Theakston K. After Number 10. Former Prime Ministers in British Politics

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grudgingly that some sort of reform was inevitable. Having to eat his own

words (‘I certainly never will enter the House of Lords from the time that it

[the reform bill] passes’, he had declared in March 1831) was perhaps the

least painful part of the process. In November 1831 he had let the King

know he was ready to ‘assist him’ and serve as prime minister again if he

wanted to escape from his Whig ministers. Six months later in May 1832

the King turned to Wellington when Grey resigned after the monarch had

refused his demand to create more peers to force the reform bill through

the Lords. But the King’s insistence that an extensive measure of reform

should be carried put Wellington in a quandary. The Duke now believed

(after his own experience in ofﬁce) that the prime minister must be in the

Commons (where the Whigs still had a majority) and that Peel was the

man for the job – but he refused the poisoned chalice. Wellington then

spent an embarrassing week discovering that other political heavyweights

would not serve and he could not himself put a government together. The

game was up: the Whigs came back in and Wellington saw that further

opposition to the reform bill had to be dropped, persuading colleagues to

follow him in abstaining or staying away until it became law.

Wellington’s relationship with Peel was a crucial aspect of his post-

premiership. Peel was 20 years younger than the Duke, had been his Home

Secretary and was the leading Conservative in the Commons. In tem-

perament and character they were different but, while each was often crit-

ical of the other’s faults and shortcomings and they did not always ﬁnd

it easy to deal with one another, they recognised they had to work toge-

ther. ‘During this time’, as Douglas Hurd sums it up, ‘they changed places

and the junior man became the senior. Each respected the other, and knew

that the other was an indispensable colleague. The partnership was not

easy; it never broke down, but it often creaked and groaned. The two men

came from different backgrounds, had different friends, and found no par-

ticular pleasure in each other’s company.’ Peel was greatly put out when

Wellington (who had not himself gone to university) was elected in 1834

Chancellor of Oxford University (a post Peel would have liked and ﬁlled

with distinction). When in government they met regularly in Cabinet but

in rocky periods of opposition they sometimes did not see each other for

months at a time and relations could be cool. But they agreed on a cautious

and moderate approach and trusted each other, and Wellington was loyal

and supportive to the man he acknowledged as party leader, prepared to

serve under him in government and to work to swing Conservative peers

behind his policies.

In July 1834, when Grey resigned, Wellington and Peel were agreed in

turning down an approach from Melbourne, made at the King’s behest,

to form a coalition government with the Whigs. But when William IV

dismissed the Whigs, that November, Wellington became – in a unique

episode on the British political stage – an acting or caretaker prime minister

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for three weeks (17 November–9 December 1834). Wellington had recom-

mended to the King that Peel should become prime minister but he was in

Italy and, while a message was being sent to him and he was travelling

back, the Duke took temporary charge of the government and was sworn

in as First Lord of the Treasury and Secretary of State. As Lord Rosebery

later put it, he acted as ‘a warming-pan for Peel’. He busied himself roving

around Whitehall, looking in at the various departments, ensuring things

ticked over. There were plenty of jokes about the Duke’s ‘one-man gov-

ernment’ and ‘dictatorship’, but it was in truth a decisive moment of

self-abnegation. The suggestion of a Peel premiership and of an interim

government under himself came from Wellington, but there were plenty of

people who would have accepted, or even preferred, the Duke as prime

minister again in his own right. He would not hear of it. The most he

would do was to prepare a report for Peel on possible appointments and

candidates for ofﬁce and to start to make preparations for a general elec-

tion. As Gash says, ‘left to himself Peel might have refused a commission

which promised little success’. The Duke at the same time as he deﬁnitively

passed over the Tory leadership presented his successor with a political fait

accompli. But it was a turning point in the remaking of the Tory party.

Wellington had wanted Lord Aberdeen, who had held the post in his

own government in 1828–30, to become Foreign Secretary again but he

demurred. The Duke therefore served as Foreign Secretary in Peel’s ﬁrst

‘Hundred Days’ government (December 1834–April 1835). He was decisive,

brisk, to the point and clear in dealing with his departmental business but

could not make much of an impact on foreign policy. He disapproved of

most of the policies of his predecessor, Palmerston, but the King indicated

he wanted the Tories to follow the same foreign policy course as the Whigs

and little could be done in just four months in ofﬁce.

