Lord John Russell recalled that Lamb’s ‘ease of manner and apparent indifference tended to conceal the excellence of his understanding and the warmth of his feelings’.
The vast fund of knowledge with which his conversation was always replete ... mixed up with his characteristic peculiarities, gave an extraordinary zest and pungency to his society ... This richness of talk was rendered the more piquant by the quaintness and oddity of his manner, and an ease and naturalness proceeding in no small degree from habits of self-indulgence and freedom ... He was often paradoxical, and often coarse, terse, epigrammatic, acute, droll, with fits of silence and abstraction, from which he would suddenly break out with a violence and vigour which amused those who were accustomed to him, and filled with indescribable astonishment those who were not.
Melbourne Pprs. p. vi; Greville Mems. vi. 129-30.
Lamb had a low estimate of mankind and, though he was one of the best-read and most thoughtful men ever to cut a figure in political life, with a well-stocked mind and formidable memory, he held no strong convictions on politics and religion.
It is a distinct declaration on the part of those who profess themselves moderate reformers, that they will be satisfied with nothing cautious and gradual, but that they are determined if they can to adopt at once a large and extensive change ... It has always been my opinion that no circumstances should ever induce an opposition to support measures which they are not convinced they should be able and willing to adopt in administration, and I cannot but think that reasonable men, if they give the matter a fair consideration, must feel themselves inclined at least to pause, before they pledge themselves to so sweeping an alteration of the constitution on the one hand, or expose themselves to the disagreeable alternative of receding from their words and abandoning their own votes, and thus subjecting themselves to all the imputations which are naturally cast upon such conduct.
Wentworth Woodhouse mun. F49/76.
Lamb, whose wife, after an interlude of something close to rationality, made an exhibition of herself in the county that month, came forward again at the general election, claiming to have pursued such a course as would ‘secure the public tranquillity’ and at the same time ‘preserve the rights of the people from infringement or diminution’. There was no opposition to his return for what he described to his diplomat brother Frederick as ‘a very pleasant and independent’ seat; but he acknowledged the ever-present threat of ‘an expensive contest’, a particularly forbidding prospect in view of the age and infirmity of his father, an alcoholic wreck. Immediately after his own election he did what he could, which included asking Arbuthnot, the patronage secretary, and the duke of Wellington for ministerial intervention, to assist his brother George, a thoroughgoing Whig, in his unsuccessful bid to retain the Westminster seat which he had won against the radicals at the by-election of 1819.
Lamb sensed a ‘spirit of violence’ in the new Parliament, as in the country at large, where economic distress had helped to create ‘discontent’. He divided with opposition on the civil list, 3 May, but ‘a bad cold’ kept him away from the division on the same subject, 5 May 1820, when he anticipated nothing more significant than ‘much talk’.
Lamb was further aggravated in the autumn of 1820 by Lady Caroline’s flaunting of her latest conquest, the young Scottish doctor hired to treat their only child Augustus, who was mentally retarded beyond redemption. He was also afflicted by a succession of minor ailments as the year drew to a close.
the interest respecting the queen seems to be subsiding quietly, as after all everything which is so very foolish must in time. The Whigs blundered the business in my opinion in this. Whilst the trial was going on, there was undoubtedly a strong, real, vivid public feeling; but after the bill was given up, the feeling that was manufactured was for the most part fictitious, belonging to party and excited by the Whigs themselves. If they had remained quiet and adopted the tone of wishing to tranquillize the country out of doors, I think they would have had a better chance of attacking the ministry within. As it was they did what they always will do when they make a manifest reach at power. They called forth a very strong expression on the part of the House of Commons that however much they might disapprove of the ministers, they dreaded the opposition still more.
Lamb’s attitude did him no good with the king, ordinarily his admirer, though his snubbing of the couple at a Devonshire House rout in the summer was probably inspired principally by tales of Lady Caroline’s ostentatious espousal of the queen’s cause.
On 24 Jan. 1821 Lamb urged ministers to undertake ‘wise and timely interference’ to preserve the integrity of the liberal government in Naples. He was still ‘frightened out of my wits at anything like movement or disturbance’ there in late February, though he did not vote for Mackintosh’s motion on the subject on the 21st.
