IN addition to the questions of blood and heredity, a Whig inheritance
involved the absorption of certain prejudices that created a psychological
mood, a context for thinking. Some contemporaries saw Melbourne's per-
sonality struggling against this family bequest. The diarist Greville, for ex-
ample, explained the ambiguities in Melbourne's career by opposing his
personality to his intellectual inheritance. 'A thorough Conservative at heart',
he was 'from education and turn of mind, and from the society in which he
was bred and always lived,. . . a Whig.' As a result of this tension, 'he was
only half-identified in opinion and sympathy with the party to which he
belonged in office', and was 'secretly the enemy of the measures which his
own Government originated'. ¹ In other words, Melbourne was a conserva-
tive who, by sad chance, had been wrapped in Whig swaddling clothes. It
was a popular line of argument with those of Melbourne's critics, who felt
that he could have done more to retard the speed of reform in his lifetime.

This idea has some force. Conservatively-minded men sometimes wander
into progressive parties. Melbourne himself loved to play up to this image, teas-
ing radicals with outrageous remarks. He shocked reformers by saying 'that the
authors of the Reform Bill ought to be hanged'. Lord John Russell was informed
that education was a complete waste of time, because everyone knew that the
Paget family was illiterate, and yet they had done well in life. But all of this was,
as his nephew pointed out, nothing but 'mischief'. Melbourne was a moderate
man, but was ultimately, and with his back to the wall, 'on the Liberal side of
the line'. ² Major themes in Melbourne's intellectual inheritance made it impos-
sible for him to be a Tory. Of these, the most important were a conviction that
politics should be the preserve of a propertied élite, led by London-living, cos-
mopolitan grandees; a belief that the countryside was an unfortunate mistake,
only to be thought about as an ideal; and the wistful acceptance that the claims
of religion, while intellectually of consuming interest, were probably untrue. At
times, he could sympathize with the Tory and the man of religion, but, in the
last resort, he was not of their number.

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