In opposition from 1835 to 1841 he led the Tories in the Lords and

helped Peel loyally, sometimes against his own convictions, to educate and

unify the party. Wellington had two main aims: ﬁrst, to control and limit

dissent from the more right-wing Tory ‘Ultras’ against Peel’s more liberal-

conservative and moderate-reformist line, and second, to avoid a major

clash between the Commons and the Lords that might provoke moves

for the abolition of the second chamber. This stance often meant helping

to support Melbourne’s government against radicals and extremists on its

own side, and sometimes pulling his punches as when he refused to go for

the jugular when the government was exposed on the Canadian issue in

1838. Wellington had great prestige and exerted a personal dominance, but

the Tory ‘Ultras’, desperate to ﬁght the Whigs tooth and nail, were often

restive and unhappy: ‘Westminster Abbey is yawning for him’, one once

complained. Thus the Duke did not like municipal reform and the creation

of ‘a little Republic in every town’, but made his followers fall into line

behind Peel, who did not want the Whigs’ legislation wrecked. Gash put it

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neatly: ‘in contrast to his military career, Wellington in politics rendered

his best services as a second in command’. In 1839 he again refused the

premiership (citing his age, 70, and health) when Melbourne resigned

and advised Queen Victoria to send for him, recommending she send for

Peel instead and even refusing to promise her he would become Foreign

Secretary again on the grounds that a prime minister must be free to make

his own appointments (although Peel was forced to throw in the cards after

a few days). Wellington supported Peel during this ‘Bedchamber crisis’ but

he was reluctant to see a change of government and new ministers forced

on ‘this poor girl’, as he described the Queen, explaining ‘I have no small

talk and Peel has no manners.’

Wellington’s health took a turn for the worse as he entered his seventies.

His deafness became worse, he frequently fell asleep, arthritis gave him a

trademark stoop, and he became more irritable and forgetful. He suffered

a series of strokes and seizures in 1839, 1840 and 1841. ‘What a stride old

age has made upon him’ commented one observer. He still lived a pretty

Spartan life and pushed himself hard, however, despite grumbling about

‘the saddle upon my back’, often standing up at his desk and working long

hours, dealing with his voluminous correspondence on matters great and

small (adding his own pungent comments to the forms he had had printed

to answer common queries and invitations). Work and activity were the

best tonic and, while now an old man, he sometimes showed surprising

vitality and strength in the last decade of his life.

Away from national politics, Wellington accumulated a number of public

posts, none of which he treated as empty sinecures. He was a reforming

Constable of the Tower of London 1826–52, briskly sorting out problems of

corruption, patronage, military security and public health (he ordered the

moat, which had been used as a sewer and rubbish pit, to be drained and

cleared up). As Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports from 1829 he had wide-

ranging responsibilities over harbour works, life-boats and salvage, channel

pilots, local appointments and magistrates. The prerequisites included an

ofﬁcial residence at Walmer Castle (which became a favourite residence)

and a £3,000 salary, which he refused. As Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire for

32 years he was an active and inﬂuential ﬁgure in the local government of

his home county. Wellington had been voted huge amounts by parliament

as grants, annuities and prize money during the Napoleonic Wars, and

Stratﬁeld Saye, his Hampshire estate, had been purchased for him by the

nation. He was a paternalistic and improving landlord, reinvesting his rents

and looking after his tenants. When his agent boasted of buying a new farm

for him for far less than its real value, the Duke promptly ordered him to pay

the full price. He had estates in Portugal, Spain and Belgium, given to him by

their grateful rulers, though they do not seem to have been well run.

When the Conservatives returned to power in 1841, Wellington told Peel

he was willing to ‘do anything, go anywhere, and hold any ofﬁce, or no

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ofﬁce, as may be thought most desirable’. He was indispensable as the

only person who could control and direct the Conservative peers, getting

them to swallow things they did not like, but he was no longer up to the

demands of a major department. Instead he was appointed a Cabinet min-

ister without portfolio and Leader of the House of Lords. He would be ‘kept

in reserve with my hands clear’, as he put it, able to be consulted and offer

advice as needed, concentrating on the high politics which interested him

and where his experience was valuable, such as defence and security issues,

foreign affairs, Ireland and India. He performed well as Leader in the Lords,

though he did not receive as much assistance from Cabinet colleagues

there as he would have liked and complained that departments did not

always keep him properly informed. In 1844 Stanley (the future Earl of

Derby) was moved into the House of Lords to add more ministerial muscle

to the frontbench and share the parliamentary load. He was the oldest man

in the Cabinet (aged 72 in 1841) and treated with respect as a heavyweight

elder statesman though he was somewhat detached, as Mather says, from

the ‘reforming activity in the ﬁscal and administrative spheres’ of Peel’s

government. Because of his deafness, he always sat in the same place at

Cabinet meetings and each minister who had something to say would sit

next to him so that he could catch something of the discussion.

