The Young Melbourne & Lord M Read online

  William was born to be her victim. His sceptical, sophisticated spirit was at once entertained and invigorated by her naturalness and her certainty: his repressed idealism glowed, even against his better judgment, in response to the confidence of hers; and he appreciated her unique flavour, with the discriminating relish of the connoisseur in human nature that he was. If he were to live a hundred years, he knew, he would find no one else like this. All the force of his virile, tender nature went out to her; he fell irretrievably in love. For the time being it had to be a hopeless love. The social conventions of the day made it unthinkable that Lord Bessborough’s only daughter should throw herself away on a younger son of small fortune. William was too unselfish and too sensible to involve Caroline in the fruitless unhappiness that must ensue from an attempt to combat universal custom. Though he could not altogether conceal his feelings, he never declared himself formally; and made some ineffective efforts to fall in love with other people. Caroline returned his passion, but oddly enough for one of her character, she also submitted to convention. Anyway, she told him, it would be a bad thing for them to marry; she was too much of a fury. Could not she, as an alternative, she suggested, accompany him on circuit disguised as a clerk? Meanwhile other young men, her cousins, Lord Althorp and Lord Hartington, were paying court to her; it seemed probable she would end by marrying one of them. For a year or two her relations with William remained, outwardly at least, no more than a fashionable flirtation.

  Peniston’s death put the situation on a new footing. Even now William was a less brilliant match than she might have anticipated; at least till his father died. For on his eldest son’s death Lord Melbourne had, for the only recorded time in his history, cut up rough. The accumulated mortifications of thirty years boiled over; he refused point blank to allow William the £5,000 a year he had bestowed on the indisputably legitimate Peniston. So strongly did he express himself on the subject that Lady Melbourne actually lost her nerve. Too scared to approach him herself, she was reduced to asking a friend to persuade him to reconsider his decision. In vain; Lord Melbourne was adamant, and William had to make do with £2,000 a year. Still £2,000 a year, with the Melbourne fortune in prospect, was good enough. In May, when the first months of mourning were over, William wrote a letter to Caroline in which he poured forth his pent up emotions. “I have loved you for four years, loved you deeply, dearly, faithfully—so faithfully that my love has withstood my firm determination to conquer it when honour forbade my declaring myself—it has withstood all that absence, variety of objects, my own endeavours to seek and like others, or to occupy my mind with fixed attention to my profession, could do to shake it.” There was little doubt as to what Caroline’s answer would be. But her family’s attitude was not yet quite certain. It was not the marriage Lady Bessborough would have chosen. The Lamb spirit had always been unsympathetic to her; she was peculiarly repelled by cynicism, coarseness, and off-hand manners; even in William, she was jarred by his “creed or rather no creed” as she put it. As for Lady Melbourne, though she had known her for years, she had never been able to feel easy in her company. Far too acute not to see through her suave exterior, she yet shrank too much from friction to be able to stand up to her. Beside Lady Melbourne’s finished poise she felt herself continually at a disadvantage; she called her the Thorn. On the other hand, she liked William personally very much; she knew Caroline to be passionately in love with him. And she was anxious to get her off her hands as soon as she could. Caroline was altogether too temperamental for family life: and was sometimes so disagreeable in her manner that Lady Bessborough had come to the conclusion that only the settling influence of marriage would ever cool her down. Anyway she was not the woman to stand in the path of true love. Sighing, she left the matter to Caroline’s decision. A day or two later William was asked to come to the play with the Bessboroughs in order to receive his final answer:

  “We met him at Dy. Lane,” Lady Bessborough tells Lord Granville, “I never saw anything so warm and animated as his manner towards her, and of course he soon succeeded in obtaining every promise he wished. I had not seen him to speak to, and he follow’d me into the passage (behind the D. Lane box). I was very nervous, and on telling him I knew Lord B. join’d with me in leaving everything to Caro’s decision, he answered: ‘And that decision is in my favour, thank heaven!’ and so saying, threw his arms round me and kiss’d me. At that very moment I look’d up and saw the Pope3 and Mr. Hammond before me in the utmost astonishment. W. frighten’d at their appearance, started back and ran downstairs. No words can paint to you my confusion, but, unable to bear the Pope’s mortifying conjectures even till all was declar’d, I flew after him and calling him out, told him the cause of what he saw, and you can have no conception of his kindness; he was delighted, quieted all my fears, assur’d me my objections were Idle—prais’d William extremely, and did me more good than any one thing I had heard before. He touch’d me to that degree with his kindness that I could not resist pressing his hand to my lips (I hope it was not wrong?)”

