Books: Caroline Lamb's Husband

THE YOUNG MELBOURNE—Lord David Cecil—Bobbs-Merrill ($3).

When naive Alexandrina Victoria became Queen of England in 1837, she inherited as Prime Minister a fine worldly Whig: William Lamb, Lord Melbourne. For four years, he, the representative of a passing era, patiently tutored the young Queen who was to play the title role in a new age. But the same man had had another life, as William Lamb, second son of worldlywise, domineering Lady Melbourne. As William Lamb, he was the husband of Byron's mistress, Caroline Lamb, and was by all odds the most urbane of the many cuckolds whom George Gordon Lord Byron left on his pilgrimage through British bedrooms.

Last week Lord David Cecil (author of The Stricken Deer, a life of Poet William Cowper) published the story of Lord Melbourne's first life. The Young Melbourne is perhaps the best, certainly the raciest and most absorbing biography since Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria.

All that he was, William Lamb owed to his mother, Lady Melbourne. She presented her husband with six children, few of whom were his. William was universally supposed to be the son of Lord Egremont, who, scandal had it, bought Lady Melbourne from Lord Coleraine for £13,000, of which Lady Melbourne got a cut. ("Your mother is a whore," a young Cambridge friend once shouted at William's brother George.)

The little Lambs worshiped their forceful mother who ruled over vast, anarchic Melbourne House. Order-loving Lady Granville, in an exasperated moment, described it as "that great ocean, where they wander about all day and sleep about all the evening; no meal is at a given hour, but drops upon them as an unexpected pleasure." In that matriarchy, the strikingly handsome, tall, dark-eyed, sensual, clever, positive, realistic Lambs horse-played and horselaughed at delicacy and romance, ate prodigiously, fell asleep and snored, shouted their arrogant opinions, cursed loud and long. Yet they had immense love of life, good humor, adroitly managed people and situations. Melbourne House was a social centre of London. It was also animal, hard, rapacious and plainspoken.

William Lamb naturally fell easy victim to the wholly different boudoir atmosphere of Devonshire House, whose tyrant was slight, agile, wide-eyed, willful, 17-year-old Caroline Ponsonby. Her lisping voice cooed out words in "the Devonshire House drawl." Said a rival: "Lady Caroline baas like a little sheep." Caroline liked to gallop bareback, to dress in trousers. Sometimes she would scream and tear her clothes, kick the floor with her heels. But she was vivid, fitful, daring and held even outraged relatives spellbound.

William Lamb was Caroline's predestined prey. They were married, though not before Caroline, "seized by an unaccountable fit of rage with the officiating bishop, tore her gown and was carried fainting from the room." For three years all went well. Once Caroline was brought in "concealed under a silver dish cover, from which she emerged on the dinner table stark naked. ..." In the mornings William and she read "Newton on the Prophecies with the Bible"; then "Hume with Shakespeare till the dressing bell."