He played a vital role in the Corn Laws crisis of 1845–46. ‘The Duke was

against repeal of the Corn Laws’, as Elizabeth Longford put it, ‘but he was

more against a split’. He wanted to keep the Corn Laws and was not con-

vinced by the economic arguments for repeal, even in the context of the

Irish famine, but stuck to his line that ‘a good government is more impor-

tant than Corn Laws or any other consideration’. Though he was privately

deeply anxious that ‘a great Mistake has been made’, or at any rate ‘a Party

mistake’, he would try to keep things together and would not swerve from

supporting Peel on political and constitutional grounds. The Cabinet and

the party should support the prime minister and he would once again

use all his inﬂuence to prevent a collision between the Lords and the

Commons. For Wellington the issues were party unity and the continuance

of the Queen’s government. ‘With all his doubts’, writes Thompson, ‘he

was prepared to accept Peel’s judgment, trusting him within the necessities

of politics to preserve as much as possible of traditional institutions, pri-

vilege and the social structure of the country … Wellington maintained

that it was better for inevitable change to be carried out by a sound min-

istry that would control and limit it than by one eager to push reform as far

as possible’.

The fall of Peel’s government in June 1846 brought to a close

the Duke’s ministerial career.

It did not mark the end of his public and ofﬁcial life for in an extra-

ordinary move in 1842 he had become commander-in-chief, a post he had

earlier held in 1827–28 but had been forced to give up as prime minister,

remaining at the Horse Guards as head of the British army until his death

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in 1852. Wellington was even prepared to leave the Cabinet to hold a post

he thought no one was better ﬁtted for, but Peel was adamant he was

too valuable to be lost to the government and so he combined his military

and ministerial positions. The advent of a Whig government under Lord

John Russell made no difference to him – the Queen made known her

strong desire that he continue as commander-in-chief, and Wellington

assured Russell that his party-political days were over. He fought hard but

unsuccessfully for increased military spending and forces under both the

Conservative and the Whig governments and worried over the dangers of a

steamship-borne French invasion and the inadequacies of coastal defences.

He was in his element masterminding security preparations for the great

Chartist demonstration in London in 1848, though it went off quietly in

the end. But on matters ranging from the army’s old muskets and the

retention of ﬂogging to the purchase of commissions, the appointment

of a chief of staff, and military supply and administration arrangements, he

was old-fashioned, conservative and an obstacle to overdue and necessary

reforms. He should not have held the post as long as he did but retirement

was unthinkable for him, and he must bear a big share of responsibility for

the military inefﬁciencies and incompetence revealed during the Crimean

War two years after he died.

Seventy-seven years old when he ﬁnally left ministerial ofﬁce in 1846,

Wellington (as he had promised Russell) occupied an independent, non-

party role and did not act politically with the opposition. He maintained

good relations with the Whig ministers who, with the Conservatives now

bitterly split, offered the best prospect for stability and orderly government.

He feared that if the Liberals went into opposition they would join in

the Radicals’ ‘agitation’ against the country’s institutions. He hoped and

trusted that Stanley (Lord Derby) could reunite the Conservative Party and

revive its fortunes, but he stayed out of the protectionist-Peelite conﬂict,

though temperamentally he was closer to the former. He lived to see

the Conservatives return to ofﬁce in February 1852, when Derby formed

a short-lived minority government – the famous ‘Who, who?’ ministry,

so-called after the Duke’s exclamations as the names of the new ministers

were read out to him (‘never heard of the gentleman!’). He continued to

attend the Lords regularly and occasionally to speak, mainly on military,

Irish and foreign affairs; he made his last speech, on the Militia Bill, on

15 June 1852, only three months before his death.

He was still looked to by the Queen and Prince Albert for advice and

counsel. ‘Is your Majesty dissatisﬁed with your ministers?’, he asked when

he was called to the Palace during the ministerial crisis of 1851. When the

Queen replied, ‘No’, the old Duke shot back, ‘Then you had better keep

them’, and that was that.

