Portrait of William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, Pc, Frs 1779-1848 by Sir George Hayter

Oil on Canvas

86.36 x 66.04 (cm) 34.00 x 26.00 (ins)

Inscribed 'Lord Melbourne' to reverse (before re-lining)

Born in London to an aristocratic Whig family and educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, he fell in with a group of Romantic Radicals that included Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. In 1805 he succeeded his elder brother as heir to his father's title and he married Lady Caroline Ponsonby. The next year he was elected to the British House of Commons as the Whig MP for Leominster. For the election in 1806 he was moved to the seat of Haddington burghs and for the 1807 election successfully stood for Portarlington (a seat he held until 1812).

He first came to general notice for reasons he would rather have avoided: his wife had a public affair with Lord Byron — she coined the famous characterisation of him as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". The resulting scandal was the talk of Britain in 1812. Eventually the two reconciled and though they separated in 1825, her death in 1828 affected him considerably. In 1816 Lamb was returned for Peterborough by Whig grandee Lord Fitzwilliam. He told Lord Holland that he was committed to the Whig principles of the Glorious Revolution but not to "a heap of modern additions, interpolations, facts and fictions". He therefore spoke against parliamentary reform and voted for the suspending of habeas corpus in 1817 when sedition was rife. Lamb's hallmark was finding the middle ground. Though a Whig, he accepted the post of Irish Secretary (1827) in the moderate Tory governments of George Canning and Lord Goderich. Upon the death of his father in 1828 and his becoming Viscount Melbourne, he moved to the House of Lords.

Melbourne was Prime Minister when Queen Victoria came to the throne (June 1837). Barely eighteen, she was only just breaking free from the domineering influence of her mother, the Duchess of Kent, and her mother's advisor, John Conroy. In May 1839, Melbourne's resignation led to the Bedchamber Crisis. On 25 February 1841, he was admitted a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Viscount Melborune's wife, Lady Caroline Ponsonby- Lamb was not a typical politician’s wife. The daughter of Frederick Ponsonby, 3rd Earl of Bessborough, and the granddaughter of the 1st Earl Spencer, she was born in 1785. Her education was haphazard. Lady Caroline married Lord Melbourne, in 1805. She gave birth to their only child, George Augustus Frederick, in 1807. He was epileptic and mentally handicapped and had to be cared for almost constantly. Lady Caroline was devoted to him. Lady Caroline died in 1828, aged 42, her death hastened by drink and drugs. Lord Melbourne, not yet prime minister, was by her bedside.