He says that he is quite miserable, and does not know what to do about her, that he never has a day’s peace, and that her violence increases so much that he is always afraid of her doing some serious mischief to some of her servants ... He says she is the greatest bore in the world, and that there never was such a temper ... He is a great ass, for having borne her as he has done, but one cannot help feeling for him, just particularly when it appears that he is not blinded about her, and that he really sees her as she is.
Yet a month later Emily told Frederick, whom she had encouraged to stiffen William’s resolve, that she had ‘little or no hope of him’, for he had fallen silent on the matter: ‘I suppose he feels that he has not courage to take any decisive step and is reduced to do what Cobbett advises the farmers to do - grin and bear’.
There was speculation after Lord Londonderry’s* suicide in August 1822 that a place might be found in government for Lamb, especially if Canning came in. The duke of Buckingham thought he would be ‘a great accession’; but John Croker* was less sure, as he told Peel, the home secretary:
He is a very respectable man and a good grave speaker for once or twice in a session, but non tali auxilio just now; besides his father cannot live many years, perhaps not many months [and] it would therefore be extremely imprudent to embarrass the cabinet with another peer, of which you have already one or two too many. If he would take a privy councillor’s office during his father’s life, I should like ... to see him by your side.
Bucks. RO, Fremantle mss, Buckingham to Fremantle, 19 Sept. 1822; NLW, Coedymaen mss 647; Add. 40319, f. 57.
This ended in smoke, but Lamb, who had initially thought that the anti-Catholics in government would succeed in keeping Canning out, strongly advised his friend John William Ward* to accept Canning’s offer of an under-secretaryship at the foreign office.
I was acquainted with Canning, liked him, admired him, agreed with him upon some great questions, in his opposition to parliamentary reform and in his support of the Roman Catholic claims, but never acted with him, nor was in his confidence, nor had any political connection with him until I accepted office in 1827.
Indeed, in the latter year, four months after Canning’s death, Lamb snobbishly told his brother that he had ‘never got rid of’ the ‘tone’ of ‘a clerk’ and that as ‘a schemer’ he ‘had none of the straightforward simplicity which belongs to a great man, although he could at times assume the appearance of it’. Lamb was, however, increasingly intimate with Canning’s close associate William Huskisson*, to whom he was related by marriage, and whom he came to admire as ‘the greatest practical statesman he had known’. His sister’s adulterous relationship with Lord Palmerston* (whose wife she eventually became) may also have had an influence on Lamb’s accelerated gravitation towards the liberal wing of the Liverpool ministry after Canning’s return to the cabinet.
Lamb attended the county meeting called to petition for reform, 8 Feb. 1823, and was barracked when he declared that he was ‘not prepared to vote for any sudden and extensive changes’, including Russell’s ‘plan of divesting certain boroughs of their franchises, and scattering them over the face of the country’.
Before any attempt was made to stir up ill feeling, and excite insurrection, those who wished to make such an attempt ought to consider, whether they would do more for those persons on whose passions they intended to work, than to give them a dinner, a few toasts, a certain portion of violent speeches, some five or six thousand pounds, and an inefficient vote in that House.
Asserting that in all matters of foreign policy it was necessary to give ‘extended powers’ to the government of the day, he ended by praising Canning, who subsequently confirmed to his wife that ‘Lamb is professedly with me’. It was at about this time, according to Canning, that the king told him that he wished Lamb to be offered a place at the treasury : ‘I stared. William Lamb! Sir, it would surely affront to him to offer it - a lordship of the treasury for a person of his standing and pretensions!’ It turned out that the king really wanted the place for his mistress’s son Lord Francis Conyngham*; but it seems that cautious overtures may have been made to Lamb by Lord Liverpool.
On the address, 3 Feb. 1825, Lamb, provoked by a personal reference to him by Brougham, warned against taking too sanguine a view of the country’s economic prospects and indicated that he would support the bill to suppress the Catholic Association, observing that the cause of emancipation, which he still warmly espoused, was being endangered by ‘the imprudence, if not the violence, of some of its advocates’. He duly welcomed the unlawful societies bill, in what Sir John Nicholl* thought ‘a good speech’, 15 Feb., when Brougham attacked him for ‘extreme inconsistency and want of argument’.
