try and overcome his nervousness by asserting, unnecessarily loudly, some outrageous paradox. But all this was superficial. A few minutes talk revealed that he was in reality unassuming, appreciative, and as agreeable as Lady Melbourne herself. Within a short time he was one of the most fashionable young men in London.

  Indeed, Whig society was his spiritual home; its order of life, at once leisurely and lively, suited him down to the ground. He rose late in the morning, breakfasted largely, strolled up St. James’s Street, to loiter for an hour or two in the window of his Club, hearing the news, surveying the world. Later might come a ride in the park or an afternoon call; the evening was the time for dinner parties followed by the opera, the theatre, or a ball; then back to the Club for some supper till four or five o’clock struck, and it was time to go to bed. William enjoyed it all. Music and dancing in themselves did not please him; they were not the fashion among smart young men of the day. But he was happy at any sort of social gathering. And dinner parties he found perfectly delightful: succulent sumptuous feasts twelve courses long, then the pleasant hour with the gentlemen over the wine, whence they emerged to join the ladies about midnight. Several of the men, he noticed, were always drunk; but this did not displease him. “It tended to increase the gaiety of society,” he said, “it produced diversity.” After the session came the social life of the country; week long visits to Petworth or Bowood, where the mornings were spent reading, while the ladies sketched or played the harp; followed by sporting afternoons, and evenings when, after another enormous meal, the party sat up till three in the morning, playing cards, writing verses, organizing theatricals. The theatricals were a trial to William’s self-consciousness. At Inverary he consented to take the part of Leander in a farce, but could not bring himself to appear publicly in the wreath of roses and bunches of cherry-coloured ribbon which the producer thought the correct costume for his role. Into the other amusements
he entered with unalloyed enthusiasm. We find him editing a comic paper during a visit, contributing stanzas to Brummell’s album; and he was ready to talk to anyone. With such accomplishments to recommend him he soon got on friendly terms with the most agreeable conversationalists of the day; Fox, Sheridan, Canning—whom he found very pleasant on closer acquaintance—Rogers, Monk Lewis, Tom Moore.

  Mainly his social life centred round four houses, Carlton House, Holland House, Devonshire House and his own home. It was not the Piccadilly home of his childhood. In 1789 the Duke of York had taken a fancy to that: and Lady Melbourne, always ready to oblige influential persons, had agreed to exchange it for the Duke’s own residence in Whitehall, that grey spreading pile of rusticated stone which is now the Scottish Office. However, re-decorated by its new mistress, the second Melbourne House was just as splendid as the first; and life there was equally brilliant, disorderly, and in the thick of things. Daily the gentlemen dropped in on their way to and from the House of Commons; nightly the courtyard re-echoed with the coach wheels that brought to dinner the Duchess of Devonshire, or the Prince of Wales. For a year or two there had been a coldness between the Prince and the Melbournes. He expected his friends to take his part in every chop and change of his endless quarrels. And when, after Mrs. Fitzherbert fell from favour, he discovered that Lady Melbourne continued to visit her he broke with her entirely. But now in 1798 Mrs. Fitzherbert was forgiven and the Prince back at Melbourne House, in wilder spirits than ever, and eating on a scale which even William, accustomed though he was to the appetites of the day, found amazing. The Prince took a fancy to him, that was why William went so much to Carlton House. Few weeks passed that he did not walk across the Mall to dine within its meretricious walls; where he sat, an observant young man, listening to his royal host as, hour by hour, he poured forth the kaleidoscopic effusions of his preposterous egotism; now abusing his parents, now bragging of his amorous conquests, now courting the applause of the company by his vivid mimicry of Mr. Pitt or Lord North, now soliciting their sympathy by sentimental laments on the unexampled misery of his lot. It was very entertaining; it was also instructive. At Carlton House William got his first lesson in an art that was to be the instrument of his greatest success in later life, the art of getting on with royal personages. Lady Melbourne carried this instruction a step farther; she showed him how to manage them for their good. One evening, when the Prince was dining at Melbourne House, news was brought that an attack had been made on the life of George III, while he was watching a play at Drury Lane. The Prince, to whom the misfortunes of his parents were agreeable rather than otherwise, was preparing to go calmly on with his dinner. But Lady Melbourne perceived at once that he ought to go and enquire. It would make him popular, it would do him good with the King; it was, in any case, the correct thing to do. He resisted, she coaxed and ordered the carriage. At last sulkily he went off. But before midnight he had come back to thank her for her advice. Certainly for William, to stay at home was to see the world: and to get an education in public life thrown in.

