> "K (^'\ N. '» V- « if Caliiform;! A'\.#!l|';,'//'- .f Exl9lBl\I§ GREAT VICTORIANS A^^ GREAT VICTORIANS MEMORIES AND PERSONALITIES BY T. H. S. ^SCOTT AUTHOR OF •THE STORY OF BRITISH DIPLOMACY,' 'CLUB MAKERS AND CLUB MEMBERS,' ETC. NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 597-599 FIFTH AVENUE 1916 / / E7-5 PHEUN [All rights reserved) PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN ». ^ ^ MY BROTHER, THE REVEREND E. HERBERT S. ESCOTT, The head of my family, as the possessor of Hartrow Manor, round which and its neigh- bourhood many of the persons or incidents recalled in the following pages naturally group themselves, with all appreciation of his public services, at Dulwich College and elsewhere, to the education and culture of his time, THIS VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED, WITH ALL GOOD WISHES, BY ITS AUTHOR, T. H. S. ESCOTT. 774409 PREFACE Kamily accidents or personal chances brought me, from a very early age, into the presence of celebrated or interesting personages, in most cases more or less connected with my native West of England. In less immature life, em- ployments and associations added extension or intimacy to this kind of acquaintanceship, giving me a knowledge that was at least first-hand of not a few among the most characteristic as well as often entertaining products of their time. In cases like Bishop Phillpotts and the first Duke of Wellington, a tolerably good memory brought before me, as clearly as if I had seen them yesterday, much that was most impressive in their appearance, their manner, and the ** habit in which they lived." For their distinc- tive attributes of various kinds, manifested in the parts they played and the principles for which they stood, I have been fortunate in being able to draw upon their contemporaries or their rela- tives, who had the authentic tradition concerning 7 Preface them. Such, as regards the Duke, were his son, the second Duke, and his most intimate and life- long friend, the Rev. G. R. Gleig, so long the Army Chaplain -General. In the case of the Bishop, I have been similarly helped by his grandson, son of the Archdeacon of Cornwall, James Surtees Phillpotts, formerly a Rugby master, and headmaster of Bedford, now living at Tunbridge Wells, by my old college friend, the Rev. A. L. Eoulkes, long a clergyman in the Exeter Diocese, and by Mr. Edmund Gosse, whose invaluable kindness refreshed a dim recollection of the Bishop as, during his last years, he could be seen in his retirement at Torquay. As a child I had first seen the Bishop with or at the house of my relative, Samuel Trehawke Kekewich, of " Peamore " ; his late son was good enough to check and supplement my own memories, as well as from his own experience to describe the Bishop's oratorical methods and effects on platforms or in Parliament, and their curious resemblance to his private conversation at dinner -tables and in drawing-rooms. The Bishop's alliance with Lord Derby against the Coalition Government of 1853, and the remarkable bitterness of his invective, first placed him high among the chief debaters on the Conservative side in the 8 Preface Upper House. The second Earl Granville was one of the few peers belonging to that Adminis- tration who lived into my time. To him I was indebted for singularly lifelike accounts of the Bishop's performances. Indeed^ without Lord Granville's help, what has been said as to the impression left by the Bishop on his immediate contemporaries would have been less distinct and fresh than I hope is now the case. As regards many other details^ the intimacy enjoyed by me from my earliest youth with A. W. Kinglake, Abraham Hay ward, and others brought back to me, long before I had any idea of writing these pages, many types of their time with whom personal acquaintance on my part would have been impossible, but whose omis- sion from a book bearing the present title must have rendered it grievously incomplete. Einally, while I have not consciously drawn upon any memoirs, autobiographies, or diaries recently published, I would gratefully acknowledge the valuable and interesting private letters in which Sir Donald Stewart's daughter. Lady Eustace, has revived and enlarged my recollection, not only of her distinguished father, but of the other Anglo -Indian generals of his day. T. H. S. ESCOTT. West Brighton, December 191 5. 9 CONTENTS PA6B PREFACE ....... 7 CHAPTER I MITRE AND BATON . . . . . - ^3 A memorable confirmation address in the old church, Bideford — Henry of Exeter's watchword for the newly confirmed, *' Incor- porate " into the Body of Christ, the Church — The skull-cap and episcopal robes in the religious light — Wizard or priest?— An address that reaffirms all those doctrines whose repudiation by the Brampford Speke clergyman, and whose disregard by the Primate, Dr. Howley, had brought about Henry's long war against the Gorham heresies and his excommunication of the Archbishop of Canter- bury — Indifference of his diocese to these escapades and local pride — His intrepidity as the champion of the reaction to clerical mediseval- ism and the subordination of State to Church — Bishop Phillpotts' position, social and political, as a type and leader of that move- ment — His gradual preparation for it, first as Tory High Church pamphleteer, d. la Jonathan Swift — Society success began when he became Dean of Chester — Famous hosts and guests in and out of London — Diocesan work and social progresses in Devonshire — The right-hand man. Archdeacon Freeman, more advanced and uncom- promising than the Bishop himself — The leavening of the West with anti- Reformation principles by Mr. Prynne at St. Mary's, Plymouth — The devotee who not only brushed the church floor but licked it with her tongue thoroughly to clean it, and made the Bishop smack his lips with delight — Social discourses on Dr. Johnson's text about the devil as the first Whig — At daggers drawn with Jeffrey, Brougham, and all concerned with the Edinburgh Review — A Bishop after the Duke of Wellington's own heart — At Buckingham Palace with the Duke as Oxford Chancellor to con- gratulate Queen Victoria on her marriage — A little dialogue on punctuality as the politeness of princes — The Bishop before the looking-glass at his palace — The episcopal sugar-plums and picture- II Contents PAOK books — The Bishop and the hunting parsons — The Bishop's gracious way with an Evangelical clergyman about the " Shebbear rogues " — Henry of Exeter's table-talk as the rehearsal of his speeches in Parliament — The Bishop and Lord Derby understand each other about the Canada Clergy Reserves Bill — Landor's " Belial Bishop" — Henry stands for damnation, not condemnation — The gamecock of the aristocratic Tories — The house party at Mount Edgcumbe and what came of it — The conqueror of Waterloo and Henry of Exeter meet — The Bishop lionizes the Duke over Exeter Cathedral — The Duke's account of it given to the Rev. G. R. Gleig — The dark and fearful face in the bath-chair — Henry of Exeter's doctrines and influence carried into Somerset by the Rev. M. F. Sadler of Bridgwater, who exercised on Archdeacon Denison something of the same influence as Archdeacon Freeman exercised on Bishop Phillpotts — The Archdeacon's brother, the Speaker, on " St. George without the drag-on " — The Archdeacon's own account of his conversion to Ritualism — The Vicar of East Brent and the school inspector — The latter welcomed with " Old Daddy Longlegs wouldn't say his prayers " — The first Duke of Wellington as a West of England worthy — Restoration of the Wellington pillar on the Blackdown Hills — The Duke's West of England and other progresses — The Duke at Kilve Court, Hartrow Manor, and Hatfield — The Duke as I remember him in the West — His grace's short way with black- mailers and other people's duns — The second Duke's likeness and unlikeness to his father — The same short, sharp, sententious manner of speech and of dealing with his fellow-men — How not to become a coroner — Sir Henry Irving's train from Strathfieldsaye — A danger- ously good memory for exposing the plagiarisms in travellers' tales and the inconsistencies of fiction-mongers about their famous friends, e.g. the Cumbrays and the recipient of Bismarck's stolen goods from Gambetta — The Duke, George IV, and the cavalry of various nations — The Duke as an art patron : ' ' Not going to let Coutts' people know what a fool I have been " — How the Duke raised a Paris monument in H.B.M. Embassy, 29 Faubourg St. Honore — The Duke, Lady Catherine Pakenham, and the young physician. CHAPTER n FROM WELLINGTON TO WOLSELEY . . . '91 A Lemon Street statue for Lord Raglan as a Truro ex-M.P. — Fitzroy Somerset acts " Ulysses " on the Latin play stage at Westminster School— Grinds at Spanish with the future Duke of Wellington on the voyage out to the Peninsula — By marriage with Lady Harriet Wellesley becomes the Duke's nephew-in-law — During the peace 12 Contents interval of 1814 Secretary of the Duke's Paris Embassy— House of Commons days — Military promotion and created Lord Raglan in 1852 With the Badminton foxhounds and in the Savernake game coverts — As aide de-camp at Waterloo loses his arm, but will not lose the ring which is a present from his wife — After the Crimea, Cardigan and his colonels on the King's Road, Brighton — Aristocrat and hussar — The old patrician regime personified — Much virtue in the lash — The soldiers starving and the General in a floating palace — Alvanley and Cardigan in the shires— Assheton Smith and Cardigan ride against each other with the hounds till their horses nearly drop — The trooper and the dying Colonel : "All safe for heaven ! " — Gradual appearance of new and better military types — Sir William Knollys, the founder of the Aldershot camp — Indian soldiers as English teachers — Lord Lawrence of the Punjab — Chairman of the London School Board — John and Henry's respective epitaphs — Comparison between the two brothers — Lord Hardinge and the Lawrences — Governor-General of India — The Sikh wars — Lough Cutra Castle — St. Helen's, Dublin — " Paddy Gough " — Chillianwallah — Hardinge's gallantry in the Peninsula — "What, tents, and chairs inside them ! " — Mrs. Disraeli's luck in her nocturnal neighbours — At daggers drawn with the Duke of New- castle and the Cabinet during the Crimean War — Dies at Tunbridge Wells in 1856 — Outram, the "Bayard of India" — Sir Colin Campbell, afterwards Lord Clyde, of Crimean and Indian fame — His delight with the House of Lords, with all he sees in town or country — Romps with children in the hayfield — Sir Donald Stewart as he looked and walked in Kensington Gardens — A typical High- lander with Norse strain in blood and features — Return to India — Commander-in-Chief in India — A Councillor at the India Office — His character summed up by Lord Bryce — A keen sportsman — Picturesque figure and surroundings at Chelsea Hospital — His opinion of the British soldier — Sir Louis Mallet — His Board of Trade work — Appointment to the under-secretaryship in 1874 — Grandson of Mallet du Pan, the French publicist and Revolution refugee — Comes to represent Cobdenism at the India Office — Free Trader, economist, and cosmopolitan conversationist — How he saw a great Duke fall downstairs at a Paris cafe and helped to pick him up dead — Sir Henry Norman — Norman as soldier and pupil in the Lawrence school — The might-have-been Viceroy of 1892 — His last promotion to the Chelsea Hospital governorship — Anglo-Indian preparation for the improved officer of the nineteenth- and twentieth- century type — Roberts and Salisbury afloat — A glass of cold water : *' Thy necessity is greater than mine " — Some points in common between Roberts and Wolseley — Sir George Hamley, the Wolseley type ; the new Army and the results — Henry Brackenbury as a type and worker — Sir Evelyn Wood and Sir Coleridge Grove, the only two survivors of the Wolseley school — Sword, pen, and Sir 13 PAOK Contents PAGE Evelyn Wood — War correspondent types from Xenophon to John and Henry Hozier — The three brothers : Sir William, Charles, and Keith Fraser — Brackenbury's diary of the Franco-Prussian War — Solving the mystery of Bazaine's movements — Hamber and Bracken- bury's proof — The " hit " of to-morrow — The fifteenth-century Sir Robert Brackenbury — Sir John Pender's steam yacht Electra — Mowbray's " Est in conspectu Tenedos" — The value of Wolseley's association with Brackenbury — The latter's articles on military reform — Office of Commander-in-Chief abolished — Bismarck's desire to interview Wolseley — Sir Charles Dilke given Bismarck's opinion of Lord Wolseley by the German statesman himself— At Cranbrook, Mr. Pandeli Ralli's Surrey country house— '"Spects I growed " — The officer who had nothing to wear — Albert Smith's gent — Cremorne Gardens — Altercations with the cabmen — Sir Vincent Caillard, the one survivor of the officers trained by Wolseley's ablest deputy — The Duke of Connaught's request — Queen Victoria's pleasure — Allan Thorndike Rice and Von Moltke — The Prussian soldier a subject of conversation — Lady Wolseley and Madame Gallifet the best dressed women in Europe — Wolseley's short ten minutes' sleep before the battle of Tel-el-Kebir — Lord Spencer and the sleepy Prime Minister — Wellington flirts with Madame Quintana just before the battle of Orthes, where the Duke was slightly injured — The Duke has a short repose before the battle of St. Sebastian — Lord Kitchener's preference for gold and silver tea-services to swords of honour. CHAPTER III AMBASSADORS AT CONSTANTINOPLE , . -154 School examining at Tunbridge Wells — The young ladies playing croquet — The gentleman on the garden bench — The great " Eltchi " as seen in the lobby of the House — Debate on the Quadruple Alliance — His only speech, as he said, in the House — Crimean War caused not by blundering and ignorant miscalculation, but by the great ideas and passions long in the air — Russia as the tyrant of national liberty under Nicholas I : " A cat whom no one cares to bell " — Stratford Canning's rise and progress — Diplomacy no longer a close borough — George Canning's cousin and precis-writer, but no friends at Court — A son of the commercial classes — At Eton, not as an oppidan but a ** tug " — Roughing it in the *' Long Chamber " — Captain of the school — Gets King's, makes many famous friends, but owes more to home lessons than to any of these — Not a persona grata to the Czar, but Sultan against Sultan at Constantinople — The terror of the Turk and of his own attaches — Granville Murray 14 Contents PAOB rebels— Caricatures his chief in Sir Hector Stubble— The great ** Eltchi " returns to London — Is the diplomatic oracle of Parlia- ment—Retires to Tunbridge Wells — Intellectual and busy to the last — Place in social and political nineteenth-century development — The great "Eltchi's" great predecessor, and those who have since filled his place at Constantinople — Sir William White and others. CHAPTER IV PALMERSTONIANA ...... I76 The Parliamentary contest at Tiverton — " Cupid " on the Tiverton hustings — A bit of Butcher Rowcliffe's mind — •* No chaff! " — The accustomed irony of Socrates matched by the habitual banter of Palmerston — A visit to the Prime Minister in Downing Street — What he looked and said — Repeated constitutionals from the standing desk to the inkpot and writing-table — His narrative of the family history of the movements ending in putting down " hells" — Cosmos out of chaos on the writing-table — Lady Palmerston's invitation cards — The " basket trick" — "Next man in" — "Bless my soul, how very singular ! " — "I hope you're better" — Man of that age sure to have been out of sorts — Palmerston and the Morning Post — George Smythe's prediction about the Tory Party — Too busy to read the papers — His Tory days — Disgrace at Court — Sir Henry Bulwer's coaching in foreign politics and its result — Palmerston with those about him in Paris, and the pocket-handkerchief which won't fall out—" Big Ben's " two faces— "Janus" or " Palmerston" ?— Palmerston as sketched by Disraeli in 1836 — His treatment of Talleyrand and its political consequence — The diplomatist in the Cambridge House drawing-room, " How like his father ! " — Things one would rather not have said — The legendary bottle of brown sherry a day — The historical Amontillado — The hard names that break no bones but make enemies — " An absolute and Absolutist fool" — " The next thing to an idiot" — The elderly gallant in the boudoir — *' I think it most gentlemanly " — The Schleswig-Holstein question understood by three persons only — Lady Palmerston's smacking kiss in the lobby — Pam and the Duke — Pam on Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Kent — How foreign statesmen cooled their heels in Palmerston's waiting-room — What they thought and said of it — How to deal with Austrian outrages and to enforce English rights in Brazilian waters — The cost of a hatless walk on Brocket Terrace — The ruling passion strong in death — "That's article ninety-eight j now go on to the next." 15 Contents CHAPTER V PAGB ARCADES AMBO" ...... 200 Palmerston on the Turf — The Palmerstonian pattern in men and dress exemplified by W. McCuUagh Torrens in his appearance, manner, stories (the whisky and the Cabinet), and by Charles Skirrow — Other early and mid-nineteenth-century types of both sexes — The third Sir Robert Peel on his father's death — Horse- dealer Quartermaine brings the three-hundred-guinea Premier round to Whitehall Gardens — Sir Robert's refusal of the high figure followed by the fatal accident on Constitution Hill — Outside and inside Pembroke Lodge — Sir Henry Calcraft's introduction to a famous veteran in Church and State — Lord John with his wind- gauge under the veranda and amid his historical souvenirs and illustrious visitors in his drawing-room — Thomas Carlyle on mis- representation of himself and on his own amiability — How the first Lord Lytton ** being dead, yet speaketh " — Lord John for the Jews — What Carlyle thought of Peel, of a certain Anglican service on a Scotland-bound steamer, and of the Church of England — H. Calcraft's and E. F. Leveson-Gower's review of Grevillian and Ellician verdicts — Johnny's "calculated indiscretions" and "dirty tricks" — Mr. E. F. Leveson-Gower and Lord John — " You will know what to say. Good-morning ! " — Charles Greville, George Payne, and ** the rigour of the game " — Palmerston and Russell compared — Speci- mens of Palmerstonian wit and wisdom, and of Russellian aphoristic invective in duel with Sir F. Burdett — How Whigs are born not made, and Lord John preaches ' ' rest and thankfulness " — Canning on the " mud-bespattered Whigs " — Cobbett's vernacular about the Whigs in general, and Lord John in particular, as the *' shoy-hoys " of politics — When statesmen fall out, body-servants come by their own — What Sir J. Graham's valet found in his master's pocket, and what he did with it — '* The Widow's Mite " : how Lord John came to be so called — Lord John Russell and Earl Granville compare notes about preparatory schools and agree in thinking mutton fat detestable — Adolphe Thiers on Viscount Palmerston and Lord John Russell — The Palmerstonian laissez-aller in private as well as public life, especially in connection with household bills — Something savours more of the " hawk " than of the ** merry- man " — How Palmerston and Russell made friends in 1858 and "hated each other more than ever" — The secret truth about Palmerston's dismissal from the Foreign Office in 1852 — The real cause not so much his " scores off his own bat " as his patronage of revolutionary movements abroad and the English Court's preference for Legitimacy in general and Austrian Absolutism in particular — Palmerston's tit-for-tat with John|Russell — The Militia Bill brings 16 1 Contents PAOt in the Conservatives under Lord Derby, and puts Malmesbur>' in Palmerston's place at the Foreign Office — Malmesbury on himself for peace, retrenchment, and reform — His Foreign Office economies — His short way with the Foreign Service messengers. CHAPTER VI FROM SIR ROBERT THE THIRD TO LORD DERBY THE FOURTEENTH ...... 227 A Piccadilly party in the eighties — Enter the third Sir Robert Peel — How " Magnifico Pomposo " lays down the law, backs his opinion, is proved wrong by the books, and pays up like a man — A modern Zimri — From father to son — Sir Robert on his seniors, con- temporaries, and men and things in general — Henry Calcraft's promise of introducing the writer to ** the lodger in Bruton Street " fulfilled — How Lady Granville ran the gauntlet of Mr. Greville's *' horrid " friends — The third Sir Robert's strange adventures and imposing appearance — His views about the fourteenth Earl of Derby — Nineteenth-century types of politics and play for the Upper Ten — Legislation or thimblerigging ? — Political country houses in the West and their company — S. T. Kekewich to be lent to the Liberals to make them respectable — Sir Stafford Northcote in the bosom of his family and neighbours — Sir Stafford's chestnuts — As literate as Thackeray could wish, though himself preferring Dickens to Thackeray — At home with Shakespeare and the musical glasses— On the practical usefulness of the study of Greek — Sides with Archbishop Temple against Sir M. E. Grant-Duff — How Priam in St. James's Place "waked and looked on drawing his curtains by night" — The South Devon "knight of the shire," squire of •' Peamore," and "the Rupert of Debate " at Eton and afterwards — The former introduces the writer to the latter — The fourteenth Lord Derby at William IV's coronation : " You have the gout ; must not kneel, my lord !" "I really must insist on kneeling, Sir " — The writer's call at Knowsley — How the Earl preferred the gout to the sherry — The Countess prefers the canal barge to the railway train, and the Earl the towing-path to either — *' One thing at a time " — Newmarket leaves no time for Imperial or home politics — Receives a wigging from the Queen and anticipates being *' beaten horse and foot " — The " ruler of the Queen's Navee" — Chaffed by his chief about his visit to Spithead — The ministerial fish-dinner — Lord Derby proposes " Sir John Pakington and the wooden spoons of old England " — The Earl makes merry about Lord John's "very bad company " with Lord and Lady Malmesbury — How for putting on 17 B Contents PAGE Wrong dress he was nearly turned out by the porter — The anecdote about the coal-scuttle — Succeeds Duke of Wellington as Oxford Chancellor in 1853 — Begins with Latin oratory — Ten years later brings down gallery and boxes by his Ciceronian welcome to the Princess of Wales — " Ipsa adest " — How and where in dealing with the Duke of Argyll Derby learnt the wisdom of the ** amuses him and don't hurt me " policy. CHAPTER VII THE POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF THE HOUSE OF STANLEY AND OTHERS ...... 248 Sir John, the mediaeval founder of the family — Contrast between the fourteenth and fifteenth Earls — Lord Stanley's uses at the Foreign Office and in Fleet Street — How a man of letters became a Consul — The Stanley Civil Service Committee — Enter an Ambassador with his dispatch boxes — Lord Lyons on himself and others — How Lord Granville worked, and how Bismarck disappeared — Granville at the Foreign Office in fact and fiction — How the work was really done — Sir Charles Trevelyan's wrinkle and its results — How Foreign Secretaries leave their mark — The confessions of a many- cousined minister — What the second Lord Granville owed to his mother — ^*'EnchanUe de vous voivy madame^ inviUi ou non inviUe.''' CHAPTER VIII FROM ST. MARY'S, WINTON, TO CURZON STREET . . 268 At Winchester — Old Trollope, young Trollope, and " Bob " Lowe — Tait is fined a pound at the meeting of the Debating Society — Robert Lowe as Member for Kidderminster — His article, ' ' The Past Session and the New Parliament," in the Edinburgh Review — Lord John Russell's wrath at Lowe, whom he regarded as the devil is said to look upon holy water — His Trojan horse similes — An albino — " The next thing a nigger with his banjo and bones" — " Vers de sociiti'''' — Lowe and Canning's dispatch to Lord Minto — Lord Lyons's letter from the British Embassy at Paris — What Lowe owed to Disraeli — His wrath at the result of the Abyssinian War — His rapidity of utterance but not of reading — Disraeli on Mrs. Lowe — Mr. Gladstone as a raconteur ^ and on the "big, big d " — A pupil, together with Henry Edward Manning, of Bishop Wordsworth— Lord Goschen's opinion of Gladstone — 18 Contents PAQS Remarks about the Oriel common-room — At Lady Strangford's — Lord and Lady Aberdeen's guest at Dollis Hill — The G.O.M. wins the race to the tea-table — His kindness to the outcast woman — Disraeli's dislike of Thackeray on account of his burlesque ••Codlingsby "— He finds Dickens "a delightful man" at the Stanhope dinner — The trio, '* Popanilla," •* Piccadilly," and the "New Republic" (Mr. W. H. Mallock) — His aphorisms repro- duced by Mrs. Reynolds — " No one is quite well, but I am tolerably well " — His advice to the two little boys — Lady Chesterfield — Her sister Lady Anson's retort — His gratitude to his wife — At the hotel in Bournemouth — His last words, *• I am oppressed." CHAPTER IX A CAMBRIDGE HOUSE HENCHMAN AND ORACLE . . 293 Abraham Hayward and the French gentleman on *' parasites " — The funeral service and mourners — At Blundell's School, Tiverton — Articled to an Ilchester solicitor — His lineage and ancestors — The lady's opinion of Hayward : " What a horrid man ! " — Disliked by Disraeli — Starts the Law Magazine — Thiers calls on Hayward — Their conversation about the alliance which was "hopeless" — Bismarck and the Kiel Canal — In the Lyme Pathway case — Roebuck excludes him from the Benchers of the Temple — " Hayward, Hayward, come back!" — Violet Fane, impatient at first but apologetic afterwards — Melbourne on ** a big balance at the banker's "—At his death-bed— Kinglake with him to the last. CHAPTER X SOCIETY, AND LETTERS .... 308 A. W. Kinglake on travelling in the Crimea then and now — The Eton all-night flogging — " Eothen's " luck in coming last — The duel that was not fought — The two seconds at the Travellers' Club — Lord Tennyson's social mentor — The remnant of the Cambridge '* Apostles " in London — A distinguished dinner-party at Dean Milman's — The host's stories about Frederick the Great — What happens when Bishops meet — The life-long social competition of Bishop Wilberforce and Cardinal Manning — Archbishop Temple recalled as he received the junior clergy in his Exeter days — Cardinal Manning's Riviera in Westminster — The Cardinal on Anglican 19 Contents PAGE sermons and their falling off— How Lord Macaulay was introduced in his reading to a "Mr. Sponge" — '* dark and smells of cheese " — A reminiscence of *' Jorrocks's Jaunts and Jollities " — The rise and progress of R. S. Surtees — Why te- Melville and the Divorce Court phrase — Improved on by George Alfred Lawrence — How ** Guy Livingstone " was written and with what results — The meeting of the wits in Air Street, Regent Street — George Lawrence's rise, progress, character, and work — Introduced at a Richmond dinner to Ouida by Harry Stone — A visit to Francis E. Smedley, the author of "Frank Fairlegh" and " Harry Cover dale's Courtship" — How the nineteenth-century masters had to wait till the twentieth for their full influence on English letters— J. A. Froude and W. E. H. Lecky in conversation and in print — Thorold Rogers and the scientific historians — E. A. Freeman's musical rides in the Mendip lanes — Freeman, Browning, and "Kentish Sir Byng" — Bishop Stubbs in the fallentis setnita vita — The historian as editor — Froude's advice to his " Eraser " writers — Dickens's readings in the West — How Thackeray was coming, but thought better of it — Dickens's intellectual legacy to his family — Disraeli and Dickens on the eloquence of their time — The Dickens school — Edmund Yates, his originality and his obligations — Had he an Egeria? — From ** Edmund " to " Henry " — " Labby " as raconteur and Radical — With Grant-Duff at Orleans House — How Don Emelio Castelar visits Galway and hears his health proposed in an unknown tongue. CHAPTER XI ROYALTIES, COURTIERS, AND STATESMEN AT WORK . 349 How and when the country first knew the Prince Consort — The opinion formed of him by his representative contemporaries — His services to the Duchy of Cornwall during the minority of the Prince of Wales — His Cornwall and Devonshire excursions — Royalty and Devonshire cream at a Dartside vicarage — The Prince Consort's legacy to his son and grandson — Greek art and literature at Marlborough House — King Edward VII as an Oxford and Cambridge undergraduate — "Oh! ruddier than the cherry" in Canterbury Quad — Greek lexicon-making on the eve of the Prince's residence — H. G. Liddell, of Christ Church — Robert Scott, of Balliol — Oxford and Cambridge influences on the culture of the coming King — ^J. E. Thorold Rogers on the Oxford Dictionary — The Royal fashion of hard work healthily infectious — How Lord Goschen mastered the art and details of naval administration in a fortnight — Lord Hartiiigton in his shirt-sleeves at Devonshire House administering India, to the accompaniment of the Sunday 20 Contents PAO« morning church bells, with the occasional refreshment of a visitor and of the Binomial Theorem — Statesmen of the Churchill line, from Bismarck to Winston — How Uncle Salisbury and the great Elizabethan Cecils live again in Mr. Arthur Balf)ur — The first Marquis of Abergavenny— How, with Lord Beaconsfield and Markham SpofForth as his " man-of-all-work " he recreated the Conservative Party, and brought it to victory in 1874 — The first Lord Burnham, being also the first of all modern newspaper men — The first Lord Rothschild of fact and fiction— Lord Rothschild and Lord Randolph Churchill on double surnames. INDEX 379 21 GREAT VICTORIANS CHAPTER I MITRE AND BATON A memorable Confirmation address in the old church, Bideford — Henry of Exeter's watchword for the newly confirmed, " Incorporate " into the Body of Christ, the Church — The skull-cap and episcopal robes in the religious light — Wizard or priest ? — An address that reaffirms all those doctrines whose repudiation by the Brampford Speke clergyman, and whose disregard by the Primate, Dr. Howley, had brought about Henry's long war against the Gorham heresies and his excommunication of the Archbishop of Canterbury — In- difference of his diocese to these escapades and local pride — His intrepidity as the champion of the reaction to clerical mediaevalism and the subordination of State to Church — Bishop Phillpotts' position, social and political, as a type and leader of that movement — His gradual preparation for it, first as Tory High Church pamphleteer h la Jonathan Swift — Society success began when he became Dean of Chester — Famous hosts and guests in and out of London — Diocesan work and social progresses in Devonshire — The right-hand man, Archdeacon Freeman, more advanced and uncompromising than the Bishop himself — The leavening of the West with anti-Reformation principles by Mr. Prynne at St. Mary's, Plymouth — The devotee who not only brushed the church floor but licked it with her tongue 23 Great Victorians thoroughly to clean it, and made the Bishop smack his lips with delight — Social discourses on Dr. Johnson's text about the devil as the first Whig — At daggers drawn with Jeffrey, Brougham, and all concerned with the Edinburgh Review — A Bishop after the Duke of Wellington's own heart — At Buckingham Palace with the Duke as Oxford Chancellor to congratulate Queen Victoria on her marriage — A little dia- logue on punctuality as the politeness of princes — The Bishop before the looking-glass at his palace — The episcopal sugar-plums and picture-books — The Bishop and the hunt- ing parsons — The Bishop's gracious way with an Evangelical clergyman about the "Shebbear rogues" — Henry of Exeter's table-talk as the rehearsal of his speeches in Parliament — The Bishop and Lord Derby understand each other about the Canada Clergy Reserves Bill — Landor's " Belial Bishop " — Henry stands for damnation, not con- demnation — The gamecock of the aristocratic Tories — The house party at Mount Edgcumbe and what came of it — The conqueror of Waterloo and Henry of Exeter meet — The Bishop lionizes the Duke over Exeter Cathedral — The Duke's account of it given to the Rev. G. R. Gleig — The dark and fearful face in the bath-chair — Henry of Exeter's doctrines and influence carried into Somerset by the Rev. M. F. Sadler of Bridgwater, who exercised on Archdeacon Denison something of the same influence as Archdeacon Freeman exercised on Bishop Phillpotts — The Archdeacon's brother, the Speaker, on "St. George without the drag-on" — The Archdeacon's own account of his conversion to Ritual- ism — The Vicar of East Brent and the school inspector — The latter welcomed with ** Old Daddy Longlegs wouldn't say his prayers " — The first Duke of Wellington as a West of England worthy — Restoration of the Wellington pillar on the Blackdown Hills — The Duke's West of England and other progresses — The Duke at Kilve Court, Hartrow Manor, and Hatfield — The Duke as I remember him in the West — His grace's short way with blackmailers and other people's duns — The second Duke's likeness and unlikeness to his 24 Mitre and Baton father — The same short, sharp, sententious manner of speech and of dealing with his fellow-men — How not to become a coroner — Sir Henry Irving's train from Strathfieldsaye — A dangerously good memory for exposing the plagiarisms in travellers' tales and the inconsistencies of fiction-mongers about their famous friends, e.g. the Cumbrays and the recipient of Bismarck's stolen goods from Gatnbetta — The Duke, George IV, and the cavalry of various nations — The Duke as an art patron — " Not going to let Coutts* people know what a fool I have been " — How the Duke raised a Paris monument in H.B.M. Embassy, 29 Faubourg Saint-Honore — The Duke, Lady Catherine Pakenham, and the young physician. Time, during the early sixties. Scene, the old church at Bideford, North Devon. A shortish, stoutish, dark-complexioned, and beetle-browed old man in episcopal robes, erect and motion- less before the ancient altar, addressing some ten or a dozen young people whom he has just confirmed. The voice as soft as any that can ever have been heard beneath that time-worn roof, yet penetrating into each remote corner as well as now and then quite ringing in its articulation. Such were the earnestness and strength in which the speaker gave out the word serving as the keynote of his discourse. Incorporate (into the very Body of Christ), '* be- cause," he continued, " regenerate by Baptism at your infancy, you have now entered into the full privileges and responsibilities of that Sacra- 25 Great Victorians ment." Words like these were charged with associations of the struggle between Church and State in which a few years earlier Henry of Exeter appeared as the Anglo-Catholic cham- pion, the restorer of mediaeval prerogatives and formularies, when as yet Keble, Newman, and Pusey were unknown names. The doctrines now condensed into a few sentences for the benefit of his Confirmation ordinands were those for which he had contended not only in the Gorham case, but during the next year had caused him first to denounce the Archbishop of Canterbury as a heretic, and next formally to excommunicate him. This step, of course, involved his repudia- tion of the Royal authority and of the Privy Council. According to the Bishop that body, among its other offences, had ignored the distinction between truth and falsehood, and had given by their spokesmen, the judges, decisions notoriously at variance with facts. Of these things nothing was known by the younger part of the congregation, and little per- haps was remembered about them by their elders, who had conducted them to the prelatic presence. The personal details noticed by the others in the oldest nineteenth -century type of the reaction from the evangelical movement begun by the ■Wesleys, were only those which most impressed 26 Mitre and Baton the present writer in what was not his earliest ghmpse of this extraordinary man. A skull- cap surmounted the bushy and projecting eye- brows, and in the dimly lighted structure, weirdly contrasting with the white surplice and with the generally low voice, seemed suggestive of a mediaeval wizard dropping solemn spells. During the first half of his episcopate Dr. Phill- potts improved the social success that had come to him unsought when Dean of Chester. ** Yes, whatever the truculence he suppresses so cleverly, I like the bitter-sweet flavour of my Henry's talk, with the occasional scathing innuendoes, uttered in the most mellifluous and softest tone of Christian charity. And then the delightfully sudden transitions, as it were, from the Mount Gerizim of blessing to the Mount Ebal of anathema. That is the real secret of the attention he gets When speaking in Parliament. There is something that reminds one of the flavour of an olive after dinner in the change from episcopal benediction to the criticism as of some * devil's advocate,' but all in the same gentle, gracious voice." Such were the verdicts heard at club and at dining-table on Henry of Exeter in senate and salon. His pen had first brought him into notice many years earlier. It now continued and completed with an increasing 27 Great Victorians public what his tongue had begun for the com- paratively few. In 1839 his occasional con- tributions to the British Critic closely united Phillpotts with the leaders of the Oxford Move- ment. At the same time his prestige and even popularity as a diocesan reached the high -water mark among the West of England clergy and laity. Hard riding, and, if kept within the bounds of decorum, something like hard living on the part of his official subjects, were not condemned by the Bishop if they went with enough of High Toryism and High Church. That combination made the Archdeacon of Totnes, the historian Froude's father, an epis- copal favourite, and his son, J. A. Eroude, an object of the episcopal wrath, when, having given up his deacon's orders in 1848, he changed from St. Ninian's biographer in J. H. Newman's series into the author of " The Nemesis of Eaith," and the panegyrist of the eighth Henry and the Pro- testant Reformers. But the Bishop found himself the idol of the Tory squires and high-flying vicars of the west, chiefly from out-doing even Sir Charles Wetherell in abuse of the new London University and ridicule of its degrees. ^ ^ To surpass Wethereirs vituperation must have been difficult, for Wetherell it was who declared that the scorn and contempt of mankind should prevent the new University from granting degrees, 28 Mitre and Baton The particular vein so effectively character- istic of the Bishop's private talk, in the opinion of Lord Granville and other good judges then leaders in the gilded chamber, first became a feature of parliamentary discussion under the Aberdeen Coalition Government, 1852-3. " The Canada Clergy Reserves Bill," ' Lord Granville told me, '* roused Henry of Exeter, at Lord Derby's instance, to a series of personal attacks upon us for bandits and Chartists, which first brought out the Bishop as a parliamentary debater." Society did not, in its own words, take its Henry too literally, or even seriously. It always enjoyed the sport of his outbreaks against his pet aversions. Sir Robert Peel, Edward Irving, Bishop Blomfield, and Arch- bishop Howley. Peel's apostasy over Catholic Emancipation would surely, he said, be followed by vengeance from on high. The first blow that the Bishop had the pleasure of witnessing came when, dining, with the Duke of Sussex, he received the news, Eebruary 28, 1829, of Peel's defeat at Oxford. ^ The earliest proposal of legislation on this subject had led to Burke's quarrel with Fox in 1793. I" that year its general eifect was to set apart one-seventh of the waste lands for the support of the Protestant clergy. Subsequent opposition to it was periodically renewed till its final repeal, in spite of all that Lord Derby and Bishop Phillpotts could do, by the Aberdeen Ministry in 1853. 29 Great Victorians About the same time Edward Irving's sermons at the Hatton Garden Church attracted the whole town. It was even said, no doubt untruly, that Phillpotts, carefully disguised, had been prompted by curiosity to hear this extra- ordinary creature denouncing PeeFs surrender to the Papists as likely to renew the bonfires and butcheries of Smithfield. It was, at least, cer- tainly not the voice of Phillpotts which, inter- rupting the preacher with a ** That is not true," provoked the repartee^ "It is well when the devil speaks from the mouth of one possessed. It shows that the truth works." ** Who and what," at another London dinner - table about this time, asked Phillpotts, *' is this Irving?" " The most powerful voice, equally musical and tender, the most admirable enunciation, the most glorious figure that ever adorned the British platform." The answer, one who was present told me, came from a fellow -diner not previously noticed by Phillpotts. This was the just men- tioned London prelate, Charles James Blomfield, then the ideal specimen of a " Greek play Bishop," whose scholarship Phillpotts, later in the evening, took an opportunity of showing as it was seen by foreign judges, supplementing 30 Mitre and Baton the exposure with a few biographical notes of his own. ** In his college library," said Phill- potts, " Blomfield had the run of all Porson's notes, yet with this help he could only manage to produce an edition of ^schylus, denounced by all German critics for the looseness of its text and the arbitrariness of its commentary.'* *' Neither the classics nor Liberalism," continued Dr. Phillpotts, "proved profitable. He there- fore went over to the Conservatives, became bear leader to a cub of quality, and contrived to com- bine with his Chester episcopate a benefice of great value. The two combined to make him the wealthiest pluralist of his time." Sir Robert Peel, overhearing this remark, could not restrain the comment, *' This beats the Gracchi complain- ing of sedition," for as a pluralist Henry of Exeter easily distanced all the ecclesiastics of his day. *' A nineteenth-century Swift," was Peel's de- scription of the Anglican champion who between 1809 and 1828 wielded the most formidable pen then at work on the High Tory press. The Edinburgh Reviewers, who gibbeted him in every issue, were more than repaid in their own coin. Here is a specimen of the Phillpottian invective against the sons of darkness, with whom Francis Jeffrey, T. B. Macaulay, and others were identified. The then Prebendary of Durham 31 Great Victorians allowed to each of them the slime of the serpent without any pretensions to its strength. The serpent's filth and the venom disgraced and de- filed every line on every page. What pleasure could there theji be in hunting down the loath- some creature, through masses of his own pes- tilential dirt? Phillpotts on discovering any of the Edinburgh gang in the corner of a room he had entered always abruptly left it, as it was natural should be done by a controversialist who had charged the " Blue and Yellow " with converting the " Whole Duty of Man " into a series of libels by labelling every vice with the name of the Squire, the Vicar, and the Church- warden. Gradually Henry of Exeter's periodical exhibitions and outbreaks in press, in Parliament, or on platform were looked for in the same way and with the same effect as Lord John Russell's indiscretions, whether from calculation or im- pulse ; while dinner -tables and drawing-rooms discussed, not only in London but throughout the land, " Henry of Exeter's last," just as the best part of a century later men laughed over the pranks and oddities in his own paper, Truth, in the House of Commons, or among his North- ampton constituents, of another Henry, whose name was Labouchere. So it went on through the militant part of the episcopal course. Henry 32 Mitre and Baton of Exeter's mission was to bring not peace but a sword, and, so far as concerned the lay world, less to revive old doctrines than to create a new sensation. Most of the paradoxes with which the Tractarian leaders fluttered the Evangelical dovecotes can be traced back to the Bishop's bolts, hurled often from a blue sky. Thus one day the Bishop elaborated an argument that the doc- trine of the Real Presence was inherent in the Thirty -nine Articles. Henry of Exeter's luck passed into as much of a proverb as his audacity. In the course of his onslaughts upon Archbishop Howley, culminating in his " excommunication " of the Primate, libel was piled on libel and outrage upon outrage. So, too, in his diatribes, written or spoken, against the two Earls, Grey and his son-in-law Durham. The latter showed how he smarted under the sting by bringing the matter, with some strong comments of his own, before the Upper House. Lyndhurst immediately called him to order, with the result that he had to apologize to their lordships generally, and the Bishop in particular^ for the language, which he admitted to have been too strong. As for the saintlike Primate, formally denounced by Phill- potts as anti -Christ, his partisans actually began libel proceedings. They came to nothing, and all that the rest of the world said or thought was, "How like our own Henry ! " 33 c Great Victorians Joanna Baillie, though a Presbyterian clergy- man's daughter, had made herself the chief hostess of celebrities in Church and State during the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. During his episcopal days, as he had been before them, Phillpotts was her frequent guest. At her table, April i8, 1828, Phillpotts so dazzled some and delighted all that his fellow-diner. Sir Walter Scott, exclaimed, *' In point of conversation, the wigs against the wits for a guinea ! " The array of episcopal headgear caused Scott to remind Miss Baillie before the evening had come to an end of the appropriateness of Crabbe's couplet :— Where all above us was a solemn row Of priests and deacons — so were all below. On this occasion, as on most others, Phillpotts held his own against all the crack talkers of the time—" Conversation Sharpe," ^ Lord John Russell, Jekyll, and Sydney Smith. Sir Walter watched it all as a tournament of talk, silently appraising the merits of the competitors, and, on the whole, in favour of awarding the palm to the Dean of Chester, as Phillpotts had just become. Only three years had now to pass before the Dean of Chester became Bishop of ^ Richard Sharpe, a wealthy business man, for a short time M.P., the maker of one speech and never heard of afterwards. 34 Mitre and Baton Exeter. He took the first opportunity of giving the House a taste of the Phillpottian invective, tempered by the Phillpottian irony. But at first his hearers were so much interested in his per- sonal appearance as not to pay full attention to his words. At the age of fifty -three, when his episco- pate began, it was a most striking presence. The deep olive complexion, the small regular features in the oval face, and the fine forehead, glowed with life and health of mind and body, and were crowned by a lofty mass of thick black hair, such as those who cannot recall Phillpotts may have seen in the Cambridge scholar, J. E. B. Mayor. The impressive signs of mental and physical activity were undiminished even to the threshold of old age. Candour and mildness beamed from his countenance. The soft, subdued, but per- fectly clear voice prepossessed all who heard it in his favour. Perfect placidity within and with- out formed the chief impression conveyed by his whole bearing, and especially by the half- closed eyes, which, if at other times they could flash fire when he first rose to address the assembly were almost hidden by the dropped eyelids. He invariably began with a confession of his reluctance to trouble their lordships, and an assurance that he would not long trespass on 35 Great Victorians their attention. The smoothness and ease with which ideas and arguments fell from his lips showed the complete mastery of his subject and the care with which facts, figures, dates, and relevant details of all kinds had been prepared. He invariably prefaced his remarks with some self-deprecatory sentences. He spoke " under correction," and with a painful feeling of his own unfitness for addressing their lordships on the particular matter in hand. But duty called ; who was he that he should disobey? The par- ticular duty that first familiarized the Chamber with his debating and oratorical methods was that of co-operating with the fourteenth Earl of Derby, the Conservatives generally, and the Peelite malcontents in particular, to throw out Lord Aberdeen's Coalition Ministry. The great Earl, a sportsman who never quite lost his fancy for an obsolete pastime, spoke of his ally as a *' lawn -sleeved gamecock," to be kept at all costs in good humour, and to be humoured equally as regards temper and health. The caution was not unneeded, for the pride of Henry Phillpotts at least equalled that of all the Stan- leys . On one occasion the Earl treated his Henry in rather a cavalier fashion. Phillpotts was up in arms at once, would not open his lips in the debate, and left the House without saying a 36 Mitre and Baton word. The Tory chief never repeated the in- discretion, and the two men planned and executed their little conspiracies for the future on perfectly equal terms. Even in this, secularly, his most aggressive period, the Bishop had surprisingly few personal enemies. It was Derby himself who explained their absence by saying, '* All Englishmen at heart like sport. Such sport as the episcopal bench now gives them they never knew before." Whatever abuse might be heard of Henry came nearly always from one and the same quarter. And Walter Savage Landor did not vent more Billingsgate against Phillpotts than against the poet Wordsworth. Addressing a friend in the Exeter diocese, he characteristic- ally exclaimed, " God preserve you from your Belial Bishop ! " " I think," went on Landor, ** I am beginning to understand Satan better than I did since coming across not only Henry but one of his pet priests named Wackerbarth, who elevates the Host, crosses himself, forgets the burning of heretics, and condenses the Phillpottian theology into a few explanatory words better than was ever done by his master, after the following fashion : ' Those who object to the persecution and extermination of heretics, do ipso facto charge all theological doctrine and belief with 37 Great Victorians being uncertain and dubious. For God will assuredly punish the rejection of doctrines essen- tial to salvation. Equally sure is it that the Church knows what these doctrines are. Does it not, then, follow that those who try to withdraw people from this faith should be treated as we treat a mad dog loose in the streets of the city ? ' " '* Our Henry," in public and private usually so gracious and mild of tongue, when he thought the occasion required it, or some weaker brother had wrongly shrunk from the strong word him- self, could use a '* big, big d " with great effect. The Bishop, I heard from one who wit- nessed the scene, formed one of the congregation in a Torquay church. The meek and gentle incumbent, who happened to be officiating, had a conscientious dislike of strong language in the Communion Service ; he therefore substituted ** condemnation " for the more awful word. The Bishop reared his head, and as he knelt with the rest of the congregation roared out " damna- tion." In most, if not all, the local stories of the Bishop as regards his diocesan relations, the hunting parson, throughout the whole of the nine- teenth century a peculiarly indigenous Devon- shire growth;, played a prominent part, and was generally represented either by one of the Rev. John Russell's set, if not by the famous '* Jack " 38 Mitre and Baton Russell himself. That clerical Nimrod's ad- mirably executed biography so runs over with characteristic stories of this kind that to this volume it will be safer to refer the reader than to risk the infliction on him of anything that it may have familiarized him with already. At a great West of England country house, I believe Mount Edgcumbe, some one spoke about the wealth of the clergy, and implied a disregard for the scriptural warning of its being '* easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven." " Rather," at last said Henry, " consider the im- pediments to salvation of which the clergy relieve you. To protect us from violence the soldier falls by the sword. The physician is of all men the least careful about his health. If I were to die worth half a million I should only be the absorbent of a poison that would have swollen up ten men to a needle eye of impracticability." Older than Pusey, Newman, and all the Oxford Tractarians by between twenty and thirty years, Phillpotts, as an Anglican type, marks less the reaction from the Wesleys and the Evan- gelical revival than a harking back to the mediaeval doctrine, discipline, and rites of the Stuart age, when no one foresaw the coming 39 Great Victorians violence of the Tudor " Deformation." Thorough and with the same objects in view, was, he never concealed, as much the watchword of his policy as it had been that of Laud and Strafford. Phillpotts did not so much denounce the Tudor settlement of Church and State as altogether ignore it, tracing his sacerdotal and episcopal pedigree from a date three or four centuries earlier than Gregory the Great's despatch of Augustine, or any other Bishop, to these shores. Such intercourse with the Vatican no doubt had its usefulness here ; it no more created the Church of England than it did the English monarchy. As a Somersetshire man the Bishop's imagination and reason were appreciably affected by the prehistoric connection of Glastonbury with a whole line of primitive Churchrnen. These were his " Fathers." The surest and shortest way to his favour was for some of his clergy to expend real research and thought on empha- sizing and illustrating that view. His favourite chaplain, Archdeacon Freeman, owed his in- fluence with him almost entirely to a book of great learning, in which all this had been done. Next to Freeman, the henchman specially com- mended to his chief by an enthusiastic adoption of these ideas was one of the Plymouth clergy named Prynne, who made the Bishop smack his 40 Mitre and Baton lips with delight by relating how a lady of his own congregation, not content with brushing the church floor, had no sooner swept than she insisted on licking it with her tongue. The stories once most widely circulated about Henry of Exeter among his own people generally bring his rougher side into prominence . He had, however, his gentler moods. One of his ordi- nation candidates had to preach a sermon before him. The Bishop observed that a young lady in the congregation seemed specially interested in the discourse. The preacher, summoned to the episcopal library for the verdict on his per- formance, found the great man visibly dissatis- fied. " And, my lord," he stammered out, " some of those who heard it liked it so much." " Meaning," rejoined Henry, " the young lady to whom you are engaged. Now," he went on, "let me give you a piece of advice. Don't believe any compliments she pays you before you are married, and after you are married be sure to profit by all her criticism." When, how- ever, the young man got to his fiancee's abode, he found the first wedding present had come from his diocesan. One of his older clergy, who had long held the living of Shebbear (locally pronounced " Shebber "), was an Evan- gehcal saint. '^ Shebber rogues " indicated the 41 Great Victorians local opinion of his parishioners. The incum- bent, talking with the Bishop, referred to this term of reproach. ** I am sure, Mr. Foulkes," came the gracious comment, ** that under you they must have outgrown it." Henry of Exeter owed his mitre to the Duke of Wellington as Prime Minister. The Duke as Chancellor walked side by side with Phillpotts in the Oxford Pro- cession from Pall Mall to Buckingham Palace to present the congratulatory address on Queen Victoria's marriage, February lo, 1840. The admission to the Royal presence was a little de- layed. The Bishop seemed a trifle impatient ; the Duke said something about the pressure on the Sovereign's time. *' May I," rejoined the Bishop, " recall to your Grace a motto, which, I think, you once said should be hung in the halls of all sovereigns ? It is the French motto, L exactitude est la polite sse des Rois^ From the Great Exhibition year, 185 1, on- wards, London drawing - rooms and clubs abounded in little anecdotes like these. Echoes of them reached the uttermost corners of the western diocese^ coupling so habitually the ducal sharp sententiousness with the prompit episcopal repartee that the names of the two began to suggest each other, and the admiring Devon- shire clergy of whatever school almost doubted 42 Mitre and Baton which was the greater man of the two— the conqueror of Napoleon or the champion, against Primate, Privy Council, and Monarch, of medi- aevalism in Anglican doctrine and ordinance. At the Athenaeum Club the Bishop met Talley- rand, and intrepidly essayed opening conversa- tion in French with the diplomatist. Talleyrand wandered off, and, meeting Bemal Osborne, referred to the episcopal remarks on interna- tional politics. "His lordship," he said, "dis- played a courage which surprised me, even in him, by delivering some half a dozen words on a subject about which he knew little in a lan- guage of which he knew nothing." Abraham Hay ward, however, to whom I am indebted for this story, and who overheard most of the talk, said that the Bishop of Exeter's argument turned upon a forgotten point in the negotiations that created the Kingdom of Belgium^ was expressed in French, if not highly elegant or idiomatic yet perfectly intelligible, and was admitted by Talleyrand himself to have put in their true light and perspective some details of the transaction often misrepresented, forgotten, or ignored. Most of the stories about the Bishop locally circulated till a comparatively recent date are apocryphal. He never suffered, as it was once said he did, any of his name or blood to come 43 Great Victorians to want. For the rest, to speak once more from my own experiences, very early as these were, I can distinctly recall being taken to the Exeter Palace. One side of the library was lined with bookshelves, so arranged that the Bishop could at once see and fetch for himself any volume he wanted, without the help of a ladder or chair, by standing on a light movable little platform, specially made for the purpose. Opposite the books, on the other side, most of the space was taken up by an immense looking-glass ; in this the Bishop could see clearly reflected every feature and movement of his visitors ; and it was in a convenient position for himself as regards this mirror that he had a chair placed for Gorham, the newly appointed Vicar of Brampford Speke, while, taking his place beside that clergyman, he examined him as to his views about baptismal regeneration. This article of furniture answered other purposes. His impressive demeanour, well -moulded features, and especially his broad, projecting forehead, gave Phillpotts a very noticeable appearance. Till past middle age he had an abundant crop of black, strong hair, bulging out into something like a little brush at the back of his head. In these personal endowments the Bishop took a modest pride. Having carefully 44 Mitre and Baton prepared his orations at his table, he rehearsed them aloud before the looking-glass, with all the action and gestures that were to adorn and em- phasize his periods. At one end of this chamber I was placed at a table while those who had brought me were conversing at the other end with our host. A picture album had been placed within my reach to keep me quiet, and presently Henry of Exeter brought me a little packet of sugar -plums, by way of refreshment, while I looked at the pictures. Many of these were portraits of celebrities then living, whose faces and names I sometimes recognized from having seen at home water-colour drawings of quadrilles in which they figured. Such were Lady Jersey, her daughter, Lady Clementina Villiers, Lord Lansdowne, with other members of the Bowood group, including Bernal Osborne and Abraham Hayward, whom in the flesh I was afterwards to know so well, Sir Fitzroy and Lady Kelly, Lady Molesworth, Lord and Lady Lyndhurst, the Bishop's particular lay intimates, Hudson Gurney, and a friend of his own cloth and rank, the Bishop of Chichester, who char- acterized, as the best piece of episcopal invec- tive he had ever heard, Phillpotts' attack upon the Whig Irish Education Bill in 1834. The collection, I afterwards heard, contained most 45 Great Victorians of those whom the Bishop really liked to know, including also a well-known Italian of quality, then much in vogue^ Prince Cimatelli ; Phill- potts had first met him as an honorary member at the Athenaeum in 1831. That was the second year, the first being 1829, in which the Bishop bewailed the ruin of the Constitution in the country. Quoth the prelate, " It is a sad thing. Prince, that you should be here at such an un- happy moment." " Bishop," came the reply, " I rejoice that I have seen already two events in England^ and hope soon to witness a third. I have watched Catholic Emancipation becoming law, followed by the overthrow of the Tories. I now hope soon to see the passing of the Reform Bill." The late Lord Granville, who knew his Henry of Exeter by heart, described to me his attitude in the Upper House, at two different periods of his life, when about to make a speech. " He seemed not so much to sit on the episcopal bench as to crouch. Suddenly some expression he heard, or thought that came into his mind, stung him like an insect attacking a lion. In a moment he did not so much rise to address as with a little bounce spring at his prey. All the force and energy of his being were com- pressed into that movement. This was the 46 Mitre and Baton Bishop at his prime. When his health gave trouble, or he felt the approach of age, he still crouched with the same vigilant, keen look, but instead of the elastic leap to his feet, pulled himself wearily up." In his see Henry of Exeter faded slowly out. He was approaching fourscore and ten when he left his palace for ever, to be seen for the future only by those who, walking on the Torquay sea- front, met a bath -chair slowly drawn along that portion of it forming Babbacombe Bay. A look inside revealed a dark and dreadful counten- ance set in a wild frown, pale knotted hands clutching at both sides of the chair. The whole apparition so terrified any children who hap- pened to behold it that with a shriek they hurried off, tearful and trembling, as at the sight of a Satanic vision. Nor was Bishop Phillpotts the only type of a great general of the Church Militant supplied by the West of England during the first half of the Victorian age. Two others may be repre- sented here, as they still live in the present writer's mind. One of these, throughout the whole East Brent region, used to be as well known as the reservoir created or cleared iby him for the health and comfort of his village. The Bishop of Exeter, as has been recalled, in his 47 Great Victorians efforts to bring back doctrine and worship to their pre-Reformation point, found his most effective agent in his chaplain, Freeman. The Archdeacon of Taunton received effectual help of the same kind from one of the clergy within his dominion, a greater scholar and theologian than himself, M. F. Sadler, Vicar of Bridgwater. Archdeacon Denison reserved all open sym- pathy with the Ritualists till, in 1865, a corre- spondence with Archbishop Longley convinced him that under existing conditions in the Church of England by law established nothing like a spirit of cordial unanimity among various parties could be hoped for. The attack from within had already begun ; his own time was nearly out. The Archdeacon, therefore, saw nothing for it but that the schools and factions should fight to a finish. The wealth chiefly acquired from his early immensely valuable pluralities raised Phill- potts to the station of a prince of the Church. Archdeacon Denison's high connections, family wealth, and healthy English tastes placed him as a clergyman among squires. They also made him something of a squire among clergymen, and gave him social pre-eminence even in that part of Somerset where " Squarsons " of high degree used not to be rarities. All this time his breeding, tact, and manifest 48 Mitre and Baton honesty preserved all his personal friends in the neighbourhood, even among those who were farthest removed from his views. To the end he remained a Somerset worthy, as Phillpotts was in his way a Devonian hero. His brother, the then Speaker, happily named him "St. George without the drag -on." The best stories about or against him were those told by himself to his friends in his lifetime, and recorded, no doubt, in his auto- biography. Such were his experiences with the school inspector, as detestable in his sight as the conscience clause itself, only because he per- sonified the principle of State control. When, therefore, this official visited the East Brent schools, the children with one accord began to sing- Old Daddy Longlegs wouldn't say his prayers, Take him by the left leg and throw him down the stairs. The intruder disappeared, but only to lunch off cold chicken and sherry with the Archdeacon at the Vicarage. From the two clerical types most character- istic of those nineteenth -century years through which they lived, one naturally passes to the great Captain already seen in company with the great Churchman. Archdeacon Denison be- longed by residence and office to the same 49 D Great Victorians county as that containing the birthplace of Bishop Phillpotts, and producing the stock from which the Duke of Wellington sprang. From the lips of his son and successor came to .me the highly characteristic sayings of the great man himself, presently to be given, and, so far as I know, for the first time, in print. The second Duke of Wellington never talked much about his father's Somerset connection or his other West of England associations, some growing out of his office as Governor of Plymouth (1819-29). That reserve always struck me as due to the neglect by its inhabit- ants of the monument to the hero and sage who took his title from the place. This obelisk^ erected at the foot of the Blackdown Hills two years after the battle of Waterloo, had fallen lamentably out of repair. In January 1853 the pillar was restored on th^ initiative and through the combined efforts of the Slade family at Montys Court and the first Duke's, as also the second Duke's, personal friend, my uncle. Since then the second Duke complained that it was once more in danger of falling to pieces. " The Somersetites," he said to me, '* have a strange way of honouring my father's memory ; but as for you, only your uncle saved the pillar from collapsing by what he said and did near 50 Mitre and Baton half a century ago, and because you are his nephew I am glad to have you for my friend." The speech thus referred to by the second Duke attracted much attention, not only on account of its object, but of the terse, classical diction, which caused the late R. C. Jebb, when Professor of Greek at Cambridge, to render it himself into Greek and Latin, and to set a portion of it for translation into Greek at one of the examinations he held. The Wellington district witnessed in the eighteenth century the beginnings of the great fortunes in store, for the Duke's ancestors ^ settled in that part of ' A footnote rather than the text seems suitable for summarizing the chief steps in the advance which changed the Wesleys, as the name was then written, from an inconsiderable family in Somerset to one of territorial status in Meath. First came intermarriage with the Cowleys or Colleys, beginning their Irish wealth and importance. Subsequently to this Lord Maryborough, afterwards Lord Mornington, while still a young midshipman, received the offer of a valuable Irish property from a distant kinsman of the Poles, on condition that he left the Navy and made his bene- factor's house his home. But at the time of this offer the outbreak of the Seven Years War saw the lucky lad on active service against the French. He therefore refused the condition ; like his relations, he supposed nothing more would be heard of the good fortune he had so narrowly missed. Presently, however, the old gentleman died, declared in his will that his young friend's conduct only increased his admiration, and left him a large slice, if not the whole, of the Pole property. Wellesley, it now turned out, was the primitive and correct patronymic. Such discoveries, it may be remarked in passing, have not been uncommon with 51 Great Victorians the county from early times. Hartrow Manor during the fifties was visited by many celebri- ties, amongst them the great Sir Robert Peel and Lord Lyndhurst. Kilve Court, some way outside the Wellington region, belonged, during a great part of the nineteenth century, to the great Duke's Waterloo comrade, Colonel Francis Luttrell,! constantly in those days the great man's host. Here, in my very earliest days, I first set eyes upon the conqueror of Napoleon. A school treat was being given in the grounds. The great man now and then Somerset houses, as of course with a good many others. The latest Somerset instance is perhaps that of the much respected Somerset squire who only reverted to the ancient and demonstrably correct orthography when he wrote Everard in place of the Evered so long and agreeably connected with Hill House, near Bridgwater, and Stone Lodge close to Dulverton. The first Lord Mornington married the first Viscount Dungannon's daughter, thus connecting the Wellesleys with the Downshire, Salisbury, and Talbot families. The distinction won by her two sons, the Duke of Wellington and the Marquis Wellesley, made this highly endowed woman, when incessantly cheered by the crowd on driving to Westminster, exclaim to her companion. Lord Cowley, "So much for the honour of the mother of the Gracchi ! " ^ Francis Fownes Luttrell, third son of John Luttrell of Dunster Castle, M.P. for Minehead, by Mary, eldest daughter of Francis Drewe, Grange, Devon, was Lieutenant-Captain in the I St Foot Guards at Waterloo ; he left the service 1825, after being Lieutenant-Colonel in the Grenadiers, having married his cousin, Miss Drewe, and become owner not only of Kilve Court but of Wootton in the same county. At Kilve he lived till his death in 1862. 