He was still taking on new assignments in his

last years, becoming Ranger of the Royal Parks in 1850, in which capacity

he had a role in the preparations for the Great Exhibition (in Hyde Park).

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There is a (probably apocryphal) story that when the Queen, all other sol-

utions having failed, asked the Duke how to get rid of the hundreds of

sparrows trapped in (and befouling with their droppings) Paxton’s great

glass palace, he advised with characteristic directness: ‘Try sparrow-hawks,

Ma’am.’

Wellington must have seemed almost indestructible to his contem-

poraries. Certainly his death at age 83, at Walmer Castle, following a stroke,

on 14 September 1852 was sudden and unexpected. His lying-in-state and

the spectacle of the magniﬁcent state funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral (he is

the only prime minister to be buried there) marked the general sense that a

great man, a legendary ﬁgure and national hero, had been lost. His passing

was more than the death of any old ex-prime minister. ‘One cannot …

think of England without him’, the Queen wrote,

not something com-

monly said at the death of former prime ministers. Wellington had ren-

dered some of his most signal services to his party and to the country as

a former prime minister after 1830, but in a larger sense his career and

achievements transcended that category.

Lord Grey (resigned 9 July 1834)

In the course of a relatively long life and with a total parliamentary service

(Commons and Lords) of nearly 60 years, Grey had only ﬁve years in

ministerial ofﬁce (three years and eight months of them as prime minister)

– most of his active political life was spent in opposition. During the

quarter-century in which he led the opposition before becoming prime

minister in November 1830, he frequently expressed a wish to quit politics,

often feeling his career had been a failure, complaining he was too old, and

insisting he wanted to retire into the pleasures of family life. Yet his strong

ambition, vanity and principles kept him in the political game, though for

long periods the prospect of ofﬁce seemed remote. When he eventually

became prime minister he was 66.

Before he ﬁnally left the premiership on 9 July 1834, Grey had several times

tried or threatened to resign. The struggle to enact the one great achievement

of his ministry – the 1832 Reform Act – was intense and exhausting. In May of

that year, when the Cabinet resigned after the King refused Grey’s request to

create more peers to overcome opposition in the Lords and Wellington was

sent for to attempt to form a government, Grey had mixed feelings about

his eviction from ofﬁce. His great reform looked like it might fail, but he was

also worn down by the demands of ofﬁce and of leading a fractious coalition,

and he would have been relieved if Wellington had succeeded. But after a

week the Duke failed and Grey was restored to power, securing the vital

promise of more creations if necessary (they were not).

Grey had not even clocked up two years in Downing Street before he was

complaining (in September 1832) ‘I feel wearied and oppressed from the

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moment that I get up till I go to bed, and I think it will be impossible for

me to go through the work of another session’. Tired and depressed, he

moaned in early 1833 he saw nobody but ministers and people on business

– ‘how sick I am of it and of them’. ‘My plagues multiply’, he sighed.

‘I wonder whether I shall ever again have a night of real rest.’ Cabinet

in-ﬁghting, splits and disagreements on foreign and Irish policy questions

in particular drove him to despair and to want to throw in the towel. He

wanted to resign in the summer of 1833 but his political colleagues would

not hear of it and persuaded him to stay on. In January 1834 the King

talked him out of another attempted resignation. A further political row

over Irish church policy, which exposed deep Cabinet divisions and pro-

voked a total of ﬁve ministerial resignations in May–July 1834, was the last

straw and, rejecting pleas to reconsider, Grey insisted on resigning.

On a personal level, Grey’s retirement was genuinely contented. He spent

most of his time at his beloved Howick estate in Northumberland with

only occasional visits to far-away London to attend the Lords.

He loved

the countryside and passed his time supervising his estate, riding, walking

and shooting, playing cards and reading in the evenings, chatting cheer-

fully with friends, visitors and family. Although he had had several affairs

during his life, Grey’s marriage was close and happy, and had produced

15 children, and he was a fond father who enjoyed being at the centre of

gatherings of the family clan. ‘I can safely say that not an hour has hung

heavy on my hands, or been embittered with regret for the loss of power’,

he told one conﬁdant in 1834. A visitor found him ‘all day as gay as poss-

ible, and not an atom of that gall he was subject to in earlier life’. The

elderly ex-prime minister seemed, in fact, almost playful and ‘the happiest

of men’.

