Page:Wives of the prime ministers, 1844-1906.djvu/157

LADY PALMERSTON except that there is no bill to settle at the end, it often seems almost as if one had been staying at an hotel where one chanced to know a few of the other visitors. The parties must have been very interesting. Among the guests at different times were all the ambassadors to Great Britain and their wives, members of all the great English families, and writers like Laurence Oliphant, Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), and Mrs. Augustus Craven, author of Récit d’une sœur.

The same unpunctuality, however, prevailed at Broadlands as in London. Dinner was nominally at eight, but was seldom on the table before nine. This indifference to time seems to have been innate in Lady Palmerston's family, for even at Panshanger in 1841, when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were on a visit there, it is recorded that though there was an agreeable absence of formality, everything was immensely unpunctual, and the poor Queen was made to wait for dinner and drives "till anybody but herself would be furious."

Besides managing the household at Broadlands and Cambridge House, Lady Palmerston had her own property to look after: Brocket, left to her by her brother, Lord Melbourne, and her Scottish estates. She saw into everything 125