  The experience of the next few weeks confirmed the Pope’s praises. William, now received as a son into the intimacy of the home circle, revealed to the full his genius for affection; Caroline, too, grew surprisingly more serene, once she was engaged. A delicious relationship established itself between the three of them, rosy with tenderness, sparkling with graceful gaiety.

  “Your letter made me cry,” Lady Bessborough writes to Caroline, “and then laugh at myself for crying. The truth is we are two simpletons, and unlike what mother and daughter ought to be—William may pride himself on his good conduct; for to nothing one atom less kind and delightful than he is, could I have yielded you. I should have forbid the banns at last, with anybody else; but as I told you the other day, he really appears to me like my natural son—I shall hasten to do your commission; for I know your happiness cannot be compleat without Rollin’s ancient History, that dear beautiful light amusing book. What a pity that it should be in twenty-four volumes and in quarto, that you cannot carry it always about you—could not you contrive a little rolling bookcase, you might draw after you, containing these precious volumes? I do not despair of your being soon able to repeat the whole, heads of chapters and all; how lulling it will be for William when he is a little drowsy. The book on education seems to me rather premature: but I will get it. What Prince do you intend to marry your future daughter to? Some of the Buonaparte family perhaps, that I may have the pleasure of being Grandmother to an Empress.

  All the same the wedding did not pass off without its storms. Lord Hartington, when the Bessboroughs came round to Devonshire House with the news, was seized with such paroxysms of agitation at the loss of his love, that a doctor had to be summoned. Then, the Thorn proved as thorny as Lady Bessborough could have feared. The antipathy between the two mothers-in-law was mutual. To Lady Melbourne, Lady Bessborough’s virtues and faults were alike distasteful; sensitive, enthusiastic, imprudent persons were the type she had always found most tiresome; and she thought the gushing manner with which Lady Bessborough sought to conceal the nervousness she felt in her presence, both silly and insincere. To these original sources of irritation was now added jealousy. Though she approved his marriage from the worldly point of view, Lady Melbourne could not bear to see her adored William so obviously absorbed in two other women. In the exhausting rush of wedding preparations her exasperation betrayed itself:

  “Yesterday, after various very unpleasant cuts,” says Lady Bessborough, “she told me she hoped the Daughter would turn out better than the Mother, or William might have to repent of his choice; and would not (like many Husbands) be made to repent impunément. This was said half joke, half earnest; but there are subjects too sore to bear a joke . . . I felt hurt and possibly could have retorted, but check’d myself, however; and only said I hoped and believ’d she would prove much better—‘especially (I added) with the help of your advice’ (I would not say example).”