On a political level it was a different story. Although he talked in 1834

about the end of his ‘public life’ and maintained he did not want to return

to ofﬁce, Grey did not want to walk away from politics completely. He

strongly defended his government’s record, and stressed the need to draw

the line under the Reform Act and resist pressure for further parliamentary

or democratic reform. His preferred successor would have been Lord Althorp

(Earl Spencer), and he regarded Melbourne as a sort of ‘understudy’ who

was not really up to the job. During his ﬁrst stint in the premiership

(July–November 1834) Melbourne seems to have deferred to his old chief,

submitting his appointments and proposed measures for approval, with

Grey ﬁring off lots of detailed advice and criticism. With Melbourne back

in the saddle after April 1835 to 1841, however, Grey became increasingly

disillusioned and disenchanted with his successor and with the Whigs

in general, who he thought were deserting his principles. His inﬂuence

declined, though Melbourne still at times put aside his irritation and con-

sulted him, as during the 1839 ‘Bedchamber’ crisis. He came across as

touchy, jealous of his successor, resentful and fault-ﬁnding, quick to spot

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supposed slights, and loud in self-justiﬁcation. Not disguising his unhappiness

at the way things were going, but making no allowances for Melbourne’s

difﬁcult parliamentary position and shrinking majority, he became alarmed

about what he saw as government concessions and pandering to the Radicals

and to O’Connell and the Irish. By 1836 Grey’s son noted that the former

prime minister ‘has a prejudice against everything the Government does’.

Grey sometimes liked to give the impression that things would have

been different had he still been prime minister but when in April 1835 he

was offered the premiership by the King and by the top Whigs, including

Melbourne, or failing that the foreign secretaryship, he refused to take

ofﬁce. Melbourne indeed once ruefully remarked that ‘the Greys … in or

out were always dissatisﬁed. When in they wanted to be out, when out they

wanted to be in’. Grey had made his eldest son, Henry (Viscount Howick), a

junior minister in 1830 and, though he disapproved of his ‘advanced’

liberal views on free trade and the abolition of capital punishment, he

wanted to see him promoted into the Cabinet as his ‘agent and watchdog’.

Melbourne made Howick wait and then gave him the post of Secretary at

War when Grey wanted a more senior post for his heir; when he resigned

from the government in 1839, his father was delighted.

By the late 1830s Grey had given up on the Whigs and had completely

lost conﬁdence in Melbourne’s government. He was not, he told his family,

‘aware of any essential points on which my opinions differ from those of

the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel’. He now saw hardly anything

of his old associates and colleagues. He said he regretted putting Lord John

Russell in charge of the management of the Reform Bill, calling him ‘a

little animal engrossed by an inordinate ambition, of the most narrow and

selﬁsh character’. He had always been at root a conservative reformer

but by the last years of his life the conservatism dominated and he felt

alienated from the political movement he had devoted his career to.

Grey effectively dropped out of the political world after his son’s resign-

ation from the government. His Northumberland estate and his family

absorbed and satisﬁed him. He remained active and in reasonably good

shape into his late seventies but had poor health for the last two years of

his life before he died, aged 81, on 17 July 1845.

Lord Melbourne (resigned 30 August 1841)

For all his do-nothing approach to politics and policy, lack of interest

in political ideas and principles, and apparent indolence (largely a pose),

Melbourne showed a remarkable tenacity in hanging onto ofﬁce, managing

nearly seven years as prime minister between 1834 and 1841, with only a

brief ﬁve-month interruption, when his ministry was dismissed by the king

in November 1834. He had been appointed largely as the least-bad option,

because Grey resigned and refused to come back, and because he seemed

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best able to hold together the competing egos and rival factions of the

Whig-Radical-Irish alliance. Melbourne’s government had nearly come to

an end in 1839 when he resigned when his parliamentary majority had

dramatically slumped on a key vote, but after a few days the Whigs had

been put back in by Queen Victoria’s partisanship and her unwillingness to

accommodate Peel over Household appointments (the ‘Bedchamber crisis’).

Melbourne’s divided, weak and discredited government staggered on, with

the Conservatives growing in strength, until it was defeated in a vote of

conﬁdence in the Commons in May 1841 and then decisively lost the sub-

sequent general election. Melbourne formally resigned on 30 August 1841.

Melbourne was 62 when he left ofﬁce. He had always been cynical about

honours, dismissing them as ‘geegaws’ – ‘don’t you think those ribbons are

rather over-valued?’ – and he refused both a step-up in the peerage (to an

Earldom; he was himself a Viscount) and the Garter (‘what I like about the

Order of the Garter’, he once sneered, ‘is that there is no damned merit

about it’.)

