Sons, Servants and Statesmen (9 page)

During the same year, 1839, the influence of Melbourne on Queen Victoria was beginning to fade. This was partly due to her growing maturity and her need for different counsel as well as company, but several events helped to weaken his authority.

The first was the ‘bedchamber crisis’. Melbourne had repeatedly urged Victoria that if he should be defeated in parliament he would have to resign, and in that case, as it was her duty to work with all parties, she would have to accept that it might be necessary to ask one of the opposition leaders to lead the government. On 6 May the government’s majority on a Bill to suspend the Jamaican Assembly was defeated by five votes. Next day he informed her that he would probably have to resign his position, and she should ask Peel or Wellington to form the next administration. She summoned the latter, who begged to be excused from forming an administration as he felt that, at seventy, he was too old. He recommended that she should send for Peel, who could be sure of securing support in the House.

With some reluctance she did so. On Peel’s audience at the Palace with her, she told him that she would not agree to a dissolution of parliament; that she wanted the Duke of Wellington to be a member of the new government; and that whatever happened she intended to continue her friendship with her outgoing Prime Minister. Peel agreed to all this but told her respectfully of the difficulties of his parliamentary position. He asked her if she would be prepared to show confidence in her new ministers by changing he composition of her ladies of the bedchamber. As a result of Melbourne’s partisanship, many female members of her household were wives or close relations of the Whig ministers, and he trusted that some of them would be replaced. As an incoming prime minister he had every right to do so, for the new government could hardly be expected to function properly if the monarch was still surrounded by his political opponents. Victoria refused to permit any changes at all, and when he told her regretfully that he could not, therefore, assume office, she triumphantly recalled Melbourne.

It was a short-term but hollow victory for the Queen, who was too inexperienced to realise that she had brought the Crown into disrepute by openly identifying it with one political party, and thus inadvertently brought into question her ability to perform a correct constitutional role of remaining above party. The Tories could argue with some justification that she was not their Queen, as the kingdom was still governed by a ministry which, as the Leader in the House of Lords emphasised, did not possess the confidence of the country. The prerogative powers of a monarch so closely identified with one party at the expense of another would surely be called into question.

One disgruntled newly elected Tory member of parliament, signing himself ‘Laelius’, wrote a letter to the Queen, to be published in
The Times
. ‘You are a queen, but you are a human being and a woman,’ he said. He warned her that she would find herself ‘with the rapidity of enchantment the centre and puppet of a Camarilla, and Victoria, in the eyes of those Englishmen who once yielded to her in their devotion, will be reduced to the level of Madrid and Lisbon.’ The consequences of her ill-thought reaction to the problem could be disastrous. ‘Let not this crisis of your reign be recorded by the historian with a tear or a blush. The system which you are advised to establish is one degrading to the Minister, one which must be painful to the Monarch, one which may prove fatal to the monarchy.’
¹⁶
Ironically, ‘Laelius’ concealed the identity of the man who was to become her favourite Prime Minister and eternally devoted admirer, Benjamin Disraeli. For a while, the Tories would find it hard to forgive and forget their sovereign’s behaviour.

Melbourne had clung to office, but he was embarrassed by the circumstances which had enabled him to do so, and out of loyalty he found himself somewhat reluctantly obliged to defend the Queen’s conduct. ‘I now frankly declare,’ he said in a speech to the House of Lords, ‘that I resume office because I will not abandon my Sovereign in a situation of difficulty and distress, when demands are made on her with which she ought not to comply.’
¹⁷

One of Peel’s earliest biographers, writing well within the Queen’s lifetime, explained the crisis with admirable even-handedness. The Tory leader, he said, was ‘little schooled in the ways of courts, and not particularly adroit in accommodating what he regarded as principle to their exigencies’, while the Queen was inexperienced, too ‘personally attached to the ministers who had surrounded her youthful throne’, as well as mortified by any proposal to dismiss her ladies. Melbourne’s judgement, he considered, was probably warped by his paternal regard for the sovereign over whose political education he had presided with rare devotion and discretion, and ‘some of his colleagues might not be proof against the temptation of giving such advice to the Crown as would enable them to pose before the country as defending a royal lady against an insult alike unmanly and unconstitutional’.
¹⁸
It was an unusual situation in which everyone inadvertently was at fault, but a mistake which fortunately for all would not be repeated.

The damage done would have been limited had it not been for the tragic saga of Lady Flora Hastings, which was unfolding at the same time. Lady Flora was one of the Duchess of Kent’s ladies, and a close friend of the detested Sir John Conroy. Early that year, she had returned to London from Scotland in a railway carriage with Conroy, and soon afterwards she complained of feeling unwell. Rumours began to circulate that she was pregnant, and worse still, with Conroy’s child. The Queen and her old governess, Baroness Lehzen, were ready to believe the worst, and Melbourne foolishly did nothing to discourage them. In a desperate attempt to vindicate herself, Lady Flora underwent a medical examination which proved that, not only was she still a virgin, but also that the enlargement of her stomach was due to a cancerous tumour. Now painfully aware of the dreadful mistake she had made, the Queen did her best to make amends, but Lady Flora rapidly worsened and died in July. When the conscience-stricken sovereign sent a carriage to represent her at the funeral, it was stoned by angry crowds.

It was time for a new start for the Queen. Both her predecessors on the throne had experienced periods of intense unpopularity, and it would not do for her to forfeit any more the considerable fund of public goodwill which had greeted her on her accession. Her phase of hero-worshipping ‘Lord M’ was running its course.