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p; Unluckily, too, as the ceremony approached Caroline became herself again. The strain of buying a trousseau and her alarm at the thought of leaving her family for the first time, united to disperse her unwonted calm. She was attacked with moods of tearful melancholy, which on the actual wedding-day rose to hysteria. They were married at eight o’clock in the evening in Cavendish Square. Towards the end of the service Caroline, seized by an unaccountable fit of rage with the officiating bishop, tore her gown and was carried fainting from the room. An hour later, as she drove off through the summer dusk for her honeymoon at Brocket under the gaze of a huge crowd, she was still in a violent nerve storm. However, she was in good hands. William had been stirred by this, the first powerful emotional experience of his lifetime, to break free from his customary attitude of amiable detachment. During the ceremony his manner was remarked on as “beautiful, so tender and considerate”: once married, he took complete charge of her. On his own responsibility he opened her letters, only allowing her to see them if they contained nothing to distress her; he asked Lady Bessborough not to visit her till she had got over her home-sickness; and himself superintended her day with vigilant care. Indeed his marriage released his nature in more ways than one. The new atmosphere of delicate demonstrative emotion in which he found himself, thawed the Lamb reserve. Shyly, tentatively, and with a stiffness still far removed from Devonshire House rhapsodizings, he tried to be demonstrative too. “I am very bad at making professions,” he writes to his grandmother-in-law, Lady Spencer, “and have besides an invincible aversion to them, but believe me I shall be very happy to come to Holywell, the moment Caroline says she wishes it, and to stay there, as long as you will allow us; and this not only now, when I may be supposed to act so for the sake of appearance, but at any time and at all times in future—notwithstanding what I have said above about professions I cannot help acknowledging that I feel the greatest and sincere satisfaction in my dear Caroline’s love and respect for you.” And later we find him beginning a letter to her: “My dearest Love, since you do not like the other opening.” What the other opening was is unknown; but clearly it was insufficiently demonstrative. However, during the honeymoon he showed affection enough for his immediate purpose. His mingled tenderness and good sense made him the ideal person to soothe disordered nerves. In the mornings, with Caroline clinging to his arm, they walked the glades of Brocket park, drowsy in the June sunshine: later in the day she sketched, while he read aloud. Within a few weeks Caroline was sufficiently recovered to throw herself into the delights of fulfilled love with all the intensity of her nature.

  * * *

  3 A nickname for Canning.

  Chapter Four

  Marriage

  For the next three years they lived in a state of idyllic happiness. Not that they secluded themselves from the world. On the contrary they were one of the smartest young couples in London. Their home was in the heart of its whirling centre: Lady Melbourne, in the Continental fashion, had allotted to them the first floor of the family mansion in Whitehall. Here, attended by a retinue of pages in liveries of scarlet and sepia designed by Caroline, they kept open house; received morning and afternoon visitors, gave dinner parties lasting till one in the morning, after which the guests would sometimes descend to Lady Melbourne’s apartments on the ground floor for supper. Two years after marriage a son was born, Augustus.

  “Caroline was brought to bed about an hour ago of a very large boy for so small a woman,” wrote William to Lady Holland with paternal jocoseness. Caroline’s own emotions were of so lyrical a kind as to require verse for their expression.

  “His little eyes like William’s shine—

  How then is great my joy,

  For while I call this darling mine,

  I see ’tis William’s boy.”

  To celebrate the christening, Lady Melbourne gave a magnificent party. Melbourne House was illuminated outside and in; and a huge concourse of guests, headed by the Prince of Wales, entertained themselves with eating and drinking and composing rhymes. The young Lambs spent as much time out as at home. They were to be seen everywhere: at the opera, at Drury Lane, at Almack’s; staying with the Duke of Gloucester at Cowes, taking part in theatricals at Lord Abercorn’s country house—William, who appeared in the role of Captain Absolute, was remarked on as “rather too vehement but very gentleman-like and nothing bad”—and very often at Devonshire House, where scandal had it that Caroline was once carried in concealed under a silver dish cover, from which she emerged on the dinner table, stark naked, to the consternation of the company. We have glimpses of William alone, too; at Brooks’s Club, to which he had been introduced by Fox himself, and staying at Brocket in order to take part in the exercises of the local yeomanry. At such times Caroline, left to herself, drew, danced and improved her mind by serious reading. In her enthusiasm she summoned others to assist her.

  “My dear Mama,” she writes in July, 1809, “if you are quite well, I should take it as a great favour if you would just write me the principal dates and events, wars, risings from Romulus till the time of Constantine the Great—if you are unwell do not do it.”

  Poor Lady Bessborough! she must have needed to be healthy indeed to perform such a task at the height of the London season. Caroline was equally interested in contemporary history; she and William had the Whig taste for public affairs. Every important event of that dramatic epoch stirred them; the Battle of Copenhagen, the Peninsular Campaign, the death of Pitt. This last, one might have expected to leave William unmoved, considering the unfavourable opinion he had always entertained of that statesman’s policy. But the passing of so historic a figure kindled his inflammable imagination; all Pitt’s faults were forgotten in the flow of generous emotion that welled up within him; moving him in fact to an uncharacteristic and slightly comical sententiousness. “When W. Lamb came in and told me,” relates Lady Bessborough, “the tears were in his eyes too: and as I had drawn my veil over my face, he said, ‘Do not be ashamed of crying: that heart must be callous indeed that could hear of the extinction of such a man unmoved. He may have erred but his transcendent talents were an honour to England and will live in posterity.’ ”