  Holland House and Devonshire House were educative too; and in a more delightful wisdom. They represented, in their different ways, the apex of Whig civilization. In them all that made it memorable found its fullest expression. Holland House showed its masculine and intellectual side. Lady Holland was a divorced woman: she had eloped with Lord Holland from her first husband, Sir Godfrey Webster. With the consequence that, though the easy-going circle of Lady Melbourne and the Duchess of Devonshire were on terms with her, she was never received by the more rigid ladies; and the society that visited her was predominantly male. Every night of the week gentlemen used to drive down through the green fields of Kensington to dine and sleep at Holland House. Staying there had its drawbacks. It could be agonizingly cold for one thing; and the dinner table was always overcrowded, so that people ate as best they could, with arms glued to their sides. Moreover Lady Holland herself was in many respects a tiresome woman, capricious, domineering and extremely egotistic; given to a hundred deliberately cultivated fads, with which she expected everyone to fall in. She shifted her guests’ places in the middle of a meal, she turned people out of the room for using scent, she interrupted, she had hysterics at a clap of thunder, suddenly she would summon an embarrassed stranger to her sitting-room in order that he might entertain her with conversation, while her page, Edgar, kneeling before her and with hands thrust beneath her skirts, rubbed her legs to alleviate rheumatism. Yet she was a good hostess; talked cleverly in a charmless combative style, and had the dominating vitality that keeps a party alive. It was Lord Holland, though, who attracted people to the house. With the bushy black brows, the clumsy figure of his uncle, Charles Fox—“in a white waistcoat,” said a contemporary, “Lord Holland looks like a turbot standing on its tail”—he possessed also his culture, his bonhomie, his exquisite amenity of address. Perhaps he was a little detached—one needed to be, to live with Lady Holland—but this only seemed still further to emphasize the unvarying infectious good humour which spread like sunshine over every gathering of which he was host. Certainly life at Holland House had an extraordinary charm; there was nothing like it in Europe, people said. It was partly Lord Holland, partly the setting, the stately, red-brick, Jacobean mansion, with its carven painted rooms, mellow with historical memories; it was chiefly the conversation. Lady Holland complained that only men visited her; she complained of most things. But in fact it was this circumstance which gave the talk at her house its unique quality. It imbued it with that mental vigour found as a rule only in exclusively male society. The tone was free and sceptical, the subject matter rational and cultivated. There of an evening in the long library, soft in winter with candle shine, in summer fresh with the garden air blowing in through the open windows, would flow forth, concentrated and easy as it could never be in the rush of London life, the strength, the urbanity and the amplitude of Whig culture; passing from politics to history, from history to literature, Madame de Sévigné’s letters, the controversies of the early Church, the character of Buonaparte; and then Lord Holland would set everyone laughing with an imitation of Lord Chatham—he was an even better mimic than the Prince of Wales—and then someone would raise a point of scholarship, and taking a folio from the shelves would verify a reference. The company was always intellectually distinguished. There were a few habitués, Mr. Allen, the librarian, erudite and positive, his eyes always bright behind his spectacles, to argue on behalf of atheism; Sydney Smith, most humane of clergymen, crackling away like a genial bonfire of jokes and good sense and uproarious laughter; the sardonic Rogers; the epigrammatic Luttrell. But most of the remarkable men of the age came there at one time or another, statesmen, writers, artists, distinguished foreigners. Lord and Lady Holland were always on the look out for new talent; and William’s reputation soon got him an invitation. “William Lamb, a rising young genius, dines here for the first time to-day,” notes Lady Holland in her diary, 1799. He made his usual impression; “pleasant though supercilious”; and later, “clever and agreeable and will improve when he gets over his love of singularity”. He, for his part, appreciated them. In Holland House he discovered an intellectual life deeper than could be found at home. From this time on, whenever he came to London, he found time to pay it a visit. In the course of years he became a regular habitué whose association was only to be ended by death.