52 Mitre and Baton walked a little on the lawn, but for the most part sat on a chair placed for him on a gravel path, near the front door. The feature that im- pressed me even more than the historic aquiline nose was the beautiful, very round, very large blue eyes, which seemed to take in everything at a glance. Before the party broke up a clerical voice gave out something between a song and a hymn with the refrain- God bless the squire and all his rich relations, And keep us poor people in our proper stations.- " By all means," grimly murmured the Duke as a chorus solo, " if it can be done." Other country houses in the north and east as well as west contain records of ducal visits paid about the same time as those to Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford with Henry of Exeter for fellow-guest. The earliest and most eventful of these occasions had been the stay at Ravens- worth Castle in 1827, the date at which Gode- ricli's growing inability to hold office as Canning's successor made it certain that the Duke would soon be at the head of affairs again. Roman Catholic Emancipation had, of course, been long in the air ; the Duke himself was beginning to think it would have been better to have given Canning a free hand and have 53 Great Victorians done with the matter than to have hunted him out of office and of Hfe for refusing to give it up ; for at Ravensworth he told his host and Sir Walter Scott that the odiitni theologicum, pointing to Phillpotts, then only a pamphleteer- ing parson, might put too great a strain even on Toryism. About the same time the Duke, going still farther north, repeated the visit to Reay, on which he had been accompanied by Sir Walter Scott in 1807, and again in 18 14. At Lord Reay's an excursion was made to the cave of Uamh Smowe. Here one of the party narrowly escaped drowning by a fall into the water, but presently reappeared, swimming strongly, and causing Scott or Lockhart to repeat, for the Duke's amusement, a quatrain in a then popular song— When Bibo thought fit from this world to retreat, As full of champagne as an egg's full of meat, He waked in the boat, and to Charon he said, " Come row me now back, for I am not yet dead." West or east, south or north, in country or town, the polite world throughout the fifties, like, for that matter, the entire country, indeed the whole Western world, thought of little but how personally to honour the deliverer and, as he next became, the sage of Europe. 54 Mitre and Baton In and about Grosvenor Square folding doors were opened^ curtains and footlights arranged ; the whole floor suddenly changed itself into a theatre in order that the hero of Waterloo might see the young people of the house and their friends enact scenes from his favourite French plays. The performance was sometimes varied by some young lady with a good voice obliging with a song. In no vocalist did the Duke take such delight as in Miss Jervis ; she was Lord St. Vincent's daughter, always asked wherever the Duke went, and seated, as a matter of course, next to him at table. Such little displays of grandpaternal gallantry and homage were seen nowhere more prettily than at his favourite home -counties resort, Hatfield, during the second Marquis of Salisbury's time. On the Kilve Court lawn the children, whose looks betrayed to the old warrior the expectation of something, were more than satisfied when the venerable hand, slowly enter- ing a pocket, brought from it a handful of coppers to be scrambled for. Any reader of these lines who can recall the incident will re- member that a minute or two afterwards a small girl, picking up a copper, dropped its donor a low curtsy, so much approved by him as to secure the child a sixpenny or fourpenny 55 Great Victorians bit. The coin might have been seen in a Quantock cottage, preserved as an heirloom long after its giver, its first possessor, and all per- sonally concerned with the story had passed away. On higher levels it sometimes ran to sovereigns and half-crowns. Among the Hat- field curios there might once be seen a gold or a silver piece bestowed, in succession to the christening cup, upon his godson and namesake, who just forty years later was to become Prime Minister. So, at least, ran the accepted Hert- fordshire version of the facts ; it derived further possibility from the Duke's devotion to the late Lord Salisbury's second and favourite sister. Lady Blanche Cecil, his interest in her marriage to James Maitland Balfour, of Whittingehame, and his declared wish to become the first child's sponsor . After he laid down the sword, " the Duke for thirty years more was the sage of Europe ; and in every civil and political effort he took a part which the wisest had wished for, but which none save he bore the power to execute— the over- coming of faction, which some call party, and the setting at naught his formerly expressed opinions, even for a time his own reputation, that he might himself consult the necessity of his Sovereign as well as promote his honour and 56 Mitre and Baton that of his country." ^ At the beginning of my Oxford days there were still living many who related to me how the Duke, then Chancellor of the University, had saved the situation just three decades ago, when the consort of William IV visited the place. Dean Gaisford then ruled Christ Church, and showed no disposition to incur inconvenience for the Royal lady's sake. He had bluntly written to the Court official. Lord Howe, that there were no suitable rooms vacant in the house. If, however, her Majesty would wait, she should be received at the Deanery, and her suite should be put up at some of the canons' residences. Queen Adelaide could not or would not postpone her arrival. Something like a scandal arose when she descended with those about her at the Angel Inn — a site now covered by the new Examination Schools. The Duke's quick eye, however, had seen his opportunity. Before, as it might have been thought, the incident got wind, he was on the spot, lionizing the Queen everywhere, seeing that the illuminations, dinners, and so forth, went off without any hitch. As a consequence the Queen received real delight from her reception, and when leaving for London let it be known that she ^ From Sherborne Journal^ January 20, 1853. 57 Great Victorians had never enjoyed anything more in her hfe. With equal dexterity, so I used to hear from the academic veterans who survived till the beginning of my Oxford days, in 1834 the Duke had recognized the then obscure germ of University Liberalism by writing to the heads of houses, frankly confessing that he and his friends found great difficulty as regards the sig- nature of the Thirty -nine Articles by matricu- lating undergraduates. He therefore expressed a hope that Convocation might see its way to sanction the repeal of subscription— though vainly, as it turned out, because a motion to that effect failed immediately afterwards by an im- mense majority. The Duke's attitude in this matter, as in that of Catholic Emancipation, recalled to not a few the words quoted above from a speech much talked of at the time of restoring the Blackdown obelisk. Before passing to certain Wellingtoniana coming to me from the friends or relations who saw much of the Duke at their houses or his own, I may give the substance of a home letter from one of these, who visited the place where the great battle was fought only a month or two afterwards. The two armies met in a large open rye -field. Throughout the summer and the early autumn afterwards the whole plain had 58 Mitre and Baton been reaped, and was covered with straw, while the atmosphere remained pestilential in the ex- treme. All the other relics of the combat were more than a hurfdred pieces of French cannon and a heap of soldiers' caps that the inhabitants had not thought worth the trouble of removing. This though during the night of June i 8th they had stripped many English bodies of their clothes. As regards the never-to-be-forgotten Duchess of Richmond's ball on the evening before, the Duke was the first British officer in the room to hear of Bonaparte's being within fifteen miles of Brussels. Contrary, it seems, to the generally received account, ** he whis- pered hurriedly to " no one, said not a word, put the dispatch in his pocket, disappeared for a couple of hours ; during that absence he drew up on paper all his dispositions. He then re- entered the room and danced all night. The one precedent for this was proudly found by the present writer's West of England compatriots in Sir Francis Drake's treatment of the tidings that the Armada had been sighted : " Plenty of time to finish our game of bowls first and fight the Spaniards afterwards." But during the fray itself, did Drake supply any parallel for that amazing calmness of the Duke, who, on the French coming up to attack the English 59 Great Victorians squares, actually laughed? Such were the great Captain's qualities, which were worth more than whole battalions to his army, and that, on the great day now recalled, more tllan once snatched victory out of the jaws of defeat. " It was twenty to one we lost the battle, sim'ply because those were the odds in favour of the Duke being killed." So ran the experts' verdict, brought back by travelling experts from their post- Waterloo tour, and handed down to one's own times. The fear had been, not that the enemy's horse or foot could have broken the English squares, but that the 250 French cannons would annihilate the whole British force, the Duke himself included. There had gone about a report that in those squares Wellington placed himself for safety. He did nothing of the kind. When it was all over he said, " If the finger of God was on any man, it was on me that day." At the hottest points of the battle he exposed himself with systematic coolness to encourage his soldiers. When asked about the conduct of our allies, he parried the question much in the same way as he did a certain well-known appeal of the Prince Regent about his imag- inary distinction at Waterloo : " You know, Arthur, I was there, don't you?" "I have repeatedly heard your Royal Highness say 60 Mitre and Baton so." So, as regards the non-British troops engaged. " I have heard," responded the ducal oracle, *' that the Dutch and others ran away in part of the line and behaved well elsewhere, also, had we been worsted, Belgians, Brunswickers, and the rest would have turned against us. The truth, however, is, when there is fighting for a mile at the same time, no individual engaged knows more than those in England of what is passing more than a hundred yards to his right or left." " The Duke," I remember hearing it said by one who had just returned from a visit to him at Walmer, " believes, like Napoleon, in his star, and in the midst of carrying his life in his hands wrote to me to inquire whether he could rent * Donnington,' Lord Moira*s Leicestershire place, for the next hunting season." Cruda deo virldisque senectus. The weak- ness of age showed itself in the rising and falling of the jaw according to the movements of his horse when, during his Walmer period, he rode " Copenhagen " with the harriers or cantered elsewhere over the turf. But persons who were much about the Duke in those days, as well as his own son, have assured me he showed scarcely any symptoms of physical decline till he had gone more than half-way through the seventies. 6i Great Victorians The kindest and best of my old friends, who wrote " Eothen " and *' The Invasion of the Crimea," may not have been a scientific critic of tactics and strategy, after the new mihtary pattern at the Universities to-day, but he was a close and accurate observer ; he had not gone through the labour of collecting materials on the spot for his great book without gathering a rudimentary acquaintance with the art of war. In the same way Abraham Hay ward's sharp wit, strong brain, ubiquitous experience, and sense of responsibility in his most casual utter- ances made his opinion at least worth some- thing on other subjects than letters and politics. Both these men habitually saw the Duke in 1848, the year of the Chartist outbreak. His mind, they agreed, had never been more vigor- ous and alert. His scheme for the defence of London did not, in completeness, wisdom, and rapidity, fall below the standard of his Penin- sular or Belgian strategy. To such effect King- lake expressed himself when dining at my house on one occasion, the two other guests being Hayward and the late Sir Henry Brackenbury ; to the last of these he appealed for correction or confirmation of his views. " I entirely," said Brackenbury, " agree with Mr. Kinglake that the defence of London should be read as care- 62 Mitre and Baton fully by military students as any other passages of Wellingtonian strategy." For these reasons it may be worth while to give here an idea of the Duke's dispositions, such as I owe to the combined good offices of Brackenbury and Kinglake. On April 9, 1848, the Ministers expected an immediate attack on the Government offices. The Duke therefore decided that the Thames bridges must be occu- pied, and the mob kept to Southwark and Lambeth. Suddenly the Duke heard Feargus O'Connor might choose Primrose Hill for his battleground, but such a possibility had been reckoned with by the Duke, who, it should be added, carried everything through without mili- tary display. He and his staff went about through the length and breadth of the capital in plain clothes ; while, in Kinglake's character- istic phrasing, his aides-de-camp were disguised as common-looking fellows that they might pass in the streets without attracting attention, and this though in ordinary times the Duke insisted on punctilio in externals and in routine gener- ally. Thus when Prime Minister he always reached his official residence early, hung up his greatcoat and hat before travelling round the expanse of tables for the various letters or boxes, and so mastered the papers submitted 63 Great Victorians for his sanction. Incidents and traits of this kind could not, for chronological reasons, form part of the writer's own experience. They were, however, in every case those which the sight or name of the Duke called up to the mind of the best placed and most exactly observant of his contemporaries . Most of the anecdotes in which the Duke of Wellington figured have long been public pro- perty. His son once helped me to separate the wheat from the chaff with the following results. Two at least of the most characteristic were rather against the Strathfieldsaye host of my own day. He, when in the Rifles, had been quartered at Walmer when his father, as Warden of the Cinque Ports, was in residence. Why, he wanted to know, had he not been included in a dinner invitation to his regiment? The answer promptly came: " E.-M. the Duke of Wellington begs to inform the Marquis of Douro that he is the only officer who has not left his card at Walmer Castle." With his second son he dealt in the same spirit on a dun- ning letter from tradesmen who had a long- standing bill against the young man. " F.-M. the Duke of Wellington begs to inform Messrs. Brown, Jones, & Robinson that he is not Lord Charles Wellesley." The second Duke also once 64 Mitre and Baton pointed out to me in the little Strathfieldsaye park the exact spot on which his father dropped his stick, and, to the little boy who picked it up, used what had become with him a stereo- typed phrase, " Can't you please to mind your own business ? " During the Duke's Premiership a notoriously stupid Earl wanted the Garter. " Why not," suggested the King, ** give him the Thistle?" then, as it chanced, vacant. ** I am afraid, your Majesty, he would think we expected him to eat it." In 1842 died at Kingston House, Bromp- ton, the most celebrated of his brothers. Lord Wellesley. A delay of an hour took place at the funeral. " It is very inconvenient," said the Duke ; "we might have been doing something else." Another brother had departed a little earlier. A lady sent an anxious inquiry after his Grace's health. "There must be some mis- take," was the acknowledgment of the friendly solicitude ; " tell her it is Lord Cowley who is dead. I am very well." He had no liking for Lord Ellenborough . The ex-Govemor-General came back to England with some remarkable stories of sunstroke ; about these, told at Sir Robert Peel's dinner-table, the Duke made no remark, though Sir Robert's face wore an ex- pression of incredulity. Appealed to by Ellen- 65 E Great Victorians borough, the Duke muttered, ** All I can say is that in some parts of India it is sometimes very- hot. " False humility, he let it be seen, was not one of his failings. A propos of some startling event which had just happened, he said to his old, really esteemed friend, Lady Wilton, '* That is the case, ma'am, according to my understanding, and" (slapping; his knee) "no one ever had a better." *' I should like to see the fellow unroll it." So said the host to an Apsley House dinner guest, the Russian diplomatist. Count Orloff. This intimate friend of the Emperor Nicholas had just exhibited the strength of his hand by crushing up as if it were paper an unusually heavy silver plate. The strong man accepted his host's challenge, did as he was dared to do, but in doing it almost tore his fingers to pieces . How the great Duke could deal with what he considered epistolary impertinence has been shown above. His son inherited the same faculty. On his father's death he received a letter from some lady, offering to sell for a high price some family papers of the Wellesley family of which she had contrived to get hold. He endorsed this attempt at blackmail with the words^ " I am telling her you may like to buy 66 Mitre and Baton them," and sent the letter to Lord Houghton as a collector of curiosities. The second Duke*s personal likeness to his father was of the same kind as that of Sir Thomas Gladstone to his brother, the Prime Minister. The features of the two showed a general but definite resem- blance. The mouth, however, and the jaw of the second Duke of Wellington, as in the case of the second Gladstone baronet, lacked the signs of decision and strength distinguishing the same features in the more famous bearers of the same name. The last owner of Strath - fieldsaye combined some antiquity rather than eccentricity of manner with a shrewdness not imworthy of his sire, as well as with his father's capacity for sharp and sometimes sarcastic say- ings. No one understood him better than Lady Dorothy Nevill, together with her son and daughter the most frequent and most warmly welcomed of his guests, which at one time or another included most of those, whatever their calling or degree, chiefly in social evidence. The Duke's refusal to take his name off the Carlton for his party independence — *' I shall do no such folly, for the position of the place suits me " — and his way of speeding the departures as well as welcoming the arrivals among his visitors were cases in point. Henry Irving, the 6; Great Victorians actor, had been induced by Lady Dorothy to accept an invitation on condition of returning to London the next day after an early lunch. For this meal Irving suggested 1.30 p.m. as a suitable hour, so that he might catch the train leaving Mortimer Station some time after two. "The day," said the Duke, "is hot, the roads are not too good, the horses are not yours ; luncheon will be ready at one." Billy Russell, the famous war correspondent, always found a second home at Strathfieldsaye . Here he once complained to the Duke of some family vexa- tions. " My dear Billy," was the expostulating comment, " I am sorry to see you are not yet a man of the world. Look at me ! I am old, I am deaf, I am blind, I owe thousands to my bankers, all my farms are imlet, the only man in whom I am interested has just married the least desirable of all living women, and yet I am happy." During tjhe early eighties he re- ceived civic honour, bestowed on his father in 1 8 1 4 . Before being gazetted to the Middlesex Lord Lieutenancy he appeared one morning at the breakfast -table with a particularly knowing smile on his astute old face, and with two pieces of notepaper in his hand— one a request from a local Sawbones, with no shadow of claim upon him, for recommendation to, as he had heard, 68 Mitre and Baton a vacant coronership, the other the reply he had composed while dressing. It ran as follows : ** Dear , Your clock goes a little too fast. Coroner Watkins is in perfect health, and I am not Lord Lieutenant." This led the talk to members of Watkins*s profession generally. ** Whatever sins," said the Duke, ** I may have committed, I have never recommended any one a doctor or a wife." About the time now looked back upon the Duke had among his guests an elderly young gentleman of the Press with a passion for talking about himself, his historic friends and acquaintances during the Franco-Prussian War. ** This little thing," he said, showing a ring or taking out a cigar-case, " was given me by Bismarck." "Then," said the host, "he is a greater rogue than I thought, for you told us yesterday that it came from Gambetta, and Bismarck, of course, must have stolen it from him." Another little reminiscence in a similar vein not only illustrates the Duke's formidable sharpness, but suggests that he had read a good deal more than he was generally supposed to have done. Another of his guests had recounted how, while yachting off the west coast of Ireland, he had heard the officiating clergyman pray for the sea-girt inhabitants of Achill and 69 Great Victorians Clare. The only notice taken by the master of the house was, '* You heard nothing of the sort, and are stealing from Lockhart, as I will show." He left the room for a moment, returned with Sir Walter Scott's Life by his son-in-law, opened the seventh volume at page 69, and read the prayer of the minister of the Cumbrays, two miserable islands in the mouth of the Clyde : " O Lord, bless and be gracious to the greater and the lesser Cumbrays, and in Thy mercy do not forget the adjacent islands of Great Britain and Ireland." On another occasion some one had boasted his descent from an eighteenth- century Earl whose family name happened to be his own, the title being long extinct. ** As for your story," commented the Duke, ** there is this much to be said. Lord at last sank into absolute idiocy, but as he died without issue your pedigree does not quite fit the facts." The great country friend alike of the first and the second Dukes of Wellington was their neighbour, the Winchfield clergyman already mentioned as honoured by the original wearer of the peerage with the account of his visit to Exeter Cathedral. His novel, "The Subaltern," had appeared in 1825, and gave what the great man called the best account of the famous battle §ver written, for the Chaplain -General had been 79 Mitre and Baton in it as a combatant officer before taking Orders. Mr. Gleig outlived the second Duke by four years, soldierly rather than clerical, except for the white choker, in his appearance to the last, and kindly giving the present writer many opportunities of direct communication with him. From Mr. Gleig, and not from his own father, the second Duke had the account of the great sailor and the great soldier seeing each other for the first time, not, as was often said, at White's Club or on any social occasion, but at the Prime Minister's in Downing Street. Here they had happened to call on the same morning. After leaving the premises Nelson said to a friend, *' I have just passed on the stairs a young man about whom, if I mistake not, a good deal will soon be heard." " His Grace and the Admiral," continued the second Duke, "had this in common. They were both the greatest masters of their crafts that ever lived. He who won Waterloo and he who died gloriously at Trafalgar knew practically every detail in every department of their work. Neither Napoleon nor any of his admirals or colonels had the same acquaintance with every part of machinery to be set in motion on land or water." That estimate endorsed an opinion expressed about himself, his victories, and their 71 Great Victorians causes, by the great Duke himself many years earlier. ** Mass^na," he had answered to a question about the leaders he had overcome, "was by far the greatest general against me. When he was there I could neither eat, drink, nor sleep. I never knew a moment's respite from anxiety." For the littleness known as " crabbing " the hero always had the greatest contempt. ** Are not," asked of him George IV, "the British cavalry the finest in the world?" The answer was, " The French are very good, sir." "But ours," repeated the monarch, "are better." Again came the same response, "The French are very good, sir." "This modesty of greatness," said Mr. Gleig, "peeped out quietly in many unrecorded little ways. For instance, he once met at my house a young lady )who did not know him by sight, and to whom he talked in the paternal way that so well became him. She talked about going to see a model of the Waterloo battle, then on view at Win- chester. ' By all means,' said the Duke, ' do so. It is a very exact representation, both of the place and fighting, to my certain knowledge, for I was there myself.' " The old clergyman, the junior by more than a quarter of a century of his famous friend, correctly called him the " soldier of all work," quick to detect any error 72 Mitre and Baton in performance, from the shape of a camp- kettle to the plan of a pitched battle. All the present writer's Wellington associa- tions are connected with Somerset, and really gather themselves around the pillar on the Blackdown Hills. In this part he was idolized as a local worthy, whose homely wit hdd speci- mens preserved of it beneath the humblest roof, sparing, as he did, himself much less than he spared others. Of his own portraits he made excellent fun. "They have painted me," he said, " in every possible attitude except stand- ing on my head." The only picture he ever commissioned was a large one of Waterloo by Allan. On calling, as desired, for payment |at Apsley House, the artist foimd the Duke count- ing out the money in notes. "Perhaps," the said, "it would save time to give a cheque." "Do you suppose," came the retort, " I would let them know at Coutts' what a fool I have been? " Throughout the west the Duke's muni- ficence was known to equal his modesty. In one year between the Tone and the Tamar his charities amounted to four thousand jx)unds. I had heard it said that the first Duke often drove down to the House of Lords in a hansom. In point of time he might have done so, because the development of the private cabriolet into 73 Great Victorians the hansom cab completed itself in 1823, though further improved upon ten years after- wards. The second Duke, however, main- tained that his father and a hired hansom were strangers to each other, adding, *' In those days hansoms were almost exclusively patronized by Albert Smith's * gents,' who drove in them with the short clay pipes in their mouths then more fashionable than cigars . For the most part of his Grace either walked to Westminster across the Park, or very much less frequently drove there in an open conveyance invented by himself, some- thing of the hansom type. I am the more clear on this point because my only drive with him in this vehicle, in, I think, the year of his death, was followed by the only speech I ever heard him make in Parliament. Some speaker had charged him with not understanding the measure then debated. * Well, my lords, all I can say is that I read the Bill once, I read it twice, I read it three times, and if after that I don't understand the Bill, why, then, my lords, all I have to say is that I must be a d— — d stupid fellow.' " " Did the Duke," I once asked, *' trouble to prepare any remarks he had to make?" "He never," was the answer, "spoke about anything that he did not know about in all its aspects." He had an instinctive passion 74 Mitre and Baton for details ; he would have made a first-rate sub-editor, for he read all the newspapers. He never missed anything in them : if fresh inven- tions, such as small patents, etc., were adver- tised, he at once sent out his servant to get them, examined them minutely, often introduced them into his speeches, and let the patentee know if they did not answer his description of them. No public word uttered by the Duke ever miscarried, because of his authority, not his oratorical skill. On his feet at Westminster he cast off all resemblance to himself in private or on the battlefield. Carried away by the im- petus of a vehement and emphatic delivery, he delivered his opinions on an enlarged scale, and revelled in superlatives. A vote of thanks to an Indian General was recommended after a campaign, ** the most brilliant ever seen." A not very serious disturbance exceeded every- thing within the range of his experience. *' His Grace's foreign politics as the first man of his age in that line? " said the second Duke, repeat- ing to himself my question. " My father, as you know, created our present embassy in Paris, and, in conjunction with Talleyrand, arranged every- thing for the restoration of Louis XVHI, after his return from Ghent, where he had been in exile. He was a real non -interventionist, aji4 n Great Victorians as such his whole system lies in a nutshell. * It is no concern of ours what form' of government other nations think fit to set up. If they prefer despotism, let them keep it. If they replace despotism with free institutions, let us not inter- fere. Our sole duty is that they observe exist- ing treaties, and give the King's subjects, when mixing with them, protection of life and pro- perty.' As for the various diplomatists with whom he had to do, his Grace placed Talley- rand as easily first as among generals he placed Mass^na. 'Talleyrand,' my father repeatedly told me, ' never talked for effect in society or flashed out witticisms. But if you carefully listened you were sure to hear at intervals some- thing so good that you would remember it all your life.' " After his victories it was not his universally acknowledged authority and wisdom which impressed foreigners so profoimdly, but his detestation of fuss and pomp. Eor instance, in 1 8 14, after the retreat of Soult's army, the Mayor and municipality of Toulouse prepared him a grand reception at the Hotel de Ville, waiting till he should approach the chief gate of the town. With a single aide-de-camp he rode round to another entrance, took his place on the balcony, bowed, and then disappeared. "No general," Mr. Gleig once told me, "ever 76 Mitre and Baton succeeded to such an extent in inspiring his troops with the integrity and honour which animated his whole life." His soldiers conse- quently won the goodwill of the people through whose land they marched. The natives there- fore permitted the Duke's hounds to follow in the rear of his army, so that he had more than one day's hunting in the interval of battles. Neither Napoleon nor the Duke ever allowed any one to shave him. The Duke took his razors to a small shop in Piccadilly, and waited while they were being set or ground ; his supreme antagonist carried throughout his cam- paigns a strop and hone made or bought in Ajaccio. The great statue of Napoleon by an Italian sculptor was the decoration of Apsley House. Here it happened more than once that, unexpectedly appearing when all the world was out of town, the Duke found only caretakers. "It does not," he said, '* signify in the least. I can afford to do without servants. I always brush my own clothes, and if I were strong enough I would black my own boots." One domestic office the Duke never performed —a family *' job." During the Peel Govern- ment an important place fell vacant in Ireland. One of his Irish relatives, anxious to get it, wrote : " One word from your Grace would be 77 Great Victorians sufficient." By return of post came the answer : ** Dear , Not one word, from yours affec- tionately, Wellington." The second Marchioness, grandmother to the present Marquis, of SaHsbury had perhaps a deeper and truer insight into the Duke*s real character than any other woman of her time. " You always," she once said to him, " take things so coolly, that I suppose you never lie awake with anxiety?" "No," he said; "I make it a point never to be anxious, and I never lie awake at all." With women his manner varied. When in India he had given up violin playing as a frivolous amusement and waste of time. After this his chief relaxation was supplied by human beings. These, if they happened to be of the other sex, were treated as agreeable companions or as playthings. In neither aspect could any one of them safely promise a friend to say a word for him to the Duke with anything like a certainty of suc- cess. '* No woman," he once said to one of his West of England hostesses, *' ever loved me." And this remarkably clever lady summed up for my benefit his whole personal ex- periences. " His father died when he was twelve years old. His mother was unsym- pathetic ; he never felt himself one of his 78 Mitre and Baton own family. His whole life was as loveless as his school life was broken and his education imperfect . *' Number i, London," was the Duke's de- scription of his home at Hyde Park Corner when, with boyish satisfaction and glee, he surveyed the finishing strokes to the structure, put by himself. The situation was then abso- lutely unique at the West End. On two sides were Park ; in front, scarcely* an obstacle then existed to bar the view to Kensington. The particular spot also had military traditions ; these, with characteristic thoroughness of in- quiry, he had found out before any one else suspected their existence. George II had given the piece of ground at the north end of Hyde Park to an old soldier who fought with him at Dettingen, named Allen. There, for his and her support, his wife kept a stall. In 1771 Lord Chancellor Apsley, who eventually became Lord Bathurst appropriated the site for him- self, and set the builders to work. Mrs. Allen, the apple woman, entered a claim of compen- sation for disturbance, brought an action (called at the time "a suit between two old women*'), and the defendant was cast in heavy damages. Mrs. Allen, with the little fortune thus acquired, found a more congenial home farther west at 79 Great Victorians Kew ; and George III increased the area avail- able for the Chancellor's operations by giving him, in 1784, all the space occupied by the Park Lodge. The original mansion of red brick had been designed by the Chancellor himself, who had completed the first floor before providing any means of communication with the second. The staircase, indeed, seems not to have been fully equipped till the years during which the whole place becamfe the property of the Duke's brother, while in 1808 Foreign Secretary, and living there in high state till the January of 1 8 1 5 ; five years afterwards it was bought by the Duke, who combined with this possession the official Downing Street abode when Prime Minister in 1828. The new owner could therefore place it in the hands of Wyatt, the builder, to remove its great inconveniences. The Duke^ however, made daily visits from Westminster to see the progress made, to con- fer with the clerk of the works, and to instruct the masons in certain details of their craft. When the Waterloo anniversary of 1830 came round, the casing of the red brick with Bath stone was finished ; the west wing and portico of the same material were added. The national demi-god, his fighting days over, had installed himself beneath a roof exactly to his own taste, 80 Mitre and Baton and with many surroundings practically of his own creation. No alteration was made till, during the Reform Bill Riots, 183 1-2, there were added the Bramah bullet-proof iron blinds, taken down by the second Duke in 1856. A propos of St. James*s Square, the Faubourg Saint -Germain, as he called it, of London, Disraeli in " Lothair " expatiates on the free and patrician life of its inhabitants. Of that life during the first quarter of the nineteenth century Apsley House became the centre, while his sobriquet, the ** beau," showed that the Duke ranked as the personification. Whatever may have been his views about the Divine Right of Kings, the Duke held the pro- videntially pre-ordained supremacy of the upper classes to be in the interests of the whole com- munity, and regarded the universal deference commanded by himself not so much as the tribute due to a great soldier, but the mark of respect which belonged of right to the most familiar figure of an aristocratic class that should know only one motto. Noblesse oblige. He was not only, to repeat a word already applied more than once, the sage of Europe, after his soldiering days had closed, but the chief around whom there naturally rallied' all the forces of aristocratic privilege and pride. Such a man 81 F Great Victorians could not wear his heart upon his sleeve. If he had not concealed his true self by a stony mask the " Iron Duke " might have been seen as the slave of sentiment. The few who had access to him in Brussels saw no approach to triumph or joy, nothing but blunt gravity in his tone, when he spoke about the battle. ** It has been a very serious business, a d d near thing, the nearest you ever saw in your life. Bliicher and I have lost thirty thousand men, and I don't think it would have been done if I had not been there.'' All that was for the world's consumption. Those who surprised him in his room often found him with eyes which dropped tears on the paper. For art and letters he had no turn, but the eyes and mouth proclaimed the whole being to be traversed by a vein of strong and deep sentiment. When those he loved were about him he could not but let himself go. After speaking about the battle in the way just described he was with his niece, Lady Fitzroy Somerset, and when trying to say something on the subject burst into a flood of tears. His most intimate friend, Mrs . Arbuthnot, died ; he washed his eyes and showed not a sign of emotion when he appeared in the House of Lords. The Rev. G. R. Gleig has described what passed when he first heard 82 Mitre and Baton of Arbuthnot Mmself being seriously ill. Clasping the doctor's hand, he articulated as well as he could, ** No, no, he is not very bad; he'll get better; he'll not die." At the funeral afterwards the power of self-control entirely failed him. Only a strong effort of the iron will enabled him to stay the service out. In houses that he frequently visited, or had but lately left, conversation dwelt on the minutest details of his person and manner. The impres- sion left by this talk when least untrustworthy was that the secret of his charm, especially for women, lay in his smile ; never, I believe, shown more happily than when some lady asked him, '* Is it true you were surprised at Waterloo? " only to call forth the answer^ ** No, but I am now." A venerable friend of the present writer was well acquainted with a once very attractive lady who had won the favour both of Wellington and his famous adversary. Which of the two did she prefer? She shook her head, and with a puzzled air said, '* Napoleon was the lover, but Wellington was the gentleman." Had the phrase " the first gentleman of Europe " been applied to him, it would have fitted him to the life ; for, with all his little failings, he showed a consideration for others' feelings at once the 83 Great Victorians mark of good breeding and practical Christi- anity. During his engagement to Lady Catherine Pakenham he was on foreign ser- vice ; he had not seen his fiancee for years. Her family disapproved of the match. Since Wellington, then Sir Arthur Wellesley, saw her last, she had been disfigured by the smallpox. The lady wrote a letter of release. He refused the proffered freedom, and married her in 1806, the year of his going into the House of Com- mons as Member for Rye. Of course before that, as well as after, Rumour, as with the great it always happens, occupied herself with her bonnes fortunes and escapades. In 18 16 his name had been mixed up with that of Lady Frances Webster ; she brought an action against the libeller, and got two thousand pounds damages. About the same time there were stories of philandering with Lady Caroline Lamb, his flatterer certainly (and he could take adulation in large doses), but probably not his sweetheart . Some years later than this a lady of the easiest virtue, Harriet Wilson, had a good deal to say about him in a book, reprinted, I believe, within the last few years. The Duke took no notice, but congratulated himself that her memory was not so good as his. All this 84 Mitre and Baton sort of thing soon became public property ; naturally the most of it was made in Whig circles. Hence, when he excused himself for leaving a Woburn Abbey party prematurely on the plea of Cabinet business in London, the Duchess of Bedford acknowledged the letter in six words : " DEAR DuKE,— Eor Cabinet read boudoir." Facts or fictions of this kind were limited to the smart circles of the period exclu- sively in London. They never penetrated or even, I think, reached the outside world. When taken in my childhood to visit the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, I have a dim recollection of a shortish figure, perfectly erect, seated on a little white cob, gently cantering down Piccadilly towards the enclosure where the world's show was held, sometimes amid the awed silence as of a crowd that beheld a more than human vision, but now and then to the music of cheers, whose outburst it did not seem in human nature to suppress or forbid. For much concerning the Duke and the habit in which he lived one has had to draw upon those of one's elders to whom his daily aspects had long been familiar. A first-hand testimony to the far-reaching social influence unconsciously exercised by him may now be given. It has been seen already how Bishop Phillpotts on 85 Great Victorians leaving Exeter Cathedral with his ecclesiastical counterpart mechanically, after the fashion of Major Pendennis, strained himself to his utmost height, and assumed something of the erect military gait. What was done without thinking of it by Henry of Exeter might be seen during those years and long afterwards in the case of innumerable laymen and divines. It was in the latter of these, and especially among those who doubled the parts of vicar and squire, that I chiefly used to see it. The parish clergyman now referred to possessed, perhaps, a Welling- ton nose. He proceeded to enlarge the per- sonal resemblance by taking on, more than half unintentionally, the Wellington manner. The Duke used informally to inspect those who made up his little establishment at Walmer Castle ramparts. The "squarson" now in my mind's eye, under the shadow of the Blackdown Hills, surveyed his household after morning prayers in the little grass -grown yard of his manor-house, fronted by a bowling-green trodden by guests who had sometimes included Lord Lyndhurst, Sir Robert Peel, and the Waterloo hero himself. The whole method of inspection, the issue of orders for the day or week, and the reception of reports from head gardeners, under -bailiffs, and the foremen of 86 Mitre and Baton hedgers and ditchers, proceeded on lines of precision not less redolent of the barrack yard or drill -ground than the life, movement, and sounds now predominant over all. Many years after- wards, having only recalled it by chance, I mentioned this to the Rev. G. R. Gleig. " Yours," he said, *' was by no means a unique experience. His Grace, you see, loomed so large in the national eye and mind that every class of the community found itself unconsciously reproducing some Wellingtonian characteristic.'* These personal impressions, even when not for the first time placed on paper, will at least be generally fresh enough to merit some record. They have no pretension to embody anything like a biography, and may therefore be sup- plemented by one of the Duke's little known achievements in time of peace, forming the appropriate sequel and completion of the results won for his country in war. The founder of the British Embassy in Paris was an ancestor of its present occupant. Sir Erancis, now Lord, Bertie. That predecessor, Lord Norreys, dispatched to France in 1566, stands out from other diplo- matists of his own, or a little earlier, age as among the first permanently accredited to a foreign Court (1566). Before then envoys extraordinary were sent as necessity might arise 87 Great Victorians on missions ad hoc— the negotiation of a royal marriage, the conclusion of a peace, the con- spiracy between two contracting Powers for seizing some possession of an objectionable or helpless neighbour and adding it to their own. The trick having been done, the agent returned home, found a grand reception with a grant of land and generally a title awaiting him from his Sovereign ; and, it may be added, when travelling for pleasure beyond the seas, was discreetly careful not to show himself again on the scene of his international triumphs. Queen Elizabeth's representative at the Court of Charles IX is thought to have lived at no very great distance from the spot occupied by his official descendant to-day. His special business was to arrange an Anglo-French con- vention which would improve the position of French Protestants. Of course he failed, and was superseded by Sir Francis Walsingham'. The importance of the negotiations, and the distinction of the political company attracted by them to the Seine, gave sixteenth-century Paris the same place among diplomatic capitals as that filled a hundred and fifty years afterwards by The Hague. As the prize of the profession the Paris Embassy went in the first half of the Victorian era to the Duke's brother, Lord Cowley. 88 Mitre and Baton The Napoleonic wars were broken by the short peace (April 1814 to March 181 5), the term of Napoleon's detention at Elba. Then it was that the Duke's ambassadorial experiences began. He had, however, at this time no special house for their performance, but did his diplomatic and political business in an hotel at the comer of the Place de la Concorde and the Rue Boissy d'Anglas. The European peace per- manently re-established itself in 181 5. The Duke now determined that those entrusted, like himself, with his Sovereign's business with his nearest continental neighbour should be suit- ably lodged. He therefore bought 39 Faubourg Saint -Honore, our present Embassy, from the Princess Pauline Borghese for £25,000. To- day it is worth ten times that amount, which shows the purchaser to have been scarcely less of an expert in the art of commercial bargain- ing than in that of war. Never— was the ver- dict, not only of the British Empire but of the European Corps diplomatique — did the Ambas- sador take possession of his new abode during months more memorable than those which wit- nessed the instability and insecurity of a dominion obtained by violence and fraud. Only a year before the malign influence of France had dominated Europe ; like a pesti- 89 Great Victorians lence it had enfeebled and tormented all the nations . In 1815 it was only remembered like a sick man's dream. Sic semper tyrannis was perhaps the only Latin quotation ever made by the Duke ; with that he clinched his pre- diction that future attempts to imitate the Napoleonic example would end in a like col- lapse. In the intervals of re-establishing the French Monarchy, the Duke made a little journey in Belgium and France. In the country inn where he spent the night an English lady was taken seriously and suddenly ill. At first there seemed no chance of procuring medical help. Presently, however, a young Scotch doctor named Stewart appeared among the latest British arrivals. He at once attended to the invalid, in whom the Duke had recognized the wife of one of his officers. His professional services proved so successful that the lady's life was saved ; her convalescence was assured, as was also the young physician's future. For the Duke, as Commander-in-Chief, at once nomi- nated him to one of the best positions on the medical staff of the Army. 90 CHAPTER II FROM WELLINGTON TO WOLSELEY A Lemon Street statue for Lord Raglan as a Truro ex-M.P. — Fitzroy Somerset acts " Ulysses " on the Latin play stage at Westminster School — Grinds at Spanish with the future Duke of Wellington on the voyage out to the Peninsula — By marriage with Lady Harriet Wellesley becomes the Duke's nephew-in-law — During the peace interval of 1814 Secretary of the Duke's Paris Embassy — House of Commons days — Military promotion, and created Lord Raglan in 1852 — With the Badminton foxhounds and in the Savernake game coverts — As aide-de-camp at Waterloo loses his arm, but will not lose the ring which is a present from his wife — After the Crimea — Cardigan and his colonels on the King's Road, Brighton — Aristocrat and hussar — The old patrician regime personified — Much virtue in the lash — The soldiers starving and the General in a floating palace — Alvanley and Cardigan in the shires — Assheton Smith and Cardigan ride against each other with the hounds till their horses nearly drop — The troops and the dying Colonel : " All safe for heaven ! " — Gradual appearance of new and better military types — Sir William Knollys, the founder of the Aldershot camp — Indian soldiers as English teachers — Lord Lawrence of the Punjab — Chairman of the London School Board — John and Henry's respective epitaphs — Comparison between the two brothers — Lord Hardinge and the Lawrences — Governor- General of India — The Sikh wars — Lough Cutra Castle — St. Helen's, Dublin— " Paddy Gough "— Chillianwallah— 91 Great Victorians Hardinge's gallantry in the Peninsula — "What, tents, and chairs inside them ! "—Mrs. Disraeli's luck in her nocturnal neighbours — At daggers drawn with the Duke of Newcastle and the Cabinet during the Crimean War — Dies at Tunbridge Wells in 1856 — Outram, the " Bayard of India" — Sir Colin Campbell, afterwards Lord Clyde, of Crimean and Indian fame — His delight with the House of Lords — With all he sees in town and country — Romps with children in the hayfield — Sir Donald Stewart as he looked and walked in Kensington Gardens — A typical Highlander, with Norse strain in blood and features — Return to India — Commander- in-Chief in India — A Councillor at the India Office — His character summed up by Lord Bryce — A keen sportsman — Picturesque figure and surroundings at Chelsea Hospital — His opinion of the British soldier — Sir Louis Mallet — His Board of Trade work — Appointed to the under-secretaryship in 1874 — Grandson of Mallet Du Pan, the French publicist and Revolution refugee — Comes to represent Cobdenism at the India Office — Free Trader, economist, and cosmopolitan conversationist — How he saw a great Duke fall down the stairs at a Paris cafe and helped to pick him up dead — Sir Henry Norman — Norman as soldier and pupil in the Lawrence school — The might-have-been Viceroy of 1892 — His last promotion to the Chelsea Hospital governorship — Anglo- Indian preparation for the improved officer of the nine- teenth- and twentieth-centiiry type — Roberts and Salisbury afloat — A glass of cold water : " Thy necessity is greater than mine " — Some points in common between Roberts and Wolseley — Sir George Hamley, the Wolseley type ; the new army and the results — Henry Bracken bury as a type and worker — Sir Evelyn Wood and Sir Coleridge Grove the only two survivors of the Wolseley school — Sword, pen, and Sir Evelyn Wood — War correspondent types from Xenophon to John and Henry Hozier — The three brothers, Sir William, Charles, and Keith Fraser — Brackenbury's diary of the Franco-Prussian War — Solving the mystery of Bazaine's movements — Hamber and Brackenbury's proof — The "hit " 92 From Wellington to Wolseley of to-morrow — The fifteenth-century Sir Robert Brackenbury — Sir John Pender's steam yacht Electra — Mowbray's " Est in conspectu Tenedos" — The value of Wolseley's associ- ation with Brackenbury — The latter's articles on military re- form — Office of Commander-in-Chief abolished — Bismarck's desire to interview Wolseley — Sir Charles Dilke given Bismarck's opinion of Lord Wolseley by the German states- man himself — At Cran brook, Mr. Pandeli Ralli's Surrey country house — " 'Spects I growed " — The officer who had nothing to wear — Albert Smith's gent — Cremorne Gardens — Altercations with the cabmen — Sir Vincent Caillard the one survivor of the officers trained by Wolseley's ablest deputy — The Duke of Connaught's request — Queen Victoria's pleasure — Allan Thorndike Rice and Von Moltke — The Prussian soldier a subject of conversation — Lady Wolseley and Madame Gallifet the best dressed women in Europe — Wolseley's short ten minutes' sleep before the battle of Tel-el-Kebir — Lord Spencer and the sleepy Prime Minister — Wellington flirts with Madame Quintana just before the battle of Orthes, where the Duke was slightly injured — The Duke has a short repose before the battle of St. Sebastian — Lord Kitchener's preference for gold and silver tea-services to " swords of honour." In Lemon Street, Truro, there stands a monu- ment to the explorer Lander. When I first saw it a generation ago, a proposal, periodically made, was being pressed, more earnestly than usual, to supplement it with some memorial of Wellington's best known officer and pupil, chief of the staff in war, during the peace inter- val of 1 8 14- 1 5, on the Duke's secretarial staff ,at the Paris Embassy, and eventually, after 93 Great Victorians Napoleon's fall, military secretary to his old chief at the Horse Guards. Lord Fitzroy Somerset's connection with Cornwall consisted in his father, Henry, the fifth Duke of Beau- fort, having married Elizabeth, Admiral Bos- cawen's daughter. The picturesque home of the Boscawen family was Tregothnan, on the river Fal, two oi" three miles from Truro town. When, therefore, he had laid down his arms, and wished to serve his country in peace, the borough of Truro provided him' with a seat at St. Stephen's from 1818 to 1820, and again from 1826 to 1829. Birth and association, therefore, gave him a place in the politico - military order much like that belonging to the great Duke himself. In his own person and character he showed from the first the blend of the courtly grace and keen sportmanship common to the Somersets with the chivalrous courage, the tenacity, and doggedness characteristic of the " sea-dogs " in general and of the Boscawens in particular. Breeding, therefore, environment, temper, and bearing made Lord Raglan as much a representative as the Duke himself of the aristocratic school that was to dominate the army from Waterloo to Sebastopol. Fitzroy Somerset resembled Arthur Wellesley in familiarity with Thames -side but not Eton 94 From Wellington to Wolseley playing fields. His education had been picked up at Westminster, beginning when that school had not ceased to be the nursery of great public servants. Among the earliest of these had been the Elizabethan voyager Hakluyt, and in the next century Sir Henry Vane and other political leaders of the Cromwellian era. So late as 1846 the Russell Cabinet consisted largely of Old Westminsters. Among Raglan's Westminster contemporaries, eventually like himself field- marshals, were Lords Anglesey, Byng, Strafford, and Combermere. Plautus and Terence have not alw^ays supplied the sole repertory of the Westminster Latin play. In Fitzroy Somerset's day Latin dramas were written by a certain Gager for the Westminster scholars ; one of these, ** Ulysses Redux," held a school stage till modern times, and was acted in by Fitzroy Somerset, who told Kinglake he had come across some lines in it containing in germ a doctrine afterwards developed by the playwright with much learning in a treatise advocating the right of husbands to beat their wives. Fitzroy Somerset entered the Army in 1804 as a cornet in the 4th Light Dragoons. Four years later he exchanged into the 6th garrison battalion^ and very shortly afterwards transferred himself to the 43rd Regiment. He had no acquaint- 95 Great Victorians ance with Sir Arthur Wellesley till the time of starting for the Peninsula. His introduction to him then grew into a friendship before their destination was reached. On their way out the two men worked together at the Spanish lan- guage. Throughout the entire war he remained at Wellington's side, first as aide-de-camp, then as military secretary. The Bourbons were re- stored for the first time in 1814. Louis XVIII abdicated and fled in the spring of the next year. The peace re-established the British Embassy in Paris, with Lord Fitzroy Somerset for Secre- tary of Embassy. The quiet interval gave the soldier-diplomatist the opportunity of finding a wife in Emily Harriet Wellesley, the third Earl of Mornington's daughter. He thus became nephew by marriage of the great man himself. Fitzroy Somerset's conversion into Lord Raglan two years before his appointment to the Crimean command might have been taken as indicating his place in official opinion. Out of London, in the Badminton country, no run with the hounds finished that did not see him in at the death. In London clubs and drawing-rooms, to afternoon strollers from Whitehall by way of St. James's Street and Pall Mall to Piccadilly, his tall, broad-shouldered, 96 From Wellington to Wolseley well-preserved figure had long been only less familiar than that of Wellington himself. For he had been Military Secretary to the Com- mander-in-Chief at the Horse Guards till the Duke's death in 1852. Then came a popular feeling that, as the last representative of the great Wellington tradition, in the event of war with Russia the country should have the benefit of his associations and services. All his work in every department was admitted by the severest judges to have been the very best possible of its kind. But outside Whitehall he had no great experience, and even there less opportunity than he might have had of develop- ing a power of initiative, because Wellington's extraordinary grasp and prodigious industry made him absolutely independent and self- sufficing. So said Kinglake to his Bridgwater constituents when the war broke out ; he placed the same opinion on permanent record in his " Invasion of the Crimea." ^ Some misgivings at this choice arose from a doubt whether Raglan's thirty years' apprenticeship to variou3 military departments in peace time would be found the best preparation for the very different responsibilities of the field, where, as Kinglake put it, with picturesque force, the genius of war ' Vol. II, p. 168. 