page_title: Lady Caroline Lamb
section_title: Marriage and family
hierarchical_section_title: Lady Caroline Lamb / Marriage and family
context_page_description: Lady Caroline Lamb was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat and novelist, best known for Glenarvon, a Gothic novel. She had an affair with Lord Byron in 1812, for whom she coined the phrase "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". Her husband was The Hon. William Lamb, who after her death became Prime Minister.
context_section_description: In June 1805, at the age of nineteen, Lady Caroline Ponsonby married the Hon. William Lamb, an up-and-coming politician, and heir to the 1st Viscount Melbourne.  Although their meeting had been shrewdly orchestrated by William Lamb's mother, theirs was a love match. The couple had become "mutually captivated" during a visit to Brocket Hall in 1802 and for many years the pair enjoyed a happy marriage. In 1809 his brother George married her namesake cousin Caroline St Jules.
  Caroline and William produced a son, George Augustus Frederick, born on 11 August 1807, and a premature daughter, born in 1809 who died within 24 hours. Lady Caroline was physically ill-suited to childbirth and suffered long recovery periods after each one. 
  Her son was born with severe mental problems. Although most aristocratic families sent mentally challenged relatives to institutions, the Lambs cared for their son at home until his eventual death in 1836, eight years after Lady Caroline's own death. The stress of their son's ill health, combined with William Lamb's consuming career ambitions, drove a wedge between the couple. A further difficulty was that William's brothers and sister, a very  close-knit clan, all detested Caroline, whom they called  "the little beast", while she and her mother-in-law hated  each other from the start, and their lifelong enmity was to be a great cause of unhappiness to Caroline.
caption: Lady Caroline Lamb, née Ponsonby
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