Called upon frantically by friend and foe at a time of crisis “to do something,” the responsibility of the times thrown on him, he sat tight and calmly answered, “Whenever you are in doubt what should be done—do nothing.”
This all sounds like the man for the Canadas. Nine hundred or so of his peers gnashed their teeth at him,—if peers ever so use their molars; and in Canada they wrote of “the prolific source of political evil, the profligate course of imbecile rulers.”
William the Fourth had called him “a great gentleman,” although he and his government had been “kicked out” by that obstinate, morbid, prejudiced and somewhat imaginative monarch. Naturally, Melbourne refused an earldom and a garter; but in his final advice to the sovereign he was as tactful as ever in making the latter partially modify the note of dismissal, thereby averting a storm of popular feeling and individual resentment of ministers. “Mind what you are about in Canada,” said the King when final instructions were given to Lord Gosford before he left England, and Melbourne and Glenelg—the Sleeping Beauty—found the monarch as hard to manage as the colony itself. “By —— I will never consent to alienate the Crown Lands nor to make the Council elective. Mind me, my lord, the cabinet is not my cabinet; they had better take care, or by —— I will have them impeached. You are a gentleman, I believe, I have no fear of you; but take care what you do.”
Posing as a man of pleasure, in reality a capable man of business, Melbourne lounged through his duties in a way to exasperate friend and foe. But as he lounged, he learned men and manners, determined to see into things, and even in Ireland, when Chief Secretary, said, “If agitation would not go to bed he would like to have a chat with it.” He was ever pleading for concession to the demands of the people, dreading the consequences of refusal. “Everything about him seems to betoken careless desolation; anyone would suppose from his manner that he was playing at chuck-farthing with human happiness, that he was always on the heels of fortune, that he would giggle away the great Charter.... But I accuse our Minister,” said his critic, “of honesty and diligence; I deny that he is careless and rude; he is nothing more than a man of good understanding and good principle, disguised in the eternal and somewhat wearisome affectation of a political roué.” Perfectly courteous to others, it was impossible for others to be discourteous to him, always excepting Brougham. But even before Brougham he did not quail, and always could give tit for tat, much to the delight of the audience of peers who, like schoolboys, exulted whenever their terror, the bully of the class, got a drubbing. The tongue which Brougham sarcastically spoke of as attuned to courtly airs, made to gloze and flatter, flayed him so completely with its quiet polish that he winced under its lash and betrayed, by his own increased violence of invective, the weight of the punishment. Soon after the accession the press said Lord Melbourne was about to publish a work on chess—the best method of playing the Queen, of getting possession of the castle, an entire disregard of the old system as to bishops, being points in the book. This genial, indolent statesman, who fearlessly told the truth irrespective of party, was rubicund, with the aquiline nose of the aristocrat; his large blue eyes sometimes flashed with fire, but oftener brimmed with merriment. The noble head, sturdy plainly clad and careless-looking figure, consorted well with the laisser aller expression of face. Strange to say, he, like Lord John Russell, usually stuttered out his speeches, thumping the table or desk before him as if to work out the sentences that would not get themselves delivered. The Reform Bill made him specially energetic. Sitting next to him was a very noble earl who wore his hat well over his brows, weighing the pros and cons of too much liberty—for other people. Melbourne in his heat took his own white hat in his right hand, beat the air with it in inarticulate struggle, and brought the white to bear, crown to crown, upon the black one. The blow was fair, the arm muscular; the very noble earl looked like the ancient White Knight, with head apparently wedged between his shoulders. He sat speechless for a moment, and then nimbly springing to his feet, amid roars of laughter, twisted his head free and regained his vision. And when the roar subsided, the Duke of Buckingham thought that the great statesman so suddenly beclouded could scarcely see his way out of the difficulty, and the laughter was renewed. To see a way out of the Canadian difficulty was to find a clue in a maze.
