1779
Privileged beginnings
William Lamb's origins were privileged, complicated and intensely social. His mother, Lady Melbourne, moved at the centre of aristocratic Whig society, and the family home was a place where politics, gossip, patronage and personal intrigue overlapped. His father, the 1st Viscount Melbourne, supplied title and position; his mother supplied much of the family's social force. Lamb therefore grew up understanding power as conversation as much as command. He was not raised to be a crusader. He learned the arts of ease, timing, irony and emotional self-control, qualities that later made him seem either wise or evasive depending on the observer.