97 G Great Victorians abhors uniformity and tramples upon forms and regulations. Such considerations, however, weighed only with the thoughtful and more experienced few. The English people at large knew nothing about Lord Raglan beyond his name. A few, perhaps, remembered his tall, well-knit, and proportionate figure as they had seen him in Pall Mall, the bright, placid face surmounting the strong, square shoulders, and the skill with which the empty sleeve of the arm lost at Waterloo was so arranged that its emptiness was almost concealed. Others heard from those who had seen him with the Badmin- ton Hunt or in the game coverts of his native district how little this loss interfered with his prowess as a sportsman, with what skill he took his own line in the chase, and how at the end of the run, over the stiffest country, he was always in the same field as the fox. First-rate judgment, indeed, united itself in the English Generalissimo with quickness of sight and promptitude in decision. A manner concili- atory but commanding went with a courteous and unfailing deference in details to the opinion of others. That quality might have been in itself e^ough to justify the selection, for the tall, slight, sharp -featured Frenchman, Marshal St. Arnaud, who was to be Raglan's colleagjue, might, it was 98 From Wellington to Wolseley thought by those who knew him, rather heavily tax the patience and self-control of the British officers. From his boyhood at Westminster to his departure from the Crimea nothing, it was said by those who had been much with him, could ruffle Fitzroy Somerset's temper or shake his presence of mind. The popular estimate found its support in several anecdotes circulated first throughout those regions connected from time immemorial with the Commander-in-Chief's family. The oldest of these stories went back to Welling- tonian days, and connected itself with the lost arm. It must have found its way into print long since, but remains so illustrative of the man as to be repeated here. Late in the day of Waterloo, as he stood by the conqueror's side, a bullet from the roof of La Haye Sainte struck his right elbow, and necessitated the amputation of the arm. He went through the process without a word till he saw the attempt being made to place the limb out of his sight. *' Hallo ! " he cried, ** don't take away that arm till I have taken off my ring "—one given him by Lady Raglan. The home affections, indeed, were always strong with him. *' I never saw him really moved but once/' was the expnerience of W. H. 99 Great Victorians Russell^ the famous war correspondent. " He was reading a letter ; his eyes filled with tears . * It is/ he said, as if apologizing, * from my daughter.' " Some years before the period of his Crimean command, he had been one of a shooting party at Savernake, Lord Ailesbury's place, near Marl- borough. Two fingers of the keeper loading Lord Jocelyn's gun were blown off. The general practitioner of the district^ with his surgical in- struments, soon appeared, and a painful opera- tion, occupying a few minutes, followed. The company, to encourage the man, stood round, but Lord Raglan was so overcome as nearly to faint^ and was compelled to withdraw. Yet this was the man who had been unmoved in the thickest of a hundred fights^ and whose calmness amidst all the horrors of war had passed into a European proverb, causing Marshal St. Arnaud to say, " C'est tou jours le meme calme qui ne le quitte jamais." I pass to the last military commander of the old aristocratic school, recalled by me to-day even more distinctly than any of his contempo- raries. In the year or two years following the Crimean War the great sight of the Brighton season was Lord Cardigan, of Balaclava fame, on horseback in the King's Road. Riding; with 100 From Wellington to Wolseley him were some of his best-known officers, the. fourth Sir George .Wombwell, Sir Roger Palmer, and Harrington Trevelyan, my old personal friend and relative, from whom I obtained my first knowledge of the Crimean officers, their character and appearance. Mounted on the beautiful black charger, whose glossy coat flashed and glistened in the frequent bursts of autumnal sunshine, the leader of the Light Brigade seemed his countrymen's ideal of a cavalry chief, still in the prime of life. Yet, like the Commander-in-Chief, the leader of the Light Brigade had first seen light in the eighteenth century. Born in 1797, Lord Car- digan numbered only eleven years less than Lord Raglan. Raglan's keenly observant manner, swift, gliding walk on foot, firm, easy seat on horseback, made him, at the age ofl sixty -six, the admiration and envy of men ten years his junior. His contemfrt of fussy or ad- vertising display found no reflection in the temper of his French colleague, but his ready acquiescence in self-effacement in non-essentials won him affection as well as respect among our allies. Both the commanders of the whole ex- pedition and of the Light Cavalry Brigade were middle-aged men or rather more. Lord Raglan, the elder by nine years, was sixty-six. Lord lOI Great Victorians Gardigan fifty-seven. Cardigan, however, entered the Army twenty years after Raglan. Raglan had been only sixteen when he obtained a cornetcy in the 4th Light Dragoons ; Car- digan on receiving the same position in the 8th Hussars ^ was twenty-seven. All the great Generals of the mid -Victorian age, not only those already mentioned but those presently to be met with, belonged by birth, like the Duke of Wellington, to the eighteenth century. Like him, too, they all presaged at times the human sentiment, the intellectual en- lightenment, and the social tolerance which passed for nineteenth - century attributes. To that rule Cardigan formed the one exception. Wellington and Raglan were students as well as fighters. Cardigan never opened a book after he left school, and showed a patrician contempt for habits of intellectual as well as moral self- discipline and control. With the absorbing selfishness, the imperiousness, the caprice, and the inhumanity of the first Erederick William of Prussia, he combined, over and above his high courage, the solitary merit of a brutal frankness. He never pretended to an interest ^ His later commissions were : 8th Hussars, Lieutenant- Colonel, 1830; 15th Hussars, Lieutenant-Colonel, 1832; nth Hussars, Lieutenant-Colonel, 1836. In the nth he stayed fpr the remainder of his regimental service. 102 From Wellington to Wolseley that he would have despised himself for feeling in fellow-officers, men, or any human being. With those about him his life was one long quarrel about the merest trifles— for instance, one day the colour of a bottle, another the size of a teacup i— leading, in the case of his equals, to duels, and of his inferiors to a heavy dose of the lash. He had succeeded to his title in the year Queen Victoria came to the throne. While Lord Brudenell he had won notoriety by the rashness of his charges ag"ainst officers he disliked .2 At a cost of not much less than £30,000 Lord Cardigan in seven years had risen by purchase from cornet to Colonel. This outlay, it would seem, not only by himself but by many of his toadies, was held to justify his treatment of other officers as anything but gentlemen, and of private soldiers as being below the level of the *' beasts that perish.'* He flogged one man on Simday in the riding- school, where morning church had just been held ; he sentenced another to a hundred lashes with an interval of half a minute between each, thus protracting the agony ^ Kinglake, vol. v. p. 13. » These accusations, resting only on the gossip of the orderly- room, had in 1836 cost him the command of the 15th Hussars, and involved his transfer from that regiment to the nth Light Dragoons, afterwards known as the nth Hussars, 103 Great Victorians of the tortured man by something like fifty minutes. In the regiment which he controlled there were, during the space of two years, 105 courts -martial and 700 punishments of de- faulters, i Public opinion in the middle of the nineteenth century was neither so strong nor so healthy as one is encouraged to consider it to- day. The new wealth, especially if it went with the old acres and high titles, covered a multi- tude of sins. Lord Cardigan's yacht, a floating palace, with its fine cuisine, well-stocked cellar, French chef, a host of servants, lay at g^nchor within sight of the battlefields. Even those of his countrymen at home who doubted as to the appropriateness of the display felt something of what they liked to think patriotic pride at the impression produced alike on our allies and the enemy by luxury and magnificence waiting, amid the miseries of war, on the great English nobleman, whose recklessness of his own life almost equalled his indifference to the suffer- ings and sickness and wants of others. Unless these considerations are borne in mind, no true idea can be formed of the Light Cavalry leader as his fellow-countrymen saw him, not only in the equestrian promenade on the Brighton sea- front, witnessed by the present writer, but as * Walpole's "History of England," vol. iv. p. 431. ?04 From Wellington to Wolseley he stood forth to the entire poiblic on the Crimean battlefields. On a higher social level his contem^raries saw nothing unusual in the insolence which with him so often approached or rather passed into brutality. " You should," said Hugo Bohun in Disraeli's novel, '* Lothair," ** buy a theatre ; it is the high mode for a swell." The duel in its palmiest period did not in the least improve the manners of the hatit ton. As Car- digan was to others, so others had habitually been to him'. Lord Alvanley combined some faculty of smart sayings with a mastery of the art of insult that formed the badge of all his caste. On the first day of a hunting season the two men met on a field just out of Melton. Taking his hat off, Alvanley said to Cardigan, " I hereby beg to apologize to you, not only for any past offences, but for any I may commit during the coming season." During the same year Lord Cardigan's most characteristic quali- ties had been shown in a run with the Queen's staghounds. From one who rode near him they were thus described to me. '* Lord Cardigan never gambled with his Hfe or limb; he feared nothing, rode straight, had very few mishaps, partly because of his magnificent animals, but even more thanks to his perfect horsemanship^ 105 Great Victorians unfailing deliberation, and sound judgment." All this had been seen, not only by his fellow- comlnanders in the war, but by the Duke ojf Wellington, who in reality attached more im- portance to the hunting-field than the Eton playing-fields as a military training. The two rivals of their time on horseback were Cardigan and Assheton Smith. On the evening before the day's run with the stag- hounds the pair met at the dinner -table of a Hampshire country house where they were stay- ing. They glared at each other like mortal enemies about to fight the next day, and rivals with a vengeance they then showed themselves. They rode a regular race till both their horses were exhausted. Cardigan finished two or three hundred yards farther than Smith, and so claimed the victory. Next to his personal valour and the grand scale on which all his life was ordered came Lord Cardigan's muni- ficent esprit de corps. An old trooper of his regiment lived in the cottage near a house where I often stayed during the late sixties. I was there at a short distance from " Deene," Lord Cardigan's place, when the soldier who had fought with him in many battles brought news that his old Colonel lay dying. *' Let us hope," was the devout comment of a rustic bystander 100 From Wellington to Wolseley who heard the news, " that he is all safe for heaven." *' Safe for heaven ! " echoed the man. " One who charged the whole Russian Army is not likely to be kept back from going where he wishes by all the powers of darkness." Lord Cardigan, it was said by some after his retirement from service as well as on his death, left a name which would for ever be execrated because of his severities by the rank and filei of the British Army. He did nothing of thei sort. All his excesses had, indeed, been for- gotten even before he passed away by the representative class on which his hand had fallen most heavily. His title, the splendour of his equipages, his fine soldiership, and, above all, the sums lavished by him on the regiment which he had made the smartest in the service, were remembered with appreciation and pride long after his floggings and court -martiallings were forgotten. Neither non-commissioned officers nor plain privates made the first outcry or led the earliest movement against the bar- barities of the lash. These, in the military estimate, helped to make hard Englishmen, like Charles Kingsley's hard, grey weather, or bully- ing at school and the most ferocious football code. Lord Cardigan's trial and acquittal for 107 Great Victorians wounding Captain Tuckett in a duel excited not the slightest prejudice against him in any quarter. This, indeed, was to have been ex- pected, from the admission made in the House of Commons as lately as 1844, that an officer who refused to fight a duel would be liable to dismissal. I Some years earlier than that Baron Hotham, in charging a jury, said that the acquittal of an officer who had slain another in a duel would be lovely in the sight of God and man. The public commentators on this statement boasted that our judicial annals had not been darkened with a single con- viction for murder in the case of a duel fairly fought .2 Lord Cardigan's active career had ended before the middle-class public opinion, graded by the first Reform Bill, had organized itself. During the previous intensely aristocratic epoch the nation at large only saw in him what was seen by the admiring loungers on the King's Road, Brighton, after the war— a mag- nificent specimen of the coronet power which helped to secure England victory over her enemies on land or sea, and in other ways made itself indispensable to the national welfare. ^ Hansard, Ixxiii. p. 827. • Townsend's "Modern State Trials," vol. i. pp. 152-5. 108 From Wellington to Wolseley To a type very different from those so far mentioned belonged the nineteenth - century captains who had made the soldiers' well-being their care, and who at the beginning of their course broke with the disciplinarian ideas per- sonified by the purchase officers of the Cardi- gan school. Among those mentioned for the chief command in the Crimea on Lord Raglan's death had been the father of the present Lord Knollys. Descended, like the Cecils, from a long line of Elizabethan statesmen. Sir William Knollys combined with the presence and manner becoming his lineage the shrewd wisdom in affairs and the wise tolerance as regards indi- viduals that marked the leading men of the period in which his family first became famous. The founder of the Aldershot camp, as its earliest commander he had taken a leading part in the enquiries and proposals made by the Committee of Military Education. No officer of his standing and experience possessed in an equal degree the confidence of the parlia- mentary leaders, on both sides, of the Court, and of the country. Hence the satisfaction caused by his chairmanship of one among the com- mittees investigating the food and health arnangements of tjie Crimean army. The tact^ insight^ considerateness, and wisdom shown by 109 Great Victorians the chairman of this enquiry caused his sub- sequent election as " Governor " to the Prince of Wales, afterwards King Edward VII. As private secretary or in some other capacity he continued with the Prince till 1877. In that year his * secretarial duties were taken over by his son, to-day the peer. But after his retire- ment from Court office Sir William Knollys had many opportunities of suggesting improvements in the conditions, and therefore in the efficacy, of the Queen's soldiers. In the matter of disci- pline he had been the first to point out in Pall Mall that an Indian Governor-General under the " John Company *' dispensation had abolished the lash in the Indian Army. At this time Sir William Knollys might often have been seen in the lobby of the House of Commons, together with an eminent Anglo-Indian acquaintance of about his own height, some five feet ten. This gentleman had a squarely built and closely knit frame, a good forehead, strongly marked features, whose expression suggested that he had known, but overcome, great difficulties. The dark, penetrating eyes, the prominent cheekbones, the compressed mouth, the long and firm upper lip, were those of a man lack- ing neither resolution nor sternness in the hour of crisis ; altogether an ideal commander of men. no From Wellington to Wolseley His square-turned joints and strength of limb, Showed him no carpet-knight so trim, But in close fight a champion grim, In camp a leader sage. Sir Walter Scott's description of his Lord Mar- mion fitted in every detail the then Sir John, afterwards Lord, Lawrence of the Punjab ; he it was who subsequently became first Chairman of the London School Board, and finished in England a second career of civil and military usefulness, only closed in 1879 by his never- to-be-forgotten funeral in Westminster Abbey. At the impressive service round his grave be- neath the historic roof were represented all that was royal and in any way great or distinguished in the London and England of his time. ** Here lies John Lawrence, who did his duty to the last,*' were the words chosen by one who knew him well as the brief summary of his life and character, and therefore an appropriate inscrip- tion for his grave. His brother Henry, killed in the Mutiny, had already been laid to his rest at Lucknow with the sentence *' Who tried to do his duty" written after his name. These famous brothers in their different ways contributed to the improvement in the life and instruction of the private soldier^ thus far syste- matically neglected by the great Generals who III Great Victorians had led him to victory. Between Henry and John Lawrence there existed many points of resemblance as well as contrast. The elder brother, a soldier by profession, became best known by his political and civil work. Lord Lawrence, a member of the Civil Service, showed throughout his course a striking aptitude for military affairs. Both in an equal degree never shrank from responsibility. John Lawrence had so disciplined by education a natural genius for detail as in all things concerning the duties of peace to become the most trustworthy of sub- ordinates and the most efficient of colleagues. Both men had learned the business of their life in the same school, under one teacher, and together with common class-fellows. In 1852 the Duke of Wellington's successor as Commander-in-Chief was his old comrade in arms, almost exactly his coeval, and his second in the duel with Lord Winchilsea. Lord Hard- inge (born 1785) had proved himself a great commander in the same campaigns as Lord Cough during the first Sikh War, and received on his return to England the national welcome given to heroes as well as promotion to the rank of Viscount. Before his establishment in the supreme command at home he had, as Governor- General of India^ trained the two Lawrences to 112 From Wellington to Wolseley the work that showed their greatness. Gener- ally agreed in their views of Indian administra- tion, they differed from each other on the subject of the Punjab. John advocated annexation; Henry resisted it, in deference, as he said, to the scruples of native Indians. On that point he could speak with authority, because he had won in a signal degree the confidence of the Sikhs, with whom he had been the first Resident. The conclusion of the first and second Sikh Wars in 1846 and 1849 respectively restored to England some of her most famous soldiers. Henry Lawrence came back on furlough to re- cruit his health. Hardinge settled in his native land permanently with the title of Viscount and a pension amounting to £8,000, £5,000 from the East India Company and £3,000 from the Government ; Gough, already created a Baron in 1846, became a Viscount, with liberal money provision from the East India Company as well as from the Treasury, and further received a beautifully situated place^ Lough Cutra Castle, in Western Galway. Standing; on a picturesque sheet of water^ famous for its fish, the house had been bought from' the Encumbered Estates Court, and had been decorated and furnished throughout after designs by Grace. Many of 113 H Great Victorians the walls were covered, not with paper, but with a light brown leather, on which were stamped in gold or coloured letters the names of the owner's g-reat Indian victories from Mudki, in 1845, to Gujerat, in 1849. Before the last of these came another fight even more famous, and proportionately prominent in the mural records of the home in his native isle given to that cross betwixt " a bulldog and a salamander," as " Paddy Gough " was styled in the spirited lyric which deserves to be better known than it is.i ^ Chillianwallah. 'Twas near the famed Hydaspes' banks Where flourished once the great king Porus, Lord Gough incensed the British ranks, And the Sikh artillery spoke in chorus ; The troops were tired, the Khalsa fired, And they're the lads that seldom bungle. Quoth Gough at the noise, "Fix bayonets, boys, And drive those blackguards out of the jungle ! " Sabres drawn, bayonets fixed. Fight where fought brave Alexander : Paddy Gough's a cross betwixt A bulldog and a salamander. On every side our luck we tried, And found the showers of shot and shell come ; Where'er we went to our sweet content The Sikhs they gave us a pleasant welcome. The guns went smack, the rocks went crack. The hills were black o'er Chillianwallah; But our General's Irish blood was up. And the battle-cry was " Faugh-a-ballagh ! " 114 From Wellington to Wolseley Lord Gough saw comparatively little of the pleasant demesne bestowed on him by a grateful The bould dragoons they dashed right thro' And back again — 'twas mighty plucky; But the th Bengals disliked the balls, And each of them he cut his lucky ! ^ But 'twould have done old Homer good To see the charge of General Gilbert's; Right and left his way he cleft, And smashed their skulls like mouldy filberts. General Dawes, he gained applause, His fighting lads were all in clover; 'Twas as good to be there as at Donnybrook Fair, And no police when the fun was over. At length the Sikhs they cut like bricks. Sheer Singh sheered off, nor looked behind him; And old Sheer Clutter did swear and splutter, But nobody cared at all to mind him. And none shall scoff at brave old Gough. Oh, he's a chief of a soldier's choosing ; We lads abroad will always applaud. Though the Times at home be always abusing. By Jumna's side their might he tried, And quelled the pride of the Khalsa gunners. And laid them flat at Guzerat With his EngUsh-Irish dose of stunners. Horatius Flaccus sang — they say — About "quae loca fabulosus Lambit Hydaspes," and his lay Our General's high renown discloses ; Sure, with the most enchanting grace He goes against those Punjab caitiffs, Horace's river licks the place, But Paddy Gough he licks the natives, Great Victorians country. He gave it over almost entirely to his son with his young family, and found a retire- ment for his declining days at St. Helens, at no great distance from Dublin, where, almost to the last, he might occasionally be seen in the famous bow window of the Kildare Street Club. At St. Helens he now and then received a visit from the very few survivors of his active years ; but when I was permitted to approach him during the sixties I recollect hearing it said that the most frequent pilgrims to his retreat came from the other side of the Atlantic, where every incident in his illustrious course was followed with the minutest interest by the descendants of the soldiers who had served under him'. The new military era, dating from the great Duke's disappearance, associates itself not only with the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Hardinge, also the ex -Governor -General of India, but with the most distinguished of his staff, his right-hand man in all important business, and his assessor in all military judgments and decisions. This was Adjutant-General Wetherall, remarkable for the faculty of ingratiating himself with the most arbi- trary of military autocrats and of winning entire confidence from his inferiors of every grade. The entire body of the Queen's forces seemfed to him an open book ; he knew everything about the ii6 From Wellington to Wolseley moral and material state of the troops quartered in every British barrack and at every foreign station. He united the gift of professional omniscience with the power of close and con- vincing statement that made his dispatches and the general orders drawn up under his chief's supervision literary models for two generations of officers. Queen Victoria's letter to Lady Raglan on her husband's death in the June of 1855 has been justly called a perfect specimen of episto- lary English. The general order produced by the same melancholy event, prepared by Wetherall for Lord Hardinge's approval, deserves praise scarcely less high. There could not have been a more salutary and serviceable combina- tion than that of the Commander-in-Chief and the Adjutant -General. Hardinge had displayed the utmost gallantry in the Peninsular War. Twice wounded, at Vimiera and Vittoria, he brought back with him not only brilliant experi- ence, but the hard-and-fast opinions common to his school, a belief in old traditions, and, not- withstanding his real interest in the welfare of the rank and file, a decided prejudice against sweep- ing reforms, though not in quite the same degree as Lord Raglan. The Commander-in-Chief never missed attendance at the War Office com- mittees, which always included at least one 117 Great Victorians Cabinet Minister with one military or naval officer of first-rate experience and authority. Lord Hardinge had already fallen once or twice a little out of favour at the Court for filling military commands independently of the Government, and without, as Prince Albert complained, any refer- ence to the Queen. In the May of 1854 he was much annoyed by the constant complaints about tents at the scene of war being uninhabitable from lack of proper equipments. ** Surely there could be no better proof of our soldiers being well looked after than the French complaint that the English had tents, gear, and every comfort. In the Peninsula they had no tents at all till the Duke got them a year or two before the end of the war. And now, at this early stage of the present struggle, the demand was not only for tents but for chairs inside them I " The truth is, by the year 1854 Lord Hardinge's susceptibilities had become morbidly developed. No great proconsul had ever enjoyed mbre keenly the feting by Society and the masses which awaited him on his return. He had been the hero of a thousand country houses, and a promi- nent figure in some of the best anecdotes of the country-house season. Such was the character- istic utterance credited to Mrs. Disraeli, after- wards Viscountess Beaconsfield, and sometimes Ii8 Prom Wellington to Wolseley more impulsive than felicitous in her remarks. At a house where the Disraelis were staying Lord Hardinge happened to occupy the next room. At the breakfast-table next morning Mrs. Disraeli said : *' Oh, Lord Hardinge, am I not the most fortunate of women? Might I not well say to myself, as I did on waking, * Surely I am in luck to have been sleeping between the greatest orator and the greatest warrior of the day ! ' " Lady Hardinge did not seem to appreciate the point of this pleasing little bit of prattle as much as the rest of the company. Lord Hardinge showed himself a true type, not only of the Wellingtonian officer, but of the Anglo-Indian magnate. Men of calibre and achievements far inferior to his, returning from posts of authority in our Asiatic Empire to their native land, have seldom been famous for any faculty of self-effacement. Whether soldiers or civilians, lay or clerical, ex-doctors or field-mar- shals, they have been apt to bring with them their autocratic manner and their dictatorial habit of speech, carrying themselves, whether entering a public conveyance or a lady's drawing-room, as men whose word is law, or as demi-gods whose breasts are ablaze with orders. This infirmity was not so conspicuous in Hardinge as in thie ex -officers of native regiments, the competition 119 Great Victorians *' wallahs '* and the ex-*' collectors " of a later day. To the last, however, he could not always restrain within politic limits a love of power almost feminine in its intensity, and a habit of self-assertion such as might have been pardon- able in smaller men, but was singularly indiscreet and suicidal in himself. He had not been back in England more than a year or two when certain newspaper and other irresponsible criticism's of his Punjab settlement stung him into open dis- plays of intolerance and resentment that drew forth words of kindly caution from Wellington, productive of no permanent effect. During the Crimean War he was at daggers drawn with the Duke of Newcastle— indeed, with all the Cabinet, Under-Secretaries of State, and private secre- taries. This chronic vexation of spirit at last defied all efforts to control, and reacted disas- trously upon his health. On July 8, 1856, the Queen reviewed the troops at Aldershot, and made them a speech. Lord Hardinge, not, as has been said, while giving a subordinate an order or a rebuke, but while talking to his Sove- reign, was seized in her presence with a fit. He was brought back to London almost, as it seemed, moribund. Gradually he became well enough for removal to Tunbridge Wells. Here, at South Park, on September 24, 1856, the end came. 120 From Wellington to Wolseley Charges and counter -charges, censures and recriminations, are as inseparable from the councils of war as jealousies and competitions from the conduct of rival chiefs in the field. These, however ruffled might be his own spirit, Hardinge did his best, often successfully, to com- pose. The relations between some among the most famous of his contemporaries, of rank scarcely lower than his own, were marked by an entire freedom from personal animosities^ open or suppressed. The " Bayard of India," as Sir James Outram has been rightly called, showed qualities that made his whole life a morally en- nobling lesson. Offered in the Mutiny the chief commatid by Lord Canning, he said, '* The work was begun by Havelock, let him have the crown- ing glory of the achievement." Outram had taken his part in the relief of Lucknow, only afterwards to find himself besieged there. The second relief of Lucknow brought into promi- nence probably the best remembered of the great soldiers who adorned that period. In 1859 the return to England of Sir Colin Campbell as Eield-Marshal Lord Clyde ac- quainted his countrymen of all sorts and con- ditions at home with the pleasantest as well as the noblest specimen of an Anglo-Indian celebrity that they had ever seen. He mixed freely with 121 Great Victorians every class in town and country. Simple, un- affected in his manner and tastes, he impressed high and low alike as genuinely unconscious of his own greatness. The delight of a schoolboy on his home-coming for the holidays, and his eager curiosity for the welfare of the rabbits or guinea-pigs that he has not seen and the pony he has not ridden since the beginning of last half, were recalled to one by the beaming grati- fication which this fine old man, straight and erect in figure as a youth, with his short-cut hair stand- ing up on his head, did not care to repress at finding himself in the company of the friends of the first Indian Viceroy, Lord Canning, who had taken good care that all doors should be open to the returned hero. I have heard from those who stood by when he took his seat on the crimson leather benches of the unconcealed pleasure with which he viewed every detail in the gorgeous decorations of the chamber, and showed his ac- quaintance with the doings of those among its leaders who, as some would have thought, would have been little more than names to him. For how could these personages possibly be anything else to the Glasgow carpenter's son, who only left his school at Gosport in 1808 to serve on the Walcheren Expedition of the next year, went through the whole Peninsular War, then took p^rt 122 From Wellington to Wolseley in the expedition to the United States, and who had no sooner ended his Sikh campaigns than he hastened off to the Crimea in command of the Highland Brigade and won the victory of the Alma? " Yes," he said simply, *' the last time I was in London the new Houses of Parliament were finished, and I think open, but I never went over them till now. And then among the faces I recognized several pointed out to me a genera- tion ago, when I was first brought on a country cousin's visit to London. Lord Derby with the eagle beak and the eyes flashing fire is quite unchanged, and that is Lord Granville ; I should have known him from his portraits. I never miss, and no one ought to miss, reading his speeches ; for whatever their subject or their length there is always something chivalrous in them. And that handsome man yonder. Lord Sydney ! Ah, I thought so ; he married Lord Anglesey's daughter." In the provinces he did not confine himself to the dwellings of the rich and great ; and wherever he went he brought smiles and joy with him . One used to hear of him in my earlier days as enjoying above all things a romp with children in the haymaking season. Among the great Anglo-Indian soldiers, my impressions of whom come not from tradition but 123 Great Victorians personal knowledge, the first I will mention is Sir Donald Stewart. During some of the years between 1870 and 1880 the present writer happened to be living in Sussex Place, South Kensington, quite close to Stewart's house in Harrington Gardejns, i^-nd was a constant walker in Kensington Gardens, often having for my companion a young friend, a well-known Anglo- Indian civilian's son. We met almost daily a noticeable figure, whose bronze complexion and heavily hanging moustache proclaimed him to be what young Nadab, the improvisatore at the " Cave of Harmony " in '* The Newcomes," would have called "a military gent from Hindostan." That which chiefly struck one was not the strongly knit, supple frame, retaining on the threshold of old age the vigour and ease of youthful movement, but the extraordinarily strong Norse features, which might have belonged to a Viking, but were really those of a Scotch High- lander with a Scandinavian strain in his blood. " I think," said my young companion to me one day, " this must be an old friend of my father ; I will go up to him and find out." Suiting the action to the word, the lad was off, and the Eield- Marshal, for such he proved to be, asked the boy his father's name. Hearing it, he said in the kindest voice imaginable, '* I might have known, 124 From Wellington to Wolseley for I recall your father's face and see a likeness to it in your own." The accidental acquaintance with Sir Donald Stewart thus begun grew by his courtesy into friendship. '* A sublime sylvan plea- saunce superior to the cedars of Lebanon and inferior only in extent to the chestnut forest of Anatolia ! " So Disraeli had described the stretch of turf and foliage surrounding William Ill's palace in the "old Court suburb." The description took Sir Donald's fancy ; he had not, he said, heard it before. ** In fact," he quietly added, " my occupations have interfered a good deal with my reading." Here our occa- sional strolls together continued till Sir Donald's return to India in 1880, followed, as that was, by his appointment, first to the Viceroy's Council at Calcutta, secondly to the Indian Commander- ship-in-Chief, held by him from April 1881 to November 1885. Then I saw him once more as one among the Secretary of State's Councillors at the India Office. By this time his Indian career was beginning to be seen at home in just perspective and its real greatness. His com- mand of our troops in Afghanistan after Cava- gnari's death, from September 1879 to the end of the war^ had been an almost unknown chapyter of history, owing to a modesty amounting to self- ^,bnegation, and an almost nervous dread of J25 Great Victorians seeming to share the popular passion of self- advertisement. Such were the ruling principles of his course from the day on which he first came to notice in the siege of Delhi in 1857. Bracketed with the Lawrences and other great men of that period, he disclaimed the idea of being a political soldier of the Henry Lawrence type. The only civil post he ever held was the Chief Commissionership of the Andamans before his appointment to the command of the troops in Southern Afghanistan at the beginning of the war in 1878. There could be no better summing up of his character than was given by the present Lord Bryce, then Oxford Professor of Civil Law, when he received his D.C.L. in 1886 : ** One of the first of living generals, whose greatness would be better known were it not for his singular modesty as well as dignity of character." When, as already described, I first saw him in Kensington Gardens during the early eighties, his presence was very striking. Throughout his later years his appearance had become familiar, not only to the entire home public but to many of his colonial fellow-subjects. A keen sportsman, equally good with rod and gun, with fur or feather, he visited his old school friend. Lord Mount Stephen, in Canada, and delighted the sporting experts gathered to meet him by 126 From Wellington to Wolseley the boyish enthusiasm with which he entered into all their pursuits, and the high satisfaction with which, from a difficult piece of water, he landed his first salmon. There are some still living who can remember the zest with which, during his last years, he handled, on most afternoons, the cue in the billiard-rooms of the Senior or the Athenaeum. But the sight that dwelt longest in the popular memory was that of the old Field-Marshal in the Chelsea Hospital garden on a summer afternoon, entertaining, not only his personal friends but some of the veteran rank and file who had fought under his command. How this and other signs of interest in their welfare were appreciated might be gathered from the beaming expression of plea- sure and pride with which, at the Jubilee of 1887, the Chelsea Pensioners massed together on Con- stitution Hill, and watched their Governor in his Field-Marshal's uniform ride past. ** Share and share alike " had been his motto in ensuring the comforts of the rank and file during his cam- paigns. That formed the practical expression of the opinion experience had taught him' about the British soldier. " Some of them," he would say, " may occasionally take a little too much to drink and be wild ; but see them on a long march without food or rest, see them in a tight 127 Great Victorians corner with only a few rags to their backs and soleless boots, and you see then that the British soldier is the finest man in the world." Spartant nactus es, hanc exorna. During the nineteenth century's second half Whitehall spoke of Free Trade as Cobdenism, and looked upon it as an unlovely Sparta whose embellishment was next door to impossible. It found, however, its ornament in another Anglo-Indian soldier of the Donald Stewart period, trained in a wider and more variously cosmopolitan school than that of Sir Donald Stewart himself. As regards per- sonal antecedents, official occupation, personal appearance, accomplishments, and tastes. Sir Louis Mallet personified a contrast to the popular notion of Cobdenism and everything connected with the Manchester school. Yet it was as a representative of this school that he was appointed to the Secretary of State's Council at the India Office in 1870. Before then he had shaken off the Toryism of family traditions and youthful surroundings, and had become Cob den's asso- ciate in arranging the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty, as well as other conventions of a like character in which England figured as one of the principals. Sir Louis Mallet's father, the French publicist, Mallet du Pan, had fled to Eng- land during the Erench Revolution^ reached it 128 From Wellington to Wolseley while William Pitt was Premier, found in that statesman a patron and protector, and received from him a place in a Government office for, his son. All that youth's first prep>ossessions were naturally anti-Whig and anti-Liberal. His French origin gave him' a grace, a finish of manner, and a lightness of touch which his official education, at Whitehall first, and on his errands with Cobden afterwards, imj)[roved into genuine diplomatic tact. Abroad and at home he had been brought into contact, more or less close, with the best -known characters of his time. While in Paris he had dined with Lord Hertford, the original of Thackeray's Lord Steyne, at his villa, *' La Bagatelle," and had heard one of his most characteristic remarks. Lord Robert Sey- mour had asked him a question which for some reason he resented, to meet with the rejoinder : " Pray, would you have the goodness to tell me whether you are my father, my grandfather, my uncle, or my maiden aunt? Good -night." Another Parisian experience of Sir Louis Mallet was of a more tragical kind. He had been dining with a friend in a private room at the Caf6 Riche. Afterwards, when on the landing outside and preparing to descend, another diner in an adjoin- ing apartment lost his footing at the head of the highly polished stairs, fell down, and, before any 129 I Great Victorians help could be rendered, had fallen on the back of his head (against every other stair till the ground floor was reached. There Mallet saw the grandest nobleman of his day, the Duke of Hamilton, taken up stone dead and carried off. During his English travels, chiefly in Lancashire and the north, he stayed with Sir John Potter, a great Manchester personage, and met among the company Benjamin Disraeli. When the guests had gone Mallet heard the future Lord Beacons - field say to his host : " Most well-to-do, highly principled, and worthy gentlemen all your friends, my dear Sir John, are— in fact, just the sort of persons out of whom clever fellows, like' me, make our fortune." Commercial consideration had placed Mallet in the Secretary of State's Indian Council. A few years later this select body was joined by General Sir Henry Norman as the military representative of the Strachey and Lawrence school, in oppo- sition to the *' forward and scientific frontier " policy in favour with the first Earl of Lytton and Lord Beaconsfield. Norman's death removed a man who, like other Anglo-Indian members of his class, combined administrative with military genius in a degree that brought him, from Glad- stone, a pressing offer to undertake the Indian Viceroyship. Since his death while Governor of 130 From Wellington to Wolseley Chelsea Hospital there has been nearly a clean sweep of the later military generation for which the warrior representatives of their age, now re- called, acted as forerunners. To the Duke of Wellington and officers trained in his traditions the private soldier was naturally and necessarily a blackguard. The greater his courage and efficiency, the greater his blackguardism. There- fore in the interest of the Army itself and the nation for which its victories were won, no serious attempt at improving the condition, moral or material, of the rank and file could be made suc- cessfully, or need be made at all. Other Generals of eighteenth-century birth held much the same opinion. Cardigan, it has been seen, acted on the principle that it was not enough for the British private to be blackguardized by circumstances, but that, like his executioners, he must be brutal- ized by the lash. To this effect, at least, the Army disciplinarians of a later and humaner school, just mentioned, summed up the theory and practice of their predecessors . After Raglan came Hardinge, who, helped by Adjutant -General Wetherall, showed a disposition to a milder regime. The reaction from the old ferocity was carried farther by the great commanders during the Mutiny, the Lawrences, Sir Donald Stewart, and pre-eminently Lord Roberts, who in 1858 131 Great Victorians won his V.C. for killing single-handed a success- sion of Sepoys intent on attacking the little stronghold which sheltered English women and children. My acquaintance with Lord Roberts began in 1882, on a Channel steamer outward bound between Folkestone and Boulogne. The same boat carried also Lord Salisbury, whose loathing of the shortest sea voyage amounted to positive terror. Some of those feelings seemed, for that occasion only, shared by his illustrious fellow -voyager ; or it may be that Lord Roberts' kindly solicitude for his famous friend caused him to remain on deck by his side while the good ship rocked to and fro like a swing at a fair, with breaker -washed deck. At any rate, there the two men stood, each clasping with his hands two strong, upright iron poles, one on either side, seldom giving a look to the sea, but accommo- dating their bodies, after the manner I have de- scribed, to the movement of the ship. Neither showed any sign of sea-sickness; for a few seconds Lord Roberts, however, had a tired look. I handed him a glass of water. In the true Sir Philip Sidney spirit he passed it on to Lord Salis- bury, as who would say, *' Thy necessity is greater than mine." Older than Wolseley by a single year, Roberts became the first famous officer who syste- matically concerned himself with lifting Tommy 132 From Wellington to Wolseley Atkins to a higher plane of social and spiritual civilization. By precept and example Wolseley laboured in the same direction. These two great Generals of our time also resembled each other, not only in their professional qualifications and reforming zeal, but in their opportunities of show- ing their capacity for command. Sir George Hamley, who had done as much as either towards creating the British ofiicer of the new school, never had the chance of doing justice to his genius as a captain in the field. This, too, was the lot of Sir John Adye, Lintorn Simmons, Lyne- doch, and Hill. It is an old saying that a soldier should have no politics. This in 1878 meant that he must be above all suspicion of Liberal proclivities. Adye had the misfortune to stand high in the confidence of Lord Carnarvon and Lord Derby, who left the Disraeli Cabinet during the Jingo epidemic of that year. Wolseley's position, rise, and progress cannot be rightly understood without recalling what happened in Pall Mall and Whitehall from 1868 to 1874. During those years the War Ofiice was controlled by one of the first, if not the very first, of those who were to fulfil Benjamin Jowett's ambition of seeing the British Empire at home or abroad, at war or at peace, run by his own pupils . 133 Great Victorians This was Cardwell, the most famous of sur- viving Peelites, whom, during my Oxford days, I had known, chiefly at a distance, as a BalUol Don, but had also had for a companion in my rides when visiting friends in that part of Oxford- shire where Cardwell himself had some private property, and which almost borders on Warren Hastings' Worcestershire Daylesford. Cardwell had not quite as short and sharp a way with young men as his Winchester contemporary, Robert Lowe. Equal to him', and even to the chief ornament of that studious set, Linwood, in width and thoroughness of classical reading, he combined with it a smattering of science and insight into European affairs then seldom pre- sented by Oxford common-rooms. CardwelFs manners, indeed, were stiff and donnish ; they often tried the loyalty of his Oxford constituents ; they may well have had something to do with prejudicing the class with which he had officially to do against the reforms he was to introduce and administer. In 1871, the third year of Card- well's War Secretaryship, Sir Charles Trevelyan'sj long efforts for the abolition of " purchase " achieved success. The next year complete effect was given to the Army education proposals of 1868. The revolutionizing of the regimental system began. Gladstonianism and its works. From Wellington to Wolseley was the complaint at every military club and mess, had closed a military career against that class which, in a hundred campaigns, had shown it could fight as well as play. Henceforth the helmeted, goggled professor of the Prussian variety would supersede the athletic and sport- ing British officer. Farewell, therefore, for ever the dashing leaders of foot and horse who had learned how to lead their men to victory on the playing fields of Eton. The future conqueror of Tel-el-Kebir and those about him accepted the fresh regime, a democrat- ized War Office and a transformed soldiery. Promotion by merit had replaced that by ** pur- chase." Long service had gone out, linked bat- talions had come in. The officers of the new order soon showed that their skill in wielding the pen was not greater than their power of handling the sword or gun. Henry Brackenbury and Evelyn Wood were acknowledged as repre- sentative specimens of the order which had opened when military commissions ceased to be matters of merchandise. At this present time (December 191 5), since Henry Brackenbury's death in the early summer of last year, the only two members of the Wolseley school left are Sir Evelyn Wood and Sir Coleridge Grove. The precedent in the 135 Great Victorians culture and intellect characteristic of the Wol- seley school was set by the men who called it into being, or at least made it possible. Sir Charles Trevelyan married Macaulay's daughter ; their son, having just missed being senior classic at Cambridge, has long since won equal dis- tinction in parliamentary or official life and in letters ; Cardwell, like his early chief, Sir Robert Peel (one of whose trustees he became), and his later chief, Gladstone, took a double first. Among the soldiers of the two surviving Wolseleyites, Sir Coleridge Grove, a Balliol exhibitioner, won a mathematical first both in Moderations and in Finals ; and, but for his preoccupation in the official field, would have commanded with his pen a distinction like that bestowed on his old associate in arms, Wood, by his "The Crimea in 1854-94,*' "Cavalry at Waterloo," " From Midshipman to Field-Mar- shal,'* and "The Revolt in Hindustan." There were heroes before Agamemnon ; and the world had not to wait for the writing soldier in the first rank of authorship till Wolseley and his men came, or to find them exclusively within those limits. Something might be said in favour of the earliest war correspondent having been, not Crabb Robinson but Xenophon, attached to the Persian Headquarters Staff, who wrote " The 136 From Wellington to Wolseley Anabasis." The Attic country gentleman whose deli vt ranee by Socrates at the battle of Delium preserved him to write '* The Retreat of the Ten Thousand," had for the first of his descendants with the English pen the historian of the Penin- sular War. In the literary succession which followed, Roberts and Wolseley had the most conspicuous, but not the only places. ^ Before Wolseley's men became a power in the Press the two Hoziers, John and Henry, were Saturday Review-ers under Douglas Cook, and had been welcomed into the comity of Printing House Square by Delane : Henry, indeed, with occa- sional breaks, was attached to the great news- paper from 1866 onwards, and was one of its regular correspondents during the Austro-Prus- sian and the Franco -Gerrnan Wars. During this period there were three noticeable brothers, each connected with the Army, two distinguished by active service. These were Sir William Eraser, whose chambers in St. James's Street were a miniature museum of curios, autographs, first editions, presentation volumes from, among ^ Wolseley's books, " Narrative of the War with China in i860," "The Soldier's Pocket-Book," "Field Manoeuvres," "Marley Castle," "Life of Marlborough," "The Decline and Fall of Napoleon," were published from 1862 to 1895. Roberts' books, "The Rise of Wellington" and "Forty-One Years in India," were published from 1895 to 1897. Great Victorians others, Thackeray and Bulwer-Lytton ; and Charles Fraser, who had brought back the Vic- toria Cross from his Crimean and Indian services. The other member of the family was Keith, the handsomest of these brothers, in whom Ouida, as she might be excused for doing, recognized the genuine original, not only of her own typical beau sabrear, but of the detrimental heroes of Court and camp whom she first knew in the pages of her master, the author of " Guy Living- stone." Keith once commanded the " Blues," and, in the Fortnightly Review during my editorship, wrote one or two articles about the uses of cavalry, extensively translated on the Continent, and studied almost as a textbook in Vienna and Berlin. The eldest, the baronet, moving from his schooldays to the spirit of the age, had become the pioneer of its taste for old china, bric-a-brac, curiosity collecting generally, for compiling autobiographies and memoirs, and for dabbling in poetry with other forms of belles lettres . The second brother, Charles, shared with Sir Henry Calcraft the distinction of being a typically consummate man of the world, an oracle on all social subjects, a model and a teacher in the arts of fashionable success and the comj>o- sition of fashionable feuds. No one man of his day prevented the unmaking of more marriages, 138 From Wellington to Wolseley or by his skill in social diplomacy arranged more family quarrels, or timed these good offices so happily that the oil fell upon the troubled waters exactly at the psychological moment. ** Charles for courage," it used to be said, " Keith for beauty, and William for books." Their old Eton master, W. G. Cookesley, viewed these kins- men somewhat differently. " Charles," he once said, ** had more of sound literary taste in his little finger than William in his whole body, and, unlike William again, had assimilated as well as remembered both the sound and sense of his school reading, whether in the form or in the library." The intellectual, social, and professional pre- cedent of the Frasers further fulfilled itself in their Eton contemporary, Henry Brackenbury, Lord Wolseley's right-hand man, not only in the field, but in co-operating with Evelyn Wood, Coleridge Grove, and Maurice to quicken and train, with the pen as well as the sword, during the seventies, the gradually reviving zeal of soldiers for their vocation. Such were the per- sonal forces in the Army that, personified conspicuously by Brackenbury, replaced the dandy warriors of Knightsbridge, Aldershot, and Windsor by a Kitchener, a Smith-Dorrien, a French, and a Douglas Haig. When 139 Great Victorians I first came to know him intimately he had just been engaged by Thomas Hamber to write in the Standard the diary of the Eranco-Prussian War. In those days I was myself told off for a daily leader on non -military topics of the hour, and had every opportunity of watching on the spot the thoroughness of Brackenbury's methods. To be within call at a moment's notice of Shoe Lane he had taken rooms at the Cannon Street Hotel. There^, on the telegraphic data brought him from the office, he broke the neck of his article. Before closing up he came himself to the premises to embody in the final paragraphs the dispatches from the seat of war which came pouring in almost to the time when the paper went to press . Skill in unravelling the telegraphic con- fusion and contradiction of the military news which, printed as it is received, often tells the public less than nothing, was an art thoroughly mastered by all of the Wolseley school. Bracken- bury was among the first to practise it in perfec- tion in his Standard articles. Something like military second sight was shown by him when, in the small hours of August 26, 1870, he solved the mystery of Bazaine's movements, which had puzzled all professional critics, by a real flash of inspiration. MacMahon, he conjectured, was marching round the Prussian flank to meet 140 From Wellington to Wolseley Bazaine before Metz. Hamber had seen some- thing of warfare when serving with the Swiss legion in the Crimea. He had also a very quick eye for a good point. He came into the room where I was grinding away at my nightly leader and exultantly brandished Brackenbury's proof, which he had just read. *' This," he exclaimed, ** will be the newspaper hit of to-morrow, and will be looked back upon as the one Press pro- phecy about the war that was fulfilled ! " Popularly passing for a pure product of the Emerald Isle, Lord Wolseley was an Irishman only in about the same degree as his right-hand man now recalled. Dublin, indeed, had given him birth, but his family belonged to Stafford- shire. His leading pupil's father, William Brackenbury, of Aswarby, Lincolnshire, had married an Irishwoman, Miss Maria Atkinson, of Newry. A turn for soldiership was in the blood of the younger son of that marriage. In the fifteenth century a Sir Robert Bracken - bury headed the Lincolnshire malcontents against Richard III. Before the landing of Henry Tudor he rallied his country partisans round him close to the exact spot on which, during the Bosworth fight. Sir William Stanley placed the dead Plan- tagenet's crown upon the first King of the new dynasty. Lord Wolseley and Brackenbury were 141 Great Victorians united, not only by professional sympathies, but by certain similarities of temperament, perhaps as a result of the Hibernian blood in the veins of both. .The stern soldier showed himself in the composition of each. But both also in feeling not less than manner sometimes revealed a woman's gentleness, occasionally verging on sentimentalism . To-day Sir Evelyn Wood is the sole survivor of a party which in 1894, on board Sir John Pender's steam yacht Electra, visited the Crimea. The voyagers included, in addition to Wolseley, the American Minister, Bayard, Lord Kelvin, and Sir John Mowbray. They were approaching the coast of Asia Minor, and were in sight of an island immortalized by Virgil. At this moment Mowbray appeared with the quotation on his lips, ''Est in conspectu Tenedos ? " "I knew you would say so," murmured the soldier, " and am tempted to cap it with * Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerint.' " To Brackenbury the classical tag might well enough have suggested itself, for he had gone to Eton in the same year as the Duke of Newcastle, and stayed there with him most of his time ; and the Latin and Greek phrases easily assimilated by a public school boy seldom take leave of him altogether. But much of Wolseley's education had been picked up casually, 142 From Wellington to Wolseley first from a Dublin day-school, then from home tutors, especially the talk of his intelligent elders. His rare intellectual faculties showed themselves in no way more strikingly than in his complete triumph over his early educational deficiencies. No one of his time, military or civilian, combined with varied and accurate general culture so many traces of having been through the regulation classical mill. My friend St. Leger Herbert, a scholar of his college at Oxford, who at different times, abroad and at home, had lived much with and worked much for *' our only General," ex- plained this by telling me, from his own experi- ence, that after passing school and college age Wolseley had again disciplined himself in the old curriculum on his own account. *' All soldiers," he once said to me, *' worth anything, from Aristotle's pupil, Alexander, to the Duke of Wellington, have been systematic students, grinding their intellect on science or language, according to their taste." His quick, alert nature, overflowing with vitality, showed itself equally in the close per- ception of all that went on about him, and his conversation upon it or suggested by it. One could not be much in his company without feel- ing that his buoyant disposition explained the apparent ease of his triumph over the difficulties 143 Great Victorians in his professional path. He set out with an exact knowledge of what he intended to do, and never lost sight of the goal, which he doubted not his lifetime would enable him to reach. The Army, as he knew it on entering it, struck him as largely an eighteenth -century organiza- tion. Its ceremonial routine, reviews, inspec- tions, manoeuvres, took up time and exhausted energies which ought to be expended on master- ing the military developments and the strategical progress of our own times elsewhere than in England. Here came in the value of his associa- tion with Brackenbury, who now, almost half a century ago, in Frasefs Magazine, then edited by Froude, wrote a series of articles on military reform, the first appearing in August 1867. These essays formed the earliest statement of the Wolseleyan programme. The chief points in- sisted on were the mischief to the public service of the dual control by the Secretary of State and the Commander-in-Chief and the appointment of a Chief of the Staff. Twenty-one years later Brackenbury, as a member of the Hartington Commission on Naval and Military Administra- tion, repeated these recommendations. Nine years before Wolseley's death ( 1 9 1 3 ), and shortly before Brackenbury's retirement from the active list, the office of Commander-in-Chief 144 From Wellington to Wolseley ceased to exist, and a Chief of the General Staff was called into being. In his ** scorn of luxurious days " and the severity of the self -education which only ended with his life, the Duke of Wellington should be considered a scientific soldier. With him came into being the personal forces clearing the way for the professional soldier of our own time, all of whose heart and mind is in his work. By such agencies, too, were removed the last obstacles to Lord Haldane's completion of Wol- seley's reforms. That General's ideal was "a fighting force which should be ready to go any- where and do anything." Those were Wolseley 's words, addressed in my presence during one of his frequent Strathfieldsaye visits to the second Duke of Wellington, who gravely remarked, " His Grace would have agreed with you exactly. My father," he added, " sufi'ered much from factious political opponents at home while fighting night and day for his coimtry abroad. You have been, no doubt, prepared for all the interference with you by the whole pack of Secretaries of State, Surveyors -General, and the rest of them." From Wellington to Kitchener, the continuity of the military succession has been without a break, for the present Secretary of State for War, if not Wolseley's officer, was when a Woolwich cadet one of Brackenbury's pupils. 