Lamb was indeed largely preoccupied in the spring and summer of 1825 with the problem of effecting a formal separation from his wife, whose behaviour, more outrageous than ever since the death of Byron, her former lover, the previous year, had finally driven him, at the behest of his siblings, to cut the cord.
Lamb, aware that his political conduct had cost him the support of most Hertfordshire Whigs, had decided by May 1825 that in view of his father’s state of health he was not prepared to risk the expense of a contest in order to retain his seat, and contemplated buying one for a close borough. Although he thought that the rejection of the Catholic relief bill by the Lords and the strong current of anti-Catholic feeling in the country made it unlikely that there would be a dissolution that year, he informed the Tory marquess of Salisbury, who helped to prop him up in the county, that he did ‘not feel it to be worth my while to maintain my seat at the expense which will be required’, the more so as the terms of his matrimonial separation had imposed a further financial burden on him.
Lamb approved the government’s emergency measures to deal with the financial crash of 1825-6, which he attributed largely to rash speculation in ‘convertible paper’ currency, but wondered whether it was possible to go on for much longer without ‘depreciation in some mode or other’.
All the Whigs are furious with him for his speech ... and I think it is a pity that he should always somehow manage to say the strangest things against the people he has left. However, as far as the speaking went all accounts say it was very good, but Canning said I could not say anything after William Lamb, for I could not have gone so far, and it is a pity that he should always take the unpopular side.
Buckingham, ii. 300; Lady Airlie, i. 126.
By now Lamb had, as he told Frederick, ‘made up my mind to have nothing to do with the next Parliament’, and he contemplated leaving England after the elections to ‘travel leisurely and in my manner through France’ in order to spend six weeks with his brother in Spain, returning home by the beginning of September. Emily reported to Frederick in June 1826 that he ‘seems well satisfied to be out of Parliament and looks very cheerful and gay’; but soon afterwards he abandoned the Spanish plan, fearing ‘the heat of travelling at this time’, and talked of making a tour of the Rhine. His sister suspected that his real reason for prevaricating was his reluctance to go abroad while Lady Caroline, unknown to Lord Melbourne, remained in stubborn occupation of Brocket, where Lamb had been ‘monstrous foolish’ enough to let her take root. He appears to have remained in England, and in February 1827, when Lady Caroline had removed to Hastings, he was ‘as amiable as ever and the best company possible’ for Emily at Cowper’s Hertfordshire residence at Panshanger.
In the early stages of the negotiations of April 1827 which led to the formation of Canning’s ministry, Lamb was widely seen as a potential recruit. To his sister’s irritation, he was not only ‘terribly supine about putting himself forward’, but even went off to Derbyshire at a critical juncture: ‘I think there is nothing so stupid as not to be on the spot. Seeing you puts people in mind of you.’ The negotiations faltered when the moderate Whig Lord Lansdowne, whom Canning wished to be home secretary, insisted that the lord lieutenant of Ireland and his chief secretary should be Catholic. This Canning could not concede, being bound by the king’s scruples on the Catholic question. After several false starts, the king agreed to the appointment of Lamb as Irish secretary until a suitable Protestant could be found or he was removed to the Lords by his father’s death; and Lansdowne acquiesced in the arrangement as an earnest of good faith. There was a possibility at one point that if Lansdowne declined to come in, Lamb would have the home seals; but Lansdowne, who entered the cabinet without portfolio, agreed to take them at a future date, when the anticipated embarrassment of appointing a Protestant viceroy had been got over. Lamb’s return on the Holmes interest for Newport, on ‘very reasonable terms’, had already been arranged, and within a few days of it he was obliged by his acceptance of office to vacate the seat in order to seek re-election. It was initially hoped that the Holmes trustees would have ‘no objection’ to facilitating this, but difficulties evidently arose, and he was brought in instead for Bletchingley, whose owner and Member William Russell had made the seat available to Canning before going abroad, on condition that he could reclaim it if desired on his return home.
His sister reported that Lamb, who ‘looks more happy and comfortable than I have ever seen him’, was
pleased with his appointment and feels I think comfortable to be fixed in his politics after having been so long no how ... Canning speaks most highly of him [and] told Madame Lieven that he looked upon him not as one, but as the cleverest person going. I am afraid he will find Ireland a hornet’s nest, but he seems very stout-hearted and well satisfied.
