Little Mania 
Ian Gilmour
- Lady Caroline Lamb by Paul Douglass
‘There never was such a Woman!!!’ Emily Cowper (later Palmerston) wrote of her sister-in-law, Lady Caroline Lamb. Lady Cowper was not being complimentary. She later described Caroline as being ‘more termagant than ever’. Such disparagement of the woman, who in 1812 had a notorious affair with Byron and was married to a future prime minister, was not confined to the Lamb family. Metternich’s mistress, Princess Lieven, referred to ‘that madwoman Lady Caroline Lamb’, and Lord and Lady Holland compared her to typhus, while within Caroline’s own family her cousin Lady Harriet Cavendish wrote of her ‘absurdities’, and her grandmother Lady Spencer, who was very fond of her, complained in 1811 of her ‘great imprudence . . . &all this not from vice but vanity, inordinate vanity . . . Dear Caroline’s perverseness makes me wretched whenever I think of it.’
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Ian Gilmour was secretary of state for defence under Edward Heath and deputy foreign secretary under Margaret Thatcher. He died on 21 September 2007.
Other articles by this contributor:
Little Mercians · why Kenneth Clarke should lead the Tories
Dingy Quadrilaterals · the Profumo Case
Vote for the Beast! · the Tory Leadership
The Horrors of Heathrow · Ian Gilmour at the Terminal 5 Enqiry
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