SEX, cash and the PM’s mother
Despite being married to a millionaire, Lady Melbourne is said to have been sold to an earl for £13,000 by one of her lovers — and she pocketed half!
THE mothers of British prime ministers don’t often sell their sexual favours for cash.
But Lady Melbourne, whose son became the young Queen Victoria’s favourite politician, was an unusual woman. In the 1770s, it was rumoured that one of her lovers had sold her to the earl of egremont for £13,000 and she had pocketed half the money.
Who knows if the rumours were true? But, as this entertaining — if occasionally disorganised — book shows, Lady Melbourne was a fascinating character.
The poet Byron knew her when she was an older woman. Despite a 37-year difference in their ages, he may even have had an affair with her. He called her ‘the best friend I ever had in my life and the cleverest of women’.
She was born the daughter of a Yorkshire baronet in 1751. At the age of 17, she married Sir Peniston Lamb, later Lord Melbourne. The previous year he had inherited £500,000 in cash and £500,000 in property and land — the equivalent of around £125 million today.
She set about transforming herself into a society hostess and a behind-thescenes power in the era’s politics.
Within a year of marriage, she was pregnant. Her husband almost immediately embarked on an affair with Sophia Baddeley, an actress and singer.
NOR was Lady Melbourne a model of wifely duty: of the six children she produced, only one was undoubtedly her husband’s. In the circles in which she moved, she was not alone in her infidelity.
‘There was hardly a young married lady of fashion who did not think it almost a stain upon her reputation if she was not known as having cuckolded her husband,’ wrote one contemporary. ‘The only doubt was who was to assist in the operation.’
The late-18th century was not a prudish time. Lady Melbourne’s acquaintances included the renowned beauty Lady Worsley, whose husband once arranged for the Marquess of Cholmondeley to view her naked. He wanted to settle a bet as to whether or not she was ‘the finest proportioned woman in europe’.
Cholmondeley himself was used to salacious wagers. He once offered to pay Lord Derby 500 guineas if he could prove he had made love to a woman ‘in a balloon one thousand yards above the earth’.
Lady Melbourne’s longest-lasting lover was the earl of egremont, a man who sowed not a handful of wild oats, but whole fields of them.
He had at least 15 mistresses and a small army of illegitimate children, possibly as many as 70. One was almost certainly Lady Melbourne’s son, William Lamb, the future prime minister, who once mused: ‘Who the devil can tell who’s anybody’s father?’
Lady Melbourne’s most prestigious conquest was the Prince Regent, later George IV. She was 11 years older than him and he was, according to her friend the Duchess of Devonshire, ‘too fat and looks too much like a woman in men’s clothes’. The liaison was short-lived, but
produced a boy, George. The prince stood as the child’s godfather.
Both Lord and Lady Melbourne were present at the disastrous 1795 wedding of the Prince Regent to Caroline of Brunswick.
The reluctant groom was so drunk, he had to be physically supported by two friends. He nearly fell over as the Archbishop of Canterbury performed the service. The prince had objected both to Caroline’s appearance and her ideas of personal hygiene.
According to one observer, her stockings were ‘never well-washed or changed enough’. The prince later complained that his bride could not have been a virgin. At a crucial moment during their wedding night, she had exclaimed: ‘ ah, mon dieu,
qu’il est gros!’ And how should she know this, the prince wanted to know, ‘ without a previous means of comparison?’
Lady Melbourne’s later years were overshadowed by another imprudent alliance. William married one Caroline Ponsonby, who later became notorious as Lady Caroline Lamb. The groom had an early example of his bride’s taste for histrionics at the ceremony. She began to weep, flew into a rage with the elderly clergyman who was conducting the service and fainted. William had to carry her out.
It was the beginning of a marriage from hell. Lady Caroline took lovers as her mother-in-law had, but, unlike the older woman, she was indiscreet. She made terrible scenes in public. The crisis was reached when she became infatuated with Lord Byron. The poet was happy enough to engage in a brief affair, but soon wished to end it. Lady Caroline didn’t. SHe
arrived at his rooms to announce that she was going to elope with him. When told by Byron’s friend, John Cam Hobhouse, that she wasn’t, she seized hold of a sword and melodramatically proclaimed that ‘ blood will be spent’. She later sent curls of her pubic hair to Byron in the post.
At a grand ball, she broke a glass and attempted to slash her arm with it. It’s hard not to feel sorry for Lady Caroline, who may well have been suffering from some form of mental illness.
William was probably not the ideal husband, either. She hinted that he had curious sexual tastes, having once ‘amused himself with instructing me in things I need never have heard or known’. She may have been referring to his alleged fondness for flagellation.
Byron and Lady Melbourne joined forces to free William from Caroline’s unwanted embraces.
Caroline became a social pariah and died at 42 after years of heavy drinking and overuse of laudanum.
The poet was propelled in the direction of Lady Melbourne’s niece, Annabella Milbanke, but their marriage was also a disaster.
Lady Melbourne died in 1818. She was not to know that her favourite son William was to become Prime Minister and give the family name to a city in Australia.