145 K Great Victorians He certainly impressed the greatest of con- tinental judges with a unique comhination of gifts. When passing through Berlin during the seventies he was the one British officer whom Bismarck wished to see. That statesman's estimate was given some years later in terms of emphatic compliment to Sir Charles Dilke. Since Lord Wolseley's time the evolution of the twen- tieth-century soldier has passed through fresh stages under new auspices. Lord Kitchener never had a place in the Wolseley school, and is not less of an original product than was Wolseley himself. At Mr. Pandeli Ralli's Surrey country house, " Cranbrook," where Kitchener used to be a frequent guest, the conversation turned on the great masters of modern warfare. The future Secretary of State for War had then first become generally known for his Egyptian achievements. *' Pray tell me, Colonel Kitchener, who helped you to become a warrior of such renown?" *' I can," he replied, " only say with Topsy in ' Uncle Tom's Cabin,' * 'Spects I growed.' " Even that strong and invaluable growth might not have produced services so immense to his country as well as to the whole profession of arms had not the atmosphere of his youth been suffused with Wolseleyism. Tel-el-Kebir came sixteen years before Khartoum. 146 From Wellington to Wolseley Some time during the seventies I called at Limmer's Hotel, Conduit Street, on a military friend of my school and college days, frequently mentioned in the dispatches for gallant conduct abroad and justly passing for a capable and smart officer at home. It was still the forenoon, and I suggested a stroll in the Park. *' Impos- sible," he said from between the sheets, for he was still in bed. ** I have nothing to wear. The fact," he continued, " is, I have had no occasion for day clothes for a long time, because I don't usually get up till it is time to dress for dinner. When I looked for my morning suit some days since, I found my servant had put it away as too shabby to wear. I have ordered things in its place, but they have not come home yet." In those days many of Captain Rawdon Crawley's descendants still flourished ; and, out- side hospitals, Albert Smith's " gent " was a by no means extinct type. Among wearers of uniforms it had not gone out when the *' Wolseley gang " began to come in. It vanished as soon as that blend of intellectual and professional in- fluence began to leaven the whole martial polity. Cremome Gardens, finally closed in 1877, were still open, but the Wolseley epoch had no sooner fairly begun than dwellers in the adjacent streets distant not more than a hundred yards from the 147 Great Victorians place ceased to have their slumbers broken by the noise outside of altercations with the cabmen : ** Wot, Capting, h'only arf a sov. for you and your lydy [in pink satin], all the way from Cre- morne ! " while some other Spring Captain, sallying forth on a night's pleasure, as he made for Piccadilly, took the preliminary precaution of entrusting his gold watch and chain to the first policeman he met with. ** Bring it round to Long's to-morrow." Such incidents as those just related were common enough in mid-Victorian days. They became part of that ancient history which never repeats itself, once a Roberts and a Wolseley established the tradition of the simple, strenuous life for Lord Kitchener to emphasize as well as by precept and practice to enforce. The soul of generosity to all those about him, Wolseley proclaimed more than once, before any one hinted at them in print, the obligations of himself and the methods for which he stood to Brackenbury and his associates. It was in 1882 that Wolseley broke the power of Arabi Pasha. The earlier acts in this drama of the near East had included Sir Beauchamp Seymour's naval demonstration at Dulcigno, followed by the Montenegrin frontier commission. The British representatives on that body included the pick of Brackenbury 's Woolwich class-room. Sir 148 From Wellington to Wolseley John Ardagh's and Sir Edward Law's deaths have left Sir Vincent Caillard the one survivor of the officers trained by Wolseley's ablest deputy. To those names, however, should be , added the Duke of Connaught. Queen Victoria's youngest son not only had been one of Brackenbury's pupils at the Academy, but when quartered at Dover in the Rifle Brigade had requested his old teacher to deliver a course of lectures on military history at the Lord Warden Hotel. Much gratified at the account she heard of all this, Queen Victoria, as ** a soldier's daughter," not only sent her thanks to the lecturer, but some years later showed the im- pression it had made upon her by referring in conversation with Wolseley to the pleasure she had received from his brilliant follower's pro- fessional services to her son. Many years ago I happened to be at Berlin in the company of Allan Thomdike Rice, then editor and owner of the North American Review, The object of this visit was to get an article fromj Von Moltke, and he brought back to our hotel a story of his interview with the great Prussian strategist and a certain oracular and rather obscure utterance he delivered. Rice had made some pleasant remarks on the great qualities of the Prussian soldier in the then almost recent war 149 Great Victorians with France. " I can accept," said the Field- Marshal, " your compliment on our troops in the hour of victory, but cannot answer for their deserving it in the day of defeat." Whether this meant that a serious German reverse was un- thinkable, or that the soldiers of the Fatherland might prove morally unequal to the strain of reverses and checks, was a point which the editor thought Von Moltke purposely left doubtful. Perhaps, however, it was only the great man's way of turning the conversation. Allan Thorndike Rice will be remembered as a very highly Anglicized specimen of the literary American. The transition, therefore, was natural from the generalship in the war between North and South to the English military leaders of the time. In France, Lady Wolseley shared with Madame Gallifet the reputation of being the best- dressed woman in Europe ; and Lord Wolseley ranked high in the opinion, not only of General Gallifet himself, but of all French critics of the time. *' From the men about Von Moltke," said Rice,, as he completed the account of his interview^ " I found the German estimate was the same. Wolseley, they all admitted, has mastered the secret of success." That was the truth which won for " our only General " the well -placed confidence, not only of successive Cabinets, but 150 From Wellington to Wolseley of the entire nation, in a degree unapproached by any great captain since Wellington. He had invented and perfected an effective fighting machine, on every wheel, spring, and check of which he could rely for producing a desired and circumspectly planned result. The careers and achievements, not of Brackenbury alone, but of half a dozen others, attest the care, skill, and instinct for character with which he chose his instruments and which placed him in his day beyond the reach of rivalry. One quality was conspicuously shared by Wolseley with other great men, and perhaps the greatest men of all times. By the night of September 12, 1882, Wolseley had arranged the attack on Arabi Pasha. Before it began, the General, taking out his watch, said, " We have exactly ten minutes to spare. If I am not awake then, call me." That did not prove necessary. At the appointed time to the minute Wolseley was on his feet, ready to open the conflict which, con- tinuing through the hours of darkness, ended by the forenoon of the next day with the victory that made the English the overlords of the land of the Pharaohs. Among statesmen the same gift of slumber descended both to Gladstone and Disraeli from Pitt. On a certain night in the early summer of 1797, news of the Mutiny at 151 Great Victorians the Nore was personally brought to the Prime Minister in bed at Downing Street by Lord Spencer, then head of the Admiralty. Pitt listened attentively and resumed his night's rest when his colleague had left. As Spencer was leaving the house he thought of something which should be added to what he had already said. He ran upstairs again, only to find the statesman buried in profound repose. General Alava, Spanish Minister in London, and the Duke of Wellington's friend and former companion-in- arms, was surprised, the evening before the battle of Orthes,' by one of his officers in much agitation coming to him with the words, " I don't know what "will happen to us. 'Here is Wellington doing nothing but flirt with Madame Quintana." *' I am glad to hear it," was the reply ; *' for it shows that, as we are on the eve of a great fight, all his arrangements are made." One exact Wellingtonian parallel to Wolseley just before his great victory may be given. In the August of 1813 the Duke, on reaching St. Sebastian, ^ " It was here that the Duke received one of the few wounds or bruises which were his lot, but," said Mr. Gleig, who told me, "he was up on his feet in a moment and joking with Alava, slightly injured at the same time." From Alava, too, Hay ward, as he told me, heard that Cambronne, on being captured by General Halkett, never said, "La garde meurt, et ne se rend pas," but only cried out for a surgeon to dress his wounds. 152 From Wellington to Wolseley heard that breaching batteries would not open for two hours. ** Then^" said Wellington to his aide- de-camp (the future Lord Westmorland), *' the best thing we can do, Burghersh, is to go to sleep.*' Suiting the action to the word, and slipping off his horse, he supported his back against one side of a trench and was snoring in a moment. " Without this power of sleep at will,*' said General Alava to Hayward, *' there can be no great commander nor man in any line ; for mind and body alike would give way under exceptional stress.*' The famous officer now filling Wolseley*s place in the nation's life has other personal tastes beyond that for hard work in common with his prototype. Lord Kitchener prefers gold or silver tea-services as gifts from a grateful country to *' swords of honour,'* and is a thoroughly trained connoisseur in all which concerns the works composed of precious metals and stones. Lord Wolseley knew enough of paintings and statuary for a professional art critic, and had as skilled an eye for old crockery and china as Mr. Gladstone himself. 153 CHAPTER III AMBASSADORS AT CONSTANTINOPLE School examining at Tunbridge Wells — The young ladies playing croquet — The gentleman on the garden bench — The great " Eltchi " as seen in the lobby of the House— Debate on the Quadruple Alliance — His only speech, as he said, in the House — Crimean War caused, not by blundering and ignorant miscalculation, but by the great ideas and passions long in the air — Russia as the tyrant of national liberty under Nicholas I — " A cat whom no one cares to bell " — Stratford Canning's rise and progress — Diplomacy no longer a close borough — George Canning's cousin and precis-writer, but no friends at Court — A son of the commercial classes — At Eton, not as an oppidan but a " tug " — Roughing it in the *' Long Chamber " — Captain of the school — Gets King's, makes many famous friends, but owes more to home lessons than to any of these — Not a persona grata to the Czar, but Sultan against Sultan at Constantinople — The terror of the Turk and of his own attaches — Granville Murray rebels — Caricatures his chief in Sir Hector Stubble — The great "Eltchi" returns to London — Is the diplomatic oracle of Parliament — Retires to Tunbridge Wells — Intellectual and busy to the last — Place in social and political nineteenth- century development — The great " Eltchi's " great pre- decessor, and those who have since filled his place at Constantinople — Sir William White and others. At the end of the sixties I was much occupied with educational work, and did, amongst other 154 Ambassadors at Constantinople things, a good deal of school examining. An errand of that sort took me to Tunbridge Wells, where I had never been before. I knew nothing except the address of the pupils or teachers to whom I had been summoned, but the cabman who drove me from the station to the place seemed familiar with it, and in a few minutes had set me down at the door, approached by a little gravel drive through a shrubbery of evergreens. Miss , said the servant, who had opened to me, was then busy with a new governess who had just come, but would be with me directly if I would be seated in the drawing-room or, if I preferred it, in the garden. I chose the latter as the day was fine, and unexpectedly found myself within a few seconds encircled by a group of young ladies between the ages of eight and eighteen, who obligingly offered to get me a chair, unless I would join them in a game of croquet. The seat not making its appearance as soon as I had supposed, I established myself on a garden bench already occupied by an old gentleman of attenuated figure but generally commanding presence, and with what may be called the remains of a penetrating and imperious expression of face, which a generation earlier had overawed the 155 Great Victorians Tui'kish Sultan and his ministers ; for, as I presently found out, he was none other than Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, our Ambassador at the Porte from 1842 to 1858. He wel- comed me most politely, then praised the house and its mistress, adding, '* You look rather young, sir, to have a daughter of school age." In a moment the alarming truth flashed upon me. ** The Laurels," whither as examiner I had oomfe, was an establishment for young ladies. And now I saw my hostess bearing down upon me. ** Ah ! " she said naively, '* I see you have made friends with his lord- ship already." "Yes," said the gentleman, once more addressing me directly, ■■' I am a neighbour of this excellent lady ; I like young people, and she lets me come here sometimes to see her ch,arges at their play. Your name," he said to toe presently, " has a West of England sound, and I am glad to hear it, for I am myself a Somersetshire man by descent." It was none other than the then sole survivor of the famous men connected with the Crimean War. And of all unlikely places for seeing the great " Eltchi," quite the unlikeliest would have seemed a girls' playground in a home county. The mention of Bristol called up Bridgwater, then, as always, a corrupt but not disfranchised 156 Ambassadors at Constantinople borough with *' Eothen " Kinglake for its mem- ber, whose account in his *' Invasion of the Crimea " of our fierce-tempered Ambassador at the Porte might have prepared one for a much more alarming personage than I had encountered so unexpectedly in the grounds of a maiden lady at Frant. A remark that I had been known to Kinglake all my life, and that I had recently seen him when visiting the House of Commons, seemed to prepare him for a little interest in myself. ** My House of Commons days," he said, '* are now some five -and -twenty years behind me, and for some time I have been a stranger even to the House in which I now have a seat." Elsewhere, liowever, in the Parliamentary precincts his figure was familiar enough ; and one of the sights for which lobby visitors specially looked was the little grey-headed, pale-faced old gentleman who from 1 84 1 to 1857 had made the great Turk tremble in his capital, and secured his own recog- nition by the rest of the world as master of the Sultan . A tolerable memory of incidents at St. Stephen's served me now in my conversation with the great " Eltchi." I had heard of his speech in the Commons two years after his entering it for Lynn. The debate had been on the Quad- 157 Great Victorians ruple Alliance, formed by England, France, Portugal, and Spain, for clearing the Peninsula of the two Pretenders, Don Carlos and Don Miguel. Sir Stratford Canning, to speak of him by his then style, had opened the discussion with an explanation of Palmerston's policy directed to that end. Of the other speakers, the best known, so far as I could remember, was Lord Leveson, the future second Earl of Granville. It was a very attenuated reminiscence, but it seemed to please the great man ; " And I think," he said, "you have recalled about the only speech I made in the House." At last he approached the subject of the Crimean War. ** You have no doubt," he said, *' heard the story of Lord Bath's discovery that it was my way of revenging myself on the Czar Nicholas for his objection to my being English Ambassador at St. Petersburg. But when two great nations, as was then the case, urge their Governments to take up the sword, one must look beyond individuals to the impelling cause and to something else than the blunders of ignorance or miscalculation, the vindictiveness of an individual like myself or the wiles of the remarkable man then at the head of the restored French Empire. Chatham in the eighteenth century could speak of * becoming more and more Russ every day,' and in comparison with the Ambassadors at Constantinople Germans, the Duke of Wellington's experience of the Czar and his agents was that of dealing with saints.'* But from the year 1 8 i 5 Russia had studiously stood outside the European polity. Ten years later Nicholas I ascended the throne. Under him Russia entered upon a course presaging, not only in its general outline but in many of its details, the pretensions and the savagery that a century later were to make the Hohenzollerns the bullies of the Continent and in a struggle for bare existence unite the rest of the Western world against them. *' During the first half of this century," said Lord Stratford, ** Russia stood forth as the tyrant, not only of Turkey, Hungary, or Poland, but of national liberty wherever it could be found. In the next century, when I am gone, you may see Russia herself making common cause wdth others against a neighbour denying to her and the rest of the world the right to breathe save on con- ditions which that neighbour lays down." The old diplomatist abstained, of course, from any direct reference to his part in the great drama except, perhaps, when he said that the Czar always believed in the impossibility of England taking up arms against him while Lord Aberdeen and his colleagues held office. This was to over- look the fact that Lord Stratford at Constanti- 159 Great Victorians nople rather than the Prime Minister in Downing Street decided and regulated British action. At the Porte, Lord Stratford managed the Turks in their own way ; it was really one Sultan against another Sultan. Lord Granville, writing to the Duke of Argyll, put the facts truly as well as effectively : " We have as Ambassador at Con- stantinople a cat whom' no one cares to bell.'* In 1852 the great *' Eltchi " had jumped at the idea of being Lord Derby's Secretary of State at the Foreign Office. The whole Corps diplomatique of London were affrighted by what they called ** a bad joke." The suggestion, of course, fell through. The Crimean War had come to an end two years when Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, both visiting London and staying at many country houses, had the opportunity of criticizing some of his own critics, among them Persigny, from 1855 to i860 French Ambas- sador in London. *' That diplomatist," said Lord Stratford, " had nothing in him, no suite in con- versation, no tact." What had offended Lord Stratford chiefly had been Persigny's remark to him : *' Milord, on me dit que vous etes deux per- sonnes — dans la conversation, rien de plus char- mant ; mais touchez aux affaires, et voila le lion Britannique." As he told this story the great *' Eltchi " straightened his neck, opened his eyes, 160 Ambassadors at Constantinople closed his lips, as if he felt himself the British lion, and as if he had had his whiskers pulled. The great " Eltchi's " indignation over this little incident was nothing in comparison with the display of wrath provoked by a little gentleman with curly hair just turning grey, dark com- plexion, vivacious manner, and glib tongue, known during the late seventies at the crack Paris restaurants as the *' Little Dook," from having for his father the most magnificent specimen of the highest order of British nobility. This was Granville Murray, the Duke of Buckingham's reputed son, and, as that son contended, lawful heir. His noble father had opened to him, not only the door of the Foreign Office, but of the Morning Post. Going as attache to Lord Westmorland's embassy at Vienna, Murray doubled the part of sucking diplomatist and news- paper correspondent. The Ambassador showed his disapproval of this arrangement by getting the young man " moved on " to Constantinople. There Sir Stratford Canning showed a suspicion of the new attache from the first ; objecting to his journalistic connection, he made him Vice- Consul at Mitylene. Murray then took his revenge upon the author of his exile by carica- turing him as Sir Hector Stubble in *' The Roving Englishman," a series of Household i6i L Great Victorians Words articles.! The home authorities next pro- ceeded to shelve Murray by making him Consul - General at Odessa. Here he constantly employed himself with attempting to blackmail English merchants. Lord Derby, then Foreign Secretary, being appealed to, gave judgment against Murray^ who divided the rest of his days between London and Paris. Though he had not spared his too literary attache for the escapades just mentioned, Sir Stratford himself was no fanatical votary of red- tapeism. He fancied that he had something of a grievance because he had not been given the Paris Embassy in 1852. Lord Granville, then Foreign Secretary, pleaded the insuperable diffi- culties of social or political etiquette. Sir Strat- ford apparently acquiesced, and assured the minister that the little disappointment should not interrupt their friendship or stand in the way of his writing on foreign questions to Lord Gran- ville himself with the same freedom as, in earlier days, he had written to his father while repre- sentative of England in the French capital. Sir ^ The usual Foreign Office bag from London, reaching Sir Stratford at the Constantinople Embassy, was accompanied by a sack of papers. These proved to be copies of the magazine containing this composition ; for not only the writer, but all his own kind friends, determined that he should not miss it, had sent it to the Ambassador. 162 Ambassadors at Constantinople Stratford, however, did not readily or for a long time completely get over his soreness in the matter. He even gave that feeling an occa- sional expression in words which showed him to have inherited some share of his famous cousin's rhetorical acidity shown during the debate on the Indemnity Bill of 1 8 1 8 in his reference to ** the revered and ruptured Ogden." The velvet- covered claw might at least have been seen in Sir Stratford's description of Granville as not only a Foreign Office sphinx but a Foreign Office sponge, absorbing every drop of intelligence but giving none in return. This was in the same eminently Canningian vein as Stratford's earlier description of Talleyrand as a rapid stream, frozen over smoothly and transparently enough to show the current without discovering the bottom. Recalling these and other experiences, Lord Stratford, as for some fifteen years he had been when I saw him, let it be seen that he believed a good deal less in the collective wisdom of the Foreign Office than in the fitness for his work of the Ambassador. If at every turn of affairs he has to wait for instructions from home he but degenerates into a Downing Street under-strapper in a gold -laced coat at the end of a telegraph wire. " Some Foreign Office training," he held, *' may be in most cases desirable, but for 163 Great Victorians diplomacy the great thing is to get the best men to he had, and not to look for them only within official Umits. That method formed the foun- dation of Austrian diplomacy in its palmiest eighteenth -century period. Maria Theresa found a successor to Kaunitz, not in the official ring but in a poor Danube boatman's son, Thugut. The same kind of thing repeatedly happened with us during the eighteenth century, when the Univer- sities were asked by the Secretary of State to recommend from time to time such of their students as Nature might seem to have shaped for an international career. i In a way not unlike this I was brought out myself. My father had given a home to my cousin George and looked well after him at Eton. -He requited this kindness by his interest from the first in me. He himself took me to Eton at the age of nine, and at Eton I belonged, not to the wealthy and aris- tocratic oppidans, but as a colleger roughed it with the poorest and humblest in that terrible * Long Chamber.' My forefathers in the Middle Ages had prospered as Bristol traders. After- wards they established themselves in London. My father did well there, but none of the family, ' So Gilbert West, the friend and contemporary of Chatham, who translated "Pindar" and wrote on the Resurrection, had been offered, in his Christ Church days, at the Dean's instance but had refused, a place in the Foreign Office. 164 Ambassadors at Constantinople like so many of their merchant contemporaries/ ever founded a poHtical house or acquired, as was done at a later day by the Whitbreads and others, political connection and influence. Captain of the school in 1806, I naturally got King's, and brought with me to Cambridge, 1 am pleased to think, as many signs of school popularity and esteem, in the shape of ' leaving books,' as any one of my time. *' My whole University life," he went on, " con- sisted of only two terms, the one thing about it worth mention perhaps being that my rooms, which were in the oldest part of the building, had been those of a famous and much earlier King's scholar. Sir Robert Walpole." "These rooms," Lord Stratford told the present writer, " were kept aired and in order for me, after my cousin had helped me to the beginning of my professional life ; for from time to time ^ The London traders who have founded or re-created noble houses included in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the ancestor of the Aveland peers, Sir Gilbert Heathcote ; Sir Samuel Dashwood, Lord Brooke's progenitor ; Sir Thomas Cooke, the draper and Lord Mayor, who prepared the way for the Verulam peerage ; Sir John Gresham, grocer, to whose posterity a Duke of Buckingham belonged ; and Sir John Houblon, grocer, whose descendants numbered the first Viscount Palmerston. Descend- ing to our own times, not only commercial success but first-class political influence associates itself with the names of Whitbread, Rathbone, and Chamberlain. .65 Great Victorians I combined short spells of college residence with my pr6cis-writership at the Foreign Office ; I had even looked forward to revisiting King's after going to Copenhagen as second secretary. At Cambridge the best -known men of my time included Lonsdale, Bishop of Lichfield ; Blom- field, Bishop of London ; Pollock, Chief Baron of the Exchequer ; Lord Palmer ston ; Ellenborough, Governor -General of India. I had also occa- sional glimpses of celebrities belonging to an earlier generation than my own. Such were the Grecian Porson, a thin, middle-sized figure with lank hair, pale cheeks, and a book parentally hugged under his arms, as well as, in the Evan- gelical pulpit, Charles Simeon, so seated as to be invisible till he rose to preach, his fingers flattened against each other and pointing up- wards, his countenance as it came slowly into view noticeable for the turned -up eyes and a smile of sweet, complacent piety." The moulding force of his character would be looked for in vain among the famous figures on the Cam ; it would be rather found, to quote his own words, in his mother. " It was good," she told her son, " of your cousin George to give you a place in his office, but your admiration of his talents and virtues must not make you blind to his faults— want of charity, sometimes even 1 66 Ambassadors at Constantinople justice, towards his adversaries, and a bitter- ness of speech that alienates friends and makes enemies. Considering all your father did for George at Eton and afterwards, his goodness to you is natural, right, and creditable to him. And remember that his sharp tongue went together with a generous heart, and how he showed this when, while at the Board of Control, he lent poor Mr. Sheridan, whom, by the by, he did not like, £200, without any acknowledgment. The per- formance of your duty to Heaven first, towards all your fellow-creatures in your various relation- ships to them, and especially to those you dis- like," was the sum of the advice given to her son by the fond mother, who not once, but re- peatedly, whenever she saw occasion, impressed on him the *' paramount need of consideration for others, as shown in the one perfect Life, and the help in the formation of character to be derived from Blair's most excellent discourse on candour and rancour. This teaches us to mitigate our censures of one who was at least a humane, forbearing, benevolent spirit, and so likely to have found more mercy from his Creator than from his fellows." For the rest, let her son above all things and in all circumstances observe the Sabbath day, cultivate the virtues of order and regularity, 167 Great Victorians and so lay the foundations of moral, spiritual, intellectual, as well as physical comfort, health, and effective industry. The influence of his mother's wishes, training, and instruction had not exhausted itself in his latest years. He was nearer ninety than eighty when he produced his two longest and most serious compositions, *' Why am I a Christian?" and "The Greatest of Miracles." As regards the former of these, the author, to quote his own words to me — words, as I thought, strongly im- bued with the Canningite spirit — had " noticed theological questions not only debated on plat- forms, discussed at dinner-tables, dogmatized in newspapers, but sometimes not a little compli- cated by members of Convocation. The subject of supreme importance, both temporal and spiritual, is, in fact, tossed about from mouth to mouth like the newest piece of gossip or scandal. It is not," he continued, ''the Church or any special Communion that interests me, but the divinity of the Church's Founder. Hence my exposition of its superhuman origin in this little book, under sixteen heads. Who may have read it I do not know, but am glad that its design and execution were approved by experts so differ- ent from each other as Dean Stanley and Lord Shaftesbury. The former admired the success i68 Ambassadors at Constantinople with which the difficulties of arrangement had been overcome, and beUeved that the Church as well as the world might be better for seeing so firm a faith combined with so large and deep an insight into the great truths which all Christ- ians hold, or ought to hold, alike. Lord Shaftes- bury welcomed the ' dear and long -known friend's ' clear, stout handwriting in the letter about his book as a proof that ' somehow or other the love of Christ keeps people very young and fresh, however old they may be.' " The width and variety of Lord Stratford's intel- lectual interests in his very latest years now received proof as conclusive as it was surprising to the person in conversation with him. The Temple Bar Magazine had lately contained some pretty verses by Mortimer Collins, ending with the lines :— Whom the gods love die young — for this reason They cannot grow old. The classical thought in the modern setting had caught Lord Stratford's eye and interested him in the poet, whose name he had not heard before . ** Tell me now," he said, '* something about the man who can write such a musical lyric as this." After theology and religion the revival of his early turn for classical scholarship and poetry 169 Great Victorians brightened and gladdened his Kentish retirement. '' Nearly seventy years ago," he explained, '* Mr. Murray published my little poem, ' Bonaparte,' in which my severest critic, my cousin George, discovered some beautiful lines, though he did not altogether like its tone. Lord Byron was more unreservedly complimentary. The author of ' Childe Harold ' had himself written an ode on the same subject in the same year. ' Can- ning's,' he said, ' is infinitely better than mine, and certainly the best thing he has ever written. I always knew him for a man of talent, but did not suspect him of possessing all the family gifts in such perfection.' " Lord Stratford throughout his whole ambas- sadorial term had always kept up his house in Grosvenor Square. Thither, therefore, he first went when, in 1858, he finally re-settled in his native land. His attachment, from domestic associations, to Tunbridge Wells made him a constant visitor to its neighbourhood, and caused him to buy, in one of its pleasantest spots, the dwelling which eventually developed itself into Frant Court. Till late in the seventies his pen was constantly busy in The Times, and his speeches were heard at short intervals in Par- liament whenever some fresh phase of the Eastern question asserted itself, or some special topic, 170 Ambassadors at Constantinople appealing strongly to his deepest convictions, emerged from the welter of talk about Anglo- Turkish and Russian relationships. Such, in par- ticular, was the Porte's treatment of Christian missionaries. "Apart from this," he told both Lord Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone, "he did not despair of finding a barrier against Russian aggression in a belt of Christian States under the Sultan's suzerainty. If that could be done the material would be ready to hand for forming a Christian Empire administered by Eastern Christians." His hopes were never realized. The extravagances and barbarities of Abd-ul- Aziz and the failure of the European Powers to enforce their periodically prescribed reforms im- posed, as he thought, on England the duty of saving the Turks from themselves. These, however, are matters of history. They have been related at once with fullness, clearness, and succinctness by Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole in his excellent and exhaustive biography, of so much use to the present writer in confirming, checking, correcting, or enlarging his own im- pressions, originally received more than forty years ago. Aristocracies, it has been said, rich in force are wanting in the ideas to be found in democracies. Of neither polity does Stratford Canning stand 171 Great Victorians out as a representative. Belonging by birth to the most powerful and prosperous section of the middle class, by training, education, social inter- course, and tastes he personified the permeation of the order from which he rose with the patriot- ism, the consuming eagerness for national service of which, during his early days, Chatham and Chatham's greater son were looked back upon as the most perfect embodiments known to English history. Of all our chancelleries none has displayed so m1ich of supreme excellence on the one hand, and of deplorable deficiency on the other, as the British Embassy at Constantinople. The eighteenth-century line of English ambassadors at the Porte was opened suitably to that patrician epoch by Edward Wortley Montagu, husband of the famous Lady Mary, who on betrothal had received from her future husband a copy of the Roman historian Quintus Curtius, instead of an engagement ring. In the Victorian age a real access of importance and power was first given to the same residence on the Golden Horn by the illustrious type of the middle-class growth to ascendancy now recalled. After that Whitehall accredited no representative of the first calibre to the Porte till Sir William White. He, as yet the only lineal descendant of the great " Eltchi," 172 Ambassadors at Constantinople received an even more impressive sobriquet from the Turk, " the British bear," not from any surli- ness or even asperity of manner, but from his rare force of character, his refusal to be con- quered by obstacles, his ursine acuteness in scent- ing intrigue and foreseeing the possible conse- quence of remote diplomatic moves. My first acquaintance, shortly afterwards ripening into something like intimacy, with this remarkable man began in Paris at the late Dr. Alan Herbert's dinner-table, long before he rose to European fame. An international exhibition was then in progress. Thither we all adjourned after dinner to pass what for some of us, certainly for me, was the pleasantest and most instructive evening yet ever known. The show in the Champs Elysees abounded in exhibits from obscure little countries known to most only by name. Sir William White found in them the opportunity for the most delightful and unpro- fessorial discourse concerning the fresh light thrown by them on our knowledge about the industrial and commercial future of the com- munities from which they came. Commencing as a consular clerk, he had made his mark by grasping the importance of apparent trifles. The best record of his progress to dis- tinction and power shows itself in the protocols 173 Great Victorians of the Constantinople Conference (1885). These, as kept by Gabriel Hanotaux, form the materials for a faithful portrait of White at work. Bulgarians, Roumanians, Servians, Montenegrins — Sir William White, the best type of the modern Ambassador the second half of the Victorian era had seen, knew them all, and was recognized by the whole Bulgarian people in 1885 for their one trustworthy agent in unifica- tion. Hence on September i 8th their deposition of the Turkish Governor -General and their poro- clamation of the Union which German machina- tions had prevented at the Berlin Congress of 1878, even as the same influences proved equally hostile to it in the Bucharest Treaty of 1 9 1 3 . Just a generation has passed since, at the date now mentioned, Prussian intrigue brought about the Turkish occupation of Bulgarian provinces. Then came the Servian attack on Bulgaria, left bare for the moment, by a German trick, of its army. These troops, however, were at once re- called, reached Slivnitsa after a march of seventy -two hours, and under Prince Alexander of Battenberg hurled back King Milan to the place from which he had come. In so doing they astounded Europe, and caused no less an expert in matters of this sort than Sir Robert Morier, then our Ambassador at St. Petersburg, to con- 174 Ambassadors at Constantinople gratulate his Constantinople colleague, Sir William White, on the consummate piece of cosmic work which, supported at home by the Secretary of State, Lord Salisbury, he had seen carried through. Since Sir William W^hite (1824-91) in the Near East, and Sir Julian Pauncefote on the other side of the Atlantic, the one really successful Ambassador we have had is Lord Bryce, a product of much the same academic training as Stratford Canning himself. In addition to his many other distinctions of the Isis, our late Ambassador to Washington won the Gaisford Greek verse prize by translating Tennyson's " May Queen " into Theocritean hexa- meters, such as no one would have admired more than Lord Stratford himself ; for while that com- position was being read in the Sheldonian, the great " Eltchi " in his Kentish retirement, in inter- vals of more serious work, was rendering nursery rhymes into Greek iambics, and finding parts of *' Little Jack Horner" rather untranslatable. 175 CHAPTER IV PALMERSTONIANA The parliamentary contest at Tiverton — "Cupid" on the Tiver ton hustings — A bit of Butcher Rowcliffe's mind — "No chaif ! " — The accustomed irony of Socrates matched by the habitual banter of Palmerston — A visit to the Prime Minister in Downing Street — What he looked and said — Repeated constitutionals from the standing desk to the inkpot and writing-table — His narrative of the family history of the movements ending in putting down " hells " — Cosmos out of chaos on the writing-table — Lady Palmerston's invitation cards — The "basket trick" — "Next man in" — "Bless my soul, how very singular ! " — " I hope you're better " — Man of that age sure to have been out of sorts — Palmerston and the Alorning Post — George Smythe's prediction about the Tory Party — Too busy to read the papers — His Tory days — Disgrace at Court — Sir Henry Bulwer's coaching in foreign politics and its result — Palmerston with those about him in Paris and the pocket-handkerchief which won't fall out — "Big Ben's" two faces — "James" or "Palmerston"? — Palmerston as sketched by Disraeli in 1836 — His treatment of Talleyrand and its political consequence — The diplo- matist in the Cambridge House drawing-room — " How like his father ! " — Things one would rather not have said — The legendary bottle of brown sherry a day — The historical Amontillado — The hard names that break no bones but make enemies — "An absolute and Absolutist fool" — "The next thing to an idiot " — The elderly gallant in the boudoir — " I think it most gentlemanly " — The Schleswig-Holstein 176 Palmerstoniana question understood by three persons only — Lady Palmer- ston's smacking kiss in the lobby — Pam and the Duke — Pam on Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Kent — How foreign statesmen cooled their heels in Palmerston's waiting- room — What they thought and said of it — How to deal with Austrian outrages and to enforce English rights in Brazilian waters — The cost of a hatless walk on Brocket Terrace — The ruling passion strong in death — ''That's article ninety-eight; now go on to the next." In the late spring or early summer of 1859 the present writer, then a small boy who had broken bounds, was one of a crowd gathered round a West Country hustings to witness an event much talked of in those years at the return of bur- gesses for the hilly little town looking down upon the confluence of the rivers Exe and Loman. That geographical fact expressed itself in the old name of the place, " Twy-ford-ton," corrupted into the modern Tiverton. Here, after his ejec- tion by South Hampshire in 1835, Palmerston had found the seat which he afterwards never lost. His re-elections always formed a feature in each successive appeal to the country, and were attended by the incidents my recollection of which is still fresh. It was in the thick of a parliamentary contest. Once before within the same twelvemonth the constituency had gone through the form of returning, with the Hon. G. Denman for colleague, the debonair septua- 177 M Great Victorians genarian, who had not yet outgrown his early nickname of " Cupid," and who was now address- ing it. In a rather chilly air he stood, bare- headed and beaming, not far from the gateway of what had once been the castle of the Earls of Devon. The temper of the multitude showed no signs of preoccupation with serious politics. Men, women, and children, country gentlemen, clergymen, and loafers had met simply for amusement. The proceedings that they watched became almost a roaring farce, especially at the point of the appearance among them of a man in a blue smock with certain articles of cutlery dangling from his side. Such were the outward insignia of the very independent elector who, on these occasions, played the part of the " devil's advocate." This was the champion heckler, who made the name of Rowcliffe famous, and without whose contribution to it the fun of the fair on the West Country hustings would have been incomplete . The ludicrous episode was always opened by the Tiverton censor to something like the follow- ing effect : " The noble lord," said Rowcliffe, " may call himself a Liberal ; he is really the best representative the Conservatives could pos- sibly have. I hope, however, he will honestly answer my present queries." Palmerston smiled 178 Palmerstoniana assent and congratulated his old friend on the retention of his youthful vigour, and with it his prejudices. " I only regret," Palmerston added, " that it seems as if Mr. Rowcliffe and I were never destined to agree in our political faith . Am I for the ballot and manhood suffrage? No, I am against both. How far, then, will I go with the suffrage? Well, I will be quite straightfor- ward with Mr. Rowcliffe, and at once say I will not tell him. After the confidence my con- stituents have reposed in me, I hold it my duty to act according to my judgment in all matters relating to Reform. I hope that the political difference between my friend and myself will not alter our private friendship. But the man who does agree with everybody is not worth having any one to agree with him." This formed the only specimen of the Palmerstonian banter which I ever had the opportunity of hearing. I could have heard no better specimen of the habitual persiflage of Palmerston than that on the Tiverton hustings just described, if I had regularly wit- nessed at Westminster his best-known perform- ances throughout the six years of his second and last premiership, 1859-65. The quick, firm step with which he entered the House I had seen in the lobby. The last of the years just named was the first of my London experiences and 179 Great Victorians brought me permission to present myself before the great man in Downing Street, just three months before he died. His movement was then brisk and elastic. After a few words of welcome he swung up to the desk at which he worked, to finish a few papers. As he paced from the desk to the table, " I believe," he said, standing up all the while, *' in getting whatever exercise one can ; and one can do a mile in one's room as well as in the street." These words explained the arrangement by which the inkpot was placed on a table some three or four yards distant from the writing-desk at which he stood. Every fresh dip of the pen therefore involved one in a series of little pedestrian exercises, which collec- tively might have mounted up to quite a " con- stitutional." I had noticed outside his horse, with a groom at its head, waiting for him. When not walking, he rode. After the Duke of Wellington he was the last of political celebrities who for his progress through the West End streets preferred the saddle to the brougham, and, when on horse- back between Piccadilly and Whitehall, was cheered by the crowd within a fortnight or ten days of his death. *' Get Lord Palmerston if you can," I had been previously told by Mr. Baillie Cochrane, the Buckhurst of " Coningsby " and the Lord 1 80 Palmerstoniana Lamington of 1880, *' to tell you how he came to form the committee which in 1846 put down all the public gaming-houses. You will find, I think, one of your relatives had a good deal to do with it." Lord Palmerston's mention of that relative soon gave me the opportunity of acting on the suggestion, "Your uncle," he said, '* sat on the committee. He had, indeed, given me no rest till I consented to it. He was a member of Crockford's, and looked in there for play most nights in the week. No doubt he had seen many friends ruined by the club. But the places he was particularly concerned to put down v/ere not of this sort. They were rather the low-class hells which abounded in the purlieus of Leicester Square and Covent Garden, amounting, I believe, to something like thirty or forty between Picca- dilly Circus and Long Acre. It seems," he con- tinued, *' some relation of his, and therefore, I suppose, of yours, I think a cousin, while an Oxford undergraduate and up for the Boat Race, suddenly disappeared from the Opera House lobby, where he had been seeing a lady into her carriage while his friends went on before to Evans's supper -rooms. Neither here nor else- where did he join them, and was never, I believe, seen or heard of till several years later, when he startled his family by entering his father's 181 Great Victorians Oxfordshire rectory as if nothing had happened. Since he was there last he had been to South Africa, made some money, for the first time in his Hfe, and got into the Cape Parhament. The explanation of his being suddenly lost to his friends was that on the night of his vanishing he had found himself nearly cleaned out. Believing in his luck, he made his way to one of the 'hazard' dens in Cranborne Street. Here he staked some of the few coins still in his pocket, of course lost them, dared not show his head at home, took coach to Southampton, found a steamer starting for South Africa, took it, and, having eventually filled his purse, thought he would like to see once more how they fared at home." Lord Palmerston occupied the frequent inter- vals of this little narrative with occasionally ply- ing his pen, now at his standing desk, now at the table. The latter was in a state of extra- ordinary confusion, papers of all kinds piled high above one another. Diving into these, he ex- tricated a number of envelopes, into which he proceeded to put letters or cards, taken from one of his red boxes, and already prepared for send- ing off. These, I afterwards knew, were in- vitations for Lady Palmerston's famous " Satur- days," or, in one or two instances perhaps, for 182 Palmerstoniana some other hospitality at that Cambridge House where one of its raiaster's severest French critics was constrained to admit, *' On dine fort bien chez lui." The most characteristic feature in the apart- ment, where I thought I had rather overstayed my time, only struck me a minute or two before I rose to leave. It might, with literal truth, have been called the basket trick. By an agency of which I could see nothing, a basket of papers reached the minister's table. Directly it had done so the minister became deep in their contents and placed his lips to a speaking-tube, thus signify- ing, as I inferred, to an invisible attendant his readiness for another visitor. While passing through the door, I met a gentleman who evi- dently had an appointment with the great man. Had I been privileged to witness the interview, this is what I should have heard : '* How very remarkable ! " would have been the Premier's greeting. " I was just thinking of your matter when you were announced ; I have, you see, got all the papers relating to it here. Your interests, therefore, are being well looked after, so that you may expect very shortly to hear from me again." This genuinely Palmerstonian farce was played probably more than once every day. Its " behind the scenes " prelude was the sighting 183 Great Victorians by a quick -eyed private secretary of a stranger outside bearing down on the ministerial resi- dence. The timely warning through the tube enabled the First Lord invisibly and inaudibly to order the necessary documents to be disinterred from their pigeon-hole. The other acts followed in the order just described. Except as a boy at the Tiverton hustings I never heard any of Lord Palmerston's speeches. In the lobby of the House, however, I saw him more than once, the picture of good-humoured and smiling composure, bestow a few friendly words alike on opponents and supporters. These were the verbal salutes that surprised and delighted their recipients by their interest in their welfare and their acquaintance with their personal or family concerns. To a gentleman advancing in years would be addressed the inquiry whether he was better, " because," as the questioner ex- plained to a friend, " a man of that age is sure to have been recently out of sorts." Lord Palmerston's organ in the daily Press had always been the Morning Post. On foreign politics he inspired its best articles, written as these were sometimes by his great journalistic ally, the late Algernon: Borthwick (Lord Glenesk), even when editor himself, and now and then by the happily still extant Mr. T. G. Bowles, whose 184 Palmerstoniana chief writing, however, in the paper belonged to a later period. *' Sharp work ! " was Palmerston*s well-known comment on Napoleon's coup d'etat of Decem- ber 2, 1 8 5 I . So far, he explained, as the remark expressed approval of what had been done, it was made, not in his official capacity but as a private individual. The Second Empire forged a new link in his connection with the great organ of the fashionable world. Shortly before that event Algernon Borthwick had gone to Paris as resident representative of the newspaper managed by his father, the well-known Peter Borthwick. I The Post in modern times was always High Tory and High Church. Notwith- standing its Palmerstonian associations, it dis- approved of the Palmerstonian bishops as strongly as did Samuel Wilberforce or George Anthony Denison. It was entirely at one with Palmerston in approving the establishment of the Second Empire. Out of that agreement grew its understanding, on European affairs only, with Palmerston, who showed his regard for its editor by giving him exclusive news and whatever advice he might find useful. Palmerston had a personal friend in George Smythe, the reputed original of " Coningsby." Smythe occasionally * Conservative M.P. for Evesham, 1835-41. 185 Great Victorians wrote paragraphs for the Post, and in one of them embodied the Palmerstonian sentiment that the Tory Party would not exist in six months. Lord Glenesk, who knew Disraeh as well as he did Palmerston, himself told me that the author of *' Coningsby " considered something of its imme- diate success due to Palmerston's admiration for it, expressed wherever he went.i On January 30, 1856, the Morning Post published in its largest type an article on American affairs that struck the chief supporters of the newspaper, Lord Clarendon and others, as most mischievous. Lord Clarendon, therefore, as Foreign Secretary, complained to his chief. The Prime Minister " Ha-ha'd ! " in reply, " I have been too busy lately to read the papers." This was the kind of repartee practised by him in season and out of season upon the most different occasions, but always with the happiest results. Before another illustration is given, these im- pressions may be placed in clearer perspective by recalling one or two biographical details suffi- ciently accessible no doubt, but sometimes for- ^ Palmerston and Disraeli had been personal friends from the time that the former was first heard of. Their oratorical duels on the floor of the House were purely stage play. Mr. William Longman, of Paternoster Row, told me that Palmerston had spoken of "Coningsby" to him as first-rate in every respect, especially its characters, which were perfect portraits. 186 Palmerstoniana gotten, and in a single instance, now to be men- tioned, perhaps unknown. The most plucky and popular Harrow boy of his time, as Palmerston was accounted, went through the intermediate stage of a Scotch University (Edinburgh) before going to Cambridge in 1803. These were his High Tory days. The influence of his first master, Canning, did not incline him to any Liberal ten- dencies till many years later. He remained an enemy to Liberalism in every form till 1828. As a Tory he was beaten in the Cambridge University Election of 1806. Three years later, without any change of political faith, the merest chance opened for him the path to official pro- motion. Spencer Perceval, the Prime Minister of 1809, offered Pemberton Milnes, a repre- sentative Yorkshire squire, best known as Lord Houghton's father, a place in his Cabinet at the Exchequer or the War Office— whichever he pre- ferred. Milnes declined, it would seem, out of mere indifference. Palmerston accepted, and with it took the first step toward political fortune. For six years of the Victorian age j( 1846-52) Palmerston found the most congenial of our ambassadors and serviceable of his political agents in Sir Henry Bulwer, Lord Bailing. This most typical specimen of the Palmerstonian diplomatist began his ambassadorial course 187 Great Victorians at Madrid in 1843, continued it at Florence, then the seat of the Italian Court, in 1852, and ended it at Constantinople as Stratford Canning's successor in 1858. Whatever his residence, his hand was on the pulse of every European Chancellery. Though never quartered at Paris, he wias always in a special degree behind the diplomatic scenes during the early days of the Second Empire. As a consequence Palmer- ston heard from him every continental incident or even piece of gossip before it reached his Cabinet colleagues, while he was Lord Aberdeen's Home Secretary. At critical seasons Palmer- ston met Bulwer in Paris, while occasionally Sir Stratford Canning completed the little party. One of these gatherings was described to me by one who assisted at them. This was a first cousin of mine, Edward Herbert, killed in the Marathon massacre of 1870. On the occasion now referred to he was in Paris for diplomatic business, and assisted at the meeting of his chiefs, dining with Lord Palmerston, Sir H. Bulwer, and M. Thiers. The French statesman asked the English if he thought the " sick man," as the Czar Nicholas called the Turk, was about to die. Nothing could have been more characteristic than Palmer- ston's reply, noted at the time by my relative and passed on to me : "I was one day walking in 188 Palmerstoniana the streets of London, when a fellow foot- passenger told me that my pocket-handkerchief was hanging out, and that I should lose it. ' Thank you, sir,' I answered, ' but unless some one pulls it out it will not fall.' Turkey is in the same position. If she be not thrown down she will maintain her place perfectly." The most authentic channels for the transmis- sion of Palmerstoniana to a later generation were Sir Mount Stuart Grant Duff and Abraham Hay- ward. After the completion of the new Houses of Parliament in 1 8 5 1 much had to be done before "Big Ben " could be got into perfect working order. " For a long time only two sides of the great clock worked properly. A propos of the deficiency, at a little dinner-party, including not only Palmerston but his most fervid assailant, the Turcophil, David Urquhart, some one sug- gested that the clock should be called Janus, the patron saint of politicians. ** Or," he added in an undertone, looking at Urquhart, ** as you might say Palmerston." Almost inaudible as the whisper seemed, it was not missed by the Home Secretary's quick ear. ** Very good," he mur- mured, with his accustomed " Ha-ha ! " and drew the talk to some other topic. *' Permit me to approach you in the spirit of unity ; this must at least gratify you, if novelty 189 Great Victorians can do so. Our language contains no expression of scorn which has not been exhausted in the celebration of your character. . . . Your dex- terity seems a happy compound of the smartness of an attorney's clerk and the intrigue of a Greek of the Lower Empire. . . . Having attained the acme of second-rate statesmanship, you remain fixed on your pedestal for years, the great Apollo of aspiring under-strappers." These, with other kindred flowers of rhetoric, formed the staple of Disraeli's Runnymede letter to Palmerston in 1836. No word of it is likely to have been read out of England. It would, however, appeal more directly to a foreign than an English public. Or, to speak more correctly, it presaged a personal antipathy against Palmerston which came to a head on the other side of the Channel during the negotiations for creating an independent Belgium'. These were fomented so systematically by Talley- rand as nearly to cause a rupture in Anglo-French relations. Talleyrand, then the French Ambas- sador in London, was possessed with a consuming sense of his own importance and superiority to the rest of the Corps diplomatique . Palmer- ston when head of the Foreign Oflice received him in the same easy way that he received all his colleagues. Once or twice, however, he kept the veteran diplomatist and wit waiting in his 190 Palmerstoniana ante-room. This neglect had been received as a personal insult. The slighted envoy, on return- ing to Paris, poisoned his Royal master's, Louis Philippe's, ears with all the current stories of Palmerston's flippant insincerity and falseness. These so worked upon the Orleanist monarch that he was gradually induced to adopt his Ambassador's feelings towards the English Secre- tary of State, and look upon him as the chief enemy of himself as well. These private senti- ments had by and by their political consequence. The French Government, instead of, as Palmer- ston wished, throwing over the Spanish Legiti- mists, gravitated more and more closely to the Carlists. Notwithstanding his easy, genial manner and social charm, Palmerston had trod on so many diplomatic toes that all the malicious stories in any way connected with him were at once re- peated in every Chancellery and club. Such was an anecdote now to be given, and after all these years requiring a few explanatory words. Lady Palmerston, the first Viscount Melbourne's daughter, had for her first husband the fifth Earl Cowper. Even, however, before possessing her hand, Palmerston, it was no secret, opened her heart. The third Marchioness of Salisbury, Lady Beaconsfield, and Mrs. Gladstone all ren- 191 Great Victorians dered services to their respective lords which have passed into a proverb. In social tact, per- sonal charm, resourcefulness, and heart-whole devotion none of them could have surpassed Lady Palmerston . Her son, William Cowper, was being introduced in her drawing-room by his stepfather to a foreign Ambassador, who, not catching the name, looked inquiringly at Palmerston, then said with a smile, " On voit bien, monsieur, que c'est votre fils ; il vous ressemble tant." When I first saw at Tiverton the man who had represented the place for just over thirty years I heard the story, and, even as a boy, instinctively doubted it, that Lady Palmerston cured any little ailment in her husband by, on its earliest sign, making him drink a bottle of brown sherry a day. Chance enabled me to seek confirmation or contradiction of this story from the late Lord Granville's brother, Mr. E. E. Leveson-Gower, whose acquaintance I owed to one of my oldest and kindest friends, the late Mr. H. S. Stokes, the Clerk of the Peace at Bodmin, and the highly cultivated and noble-minded gentleman, as Mr. Leveson-Gower justly called him, who managed his election business for many years. The answer to my inquiries came as follows : " Lord Palmer- ston in all his life never drank as much brown sherry as would fill a pint bottle. He took tea 192 I Palmerstoniana and coffee very sparingly, and wine of any kind more sparingly still. But before mounting his horse for the ride to Whitehall in the morning he sipped with his biscuit a glass of the palest and driest Amontillado or Manzanares sherry. At dinner in the usual way he might take as much of the same vintage again." As regards his intercourse with foreign diplo- matists, he always attributed his success in mystifying them to his way of speaking the truth and nothing but the truth, which, habituated to speech of another kind, they did not believe, and so perplexed and puzzled themselves. How- ever true they might have been, some of the Palmerstonian utterances were calculated to try the patience, if they did not obscure the under- standing, of those whom they concerned or who were their subjects. Of this the classical instance belongs to the Spanish marriages episode in 1846-7 (and may be found in Ashley's ** Palmer- ston," vol. ii. pp. 85-7). He then described the Duke of Cadiz, two months afterwards King of Spain, as an '* absolute and Absolutist fool ! " while the Emperor of Austria was put down as the '* next thing to an idiot I " These outbursts, rather than the other little vagaries too well known to be repeated here, and greatly exaggerated at the time, caused Lady 193 N Great Victorians Palmerston much anxiety as to their pohtical results. In 1861, when well over seventy, he retained many of the personal endowments and tastes which had won for him the name of " Cupid." Lady Shaftesbury^ as his relative and well-wisher, remonstrated with him on his flirta- tions with yoimg married women. " You know/' she said, "it is really most ungentlemanly ; it is horribly irreligious ; and, besides, it can never be successful." Now for the incorrigible old gentle- man's reply. " As regards its being ungentle - manly, that is a question of taste ; I think it most gentlemanly . To take the religious point of view^ I admit the custom of the Churches differs. But about its being unsuccessful, your ladyship is totally misinformed^ for I have never known it fail." A perfect feminine Gallio in her way. Lady Palmerston cared for none of these things, or smiled them off as by no means to her lord's dis- credit. What did concern her was the appalling possibility of his being put into a minority on an important division. In the year just mentioned came the Schleswig- Hoist ein question, with all its complications and its more critical sequel. The subject in many of its bearings was excru- ciatingly abstruse, and was thus described by Palmerston himself : " The affair of the Duchies 194 Palmerstoniana has never been understood by more than three persons. One is a German diplomatist, and he is dead ; the second is a Danish professor, who is now in a lunatic asylum ; the third is myself, and I have forgotten it.'