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William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, usually addressed as Lord Melbourne, (15 March 1779 – 24 November 1848) was a British Whig statesman who served as Home Secretary (1830–1834) and Prime Minister (1834 and 1835–1841). He is best known for his intense and successful mentoring of Queen Victoria, at ages 18–21, in the ways of politics. Historians conclude that Melbourne does not rank high as a prime minister, for there were no great foreign wars or domestic issues to handle, he lacked major achievements, and he enunciated no grand principles. "But he was kind, honest, and not self-seeking."〔J. A. Cannon " Melbourne, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount," in John Cannon, ed., ''The Oxford Companion to British History'' (2009) p 634〕 Melbourne was dismissed by the King in 1834, the last Prime Minister to have been dismissed by a Monarch. ==Early life== Born in London to an aristocratic Whig family, son of Sir Penniston Lamb and Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne (1751–1818), though his paternity was questioned. He was 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).〔Peter Mandler, "(Lamb, William, second Viscount Melbourne (1779–1848) )", ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008, accessed 27 Dec 2009.〕 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. In 1816 Lady Caroline published a Gothic novel ''Glenarvon'', which portrayed both the marriage and her affair with Byron in a lurid fashion which caused William even greater embarrassment, while the spiteful caricatures of leading society figures made them several influential enemies. 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 suspension of ''habeas corpus'' in 1817 when sedition was rife.〔 Lamb's hallmark was finding the middle ground. Though a Whig, he accepted (29 April 1827) the post of Chief Secretary for Ireland 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. He had spent 25 years in Commons as a backbencher and politically was not well known.〔Henry Dunckley, ''Lord Melbourne'' p 135〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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