Melbourne, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount

Melbourne, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount (1779–1848). Prime minister. Melbourne was such an agreeable man—perhaps the most pleasant prime minister since Lord North—that it is not easy to form a detached judgement. In some respects he was an essentially 18th-cent. figure: his idea of government was static, if not negative—the maintenance of law and order, conduct of foreign relations (usually with tiresome powers), and the implementation of those changes that could neither be postponed nor avoided.

To appearances he was an archetypal old-fashioned Whig—lounging, aristocratic, amiable, amateurish. But appearances were deceptive. He was not of the old nobility. His grandfather was a clever attorney who had acquired a baronetcy and obtained Melbourne Hall by marriage: his father, an obscure MP and follower of the prince of Wales, added an Irish and then an English peerage. Though Melbourne's attitude of ironic unconcern was not a pose, he was capable of hard and sustained application. ‘I am sorry to hurt any man's feelings,’ wrote Sydney Smith, another ironist, ‘and to brush away the magnificent fabric of levity and gaiety he has reared, but I accuse our minister of honesty and diligence.’ But near the core of Melbourne was a sadness: ‘the man was mournful in his heart of hearts,’ wrote W. M. Praed, in a poetical assessment. His mother was pretty and charming but, as Melbourne was overheard muttering in old age, ‘not chaste, not chaste’: consequently it is uncertain who his real father was and the earl of Egremont is as good a bet as any. At the age of 26 he was unlucky enough to marry Lady Caroline Ponsonby, whose indiscretions, scenes, and tantrums reinforced Melbourne's horror of unpleasantness and confrontation, which she adored. Their only child was retarded. Politically Melbourne turned all this to advantage in that he was a sensible and conciliatory man among Whig prima donnas—Grey, Brougham, Durham, and Russell. But it also meant a reluctance to face disagreeable reality, and to some extent Melbourne was a Wilsonian figure, the very man to hold the party together, but less well equipped to tackle the urgent problems of a great nation.

He grew up in a large, high-spirited cliquish family, went to Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and spent a year at Glasgow under Professor John Millar. With few pretensions to scholarship, he finished with a lifelong love of books and a well-stocked mind. His fortunes changed abruptly in 1805 when the death of his elder brother left him as heir to the peerage. He abandoned the legal career upon which he had started and began a political one. He joined the Whig opposition but was on the right of the party, and had much in common with Peel, Huskisson, and the liberal Tories. His rise was slow, and, indeed, coping with Lady Caroline was a full-time job. He was 48 before, in 1827, he held office in Canning's ministry as chief secretary for Ireland, and within a year he was out again, resigning with the Huskissons.

This limited service was of consequence since the Whigs, when they took office in 1830, were short of experience and Melbourne became home secretary in Grey's government. He showed unexpected firmness in dealing with the Swing riots in 1831 and the Tolpuddle martyrs in 1834. He was the obvious choice to succeed Grey in 1834. It was to his advantage that, after six years of reform, the country was not averse to a pause. But his colleagues were unusually quarrelsome, William IV mistrusted the government, and Grey scrutinized every action, looking for backsliding. After six months, the king turned out the ministry and brought in the Tories. Peel dissolved, failed to win a majority, and Melbourne returned, taking the opportunity to drop Brougham, one of the more impossible ministers.

It cannot be said that Melbourne's second administration made much of a mark. It was dependent upon Irish and radical votes and the Tory House of Lords killed off several of its measures. Melbourne soldiered on, swearing, jesting, despairing. But the succession of Victoria in 1837 changed everything. He experienced an Indian summer in which he basked in royal favour, the young queen hanging on every word, enjoying every joke. Greville wrote kindly: ‘he is passionately fond of her as he might be of his daughter if he had one, and the more because he is a man with capacity for loving without having anything in the world to love.’ He talked less and less about retirement and though his attitude to his opponents was generous, it merely confirmed to Victoria that they were horrid, horrid Tories. She and Melbourne were hissed at the races and ‘Mrs Melbourne’ was a vulgar taunt. The Bedchamber crisis of 1839, when Peel failed to form a ministry in the face of the queen's evident hostility, gave Melbourne's government two more years. It lost by-elections with regularity though surviving a sharp foreign crisis over Mehemet Ali with some skill. But in 1841 he went to the country and was defeated. The parting with Victoria was painful, even though an irresistible competitor in the shape of Albert had arrived. Melbourne kept in touch in a series of confidential letters of an unconstitutional nature. But in 1842 he suffered a stroke and well before his death in 1848 he was a figure from the past. ‘Not a good or firm minister,’ was Victoria's cool judgement on a man she had once adored.

As a prime minister, Melbourne does not rank high. He had no great achievements to his credit, no grand principles to enunciate. But he was kind, honest, and not self-seeking—he refused both the Garter and promotion in the peerage—and these are not inconsiderable virtues.

J. A. Cannon

Bibliography

Mitchell, L. G. , Lord Melbourne (Oxford, 1997).