* Meanwhile, the wanton attack of Germany on Denmark aroused the English public to indig- nation, and caused the Government, which would not take up arm's for the weaker State, to tremble in the balance. On the last night of the debate Lady Palmerston listened in evident agitation from her box in the gallery. When it was all over she rushed downstairs to congratulate her husband. He had just come into the lobby; she at once embraced him with a sounding kiss. *' Lady Palmerston," said to me the late Earl Granville, " did more than keep her husband in health and his followers together. She also kept the peace between him and the Duke of Welling- ton, whom he had never forgiven for suddenly dismissing him from the Eoreign Office in 1834. In that year, and more than once afterwards, though few historians, and, I think, no diarists, have brought out the fact, the two men were constantly doing all they could to upset each other. The Duke relied for success on the great- ness of his achievements and name, Palmerston on his extraordinary popularity. It was not till 195 Great Victorians after Huskisson's death in 1830 that a renewal of personal relations became possible. Seven years later the rivalry returned in an acuter form than ever. One of the Tory ladies at the Palace made the silly but fatal mistake of supposing she could prejudice the young Queen Victoria against her early Whig surroundings by letting her see the fun into which the smaller Tory news- papers turned her games of chess with Lord Melbourne, her filial solicitude for his health, and her girlish gratification at Palmerston's com- pliments to her industry and capacity, carefully repeated to her as they were by her ladies in the Palmerstonian interest. The present writer had another of Palmerston's remarks from a lady who was at Windsor at the time, and who heard Lady Charlemont speak of the credit due to the Duchess of Kent for having made her daughter what she was. *' The Duchess," interposed Palmerston, *' has every possible merit. But the Queen has an understanding which could be made by no one, and will go down to history as the greatest Sovereign of her sex whO' ever ruled this realm." The talk was taken up by the Duchess of Sutherland, who, as a proof of the Queen's industry and capacity for work, said that from morning to night she took no relaxation from her duties, and 196 Palmerstoniana that when her maid was combing out her hair she was surrounded by crimson boxes and reading official papers. "And/' said Palmerston, "it will before long be seen that Her Majesty does a great deal more than this." It was, as Palmerston eventually found to his cost. The Duchess of Sutherland's tribute is of the more significance because only a few days before paying it she had been sharply rebuked by the Queen for keeping dinner waiting half an hour. "It is not so much," the Royal lady had said, " that it inconveniences me^ but it tries the patience of my guests." Talleyrand was not the only member of the diplomatic circle who found Palmerston a little trying. The present Lord Esher's father-in-law, Sylvain Vanderwere, while Belgian Minister, used to say : " When the Foreign Secretary gave me an appointment he always kept me waiting one or two hours, and sometimes never appeared at all." The mass of Englishmen may have heard stories like these at the time, only to laugh at them quite in the Palmerstonian manner. And the things which in connection with their favourite statesman impressed them most were those to- day almost forgotten, and even at the time much less talked about than the Don Pacifico incident. Such was the Elorence Mather affair in 1852. 197 Great Victorians This at first somewhat shook the Palmerstonian prestige, but was afterwards placed to the Palmerstonian credit. A youth named Mather was in the way of Austrian soldiers marching through a Florentine street. The officer in com- mand, striking him with his sword, cut his head open. The father complained to the English Ambassador, Sir Henry Bulwer, demanding as damages £5,000. Eventually he received £250. The actual result did not seem m'uch to affect the popular verdict on the Palmerstonian action. It was a self-assertive era in our nineteenth-cen- tury record. Palmerston personified the temper of the time, and received and retained the gallery plaudits not only in spite of but sometimes in consequence of his mistakes ; for a mistake it certainly was, as the Brazilian Minister, Macedo, complained in 1852 to an acquaintance of mine, " not to give Brazil a chance of showing the sincerity of her objections to the slave trade before compelling us to submit to the right of search in our own waters.'* My last sight of this overwhelmingly popular type of the aristocratic, autocratic diplomatist was some day during the first half of October 1865, as he mounted his horse in Downing Street. A few days later he had gone. In Disraeli's novel " Endymion " Lord Rowhamp- 198 Palmerstoniana ton, Palmerston drawn from the life, dies at his desk. The immediate cause of the real Palmer- ston's death was a walk on the terrace at Brocket without his hat. To the remonstrance ujx)n this indiscretion he said, '* Oh, it's only what bathers call 'taking a header.'" He kept his habitual courtesy and cheerfulness to the last, and when, a few minutes before dissolution. Lady Palmer- ston came into the room, he kissed his hand to her. His last words were those of one at work on a treaty : '* That's article ninety -eight ; now go on to the next." 199 CHAPTER V "ARCADES AMBO" Palmerston on the Turf — The Palmerstonian pattern in men and dress exemplified by W. McCullagh Torrens in his appear- ance, manner, stories (the whisky and the Cabinet), and by Charles Skirrow — Other early and mid-nineteenth- century types of both sexes — The third Sir Robert Peel on his father's death — Horse-dealer Quartermaine brings the three- hundred-guinea Premier round to Whitehall Gardens — Sir Robert's refusal of the high figure followed by the fatal accident on Constitution Hill — Outside and inside Pem- broke Lodge — Sir Henry Calcraft's introduction to a famous veteran in Church and State — Lord John with his wind- gauge under the veranda and amid his historical souvenirs and illustrious visitors in his drawing-room — Thomas Carlyle on misrepresentation of himself and on his own amiability — How the first Lord Lytton "being dead, yet speaketh" — Lord John for the Jews — What Carlyle thought of Peel, of a certain Anglican service on a Scotland-bound steamer, and of the Church of England — H. Calcraft's and E. F. Leveson- Gower's review of Grevillian and EUician verdicts — Johnny's "calculated indiscretions" and "dirty tricks" — Mr. E. F. Leveson-Gower and Lord John — "You will know what to say. Good-morning ! " — Charles Greville, George Payne, and " the rigour of the game " — Palmerston and Russell compared — Specimens of Palmerstonian wit and wisdom, and of Russellian aphoristic invective in duel with Sir F. Burdett — How Whigs are born not made, and Lord John 290 " Arcades Ambo " preaches " rest and thankfulness " — Canning on the " mud- bespattered Whigs " — Cobbett's vernacular about the Whigs in general, and Lord John in particular, as the "shoy-hoys" of politics — When statesmen fall out, body-servants come by their own — What Sir John Graham's valet found in his master's pocket, and what he did with it — " The Widow's Mite " : how Lord John came to be so called — Lord John Russell and Earl Granville compare notes about preparatory schools and agree in thinking mutton fat detestable — Adolphe Thiers on Viscount Palmerston and Lord John Russell — The Palmerstonian laissez-aller in private as well as public life, especially in connection with household bills — Something savours more of the " hawk " than of the "merry-man" — How Palmerston and Russell made friends in 1858, and "hated each other more than ever" — The secret truth about Palmerston's dismissal from the Foreign Office in 1852 — The real cause not so much his "scores off his own bat " as his patronage of revolutionary movements abroad and the English Court's preference for Legitimacy in general and Austrian Absolutism in particular — Palmerston's "tit-for-tat" with John Russell— The Militia Bill brings in the Conservatives under Lord Derby and puts Malmesbury in Palmerston's place in the Foreign Office — Malmesbury on himself for peace, retrenchment, and reform — His Foreign Office economies — His short way with the Foreign Service messengers. In his international sympathies, as in a certain amount of his statesmanship, Palmerston typified the reaction towards democracy from the indiffer- ence to racial connections or aspirations of the Vienna Congress in 181 5, and from Metternich*s system of police despotism at home, together with contempt for popular, even national, move^ 2Q\ Great Victorians ments abroad, that led to the revolution of 1848. With these public tendencies he combined, in the whole habit of his private life, his associations and pursuits, the patrician tastes of the period to which he belonged, coupled with an easy acceptance of the social fusion at whose begin- nings he had assisted, and whose progress he did much to encourage. In his fondness for the Turf, in his intercourse with his trainer, John Day, and all his stable connection, he not only reflected the social temper of his own time, but in his own person presaged the ruling passions, in their most familiar aspects, as well as in all their levelling influence, of the era following his own. Like the Duke of Wellington and many others, filling a large place in the public eye and mind, he became a pattern as well as a type. George IV, after consultation with his tailor, may have brought in the frock-coat. Palmer- ston was the first to make it a compiulsory article of costume. Black and white check trousers when worn by Palmerston became universal . 'He laid them aside, and striped nether garments were soon the only wear. With the Palmerstonian dress there came in, for gentlemen of mature age, whether of St. Stephen's, at Newmarket, or in the City, the Palmerstonian blend of genial dignity and smiling ease of personal bearing. 2p? " Arcades Ambo '* There lived, till quite the close of the nineteenth century^ two perfect and miscellaneously known specimens of the Palmerstonian school . One was W. McCullagh Torrens, who died April 26, 1894, from a hansom cab accident. This clever and kindly Irishman had long shared the social life of St. Stephen's with Palmerston, and had so caught his phrases that the terse sayings often attributed to Palmerston himself were really those of Torrens . Such was the description of so m^ny Irish reforms as doomed to failure because they attempted to make sovereign proprietors out of pauper peasants. So, too, though Palmerston may have thought it of his particular friend. Sir Patrick O'Brien^ it was not he, but Torrens, who said, ** Eh, Pat, if it weren't for the whisky we'd have you in the Cabinet." The self-posses- sion and dignity of the disciple were at least equal to those of the master ; and during thej latter half of his life, after his second marriage,^ Torrens, seated at the top of his dinner-table in Eaton Square, recalled to miany of his guests the Amphitryon of Cambridge House. » The second of the two nineteenth -century hosts visibly cast in the Palmerstonian mould was Charles Skirrow, by profession a solicitor, subsequently a taxing master in the High Court of Justice, the kindest and smoothest of men, 203 Great Victorians with a face which was the picture of discreet conviviahty, a remarkably sound taste in wine, and in his earher days more or less mixed up, socially as well as professionally, with Palmer - ston and the first Lord Westbury. Among the other figures, varying in magnitude, of the Palmerstonian era to be met with during an after- noon walk frotn' Pall Mall to Westminster were the two inseparables. Lord Adolphus (Dolly) Fitzclarence with Sir George Wombwell, wild- eyed, thin, fiercely gesticulating Nineveh Layard, and Sibthorp and Chisholm Anstey, the two men who were to Palmerston at Westminster what Rowcliffe was to him at Tiverton. But most observed of all observers would, of course, have been bell -hatted, white -waistcoated, wide- trousered Sir Robert Peel, destined to meet his death through two galloping young ladies, who caused his horse to shy, a rib breaking and piercing the lung.^ Going imto the Park one would have seen two or three ladies, for the ^ The third Sir Robert Peel, the minister's son, once showed me, outside his house in Whitehall Gardens, the exact spot at which Quartermaine, the best-known dealer of those days, stationed the horse he had brought round for his father's inspection. " His name," said the dealer, " is The Premier." "And his price ? " said Sir Robert. "Three hundred guineas." "More than I care to give," was the rejoinder. The animal actually purchased, costing ^bout that sum, stumbled, threw, and killed its rider, 304 ^^ Arcades Ambo '* most part well mounted and well equipaged. Anonyma in Rotten Row was then the subject of innumerable letters in The Times. Agnes Wil- loughby, to be followed some years later by Cora Pearl, queened it among the " pretty horse- breakers," but was a poor substitute for the typical Palmerstonian demi-monde notoriety, Lola Montez, the bold-faced, black -haired lady whose sole beauty lay in her brilliantly flashing eyes. There would be the Countess de Landsfeld, as she had been created by the old King of Bavaria, who, to avoid expulsion from his capital, had made her escape in man's dress. From Switzer- land she came to this country, started a little establishment in Half-Moon Street, came across an officer in the Life Guards who shared her fondness for dogs, married him bigamously, retired across the Atlantic, and died in San Erancisco. As representative of his age, though from a very different point of view, as Palmerston was the rival with whom he had so many skirmishes, heavy or light, and who outlived him by nearly thirteen years— Lord John Russell. On a fine afternoon in the summer of 1875 ^ was walking through the great Park, and was just leaving it by the Richmond Gate, when I caught sight of a little old gentleman on a spacious wicker 205 Great Victorians chair, or couch, under the veranda of the Crown villa known as Pembroke Lodge, occupied for some thirty years by Earl Russell. At the moment he was apparently occupied with ad- justing a mechanical contrivance of a sort I had never seen before. While thus looking I was accosted by my acquaintance, then at the Board of Trade, Sir Henry Calcraft, the scion of an old Whig family, who knew everything about everybody, and not to know whom was indeed to be unknown oneself. ** Watching," he said, ** old Johnny's diversions with his wind-gauge ? If you like, I will take you in and introduce you to him." Five minutes afterwards I formed a humble unit in the most illustrious comipany which I had then ever been privileged to enter. The host was talking with great animation by turns to J. A. Eroude and W. E. H'. Lecky, the his- torians, to Sir Joseph Hooker, the director of Kew Gardens, and to Thomas Carlyle, the prophet and sage of Chelsea. I had seen the veteran for the first time a few months earlier in the House of Lords during a debate on Irish coercion or the Endowed Schools Act, I cannot remember which. In parliament- ary utterance what the " Ha-ha ! " was to Pal- merston the " Hem-hem ! " was at his latest to Lord John. His speech was little more than 206 " Arcades Ambo 9> dumb -show, for only an occasional word mounted to the gallery where I had my seat. Weariness of the situation and the weakness of age then gave the observer no chance of seeing, as Bulwer- Lytton in "New Timon '* has it :— . . . our statesmen when the steam is on, And languid Johnny glows to glorious John ! When Hampden's thought, by Falkland's muses dress'd, Lights the pale cheek and swells the generous breast ; When the pent heat expands the quickening soul, And foremost in the race the wheels of genius roll ! The contrast between the old Whig as I had thus caught a glimpse of him in the ** gilded chamber " and as I now saw and, for the first time, heard him in the home lif)e he loved, enabled one to realize the transformation described by the poet. His conversation was not monologue ; at the same time, it had little of the give-and-take belonging to casual talk. He spoke seldom, and then chiefly to Carlyle and Hooker. When, however, he opened his lips, the words coming from them were compact of long experience, full of wisdom, and memorable for their point. The announcement of Mr. Charles Villiers, to whom as to a family friend I had been known all my life, secured mfe the notice of the old Earl. He had seen me looking at the bric-a-brac on the velvet-covered slab just above the chimney- 207 Great Victorians piece. I beard the new-comer say to him of me, " Bickham Escott's nephew." " I recollect your uncle/' said to me the master of Pembroke Lodge, " and here "—pointing to one of the medals— *' is a memorial of a cause in which I had his co-operation, though in his time nothing came of it." The souvenir in question bore the in- scription :— Have we not one Father? Hath not one God created us? Lord John RusselFs constituency for the twenty years before his peerage was the City of London. The movement for the complete enfranchisement of Jews began in 1835; it was only crowned with success in 1858, when, on the 26th of July, Baron Rothschild took his seat for the City. By that time most of those who had laboured with him had gone, and my own relative, to whom he referred, had died in 1853. As for my fellow-visitors on this occasion to Pembroke Lodge, one could not but notice a certain resem- blance to the host in Lecky's incisively senten- tious talk, gentle and subdued manner, though stopping short of the frigidity traditionally attri- buted to Lord John. The warm atmosphere of a country house was necessary, they said, to thaw Lord John's iciness, and to bring him out as 208 " Arcades Ambo 5> he was known by those who saw him at his best when staying with Lord Lansdowne at ** Bowoo'd " or Lord Stanhope at " Chevening.'* Concerning Froude, whom I had met before, and with whom I became intimate afterwards, something will be said later. As regards the author of ** Sartor Resartus," I saw him at Pem- broke Lodge for the first and last time. Before he left he led me to a corner of the room, or of the veranda outside, and gave me a few words entirely to myself. ** You may hear it said of me that I am cross-grained and disagreeable. Dinna believe it. Only let me have my own way exactly in everything, with all about me precisely what I wish, and a sunnier or pileasanter creature does not live. And now," he said, "that I have heard your name, let me tell you I met some one bearing it, maybe your father, on board the steamer by which some time ago I was voyaging to Scotland. It was Sunday ; we had a little religious service on deck. He read from the Church of England Prayer Book, delivered a short and sensible discourse, leaving me, like others, with the feeling that the English Estab- lishment is the best thing of its kind out." With regard to Lord John himself. Sir Henry Calcraft, reared from infancy in Whig aristocratic circles, almost congratulated me on my recep- 209 o Great Victorians tion beneath the roof to which he had introduced me. " The truth/' he went on to explain, " is that Lord John's manner, frigid and forbidding as at first it seems, is rather that of his period than of the man himself. In comparison with Sir Robert Peel he is cheeriness and geniality personified. No one," he went on, *' could have hit him off better than a man to whom I will find an oppor- tunity of introducing you one day, and whose memoirs a few years hence wc shall all;, I suppose, be reading." This was an allusion to Charles Greville, then Clerk of the Council, a great figure at Newmarket and on every racecourse. His phrase, so pleasing to Calcraft, describing the great Sir Robert, was " a cold feeler and a cautious stepper." " Russell," resumed Calcraft, ** had always an attached personal connection. Peel, on the other hand, was always without friends." Before we left Pembroke Lodge Carlyle put the truth to toe pretty well when he said, *' Peel can bribe, coerce, palaver, can win votes but not hearts." Some years later I repeated this estimate to one of Peel's literary trustees^ Charles Stuart Parker, who, when a Fellow of Univer- sity, had examined me in the final schools, and to Peel's eldest son. Sir Robert the third. They both circumstantially denied its truth. Nor, as 2 ID " Arcades Ambo " I knew from their conversation, could any public man have personally endeared to himself in a warmer degree not only Parker, but Cardwell, the most famous and staunohest of Peelites, who lived well into my time. " My father's manner," said to me the third Sir Robert, *' was not remark- able for abandon, but he felt very deeply and quickly. I have seen the account of a railway accident cause him to turn deadly pale, and even go off in a faint. What really," continued the great man's son, " stung my father in the attacks on him for his grand apostasy A^as the ignoring of his words four years earlier, 1842, that on the general principles of Free Trade there existed no great difference in opinion. 'All,' he said, ' agree in the broad rule that we shall buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest.' " There were then three different methods of dealing with the doome^d Corn Laws . One was the fixed duty of the Whigs, the other Peel's own original sliding scale, and last, the total abolition of the Re- pealers. The Irish famine determined Peel's course. In the Duke of Wellington's words, *' Rotten potatoes did it all : they put Peel in his d d fright." As a fact, and as some of those I had met at Pembroke Lodge reminded one, some weight must be given to Lord John's ** Edinburgh Letter," denouncing the Com Laws 211 Great Victorians as the blight of commerce, the bane of agri- culture, the source of bitter divisions among classes, the cause of penury, fever, mortality, and crim^ among the people. Outbursts of this sort sometimes staggered his party colleagues. They had the effect, however, of fixing the national attention upon their author. They made him, indeed, always the talk, and sometimes in the City, as well as in the country, the idol of the hour. Johnny's '* calculated indis- cretions," as they seemed to some, or *' dirty tricks," as, without any real resentment, they were loosely called by others, were the most in- teresting of political pheiiomena, periodically re- current during the first half of the Victorian age. Afterwards they were to some degree, if uncon- sciously, imitated by the Lord Salisbury of our time in the " blaze of apology " which now and then lit up his place, or the sensational candour with which, when meditating a fresh stroke. Lord RandoJp'h Churchill took the multitude into his confidence . Lord John, indeed, not only never advertised after the Churchillian fashion, but was apt to be severe about any approach to doing it in his partisans or opponents. He did, however, realize the need in a democratic age of occasionally em- phasizing his views for the benefit of himself, if 212 *' Arcades Ambo 5> not of his party. All personally acquainted with Palmerston and Russell felt that the two resem- bled each other in there being no pose about either. In the autumn session of 1854, Mr. E. E. Leveson-Gower, Lord Granville's brother, was to second the Address in the Commons. He therefore had to see the Prime Minister, Lord John, on the subject. On the Premier therefore he called, to receive from him, in the way of in- struction, nothing more than these words : ** I am glad you are going to second the Address. You will know what to say. Good -morning." The reserve of Russell was as much a part of his nature as the colloquial urbanity of Palmer- ston. In conversation with Palmerston during their earlier days. Napoleon III once attributed his habitual taciturnity to the influence on him of long connection with the grave, silent men of the English turf. These associations never had the same effect on the evergreen minister. Like all those of his time and set, Charles Greville and George Payne, as much as others who were never on a racecourse in their lives, he took his amuse- ments in earnest, and might have been bracketed with Charles Lamb's Sarah Battle in upholding "the rigour of the game." In the very year, I believe, of his death, he left ** Broadlands " after a very early breakfast on a ride to Littleton stables 213 Great Victorians to see his horses gallop, and only returned home in time for a late luncheon . A little earHer in the same twelvemonth he had trotted down on a *' speech day " to Harrow from his house in Piccadilly, a distance of more than ten miles, done well within the hour. Sir Henry Calcraft, to whose good offices, as I have said, I owe the material for a comparison between the two men, had a rare experience of the public service in nearly all its departments and knew thoroughly the official qualities of its chief directors. "At the Home Office, the Foreign Office, and wher- ever else they may have served," said this remarkably competent critic, " Palmerston and Russell established a tradition which will make itself felt to the end of time. In all matters of detail, such as the principles of caligraphy, the docketing of papers, and very much else, they created precedents and set examples which have operated as widely and effectively as if they had been the reforms recommended by a Parliamen- tary Commission." Palmerston and Russell were both credited by the contemporaries who knew them best with contributing to the political phrase-book words or expressions which it was predicted would long survive their authors. Palmerston's *' mankind, taking them altogether, are very good fellows, 214 " Arcades Ambo » but rather conceited/' may be matched by Russell's stinging rebuke to Sir Francis Burdett when that former champion of popular rights had ratted to the Tories. "The cant of patriotism may be as disgusting as the right honourable baronet says . I will point out, however, that what may be no less disgusting is the recant of patriot- ism." *' Rest and be thankful " as a protest against present agitation for a further suffrage enlargement at once passed into the currency of the language and exposed the maker of the expression to an amount of Radical indignation which it is a testimony to Russell's greatness that he so soon and so completely lived down. Can- ning, Liberal in all things except Reform, had already described *' the mud -bespattered Whigs, with laurels in their hats and brickbats at their heels, bedaubed with ribbons and rubbish, and only rescued from their overpowering popularity by a detachment of His Majesty's Horse Guards." Cobbett now coined one of his effective nick- names, which, sticking for a little time like a burr, was shaken off completely by Russell's moral force. "Lord John," he said, "and the rest of the Whigs are like ' shoy-hoys ' [ the Hampshire word for scarecrows] put up to frighten thievish sparrows, looking very formid- able at a distance, but soon discovered to be 215 Great Victorians perfectly harmless. The borough-mongers care no more for such men than the sparrow in the garden of a neighbour of mine at Botley, which sat hammering out the peas on the crown of the hat of a sham man that had been stuck up to frighten the sparrows away." Historians and biographers may have been chary in giving instances of it, but the attribute that, in the same degree as the premeditated dis- plays of fitful impetuosity, interested the contem- porary public was Lord John's essentially British and typically patrician serenity of bearing and temper. With admirable felicity and point Bulwer- Lytton interpreted the popular appreciation of this trait in the "New Timon," 1846. This incident is more noteworthy still because it marked one of Russell's earliest departures from Whiggism towards Radicalism. Next, cool, and all unconscious of reproach, Comes the calm "Johnny who upset the coach." The coach was the 1834 Grey Ministry, the occa- sion the debate on the superfluous funds of the Irish Church. The whole subject had long caused much difference of opinion in the Whig Cabinet. Up to now the English language had failed to provide Stanley, then a Whig minister, the future fourteenth Earl of Derby and Tory chief, with 216 " Arcades Ambo " words to express his loathing of O'Connell. In the discussion that took place towards the end of May he changed his tone and spoke quite pleasantly of the Irish dictator. Lord John, though quite consistently with everything he had said and thought on the subject, A^ent further by declaring the revenues of the Irish Church to exceed the sum necessary for the moral and religious instruction of its members. Suppressed sensation all round, amid which Stanley scribbled on a piece of paper the words, *' Johnny's upset the coach," and passed it to Sir James Graham. A little later the words had their fulfilment in the resignations of the Duke of Richmond, Lord Ripon, as well as Graham and Stanley them- selves. Of those last two Graham put the paper into his pocket. His servant, a very smart fellow, found it there the same night, and at once took it to Printing House Square. The Times next morning intimated the fatal ending of the Cabinet crisis. The Whig place-men and place- hunters, the tapers and tadpoles of *' Coningsby," forming the entire tribe of " twelve -hundred -a - yearers " in real life, never forgave the indiscre- tion which hastened their doom and quickly pre- pared the way for the Tory Government under Peel as Premier and Wellington as Foreign Secretary. Deep and long, if not loud, at 217 Great Victorians Brooks's and among the Cavendish section of Whiggism were the curses heaped on '* the con- ceited puppy " who by blurting out the fatal secret had let in the Tories, Of all the public men surviving to our times, Lord Granville showed the quickest and truest insight into Lord John's idiosyncrasies. The two men diflfered widely in tastes, temper, habits, and interests of mind and life, but when together by themselves and in a congenial frame would cap each other's stories of their earliest days, especially of their tribulations at preparatory schools and their devices to avoid eating the mutton fat which it meant a punishment to leave on their plates. ^ Russell's betrothal and marriage to the lady who had been the wife of Lord Ribblesdale combined with shortness of stature to secure him the sobriquet of *' the Widow's Mite." His non- chalance on suddenly trying conjunctures secured him the admiration even of those smarting from the party havoc worked by his recent words. Only a few days later in the May that had seen ^ The conversational intimacy of the two finds innumerable illustrations in Lord Fitzmaurice's encyclopaedic biography, at once a treasure-house of nineteenth-century international politics, alike in their domestic and foreign aspect, and of society in the same epoch sketched from behind the scenes. Beyond my obligation to that work I owe much also to Lord Granville's brother, Mr. E. F. Leveson-Gower, as well as others, like him, unhappily no longer here. 2l8 " Arcades Ambo ^^ him '* upset the coach," he was walking with Samuel Rogers across St. James's Park. The pair met full face the trio whose resignation Lord John had caused. " I," Rogers told Kinglake, " stopped to speak to them. Johnny walked on, but framed his features into an expression imply- ing that he thought less of them than of the dirt that soiled his boots." " Palmerston," said Thiers, who took the correct measure of both, " was guided par la caract^re, non par la raison." In private as well as public laissez-aller had become his motto. He never troubled about tradesmen's little accounts, from no idea of keep- ing them out of their money, but from mere carelessness. The frequent consequence was a lawyer's letter. One of these, more peremptory in tone than usual, had the signature, *' Hawk and Merriman." *' Really," said Palmerston, tossing it to one of his secretaries, *' they should be told that this savours more of the hawk than of the merry -man." His political associates received much the same treatment. As deeply interested in politics as Melbourne, he often showed as little good faith as Russell. None ever knew exactly where they were with him. Until he became supreme over his own party nobody could be quite sure whether he was going to nobble the Tories or to square the Radicals. 219 Great Victorians All this was as well known to- his official col- leagues as to the critics behind the scenes, such as Greville. In Melbourne's second administra- tion (1835-41), Clarendon and Palmerston were respectively Lord Privy Seal and Foreign Secre- tary. *' It is impossible," said Melbourne to Clarendon one day at Windsor, *' that this Government can go on ; Palmierston in com- mvinication with the Tories— Palmerston and Ashley " Then he stopped. Clarendon took up his parable. *' What ! You think Palmerston and the Tories will come together? " Melbourne nodded assent ; and when asked, *' Which will come to the other? " chuckled, grunted *' I don't know ! " laughed, and rubbed his hands. As to the Tories, the dozen attempts to unite Palmerston with Derby only failed because Palmerston would not give up Free Trade and Dei^by from 1846 led the Protectionists. The Melbournian dispensation just referred to required, no doubt, Melbourne's tact and humour to keep it together during the six years of its life. Its internal dissensions and recriminations were always dooming it to death. During the quiet intervals the Prime Minister went to sleep. The Cabinet's brains and mainsprings were Russell and Palmerston, both immeasurably above the Prime Minister, with infinitely more force of character and knowledge of affairs. Russell had 220 " Arcades Ambo " inherited, not formed, his opinions. Representing the Whig tradition, he believed in the infalli- bility of its exponents or oracles, from Sidney to Somers, from Somers to Fox and to himself. It was part of the providential order that the Great Revolution families should govern the country in unbroken succession throughout the centuries. The difficulties into v^hich he got the Whigs had the same cause as those created by Palmerston for his partisans and himself— the practice inveterate in each of playing for his own hand. "The worst of Johnny," said "Bear" Ellice, " is that he is always springing mines under our feet or bidding for popularity over our heads . One never goes to bed at night without knowing whether we shall not wake up to be confronted in the morning by a Stroud Letter, an Edinburgh Letter, or a Durham Letter, or that when the House opens he may not denounce his friends as he did denounce them on the conduct of the Crimean War." Palmerston, on the other hand, entirely ignored the notion of subordination or community of responsibility. During the Melboumian era, in the election of a Speaker, Russell, by his moderation, averted a collision between the two sides of the House^ certain, had Palmerston been left to himself, to have caused much inconvenience. The final reconciliation between Palmerston and Russell in 221 Great Victorians 1858 was no drawing-room incident, as it has been described, but was managed entirely by " Bear " Ellice and took place at his house. After shaking hands, they may, as Lady Tankerville said, have hated each other more than ever. But at the time Ellice's account of their estrange- ment differed a good deal from the usual story, and may be given now as I had it from .Lord Houghton . After the Kossuth incident of 1 8 5 i the Radicals dined Palmerston at the Reform Club, and democratic deputations from Islington and Finsbury presented him with congratulatory addresses. The Court being strongly pro- Austrian, he at once got into trouble, and only a plausible plea for turning him out was wanted. To have found that in his Hungarian sympathies would have been to cemtot his alliance with the Radicals. As a fact, the unpardonable offence of Palmerston in the Royal eyes, making it sure that on the first opportunity he would be sent to the *' right-about," was neither his prematurely expressed partiality for the Second Empire, nor the failure to show the Queen, after she had first seen and signed them, his alterations in foreign dispatches. The true cause of his disgrace was purely dynastic. The revolutionary year 1848 fixed the Court sympathies very strongly on Austria against Hungary and against Italy. Those feelings had grown in intensity rather than 222 I " Arcades Ambo " diminished three years later. On the occasion of Louis Kossuth's visit, the Austrian Ambassador in London received rather rough treatment from Barclay and Perkins's draymen. This was the moment that Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, chose for accepting the Reform Club invitation to dine, as the courtiers put it, with the rabble — men not ten of whom any decent man knew even by sight. The Queen and the Prince Consort were furious, and the more so because they knew that on the issue which had chiefly provoked their wrath they could not get rid of the minister. The Whigs, therefore, were to go with the least possible delay. With a strangeness as of comic opera, Palmerston himself hastened the fulfilment of the Royal desire. Lord John's former Foreign I Secretary himself upset his former chief by the Militia Bill, February 1852. So lightly, however, did his Liberalism sit on '* Pam " that he was perfectly ready to take the Foreign Oflice under Russell's successor. Lord Dei'by. "The Rupert of Debate," however, had other views. According to ** The Memoirs of an Ex-Minister," he acci- dentally met the author of that work and asked him to suggest some one for the Foreign Office. The third Earl of Malmesbury naturally sug- gested himself. Meanwhile the new Prime Minister had been angling for Lord Stratford de Redcliffe with the Foreigu Portfolio as bait ; 223 Great Victorians he did not even get a bite. The day after the meeting with his brother peer just related, Lord Derby actually put into the Foreign Office the self -proposed Malmesbury, of whom his political opponents used unkindly to say that he was never less in place than when in place. Burke had something to say about the " gentle historians " who judge of every man's capacity for office by the number of offices he has filled ; and the more offices, the more ability. The Earl of Malmesbury belonged in his time to three Cabinets. In bearing, manner, and a never absent sense of his own importance, he resembled the Lord Sydney of his own period. His father had taken the leading part in the abortive nego- tiations with Napoleon, first to prevent, and then to stop, the great war. The son must have in- herited something of the paternal qualifications ; for Lord Derby really considered him one of the best Secretaries of State with whom he had ever served. As " Tamarang " he was favourably known in every European capital. Chancellery, and Court, and had no serious enemies except the Orleanist faction, socially so active and politically so powerful in the English polite world during the years that opened the second half of the Victorian age. Thoroughly ruse as he showed himself, he owed more than has ever yet been stated to our then French Ambassador, Lord 224 " Arcades Ambo " Cowley, who not only helped him privately iti his work but used his influence to prevent many in- convenient questions being put to the Foreign Secretary in Parliament. This third Earl of Malmesbury was something more than a man who thought a good deal of his family antecedents, his title, and himself. In his private as well as official life and doings he typified the prudential virtues characteristic of his caste in an age when so many of its members began to supplement, if not create, their incomes by *' going into the City." My own very slight acquaintance with him came about during the earliest eighties in the following fashion. His old precis-writer and, I think, private secretary as well as Hampshire neighbour, a very old-standing friend of mine. Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, asked me whether I could recommend him a trustworthy and practised writer who would share with him the burden of preparing his memoirs for the Press. I at once named Mr. J. M. Tuohy, then, as now, a dis- tinguished member of the Dublin Freeman's London staff. There were some preliminaries, it seemed, on which Lord Malmesbury was desirous of speaking to me. Nothing could be more frank than the Earl's conversation or more considerate than his ideas . After some talk on the immediate business, he looked at me through his glasses and 225 p Great Victorians rather thought he saw in me a family resemblance to a relative of mine already mentioned in these pages as the victim of the Greek brigands at Marathon. The Earl then had something to say on general subjects, such as the influence of the Press, the effect of the House of Commons on foreign policy, of a scheme prepared by himself and Sir Henry Wolff for replacing war by arbi- tration. *' Whatever," he continued, " one's party or position, one must adapt oneself to one's times ; and I have always worked for peace, retrenchment, and reform. Among the leakages I have stopped are the foreign service messengers. Very soon after first coming into office I reduced them front a little less than a score to fifteen in number. I also reduced the length and cost of their journeys. The salary used to be eight hundred or nine hun- dred a year, not including perquisites ; and some messengers, with mileage and other allowances, brought it up to over a thousand pounds. Lord John Russell, who followed me at the Foreign Office, first in 1852 and again in 1858, went farther and fixed the messengers' emoluments at four hundred a year, with travelling expenses and a pound a day for pocket-money. Since then there has been more cutting down, and in these days of electricity and steam locomotion the office by and by may cease to exist." 226 CHAPTER VI FROM SIR ROBERT THE THIRD TO LORD DERBY THE FOURTEENTH A Piccadilly party in the eighties — Enter the third Sir Robert Peel — How " Magnifico Pomposo" lays down the law, backs his opinion, is proved wrong by the books, and pays up like a man — A modern Zimri — From father to son — Sir Robert on his seniors, contemporaries, and men and things in general — Henry Calcraft's promise of introducing the writer to "the lodger in Bruton Street" fulfilled — How Lady Granville ran the gauntlet of Mr. Greville's "horrid" friends— The third Sir Robert's strange adventures and imposing appearance — His views about the fourteenth Earl of Derby — Nineteenth- century types of politics and play for the Upper Ten — Legisla- tion or thimblerigging ? — Political country houses in the West and their company — S. T. Kekewich to be lent to the Liberals to make them respectable — Sir Stafford Northcote in the bosom of his family and neighbours — Sir Stafford's chestnuts — As literate as Thackeray could wish, though himself pre- ferring Dickens to Thackeray — At home with Shakespeare and the musical glasses — On the practical usefulness of the study of Greek — Sides with Archbishop Temple against Sir M. E. Grant-Duff — How Priam in St. James's Palace " waked and looked on drawing his curtains by night " — The South Devon " knight of the shire," squire of " Peamore," and " the Rupert of Debate" at Eton and afterwards — The former introduces the writer to the latter — The fourteenth Lord Derby at William IV's coronation : " You have the gout ; must not kneel, my lord ! " "I really must insist on kneeling, 227 Great Victorians Sir " — The writer's call at Knowsley — How the Earl preferred the gout to the sherry — The Countess prefers the canal barge to the railway train, and the Earl the towing-path to either — "One thing at a time" — Newmarket leaves no time for Imperial or home politics — Receives a wigging from the Queen and anticipates being " beaten horse and foot " — The " ruler of the Queen's Navee " — Chaffed by his chief about his visit to Spithead — The ministerial fish-dinner — Lord Derby proposes "Sir John Pakington and the wooden spoons of old England " — The Earl makes merry about Lord John's " very bad company " with Lord and I^ady Malmesbury — How for putting on wrong dress he was nearly turned out by the porter— The anecdote about the coal- scuttle — Succeeds Duke of Wellington as Oxford Chancellor in 1853 — Begins with Latin oratory — Ten years later brings down gallery and boxes by his Ciceronian welcome to the Princess of Wales — " Ipsa adest " — How and where in deal- ing with the Duke of Argyll Derby learnt the wisdom of the " amuses him and don't hurt me " policy. The last chapter introduced a personal link between politics and society in the earlier and later half of the Victorian era. This was the third Sir Robert Peel, of whom, during and after the seventies till his death in 1895, ^ saw a great deal, always with extreme profit and pleasure to myself from his extraordinarily varied experi- ences and generally, but not invariably, accurate memory. I make this reserve because it was a momentary slip in his recollection of the past which first brought me to his notice. About the time of the then Laureate's peerage (January 1884), I happened to be one of a little party 228 Sir Robert the Third to Lord Derby dining at Baron Eerdinand Rothschild's house in Piccadilly. Some one ventured on the obser- vation that Lord Tennyson would be the first peer created for literary eminence alone during recent times. Sir Robert waved with his hand rather than articulated dissent. ** How about Macaulay ? " I then ventured to hint that the his- torian, like the novelist Bulwer-Lytton, had long been well known in Parliament, and a Cabinet Minister before receiving his title. *' What ! " exclaimed Sir Robert, in his most magnificently crushing tone and manner, " you the editor of the Fortnightly Review, and give yourself away like this ! " ** Indeed," I meekly persisted, " un- less the history books are wrong, Macaulay in Melbourne's 1840 Ministry certainly had the War Office." *' Why," continued Sir Robert, to com- plete my annihilation, " there was no Secretary of State at the War Office till after the Crimea in 1857." *' Pardon me. Sir Robert, I did not say there was, but only that as Secretary-at-War Macaulay was one of Melbourne's Ministers ; and if I have deceived you and myself, our host's library will enable you to confirm your correction and secure you my apologies." But Baron Ferdinand had been beforehand with us both. Having left the room for a moment, he re- appeared with that admirable little manual, 229 Great Victorians Ransome and Acland's *' Political History/* open at page i86, showing the composition of the Whig Government as reconstituted after the "Bedchamber Plot's" failure. "However, I acknowledge," said Peel, " I had overlooked the Cabinet, which was the real matter, and that you were right." No parliamentary personage of his time below the first rank was better known to the multitude in town or country than the third Sir Robert. Wherever he might be staying there took place no public gathering, religious or secular, into which he did not find his way. Once there he always received, and seldom refused, an invita- tion to mount the platform. With some sug- gestion in his ruddy face, heavy, well -waxed moustache, dress, and general manner of the master of a circus ring, he possessed what Mr. Gladstone called the finest voice in the St. Stephen's of his time. As versatile in his choice of subjects as he was voluble in dealing with them, he adopted generally a homely style, packed with varied information, and lightened with amusing illustrations and personal reminis- cences. Disraeli, during Sir Robert Peel's earlier days at St. Stephen's, never missed a chance of visiting on him a dislike of his father's memory^ sometimes, so I have been told by those present 230 Sir Robert the Third to Lord Derby at the time, with some discredit to himself. That happened during a Foreign Policy debate of the early sixties. Sir Robert Peel, as what was then called Liberal-Conservative Member for Tamworth, spoke of seeing Mr. Disraeli smile at some of his remarks. Disraeli, who, by the by, never smiled, called him to order, and even went so far as to retort the charge on his censor. As it was. Sir Robert did not come off second best in the little encounter. So long as he had a seat in the House he filled the assembly directly he rose to speak, and never moved it to such roars of laughter as during his last session, when joking about the German patronymic of Queen Victoria's sculptor-in -ordinary. Sir Edgar Boehm. " Pooh ! " magnificently sniffed Sir Robert, "the very name smells." In the same vein some years before, more graphically than Thackeray in any of his lectures, he described George I in his " harem," blubbering *' curagao." The Court took great offence. The then Prince of Wales let it be known to Sir Robert that he thought it a mistake. Sir Robert himself took an opportunity of explaining that he had spoken in a Pickwickian sense, and the matter ended. Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts and nothing long. 231 Great Victorians Cast in such a mould, the third Sir Robert was predestined to be as often in hot water of every kind as Zimri himself. Nor did many weeks together pass without once hearing of Turf Club episodes in which " Sir Peel " figured, and which in more belligerent days might have had serious results. The minister's eldest son and name- sake during the period of my close acquaintance with him lived a great deal at Brighton at the New Club. Here he had his bed-sitting- room, finely fitted up and furnished, on the first floor ; and here, downstairs, he was often as visible to passengers on the King's Road outside as to members within, the ornament and oracle of the place, typically linking in his own person, as well as by his own grand manner, the London - super-Mare of his own time with the exclusive associations of the Pavilion— its titled and un- titled demi-reps of the days when the Pavilion first rose to the honour and glory of the fourth George. There were then still living those who could recall as well as this chief of South Coast nota- bilities the brilliant auspices under which he began, and the national position which it had seemed his fate to fill. The second Duke of Wellington had celebrated the day on which the son of his father's old colleague took a wife by 232 Sir Robert the Third to Lord Derby a splendid banquet in the great gallery of Apsley House. By this time the bridegroom had given up diplomacy, and for six years had held as Liberal -Conservative his father's old seat of Tam- worth. Some twenty years later, during our Brighton walks and talks, he had much quite fresh to say about all this, and about the men of his father's timfe and of his own. Some years before the date now looked back upon Sir Henry Calcraft had fulfilled his promise of presenting me to Charles Greville, the diarist, known indifferently as ** Punch " Greville, from the formation of his nose and back, and as the " Cruncher." His most popular sobriquet, how- ever, was the '* Lodger," because he occupied some rooms on an upper floor at Lord Granville's, 1 6 Bruton Street— a house I was afterwards to know very well. His visitors were often the racing men who caused Lady Granville to say that she dreaded going upstairs because she was sure to meet one of Mr. Greville's "horrid" friends. The only other caller present when Calcraft took me in was that polished and agree- able old Turfite, George Payne, whose conver- sation with Greville my arrival scarcely interrupted. *' To the Greville school," said to me Sir Robert Peel, *' politics and racing seemed things which 233 Great Victorians Providence had joined and which man ought not to put asunder." Both were the proper occu- pations of a leisured, aristocratic, and wealthy class. Parliament, in fact, seemed as much a department of sport as the Turf. " Thus my grandfather, a high Tory, one of Lord Liver- pool's strongest supporters, told his chief that he would no longer put his money on the Tories but go over to the Whigs if his son, my father, were not immediately provided with a high political office." That was how Sir Robert be- came Irish Secretary in 1809. As for the third Sir Robert, the last constituency he contested was that in which he passed so much of his time. As Gladstonian Home Ruler he stood for Brighton in 1889, and concentrated on himself the bitterest personal and political opposition. The Primrose League then formed the chief local power ; its ladies worked day and night against him^ and ensured his defeat. In vain he told the electors that if they wanted humour in their representative he had more fun in his little finger than Mr. Gerald Loder in his whole body. The cult of Lord Beaconsfield's " favourite flower " had robbed him of his only chance. Retaliating rather warmly on the " witches " of the Primrose League^ he was represented by the reporters as using another word which rhymes with that, but 234 Sir Robert the Third to Lord Derby begins with a *' b^ The proprieties of the ** Queen of Watering-places " were scandalized, and one heard nothing more of the vanquished baronet till one read of his death. His career connected the very latest ninetenth- century politics with those of the regime when English democracy was only a phrase, and the fourteenth Earl of Derby had yet to take the leap in the dark which established it. The late Sir Robert reflected in his estimate of that nobleman the contemporary ideas concerning him. They corresponded exactly with what I had already heard from Lord Derby's own Cabinet colleagues, such as the fourth Lord Carnarvon. "During the year in which he became Prime Minister for the first time, 1852, I saw him at Newmarket," said to me Sir Robert, " surrounded by a crowd of betting men and blackguards of every descrip- tion, in the midst of them, roaring with laughter, chaffing and joking with everybody, and betting Lord Glasgow that he would not sneeze before a given moment after taking a pinch of snuff. This," he continued, " is exactly what might have been expected by one who heard, as I did, when a boy of fourteen, from under the gallery, the famous * Thimblerigging' Speech.' i His science ^ The Whig Irish Tithe Bill of 1834 had produced from O'Connell an amendment for making good the loss to the Church 235 Great Victorians of parliamentary defence, in Macaulay's words, no doubt resembled an instinct ; but/' insisted Sir Robert, " he was a first-rate debater because he was also a consummate actor. The slight wave of his hand, the tone of his voice, and the spark of his deep-set, eagle eye, brought before one the whole scene— the trickster in corduroys at the table, the mingled cajolery and menace of his voice, the open-mouthed perplexity of the bamboozled yokel, and the derisive shouts of those who had wit enough not to become victims." '* They ought to get the Conservatives to lend them Kekewich, that they might look a little more respectable." This is what one used to hear at the Carlton whenever the Liberals were in office any time between the later fifties and the earlier seventies. The then Member for South out of several different funds. " I have never," said Stanley, " witnessed any proposal like this which the Government favours except among a class of persons not generally received into Society. Their skill is shown by the dexterous shifting of a pea on a small deal table, placing it first under one thimble, then under another, and getting any flat among the bystanders to bet under which thimble it is. Even so O'Connell has got the pocket of the State, the pocket of the landlord, the pocket of the tenant, the Perpetuity Fund, and the Consolidated Fund under his various thimbles. When the thimbles are taken up the property will be found to have disappeared, and the dupes will be laughed at." 236 Sir Robert the Third to Lord Derby Devon thus referred to was indeed a magnificent specimen of a highly bred ** knight of the shire ** of the old school. As my father's first cousin he was good enough during my parents' absence abroad, from time to time, to make his house, '* Peamore," near Exeter, my second home. There I was duly presented, not only to local celebrities, social and p>olitical, without number, but to the two Conservative chiefs of the time, Sir Stafford Northcote and " the Rupert of Debate " himself. Sir Stafford had been my father's contemporary at Eton and Balliol. Their friendship continued through their working lives. Nor can I recall any truer or kindlier type of the political squire met with in my early Devonshire days than the master of '* Pynes." My first impression of him is that of a much gentler mannered West Country sportsman than any other member of that class I had ever seen, superficially distin- guished from most gentlemen of his sort in that when shooting he wore brown polished gaiters rather than the high Wellington boots then much affected. At Balliol Northcote, together with Dean Stanley, Goulburn, Jowett, and Lake, had been scholars when my father was exhibitioner. ** Our positions there ought," he pleasantly said, " to have been reversed, and your father to have ^17 Great Victorians had my scholarship. But," he went on to say, *' the conditions under which your father got a Third Class made it, as we all thought, equal to a First." ' Of the future Lord Iddesleigh's conversation I can clearly, and I am sure correctly, recall that it was racy of the Devonian soil, abounding with local anecdotes, told in the same Devonshire idiom and occasionally accent, shared by him with another West Country personage, also often seen by me at this period, the future Primate, then Bishop of Exeter. Many years later my kindest and mbst instructive of friends, Sir M. E. Grant- Duff, had taken Dr. Temple to task for saying that Greek was educationally valuable precisely because it was a *' dead " language. It brought boys into an entirely new order of ideas. Dr. Temple contended, and an atmosphere intellec- tually stimulating precisely in proportion as it was strange. " And," said Sir Stafford, " Temple is perfectly right. The * dead ' languages are chiefly useful as the keys of another world from that we live in." In the Exeter district the Squire of " Pynes " was famous above all things for his ^ Ill-health had prevented my relative from reading for anything more than a pass. But his earliest papers impressed the ex- aminers so favourably that on the second or third day he received from them a written request to go into the Honours School. 