Canning’s Ministry, 283, 396; Lady Palmerston Letters, 169.
Lamb, who lost no time in making obsequious contact with Lord Wellesley, the lord lieutenant, initially found the pressure of office business and ‘constant attendance in the House’, which ‘loses him his dinner almost every day’, a little overwhelming, but he soon warmed to his task and began to thrive on it.
No man was more impressed than himself with the necessity of preserving a strict, but at the same time a prudent economy in the public service. He was anxious to make every reduction in these grants that was consistent with humanity and the responsibility which government had in preserving the health of the people.
He did, however, warn Wellesley that the attitude of these Members laid ‘the ground of future difficulty, unless something effectual can be done’, and he recommended a curb on additional expenditure by the institutions which had come in for criticism. He conceded a select committee on Irish grand jury presentments, 6 June, but the following day dismissed Moore’s proposal for the establishment of a small loans fund to assist needy labourers as a ‘dangerous’ precedent and departure from the safer practice of relying on private charity.
On the eve of his departure for Dublin in early July he told Frederick that ‘I have a difficult mission, but somehow or other I feel it in me, as if I shall manage it. I may and probably do deceive myself’. He took Augustus with him, which Emily considered to be ‘madness’; and a month after his arrival he informed his brother:
I find myself well enough here and shall bide it for a short time. The business is not much in itself, but it is enough for me, who have been so long used to do nothing, particularly when added to the necessary dining out, which goes on without intermission. There is a good deal of annoyance with impudent applications, and more to do with gaols, police, hospitals, penitentiaries than suits me, being subjects which I have little or no time for.
Lady Palmerston Letters, 169; Add. 45548, f. 165; 45551, ff. 99, 101, 103.
Before leaving for Dublin Lamb had sent a message to the Catholic leader Daniel O’Connell* to the effect that ‘I must for a time be worse than Peel but when we can we will do all the good we can. Beg of him to have confidence, though we cannot do much, or worse men will come’. O’Connell was unimpressed, and although he later conceded that Lamb was ‘perfectly free from guile’ and ‘honourable’, he always felt that he had ‘done nothing’, even though he had it in his power, to break the Orange supremacy.
As to the Roman Catholics, it is of course better that they should be tranquil and prudent than the contrary, but it is of importance that they should not think that they confer a great obligation upon the government by their tranquillity and forbearance.
He initiated a correspondence with Brougham on the possibility of introducing a general system of education to Ireland, but was discouraged by the ‘very great difficulties’ which emerged as he studied the subject.
On 18 Nov. 1827 Lamb wrote to Frederick of the general political scene:
There are competent men enough, but the difficulty in governments is putting men together and making them co-operate. I do not see how this is to be done. They have all got into false positions, the duke of Wellington falsest of all. He made a wrong move [in refusing to serve with Canning], and the consequence is that he never can make a right one after. I have no doubt he had every provocation; but a politician should be, as the thirty nine articles define the deity, sine passionibus.
Panshanger mss F78.
The following month he was informed that William Russell now wanted to resume his seat, but an opening for him presented itself in county Durham and Lamb was allowed to remain undisturbed at Bletchingley.
more than probable that the arrangement will be such as will make my present situation untenable. In politics tone and impression are everything, and whatever may be the real feelings and merits of the duke of Wellington, Peel, Goulburn, etc., they have got such a damned character for intolerance ... in this country, that their accession to the office would encourage the violent Protestants and depress the Roman Catholics to such a degree, as would make it impossible for me to pursue my course in this country or to continue here with credit and the appearance of consistency.
In reply to Wellington’s letter, Lamb asked for time to consult Huskisson and the other Canningites in London. He arrived there on 19 Jan. 1828, after a dreadful sea passage to Holyhead, as he told his mistress, Lady Branden, the estranged wife of the 4th Lord Branden, a worthless clergyman, with whom he had formed an indiscreet, warm and volatile relationship soon after going to Dublin:
When I got down to the water and saw how it blew, I should have liked to return without going on board, but was ashamed. What would Dublin have said of a secretary who was turned back from the edge of the sea by a gale of wind? I had a melancholy journey, believe me. Behind me deep grief, before me death.