Queen Victoria, it is said, was a man’s woman, and ‘the men whom she liked best were strong and imperturbable men who made her laugh, maybe with a touch of the rascal about them’.
¹⁹
The Hanoverian in her relished life and laughter, and without it she had a tendency to become morbid and introspective. Some of the men whose lives were to be bound up closely with hers recognised this. Melbourne had been quick to see it in her early days on the throne, while in later life the Ponsonby family and her youngest son-in-law, Prince Henry of Battenberg, would notice it equally.

Lord Melbourne remained in office for two more years. Not the least of his services to the Queen was his ready, if reluctant, acceptance of the inevitable. His period of influence on her and his days of power as head of government were coming to an end. Nevertheless, she was very touched when he took communion with her on Christmas Day 1839. ‘It was a fine and solemn scene,’ she wrote afterwards. ‘I felt for one, my dearest Albert, – and wished he could be by my side, – also dear Lehzen, – but was
very
glad Lord Melbourne was there, the one whom I look up to as a father, and I was glad he took it [communion] with me.’
²⁰

While he was ‘much affected’ at her wedding to Prince Albert in February 1840, Melbourne was not so selfishly devoted to her as not to care deeply about her future happiness. Whatever initial reservations he may have had about the young man as his adored sovereign’s husband and advisor were quickly dispelled, for he soon learnt to appreciate and respect Albert’s conscientious approach and intelligence. The Prince, he foresaw, would soon acquire ‘boundless influence’. He discussed political matters with Albert and urged the initially hesitant Queen to take her husband fully into her confidence. Albert had equal respect for Melbourne, aware that the outwardly imperturbable manner concealed the shrewdest of minds.

In May 1841 Melbourne’s government was defeated by one vote, and parliament was dissolved at the end of June. The Queen was certain that the administration ‘would gain by a dissolution’, but when elections were held the Tories won with a clear majority. George Anson, Prince Albert’s private secretary and treasurer, had dreaded the possibility of another bedchamber crisis, and on 12 June he expressed his fears to Melbourne. The latter was strangely unhelpful, advising him to ‘let it alone until the time for action arrives’. Anson pointed out that the uncertainty kept the Queen’s mind ‘in perpetual agitation, when it ought to be perfectly calm, & that under existing circumstances this excitement might be attended by serious consequences’. The Tories were equally anxious, and Lord Ashley warned Anson that any repetition of the events of 1839 would ‘destroy the position of the Queen, & it would be impossible to foresee the effect of it upon the country’. Peel, he said, had been deeply hurt by her conduct two years earlier and would probably be unable ‘to place entire confidence in the disposition of the Queen before him . . . if it had been proposed to him to take office 6 months after that intrigue he was certain that nothing wd. have induced him.’
²¹

Melbourne left office for what he knew was the last time. His last advice to the Queen was that she should put her trust in her husband. In another memorandum from Anson, the outgoing Prime Minister recommended that his successor, Sir Robert Peel, ‘should write fully to Her Majesty, and
elementarily
, as Her Majesty always liked to have full knowledge upon everything which was going on. He would advise the Queen to be cautious in giving a verbal decision, that she should not allow herself to be
driven into a corner
, and forced to decide where she felt her mind was not made up and required reflection.’
²²

On Melbourne’s departure from office, Victoria was particularly depressed. Throughout her life, at times of severe stress she was prone to ‘sick headaches’, worries about her appearance and supposed failing eyesight. On this occasion, any such symptoms were exacerbated by the fact that she was four months pregnant.

At first Melbourne continued to correspond with the Queen. Though it was a mainly harmless series of exchanges on social and personal matters, the very fact that she should be so closely in touch with her former Prime Minister was enough to provoke alarm. Baron Stockmar, who had been King Leopold’s mentor from early days and also served Victoria and Albert during their formative years with advice, not least with helping on the Conroy problem, took it upon himself to bring this communication to an end. He wrote a lengthy memorandum for Anson to take to Melbourne and read aloud, stressing how unfair it was to Peel. ‘This is a most decided opinion indeed, quite an apple-pie opinion!’
²³
Melbourne retorted. Anson went on to say that Stockmar thought it a great pity, if he meant to continue writing to the Queen, that he should have made a recent speech in the House of Lords that appeared to attack government policy.

At this Melbourne was furious, leaping up from his sofa and pacing wildly up and down the room, exclaiming ‘God eternally damn it! Flesh and blood cannot stand this.’ He could not be expected to give up his position in the country, ‘neither do I think that it is to the Queen’s interest that I should’. When asked to consider the position in which he was placing the ministry, Melbourne thought deeply, muttering that he ‘certainly cannot think it right’.
²⁴

Even so, he and the Queen continued to write to each other. A fortnight later, Stockmar found it necessary to make another personal intervention, and he warned Melbourne that he was encouraging the Queen in a course of action that could possibly get her into serious trouble. He advised that he should wait until after the Queen’s second confinement, expected the following month, and then write and tell her that he thought it best all communications on politics between them should cease. Melbourne wrote to the Queen to say he thought it inadvisable for him to dine again at Buckingham Palace. Soon afterwards, Stockmar learnt that the correspondence had still not ceased, but another anguished letter from him was sufficient. Henceforth Melbourne’s letters, while not coming entirely to an end, became more infrequent. Never again did he attempt to discuss politics with Victoria or even influence her at all. He knew Stockmar was right and was magnanimous enough not to bear him any grudge.