236 Sir Robert the Third to Lord Derby stories, ** wise saws and modem instances/' culled from different points of the entire country between the Exe and the Tamar or Plymouth Sound and Tresco Bay. Of such anecdotes the charm evaporates in writing ; and those whom they would specially interest know them already. The great attraction of Sir Stafford's talk came from its being, like himself, " thoroughly literate," to use Thackeray's favourite epithet. He was just old enough to have held his own in a discus- sion on niceties of scholarship with Lord Welles- ley, ranked by the Headmaster of Eton above Porson himself as Grecian and Latinist. His quotations from modern not less than from classic authors were always felicitous and ready, as the following instance will show. During the early eighties I wrote nightly a Standard leader at the office ; it always aimed at embodying some special information from the party leaders. At the desire of my friend and editor, W. H. Mudford, whose shrewd good sense and brains re-created the paper, I called one night on Sir Stafford at his St. James's Place house. It was very late, and he could not be disturbed. I persevered, and was shown into his study, whither presently, wrapped in a dressing- gown, he descended, looking, as I thought, a little tired, but not at all out of temper. No 239 Great Victorians doubt he noticed the intentness of my gaze. In a moment there came from him Goldsmith's couplet in the " Haunch of Venison " :— "With a visage so sad, and so pale with affright Waked Priam in drawing his curtains by night. You have," he added, " shortened my beauty sleep; but I will try to tell you what I can." ^ The fourteenth Earl of Derby had been in the same division at Eton as my kinsman Trehawke Kekewich, whom he constantly addressed in Latin verses begun at school, and resumed many years afterwards, as Arboris accipiter . In face and bearing the two men were not unlike. The Earl had not his schoolfellow's tall, handsome figure, but both carried beyond the threshold of old age the same prolific crop of tousled and shaggy hair, the same hard, aquiline features, and the same blunt, masterful manner. The resemblance had first been noticed in their school -days ; it became more, rather than less, conspicuous as the years went on. They called each other Rupert and Trehawke. My kinship with the ^ I had been less fortunate the same evening, a Wednesday, in my nocturnal invasion of Mr. Chamberlain and Sir Charles Dilke, then constituting the party of two. Both were out. "A committee," said Mudford, " of the old women of the House of Commons ought to inquire how and why the two right honourable Members are away so late from their homes." 240 Sir Robert the Third to Lord Derby latter alone secured me the notice of ** the Earl," as he used, par excellence, to be known, and permission to call at ** Knowsley " if I ever chanced to be in the neighbourhood, as several years later I was. Ushered into his presence in the billiard-room, I found him alternately prac- tising strokes with his cue and at a little table close by writing letters or dispatches in his beau- tifully delicate and clear Italian hand. He must then have been completing his threescore years and ten, but was physically in better case than when, between two and three decades earlier, he took the Privy Councillor's oath to William IV. The King then said, " I beg you won't kneel. Lord Derby. You have the gout." "Your Majesty must allow me," *' I won't hear of it. I heard my father say you were the best Lord- Lieutenant in England, and so you are now." •* He takes," I was told by one of his private secretaries, ** enough exercise to wear out two or three ordinary men ; only last week he walked some part of the way from London to Liver •» pool." The explanation of that feat was, it seems, this. Lady Derby's health rendered the move- ment of a railway train unpleasant, if not in- jurious. A barge, therefore, was fitted up for her conveyance by canal ; at the side of this, on the towing-path, her husband took long spells 241 Q Great Victorians of walking, periodically entering her ladyship's floating boudoir for meals or rest. About the time I visited " Knowsley " a certain very char- acteristic story about its master was going the rounds. An advertising wine merchant had sent him some very particular dry sherry as a panacea for gout, to receive in a day or two this acknow- ledgment : "I am desired by Lord Derby to say that he has tried your sherry, and prefers the gout." " Did this," I ventured to ask the private secretary, "really happen?" "Most certainly," was the reply, " it did, and I ought to know, for I wrote the letter." A Whig by political descent, Lord Derby some- times surprised and inconvenienced his colleagues by fidelity to the social traditions of Charles Fox, who when abroad for a holiday never opened a newspaper except to see the betting at New- market. So the Earl, at the height of the diplo- matic and international crisis caused by the third Napoleon in the April of 1855, on his return from the " First Spring Meeting " knew nothing about the propositions of the Government at the Vienna Conference, though all the newspapers scarcely reported or wrote about anything else. *' Let the world slide," was Christopher Sly's motto. " One thing at a time," came from Lord Derby's lips more frequently than any other 242 Sir Robert the Third to Lord Derby maxim, and expressed his resolve not to let busi- ness interfere with pleasure. " Brains," he would also say, " differ less in their quality than in the faculty of concentration.'* The Earl sometimes resembled Palmerston in his disinclination to adopt as a matter of course the Queen's revisions in his dispatches. In 1858 the Indian Viceroy, Earl Canning, was thought by the Home Government to have dealt too gently with the natives who had taken the lead in the Indian Mutiny. Lord Ellenborough, as Presi- dent of the Board of Control, sharply criticized his policy in a dispa.tch^ considered by the Court to be much too severe. Whole paragraphs to which the Queen had taken exception were left in the document. As Prime Minister, Lord Derby was at once summoned to the Palace, and asked to explain his own behaviour in the matter, as well as that of his lieutenant in the Commons, Disraeli. Meanwhile the Ellen- borough dispatch had got into the newspapers, and was about to be debated in Parliament. Derby himself anticipated being " beaten horse and foot," but added, " Bad, however, as our cards are, there is just a chance that they may contain the winning one." So, indeed, it proved. The vote of censure failed in both Houses, be- cause, as " the Rupert of Debate " put it. Lord 243 Great Victorians Ellenborough's resignation made the whole thing like flogging a dead horse. Little checks of this kind were taken very lightly by the Earl. His India Bill, transferring after the Mutiny the government from the Com- pany to the Crown, w'ent through without a hitch. The fish -dinner closed the Session at the end of July. One of the ministers then present, the Colonial Under-Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, told me that Lord Derby was in tearing spirits, crack- ing jokes with each of his colleagues in turn^ and especially with Sir John Pakington, who at a Cabinet a few weeks earlier had tempted, by his late arrival, the Prime Minister to poke a little fun at him. " I have been," Sir John excused himself, " at Spithead." " Then," said the Earl, " I'll be bound there never was such a swell there before." Sir John, it seems, was also not quite up to time at the Greenwich dinner -table . As the minister in the Commons who had taken part in the fewest divisions, he had made good his claim to the same distinction as tradition awards to the mathematician whose name closes the list of the Cambridge Wranglers. After dinner Lord Derby, more than ever delighted with his own humorous vein, proposed the health of " Sir John Pakington and the Wooden Spoons of Old England." 244 Sir Robert the Third to Lord Derby Bulwer-Lytton did but write the exact truth when he wrote in the " New Timon " :— Nor age nor gout his freshness can destroy, And time still leaves all Eton in the boy. A little later, after a concert at Buckingham' Palace, " the Rupert of Debate " saw Lord John Russell talking with his own Foreign Secretary, Lord Malmesbury, and Lady Malmesbury. " You have got," he said, " Lord John, into very bad company ; and, while I think about it, you ought to be wearing full dress and not lev6e uniform.'* ** I know it," came the rejoinder, " and the porter wanted to turn me out." " Did he? " exclaimed Derby. " Thou canst not say, / did it." About the same time there went about another Dei^by anecdote, also, if I mistake not, told con- cerning Lord Salisbury. The ultra-Whig Clerk of the Council, Charles Greville, to mark his detestation of the Conservatives, made, whenever he could, his colleague, William Bathurst, attend in his place. The mention of this to the Earl drew forth, " It can signify nothing to me what footman brings up the coal-scuttle when I ring the belli" Two years later than this, as an Oxford undergraduate, I renewed whatever of personal 245 Great Victorians acquaintance it might be said I had with the great man. At the commemoration of 1863, as Chan- cellor of the University, he had delivered in the morning an address of welcome to the Princess of Wales, who had come there with her husband, the future Edward VII. It was composed in the most smoothly, and in part musically, flowing Latin, full of point in every sentence, with every personal touch a transcript from life. A very graceful description of the Royal lady, then in the bloom of her early loveliness, was followed by a sentence of two words, " Ipsa adest,'" repeated more than once with all the melody of a refrain. In the evening, at a reception given by the head of my college, in a recess of the drawing-room I reproduced, for the benefit of a friend who had not been in the Sheldohian, a good deal of the beautiful oration. Presently, looking rounds whom should I see but the orator himself, who could not fail to have heard a good deal of what I had been saying. He was with Lord Carnar- von, then High Steward of the University. The latter made a movement as if about to present me to the great man. " Oh," said the Chan- cellor, *' I know Mr. Escott already, from my old friend Trehawke Kekewich." Then, turning to me, he added, " Your memory of what I said this morning seems uncommonly good." Not 246 Sir Robert the Third to Lord Derby till many years afterwards did I again hear that voice, which, hke Mr. Gladstone's, never quite lost its rich Lancashire burr. The Duke of Argyll had delivered an elaborately bitter tirade against the then Leader of the Opposition, who surprised the chamber by entirely ignoring the attack. " If," he said before the debate closed, " your lordships wish to know why I do not return the noble Duke's invective, I will give my reason in a little anecdote . The other day, walking near my house in the country by the waterside, I saw a little vixen of a woman belabouring a great, hulking bargee, her husband, with blows. When I asked the man how he took it all so quietly, he said, * Well, my lord, you see, it's like this. It amuses her and it don't hurt me.' That explains my silent resignation under all the noble Duke's abuse." 247 CHAPTER VII THE POLITICAL ADVENTURES OF THE HOUSE OF STANLEY AND OTHERS Sir John, the mediaeval founder of the family — Contrast between the fourteenth and fifteenth Earls — Lord Stanley's uses at the Foreign Office and in Fleet Street — How a man of letters became a Consul — The Stanley Civil Service Committee — Enter an Ambassador with his dispatch boxes — Lord Lyons on himself and others — How Lord Granville worked, and how Bismarck disappeared— Granville at the Foreign Office in fact and fiction — How the work was really done — Sir Charles Trevelyan's wrinkle and its results — How Foreign Secretaries leave their mark — The confessions of a many- cousined minister — What the second Lord Granville owed to his mother — " EnchanUe de vous voir^ madame^ tnvitic ou non invitie" The Stanleys are associated with the making of Lancashire ; Lancashire returned the compliment by making the Stanleys. The family, originally known as Audley, from its twelfth -century Cum- berland founder, derived its present name from its earliest landed property, Stanleigh, Staffordshire, and remained in a very modest position till, be- tween 1377 and 1399, its head, Sir John Stanley, a Macclesfield trader^ was appointed Lord Deputy 248 The House of Stanley and Others of Ireland by Richard II, with extensive grants of land on the other side of St. George's Channel then, and 170,000 acres in the Isle of Man after- wards. A marriage with Isabella, heiress of the Lathoms, brought an increase of wealth and in- fluence. Knowsley Park, between nine and ten miles in circumference, came by this marriage to Sir John Stanley, who afterwards fortified the old house in its midst, where his descendants lived till 1 8 19. Thus began the family's lucra- tive connection with Cottonopolis on the Mersey. Its development resulted in their local supremacy, and paved the way to immense wealth by en- abling them to exact practically unlimited sums out of the profits or earnings of the mills, ware- houses, and docks constructed by the representa- tives of commerce and trade. The Stanleys, therefore, achieved wealth and jx)wer less from their own territorial possessions than from the industrial and commercial enter- prise of their humbler neighbours and depend- ents. Sic fortis Etruria crevit, Scilicet et facta est rerum pulcherrima Roma. Such, also, w*as the rise of the Peels, the Philipses, the Chethams, and the Arkwrights. This pro- gress reacted morally on the Stanleys themselves. 249 Great Victorians They now, in one generation after another, com- bined the taste and prowess of country gentlemen with growing aptitude for mercantile affairs. Whether on the Turf or where the professional capitalists on the Mersey " most do congregate," the great Earl, who had only one senior in the Peerage, Lord Shrewsbury, showed himself a first-rate man of business, and, notwithstanding his innate feudalism, never in practice set himself against modern ideas. i The Spectator in its Townsendian and Huttonian period used to com- pare the fifteenth Earl of Derby's mind to a series of condensing chambers. From that point of view he stands out from the family's ranks as not less a type of his own time than was his father of an earlier and diametrically different dispensation. The fourteenth Earl complained to an intimate friend, the late Colonel Napier Sturt, of his son and heir's disloyal indifference to the august family traditions. Nothing could be more un- just. Whatever the party label of any among ^ The already mentioned boast of belonging to the pre-scientific era was mere rhetoric. As Chancellor of the University "the Rupert of Debate " did all he could to encourage natural science as an examination subject in the Oxford schools ; while the notion of a theology "school" originated in germ with him, though the influence of Dr. J. R. Magrath chiefly brought it to practical maturity. 250 The House of Stanley and Others their representatives to-day, the Great Revolu- tion families were almost, if not quite, without exception Whig. So, of course, was "Rupert'* himself, till the " upsetting of the coach " in 1834 saw him scramble out of the ruins on the Tory side, and raised him to the Tory leadership. This was in exact keeping with the ancestral pre- cedent of quick change set by the famous Stanley who veered from Yorkist to Lancastrian, thence to Yorkist again and neutral, till he married the Countess of Richmond, Henry Tudor's mother, and so closed this chapter of adventure by de- serting his lord and sovereign, Richard III, in the middle of Bos worth fight, and afterwards placing the defeated and dead King's crown on his stepson, Henry VH. The fifteenth Earl, in truth, exactly followed the paternal footsteps by beginning under his father at the Foreign Office, becoming the first Secretary of State for India afterwards, by separating himself from his old friends in 1878, by definitely joining their oppo- nents two years later, and by serving in Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet till the Home Rule convul- sions of 1886. When Lord Stanley in 1857 he had rendered his father real service in a deli- cate matter much talked about at the time, but soon afterwards forgotten. The fourteenth Earl systematically snubbed the political Press^ Con* 251 Great Victorians servative as well as Liberal. At that time the Standard had not become a penny paper and a Conservative organ. The journal issued from the same office at the price of threepence, and always ready to support its friends in return for early information, was the Morning Herald, *' If," urged the then Lord Stanley, ** you do not humour this broadsheet you will find it your enemy, just as, a moment after, you may use it for your good." Eventually Lord Stanley saw the Herald managers, admitted that the editor might not be without cause for complaining he had been kept out of news from Downing Street, and promised him some measure of official con- fidence in the future. The paper, therefore, which had gone to great expense in developing some new popular features, continued to support the party. For the time, therefore, the great Earl spoke rather less slightingly of his son. He had never underrated his brains, though he found in their quality nothing congenial to himself. He now publicly recognized his heir's statesmanship by making him Foreign Secretary in his own Cabinet of 1866-8, and by bequeathing him in that capacity to Disraeli. The fourteenth Earl outlived his son's first tenure of that office, and spoke on the various subjects, chiefly of Central Asian policy, then occupying the department, 252 The House of Stanley and Others It was during this period that a sporting friend and parliamentary supporter of the Prime Minister, the then Colonel Napier Sturt, Lord Alington's brother, by way of telling his chief what he knew would amuse him, said to him, *' I really think I saw Stanley last night in very pleasant company at Cremorne." ** I only wish to goodness," returned the fond father, '* you had done so.'* As a fact, the then Lord Stanley, afterwards the fifteenth Earl, was no more likely to have been at Cremome than when in Paris on official business to have danced the can-can at Mabille. The little dialogue^ as authentic as it is slight, may serve to hint the difference between the two best known of the nineteenth -century Derby earls. A little incident, in which I took some part, showed that, as head of the Ministry, 1866-8, Lord Derby had no more idea of inter- fering with his son's department than of allowing himself to be overruled in any administra.tive detail even by so indispensable a lieutenant in the House of Commons as Disraeli. A very old and gifted friend of mine, a first-rate classical scholar and accomplished writer, wanted to get a Consulship which had just fallen vacant. Not being in London, by way of saving time he tele- graphed me the request to approach the Prime Minister for him if I could, and remind that 253 Great Victorians potentate of his past services for the party with his pen, of his family's connection with Lanca- shire, and close associations at various times with the house of Knowsley. " I will," the Prime Minister assured me, " do what I can, and support you at the Foreign Office with my son, the Secre- tary of State." To him I went with a letter from the Prime Minister. On my way I heard that another candidate for the p'Jace was backed by Disraeli, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. I had, however, some reason for thinking that on *' public form " my friend had a better chance than, notwithstanding his Disraelian backing, his most formidable competitor, and that the two members of the house of Stanley were disposed to resent anything that looked like an attempt, by whomsoever made, to influence their judg- ment. And so the event proved.. Eventually the actual Premier's influence prevailed, and the person in whom I was interested got the appoint- ment, though I heard in more than one quarter that he had not the ghost of a chance. Ten years later the fifteenth Lord Derby, as private member and afterwards as Foreign Secre- tary, perpetuated the Stanley influence in the Upper House, in the face of bitter personal attacks and a constant bombardment of malicious anecdotes. At that time the family house was 254 The House of Stanley and Others still in St. James's Square, and was constantly kept open for innumerable family friends and relatives ; its master, therefore, assured himself the quiet half-hour in the evening by walking across Pall Mall and sipping a glass of the famous port at the Travellers' Club. As a boy at Eton first and Rugby afterwards, his tongue had always seemed a little too large for his mouth, causing him to speak with a certain thickness. This I heard from his own doctor, while the late Sir Richard Quain circumstantially confirmed the story, entirely disposing, as it did, of the calum- nies raised on the foundation of Lord Derby's evening visits to his favourite house of call. As Lord Stanley he first made his mark on public life in the Palmerstonian period as chairman of the committee inquiring into the Civil Service system, anticipating, as that did, many of the reforms finally carried out under Lord Salisbury three or four years later. One instance of Lord Stanley's prescience in foreign affairs may be given. So early as 1867 he believed war between France and Prussia to be inevitable if the Prussian garrison were not withdrawn from Luxemburg. That was done. For the time the danger disappeared. " I am not, however," said Lord Stanley, " sanguine of averting hostilities on another issue some time 255 Great Victorians later." When in 1870 the long -smouldering embers burst forth into flame, Europe was taken by surprise. Lord Clarendon had been followed (June 27th) at the Foreign Office by Lord Gran- ville. The new minister, the day before he received the seals of office, was told by the very experienced Under-Secretary, Hammond, that h( never knew so great a lull in foreign afl"airs. Except the recent murder of British subjects by Greek brigands, he was not aware of any particular question with which Lord Granville would have to deal. The minister, indeed, knewi better. Earlier and more exact news from the coulisses of European diplomacy, often through other than official channels, reached him than flowed into the private room' of Lord Palmer - ston himself. During the eighties one of the most frequent and agreeable apparitions at country houses I might be visiting was Lord Lyons, with the inevitable Mr. George Sheffield in the carriage sent to fetch him^ at the station, in a travelling cap that covered all his head, with part of his face, followed by a fly full of despatch boxes. I have recently seen it stated that both in his despatches and in Parliament Lord Granville signalized his instalment in the Foreign Office by an assurance that the world would continue at peace for som^ time to come. 256 The House of Stanley and Others •' Lord Granville," said Lord Lyons, " never did anything of the kind. All that he wrote to my Embassy in Paris and said in Parliament breathed the spirit of apprehension and misgiving." No man, thought Lord Lyons, ever worked harder or more incessantly, night and day, at the busi- ness of peace-making. As Lord Granville said in private conversation, the position for himself and his Government was very much that of a man trying to prevent a fire with inflammable materials all around him. Every one had his hand full of matches ready to ignite. Therefore, he insisted, it was not the moment to elaborate inquiries as to who brought the materials, but to remove them, and so avert the greatest of calamities. Another thing, went on Lord Lyons, in which Lord Granville was perfectly right was that Napoleon III wished for peace, that the Empress was warlike, and that the decisive steps finally making peace impossible were those taken by General Leboeuf. Some years later I had frequent opportuni- ties of seeing Lord Granville. The general im- pression left by his talk and manner was that he had no love for the Prussians, and that he would willingly make the best of the French, always excepting the Due de Gramont ; for him, Lord Granville's antipathy could only be compared to 257 R Great Victorians the mutual dislike of the fifteenth Lord Derby and the Due Decazes during the year of the Suez Canal shares purchase. *' Have you," I once ventured to ask Loid Granville, " had any direct dealings with or ever met Prince Bismarck?" " Not exactly," came the answer. ** When in attendance on the Queen I was once in a garden with him at Baden. Suddenly there rang out through the air the word ' Sharp ! * meaning that the Queen would appear on the scene in a few minutes. It was not lost upon the 'man of blood and iron,' who suddenly disappeared, plunging, as it seemed, into a shrubbery, and was then lost sight of, never again to be seen by me." Among Foreign Secretaries none can have sur- passed Lord Granville in the faculty of isolating himself amid company from all sounds and per- sons around him, and working at his papers even in the conversation-room of a foreign hotel. No one ever worked so hard with so little appearance of effort. This and a certain epicureanism of bearing sometimes gave the idea of dalliance with, rather than active performance of, his employments. One used to hear the very absurd story of his postponing the signature of some treaty or other equally important paper till at last he was hunted down by the 258 The House of Stanley and Others foreign attach^ as he was entering his brougham to go out to dinner. Pen and ink were quickly forthcoming, and so at last the business was dispatched. The truth, however, is this. A continental diplomatist stationed in London had for some time been importuning the Secretary of State with inconvenient questions. As long as possible Lord Granville kept out of his way, but was finally pounced upon by him just as the carriage was starting on the homeward drive from Downing Street. Comparing him with other Foreign Ministers or their Cabinet colleagues of my time, Lord Granville in his own fashion and in his own hours was a remarkably hard worker, never, as he once put it to me, intimidated by detail, and always recognizing that to grasp principles one must surmount an infinite amount of drudgery. He did not keep his secretaries so late at work in Downing Street as was done by Lord Palmerston. Like Palmerston, however, he took work, though in greater quantity, home with him. If he did not stay up so late at night with it, that was largely because, early in his course, he acted on a sugges- tion of his friend Sir Charles Trevelyan. That most strenuous and least self -sparing of officials never looked at a paper after beginning to feel fatigued over -night. However early, he went to 259 Great Victorians bed, and in a very short time to sleep. Shortly after midnight, or "in the small hours beyond twelve," he would wake with clear head, rein- vigorated brain, and hungry for his uncompleted task ; the materials for that were at his bedside. With these he occupied himself till all was done, only a little later than he might have been return- ing from an evening party. " I tried the idea," was Lord Granville's comment, " directly Sir Charles gave it to me. Whatever good work I may have done, I think this in great measure to be the secret of it." Every department of State had, from Lord Granville's point of view, its domestic idiosyncrasies. These, he thought, should be stamped upon its official arrangements down to the smallest detail. Herein he resembled Palmerston, who, on going to the Home Office in 1852, insisted on the despatches being folded differently from the Foreign Office fashion. So Lord Granville, migrating to the Privy Council Office in 1853, introduced an entirely new ribbon for tying up papers. " The most exercising time," the present writer once heard Lord Granville say, " I ever went through was in Lord Aberdeen's Coalition Cabi- net, where I only resigned the Presidentship of the Council in 1854. Since Pulteney with the help of Swift, in the seventeenth and eighteenth 260 The House of Stanley and Others centuries, rallied the Opposition by organizing its journalism, so many public men had never actively mixed themselves up with newspapers before. Disraeli had his organ in the Conser- vative Press. Lord Palmerston inspired, and often practically wrote, leading articles in the Morning Post. The Star had become the favourite medium of John Bright, the Manchester School, and extreme Radicalism generally. I myself was accused of being in close personal alliance with Delane and The Times. The Duke of Newcastle, when Colonial Secretary, in the kindest, friendliest, but most pointed manner, put me on my guard against identifying myself or my colleagues with the opinions and policy of the great newspaper. Delane and Reeve fre- quently dined with me in Bruton Street. Charles Greville was in constant intercourse with and in the close confidence of both. Social civilities seemed to be the best mode of admitting to com- munity of interest, as well as intercourse with the higher classes and the public men, those whose pen can exercise such enormous influence for good or bad. As to Printing House Square/* continued Lord Granville, " during my time at the Foreign Office I never gave effect to the direct and indirect overtures made to me from The Times, nor did I ever, directly or indirectly, 261 Great Victorians give information to any writer in The Times. ^ Five years before the beginning of Delane's time, Disraeli's lifelong friendship with the newspaper had been secured by the publication of his " Runnymede Letters " during Barnes' editorship in 1836. The conductor of the famous broad- sheet in the second half of the Victorian Age sometimes came up in the social conversations in which the Conservative leader and the Whig Earl exchanged opinions on men and things. ** What," once asked Lord Beaconsfield, '* do you really think of Delane ? " " I think," came the answer, " I would sooner wait till Delane is dead before I say." Under Delane, as to a greatly diminished extent under his successors, and even occasionally in the existing dispensation, whoever was out, and who- ever was in, all foreigners persistently invested The Times utterances with something of an official and inspired character. So, too, as regards Lord Granville and the department which he first began to control in the December of 1 8 5 i . Whoever * Lord Fitzmaurice's two volumes are not merely a masterpiece of faithful biography but a survey from behind the scenes of the chief events happening in the period recorded and of the men who helped to make them. They also contain, vol. i. p. 91, further details than those given above in Lord Granville's own words of the personal relations between Bruton Street and Blackfriars. 2^2 The House of Stanley and Others at a later date the Liberal Foreign Minister might be, the other side regarded Granville as per- sonifying the foreign policy views of responsible Liberalism. Even when a Conservative Premier had his own Foreign Minister, like Lord Derby in 1852, he went to Lord Granville rather than Lord Malmesbury for advice at a critical moment. The new Emperor was supposed to be bent on con- fiscating the Orleans property. That purpose, rather than the other iniquities of the Imperial regime, chiefly embittered Printing House Square against the nascent Empire. Napoleon did not conceal his extreme annoyance at the language of The Times. In England both parties saw the danger of such abuse in such a quarter goading the Emperor to acts of violence. Lord Granville so far complied with the wishes of his Conserva- tive successor at the Foreign Office as to express a hope to the great editor that, without any actual sacrifice, lie would lay down his policy with rather less asperity of tone. In those days Englishmen of all classes were much divided about the coming Napoleon III and his doings. His chief sup- porters met at Mrs. Mountjoy Martin's house, his chief social headquarters during his London exile, frequented during the early fifties and long afterwards by believers in the Napoleonic legend, then in favour ^vith iecclesiasticai as well as secular 363 Great Victorians circles. For the High Church people, brought into ascendancy by the Oxford Tractarian Move- ment, were alarmed by the menaces of the 1848 Revolution to Church as well as State. Monta- lembert,! a great figure at the Mountjoy Martin gatherings, then Napoleon's chief adherent, per- suaded a good many that the new Empire would mean not only the Papal restoration, but war against infidelity and a religious revival all round. During the nineteenth century's first half the new Bonapartism had another English exponent and champion in one of the least known but most remarkable men of his time, a retired lawyer who lived at Torquay, whom as a boy I had often seen there, who was intimate with Disraeli, the two Bulwers, the novelist and the diplomatist, and in request with a far wider circle because of his skill in healing family feuds and getting young men out of scrapes .2 The two formerly most active of Napoleon Ill's supporters in general society were Sir Arthur Otway and Sir H. Drummond Wolff. Both these had seen him enter Paris as ^ Montalembert continued to support Napoleon III till his confiscation of the Orleans property. He then became the Empire's bitterest opponent, and remained so till his death, in 1870. " I leave this paragon anonymous because, though I heard him spoken of as Mr. Stuart, I was told this was not his real name, and that he had formerly been better known by another. 264 The House of Stanley and Others President of the Republic ; while Drummond Wolff, when Lord Malmesbury's private secre- tary, had negotiated with him several State matters. The best men of letters at the time, A. W. Kinglake, Hayward, and Henry Reeve, were all strong Orleanists, and formed a little set, extending across the Straits of Dover, with Adolphe Thiers as its chief representative in Paris . Lord Granville's acquaintance of every kind in the Pare Monceau as well as the Faubourg St. Germain fitted him, as far as was possible, to play the social mediator between Orleanist and Bonapartist. The happiness of the vein in which he could do this may be judged from his treat- ment, about the same time, in the House of Lords of Lord Ellenborough's taunt that the Palmerston Cabinet was nothing more than a family party. " My lords," he said, *' I must make a clean breast of it at once. Some of those who went before me had such quivers full of daughters who did not die old maids that I have relations uj>on this side of the House, relations upon the other, and that I had the unparalleled misfortune to have several in the last Protectionist Administra- tion." All his arts of personal popularity and opportunities of social charm were used to con- solidate the old acres into social unity that should 265 Great Victorians prove as much to the real interest of the classes as of the masses. That object, never lost sight of, came out still more strongly towards the end of the sixties in connection with the Jews. In 1868 the Carlton Club sent down as its candidate for the seat at Sandwich a Jew, the future Baron Henry de Worms. About the same time Lord Shaftesbury pressed on Mr. Gladstone Sir Moses Montefiore's claim to a peerage, and the Prince of Wales complained to Lord Granville himself about the defective representation in the Upper House of new types of experience and minds. Nothing was more important, Lord Granville agreed with the Heir -apparent, than the attach- ment to the aristocracy of the Hebrew wealth, culture, cosmopolitanism, and power—and if to his own political divisions of that caste, so much the better. My own visits to Lord Granville were chiefly at his London house. Once or twice, however during his wardenship of the Cinque Ports, I visited him at Walmer Castle . Here the company was widely representative. The social mixture seemed to delight no one more than the Lord Warden. " In these matters," he said to me, *' I owe a great deal to both my parents, for when at the Paris Embassy my father liked to see ' all sorts and conditions of men.' My mother z66 The House of Stanley and Others was a perfect hostess, and was never disconcerted by the occasional presence of a stranger she did not know by sight and had never asked, her wel- come in such cases always being, * Enchantee de vous voir, madame, Invitee ou non invitee ' " In an earlier chapter the scion of an old Whig line was seen as the successful champion of a Hebrew claim to a seat at St. Stephen's, and later was, with some interruptions, for twelve years col- league in the representation of London of the first Jew Member, Baron Lionel de Rothschild. Ten years later the other descendant of a Whig house now recalled was to promote the logical completion of that movement by urging upon the Prime Minister of the day the practical reason for converting the German barony into an English peerage . 267 CHAPTER VIII FROM ST. MARY'S, WINTON, TO CURZON STREET At Winchester — Old Trollope, young Trollope, and *' Bob " Lowe — Tait is fined a pound at the meeting of the Debating Society — Robert Lowe as Member for Kidderminster — His article, "The Past Session and the New Parliament,' in the Edinburgh Review — Lord John Russell's wrath at Lowe, whom he regarded as the devil is said to look upon holy water — His Trojan horse similes — An albino — "The next thing a nigger with his banjo and bones " — " Vers de sociiti^^ — Lowe and Canning's despatch to Lord Minto — Lord Lyons' letter from the British Embassy at Paris — What Lowe owed to Disraeli — His wrath at the result of the Abyssinian War — His rapidity of utterance but not of reading — Disraeli on Mrs. Lowe — Mr. Gladstone as a raconteur and on "the big, big d "—A pupil, together with Henry Edward Manning, of Bishop Words- worth — Lord Goschen's opinion of Gladstone — Remarks about the Oriel common-room — At Lady Strangford's — Lord and Lady Aberdeen's guest at Dollis Hill — The G.O.M. wins the race to the tea-table — His kindness to the outcast woman — Disraeli's dislike of Thackeray on account of his burlesque " Codlingsby " — He finds Dickens a " delightful man " at the Stanhope dinner — The trio, " Popanilla," " Piccadilly," and the " New Republic " (Mr. W. H. Mallock) — His aphorisms re- produced by Mrs. Reynolds — " No one is quite well, but 268 St. Mary's, Winton, to Curzon Street I am tolerably well" — His advice to the two little boys — Lady Chesterfield — Her sister Lady Anson's retort — His gratitude to his wife — At the hotel in Bournemouth — His last words, "I am oppressed." Others than those already recalled were num- bered among the survivors to my time of the men who had places in the Coalition Ministry (1852-5) and Lord Palmerston's first Govern- ment, which came afterwards. In consequence of family Wykehamist associations, Robert Lowe had been a familiar name to me from my child- hood. At the Winchester of my father's and other near relatives' time the cry as of a small boy in great pain would sometimes be heard ; that, it generally turned out, was only Tom Trol- lope thrashing his younger brother (Anthony the novelist). Presently came a cry still more pitiful and piercing. " Oh," it used to be said, *' that must be Lowe thrashing both of them." ^ As fellow and tutor of " University," Lowe passed for the best classical coach as well as one of the best scholars in the Oxford of his day. Several of my people, belonging to my father's generation, had been his pupils, and recited to me long passages from the Grseco-Latin commemorations ^ So ran the story, which, it must be said, is open to doubt. For both the TioUopes were collegers ; the future Lord Sherbrooke was a commoner, and the two classes of boys did not see much of each other. 269 Great Victorians (like the *' Uniomachia ") of his encounter with other members of the Debating Society, then, of course, a much smaller affair than it soon afterwards became. In this way I heard how Lowe as chairman ruled the meeting with a rod of iron, how, when Tait interrupted somebody's speech, the future Primate was fined by him a pound, and threatened with a further mulct if he again insulted the " chair " by an appeal against its authority. Subsequently to his Oxford days he found a place among the most brilliant, as well as earliest, of those cited by Disraeli more than a generation afterwards as illustrating the unity of public life in distant parts of the British Empire : " To-day a man is Member for Sydney, finds a nugget or shears a thousand flocks, and becomes Member for London to-morrow." Having made a fortune at the Sydney Bar and a reputation in the Sydney Parliament, Lowe reappeared in England during 1850. Very soon thereafter (in 1852) he began his English parliamentary course as Member for Kidderminster, and twelve months afterwards his official apprenticeship under Lord Aberdeen as Secretary to the Board of Control . Neither then, nor under Palmerston as Vice-President of the Board of Trade, did he become well known to the public. 270 St. Mary's, Winton, to Curzon Street During these years some one asked a friend in the Lower House, " Have you heard Lowe's speeches this session?" *' Not exactly," was the reply ; " why should I ? I have read his articles in The Times.'' It was not his tongue but his pen that was first to fix general attention upon him in the spring of 1857. "The Past Session and the New Parliament " formed the title of the most sensational article in the spring number of the Edinburgh Review; it constituted a vitriolic attack on Lord John Russell and Glad- stone for having resigned their places under Palmerston in 1855. These men had acted treacherously by their colleagues and their party. They were therefore trounced in the old Whig " blue and yellow " with a severity which caused its proprietors to tremble in their shoes at the possible consequences to the fortunes of their periodical . The personal motive of the onslaught showed itself, they protested, in every paragraph. Lord John, however, had at once divined the authorship of the anonymous effusion, and was not easily appeased. He regarded Lowe much as the devil is said to look upon holy water, and would be content with nothing less than that the demand for a second edition of the number, caused by this *' success of scandal," should be refused. 271 Great Victorians As a House of Commons debater and orator, the man who died Lord Sherbrooke first won universal notoriety during the debates of 1866 for his attacks on the Russell-Gladstone Reform Bill, for his hard and long-worked Trojan horse similes, and for one or two highly classical, terse, and pungent denunciations of democracy. "What like," as the Scotch say, '' was the man who in his fifty-fifth year, just midway through the Victorian Age, had so unprecedentedly excited the admiration of many, the detestation of some, and the attention of all?" His hair was perfectly white, but, like the prisoner of Chillon, " not with age " ; his eyebrows and lashes were of the same hue. His little deep -set eyes were pink. He was, in fact, an albino. " Bless my soul ! " said one of the present writer's mentors, an old county Member, who often introduced me under the gallery, " I wonder what we are coming to. We have just got what they call an Albanian. The next thing we shall have, I suppose, is a nigger with his banjo and bones I " A trifle above rather than below the middle height, " the Albanian " had a strong, clear, well -managed voice, penetrating every corner of the assembly, a defiant manner, a fair command of his temper, but a visible intolerance of any approach to con- tradiction or opposition. 272 St. Mary's, Winton, to Curzon Street These characteristics belonged to an individual who combined in himself at least two or three distinct personalities. It was not that he had any thought of being *' all things to all men,'* but simply that different people seemed to touch dif- ferent springs of his being. If to some he seemed rasping, repellent, contemptuous, that was because they went to the wrong partition of his identity. Had they approached him rightly, they would have found a kindly witted, genial companion, whose sparkling talk and ready turn for acrostic- spinning and charade -contriving brought the sun- shine of amusement into the dullest and darkest country houses. To put it differently, Mr. Lowe was a sort of social olive, to be thoroughly en- joyed only by social and intellectual palates that had undergone a thorough course of preparatory discipline. On one of the few occasions I found myself at the dinner -table with him he engaged me in con- versation and seemed to expect that I should say something. I had heard of his happy turn for the lighter kind of poetry, and therefore referred to one of Frederick Locker's composi- tions published in that morning's Times. I described them as vers de societe. His coun- tenance at once darkened and fell. What did I mean? The rhymes I referred to were not 273 s Great Victorians what I called them . They were occasional verses, and so on, and so on. Presently our host, Lord Carnarvon, as if to change the subject, asked me whether I had sent Lord Lyons, whom I had recently met at Highclere, some verses, my quota- tions from which had amused our then French Ambassador. "What were they?" some one asked. " A rhymed despatch from George Can- ning at the Foreign Office to Lord Minto at The Hague about a necklace." *' Canning," said Lord Sherbrooke, as he had then become, " never wrote anything of the sort. It exists only in your own imagination." " It is at least," I said, with all proper meekness, " to be found in the two volumes of Hookham Frere's Remains ; for I copied them out from the book for that purpose before forwarding them to Lord Lyons a few days ago." " Before," rejoined his lordship, " I could accept that, I need some evidence of it." " That," I said, " happens to be in my pocket and is quite at your service." Remembering Lord Sherbrooke's eye troubles, I handed to our host to read aloud if he thought fit the little document which I have just mentioned, and which would show I was not intentionally deceiving my illustrious fellow -guest. This letter is before me now and runs as follows :— 274 St. Mary's, Winton, to Curzon Street British Embassy, Paris, February 5, 1886. Dear Mr. Escott, I thank you heartily for so kindly recollecting my wish to see Canning's despatch in verse to Lord Minto. It has amused me much, as I have a liking for the somewhat formal pleasantries of the Canning and Hookham Frere period. When you next come to Paris I shall claim your promise to see me, and let me know all about that other versifier, Mortimer Collins, in the "British Birds," who wrote the drollery you introduced to me, beginning " There was an ape in the days that were earlier." Believe me, Yours very truly, Lyons. It is not to be supposed that in the little incident just recalled Lord Sherbrooke was influenced by any conscious animosity against myself. Of him, perhaps, as of others, it might be said that knowledge was his forte and omni- science his foible. What Lord Lyons called the little pleasantries of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were considered by Lord Sherbrooke one of his own specialities. He may therefore have resented my accidental acquaint- ance with something in this department of letters that he did not himself at once recall. The real explanation, however, must probably be found in the fact of his having been as contentious as he was gifted. He had a passion for contra- diction which in certain humours he could not restrain. That in his public life was the secret 275 Great Victorians of his almost lifelong duel with Disraeli. Two of a trade never agree. Both men had the same gift, nearly in the same degree, of con- densing malicious sentiment into epigrammatic form. At the time of the Abyssinian War, during Disraeli's first Premiership (1868), Lowe's dis- plays of petulance against the minister he hated were ill-mannered rather than effective. Disraeli took them very quietly — indeed, laughed them off in the old Palmerstonian manner. *'The Member for London University," he said, " were he capable of gratitude, would remember that my Reform Bill created his constituency, and that but for me he would not to-day have a seat here." Lowe had predicted every kind of failure and calamity as sure to result from the expedition to Magdala. As Disraeli, in his happiest vein, put it, he had discovered a certain African fly which would decimate the British forces. The right honourable gentleman, in fact, was as vitu- perative of the insects of Abyssinia as if they had been British workmen. Cassandra, however, turned out an untrue prophetess, and before the close of April 1868 the Prime Minister could not only exult over his falsified foe, but moved a vote of thanks to Sir Robert Napier, the trium- phantly successful General who had overcome 276 St. Mary's, Winton, to Curzon Street indescribable difficulties, had transported the artillery of Europe on the elephants of Asia across the deserts and the precipices of Africa, and had planted the standard of St. George on the moun- tains of Rasselas. How during this discussion Mr. Lowe could not prevent his wrath and disgust from showing themselves in the expression of his face and the movements of his body was described at the time by all the picturesque reporters of the day. Disraeli's crowning triumph over his fallen foe came a year or two later. Speaking on the Royal Titles Bill, Lowe had stated as a fact of which he had personal knowledge that Queen Victoria in the near past had more than once wished her Government to confer upon her the Imperial style, and till Mr. Disraeli, he continued, all the ministers thus applied to had refused. At the moment Disraeli said nothing. A few days later, however, he stated that the allegation was too serious to pass by in silence, and he had there- fore humbly requested his Sovereign to tell him whether there was anything in the story. He now had the honour of informing the House that from beginning to end it was pure fiction. After this the future Lord Sherbrooke desisted from public provocations of the man who, on the balance, had so much the best of the encounters. 277 Great Victorians His private depreciation of his enemy continued, and was expressed as bitterly as usual at Mr. Jowett's Balliol dinner-table ; some rhetorical ability formed on that occasion the one merit allowed by the censor. No English more pure or better balanced was ever heard in the House of Commons than that of Robert Lowe at his best. It was the true Oxford diction, the English of Jowett, of Newman, of Matthew Arnold, and Froude. Most of his important speeches in the Commons were listened to by the present writer. They were marked by the same logical sequence of pure thought, of varied, mostly first-hand, knowledge, and occasional metaphor, focused upon the suc- cessive divisions of his address. Yet if action be the first, second, and third thing in oratory, Robert Lowe, Lord Sherbrooke, was not an orator. He used no gesture, standing, in every part of his body, motionless as a statue. My relative Charles Wordsworth, Bishop of St. Andrew's, Headmaster of Harrow in 1836,. knew from his successors the school tradition of Sir Robert Peel, steadily standing- Reading rapidly, all at ease, Pages out of Demosthenes.^ Mr. Bowen's Harrow Songs. 278 St. Mary's, Winton, to Curzon Street The Bishop had gone with me one day on a visit to St. Stephen's. Watching Lowe, he could not but be, he said, reminded of him by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer's rapidity of utter- ance and automaton-like lack of animation. Every physical aid )to oratory was eschewed . The whole performance impressed every one who wit- nessed it as a purely intellectual effort, splendidly executed by one whose chief anxiety appeared to be that it seemed he should not see his audience. ** Seem " Lwrite purposely, because no one could exactly tell who or what, whether in public or private, were within the range of Lord Sher- brooke's vision. He never, it is certain, read anything "rapidly all at ease." One of the parlourmaid's or lady's-maid's duties beneath the Lowe roof in Lowndes Square, or at " Warling- ham," in the Surrey hills, was to read aloud to the master. On occasion she may have become his amanuensis for his Times leaders. These, how- ever, were generally, if not always, dictated to his devoted wife, who had every personal recom- mendation except that of beauty. This deficiency did not diminish her husband's affection, and caused one of Disraeli's wickedest jokes. " De- lightful," said some one, *' to notice Lowe's fond- ness for his very plain wife." " Yes," came the rejoinder, " but then, he can never see her, and perhaps never did see her at all." 279 Great Victorians Appreciation of Lord Sherbrooke's unique per- sonal flavour and social gifts belonged, as has been said, to a limited set. He was, however, less unpopular than his colleagues. The droop- ing shoulders, crowned by the white head, of the rider of the old white cob in Rotten Row or in the Surrey lanes had becomie as much of an in- stitution as Thomas Carlyle on his " Rosinante " in the district separating Knightsbridge from Putney. The ministerial defeat on the Irish University Bill in the March of 1873 had for its sequel the outburst of strong antipathy against the defeated Government. For the first timei since 1728, the year in which Gay lampooned the Walpole Administration, the Cabinet of the day was held up to ridicule on the public stage. On March 5th, the day fixed for the Irish University Bill's second reading, " The Happy Land," at the Court Theatre, a burlesque of the Gilbertian fairy drama, " The Wicked World," filled the stalls of the little Chelsea playhouse. The Society audience laughed, as they had never laughed in the theatre before, at the presentations of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Ayrton, and the rest of the Cabinet as the chief characters in the skit. The Lord Chamlberlain's veto only increased its vogue. All who, like myself, saw the piece several times, were struck by the fact that, notwithstanding the 280 St. Mary's, Winton, to Curzon Street storm over his match-tax, there were fewer demonstrations at the future Lord Sherbrooke's expense than in the case of any of the other caricatures . Their scholarship, learning, and University- associations excepted, Mr. Lowe had as little in common with Mr. Gladstone as, years afterwards, Mr. Gladstone himself with Mr. Chamberlain. Both men, in truth, were only known and thoroughly at their ease within the narrow Hmits of a coterie of their own. It would have been as impossible to reduce the two to a common social denominator as to harmonize the yellow - backed novel with the Greek Fathers or the writings of Samuel Butler with Palais Royal opera bouffe. The most powerful legislative in- strument of his time, Mr. Gladstone never greatly enlarged his personal following beyond an occa- sional recruit of high distinction like Henry Drummond, who wrote " Natural Law in the Spiritual World," and who delivered lay sermons to a fashionable company on Sunday afternoons at Grosvenor House. I have heard people call the Gladstonian hospitalities, whether at Downing Street or Hawarden, formal and stiff. They were really as pleasant as could be expected ; and at his London dinner-table the host, if at his best, delighted all. He had one of his most regular 281 Great Victorians guests in the memorable O'Gorman, whose con- versations about the social Ireland of other days resembled a new chapter in " Sir Jonah Barring- ton." Mr. Gladstone himself illustrated in an occasional anecdote some of the differences be- tween the social talk of the present and the past. ** Certainly," said Dr. Magee, then Bishop of Peterborough, " men have largely dropped the habit of swearing." Here some one suggested that Colonel Napier Sturt, who had been at St. Stephen's with Gladstone, might be considered an exception. " I mean," said the host, '* that at Cabinet meetings and on other such occasions swearing has practically gone out. The Duke of Cumberland within my recollection was very anxious to stimulate Archbishop Rowley's opposi- tion to a proposal for abolishing Church rates. Now Howley was the meekest of men, and as circumspect in his speech as a Primate ought to be. The Duke of Cumberland hoped he would attend this particular meeting of peers. Not seeing him^ he went out, presently returning quite radiant. ' My lords,' he broke out, * it's all right. I've seen the Archbishop, and he says he'll be d d to all eternity if he doesn't oppose the Bill tooth and nail.' " " I wanted," Mr. Gladstone once told me, *' after getting an All Souls' fellowship, to be 282 St. Mary's, Winton, to Curzon Street a clergyman." The already mentioned Bishop Wordsworth, when a student of Christ Churchy had at the same time for his pupils Henry Edward Manning, of Balliol, and William Ewart Glad- stone, of the House. " Both," in his own words, *' were visibly resolved on turning all their oppor- tunities to the best account. The future Cardinal deserved the highest honours afterwards gained by him in the classical schools ; the papers set on that occasion suited exactly, the result being that his first-class was one of the very best on record. He had not, however, the future Prime Minister's passionate energy for work of every kind, and would sometimes come to my rooms a good deal after the appointed hour . Gladstone, on the other hand, always came before it. When I entered I invariably found him busy writing down what turned out to be points in his books that he wished specially to discuss. No one could be more sur- prised than myself when I heard of his decision not to take Orders but to go into politics." As regards the career he actually adopted, the first Lord Goschen, after nearly twenty years* Cabinet experience of Gladstone as chief or colleague, said to me : " No man, in my opinion, ever more completely mistook his vocation. A •born poet and a born religious, he was meant by nature to found Churches rather than 283 Great Victorians destroy them, and to exercise his Uterary gifts on the borderland separating theology from meta- physics and poetry." Certainly in whatever com- pany he moved (and the present writer saw him frequently among all sorts and conditions of men, and women too), Mr. Gladstone apparently never tried to divest himself of the hauteur that was the note of the aristocratic high Tory school, to which by birth and training he had belonged, nor of the donnishness that marked the ecclesiastics and the ecclesiastically minded laymen conspicuous in the Oxford Anglicans of the thirties. This was called the Oriel manner. When some one had ventured in a devout undertone to call the Oriel common-room of those days like heaven, an irreverent acquaintance observed, " Surely they can't be as bad upstairs as all that." The spiritual fervour of the man penetrated and kindled the Oxford crust, communicating its glow to those with whom he talked on such high subjects, and causing C. H. Spurgeon to say that no one could be long in his company without a consciousness of conversing with one who could " see the King in His beauty and behold the land that is very far off." ^ In general society, most to be appreciated, Gladstone should have been met at the late Lady Strangford's, in Chapel ^ Isa. xxxiii. 17. 284 St. Mary's, Winton, to Curzon Street Street, Park Lane, exchanging views on Church or State with Lord Camoys, comparing notes on the smaller nationalities of the world with Lord Shaftesbury, or not shrinking from an occa- sional wit combat with his hostess, one of the very best talkers then living, quite unsurpassed in the knack of summing up well-known men and their work as well. A propos of A. H. Layard's Nineveh excavations she said in her softest tones : ** With firmans from the Sultan and several pick- axes one is sure to find out a good deal." His most genial moods showed themselves to the best advantage as Lord and Lady Aberdeen's guest, both in Grosvenor Square and at Dollis Hill. At the latter I saw him, together with Sir Andrew Clark, for the last time during the eighties. Lady Aberdeen, seated under a tree, was preparing refreshments for the school -chil- dren she was entertaining. As we walked up and down the gravel path the great man seemed to be getting restless. At last he turned round to the doctor, nearly of his own age, with the words, *' Let us run a race to the tea-table." Off the patriarchs started, the G.O.M. winning by a short head. Mr. Gladstone's eagerness and Mrs. Glad- stone's devotion to good works brought them sometimes into strange companionships, and set many tongues idly wagging. The second Lord 285 Great Victorians Greville, when Gladstone's private secretary, was walking home with him late one night when he lived in Harley Street ; not far from the house they were accosted by a poorly clad, hollow -faced outcast woman . " Come with me inside," said Mr. Gladstone, '* and I will speak to you." As they entered the door the private secretary murmured, " What would Mrs. Gladstone say to this? " '* I am," was the reply, " this moment going to fetch her." The lady came ; presently some hot soup made its appearance . Shortly af terwiards the poor wanderer of the streets, supplied with all neces- saries, was placed beneath a roof, with at least a chance of beginning a new life. The anecdotes about Gladstone's great rival, Disraeli, were more generally apocryphal than those in which the Liberal leader figured. Three men who at times lived more or less intimately with Disraeli survived into the twentieth century. Thomas H amber, once editor of the Standard y subsequently of the shortlived Hour, when broken in fortune and health found a retreat in the Hughenden neighbourhood. Here he was discovered and relieved by the lord of the manor. But after the death of his two private secretaries (Lord Barrington and Lord Rowton), Lord Glenesk, Lord Burnham, and Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower remained the only three who 286 St. Mary's, Winton, to Curzon Street had possessed with him anything like long-stand- ing intimacy. In the obscurity of my extreme youth the fifth Lord Stanhope, the Maecenas as well as historian of the day, gave me the chance of meeting some famous men at his dinner -table, Disraeli among them. The latter had been told that Thackeray would be among his fellow- guests. "Then," was the reply, *' I cannot come." Disraeli, as is well known, never forgave the aiihhor of *' Vanity Fair " the Punch burlesque as " Codlingsby " of his first great novel. "Well," said Stanhope, "I will ask Dickens." Disraeli never became a votary of that novelist. His own colleague and Chancellor of the Ex- chequer. Sir Stafford Northcote, an ardent Dickensian, often tried, but always unsuccess- fully, to inoculate him with a taste for *' Pickwick." At the Stanhope dinner, however, he found in Dickens the writer whom, many years earlier, he had met at Lady Blessington's and termed "a delightful man." The first place in Lord Beaconsfield's estimate of contemporary authors was always reserved for Matthew Arnold. Some words or ideas of the creator of Arminius, rather than anything he had ever heard from Sir Francis, afterwards Lord Leighton, formed the intellectual germ that even- tually grew into the Gaston Phoebus of " Lothair." 