Dark horse
Simon Raven Melbourne: A Biography of William Lamb 2nd Viscount Melbourne Philip Ziegler (Collins £6.50) As Philip Ziegler remarks in his foreword, 'Melbourne is already the subject of one of the most delightful biographies of our age. Why then write another?' Well, pursues Mr Ziegler, it is now thirty years since Lord David Cecil finished his, and many papers Which Lord David could not consult have been made available since, among them those of Lord Brougham and Lord Grey, a large hunk of Melbourne's own autobiography, and many letters to and from Melbourne's reputed Mistresses, Lady Branden and Mrs Norton. What is more, Mr Ziegler assures us, he himself has a new Picture of Melbourne to present. Whereas Lord David has shown Melbourne as the insouciant, amiable, amusing and 'carefree amateur', Mr Ziegler takes a tougher view of one whom he believes to have been altogether a tougher man, professional, Perhaps ruthless, in any case cynical and almost wholly without political principle'. Let us now consider, therefore, to what extent Mr Ziegler establishes this thesis.
• Mr Ziegler runs through the early stages of Melbourne's life swiftly and competently. The little William Lamb, as Melbourne was born, second son of the 1st Viscount Melbourne (though conceivably Sired by the I,:ord Egremont of the day) disliked nannies, tutors and formal learning, faked illnesses in order to read widely after his own choice, was all the fashion at Eton, and wallowed in debauchery at Cambridge—where, however, he woke up one 11-1, orning in conscious and salutary detestation of himself, his conceit and his ignorance.
Full of new purity and priggery, now a keen Foxite and student of the human condition, he departed to Glasgow, where he diligently read the Law and came much under the influence of Professor John !Alllar, a doctrinaire radical who rejoiced In the memory of the French Terror, denounced poetry and painting as 'trivialities', made inflated claims for the Scottish Schools of Law and Metaphysics, ciLnd informed young William that the only upippe for Britain was to be conquered by 'ranee and thus rid of her monstrous government. But once again William woke one morning to sanity, this time with the envon that the Law was an ass and :rofessor Millar another.. He reacted by 41.r,ing off to become a man of fashion in London and to be purged of the last rem_hants of his Foxite sanctimony by personal "xOerience of Charles James Fox. Then two
things happened, one of which helped to make him while the other might well have destroyed him: the sudden death of his elder brother raised William from the status of annoying younger son to that of much courted heir apparent to a viscountcy with estate to match; and he became engaged to Lady Caroline Ponsonby, of whom Mr Ziegler aptly remarks that 'if one had to sum up Caroline's personality in a single word, it would be excess.'
Now, up to this point Mr Ziegler has wagged along pretty well; and indeed he continues to do so in as much as he has to deal with William Lamb's personal, social, matrimonial and otherwise amorous activities. The trouble is, to put it bluntly, that Mr Ziegler is most confoundedly dull when he goes, along with Lamb, into politics. Although this is almost my only complaint, in the light of Mr Ziegler's proposed theme, that Lamb the politician was both more serious and much more nasty than we had thought, it is a very damning one. For Mr Ziegler's accounts of the politics of the period, while conscientious and (as far as my knowledge serves me) more or less correct, are so lacking in the vigour, wit and sympathy which inform the rest of this book that to essay any interpretation of actions taken or interests at stake requires a labour of Hercules. One accepts Mr Ziegler's announcement that Melbourne is now Home Secretary, Prime Minister or whatever, but without understanding or caring why, and therefore without being able to understand the means or motive of Melbourne's progress. This, in turn, makes it very difficult to judge how far Mr Ziegler's attributions of love of power or lack of principle are sustained or justified; and I should confess at once that I still don't know the answers.
What I do now know, however, is a great deal more, of Melbourne's tempestuous and near-ruinous marriage with the flagrant Caroline, who is treated by Mr Ziegler with humour, shrewdness and, not least, affection; a lot of highly entertaining and hitherto unheard anecdote about the Holland House set; and some very pertinent facts about Melbourne's amatory fancies. For some of the most piquant of Mr Ziegler's passages concern Melbourne's relations with the four loves of his life, from Caroline, the termagant wife, through Lady Branden and Mrs Norton, the grabbing mistresses, to the young Queen Victoria, the fickle goddess; and what Mr Ziegler chiefly demonstrates is that Melbourne, like many men, while loving several women loved the same woman in all of them, in Melbourne's case a woman turbulent, venomous and yet herself very vulnerable. It also emerges that he was titillated (no more) by the idea (no more) of taking a birch to the lot of them (especially, I suspect, to the last); that his sexual performance was restricted sand, to himself, unimportant; and that he was extremely skilful at gliding away when things turned noisy or awkward.
All of which inclines me to the following speculation: granted that Mr Ziegler has failed, in my view, tO find the essential clue to Melbourne's political motives in his account of Melbourne's political actions; but might he not, after all, have turned up this clue in his account of Melbourne's personal life? Clearly, Melbourne's taste was for getting into meses (e.g. dirty habits at Cambridge or scandal with the possessive Lady Branden) and his talent was for getting out of them again. Why he should have enjoyed getting into them is anybody's guess (I suggest an indolent yet inquisitive nature), but how he got out of them is plain enough for all to see—by application of sheer common sense when (and only when) it became really necessary, by letting the thing go on but making intelligent adjustments or evasions a split second before it had gone on too far. Melbourne the private man, in short, always contrived to wake up just before he was badly caught napping.
Now, surely we can detect very much the same way of doing things, very much the same pattern of procrastination and last minute provision or prevention, in Melbourne the politician ? Surely we can discern that he did twt move into politics out of ambition or authoritarian purpose, but idled into them out of curiosity and from the sudden accident of becoming a wellheeled elder son; that he found himself involved in a pretty mess as a result, let things drift on as long as possible because he considered it ill-bred and tiresome to meddle, but at last, when something really had to be done, exercised his unrivalled common sense and worldly knowledge in order to tidy the place up as tolerantly and as painlessly as possible for all concerned? This is a portrait of Melbourne which Mr Ziegler makes entirely intelligible to us in his colourfully rendered domestic and social sequences: cynical and lacking in principle. I agree, but most certainly not the calculating coveter of office and power whom Mr Ziegler has tried to impose on the reader in his tedious lapses into political 'black and white'—or rather grey,
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