  As for the way that people began canvassing as to who should get Pitt’s seat at Cambridge, before he was cold in his grave, William thought it absolutely disgusting. “Damn him,” he exclaimed vehemently, on receiving a note from one of the Whig leaders asking for his vote, “can no feeling but party enter his cold heart?”: and he crumpled the note in his hand. It was a sad year altogether. Fox died soon after Pitt, and a few months earlier, after a protracted and agonizing illness, the Duchess of Devonshire. To her immediate circle it was an irreparable loss. With her went the centre round which their whole social life had revolved for thirty years, Caroline was plunged into an agony of tears; while Lady Bessborough’s spirits received a shock from which they were never to recover.

  However, neither private nor public calamities had the power to shake the inner citadel of the young Lambs’ happiness. Love breathed round them a rosy cloud in which they moved, entrancedly insulated from the world. “They flirt all day,” said an observer. And they talked as much as they flirted. William had always liked to teach, Caroline to be taught. Entertaining, unpedantic, his mind a storehouse of varied information, he was a perfect teacher; her quickness, her responsive enthusiasm, made her the ideal pupil. Every day of their crowded lives they contrived somehow to find time to read together; history, poetry, theology. Even in the turmoil of the Abercorn theatricals, she would write:

  “Wm. and I get up about ten or half after or later (if late at night)—have our breakfast—talk a little—read Newton on the Prophecies with the Bible, having finished Sherlock—then I hear him his part, he goes to eat and walk—I finish dressing and take a drive or a little walk—then come upstairs where Wm. meets me and we read Hume with Shakespeare till the dressing bell.”

  When he was away he would send
her translations from the classics he had made to pass the time, and ask her opinion of them: meanwhile she read the books he recommended that she might ply him with questions when he came back. And when they grew weary of serious subjects they would relax, she to enjoy his shrewd, subtle agreeability, he to savour her ever changing moods, the leaps and somersaults of her harlequin fancy. Whether serious or frivolous or sentimental, each was a continual delight to the other.

  But it was not to last; their happiness was as short-lived as it was ecstatic. Before four years were over, a rift had begun to show itself in their relationship which was to bring down their married life in irreparable ruin. It was predominantly Caroline’s fault. In spite of all her charms and all her talents, her character was of a kind to make her an unsatisfactory wife for any man. Not that it was a bad one. On the contrary, nature had made her generous, tender-hearted, fearless and unworldly. She aspired far more genuinely than most people to live a noble life; if her heart was touched, no kindness was too much trouble for her. But with a glint of the unique fire of genius, she possessed in the highest degree its characteristic defect. A devouring egotism vitiated every element in her character. In her eyes she was the unquestioned centre of the universe. She did not acknowledge, she was not even aware of any authority beyond her own inclinations. What she liked was right; what she disliked was wrong. This made her abnormally selfish, abnormally uncontrolled, and abnormally unreliable. One moment she would offer you her whole fortune, the next fly at you with nails and fists. In either mood she thought she was justified, and other people had to think so too. In addition, they had to admire her. Life was a drama in which she was cast as heroine; and both her fellow actors and her audience were expected to applaud her every movement. Capricious in all else, in one thing she was consistent, her determination to hold the centre of the stage. It was for this she dressed and behaved unlike other people; this was the reason of her faintings and sobbings and unconventional interruptions. Even her generous actions were partly a method of showing off. She liked to dazzle others by the spectacle of her munificence. For—it was the most dangerous effect of her egotism—her ambitions were never completely sincere. It would be inaccurate to call her deceitful. Her very lack of control made her incapable of conscious pretence; indeed she thought quite sincerely that, compared with herself, most people were shocking hypocrites. But self-absorption tainted the essential quality of her reactions. Her feelings were one part genuine, two parts self-indulgent pleasure in emotion for its own sake, and three parts a means of self-glorification. Her intensest affections, her most exalted enthusiasms, were largely make-believe.