287 Great Victorians None of these writings when, many years later, I heard him talk on such subjects, seemed to in- terest him so much as Mr. W. H. Mallock's ** New Republic." Our hostess, Mrs. Singleton, afterwards Lady Currie, had hoped on this occa- sion to present the author to the great man. Something at first rendered it doubtful whether Disraeli would be present. Mr. Mallock, there- fore, never came, but, almost unexpectedly, Dis- raeli did, and talked a good deal to the lady of the house about the absent author and other kindred subjects. "I place," he said, '* the * New Re- public ' in a genuinely original trio, appearing within something like half a century. First in order of titne came my own * Popanilla 'in 1828; then " (looking towards Lawrence Oliphant, who happened to be of the company) " ' Piccadilly ' ; and now, 1877, the ' New Republic' With these exceptions, in that department of satire and fan- tasy to which they belonged, I cannot recall any other works owing so little in idea and execution to other writers of the time." Lord Beaconsfield's more short and sententious condensations of experience, wisdom, and wit were mostly reserved for a tete-a-tete, generally with some lady of about his own age . Such were his aphorisms treasured and reproduced by Mrs. Reynolds as follows : *' I hope," she had casually 288 St. Mary's, Winton, to Curzon Street said, "you are quite well, Lord Beaconsfield ? " " No one," came in solemn tones the reply, " is quite well; I am tolerably well, thank you." The only books that really amused him were of the same order as his father's ** Curiosities," etc. ** As for novels," was his deliverance, ** when I want to read one I write one " ; and again, " Yes, I confess to being a flatterer ; people like it ; but in the case of royalty you must lay it on with a trowel." He had passed the night beneath the roof of one of his strongest supporters in the Midlands. Before he left the next morning the host brought forward his two little boys, with the request that the departing guest would say to each something which he might remember. " My boy," were the words vouchsafed to the elder, ** never you ask in going through life who wrote the ' Letters of Junius,' or they will think you a bore." " And you," the younger was next told, " never want to know about the * man in the iron mask,' or they'll think you a bigger bore than your brother." His political and literary work apart, Disraeli must be remembered as the most magnificent type and forerunner of nineteenth-century Semitism's social triumphs. Two great ladies chiefly minis- tered to his enjoyment in the later days. Of these the superb Lady Chesterfield, like Lady 289 T Great Victorians Bradford, had not known him during his strug- ghng period. Her sister, however, the not less beautiful and stately Lady Anson, had believed in and backed him from the first. " No genius for practical politics ! " she had exclaimed when some one sneered at the " dandified Jew." '* Why, did he not invent George Bentinck, who, before he knew ' the Jew,' had scarcely ever opened his mouth at Westminster? " And " the Jew " lived to win full satisfaction for the social slights placed upon him by the Lennox, Bentinck, and Stanley gang. In 1870 the party managers had fixed for Whit Monday the Crystal Palace dinner of Conserva- tive Associations, memorable for Disraeli's decla- ration in favour of an Imperial Customs Union. The Duke of Abercorn, with some other grand Transparencies and great Panjandrums, wanted the day changed. "Don't," the great man said quite sharply, " talk to me of your dukes, but arrange as it was decided." In his sorrows especially he turned instinc- tively for comfort to those of his own race. " Circumstances," he once said to Mrs. Singleton, " have taken me much away from home and com- pelled me to talk a good deal ; but Nature in- tended me not only for a silent but a domestic man." Part of the secret of his devotion to his 290 St. Mary's, Winton, to Curzon Street wife was that, in Baroness Lionel Rothschild's words, '* she always understood and never bored him." Her wealth made him independent of office, just as, even at the outset, his patrimony, even without the addition to it from his pen, might with economy have sufficed for all his wants. Nothing deepened his gratitude to his wife more than the comfortable home with which she en- dowed him at Grosvenor Gate, bringing, as it did, within his reach the hospitalities that were so useful in holding together the different sections of his followers. During this year I once heard him say, ** I have had the pleasure of entertain- ing more than five hundred of my friends." The State dinners were well done and the wine was first-rate. Except on such occasions wine and cookery were of the simplest and cheapest, and after dark no gaslights burned in the hall. He felt the cold almost painfully. " The only time," said to me Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, *' that I ever saw him burst out into a real fit of rage was during a not really severe winter at Bourne- mouth. I had suggested his coming there for its mildness. On calling at the hotel I found him furious because he could not get the tempera- ture of his room up to sixty degrees. As I went out the manager stopped me to say, * Lord Beaconsfield told me he considered the house, 291 Great Victorians the place, and everything to do with them an imposture.'* Last scene of all : In the final sickness Sir Richard Quain had for his colleague a doctor recommended many years earlier by Disraeli's then private secretary, Ralph Earle. This was the happily still surviving Dr. Joseph Kidd ; he saw the signs of the approaching end about 2 a.m. ; he imparted his fears 16 Lord Rowton, who summoned Quain. Those three stood or sat by the dying man till all was over. During the last hour or two there was very little conscious- ness, and few words of any kind came from the lips. Actually the last— I had it directly from Quain himself— were, " I am oppressed." 292 CHAPTER IX A CAMBRIDGE HOUSE HENCHMAN AND ORACLE Abraham Hayward and the French gentleman on " parasites " — The funeral service and mourners — At Blundell's School, Tiverton — Articled to an Ilchester solicitor — His lineage and ancestors — The lady's opinion of Hayward: "What a horrid man ! " — Disliked by Disraeli — Starts the Law Magazine — Thiers calls on Hayward — Their conversation about the alliance which was " hopeless " — Bismarck and the Kiel Canal — In the Lyme Pathway case — Roebuck excludes him from the Benchers of the Temple — " Hayward, Hayward, come back!" — Violet Fane, impatient at first, but apologetic afterwards — Melbourne on " a big balance at the banker's " — At his death-bed — Kinglake with him to the last. About the middle of the Victorian era an intelli- gent little French gentleman, paying his first visit to London, was eagerly investigating our social polity. He had found his cicerone in the memorably rase and re panda Abraham Hayward. That accomplished belles -lettrist, barrister, man of the world, and tame cat to the great Whig and Liberal houses of his time, was better qualified than any mlan then living to initiate a stranger into the innermost mysteries of polite life. 293 Great Victorians *' Just below the highest and most aristocratic classes," explained this mentor to his Tele- machus, " are certain men who, while not born of kin to the purple, live with the great ones of the earth on terms of intimacy, and are always welcome at their dinner -tables or in their draw- ing-rooms." The stranger's face at once brightened. '* I understand perfectly," he said. '* These are what you call * parasites.' " It was an apt remark, though it might have given offence had the gentleman to whom it was addressed cared to take it personally, because Society then possessed no more typical member of the class than himself. The best idea of Hayward's place in the great world during more than half a century is given by the representative names of those who, on February 6, 1885, attended the memorial service in St. James's Church, Piccadilly. Mr. Glad- stone, then Prime Minister, placed a wreath of snowdrops, fresh from Hawarden, on the pall. Near him were two of his Cabinet colleagues, several of those who had held high office in other Administrations, the President of the Royal Academy, delegates of all the learned societies, the editors of The Times and of all the great weekly, monthly, or quarterly reviews. Among historians there were J. A. Eroude, W. E. H. 294 Cambridge House Henchman and Oracle Lecky, and his lifelong and closest intimate, A. W. Kinglake. The muses had sent the best known after Tennyson and least understood of nineteenth-century poets, Robert Browning. Society agreed to see in Hayward the habitue of its favourite resorts, the most pointed as well as the sharpest conversationist of the time, a good deal of the epicure, and not a little of the cynic. All, or most of this, he no doubt was. He had also other qualities, moral as well as mental— a genuine determination to get at the truth, a hatred of pretence and sham, a consuming earnestness in whatever he took up. These attributes made Hayward a type, not so much, perhaps, of his time, as of all that was most distinctive of the English temper itself. Bom into the class of smaller landed gentry, he lost nothing, but porob- ably gained much, from not going to a great public school or university, but to BlundelFs School, Tiverton, a " West Country Winchester," and very shortly afterwards beginning the appren- ticeship for his career. The associations of his Wiltshire birthplace, Wilton, near Salisbury, had formed, as we shall presently see, a little educa- tion in themselves. A Somersetshire mother of refined tastes, a well-to-do uncle, her brother, and a little later the run of a really good library, secured him the intellectual training and oppor- 295 Great Victorians tunities calculated to give him, in the most useful form, the varied culture and experience which constituted his working capital when, coming to London in 1824, he began keeping his terms at the Inner Temple, where he was duly called eight years afterwards. '* My father's people," Hay ward once said to me in one of his autobio- graphical humours, '* the Hillcotts of Wiltshire, once had a really good estate, which ought to have made me independent for life ; and all that reading could give I got beneath the roof of the Ilchester solicitor to whom I w^as apprenticed. I got, however, more than this. For the good parents, and especially the extraordinarily gifted mother of my lifelong friend Kinglake, made their house in the Taunton district, called * Wilton,' my second home." " It was," Hay ward went on, " something per- haps to have for one's ancestors people who, like these Hillcott Haywards, had the pas of all the parishioners in entering church. It was a good deal more to live in my Wiltshire birthplace,, under the very shadow of the Pembroke man- sion, in a different way as much an historical monument as Stonehenge itself. In the picture- gallery of Wilton House, as a child of eight or ten, I first got the idea that English history, properly looked at, would be found only another 296 Cambridge House Henchman and Oracle and longer corridor of portraits. Fitting on my own head the cap once worn by Charles I when he slept at * Wilton ' on his way to Carisbrooke, I seemed to imbibe some of the old cavalier's spirit, making me a high Tory till I came to years of discretion, as all my elders and betters on both sides were, and more particularly my Taunton uncle, Richard. I By first sending rne to Blun dell's School at Tiverton, and then to the Ilchester attorney's office, he put me in the way of getting exactly that kind of knowledge which stood me in better stead than had I gone with my friend Kinglake, as both he and his good mother wished, to Eton first and Cambridge afterwards. The Wilton, family also were my first patrons. Sidney Herbert's introductions got me on to the staff of the Peelite Morning Chronicle. Together with a tolerably good knowledge of German and French, they procured me, when I was abroad, quite a cosmopolitan acquaintance ; for, from his partly Russian parentage .2 Russians, then ' From that relative's patronymic Hay ward derived his Christian name, Abraham. That, he always insisted, was Jewish only in sound, and meant etymologically " auburn." Abraham, indeed, is, or used to be, a not uncommon Somerset surname, but Abraham Hayward's thick lips and Jewish nose led many people into the pardonable error of crediting him with the Hebrew lineage that he always vehemently disclaimed. ^ Sidney Herbert's father was the eleventh Earl of Pembroke, and his mother was Count Woronzow's daughter. 297 Great Victorians great personages in all continental society, looked upon Sidhey Herbert as one of themselves." The qualities that gave Hay ward's literary gifts a place among the personal forces of his time were moral as well as intellectual. His genuine- ness, intensity, abhorrence of trickery and im- posture, of falsehood and sham ; his dauntless determination to arrive, in every case, at the facts himself, and to prevent others being misled by phrases, "wrung many withers." " Hay ward," said a well-known chaperon to her charge, '* will do you vehement justice if you are wrongly attacked, but will show you no mercy if you make a slip." " What a horrid man ! " was the not unnatural exclamation. Horrid or not, she well knew he had, as things then were, to be pro- pitiated. " Professional beauties," indeed, had not at this time come in. " Beauty parties," with whose arrangement Hayward had much to do, were in great vogue, and brought him requests for invitation cards ; he granted none of these unless he considered the aspirant came up to the proper standard, not only of good looks, but of good company. As for men, Hayward was engaged in some- thing like a lifelong warfare with only two— Bernal Osborne, a rival conversationist he called too flippant, and Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield), 298 Cambridge House Henchman and Oracle whom he thought an impostor, and who cordially reciprocated his antipathy. For Hay ward had been the first to expose, in the Morning Chronicle, the twofold plagiarism of Disraeli's funeral panegyric on the Duke of Wellington. First the English speaker had appropriated the artistic phrases and the impressive imagery of Thiers' eulogism of Marshal St. Cyr. Secondly, he had not read that oration in the original French. He only knew of it from Hayward's own rendering in the newspaper, and of that version he adopted the actual words . Quite apart from this incident, Disraeli's character seemed to Hay ward essentially false, just as Mr, Glad- stone's, in spite of all his mistakes, had in it the ring of truth. That he might have, as the psalmist puts it, the tongue and also *' the pen of a ready writer," he found an opening for forensic as well as news- paper exercise. He made himself a really good lawyer by working in chambers all day. He listened most evenings of the week to the masters of debate at St. Stephen's, where most of his spare half-crowns went in inducing the door- keepers to give him a good place. When not there he practically studied the art of addressing an assemblage or convincing a jury in the London Debating Society, then frequented in their extra- 299 Great Victorians parliamentary period by the budding orators, the social wits, and the polidcal philosophers of the time. At these discussions J. A. Roebuck on the Radical, and Hayward on the Conservative, or more often high Tory, side, were the rival champions . After being called to the Bar in 1832, a cleverly planned foreign tour made him almost as much of a personage in continental society as he had become in English. He just missed Goethe, but he lived familiarly with Tieck ; to the Countess Hahn-Hahn he became all that he afterwards was to Lady Waldegrave. In France he struck up a friendship with Thiers, lasting till his death. With that acquaintance began the constant interchange of visits and hospitalities between English men of letters and the intellec- tual lights of the Orleanist monarchy that during much of the nineteenth century's first half annexed certain more or less distinguished houses on both sides of the Channel to a single Anglo- French set ; its best known members in France being Thiers and Tocqueville, in this country Henry Reeve, Kinglake, A. H. Layard, and Hay- ward. A further friendly link of intellectual union between the two nations forecast, and even prepared the way for, the Entente of our own times. This link was forged by Hayward in the 300 Cambridge House Henchman and Oracle Law Magazine, whose pages brought together the chief jurists on both sides of the Channel. The Franco-Prussian War showed the import- ance attached, at least in France, to this inter- national freemasonry. Just before the investment of Paris in 1870, Thiers, coming to England on a futile quest for an alliance, went to Hayward directly he reached London, and sounded his old friend on the possibility of the Gladstone Govern- ment supporting France. "The idea," at once said Hayward, "is quite hopeless." The visitor then began to argue his case and to talk about the balance of power. " My friend," Hayward broke in, " put all that stuff out of your head ; we care for none of these things." One of the literary events between i860 and 1870, watched with equal interest at home and abroad, was the collection of Hayward's essays into the volumes which have not yet lost all their readers. As a writer, indeed, his European repu- tation rested on the translation of Faust (1833). This opened to him the Athenaeum, and coincided with the beginning of his club life generally. He was among the earliest instances of the pen alone proving the key to the co-operative cara- vanserais of St. James's Street and Pall Mall; and he headed in 1845 the list of a hundred additional members taken into the Carlton. At 301 Great Victorians the Bar his conduct of the great Lyme Pathway case brought him many briefs. Roebuck's oppo- sition prevented his becoming a Bencher of the Inner Temple but not his receiving *' silk." His old Wilton friends, as said above, found him a new opening in the Press, on the reorganized Morning Chronicle, bought by Sidney Herbert and others in the Free Trade and Peelite interest . Apart from his pen no one not in Parliament had so much to do with the arrangements for the Coalition Government of 1852. George Smythe, the original of " Coningsby," had just lost his seat for Canterbury ; he was chosen by Hayward for his chief colleague and leader-writer. Delane of The Times was unlike Hayward in being not a learned, a specially literary man, or, indeed, anything more than a shrewd, open- minded, genial citizen of the world. His editorial dignity did jQot give him more influence abroad and at home than Hayward had secured by his pen and tongue alone. The future Napoleon III when in exile in London had consulted the leading spirit of the Peelite newspaper as a kind of oracle . The Taunton uncle from whom Hayward had expectations, calling on his nephew in his Temple chambers, had been disgusted a few years earlier at not finding him deep in his law books and briefs, but engaged with no other visitor than 302 Cambridge House Henchman and Oracle the future Napoleon III, the worst specimen, as the uncle thought, of a needy foreign adventurer . Hayward's crowning triumph as a practical politician came in 1864. The Prussian policy of dismembering Denmark by the Schleswig-Hol- stein annexation, coming, as it did, a year after the Heir-apparent's marriage to a Danish princes, had raised the anti -German feeling to fever height, and brought us to the verge of what would have been a popular war. On July 23, 1863, Palmerston, as Prime Minister, had, it was thought, committed England to the defence of Denmark. As a fact, however, the public sen- timent thus voiced proved neither general nor deep. After a few weeks or even days. Parlia- ment and Press alike endorsed Lord Stanley's words that a European war for the sake of the Duchies would be an act, not only of impolicy but of insanity. Full of all this. Hay ward called at Cambridge House and sat with Lady Pal- merston till her lord returned from the Cabinet. The minister had an unusually worn and weary look. Hay ward, therefore, after a few words, rose to go, and left the room ; he had almost reached the bottom of the stairs leading into the hall when he saw the master of the house leaning over the banisters above. He next heard the 303 Great Victorians voice, " Hay ward, Hay ward, come back ! " The re-entering visitor then encountered the question, *' What does all this mean? " " It means," came the answer, " that none of you seem to know to what you are heading." " Surely," rejoined the minister, " Russell and I have not gone beyond a moderate and rational patriotism." Hayward then showed his careful and minute analysis of the party groups and individual opinions on both sides, conclusively . proving as they did the progressive formation of an irresis- tible majority against war. *' If you doubt me, ask Brand [the ministerial whip] . Unless," he wound up, " you execute an immediate change of front you will be out in a week." A day or two later Palmerston went down to the House and announced the " right-about-face." Hayward's influence with Palmerston first, as with Gladstone afterwards, arose not only from his thoroughly practical turn of mind, but in foreign affairs his accurate information about the personal views of statesmen abroad and the steady, if often un- noticed, movement of feeling and conviction at home . As regards the questions now looked back upon, he almost alone among Englishmen knew that Bismarck, then first asserting himself, was bent on taking the Duchies because at their north- eastern corner lay the harbour of Kiel. This, in 304 Cambridge House Henchman and Oracle Prussian hands, would facilitate the linking by a canal of the Baltic with the North Sea. Hay ward delighted in the reputation of being behind the political scenes, but never betrayed a confidence or spoke of anything for which he could not give chapter and verse. A really good judge of cookery and writer on it, he was a diner-out, not as a gourmet but as an observer of life and character. " Within this twelve- month," he said not long before his death, " I have dined away from home— that is, from the club— only three times." "Cold beef," were the last words I ever heard him utter on this subject, "if you like, but good claret and plenty of it." He might have added, " And no talker in the com- pany except myself." Failing that condition, he did not show to advantage, and generally re- mained silent throughout the evening. Hence he could not socially co-exist with " a dinner- table and smoking-room hack like Bernal Osborne, with a master of monologue like Macaulay, with his friend Lord Houghton, a fine intellect spoiled by paradox, or with Anthony Trollope, whose boisterous ways formed a striking contrast to his own delicate dissections of feminine life and character." Great ladies like the hostesses of Strawberry Hill and Cambridge House consulted Hayward about 305 u Great Victorians their parties. Smaller ones, especially if of a literary turn, were afraid of him. The highly endowed authoress who won fame as ** Violet Fane " once showed a little impatience at a story he was telling. ** He will never forgive you," said a bystander ; ** you, who wish to suc- ceed in literature, have mortally offended the ' great Cham ' of latter-day criticism." The Mrs. Singleton of those days took the first oppor- tunity of apologizing, and received from him a lecture upon the satisfaction natural to an elderly man from perceiving that younger men and especially younger women are anxious to avoid wounding his susceptibilities. In education and sympathies belonging, like Macaulay, to the eighteenth as well as the nine- teenth century, Hayward linked by his personal experience the Melbournian with the Palmerston- ian period. He was at Brocket with Melbourne shortly before he died and found Mrs. Norton in the room. Presently Melbourne came up to him and said, ** It is a d d good thing to have a big balance at your banker's, and it is a d d bad thing when a woman finds it out." Hayward lodged all his best-known years at 8 St. James's Street (beneath the roof which had once sheltered Byron). Here, ministered to during his last illness chiefly by his lifelong friend 306 Cambridge House Henchman and Oracle Kinglake, he died. A little before the end his sister came from Dorsetshire, to take him, should he recover, to her house at Lyme Regis for his convalescence. " Yes," Kinglake tried to comfort his friend, '' we will all go down there and start soon." "Why delay at all?" said the dying Hay ward. ** There shall be no delay," returned Kinglake. "The servants are packing now, and you would not wish to hurry them." " On no account," murmured the dying man, " hurry the servants." A few seconds later he said : " I have no fear of death ; I have some faith amd I know there is something grand." These were his last words . 307 CHAPTER X MID-VICTORIAN TYPES AND FORCES IN CHURCH, STATE, SOCIETY, AND LETTERS A. W. Kinglake on travelling in the Crimea then and now — The Eton all-night flogging — " Eothen's " luck in coming last — The duel that was not fought — The two seconds at the Travellers' Club — Lord Tennyson's social mentor — The remnant of the Cambridge " Apostles " in London — A distinguished dinner-party at Dean Milman's — The host's stories about Frederick the Great — What happens when Bishops meet — The lifelong social competition of Bishop Wilberforce and Cardinal Manning — Archbishop Temple recalled as he received the junior clergy in his Exeter days — Cardinal Manning's Riviera in Westminster — The Cardinal on Anglican sermons and their falling off — How Lord Macaulay was introduced in his reading to a *' Mr. Sponge " — " dark and smells of cheese " — A reminiscence of " Jorrocks's Jaunts and Jollities " — The rise and progress of his creator — Whyte-Melville and the Divorce Court phrase — Improved on by George Alfred Lawrence — How " Guy Livingstone " was written and with what results — The meeting of the wits in Air Street, Regent Street — George Lawrence's rise, progress, character, and work — Introduced at a Richmond dinner to Ouida by Harry Stone — A visit to Francis E. Smedley, the author of " Frank Fairlegh " and " Harry Coverdale's Courtship " — How the nineteenth-century masters had to wait till the twentieth for their full influence on English letters — J. A. 308 Mid-Victorian Types and Forces Froude and W. E. H. Lecky in conversation and in print — Thorold Rogers and the scientific historians — E. A. Freeman's musical ri. es in the Mendip lanes — Freeman, Browning, and "Kentish Sir Byng" — Bishop Stubbs in the fallentis semita vttce — The historian as editor — Froude's advice to his " Eraser " writers — Dickens' readings in the West — How Thackeray was coming, but thought better of it — Dickens's intellectual legacy to his family — Disraeli and Dickens on the eloquence of their time — The Dickens school — Edmund Yates, his originality and his obligations — Had he an Egeria?— From "Edmund" to "Henry"— " Labby " as raconteur and Radical — With Grant- Duff at Orleans House — How Don Emelio Castelar visited Galway and heard his health proposed in an unknown tongue. The friend who has just been seen by Abraham Hayward's death-bed, Hke two or three more of his old Cambridge set, personified the militant patriotism which the stirring events of the times had helped to develop. During the eighties Kinglake had heard some one speak of travelling in the Crimea with a special permit from the Russian Government. " In my time," Kinglake observed, ** an Englishman went wherever he liked in the Crimea without leave at all." I may recall a characteristic display of his electioneer- ing adroitness on the Bridgwater hustings, wit- nessed during childhood by myself. '* Eothen " had then made him a literary and social lion of some ten years' standing, but probably had not been read by 2 per cent, of the electors. Standing as a Liberal, he was pitted in his speech- 309 Great Victorians making against the Conservative, Spencer FoUett, far and away the finest orator that most people in the West of England had then heard . Though nowhere at the subsequent polling, he knew how to humour the sentiment and flatter the local patriotism of the crowd. " My experi- ences of foreign travel," he said, *' certainly had their charm. But, gazing on Libanus and Anti- libanus, I could not but feel their inferiority to my own Mendip, Quantock, and Blackdown. Even the River Jordan seemed to me quite un- worthy of comparison with our own River Parret." " Something of the vogue which, with a limited circle, * Eothen ' won, was due," Kinglake once told me, " less to my writing than to OUivier's coloured pictures in the first edition, verging as they often did on caricature, of Mexborough, my travelling companion, and myself. People, how- ever," he went on, " soon got disappointed ; for the women seemed to think I ought to be a sort of Don Juan ; and that was not then my humour." He was one of those persons to whom adventures seemed to have a way of naturally coming, or whose everyday experiences had in them an un- usually large element of the adventurous. At Eton he had been one of the division that Keate stayed up all night to flog. ** Keate," he told me, *' had a remarkable fancy for working himself 310 Mid- Victorian Types and Forces into a scarlet-faced passion for little or nothing. A few days before, because some boy had been inattentive he kept us in long after the usual time. * Well,' I murmured too audibly, ' if this is not a shame, there never was one.' The Head over- heard, threatened me with a special flogging or expulsion, but, instead of either, remonstrated with me most kindly. He seemed quite wounded in his feelings when on the fatal night my turn for execution came. But the Doctor had been at it ever since about lo p.m. ; his arm, therefore, was rather tired, so I got off pretty easily." The trio of intimates to which Kinglake belonged included, not only Hay ward, but also Eliot Warburton, whose " Crescent and the Cross " came out in the same year as " Eothen " ( 1844). Warburton considered he received from Lord Ranelagh an insult, demanding the satisfaction due in such cases from and to a gentleman . It was agreed, therefore, that a Norfolk squire, named Pack, should act for Ranelagh and that Kinglake should represent Warburton. " Pack," to give Kinglake's words, " was to call on me at ' The Travellers',' between 7 and 9 p.m. He arrived punctually, a jolly, red-faced. East Anglian squire, up for the cattle week, fresh from a dinner at the Windham, washed down by abundance of that club's then famous port. He almost em- 311 Great Victorians braced me in his effusive geniality and opened the interview with, * I always say that Ranelagh is a gentleman.' As icily as I could," continued Kinglake, " I said, ' That I am willing to assume.' The words had an extraordinary effect ; for they at once froze him sober." Kinglake, like most of his friends, had always been on intimate terms with the first President of the third French Republic. On the official headquarters being removed to Versailles, he paid his old friend a visit, riding for that purpose on horseback from Paris. In person, manner, age, and everything, no greater contrast could be imagined than that between the author of *' Eothen " and the baronet who then represented Chelsea. But, as Kinglake alighted at his friend's residence, he found a crowd collected round him, saying, to his great amusement, " II doit etre Sir Dilke." Through Kinglake I was often in the company of his most famous Cambridge contemporaries. Long before then, indeed, during school or college holidays, I had been made known to Tennyson by my dear old friend, that noble - hearted gentleman, Henry Sewell Stokes, the Laureate's frequent host, beneath his roof in Strang ways Terrace, Truro. On the banks of the Fal, near Tregothnan, where I was watching some fishermen mending their boats, the great 312 Mid-Victorian Types and Forces man, then in a remarkably vigorous middle age, conspicuous chiefly for his brilliantly flashing, jet black eyes and dense crop of hair to match, often strolled up to me, and always when the boat -repairing was in progress, took out a pocket edition of the " Odyssey," opened it at the description of Ulysses constructing his raft, and turned to the operations then in progress before him. Then, with the Greek classic in one hand and the other pointing to the details of the boat- tinkering, he mouthed out, in his deep -chested sing-song, the features of their industry common to the Cornish toilers and their Homeric proto- types. I did not see the Laureate again till I was presented to him in Sir James Knowles's suburban garden, as he sat together with the other great bard of the day, Robert Browning, receiving a few favoured fellow -guests at the entrance of a little tent on the lawn. All the familiarity of early and lifelong friendship showed itself in Kinglake's talk with Tennyson when no other guest but myself was there. At Cambridge the two men often dined together at a tavern. In London they periodically kept up the practice at the Fleet Street " Cock." The Laureate then still retained his picturesque presence, with all the added impressiveness of years. As to how or what he looked he had become altogether in- 313 Great Victorians different. His slouch felt hats and his capacious cloaks were worn till there was no more wear in them and were replaced from a little stock of both articles which he always had on hand to avoid, save at the longest intervals, the loathed visit to hatters or tailors for a fresh supply. " My dear Alfred," one of his old Cambridge " Apostles," generally Lord Houghton, would say, " be a little more careful, or they will take you for one of Carlyle's ' old clo'esmen ' from Houndsditch or Petticoat Lane." To enjoy or even fully under- stand Tennyson's intimate talk one almost ought, as Thackeray, his contemporary on the Cam, told Browning, to have been with him at college, because, I suppose, of his frequent allusions to colloquies or discussions with his Cambridge associates on Shakespeare and the musical glasses, on every age of English and classical literature, as if they had been held only the other day and could be recalled by the company in which he happened to be half a century later. Tennyson's literary judgments were towards the close of his life what they were at the beginning. Dryden he admired for his unexpectedness. " But," he asked, " why should Dryden have drawn Alexander as the great fool which his poem makes him? Cowper in his short poems was an individual and a thorough gentleman to boot. 314 Mid- Victorian Types and Forces Byron said nothing not literally true in praise of Pope's imagination and fancy." But as for Byron's own narrative poems, Tennyson much preferred the headlong drollery of Barham's Nicholas in the " Ingoldsby Legends " to the " Bride of Abydos." *' I myself," said the bard, "like my own shorter pieces the best. As for our friend Browning, are not his ' Ride from Ghent,' his ' Cavalier Lays,' and ' Herve Riel * worth all his modern epics put together. In expression," he went on, *' I am not perhaps below Sophocles, but there's nothing in me." " That," commented Lord Houghton, " was the height of paradoxical exaggeration. For the Broad Church divines, Maurice and F. W. Robertson, found their gospel in ' The Two Voices,' and in ' In Memoriam,' while Herschell, Owen, Sedgwick, and Tyndall read in him the reconciliation of science and religion." Tenny- son had always been absent-minded. As years went on he almost rivalled in this quality Sir Isaac Newton himself. Henry Irving the actor, who latterly saw more than most people of him, was his frequent guest both at Freshwater and Aid- worth. A bottle of port generally appeared with the dessert ; the guest was always offered and never touched the wine, which the host, in an abstracted manner, would slowly sip, gradually 315 Great Victorians coming to the last glass. As he swallowed this, he would turn to Irving and say, '* Do you always take a bottle of port after your dinner? " The least remembered, but assuredly not the least remarkable, of the Kinglake -Tennyson group was the famous banker and economist whose visible monument to-day is the London County and Westminster Bank. Jones Loyd, till his death as Lord Overstone in 1883, had lived much at Cambridge with all the " Apostles," if not himself actually one of the number. He shared to the full during the stormy fifties the warlike enthusiasm' of his friends. Benjamin Disraeli, Morell Mackenzie, the throat specialist, and the just mentioned Henry Irving, all impressed one with an extraordinary feeling of intellectual power and a superiority over their fellows. So, too, did Overstone. No one could be in his company for half an hour without the consciousness of looking upon a unique combina- tion of mental strength generally, with insight into individual character and statesmanlike sagacity. Together with Kinglake and Fitz- gerald he was the Laureate's guest in the Isle of Wight. After dinner Tennyson read aloud his invitation to the Rev. E. D. Maurice, and came to the lines :— Where, if below the milky steep Some ship of battle slowly creep. 316 Mid-Victorian Types and Forces Here Overstone, his face aglow with enthusiasm and a note of triumph in his voice, looking in the direction of the sea, burst in with, " Would to Heaven I could now see, not one, but a hundred, good ships of the line sailing eastward ! " During the first year of my settlement in London I called, as I had been invited to do, at the Deanery, St. Paul's, to find the front door blocked by some young people of both sexes, tumbling, as fast as they could after one another, into a huge travelling carriage and pair. They were the Dean's youthful relatives or dependents being taken off by him on their summer outing. When this holiday rite had been instituted railway locomotion was practically unknown on the other side of the Dover Straits, and the Milman family drove to the packet station on the English coast in their family coach, re-entering that vehicle as soon as they reached the French shore. Steam locomotion g^radually penetrated every British and European corner. The Dean, however, clung to the fiction of the road, and compromised with the facts by beginning the journey behind a stout pair of horses, afterwards taking the water, gener- ally, I think, at Gravesend. So, at least, his accomplished son. Sir Archibald Milman, Clerk of the House of Commons, himself told me when I met him many years afterwards. Within a few 317 Great Victorians days of my call at the Deanery I dined beneath its roof . My chief fellow-guests were men whose fame seemed a part of ancient history, with the single exception, I think, of the future Bishop of Exeter, then Headmaster of Rugby. Erederick Temple, like all his " co-Essayists and Re- viewers," considered H. H. Milman's " History of the Jews " the first really great literary product of the Broad Church school, applying, as it did, the same critical tests to the Old Testament and other sacred writings as to uninspired and secular literature. Thus one of the septem contra Christum, eventually in 1896 Archbishop of Can- terbury, had been a familiar figure to me while he was Phillpotts' successor as Bishop of Exeter. Never till then, however, had I been so close to him as to estimate rightly his extraordinary strength of body and limb. Bred on a Tiverton farm, though the son of an Army officer, he justly gloried in his power to plough a straight furrow against any one, and might sometimes be seen helping, with his enormous shoulder, a coal -cart out of a rut or uphill. "The Hon. Mr. ," announced his servant as he sat in his study in the Exeter palace. The Bishop never looked up from his writing-table, but simply said, " Take a chair," and went on with his pen. '* Perhaps, my lord/' murmured the abashed visitor, " you 318 Mid-Victorian Types and Forces do not know that I come from " '* Take two chairs ! " was the only episcopal acknowledgment vouchsafed. As for the host, he was very full, before dinner, of his latest travels abroad. Amongst other places, he had lately been at Prague. Here his patriarchal appearance, to- gether with his knowledge of Hebrew tongues and customs, had caused him to be taken for a distinguished foreign Rabbi ; by way of compli- ment the Synagogue officials gave him a copy of the '* Torah," the Book of the Law, in other words, the '* Pentateuch," to carry. While at Prague he saw much of an ancient Polish general, Skrynecki, who, he said, gave him almost a daily lesson in military tactics. But far the best of Milman's travellers' tales concerned themselves with Frederick the Great of Prussia, who had died only five years before the Dean's own birth, and whose memory at the time of Milman's first German trip had been fresh enough for the visitor to bring back many good stories about him that, at least then, were quite new. Most of these had come immediately from Goethe, who reproduced the theatrical gestures with which Frederick attri- buted his attack on Maria Theresa to " the vivacity of my temperament, my well -filled war- chest, and my thirst for glory." " To the sag© 319 Great Victorians of Weimar,'* said the Dean, '* it seemed an out- break of the national ' Sturnt and Drang ' period. For the comfort of posterity," added Milman, '* Goethe spoke of the results entailed by Frederick's precedent as likely to last into the twentieth century. Ages must pass," said the Dean, ** before the great Prussian robber or his family traits can be understood. Look at the conditions under which he grew up. With his father, Frederick William' I, his life was never worth a day's purchase. As the greatest knave and rogue in Europe, he was condemned to pass about one-third of his youth in a fortress, and almost repeatedly escaped by a miracle being done to death. The sire who hanged one 0)f his counsellors for a trivial offence, and compelled all the others to be present at the execution, was not likely to spare the son who had provoked his wrath by an unsuccessful attempt at escape to England, where his uncle, George I, was then King. Frederick William I had a kind of affec- tion for his wife ; he made her life scarcely less of a terror to her than existence became a burden to his son. The poor woman appealed to the English Court for help ; a royal separation be- came the fashionable talk of Berlin. * It would be,' said Frederick William, ' like having a de- cayed tooth drawn— a momentary pang and then 320 Mid-Victorian Types and Forces one would get over it.' " In due course the son modelled himself upon the sire. The Potsdam Palace still contains many memorials of the second Frederick's friendship with Voltaire. Some of these exhibited at once its apparent warmth and its real danger to the great French writer. The Sans Souci archives were not at one time thought to explain satisfactorily the incidents causing the King's abuse of the poet as a fool, hypocrite, and traitor. To Milman the whole matter seemed perfectly clear. Voltaire's purpose of leaving Prussia was as unpardonable an offence in the eyes of his royal host as Admiral von Tirpitz considers the desire of a neutral trading ship to place itself outside the range of his guns. " The wretch," said Frederick, *' wishes to hand my poems round Europe and make fun of them." As a fact, Voltaire had none of these verses in his possession. His imprisonment, therefore, came to an end after five weeks ; he then proceeded on his journey, and, safely gaining Switzerland, had his revenge in writing and publishing during the summer of 1853 his scandalous but deadly satirical " Life of the King of Prussia." Small wonder, therefore, that J.-J. Rousseau, some years afterwards, would not walk into the trap from which Voltaire found it so difficult to escape. A cow and poultry, the cultivation of his own 321 X Great Victorians vegetables, a quiet life with its necessaries, a sub- stantial pension, and liberty were the baits. '* Why," said Jean-Jacques, *' do you offer these things to me, but withhold them from the brave men who have lost a leg or arm in your service ? " " This monster," Goethe said to Milman, " was also a born sentimentalist, with crocodile's tears ever ready for the eyes. First one, then an- other, of his young military favourites died ; he insisted on keeping the dead bodies in his room: till some time after decomposition had set in." Some of those who, on the occasion now re- called, were seen by me at St. Paul's Deanery, bore names that took one back into the Byronic period, if not a generation farther. To one who had only the day before yesterday put on his bachelor's hood, like the present writer, it was the entrance into a new world that was the old. Did I, some one asked me, know who it was that before dinner in the drawing-room had stood next to me, leaning against the mantelpiece? It turned out to be no less a person than the Wliig manager and Liberal disciplinarian, the Right Hon. Edward Ellice, the great Earl Grey's son- in-law, who, it seemed, had been telling some one near me how absurdly the great Lord Brougham exaggerated his importance to and influence with the Grey Reform^ Government. Of two Bishops 322 Mid- Victorian Types and Forces present, one formed the only member of the com- pany I had ever seen before. This was the Right Rev. John Robert Eden, then Bishop of Bath and Wells ; but for his episcopal dress he might have been taken for a great Kentish or Somerset squire. Thackeray recounts his own almost in- credible experience of having known a lady sought in marriage by Horace Walpole. Exactly at the time now looked back upon I did not know the facts, but it seemed afterwards overwhelming to learn that my old friend the Somersetshire diocesan of the sixties must have been the brother of the Hon. Emily Eden, the first Lord Auckland's daughter, the only woman the second William Pitt is known to have loved, whose re- fusal to him by her father he took deeply to Jieart. The episcopal Lord Auckland, in the kindest way possible, presented me to another prelate present. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce had been installed in the Oxford see twenty years earlier. At a later date family accidents secured me his friendship and many good offices. At the Deanery dinner he sat next to Sir Charles Lyell and Michael Faraday. Lyell had just returned from a visit to Oxford, and told the company how he had found the general idea of the place to be that the Old Testament was a fabrication of some spiritually minded Jews and the New Testament 323 Great Victorians of some similarly disposed Christians afterwards. A propos of physical research and the Oxford curriculum, the Dean, who had known Sir Walter Scott well, quoted his disbelief in the improve- ment to be derived from the advancement of science, on the ground of its being the study whose ultimate tendency must be to harden the heart . Faraday, a propos of its intellectual value, said^ " Its education of the judgmient has, for its first and last step, humility." After Bishop Wil- berforce, who left early, had gone, the tolerant and comprehensive host murmured, I think to the publisher, John Murray the third, the pleasure it would have given him had it been possible to see at his table Wilberforce's brother-in-law, Henry Edward Manning, who in the preceding spring had followed Cardinal Wiseman as Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. The two men never, so far as I saw, met in private society, but constantly encountered each other at public and semi -public functions— always with something like competition between the two. Nothing on such occasions could exceed Wilberforce's vigi- lant adroitness and gentlemanlike tact. On the platform or at the table Manning kept a close look-out for the chance of taking precedence,; of the Bishop. As surely as he had seemed to triumph by entering the room first or taking the 324 Mid-Victorian Types and Forces place of honour, Wilberforce, up to that moment invisible, contrived to get ahead of him, and look back with a smile two-thirds seraphic and one- third satirical. Whatever the Bishop's strength or weakness in pure theology, he certainly stood high among the most accomplished men of his time. His real turn struck those who talked with him as less for divinity than for mathematics and physical science. Whether with pen, on platform, or at the dinner-table, he could at least hold his own, perhaps more, against the physical savants of his time. His, indirectly, was the suggestion that in early days caused the Dally Telegraph to make a point of publishing, at least once a week, a leader on some branch of national re- search. Thus typifying a marked intellectual tendency of his time, he was the earliest of the new school of bishops. Who used their office not to glorify their apostleship but to serve their Church by sheer hard work. In the House of Lords over some scientific issue of the time a little breeze often sprang up between the Bishop and the Duke of Argyll, and occasionally, on a different issue, with Lord Shaftesbury, who once charged him with an offensive utterance. The Bishop was most indignant. " I can assure," he said, " the noble lord and the House that the utmost I sug- gested was that words of a certain sort, if not 325 Great Victorians employed in a purely Pickwickian sense, might be considered as verging on the unsavoury." Manning, perhaps Wilberforce's equal— no one could have been his superior— in administration, had by several years the start in the purely social race. He first made his mark during the season of 1856, when Mayfair welcomed him as a new- comer, a fine-looking, intellectual priest, with good manners and very agreeable, a friend of Sidney Herbert, with whom he had been at Harrow, and whom he rated very highly. Manning had not then begun proselytizing, and never spoke bitterly of the Church in which he had been born and bred. He only lamented the loss of its influence with the middle and lower classes, due, as he thought, to the clergy's habit of writing their sermons. " That," he said, " made the preachers appear less in earnest, and also less careful in preparing their discourse than if they were about to speak it. You Anglicans," he added, " seem to forget that the artisans are a very sceptical and thinking race." Something to the same effect I heard from him many years later when he used to receive me at " Archbishop's House, West- minster." In the winter he used to keep his fire heaped up high and his room at a temperature which only the strongest heart could have borne. *' This," he would say, pointing to the grate and 326 Mid-Victorian Types and Forces the thermometer near it, "is my Riviera, and I command at home a cHmate equal to anything in the South of France." ** Turned over Philo, also some of a novel about sporting; a Mr. Sponge the hero." So wrote Macaulay in his diary for the spring of 1856. More than a generation after this a well-known Member of Parliament and a Foreign Under- Secretary were groping their way out of the ill -lit hall and obscure garden path of a suburban villa where they had been dining. ** Very dark," said the M.P. "Yes," was the Under-Secretary's comment, and, as if to amend and complete a faulty quotation, " ' Hellish dark and smells of cheese,' as said Mr. Jorrocks." It was indeed a quotation from the creator of " Soapy " Sponge, who had first achieved fame in sporting fiction by " Jorrocks's Jaunts and Jollities." This, like all the writings of Robert Smith Surtees, abounded in sentences such as the foregoing, constantly on the lips of school or college youths during the nineteenth century's first half. Such were verbal contortions a la Mrs. Malaprop, " Wot a consternation [constellation] of genius ! " and the Jorrockian exclamation, on being thrown from his horse over a wall into a cucumber frame, " My heyes, vot a splitter ! and all for a fippun note 1 " As an undergraduate I saw more than 327 Great Victorians once this pioneer of the sporting novel, with his tall, erect form, high cheekbones, quiet dress, and grave expression of face, at the Old Ship Hotel, Brighton. The second son of a Durham squire, who had bought his estate, Hambersley Hall, from the Swinburne family, Surtees went to the south coast while his family stuck to Scarborough. His most frequent companion at the *' Ship " was John Leech, of Punch, and afterwards the illustrator of his own novels. Those were the days when noble sportsmen talked and dressed like professional coachmen and jockeys, when Thackeray's Jack Snaffle, Spavin, and Cockspur would have been flattered by being mistaken for grooms, and in any Turf transaction would have cheated their own fathers if by so doing they could have gained a point in the odds.i Those humours of the time were personified most faithfully in the pages of Surtees by the pencil of Leech. As regards dress and bearing, both Robert Smith Surtees and John Leech might have been taken for Church of England clergymen. And the fidelity of Surtees to the temper of his time will be the better realized when one remembers that Mark Lemon and Charles Dickens were ^ "Book of Snobs," p. 191, Pocket Edition (Smith, Elder & Co.), 1887. 328 Mid- Victorian Types and Forces then the lions of the Pavilion, and that J. B. Buckstone with Paul Bedford and J. L. Toole delighted the highest theatrical taste of the day at Mrs. Nye Chart's newly decorated playhouse. By this time Surtees, now a qualified solicitor, had gone into business in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and, together with Rudolf Akermann, had started the very successful New Sporting Magazine. He still contrived, like Anthony Trollope at the Post Office, to get one or two days' hunting every week. By 1836 he had given up his magazine editing and inherited the North Country family estates, but by the pen-name of " The Yorkshire- man " or by his own gave a transcript in the " Jorrocks " series as well as in articles for BeWs Life of his own adventures in town and country. Macaulay called the style of " Soapy " Sponge not vulgar but loose ; and though Surtees wrote about vulgar people and their stable tricks, he had profited too well by his study of Apperley's ("Nimrod") Quarterly Review essays, and was too well bred a man of the world, to write vulgarly himself. Before Surtees died at the " Old Ship," Brighton, in 1864, he had lived long enough to see the rise of other sporting authors, who, writing rather in Apperley's style than his own, owed something to his example. Tall, heavy- 329 Great Victorians moustached and whiskered, languid of manner and look, G. J. Whyte- Melville, of the Cold- streams first and the Turkish Cavalry afterwards, was the very ideal of a thoroughbred beau sabreur, with a bored and melancholy air, re- calling Sir Charles Coldstream in " Used Up," who had seen and done everything and " found nothing in it." Notwithstanding his air of dis- tressed dreaminess, he had a keen sense of fun, never shown more happily than in the church at St. Andrew's, when on a visit to his friend and publisher, John Blackwood. Dean Stanley was preaching a St. Bartholomew's Day sermon, and in it he used Dr. Chalmers's expression, " the expulsive power of a new affection." Whyte- Melville whispered in his host's ear, " Capital phrase that, Blackwood, for the Divorce Court ! " To ride straight to hounds and to say nothing was his favourite prescription for a young man's suc- cess in after-life. Whyte -Melville often rode to hounds in the Oxford and Bucks country. While making the University town his headquarters, he met an undergraduate originally at Balliol, then (1850) about to take his B.A. from New Inn Hall, destined by the literary example of his accomplished elder afterwards to become a novelist as typical of his time as Whyte-Melville himself . 330 Mid-Victorian Types and Forces This was George Alfred Lawrence^ an Essex clergyman's son. Going from Rugby to Balliol in 1 84s, he made himself a fair classic, nourishing himself in Greek, chiefly on Homer, exulting in the poet's sonorous cadence and swing and heroic pictures of battle and love. Next to " Digby Grand " and " Kate Coventry," the " Iliad " and " Odyssey " were the earliest intellectual forces contributing to the later production of ** Guy Livingstone " and " Sword and Gown," to men- tion only two in a long list. For each of these novels, all securing an immense vogue at the time, the publishers, Tinsley Brothers, paid Lawrence £1,000. At Oxford Lawrence's course, if not highly distinguished, had been in many respects exemplary. My old friend Mr. Strachan-Davidson, the present Master of Balliol, has very kindly ascertained for me that the college records show no black mark against him, and that his migration to the " Tavern " was altogether voluntary.^ Afterwards in business of every kind he showed himself the soul of method, punctuality, and honour. Lawrence was now beginning to be known in ^ The Balliol register of terms kept begins only in 1852 — i.e. two years after Lawrence's time. The Latin register of offences against discipline, with admonitions and rustications, contains no reference to him whatever. 331 Great Victorians the ** whole world " as well as in the " half- world." The notion that this, his first novel, formed an autobiography of his boyhood and youth increased the piquancy of his personal interests. To boys and very young men it possessed the same sort of fascination as Byron's poems, with their personages and their philo- sophy, in an earlier generation. The chubbiest of golden youths discarded their usual collars and ties and sported a neck -gear known as " ^ la Guy Livingstone." Others, in the Livingstonian fashion, *' set their faces like a flint," and ad- dressed their sweethearts in tones of calm com- mand rather than the old-world voice of beseeching admiration. " The world consists of soldiers, the aristocracy, and others. Of these classes the first two treat as they please the third, which duly submits, and even rather likes it. Run off, supposing you can, with your friend's wife, if she likes you better than she does him. It is a duty you owe to Society. Should you be an excessively strong man, attack and terrify every one smaller than yourself. You have, perhaps, very little, and even no money. Get any one you can to trust you, and victimize them to the uttermost farthing. This is not swindling. It is simply being a ' detrimental.' If you are a man your two objects in life are 332 Mid-Victorian Types and Forces the chasse de marie e and the chasse de renardy with, of course, frequent intervals of whist and ecarte. Such is the whole duty of man. Stick to it ; never break your word to a friend, or keep it to a woman. You are then a gentleman and true to all the essential principles of your ' order.' " Such is the moral of the Livingstonian novels. Part of it, that relating to the chivalrous obligations of brute force, reads like a presage of twentieth -century Germanism in those mani- festations and precepts so well known to the world. It was the concentration, epitome, and amalgam of a theory of life which to boys of the mid-Victorian epoch exactly represented every- thing that " Childe Harold " and " Don Juan " did to their fathers. Anything specially autobiographical must be looked for only in " Border and Bastille " ( 1863) —recalling a journey to the United States to become a Confederate volunteer. Before Law- rence reached his destination he was taken prisoner and shut up in the guardhouse, ilt took some time before Lord Lyons, then British Minister at Washington, secured his liberation on a promise that he would immediately return to England. A great gambler, he had what is not seldom the gambler's virtue of keeping his engagements 333 Great Victorians to the day and hour. The large sums sent to him at Baden-Baden or Horn burg by the Catherine Street House were worked off as soon as uninter- mitting industry allowed. George Lawrence's muscular paganism formed a typical product of the literary movement that, first inspiring the muscular Christianity of Charles Kingsley and " Tom " Hughes, afterwards found its expression in the Army romancists, who, like James Grant, author of *' The Aide-de-camp " and " The Romance of War," were in their beginnings the creations of Charles Lever alone. To each of these a good deal was owed by Lawrence, when, having left Oxford for chambers in the Temple, he settled finally in London. Here, thanks to his mother's titled relatives, he saw as much as he cared for of the smart aristocracy generally de- scribed in his novels as " the order " to which his heroes and heroines belonged. His first practical introduction to literary workers and work took place, soon after he left Oxford, in a little thoroughfare off Regent Street, at a house of call then much frequented by the most successful delineators of adventurous life. The chief acquaintances made by Lawrence at this place were G. P. R. James, during the in- tervals of his consular service in South America first, and Venice afterwards, till his death in 334 Mid- Victorian Types and Forces i860, and Captain Mayne Reid, the contrast of whose dress with his face made him something of a cross between a Paris houlevardier and one of his own prairie freebooters, the heroes of those stories that had made him a kind of classic with the juvenile public during the first half of the Victorian age. He had been called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in 1852. The two Fleet Street friends whose conversation and example impelled him to authorship soon afterwards were the two essentially Victorian writers, Edmund Yates and G. A. Sala, each a real help to Lawrence on his first start. Both these clever writers were very well-read men on character- istically Victorian lines. They had really studied life and literature in all their aspects, and differed in nothing more from their twentieth -century suc- cessors than in their contemptuous ignorance, in all its departments, of the physical science now- more and more successfully competing with letters as a basis of training for those who write. The ** romance of realism " was the phrase in which Lawrence's novels were summed up by his most gifted but most admiring disciple and imitator, Ouida. She had come powerfully under the spell of Lawrence's pen long before she made, in the early sixties, his personal acquaintance ; this was secured her in the following manner : 335 Great Victorians " Harry Stone," a tall Yankee with a particularly good carriage, having business connections with New York, Paris, and London, a pioneer of the elderly Transatlantic dandy of later days, had seen Miss Ramee in various countries. He had also met Lawrence at the Air Street Tavern. At one of his rarely given *' Star and Garter," Richmond, dinners, Ouida gratified one of her earlier ambitions by meeting Lawrence . She had then written nothing in book shape. Within two or three years appeared the first of her novels to make its mark, '' Strathmore." Something like a generation afterwards I heard her say to Lawrence, whom she met for the last time on the sea -front at Ostend, " Without ' Guy Livingstone ' there would have been no ' Strathmore.' " For some time after her fame had fully established itself, she valued Lawrence's opinion more than that of any other writer. ** With all his paganism, his questionable morality, and much else of the same sort, he has," I heaM her once say, '' the rare power of breathing real life into his characters and holding the interest of all who read him." Some one in her presence had depre- ciated the '* Guy Livingstone " guardsmen as fancy pictures by one who only knew the Army from his own Militia regiment. "And," she at once rejoined, " was not the best sketch of every- 336 Mid-Victorian Types and Forces day Oxford life and people written by a man [one Davies with the pen-name of " Cuthbert Bede "] who had lived in no university but Dur- ham, and only knew Oxford as a visitor?" A little later, during one of her London residences at the Langham Hotel, I met at one of her ** cause rles intlmes, cigarettes per raises,'' to quote her invitation cards, the then Sir Frederick John- stone (died 19 13), Serjeant Ballantine, and " Harry Stone " himself ; that gentleman was openly saluted by the hostess as the early friend who, in the way just described, had, without knowing it, helped her on the literary road. Personally the most amiable, physically the most unfortunate of the mid-Victorian writers, was Francis Smedley. He had been prevented by lameness from going to Westminster School, but had been the private pupil of his uncle, a clergyman at Chesterton, close to Cambridge. Here he picked up a good deal of knowledge, ancient and modern, as well as some acquaintance with University life, of which he made the most in his first novel, immediately and immensely successful, " Frank Fairlegh." Many years after this I saw him at his house in Regent's Park. During the few minutes I was in his company two things struck me, first his extreme graciousness and gentleness of manner, secondly the feminine 337 Y Great Victorians alertness of perception with which Nature seemed to have compensated his bodily disability. The great masters of Victorian fiction were of course in every one's hands during these years. With the younger generation of readers now looked back upon, neither Dickens nor Thackeray, neither Captain Marryat nor Charles Lever, not- withstanding their wider and more enduring popularity, was assimilated and became part of his readers' being to anything like the same extent as the smaller romancists now recalled as at once types and forces of their age. Not indeed till this^ second decade of the twentieth century has the genius of Dickens, as regards the concep- tion of life and drawing of character, to a really noticeable degree shown its influence upon a novelist of the first order, like Mr. Joseph Conrad. And even he, certainly with respect to diction and style, owes at least as much to Mr. Henry James as to the author of " David Copper- field." Mr. H. G. Wells, in the remarkable series including " Tono -Bungay," "The New Machia- velli," and " The Passionate Friends," so far as he reflects anything that is not entirely himself, shows himself no student of Dickens or Thackeray and is exclusively the product of the same agencies that made George Meredith. As writers few men in tone, temper, and 338 Mid-Victorian Types and Forces general sympathies could differ more than the historians J. A. Froude and W. E. H. Lecky. When associating in the flesh with the rest of their kind, the two men displayed many qualities in common. Lecky, indeed, gentle and almost caressing in manner, his delicate features quiver- ing with sensibility, presented a marked contrast to Froude's strongly moulded nose, lips, chin, and jaw, and, as regards his conversation and manner, equally lacked all suspicion of the veiled aggres- siveness which, notwithstanding his grave and even solemn urbanity, something about Froude seemed to suggest. Lecky, a born peacemaker, more than once tried secretly to compose the quarrels of his contemporaries. His artistic pains to illustrate with fresh personal details the rela- tions of famous men and women with the move- ments, moral, spiritual, and political, of their time, gave him a position midway between the picture- painting chroniclers and the scientific researchers of the later Oxford school- Where from alternate tubs Stubbs butters Freeman, Freeman butters Stubbs. In spite of Thorold Rogers's epigram, no two men could be personally more unlike each other. The Somerset equestrian, pounding on his stout cob through the lanes surrounding his house, 339 Great Victorians ** Somerleaze," Wells, generally enlivened his solitary ride by singing at the top of his voice some old cavalier song, as if to let the country- side know that he was coming. In private life Freeman rather avoided Browning as an affected and eccentric fop. In his poetry he only cared for the "Cavalier Tunes." Kentish Sir Byng stood for his King, Bidding the crop-headed Parliament swing, was a special favourite, and more often than anything else was chanted by him as he pursued his lonely way under the shadow of the Mendips. Another Browning sentiment, " I was ever a fighter," might have also fitted Freeman. In most controversies of the time, from the Bul- garian atrocities to the morality of fox-hunting, he took an active part on platform or with pen, keeping himself well in evidence on every possible occasion. For years, as he put it to a Somer- setshire neighbour, in the capacity of Saturday Review -QY, he was " haminering the books of blockheads." On the other hand. Bishop Stubbs, of whom the present writer cannot speak too appreciatively or gratefully, was always the reserved and quiet student, never avoidably asserting his opinion or authority, neither in print. Parliament, nor private gathering volunteering a word that was not really worth saying. 