  All the same it is to be doubted if he did not enjoy Devonshire House more. Here flowered the feminine aspect of Whiggism. The Duke, a stiff, shy man, preferred to follow his own way, aloof from others; and the social life of his home revolved round the Duchess, her sister Lady Bessborough, and her friend Lady Elizabeth Foster. Each, in her way, was conspicuously charming; the Duchess in particular, lovely, exuberant, her whole personality flushed with a glowing sweetness which no heart could resist, seemed born to get and to give pleasure. From the time she was eighteen, the great house gazing across its courtyard at Green Park was the scene of all that was g
ayest and most brilliant in London society. Life there had none of the ordered rationality of Holland House. It passed in a dazzling, haphazard confusion of routs, balls, card parties, hurried letter-writings, fitful hours of talk and reading. But in its own way it was also unique. Rare indeed it is to find a real palace inhabited by a real princess, a position of romantic wealth and splendour, filled by figures as full of glamour as itself. Moreover in Devonshire House, the graces were cultivated in the highest perfection. Here, in the flesh was the exquisite eighteenth century of Gainsborough, all flowing elegance, and melting glances and shifting silken colour. Its atmosphere was before all things personal. The characteristic conversation of the Devonshire House ladies was “tête-à-tête,” in a secluded boudoir, or murmured in the comer of a sofa amid the movement of a party; it was delightful for its charming gaiety, its intimate sympathy, its quick perception of nuance. Their culture—for they too were cultivated—was of a piece with the rest of them, an affair of enthusiasm and sensibility. They read and wrote poems, they listened to music, they appreciated subtle analyses of emotion and character, La Nouvelle Héloise, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. In politics they were all for the ideal, for honour and liberty and enlightenment. Above everything they prized warmth and delicacy of feeling, abhorred cynicism, vulgarity and harshness. People spoke gently in Devonshire House, smiled rather than laughed, expressed disapproval, if they had to, by a hint or an intonation. Their less sensitive acquaintances criticized them as sentimental and insincere; laughed at the gushing terms, interspersed at every turn with French phrases, in which they expressed themselves, their cooing ecstatic Voices, “the Devonshire House drawl.” But the Duchess and her sister, at any rate, were in reality the very reverse of artificial. They seemed affected because they were unselfconscious; their privileged position had always allowed them to express their naturally refined and warm-blooded temperaments with uninhibited freedom. Impulsive, spontaneous, uncontrolled, they followed in everything the mood of the moment, the call of the heart. They danced till dawn, they gambled wildly, they mourned and rejoiced with equal lack of restraint. In them the affections, for friends, for relations, swelled to fever pitch; while into love they flung themselves with a reckless abandon. Love was indeed their vocation, the centre and mainspring of their lives. From earliest youth to the threshold of old age, the ladies of Devonshire House had always an affair of the heart on hand; ranging from light flirtation to the most agonizing drama of passion. For privilege did not save them from suffering. How should it, blown about as they were by every gust of desire, and without the slightest vestige of self-control? The life of feeling does not make for happiness in this rough world. The very basis of Devonshire House life was complicated by it. Lady Elizabeth Foster, a penniless grass widow, living by her wits, and of a more designing character than her friends, had, in addition to being the Duchess’s friend, contrived also to become the Duke’s mistress. And though a vigilant tact enabled them all to get along together without open explosions, they lived at an unceasing tension, rendered still sharper by the vicissitudes of the Duchess’s own hectic amours. At once gorgeous and dishevelled, frivolous and tragic, life at Devonshire House was a continual strain on the spirit; beneath its shining surface seethed always a turmoil of yearning and jealousy, crisis and intrigue, gnawing hope and unavailing despair. All the same the source of its unrest was also the chief secret of its attraction. For it meant that it was quickened by that delicious emotional stir only found in societies whose chief concern is love. It was love that breathed warmth into the social arts in which its inhabitants were so accomplished: love suffused the atmosphere, in which they moved, with a soft enticing shimmer of romantic sentiment and voluptuous grace.