Lord Melbourne
'He treats her with unbounded respect', wrote the diarist Charles Greville, of the behaviour of her first Prime Minister, the Whig Lord Melbourne, towards the 18-year-old Queen Victoria. 'He consults her tastes and wishes and puts her at her ease by his frank and natural manners, while he amuses her by his quaint, queer, epigrammatic turn of mind, and his varied knowledge upon all subjects.'
'...she herself said that she loved him 'like a father'.'
Victoria basked in Melbourne's skilful flattery. Her shyness, he assured her, was not only appealing, it was indicative of a sensitive temperament. Her smallness, of which she was continually conscious, was a positive advantage to a queen; her inexperience was all to the good: she came to her duties fresh and unprejudiced.
Melbourne endeavoured to curb her tendency to intolerance, and to a truthful directness that verged on tactlessness, but the advice was given in such a kind and fatherly way that she never resented it. Nor did she mind when he warned her that, having inherited a tendency to plumpness from her German forebears, she was liable to grow very fat.
While the Queen's feelings for Melbourne, as Greville suggested, may have been sexual, 'though she did not know it', she herself said that she loved him 'like a father'. She forgave him when he began talking to himself and when he fell asleep after dinner, snoring loudly, as he often did in chapel.
She listened to him carefully when he instructed her about the political problems of the day, about the workings of Parliament and the Cabinet, and about the mysteries of the constitution. It cannot, however, be said that Lord Melbourne aroused the conscience of the young, naïve girl whom it was his duty to educate and instruct. Indeed, he assured her, for instance, that attempts by Lord Shaftesbury to improve the conditions of children working in the mines were quite unnecessary.
Nor did he give her sound advice when a court lady-in-waiting, Lady Flora Hastings, dying of cancer of the liver, was falsely accused of becoming pregnant by Victoria's 'bête noir', Sir John Conroy. The young queen was at first inclined to believe the worst of Lady Flora, as she did of Conroy. When the matter became a public scandal, the Queen's early popularity began to fade away. Her carriage was stoned at Lady Flora's funeral, and she was hissed at while she was at the theatre. She was also under attack at Ascot, where two ladies in the crowd shouted 'Mrs Melbourne!' at her.
Published: 2001-01-01
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