Geo. IV Letters, iii. 1461; Wellington mss WP1/913/21; 918/20; Panshanger mss F78, W. to F. Lamb, 11, 12 Jan.; F40, same to Lady Branden, 18, 21 Jan. 1828.
After consultations with Huskisson, Palmerston, Anglesey and others, and interviews with Wellington and Peel, Lamb, whose continuance in Ireland was seen, with Anglesey’s appointment, as a guarantee of ministerial neutrality on the Catholic question, had little hesitation in accepting the offer. He told Frederick:
With respect to the past I could not make out much from any of them. With respect to the future nothing could be more satisfactory or in fact more agreeable to my own opinions than the language and views of Peel and the duke; and under the circumstances in which I stood there was nothing to preclude me from giving them every assistance I could, and if they thought I could serve them best by remaining in my present situation, I was ready to do so, in fact liking it better than any other, except the real efficient places, such as the treasury and the secretaryships of state.
Add. 38754, ff. 162, 182, 200, 219; 40395, f. 86; Huskisson Pprs. 285; Bulwer, Palmerston, i. 215-18; Fitzwilliam mss, Scarlett to Milton [c. 27 Jan.]; Panshanger mss F78, W. to F. Lamb, 28 Jan. 1828.
Lady Caroline died on 26 Jan. 1828. Lamb attended her death bed, and was not quite as unmoved as it appeared to his sister, who reported that he was ‘hurt at the time and rather low next day, but he is now just as usual, and his mind filled with politics’. ‘Nothing but tears and misery here below’, he told Lady Branden, to whom he wrote almost every day, and whom he assured that ‘the six months we have just passed seem to me as if they were the last sunshine which would gleam upon my life’. He was ‘very low and melancholy’ before the funeral, but felt ‘relieved by it’, as ‘it seems as if everything had been done that could be and every duty paid’. Yet two weeks later he told her:
I have had a great blow and have not recovered my spirits. I felt upon that occasion [the funeral] a sort of impossibility of believing that I should never see her countenance or hear her voice again, a sort of sense of desolation, solitude and carelessness about everything, when I forced myself to remember that she was really gone, such as I never experienced before, nor anything like it.
This said, Lamb, who had essentially had a millstone removed from his neck, did not grieve for long; and, politics aside, he had enough to distract him in the importunities of Lady Branden, to whom he wrote, 21 Feb. 1828:
I have received your letter of the 17th. There is no ground whatever for any suspicion, and my feelings are just the same, as when I left Dublin. Is this distinct enough? Is this satisfactory? Will this do? I am still very low. What I have seen haunts me and returns to my recollection upon every occasion.
Howard Sisters, 107; Lady Airlie, i. 129; Melbourne Pprs. 80-81; Panshanger mss F40, Lamb to Lady Branden, 27-29 Jan., 4, 18, 21 Feb. 1828.
In answer to Spring Rice’s question in the House, 15 Feb. 1828, as to whether the government intended to renew the Act to curb the activities of the Catholic Association, Lamb, having consulted Wellington, said that nothing had yet been decided. When, in late March, Anglesey strongly recommended allowing the Act to lapse at the end of the session and relying on the ordinary law and the constabulary to maintain order, Lamb was in complete agreement with him; but on discussing the matter with Wellington, he was
sorry to find ... that his mind was a good deal impressed with the idea of its being necessary to renew the bill ... I stated to him strongly my opinion that the bill could have no other effect than to produce useless and unnecessary exasperation ... He looked staggered and with that air, which he always has, of a man very little accustomed to be differed from or contradicted, and changed the subject.
Lamb forcefully argued the ‘conclusive’ case against renewal to Peel and Huskisson and eventually carried the point.
When ... a country is distressed, if we wish to alleviate that distress, the only way is to introduce a system of patient perseverance, of rigid economy, of increasing industry. This may be a hard lesson to learn.
He would not commit himself to abolishing the jurisdiction of the Irish ecclesiastical courts, 25 Apr., but thought the subject worthy of ‘a full and solemn inquiry’. His speech of 9 May 1828 in favour of Catholic relief, which, though it would not ‘heal all the wounds or remedy all the evils of Ireland’, would ‘give rise to a general feeling that justice has been done ... [and provide] a ray of light which will illumine the darkest cabin of this country’, was applauded by Croker as ‘a short and fine burst for conciliation and harmony’.
