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I believe, my lords, that conduct like this is sufficient to induce you to say that the noble lords opposite do not deserve your confidence. August 24, 1841. Lord Melbourne's services to the Queen. I am willing to admit that the noble viscount has rendered the greatest possible service to her majesty.
Then Lord Melbourne's motion for Portuguese papers. He did not speak well but very bitterly. Goderich spoke pathetically against the Terceira affair Lord Wharncliffe well with us Lansdowne wide and loose the Duke very excellent Aberdeen worse than usual, and very imprudent, abusing Miguel and making awkward admissions.
Let us never lose sight of Lord Melbourne's memorable words: "Whether the object be to have a fixed duty, or an alteration as to the ascending and descending scale, I see clearly and distinctly, that the object will not be carried without a most violent struggle without causing much ill-blood, and a deep sense of grievance without stirring society to its foundation, and leaving every sort of bitterness and animosity.
The question was a complicated and subtle one, and it had never arisen before; but subsequent constitutional practice has determined that a Queen Regnant must accede to the wishes of her Prime Minister as to the personnel of the female part of her Household. Lord Melbourne's wisdom, however, was wasted. The Queen would not be soothed, and still less would she take advice.
But the royal responsibility was, according to the doctrine of our Constitution, completely taken over, ex post facto, by Sir Robert Peel, as the person who consented, on the call of the King, to take Lord Melbourne's office. Thus, though the act was rash, and hard to justify, the doctrine of personal immunity was in no way endangered.
"There is Lord Arthur Sibthorpe," said she softly. Lord Charles bounded in his chair, and muttered a word or two such as were more frequently heard from Cabinet Ministers in Lord Melbourne's time than now. "Are you mad, Clara!" he cried. "What can have put such a thought into your head?" "The Prime Minister." "Who? The Prime Minister?" "Yes, dear. Now do, do be good!
The only person who took the trouble to put down Melbourne's sayings, just as they came out, was Queen Victoria but then she was in love with him without knowing it: and in the end he got stuck into the heaviest and most ponderous of biographies, and is lost to the world. Stale politics there's nothing to beat them for dulness unutterable!"
The ironic mood which was tolerably constant in him did not in the least interfere with his normal enjoyment of normal goods. He saw himself often as a shade among shadows, as an actor among actors; but the play was good all the same. That a man should know himself to be a fool was in his eyes, as it was in Lord Melbourne's, the first of necessities.
The time has come when it is fully recognised that whatever might have been Lord Melbourne's defects, he never brought them into his relations with the Queen. To her he was the frank, sincere, devoted adviser of all that it was wisest and best for her to do. "He does not appear to have been greedy of power, or to have used any unfair means of getting or keeping it.
We hear of Lord Palmerston's good-humoured elegance, Lord Lansdowne's amiability, Lord Jeffrey's brilliant conversation, and, most delightful of all, Lord Melbourne's frank, unaffected cordiality. Melbourne, it appears, enjoyed his sittings, for he asked many questions about Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Keats, and Shelley, and highly appreciated Haydon's anecdotes.
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