William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne William Lamb, 2nd Viscount 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 in the ways of politics, when she was between the ages of 18 and 21. Historians have concluded that Melbourne does not rank highly 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
Frederick Lamb, 3rd Viscount Melbourne Baron Beauvale, of Beauvale in the County of Nottingham. In 1848 he succeeded his elder brother as third Viscount Melbourne. Despite a certain personal distance between them, Lord Palmerston, as Foreign Secretary placed great confidence in Lamb, wrote to him in a courteous style very different from his usual brusque manner, and left the running of the Vienna Embassy almost entirely in his hands. The coolness was due to Palmerston's decades-long affair with Lamb's sister Emily, Lady Cowper; Lamb disapproved of the affair and disapproved equally of their eventual marriage, although this proved to be very happy. Palmerston's biographer notes