and was very pleased that he did not include their brother, her father, as being of their naughty company. ‘From all what I heard,’ she wrote, ‘my father was the best of all.’11
His conversation was not only unfailingly interesting, it made her laugh. He would plead, for example, that he rarely went to church ‘for fear of hearing something very extraordinary’. Besides, his ‘father and mother never went. People didn’t use to go so much formerly; it wasn’t the fashion.’ Or he would protest that it was almost worthwhile for a woman to be beaten by her husband, ‘considering the exceeding pity she excites’. In the world of Whiggery, in which Whigs were ‘all cousins’, people used never to change their lives when they married: ‘they were very fond of their wives, but did not take care of them, and left them to themselves’. Chastity was not prized and there was ‘great licence’. In any case, the wife was ‘always in the wrong’.
Whig families like his also emphasized their separateness from the rest of society by bestowing nicknames which were recognized only by the cognoscenti and they pronounced words in a peculiarly Whiggish way. When Queen Victoria was once asked if Lord Melbourne had been a proper Whig she replied that he must have been because he spoke in a recognizably Whiggish manner, pronouncing Rome as ‘room’ and gold as ‘goold’.*12
Talking of children he said that ‘almost everybody’s character was formed by their mother and that if children did not turn out well, their mothers should be punished for it’. Talking of doctors he would say that the English variety killed you while the French merely let you die; and commenting on horse racing he would express the opinion that the Derby was ‘not perfect without somebody killing himself’. Yet at heart he was ‘such a good man’, ‘excellent and moral with such a strong feeling against immorality and wickedness’. One day when she remarked that there were so few good preachers in the Church, he agreed with her and added, ‘But there are not many very good anything.’ That was very true, the Queen thought. She was equally sure, though, that he was one of the ‘very good’.13
Having so high an opinion of Melbourne’s talents and virtues, she basked in his skilful flattery. Her shyness, he assured her, was not only appealing, it was indicative of a sensitive and susceptible temperament; her smallness, of which she was continually conscious, was a positive advantage in a queen; her inexperience was all to the good: she came to her duties fresh and unprejudiced. Upon her complaining of the great difficulty she had in keeping her temper when she was ‘very much irritated and plagued’ and how ‘very sorry’ she was when she ‘let it out’ towards her servants, he comforted her by observing that a person who had rather a choleric disposition might control it, never wholly got over it and could not help letting it out at times.
He endeavoured to curb her tendency to intolerance and to a truthful directness which verged on tactlessness; but the advice was given in such a ‘kind and fatherly’ way she never resented it. Nor did she mind when he warned her that, having inherited the Hanoverian tendency to plumpness, she was liable to grow ‘very fat’.
The Queen was well aware of Melbourne’s past amours, of the divorce cases in which he had been involved, of his late, unbalanced wife, Lady Caroline Ponsonby, who had been so much in love with Byron, and of his pathetic, infantile son, also dead. These misfortunes made him all the more fascinating in her eyes, all the more to be pitied, loved and indulged. She soon concluded ‘that he was, in fact, the best-hearted, kindest and most feeling man in the world…straightforward, clever and good’, a ‘most truly honest and noble-minded man’. She esteemed herself ‘most fortunate to have such a man at the head of the government’, a man in whom she could ‘safely place confidence’. There were ‘not many like him in this world of deceit’.*14
Drawn to Melbourne by their common experience of loneliness, the Queen spoke to him of her past life, as well as the problems and business of politics, talking to him for three or four hours a day and writing to him on the occasions when they could not meet. These occasions were rare enough since he now virtually lived at Court where their intimacy was plain for all to see. ‘I have seen the Queen with her Prime Minister,’ wrote Princess Lieven. ‘When he is with her he looks loving, contented, a little pleased with himself; respectful, at his ease, as if accustomed to take first place in the circle, and dreamy and gay – all mixed up together.’15
Charles Greville, who suspected that the Queen’s feelings for him were ‘sexual though she [did] not know it’, thought that no man was more formed to ingratiate himself with her than Lord Melbourne.
He treats her with unbounded confidence and respect, he consults her tastes and her wishes, and he puts her at her ease by his frank and natural manners, while he amuses her by the quaint, queer, epigrammatic turn of his mind, and his varied knowledge upon all subjects…[He is] so parental and anxious, but always so respectful and deferential…She is continually talking to him. Let who will be there, he always sits next to her at dinner, and by arrangement, because he always takes in the Lady-in-Waiting which necessarily places him next to her, the etiquette being that the Lady-in-Waiting sits next but one to the Queen. It is not unnatural, and to him it is peculiarly interesting. I have no doubt 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. It is become his province to educate, instruct, and form the most interesting mind and character in the world…Melbourne thinks highly of her sense, discretion, and good feeling.16
Content as she was to listen to his advice, to be instructed in such simple matters of propriety as the inadvisability of receiving divorced women at Court, of allowing maids-of-honour to walk unchaperoned on the terraces at Windsor Castle and of accepting the dedication of novels until he had read them to ensure that they contained nothing ‘objectionable’, the Queen was always ready, having formed her own views, to express her own opinions.17
While the Queen’s feelings for Melbourne may have been subconsciously sexual, as Charles Greville suggested, she herself said that she loved him like ‘a father’. She forgave him when he fell asleep after dinner and when he snored, as he did even in chapel, or became ‘very absent’ and began talking to himself, ‘loud enough to be heard but never loud enough to be understood’. ‘I am now, from habit,’ she wrote, ‘quite accustomed to it; but at first I turned round, thinking he was talking to me.’ By way of apology, and then with welcome regularity, bouquets of flowers would arrive at the Palace from Brocket Hall, Melbourne’s house in Hertfordshire.
Although he was conscientious in instructing the young and, in many respects, naive Queen about the political problems of the day, the workings of Parliament and the Cabinet, and the mysteries of the Constitution – leaving Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, to acquaint her with international relations – Lord Melbourne cannot be said to have aroused the Queen’s social conscience, or to have made her more aware of the pitiable conditions in which so many of her people lived and which she had briefly glimpsed in her travels in the Midlands and in the North before her accession to the throne. Melbourne was far from being an idle man. That acute observer, the Revd Sydney Smith, commented: ‘Our Viscount is somewhat of an impostor…I am sorry to hurt any man’s feelings and to brush away the magnificent fabric of levity and gaiety he has reared, but I accuse our Minister of honesty and diligence.’18 Yet Melbourne’s suspicion of reform and of the motives of reformers, his not altogether flippant suggestion that one should ‘try to do no good’ and then one wouldn’t ‘get into any scrapes’, undoubtedly had their effect on the still developing sensibilities of the young Queen Victoria. He maintained that Sir Walter