When the government seemed to be on the verge of breaking up in late March 1828 over Charles Grant’s* disagreement with the rest of the cabinet on the revised corn bill, Lamb, though he thought Huskisson was wrong to offer his resignation in sympathy, did not see how he could remain in office if they and Palmerston and Lord Dudley went out.
Having remained in office in January last with Huskisson, being connected with him by the ties of relationship and feeling that though he erred in the first instance, yet that the duke took too hasty an advantage of that error, and acted towards him both harshly and sharply, I felt myself ... bound to resign with him. At the same time I did not take this course with perfect satisfaction to myself. I feel that the ground of difference is too insignificant and even ridiculous, and that I am depriving myself of the power of doing some good and running the risk of doing some evil by producing an unfavourable impression upon the public mind in Ireland for no sufficient reason. On the other hand, if we had acquiesced in the duke’s conduct without notice or remonstrance and let Huskisson go, how would he hereafter have treated those who remained, if upon any occasion they had differed from or resisted him?
He elaborated the point a few days later:
The real cause of my resignation is that under the circumstances I felt that I could not abandon Huskisson. It has always been a maxim with me, that it is more necessary to stand by one’s friends when they are in the wrong, than when they are in the right; and though I do not say that he is quite in the former predicament, yet to have let him go out, with circumstances by no means clear in his favour and with the additional blow of being deserted by all his personal and political friends, would have been a course to which I could not have reconciled my feelings. At the same time I must say that I never took a step with deeper regret and less satisfaction, but I think I should have felt even more dissatisfied and uneasy, if I had adopted a contrary line of conduct.
Yet Anglesey told Holland that Lamb was ‘probably in some measure influenced [in] his decision’ by the ‘scrape’ which he had got into with Lady Branden. When Wellington made overtures to Lamb two years later, he suggested to him that the sole reason for his resignation had been that entanglement, ‘which made it unpleasant to him to return to Dublin’; but Lamb emphatically and quite justifiably rejected this interpretation of his motives. He was prepared to place ‘the most perfect reliance upon the sincerity’ of Peel and Wellington in their public professions that they had ‘no intention to change the principles upon which the government had been conducted during the last five years and upon which the administration had been formed in January’, though he was worried about ‘the high opinions and strong prejudices of the duke, fostered, as they are said to be, by those who are about him and have his ear, and not opposed by persons of weight and authority, as they have been’; all the more reason, he thought, for Anglesey to stay in office.
In May 1828 Lamb, who had developed a taste for flagellation in his sexual relationships, had an action for crim. con. brought against him by Lord Branden. When it came to court the following year, it was thrown out; but it is clear that Lamb had bought Branden off. In 1836, as prime minister, he successfully defended another action brought against him by the hitherto complaisant husband of his current mistress, Mrs. Caroline Norton.
surprised all those about him by a sudden display of activity and vigour, rapid and diligent transaction of business, for which nobody was prepared, and which will prove a great mortification to Peel and his friends, who were in hopes he would do nothing and let the country be burnt and plundered without interruption.
Greville Mems. ii. 75.
Ever the pragmatist, he swallowed the reform bills when he saw that there was no alternative. The story went that when the king sent for him to ask him to form a government on Grey’s resignation in July 1834, he said to his secretary Tom Young that
‘he thought it a damned bore, and he was in many minds what he should do - be minister or no’. Young said, ‘Why, damn it, such a position was never occupied by any Greek or Roman, and, if it lasts two months, it is well worth while to have been prime minister of England’. ‘By God that’s true’, said Melbourne; ‘I’ll go’.
Ibid. iii. 76.
As the head of two troubled and divided administrations, with the thrust of which he was increasingly out of sympathy, he applied all his arts of cynical passivity to the task of keeping them in power. His greatest achievement perhaps lay in his political education of the young Queen Victoria, who was devoted to him.
Lamb’s health began to fail from 1842 and, while at times he came close to recovering his old exuberance, he tended frequently to lapse into ‘gloomy silence and reverie’, as Lady Holland put it. After his death, following a series of strokes, at Melbourne Hall in November 1848, Hobhouse commented that ‘his existence had become painful to himself and others, and the continuance of it was not to be desired’.
