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. When she was ten, her grandmother became alarmed at Caroline's eccentric behaviour. She consulted a doctor, who advised that Caroline should not be strictly disciplined. As a result, she ran wild, and could not write or spell until she was in her teens.

Despite her lack of formal education, Lady Caroline was a good linguist, fluent in French, Italian and Greek.

She was artistic, loving music, painting watercolours and writing poetry and novels. Impulsive and excitable, she sometimes verged on hysteria, and often flew into terrible rages.

Lady Caroline married Lord Melbourne, in 1805. After two miscarriages, 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.

In 1812, Caroline read Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and declared:

"If he was as ugly as Aesop, I must know him." On meeting Byron that summer, she famously noted in her diary that he was "mad, bad and dangerous to know".

They began an affair which lasted until 1813, but even after it finished Lady Caroline's obsession with the poet continued. She published a novel, Glenarvon, in 1816 containing obvious portraits of herself, her husband, Byron and many others.

Embarrassed and disgraced, Melbourne decided to part from his wife, though the formal separation did not occur until 1825.

Lady Caroline died in 1828, aged 42, her death hastened by drink and drugs.

Lord Melbourne, not yet prime minister, was by her bedside.

Quote unquote

"It is impossible that anybody can feel the being out of Parliament more keenly for me than I feel it for myself. It is actually cutting my throat. It is depriving me of the great object of my life."

Did you know?

Melbourne's most lasting memorial is the city in Australia which was named after him in 1837.