Canadian Tories were triumphant over the fall of the Ministry on the Jamaica question. “We cannot guess,” says one editor, “into what hands Her Majesty may be pleased to commit the trust which Lord Melbourne has declared his unfitness to administer.” The incoming man, Peel, quoted the state of Canada as among the trying questions which made the office of premiership the most arduous, the most important that any human being could be called upon to perform ... the greatest trust, almost without exception, in the whole civilized world, that could fall on any individual. A few moments later he had to confess that there was one question worse than the Canadian one, greater than colonial politics, a “question de jupons.” So the Government, after forty-eight hours’ attempt at change, reverted to its former holders; Canadian Tories were as glum as ever, and said Melbourne was again the governor of the petticoatocracy.
The St. Lawrence alone made the colony worth keeping; also, Canada by its confines came in contact with Russia; it was the seat of the most valuable fur trade in the world, and England would not be out of possession of it for two months before a French fleet would be anchored in the Gulf. These were thoughts impossible to think with calmness, worse even than annexation to the United States. The least calm of these men who debated upon what we were worth, and just what should become of us, was Brougham. Like most who love to torment, he himself was easily tormented. How does this champion of liberty look as he rises to condemn the policy on the Canadian question as “vacillating, imbecile, and indolent;” as he puts his awkward questions to those whom he calls his “noble friends” or “the noble lords,” all looking marvellously uncomfortable when their names are in that merciless mouth. We hear of him as absent from his place, ill in Paris through having swallowed a needle; yet after his return, one could imagine, in spite of his pointed replies, that his gastronomic feat had been to swallow a flail. “The foolish fellow with the curls has absolutely touched him,” says a contemporary writer.... “Make way, good people, the bull is coming—chained or loose, right or wrong, he can stand it no longer; with one lashing bound he clears every obstacle—there he is, with tail erect and head depressed, snorting in the middle of the arena.” The eyes flash, the brows gather, the dark iron grey hair stands up rigid, his arm is raised, his voice high; he is well out of the lush pastures of rhodomontade and diffuseness. The display of his power and the fertility of his mind amazes friend and foe; for the genius of his fervent intellect includes French cookery, Italian poetry, bees and cell building, and a host of subjects seemingly far removed from law and politics. This must have been knowledge gained at the cost of his profession, for an epigram has it that he knew a little of everything, even of law. “Brougham, though a Whig, is not a goose,” says the Noctes. Certainly “the whipster peer” who was so lately defiant does not look as if he thought so, as his late pretty bits of rhetoric rattle about his own ears. Sarcasm on his tongue, bile in his heart, Brougham talks pure vitriol, and everywhere a word falls a scar remains.
His foes accused him of being “one of those juggling fiends” “Who never spoke before,
But cried, ‘I warned you,’ when the event is o’er.”
He contended that his conduct on the Canadian question had been “impudently, falsely and foully aspersed.” So far from being a juggling fiend who did not warn until the event was o’er, instead of standing by and not giving a timely warning, he had, not less than ten months before, standing in that place, denounced the policy of the Government. More, he had entered his protests on the journals, warning, distinctly warning, the Government that their proceedings would lead to insurrection; and to mark the falseness of the quotation, more marvellous still, he had never twitted them when the event was o’er by saying he had warned them.
There were, however, occasions and combinations which dismayed even Brougham. He, Ellis, Hume, Papineau and Bedard, happened to meet in Paris. Much to the satirical disgust of some Canadian papers, Lord Brougham declined a dinner invitation and remained in bed in order to be quite incapacitated, as he had good reason to fear that his seat at table would be opposite Papineau.
But there is a grave in the Benchers’ Plot at Lincoln’s Inn which tells the tale of the one vulnerable spot, the wound which would not heal, in this extraordinary, audacious, eloquent man, this free lance, the critic of administrations, so prone to wound others. There he laid his only remaining child, a girl of seventeen, his application to have her so buried listened to by the Benchers because he too wished to be laid there in the same grave with her.
The third in this trio who faithfully laboured to abolish or mitigate “toil, taxes, tears and blood,”—who all for their pains were burned in effigy in Quebec and other places—was Lord Glenelg. The following is a travesty on what were supposed to be the instructions given by him, when debates as to what would prevent rebellion were followed by debates on what would cure it, Lord Durham chosen the Physician Extraordinary for colonial ills. The document was intended to regulate the Canadian Government, and showed the zeal and watchfulness of Lord Glenelg: