WILLIAM LAMB, second Viscount Melbourne, disliked the idea of biography.
He particularly disliked any notion that his own life should be examined. Late
in life, he looked back 'with astonishment at the things I've done; they seem
to me so absurd, and so wrong; it seems quite impossible, quite incredible'. ¹ He liked to claim that he had once been the assiduous keeper of a journal,
but that 'looking back to it some time afterwards he was so alarmed at what
he saw that he made up his mind to destroy everything'. ² This was probably
untrue. The gap between Melbourne's public statements and behaviour and
his private emotions was huge. No man his his feelings more effectively. In
this case, he kept a journal intermittently for the first thirty-four years of his
life, and began an autobiography at roughly the same age. All these volumes
survive. So far from destroying his past, Melbourne was intensely interested
in it.

Contemporaries were clear that any account of William Lamb should con-
centrate as much on family background as on politics. This might be thought
a strange remark to make about a future prime minister, but Lamb was 48
years old before he held any government office, and 51 before he entered a
Cabinet. He came to high politics late. His character and views had already
been formed by experiences that were not political. Rather, he had been fash-
ioned by membership of a distinctive family within the distinctive world of
early nineteenth-century Whiggery. As contemporaries noted, the Whig
world was as much a social organism as it was a political party. It had promi-
nence in public life and was proudly dynastic. For Melbourne, politics was
only an extension of a particular notion of social living. As a result, 'he inter-
ests less as a statesman than as a person', ³ or, as the Morning Chronicleobserved
in its obituary notice on Lamb, 'in this particular instance, the statesman is
indissolubly mingled, blended, and associated with the man'. ⁴

Melbourne himself once famously described the Whigs as 'all cousins'. ⁵ As
the family tree of Whiggery suggests (Fig. 1), this was hardly an overstate-
ment. Even so, the Lambs were relative newcomers to this charmed circle.

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