One of Lamb’s obituarists, in a sour piece, wrote disparagingly that his life and career had been shaped by ‘the negative enjoyment, which he vastly prized, of avoiding trouble’, though he conceded that he had ‘many estimable qualities’.
of all the public men I have ever known, Lord Melbourne was approached with the greatest pleasure and satisfaction ... He seemed to have no reserves, and to make everyone his confidant. Yet without any duplicity or deceit he was exceedingly prudent, and to those only whom he knew he could perfectly trust did he say anything that he wished not to be repeated. Then he had singular rectitude of judgement and much vigour in cases of emergency, his courage always rising with the danger ... His great defect was that he had no fixed system of policy. In his heart he was inclined to Conservatism ... He was contented with indolence and luxury, and cared little about the active exercise of power.
Lady Holland to Son, 158; Life of Campbell, ii. 204-5.
Henry Lytton Bulwer portrayed him in what was perhaps a rather flattering light:
His habits were in appearance those of indolence ... and consequently he was called idle, and for many years of his life decried as idle, by a vast variety of persons who were far less usefully employed than himself. During this time he read more, and thought more, than perhaps any person of his own station and standing ... As a minister ... he had ... many qualities of a first-rate kind ... a temperament cool and courageous; a mind dispassionate and unprejudiced; a manner remarkably good humoured and conciliating; an intellect of a high order, and which had been improved by incessant, though not forced cultivation ... The extent of Lord Melbourne’s acquirements, and the comprehensiveness of his understanding, stood in one sense in his way. They made him so well acquainted with all that could be said on one side or the other of every argument ... that the tendency of his judgement was to underrate distinctions; and to deem differences between opinions less wide and less important than they really were ... This habit of mind, while it gave moderation to his judgement, did not infuse irresolution into his conduct ... He never, after having once adopted a policy, faltered in the execution of it.
Bulwer, Priv. Mem. of Melbourne (1848), 2, 28-29.
In a thoughtful and objective assessment of Lamb, Greville, who knew him well, but not intimately, wrote:
He was certainly a very singular man ... good-natured, eccentric, and not nice ... He never was really fitted for political life, for he had a great deal too much candour, and was too fastidious to be a good party man ... And still less was he fit to be the leader of a party and the head of a government, for he had neither the strong convictions, nor the eager ambition, nor the firmness and resolution which such a post requires. No position could be more false than the position in which Melbourne was often placed, and no man ever was more perplexed and tormented than he was by it, for he was remarkably sensitive; and most of the latter years of his administration were passed in a state of dissatisfaction with himself and all about him ... He held office with a profound sense of its responsibilities; there never was a minister more conscientious in the distribution of patronage ... He was perfectly disinterested, without nepotism, and without vanity ... His distinctive qualities were strong sound sense, and an innate taste for what was great and good, either in action or sentiment ... But while he pursued truth, as a philosopher, his love of paradox made him often appear a strange mass of contradictions and inconsistency. A sensualist and a sybarite, without much refinement or delicacy, a keen observer of the follies and vices of mankind, taking the world as he found it, and content to extract as much pleasure and diversion as he could from it, he at one time would edify and astonish his hearers with the most exalted sentiments, and at another would terrify and shock them by indications of the lowest morality and worldly feelings, and by thoughts and opinions fraught with the most cold-hearted mockery and sarcasm. His mind seems all his life long, and on almost every subject, to have been vigorous and stirring, but unsettled and unsatisfied ... During his administration his great object seemed to be to keep a rickety concern together, less from political ambition than from his personal feelings for the queen. He abhorred disputes and quarrels of every description, and he was constantly temporising and patching them up ... by all sorts of expedients ... Such weak and unworthy misrule brought his cabinet, his party, and himself into contempt, and it was unquestionably in great measure owing to his want of judgement and firmness that they became so unpopular, and at last fell with so little credit and dignity ... Taking him altogether, he was a very remarkable man in his abilities and his acquirements, in his character and his career, with virtues and vices, faults and merits, curiously intermingled, and producing as eccentric results as society has beheld.
Greville Mems. vi. 129-36.
Lamb once observed that ‘neither man nor woman can be worth anything until they have discovered that they are fools’;