He had increasingly been feeling the strain and his health

had been deteriorating as prime minister with attacks of gout, biliousness,

lumbago, bowel and bladder problems, and insomnia – all aggravated

by his habit of drinking two or three bottles of wine a day. He found the

release of pressure a relief and for the ﬁrst year out of ofﬁce seemed more

cheerful, relaxed and ﬁtter than for a long time (‘being out of ofﬁce is

much healthier than being in’, he told the Queen). He gamely insisted he

was happy at being free from the burdens of ofﬁce, but his smile, one of his

former ministers noticed, was not that of a happy man. When he talked

about ‘the fun of opposition’, no one was really fooled by his careless

manner. Melbourne had long feared the loss of ofﬁce and bitterly regretted

it when it happened. The loss of occupation, hard work, authority and

status created a psychological and emotional void that little in his pri-

vate life could ﬁll.

He had been scarred for life by his disastrous mar-

riage to the notorious Lady Caroline Lamb, who died in 1828, and their

handicapped son had died in 1836.

One thing he particularly missed was regular contact with Queen Victoria,

with whom he had become besotted since she came to the throne aged just

18 in 1837. Their relationship had become close, the elderly prime minister

relishing his role as adviser, mentor and close companion, and she regard-

ing him as a sort of father ﬁgure. There was calculation of political advan-

tage on his part.

In 1839 her actions in rejecting Peel’s ‘Bedchamber’

nominations, and Melbourne’s in advising her she could do so, although

having resigned he had no right to give that advice, were unconstitutional.

For about a year over 1841–42, Melbourne as an ex-prime minister and the

Queen again sailed close to – if not actually over – the boundaries of what

was constitutional. There could have been a political and constitutional

crisis, with Melbourne being attacked as a latter-day Lord Bute wielding

‘secret inﬂuence’, had his inﬂuence over the young monarch and at Court

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not been ‘snuffed out’ by anxious Palace advisers and by Prince Albert

(whom Victoria had married in 1840).

No one could have complained if Melbourne and the Queen had just

swopped social tittle-tattle and personal news. Instead she actively sought

his views and passed government documents to him, asking for his com-

ments, while he offered solicited and unsolicited advice on Peel’s Cabinet

and diplomatic appointments, government policies and political develop-

ments. The young Queen did not ﬁnd Peel a likeable character and was

(at that stage in her life) anti-Conservative in her views, and Melbourne

could not and would not pull back to a more ‘correct’ relationship with the

sovereign. Once they realised what was going on, as the stream of letters

passed back and forth, Palace advisers became seriously worried. The secret

exchanges were not just indiscreet, they were constitutional dynamite. If

Peel had discovered the Queen was taking advice on affairs of state from

anybody but him, as her prime minister, he would have immediately

resigned. Melbourne was repeatedly warned about his continued meddling

and the potential undermining of his successor. His response that he would

always advise the Queen to stick by her government ‘unless he saw the

time had arrived at which it might be resisted’ did not reassure the Palace.

At times Melbourne seemed to half-acknowledge the political and con-

stitutional dangers for the Queen, but the developing problem was ended

only when he was knocked out of action by a stroke in the autumn of

1842. Their correspondence dwindled and they saw relatively little of each

other, and it became painfully obvious to him that the Queen no longer

treated him with any special attention. He had become a ﬁgure from

the past for her. It was bound to happen in the end, after her marriage

to Albert and as she got used to new ministers. It was a terrible personal

loss for Melbourne; the occasional meeting with the Queen or even just her

name coming up in conversation could in the last few years of his life

reduce him to tears.

Melbourne’s severe stroke in October 1842 was a turning point. He made

only a slow recovery and was left permanently weakened by its after-effects.

He suddenly became an old man, a semi-invalid, fussing about his poor

health but eating and drinking much more than was sensible, much weak-

ened and slower physically and mentally, his horizons narrowing. He

was now forced to spend most of his time quietly at his country house

(Brocket), looked after by his family (his sister, who was now Palmerston’s

wife, and his brother and his young wife), something that, as a gregarious

man who had always lived in and for London ‘Society’, he found hugely

boring and depressing.

Politically there was a similar process of decline and marginalisation, a

sense of the shutters closing. Few people believed he could or would return

to power as prime minister: ‘10 men would not follow a future government

of his’, commented one insider. In August 1841 Melbourne told Prince

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10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston