Lady Jocelyn was early left a widow. When, in 1854, her husband’s militia regiment was quartered at the Tower there was an outbreak of cholera. Finding him unwell one morning, the doctor advised Jocelyn to join his wife at Kew, where they were living. In the cab he felt so much worse that he stopped it at Lady Palmerston’s house in Piccadilly. He had taken cholera, and died in the back drawing-room. Lady Jocelyn, who had by chance driven into town, found him in a dying condition.
In the autumn of 1844 Lady Palmerston made a tour in Germany with her husband, dining with the King of the Belgians at Laeken, with the King of Prussia at Berlin, and the King of Saxony at Dresden. The next year her friend Lady Holland died, leaving her £300, a portrait of Lord Melbourne by Landseer,[29] and all her fans.
A pleasing incident, which showed in what estimation Lady Palmerston was held by the party, occurred in 1850, when a hundred and twenty Liberal Members of Parliament presented her with a full-length portrait of her husband by Partridge. She was extremely proud of the compliment paid her. The painting, now at Broadlands, was hung on the staircase of their town house.
Lady Palmerston could not bear, as I have said, to be separated from her husband. In January 1851 she went to Brighton with Lady Ashley and her children, leaving him in town, and her letters to her “dearest love”--she was sixty-four and he was sixty-seven--show how not to see him even for the space of a fortnight was unthinkable. One day she wrote: “Whenever you write me word that you have opened your carpet bags I shall make a bonfire on the Steyne.” When he was away from her her letters to him are filled with adjurations to take care of himself, not to go sailing on Luggan Lake, or if he bathes, not to go out of his depth.[30]
She wrote to him nearly every day while she was at Brighton, and the following extracts from her letters are of interest:
“I got down very safely yesterday, but I never was in a more shaky train, however. The Ashleys and I were together, and we got down in an hour and ten minutes, but I think for the future I shall always avoid express trains. There is something so awful in the notion of not stopping anywhere, so that if unfortunately there should occur anything wrong about your carriage you would have to go on fifty miles without any help or the least power of getting your distress known. It is like the horror of a bad dream to imagine the possibility of such a casualty.”