340 Mid-Victorian Types and Forces *' The sailor's rule for grog— three -fourths spirit and all the water you add spoils it "—summed up Froude's advice, when editing Fraser's Magazine, to all contributors. "The closer you pack the farther you can go. And you will be the more effective if you are vicious in the same proportion as you are short." The last very characteristic touch contains the whole secret of the great prose artist's dealing with his Carlylean material. To pass from professed history to declared fiction. As for the nineteenth -century masters of the English novel who lived into my time I can only say vldi tantum, except in the case of the first Lord Lytton and Anthony Trollope ; to both of those memories I have tried at some length to do justice elsewhere . Thackeray died shortly after my undergraduate days had begun. That my eyes ever rested on him was due to Tom Hood, son of him who sang " The Song of the Shirt," during the years when, fresh from Oxford, he lived much in the West of England, and stayed con- stantly with his sister, Mrs. Broderip, at Cossing- ton Rectory, three or four miles from Bridgwater. Hood was standing on the steps of the Clarence Hotel in that town, talking to a stranger who presently left him, and who, as he afterwards told me, was the editor of the Cornhlll, then very recently started. The novelist, it seems, thought 341 Great Victorians of buying a little property then for sale in or near a village called Ham, on the spurs of the Quan- tock Hills. The purchase was never made, nor, from what I afterwards heard, perhaps ever seriously entertained, though the great man had long liked the neighbourhood, and visited it several times in A. W. Kinglake's company. Dickens, like Thackeray, was then much in request at great country houses, where, however, it was so arranged that the two never met. The author of " Pickwick " was a difficult guest to secure, and all the stories told about his readiness to associate at watering-places or elsewhere with persons having any kind of handle to their name are pure inventions. The first public dinner I ever attended was the send-off banquet to Dickens under Lord Lytton's presidency in Free- masons' Hall, November 2, 1866. The chair- man's proposal of his health, the toast of the evening, contained amid its compliments some words suggesting that Sir Mulberry Hawk and Lord Frederick Verisopht were caricatures rather than sketches from life, and that the great novelist's weakest point, perhaps, might be seen in his few delineations of fashionable life and its characters. This brought up Dickens himself, who, with a perfectly good humour and show of indignation, wanted (so far as from memory I 342 Mid-Victorian Types and Forces can recall the exact words ) to know what amazing devil had instigated his noble friend to recall in connection with the present state of society two obsolete characters drawn more than a quarter of a century before. There were no more breezes inside the building that night. At Evans's supper-rooms, whither many of the diners soon adjourned, it was differ- ent. George Augustus Sala, then at the height of his Fleet Street fame, had been one of Dickens's discoveries, and had been trained by him into a most effective all-round writer. For some reason Sala had been dissatisfied with his great master's public references to himself. Within a few hours of the dinner being over, in the cafe part of the supper -room " reserved for conversation," he gave, from his own point of view, an account of his relations with his chief, and of what he held to be that chief's obligation to him in the growth of his fame. Dickens, of course, was told about the escapade by a little bird ; a few minutes later he received through a common friend his contributor's expression of regret for having said what he had better have left unsaid. *' Dear George," ran Dickens's acknowledgment, " it would of course have been better so, but do not think any more about it." Dickens's brains, I have heard it said, did not 343 Great Victorians prove an hereditary possession in his household. Not perhaps ahogether, but his eldest son's ability showed itself in the conduct of Household Words after his father's death. That son's eldest daughter, Miss Mary Angela Dickens, has shown herself in her novels at least as much an instance of heredity as was Thackeray's daughter, the late Lady Ritchie. Dickens' sixth son, apart from his distinction at the Bar, can reproduce, upon occasions, the great man's graphic attitude of happy phrase. Thus a barrister opposed to him, named Willis, was irritating him and the court by an incessant and, as it seemed, a preventable little cough. At last he quietly remarked, " An illustrious relative of mine has immortalized the words ' Barkis is willing ' ; perhaps I may be allowed in present circumstances to say ' Willis is barking.' " The reader, it has been said, should be a continuation of the writer. That, of course, explained the novelist's success on the platform. The principle itself is constantly being illustrated by Mr. H. F. Dickens, K.C., in the assistance he gives to charities by his rendering of " A Christmas Carol " or other writings of the same deathless genius. I sat only twice at the same table with Dickens ; once on the public occasion now recalled, again at the historian. Lord Stanhope's, in Grosvenor 344 Mid-Victorian Types and Forces Place, where he had been asked specially to meet Disraeli, who was thus also present. Some one had asked the future Lord Beaconsfield whom he considered the most eloquent speaker he had ever heard. After some little reflection came, in a deep tone of sepulchral solemnity, the reply, " Daniel Whittle Harvey." A like inquiry was presently addressed to Dickens, as to who struck him as the best of all after-dinner orators. With- out a second's hesitation he answered, " Pro- fessor John Wilson " (the " Christopher North '* of Blackwood's Magazine).^ That which chiefly struck a personal stranger like myself, as it did many others, in the great novelist, was first his power of teaching apt pupils the technique of the literary craft ; secondly, the contagious influence on them of his own social as well as intellectual idiosyncrasies. The effect of Dickens's Daily News editing long survived not only his connection with the paper but his existence. It was not limited to Dally News ^ The experience on which this opinion rested was, I after- wards heard, Wilson's post-prandial welcome to Dickens in the Waterloo Rooms, Edinburgh, when the visitor, acknowledging the compliment paid to his creative power, unveiled by a single autobiographic touch his own innermost self. " I feel as if I stood among old friends whom I had intimately known and highly valued. I feel as if the death of the fictitious creatures in whom you may have been kind enough to express an interest deepens friendship, just as real afflictions do in actual life." 345 Great Victorians writers, but was shown by Dickens men like Edmund Yates equally in his Morning Star con- tributions and the earlier conduct of his very successful venture, the World. Dickens, as one did not need John Korster's biography to show, was in the habit of calling friends like Forster and others into his confidence, not less on the development of the plot and personalities of his novels than the management of his magazines. Edmund Yates did exactly the same, sometimes with consequences less than just to him'self . For when I first knew him in his comparatively early stage of novelist, Mrs. Cashel Hoey was a regular figure at his councils of friends. Herself an expert in fiction, she suggested many improve- ments in the stories which he used to read aloud specially. Hence it went about that " Broken to Harness," " Black Sheep," and others were not really by their reputed author, but by his Egeria. This was pure fable, because Yates, with his really fine brains and trained powers of observation, always showed himself quick enough to take a hint, but had never the slightest need of looking to other brickfields for his clay. With the exception of Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, Yates was the adroitest performer in the Dickensian style, not only of writing but of platform speaking and private conversation. 346 Mid- Victorian Types and Forces Like his master, one of the most hospitable of men, he had a curious fondness for reminding the world of his existence. The guests at his Thames -side parties used to say that their host would have enjoyed himself more than he visibly did had the steam launch on which he feted them so pleasantly been preceded by some pilot craft blazoned with the announcement, *' Yates is coming." As a notoriety lover, however, he was outdone by his journalistic colleague first, his rival afterwards, Henry Labouchere. Many of his best stories were told against himself for no other reason than that of heightening their sensational interest. i The Thames during the early eighties was the most cosmopolitan of streams, for in the Twicken- ham district one left the Laboucherian gatherings at Pope's Villa to be sure of meeting persons perhaps more instructive, and often not less ^ These anecdotes were chiefly burlesques of the commercial success that had transformed his father and uncle from mere men of business into territorial magnates. During his early House of Commons days, one of his constituents came up to him in the Lobby full of congratulatory admiration for a speech he had just heard his father deliver in the House of Lords. " My father ! " rejoined " Labby." " You have relieved me very much. For my father has been dead twenty years; the family were getting anxious about him, and would be glad to know he is in such a good place." (The supposed father was, of course, the uncle, Henry Labouchere the first.) 347 Great Victorians amusing, at Grant-Duff's Orleans House. Here the great object of the host's oratorical admira- tion, the Spanish statesman and speaker, Emilio Castelar, happened at last to be paying a visit on his way home after a little tour in Ireland, especially Galway. The town of Galway itself has never lost the signs of its Spanish associa- tions since the defeat of the Great Armada at the end of the sixteenth century. Its mayor, at the time of Castelar's visit, prided himself on the Spanish blood in his veins and his command of the Spanish language. At a dinner to Castelar he insisted on proposing the guest's health in what he considered the Castilian tongue. The illustrious visitor sat silent and impassive throughout the performance ; at its close he got up and, in the little English he could com- mand, expressed his deep regret that he had not been long enough in the British Isles to under- stand the words of the gentleman who had just sat down, or to thank his good friend, as he should like to have done, in his native tongue. 348 CHAPTER XI ROYALTIES, COURTIERS, AND STATESMEN AT WORK How and when the country first knew the Prince Consort — The opinion formed of him by his representative contem- poraries — His services to the Duchy of Cornwall during the minority of the Prince of Wales — His Cornwall and Devon- shire excursions — Royalty and Devonshire cream at a Dart- side vicarage — The Prince Consort's legacy to his son and grandson — Greek art and literature at Marlborough House — King Edward VII as an Oxford and Cambridge under- graduate — " Oh ! ruddier than the cherry " in Canterbury Quad — Greek lexicon- making on the eve of the Prince's residence — H. G. Liddell, of Christ Church — Robert Scott, of Balliol — Oxford and Cambridge influences on the culture of the coming King — J. E. Thorold Rogers on the Oxford Dictionary — The Royal fashion of hard work healthily infectious — How Lord Goschen mastered the art and details of naval administration in a fortnight — Lord Hartington in his shirt-sleeves at Devonshire House ad- ministering India, to the accompaniment of the Sunday morning church bells, with the occasional refreshment of a visitor and of the Binomial Theorem — Statesmen of the Churchill line, from Bismarck to Winston — How Uncle Salisbury and the great Elizabethan Cecils live again in Mr. Arthur Balfour — The first Marquis of Abergavenny — How, with Lord Beaconsfield and Markham Spofforth as his " man-of-all-work " he recreated the Conservative Party 349 Great Victorians and brought it to victory in 1874 — The first Lord Burnham, being also the first of all modern newspaper men — The first Lord Rothschild of fact and fiction — Lord Rothschild and Lord Randolph Churchill on double surnames. Throughout the earlier period covered by this volume, English attention, to a degree not perhaps now easily realized, fixed itself on the Prince Consort. By an accident, now to be re- called, I once found myself in his presence. My real knowledge of him came from well-known men, especially in the South and West of England, often as the Queen's ministers in atten- dance at Balmoral or Windsor, and at other times his colleagues in the various undertakings which, more than anything else, gradually enabled the country to set a true value on his worth. The best personal records of the Prince are the addresses of condolence to his widow from the local bodies to which he had been a familiar figure, and various distinguished individuals to whom he often talked without restraint. Such opinions as these I was much in the way of hearing on their first expression, and, as they are not without permanent interest, may briefly recall now. He had died at Windsor just before midnight on the 14th of December, 1861. By the early spring of the next year the best known Englishmen of their generation, speaking some- times as county Lords -Lieutenant, sometimes as 350 Royalties, Courtiers, and Statesmen Chairmen of Quarter Sessions, took the first step towards supplying from their own experience authentic materials for a lifelike portrait of the Prince. The points on which the best informed of these dwelt were the intellectual force of his character and his faculty of self-restraint. No one illustrated these traits with more graceful effect than the fourth Earl of Carnarvon, in the County Hall at Winchester. " It is the Prince to the life," was the comment of the Laureate, then plain Alfred Tennyson, as I stood at his side in that building, intent upon each touch of the word picture. Prince Albert had first visited the West of England during a tour with the Queen. Afterwards he personally examined the estates of the Duchy of Cornwall, and their management by the Council responsible for them during the minority of his eldest son. His Cornish visits were sometimes varied by excur- sions into Devonshire. While on one of these, chance brought him to a Vicarage in that portion of the county watered by the river Dart. The stream reminded him, in parts, of the Rhine, in its sudden bends and picturesque convolutions from the " Anchor Stone " to Dartington. On its banks he initiated himself into the mysteries of Devonshire cream -making, not without an idea, as he said, that the rich Berkshire pastures might make it possible to reproduce the industry 351 Great Victorians on the royal demesnes. Those with whom, in this part of the world, the Prince talked found him unaffected and agreeable if the subject really interested him, and saw nothing whatever of the curt pomposity and the much lied about petty Prussian despotism, making, as was said, the lives of so many Court ladies a burden to them. The way in which I once found myself in the Prince's presence was as follows. I was staying near Totnes with a family friend, a great authority on the geology of the whole country between the Dart and Land's End. One day, when about tOi sit down to luncheon, we were all fluttered by the rumour of a royal invasion as possible. The Queen's husband had already entered the village and enquired for the Vicarage, with further questions about the dairy farm and its grounds. The Vicar himself met the illustrious visitor on the front lawn, upon which the dining- room windows opened . Before any of us, I think, knew exactly how it had happened, " Albert the Good " had seated himself at the table before a knife and plate. The stony silence in which at first we sat seemed painfully long ; but we knew it was a high offence to take the con- versational initiative in such august company. At last one of the daughters of the house, a bright^ high-spirited girl, decided that the time 352 Royalties, Courtiers, and Statesmen had come to break the ice. Would his Royal Highness take some more clotted cream with his raspberry and currant tart ? We were all, I remember, relieved to find a violation of Court etiquette had been taken so graciously. The dairy farm was duly visited before his Royal Highness went his way, as we afterwards heard, to Mount Edgcumbe. Here the story of the little incident just recorded had preceded him. The insight, however, acquired by him into the local farm industries came as a surprise even to those whose experience of his methods in the Duchy of Corn- wall business had acquainted them with his rare aptitude for accurately observing and mastering fresh details, whether in great matters or small. The present, the fourth, Earl of Moimt Edg- cumbe, then Lord Valletort, had not himself a place in the Council of the Duchy of Cornwall till 1889. As regards the Prince, however, he had other opportunities of noticing in all the varied activities of his station the imion of moral and intellectual qualities which formed his dis- tinctive characteristic, and which those who knew him best aptly indicated by the single word ** judgment." This was the faculty, as those surrounding him saw^ that, to quote from memory the conversation of Lord Carnarvon, Charles Kingsle,y,, and Bishop Wilberforoe, ** enabled the 353 z Great Victorians Prince in the conscious plenitude of his own mental strength to> tie down and restrain that vigour to the strict and careful observance of constitutional practice and duty." Prince Albert's power of withdrawing his mind from the distractions of daily life and fixing it on new and complicated details till he had thoroughly mastered them was^ as I can say from practical experience, fully bequeathed by him to his eldest son ; it may^ indeed, now be con- sidered the family gift of the reigning House. During the summer of 1885 there appeared in the Fortnightly Review, then conducted by me, an article by the fanuous Greek scholar R. C. Jebb, advocating the foundation at Athens of a school of classical studies, that might also, to some extent, be a social centre for cultivated English- men on their travels in Eastern Europe. The then Prince of Wales was brother-in-law to the King of Greece, and for other reasons, im- mediately to be explained, was predisposed to take an active interest in the project. The good offices of Sir Francis, now Viscount, Knollys secured his attention to the Fortnightly article. With his accustomed kindness he gave more than one interview to Sir R. C. Jebb and myself, receiving at the last of these the further facts and figures supplementary to the printed matter, 354 Royalties, Courtiers, and Statesmen and fully setting forth the origin, the progress, and the proposed future organization of the idea. As a result he convened a meeting at Marlborough House. This was attended by, the most distinguished representatives of State, Church, scholarship, and learning. The Heir- apparent opened the proceedings with an account of their object, its requirements, difficulties, and the international advantages not unlikely to attend it. Jebb was called upon to elucidate a few points, not, as he was constrained at the outset to remark, an easy task, because his Royal Highness had studied the data pressed before him so thoroughly^ and had assimilated them so completely, as practically to have exhausted the subject in his own remarks. That would have been a noticeable performance for any of the busy and preoccupied personages at the Marlborough House gathering to have accom- plished after two or three days' preparation. Achieved by one having so few hours or minutes to call his own, in the height of the London season, it formed a feat extraordinarily significant of his power of intellectual concentration. The Prince's prompt felicity in handling the subject may be explained in part by his frequent conversations with some of those who were among the most picturesque or prominent per- 355 Great Victorians sonages on the Isis during his short residence in the place, not his contemporaries but the representatives of an older generation. Of the former, one, then Smith Barry, of Christ Church (now Lord Barrymore), lingered on at Oxford or frequently revisited it in my time. His intimacy with the future Edward VII began after he had ** gone down," and according to the old story, grew out of his horse in Rotten Row having cannoned against the Heir-apparent and, indeed, upset him. The chief member of the peerage at Oxford with the Prince was the Duke of Hamilton, then a lusty, red-faced, red-haired youth, not taken as seriously as he might have wished by his fellow -undergraduates of title. These, indeed, had a way, little to his taste, of serenading him at his rooms near Canterbury Gate with improvised instruments of music to the accompaniment of the old English catch, ** Oh I ruddier than the cherry." The most intellectually impressive among Oxford residents in the Prince's time, as they continued to be several years later in mine, were H. G. Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, A. P. Stanley (not Dean of Westminster till 1863), Robert Scott, not then superseded in the Balliol mastership by Jowett, Goldwin Smith, J. E. Thorold Rogers and Robinson Duckworth, after- wards Canopn of Westminster. Among all these 356 Royalties, Courtiers, and Statesmen tihe future King became far the best known to Goldwin Smith, then Regius Professor of History, whose tall, dark figure, as he rode his tired horse slowly over Magdalen Bridge and dismounted at University College steps, may have reminded the Prince as well as others of Don Quixote steering the exhausted Rosinante to the stable after a day's knight-errantry among the Canta- brian mountains. Occasionally too, before he ** went down," the Prince caught a glimpse of the gifted Wadham ^roup, whose most famous member, Frederic Harrison, had not then become identified with the philosophy of Auguste Comte, but whose Radicalism, before he left Oxford, had been much influenced by Bridges, Lushington, W. L. Newman, Bowen of Balliol, by Miss Martineau, and in Italy by Mazzini. Whatever the effect on Oxford of Harrison's democratic ideas or speculative enthusiasms, no one doubts that the clear and simple brilliancy of his prose style educated the best Oxford bends for the greater part of two generations. From Liddell the Prince heard how the famous Greek Lexicon^ had been written in conjunction with ^ People still repeated then the doggerel about the great work : — This Lexicon now by Liddell and Scott, Some of it's good and some of it's not. Solve me, I pray you, this difficult riddle — What of it's Scott and what of it's Liddell ? 357 Great Victorians Scott. The modus operandi, as described by the Dean to the Prince, was this : Every day, between 5 and 6 p.m., Liddell would come to Balliol from Christ Church, and at once make for Scott's rooms in Potter's buildings. There the two worked together till midnight. The work had begun in 1833; after ten years, the first edition came out in 1843. But the fifth edition, really constituting the volume as it is known to-day, did not appear till eighteen years later, 1 861. With Duckworth, the pleasantest and most polished of Oxford courtiers, the Prince met not only Goldwin Smitih but Thorold Rogers, some of whose pungent criticisms he never forgot . The latest, however, and perhaps the best, of Rogers's good things was reserved till a much later date, being called forth by the question asked him : ** What would Samuel Johnson have said had he been foretold of his lexicon being edited by a Scotsman?" "His words," replied Rogers, '* would have been to this effect : * Sir, to be facetious it is not necessary to be indecent.' " The Prince, it has been seen, owed his introduction to Hellenic archaeology or art to the personal influences under which he came in his undergraduate days . At Oxford he had been disappointed at hearing less thaai he had expected about the old Greek paintings. At Cambridge, 358 Royalties, Courtiers, and Statesmen however, he had learned from Charles Kingsley, then a Professor, something definite about Greek and Byzantine architecture and statuary. His acquaintance with the Cambridge Kingsley and the Oxford Bishop Wilberforce grew in intimacy until their deaths. They were both constant visitors at Sandringham, and were frequently consulted by their host about his sons. They each formed the same opinion of the younger, the future George V, and foresaw at a very early age the progressive growth of the qualities which have since distinguished alike the sovereign and his reign. Heredity is a word not so often on the lips of men in those days as it has since become, but in conversation, specially with the future Dean Stanley, Kingsley and Wilberforce both spoke of the then Prince George's mental ballast as in the first place a heritage from his grandfather. Such an equilibrium, they agreed, will descend as a Saxe-Coburg bequest to the Royal posterity in the same way that successive generations have bequeathed to each other the cleverness of the Plantagenets or that the Royal physi- ognomy of to-day shows the fullness on the right side of the lower face which is an inheritance from the Stuarts. Concerning the moral attributes reviewed by these shrewd judges 359 Great Victorians of character, as it was with the Prince Consort's son and grandson, so it is with the Prince of Wales of to-day. Unwearied drudgery in details, it was a Victorian Court saying, marked all the Royal Family from the Queen downward. '* The Duke of Cambridge," once said to me General Macdonald (" Rim " Macdonald), '* is the hardest worker in all the Army, and (let him do things in his own way) the most successful." The Duke's description of a nineteenth and twentieth century sovereign—'* the nation's universal and permanent Secretary of State "—was sometimes on King Edward's lips ; it will probably not be strange to his successor. Throughout the Victorian age, naturally more than in earlier periods of our political history. Parliament men for the most part made their earliest mark, not by the excellence of their set speeches or even their skill in debate, but by their thoroughness in the mastery at short notice of complicated subjects and branches of public business entirely new to them. Two instances of this during the Gladstonian period especially impressed the Court as well as the country. During the second week of March 1871 the future Lord Goschen, a complete stranger to the department, became First Lord of the Admiralty. Two or three weeks later he ex- 360 Royalties, Courtiers, and Statesmen plained the naval estimates in a speech of two hours, so clear, convincing, and so skilfully arranged that the men who had heard Peel's and Gladstone's Budgets murmured their praise, and that the Duke of Edinburgh, who, with his eldest brother, had come to St. Stephen's for the occasion, congratulated the speaker in the lobby. The other instance to be mentioned was of an entirely different kind, though not less striking in its way. A month later, March 30th, Sir Charles Dilke, then a young man of twenty- eight, independent Radical Member for Chelsea, brought in a motion condemning the Liberal Government for agreeing to the Black Sea Conference under the conditions which then existed. Each successive point of the speech was strengthened by dates and quotations that only a consummate master of his subject could have handled without coming to grief. On this occasion, too, the future Edward VII had taken his place in the Peers' Gallery. His comment on the speech showed alike the closeness of his attention and the thorough competence of his opinion : *' It comes too late to be a parlia- mentary success, but it marks out the man who made it as an international critic destined to rise high in his party and in the House." Lord Goschen, first introduced to the Prince at the 361 Great Victorians Duke of Fife*s dinner-table, made no pretence of being himself a Gladstonian. As he often put it, he saw in his chief one intended by Nature less for a statesman than a poet and perhaps theologian. Lord Goschen, however, resembled Gladstone in his gift of turning private secretaries and other understrappers into independent poli- ticians of the first order. He performed that feat most signally in the case of Lord Milner, whose brilliant reputation so dazzled the Balliol of his day that it could not fully see the full promise of Mr. Asquith, the young man whom Jowett predicted would go far because he knew exactly what he wanted and resolved to get it, but of whom Mr. Gladstone, when asked whether he would ever lead the party, shook his head and significantly murmured, " Too forensic." The two members of the Gladstonian Cabinet who had most of each other's confidence were Lord Goschen and Lord Hartington. The future ninth Duke of Devonshire tempered his aristo- cratic Whig instincts with some popular sen- timents, or at least phrases, faithfully reflecting a good-humoured contempt for those not bom into his own governing class. During the eighties something was said about closing the Park on Sundays to different kinds of meetings. 362 Royalties, Courtiers, and Statesmen " Really," was the then Lord Hartington's deliverance, *' I don't see how you can open the Park every week-day to a mob of well-dressed people and shut it up in the face of a less well- dressed mob on Sundays." As leader in the Commons from 1875, Hartington was far more of a political grand seigneur than he ever seemed after coming to his full title. During the pre- ducal days, as seven o'clock approached a liveried horseman was seen by an expectant crowd gal- loping out of Parliament Square towards Picca- dilly. It was one of the Cavendish retainers hurrying to Devonshire House with the news that the Marquis might be expected home any moment for his dinner. On his becoming, in 1883, Secretary for India, Sir Louis Mallet and the other permanent officials spoke of it as a calamity that the control of the department should pass to a man of pleasure and a sportsman like the Duke of Devonshire's eldest son. Very shortly they found that their new chief was also the hardest worker whom they had known for many a long day. Every Sunday morning the Secretary of State, always in his shirt -sleeves, settled down to his papers, and inter- viewed successively those of his staff whom he wished to see and any others whom he cared to receive. Amongst those I happened, in the year 363 Great Victorians 1885, to be one. I found him in his Piccadilly home, in his room on the ground floor a little to the right after entering. A deputation of some kind had just left him ; he seemed to be em- ploying the short interval between his reception of visitors and reading of papers by scribbling on one piece of paper and occasionally munch- ing other pieces in his mouth. *' I was," he ex- plained, laying down his pen when he saw me, *' amusing myself by trying to write out the Binomial Theorem ; I think I have forgotten something; perhaps you can put it right." I regretted to say I could not. Professor Liveing, who filled the Cambridge Chair of Chemistry, somewhat Lord Hartington's senior, once told me that the head of the India Office, as he then was, had a true Yorkshireman's head, not only for everything which concerned the horse, but for facts, figures, and puzzling details of every kind. His tutor at Trinity, John Cooper, afterwards Vicar of Kendal and Arch- deacon of Westmorland, bore emphatic testimony in the same direction. "But for his station, his wealth, and his countless preoccupied in- terests, there was scarcely any distinction in the mathematical tripos," said this gentleman, " which Lord Hartington's very exceptional brain power, scientific aptitude, extraordinary power of 364 Royalties, Courtiers, and Statesmen self-adaptation, and of concentrated industry might not have placed within his reach." The branch of the public service on which Lord Hartington left the mgst enduring mark is the Army. In 1888 his commission on naval and military administration suggested that the control of the Army, divided between the Secre- tary of State and the Commander-in-Chief, should be replaced by the supreme authority of a single Cabinet minister. Even then, however, fifteen years had to pass before, in 1904, Lord Esher's Committee endorsed the recommendation. It then received full effect. The Commandership-in- Chief ceased to exist ; a Chief of the General Staff ruled in his stead. The official whose name immediately connects itself with this change. Lord Esher^ had been for seven years (1878-85) Lord Hartington's private secretary, and a character- istic product of Eton and Cambridge culture, as well as a finished link connecting the Court and courtiership of the Victorian age with those of the two reigns that have followed since. Among the great political Victorians, the first Lord Goschen outlived Mr. Gladstone by nine years, Lord Hartington, as Duke of Devonshire, by ten. *' The old man in a hurry," as, in refer- ence to Home Rule, Lord Randolph Churchill called the Liberal leader, survived Churchill 36s Great Victorians himself, but did not live to see his son repre- senting his third constituency. i Prince Bismarck had something to say about the difficulty with which he had trained himself from being merely a " bundle of nerves " into the '* man of blood and iron." In some respects Mr. Winston Churchill began where his father left off and showed a knowledge and a solidity with which Lord Randolph never troubled himself, if for no other reason than his not thinking it suitable to the character in which he first made his public mark .2 Whether, in achieving this development, he may or may not have consciously contended against any of the Bismarckian difficulties, among his father's contemporaries there are some who will recollect his early days at a pre- paratory school near Brighton. From this, one half-holiday, he was brought, as a very small » Winston Churchill became M.P. for Oldham in 1900, North- West Manchester in 1906, and Dundee in 1908. » "Blue Book speeches," he said, "are not in my line, and if I tried them nobody would attend to them." Randolph Churchill, however, had great power of getting up a subject, as he showed when Chancellor of the Exchequer, after having once mastered the mystery of decimal points. Possessing an excep- tionally good memory, he had never been much of a reader, and only made the acquaintance of Disraeli's novels in the latter part of his short life, about the same time that a chance quotation from that work made him brush up his half-forgotten Greek enough to read in the original a good deal of Aristotle's "Politics." 366 Royalties, Courtiers, and Statesmen boy, by the late Sir Henry Drummond Wolff for lunch to the now extinct Orleans Club at Brighton. He said nothing till, at the end of the meal, his father's friends engaged him in a little conversation. Then, in tones surpris- ingly deep for one of such tender age, and with something oracular in his manner, he fixed our attention by these words : ** They all tell me I am a remarkably nervous child." Circumstances quickened and prolonged the rivalry inevitable between two men of the same age, antecedents, and parliamentary standing as Randolph Churchill and Mr. Arthur Balfour. Of these competitors the former had scarcely passed away when his son stepped forth to renew an hereditary antagonism and to take up the dropped stitches of his father's career. The Mr. Balfour of those day^ has been altogether outgrown by the Admiralty First Lord of the existing Coalition, a Balfour in name only, in breadth of shoulders, thickness of frame, heaviness of jaw, and proportions of forehead a Cecil marvellously recalling, not only his illus- trious uncle, but that relative's Elizabethan ancestors as from their picture frames they look down upon the neo - Georgian Hatfield. Mr. Gladstone's posthumous influence upon the new Georgian age has been personified less in the 367 Great Victorians Palace of Westminster than in its official environs . Of the twoi Treasury officials most expert in Gladstone's methods and most after his heart, after Lord Welby had gone, Sir Charles Rivers Wilson (since dead) for a time connected the finalice of the old exclusive order with that of the new democratic regime, under which Bonar Law, Chamberlain, and Simon will hereafter be looked back upon as the founders of political families that are, under George V, what the Whit- breads and the Rathbones were under Queen Victoria, or had been during the two previous reigns. Both Mr. Gladstone's old pupils and assistants, the controllers respectively of the London County Council's Exchequer and the National Debt Office, outlived by nearly a year another well-known representative of the High Secretariat. Sir Bruce Maxwell -Set on, the kindest, gentlest, most widely known and be- loved man of his day^, had served the War Office from early youth under many chiefs. His best known "master" was the Marquis of Ripon. He himself will best be remembered for the hospitalities yhich acquainted many of his guests for the first time that nineteenth -century London possessed public dining-places, not of the most advertised kind, requiring only a little encouragement to place them in the same rank 368 Royalties, Courtiers, and Statesmen for artistic cuisine as the choicest restaurants of the Palais Royal or the Boulevards. While these pages have been in process of writing two typically Victorian figures have dis- appeared. The first Marquis of Abergavenny connected the twentieth century, not only with its predecessor, but with the fifteenth ; Warwick the Kingmaker's collateral descendant, he per- sonified in these later days something of the aims, the ideas, and the bearing of his mediaeval ancestor. He also presented in many respects a close parallel to an earlier political Victorian of noble birth. Lord George Bentinck. Like Bentinck, the Lord Nevill of 1868 gave up sport to promote Conservative reaction. The son of an Evangelical clergyman, the fourth earl of his line. Lord Abergavenny always disapproved Mr. Gladstone scarcely less as a ritualist than as a Conservative renegade. The Conservative defeat in the General Election of November 1868 did not in the least discourage him. He had failed to whip up men enough to avert it. The more earnestly, therefore, he took in hand the work of neutralizing its results. The first thing was to ascertain the true trend of political feeling among the industrial and lower middle-classes of town and country. As for the latter, his vast possessions in South England and South 369 A A Great Victorians Wales had already given him the information he wanted . In London, for thfe first time in his life, he took innumerable omnibuses in various directions, and rubbed shoulders with the man in the street, whterever he could find him, for the purpose of disaovering his real feelings in matters of Church and State. At the music-halls visited by him for the same purpose he saw a little broad- sheet, the " Glowworm," uniting some features of a newspaper with those of a play-bill. Why should it not become a Conservative organ with slashing leaders against the enemy4 ? The present writer, then beginning his journalistic course, was one of those personally acquainted at that time with Lord Abergavenny's notion of the union between press and party. These things were for the masses. For the classes there were the Carlton, with its younger namesake. In succession to Samuel Montagu ('* the little squire "), the chief of the Kentish gang became the good genius and the universal Providence of both. He cemented and broadened the alliance of pleasant fellowship with constitutional ortho- doxy. As a consequence, the two clubs were largely instrumental in eliminating from the social mixture known as '* the polite world '* any Liberal leaven. The final triumph came at the appeal 370 Royalties, Courtiers, and Statesmen to the constituencies in 1874. The true organizer of victory had not been the fourteenth Earl of Derby, or even Benjamin Disraeli him- self, but Lord Abergavenny, with his man of business, the Conservative election manager, Markham Spofforth, and the two Carlton Clubs. Lord Abergavenny died on the loth of December, 1 9 1 5 . Just a month later there passed away another expert in the estimate and forma- tion of public opinion, also the pioneer of the penny daily Press. Edward Lawson, the first Lord Bumham, inherited from his consummately clever father an almost unerring insight into the popular mind and taste, as well as an instinctive knowledge of what the new public would read and write. Thus, like his son, he knew the sort of '* copy " he wanted almost from the hand in which it was written. No general reflections^ or pseu do -philosophic platitudes, plenty of good arresting names, with three paragraphs, neither more nor less, for every leader. These were old Mr. Levy's notions of an efl'ective article. Next year (19 17) will witness the centenary of a magazine, Blackwood^s, that, far more than any other single cause, has influenced newspaper editors and their sheets from Delane and The Times to the Lawsons and the Daily, Telegraph. Delane's personal intimate and contemporary, 371 Great Victorians John Blackwood;, the son of William, *' Maga's ** founder, made the periodical the best thing of its kind ever known. '* I don't," he said, *' engage the regular literary, man. He is apt to be too maniere . I look out for a man who, say a Dean, has gone in for bee culture for an article— never mind the writing, we will see to that, so long as it has facts. Or I come across a cavalry officer who shoots big game in the Carpathians and do the same with him . So I get the freshness and knowledge which attract and keep readers." Delane among journalists, being the earliest in the field, first dealt with his occasional articles in the Blackwood manner. He was followed and soon surpassed by Lord Bumham, who made the Telegraph, not only the first news-sheet of the day, but a trustwoirthy storehouse of topical tidings about the persons and things dominating at the moment the popular mind", whether it happened to be the interpretation of (Cuneiform dharacters, Dr. Livingstone's whereabouts, or the Marquis of Bute's disposition of his heart.'' Always in the van of journalistic enterprise. Lord ' On the 15th of October, 1900, the Daily Telegraph an- nounced that the heart of the late Lord Bute was being con- veyed from Cumnock House to the Mount of Olives, after, as it was shown from several instances, a fashion once much pb^^rved \y^ the Scottish nobility. 372 Royalties, Courtiers, and Statesmen Bumham had nothing in common with some other newspaper peers of his time, because he held and acted on the principle that a newspaper's business was to give the earliest, fullest, most exclusive information on all subjects in the best literary, form, not to influence markets, or to vent personal spites, by publishing one day what might call for contradiction on the next, or to influence markets by the pure fabrications which are the chosen opportunity of " bulls or bears," as the case may be. Before finishing his course at London University, Edward Lawson had come under the personal influence of a really fine old English gentleman and ecclesiastic, Dr. Richard William Jelf^ from 1844 Principal of King's College. To know him was itself a liberal education, and through him Edward Lawson made many other acquaintances of the same sort. The Dally^ Telegraph had no sooner become the earliest of London journals sold for the twelfth part of a shilling, than it recorded its sense of Gladstone's services in making the penny Press possible by recognizing him as the greatest party leader and most powerful instrument of legislation who had appeared since Peel. Lord Bumham, however, had always shown a keen sense of literary form as well as of his time's tendencies. From its 373 Great Victorians beginnings to the present day the articles in his newspaper have never failed to combine with pohtical shrewdness the regard for diction and style that first, more than half a oentiiry ago, gave its writers the same sort of personal dis- tinction as was then generally associated with contributorship to the Saturday, Review. What is known in the scientific vocabulary as ** persistence of type " has shown itself very noticeably in other branches of the intellectual industry whose head Lord Burnham became. To take two very different journalistic instances. The Spectator still combines the well-informed statesmanship with the strength of style and clearness of arrangement with which it was first endowed by its two nineteenth-century re-creators, Meredith Townshend and R. H. Hutton. Vanity Fair also still preserves in its personal comments the terse pungency that its founder, Mr. T. G. Bowles, first imparted to it, and that some predicted would finally disappear when that accomplished master of concise and vigorous phrase had withdrawn his pen . The first Lord Rothschild died in the early sumtner of 1915; his last public words were about the financial effects of the war on the entire Continent. The second Lord Rothschild took as one of his earliest themes for a 374 Royalties, Courtiers, and Statesmen Buckinghamshire speech the consequences of the war to labour. Whatever the future develop- ments of New Court, the qualities that marked its establishment at the beginning of the nine- teenth century have never been wanting since. Three years before Queen Victoria's accession the Rothschild hospitalities at Gunnersbury be- came a feature in London society. About the same time, too, Baron Lionel's younger brother, Meyer, began the entertainments at Mentmore which brought together all that was most representative in the cosmopolitanism which the polite world of the British Isles had already begun to reflect, and whose influence upon it is likely to increase rather than diminish. Dealing in uncertain values has been described as a Jewish instinct^ ^d as explaining the interest of successive Rothschild generations in the Turf. But before the colours of the two brothers, Lionel and Meyer, were known on the racecourse, the men who owned them were country squires of the first order. In each case their facial features were those of their race. Both, however, and especially Meyer, had all the tastes and not a little of the manner of the Midland territorial- ists among whom they passed so much of their life, and who rode regularly to Baron Meyer's stag-hounds in the Aylesbury district. What- 375 Great Victorians ever could improve the breed of horses on their Midland estates had the support and encourage- ment of both brothers. They were landlords first and sportsmen afterwards . In other respects the Rothschild aptitude and taste have de- scended from the earlier to the later members of the house. Baron James of Paris (1792- 1868) was much in Disraeli's mind when he drew the Sidonia of ** Coningsby,." Among his many clever sayings one is not too familiar for mention. During the disturbances of 1848 he saw from his house of business on the Seine a gang of noisy Socialists making for his front door. Another moment and he faced them on the threshold. ** Gentlemen," he said, ** there is no need for violence. Let your leaders come in and arrange the affair with me." Presently the Baron opened the interview with : , *' You desire an equal division of property throughout the whole of Franide. I agree. To forward your views I have prepared for your inspection a statement of my means, amounting as they do to such and such a figure. Divide that by the total population ; you will see it exactly works out at two sous apiece. Allow me, therefore, the pleasure of now handing over to you your share." In a somuewhat similar vein the late 376 Royalties, Courtiers, and Statesmen Lord Rothschild, hearing a gilded youth's con- temptuous remark about a halfpenny, said, ** That young man does not seem to know much about large transactions." The trio of brothers controlling New Court up to the fifteenth year of the present century had severally identified themselves with the chief pursuits and interests in the England of their day. Their social influence and the social opportunities for others of their race accom- plished the personal understanding of Lord Randolph Churchill with Lord Hartington with- out which Unionism could not have existed. And this though the first Lord Rothschild, during his House of Commons days, passed for a Liberal, and more than once pleasantly rallied the ** fourth party's " chief on some little weak- ness or oversight. That had happened when Randolph Churchill, referring to the then Mr. Sclater-Booth, characterized a double surname as a sure sign of double mediocrity. *' How," in an audible aside murmured the great man of St. Swithin's Lane, •** about Spender- Churchill ? " There still happily survives the second of the three brothers, who has done more, perhaps, than any other individual towards teaching, guiding, and improving the modem 377 Great Victorians English taste in picture -fancying and art- collecting. There is also still left the youngest of Baron Lionel's sons, who, on the Turf as on his country estates, is to the present reign what his father and his uncle were to that of Queen Victoria. 378 INDEX Aberdeen, Lady, 285 Aberdeen, Lord, 285 Abergavenny, Lord, 369-71 Adelaide, Queen, 57 Alava, General, 152-3 •^Albert Edward, Prince Consort, 350-4 Allen, Mrs., 79 Alvanley, Lord, 105 Ambassadors, appointment of, 87-8 Anson, Lady, 290 Apsley House, 79-81 Apsley, Lord, 79 Arabi, Pasha, 151 Arbuthnot, Mrs., 82 Ardagh, Sir John, 149 Argyll, Duke of, 247 Arnaud, Marshal, 98, loo Asquith, Mr., 362 Authors, Military, 135-7 Baillie, Joanna, 34 Balfour, Rt. Hon. A. J., 367-8 Barrymore, Lord, 356 Battenberg, Prince Alexander of, 174 Bazaine, Marshal, 140-1 Bismarck, 258, 304-5, 366 Blackdown Monument, 30, 58, 73 Blackwood, John, 300, 372-3 Blomfield, Bishop, 30-1 Boehm, Sir Edgar, 231 Borthwick, Sir Algernon, 184, 185 Bowles, T. Gibson, 184, 374 Brackenbury, William, 141 Brackenbury, Sir Henry, 135, 139 ; journalistic methods, 140-1 ; Army reform, 144, 148 Bright, John, 261 British Embassy in Paris, 89 Browning, Robert, 313-4, 340 Bryce, Lord, 126, 175 Buckingham, Duke of, 161 Bulwer, Sir Henry, 187 Bulwer-Lytton, 207, 245 Burdett, Sir Francis, 215 Burnham, Lord, 371-4 Caillard, Sir Vincent, 149 Calcraft, Sir Henry, 210, 214, 233 Cambridge, Duke of, 360 Cambronne, 152 Campbell, Sir Colin, see Lord Clyde Canning, Lord, 121-2, 166-7, 243, 274 Canning, Sir Stratford (154-72) ; remarkable forecast of present war, 159 ; reminiscences, 163-6 ; as author, 168-70 ; 175, 188, 223 Cardigan, Lord, loo, loi ; his unpleasant character, 102; as duellist, 103 ; rises by purchase, 379 Index 103 ; brutality of, 103-4, ^^7 > ^is idea of the British soldier, 131 Cardwell, Lord, at the War Office, 134 Carlyle, Thomas, 206-10, 280 Castelar, Emilio, 348 Chesterfield, Lady, 289 "ChiUian wallah," 114 Churchill, Lord Randolph, 212^ 3^5-7> 377 Churchill, Winston, 366 Cimatelli, Prince, 46 Clarendon, Lord, 186, 220 Clark, Sir Andrew, 285 Clyde, Lord, 121-3 Cobbett, 215-6 Coleridge, Sir George, 136 Commandership - in - Chief, abo- lished, 144 Connaught, Duke of, 149 Constantinople, British Embassy at, 172 Cooper, John, 364 Cooper, William, 192 Corn Laws, repeal of, 211 Cremorne Gardens, 147 Cumberland, Duke of, 282 Daily News, the, 345 Day, John, 202 Delane, 261-2, 302 Denison, Archdeacon, 48, 49-50 Denman, Hon. G., 177 Denmark, attacked by Germany, 195 •^Derby, Lord, 36-7, 160, 162, 216, 220, 223 Dickens, Charles, 287, 338, 342-5 Dickens, H. F., K.C., 344 Dickens, Mary Angela, 344 v^Dilke, Sir Charles, 361-2 Disraeli, 81, 128, 180-6,231,261-2, 270, 276-7, 279, 290-2, 298-9,316 Disraeli, Mrs., 119, 130, 291 Drummond, Henry, 281 Duff, Sir Mountstuart Grant, 189 Eden, Rev. R. J., 323 Edinburgh Reviewers, the, 31 Edward VH, 266, 354-61 Ellenborough, Lord, 65-6, 243 Ellice, Hon. Ed., *' Bear," 22 1-2, 322 " Eltchi," see Stratford Canning Esher, Lord, 365 Eugenie, Empress, 257 " Fane, Violet," 306 Faraday, Michael, 323-4 Fitzclarence, Lord Adolphus, 204 Fitzgerald, Percy, 346 Eraser, Keith, " Ouida's " hero, 138 Eraser, Charles, 138-9 Eraser, Sir William, 137 ; as col- lector, 138-9 Frederick the Great, 319-20 Frederick Wilhelm I, 320-1 Freeman, Archdeacon, 40, 339-40 French, Viscount, 139 Froude, Archdeacon, 28 Froude, J. A., 28, 144, 206, 209, 339; 341 George IV, 72, 202 George V, 359 Germany attacks Denmark, 195 1 /Gladstone, W. E., 271, 280-5, 3^5 Gleig, Rev. G. R., 70-2, 76-7, 87, 152 Glenesk, Lord, see Algernon Borth- wick Goethe, 319-22 Goschen, Lord, 283, 360-2 Gough, Lord, 11 2-5 380 Ind ex Grant, James, 334 Grant-Duff, Sir M. E., 238 7 »X}ranviIle, Lord, 29, 46, 195, 218, 256-62 Greville, Charles, 233-4, 24S Greville, Lord, 285-6 Grey, Earl, 33 Grove, Sir Coleridge, 135 Haig, Sir Douglas, 139 Haldane, Lord, 145 Hamber, Thomas, 140-1 Hamilton, Duke of, 129-30, 356 Hansom cab, the, 73-4 Hardinge, Lord, 112-3, 116-8 ; his character, 119; death, 120; 131 Harrison, Frederic, 357 Hartington, Lord, 362-5 Hayward, Abraham, 293 - 307 ; gives brief description of his ^/Labouchere, Henry, 347-8 life, 296-8 " Henry of Exeter," see Phillpotts, Bishop Herbert, Dr. Alan, 173 Herbert, St. Leger, 143 Herbert, Sidney, 297-8, 302 Hertford, Lord, 129 Hood, Tom, 341-2 Hooker, Sir Joseph, 206-7 Houghton, Lord, 66, 187,305,314-6 Howley, Archbishop, 33, 282 Hozier, Henry, 137 Hozier, John, 137 Iddesleigh, Lord, see Northcote, Sir Stafford Irving, Edvi^ard, 30 Irving, Henry, 67-8, 315-6 James, G. P. R, 334 Jebb, Sir R. C, 354-5 Jelf, Dr., 373 Jervis, Miss, friend of Wellington, 55 Jowett, his ambition, 133 ; 362 Keate, Dr., 310-1 Kekewich, Trehawke, 230-40 Kent, Duchess of, 196 Kidd, Dr. Joseph, 292 Kilve Court, 32, 55 Kinglake, 62-3, 95, 97-8, 157, 296-7, 307, 309-12, 316 Kingsley, Charles, 334, 359 Kitchener, Lord, 139, 145-6, 153 Knollys, Lord, no KnoUys, Sir Wm., 109 Knowles, Sir James, 313 Kossuth, 222-3 Lamb, Lady Caroline, 84 Landor, Walter Savage, 37-8 Lane-Poole, Stanley, 171 Lansdowne, Lord, 209 Lansfeldt, Countess, 205 Law, Sir Edward, 149 Lawrence, G. A., 331-7 Lawrence, Henry, 11 1-2, 131 Lawrence, Lord, 110-2, 131 Layard, A. H., 285 Law Magazine, the, 301 Lecky, W. E. H., 206, 208, 339 Leech, John, 328 Leveson-Gower, E. F., 192, 213 Liddell, Dean, 356-8 Locker, Frederick, 273 Loder, G., 234 Lowe, Robert, 134, 269-79 Lucknow, relief of, 121 Luttrell, Col. Francis, 52 l|<^Lyell, Sir Charles, 323 38, Index Lyndhurst, Lord, 33 Lyons, Lord, 256-7, 274 Macaulay, Lord, 229 Mackenzie, Sir Morel, 316 Magee, Dr., 282 Mallet du Pan. 128 Mallet, Sir Louis, 128-9, 3^3 Mallock, W. H., 288 Malmesbury, Lord, 223-6, 245 Manning, Cardinal, 283, 324 326 Martin, Mrs. Mountjoy, 263-4 Massena, 71-2 Mather affair, the, 197-8 Maurice, Rev. F. D., 315-6 Melbourne, Lord, 196, 220, 306 Metternich, 201 Milman, Sir Archibald, 317 Milman, Dean, 317-9, 323-4 Milner, Lord, 362 Milnes, Monckton, see Lord Hough- ton Milnes, Pemberton, 187 Moltke, 149, 150 Montagu, Wortley, and Lady Mary 172 Montalembert, 264 Montefiore, Sir Moses, 266 Montez, Lola, 205 Morier, Sir Robert, 174 Morning Chronicle, the, 302 Mowbray, Sir John, 142 Mudford, W. H., 239 Murray, Granville, 16 1-2 Napier, Sir Robert, 276-7 Napoleon, 77 Napoleon III, 213, 257, 263-5 302-3 Nelson, Lord, 71 Neviil, Lady Dorothy, 67-8 Nore mutiny, the, 151-2 Norman, Genl. Sir Henry, 130 Norreys, Lord, British Ambassador in 1566, 87 »pNorthcote, Sir Stafford, 237-40 Norton, Hon. Mrs., 306 O'Brien, Sir P., 203 O'Connel, 235 Officer, new style of, 135, 139 Oliphant, Lawrence, 288 Orleanist Party, the, 263-6 Orloff, Count, 66 Osborne, Bernal, 43, 298 Otway, Sir Arthur, 264 " Ouida," 335-7 Outram, Sir James, 121 vOverstone, Lord, 316-7 Pakenham, Lady Catherine, first Duchess of Wellington, 84 Palmerston, Lady, 19 1-5, 303 Palmerston, Lord (177-99) > ^^ home, 182-4 > his friends, 184-5 ; school days, 187 ; French dislike of, 190-1 ; puzzles foreigners by the truth, 193 ; his flirtations, 194 ; quarrel with Wellington, 195-6 ; in " Endymion," 198 ; death, 199 ; 201 ; arbiter of fashion, 202 ; 214-5, 220-2, 259- 60,303 Pavilion, the Brighton, 231-2 Pearl, Cora, 205 ' Peel, Sir Robert 1, 29, 31 ; death of, 204, 210-11 -• Peel, Sir Robert II, 234 -Peel, Sir Robert III, 228-34 Pender, Sir John, 142 Persigny, 160-1 382 Index Phillpotts, Bishop, " Henry of Exeter " (25-50) ; his Anglo- Catholic sympathies, 26 ; ap- pearance and style, 26-7 ; attacks upon Howley, 33 ; views on Reformation, 40, 85-6 Pitt, 15 1-2 Potter, Sir John, 130 Purchase of Commissions, 135 Quain, Sir Richard, 255, 292 Raglan, Lord, 94-6 ; Crimean com- mand, 97 ; character, 98 ; loss of arm at Waterloo, 99 ; nearly faints at Savernake, 100 ; loi, 102 Ralli, Pandeli, 146 Ranelagh, Lord, 31 1-2 Ravensworth Castle, 53 Reform Club, 223 Regent, the Prince, 60 Reid, Capt. Mayne, 335 Reynolds, Mrs., 288 Rice, A. Thorndike, 149-50 Richmond, Duchess of, her his- toric ball, 59 Roberts, Lord, 13 1-3 Rothschild, Baron, 207 Rothschild, Baron Lionel, 267, 375-8 Rousseau, J.-J., 321-2 Rowcliffe, famous heckler, 178-9 Russell, Earl, 207-8 v^Russell, Lord John, 205-7 > attack on Corn Laws, 212 ; upsets Government, 216 ; 221-2, 245, 271 Russia, affairs of, 158-60 Sala, G. A., 335-43 Salisbury, Lady, 78 Salisbury, Lord, 132, 245 Scott, Sir Walter, 34, 53-4, 76 Schleswig-Holstein, annexation of, 303 Shaftesbury, Lady, 194 Shaftesbury, Lord, 168-9, 3^5 Sherbrooke, Lord, see Lowe Sikh War, 11 2-3 Skirrow, Charles, 203-4 Sleep, gift of statesmen, 151 Smedley, Francis, 337-8 Smith, Assheton, 106 Smith, Goldwin, 356-7 Smith-Dorrien, General, 139 Soldiers, private, changing views of, 13 1-2 Somerset, Lord Fitzroy, see Lord Raglan " Squarsons " of Devon and Somer- set, 48 Standard, the, 140, 239 Stanhope, Lord, 287 Stanley, Dean, 359 Stewart, Sir Donald, 124-5 J ^is modesty, 126 ; character, 127, 131 Stokes, H. Sewell, 312 " Stone, Harry," 336-7 Strachan-Davidson, Dr., 331 Stubbs, Dr., 340 Surtees, R. S., 327-9 Sussex, Duke of, 29 Sutherland, Duke of, 196-7 Tait, Archbishop, 270 Talleyrand, on Phillpotts, 43; Wellington on, 76 ; 163, 190, 197 Telegraph, Daily, the, 325, 371-3 Temple, Archbishop, 238, 318 Tennyson, 229, 312-5 383 Index Thackeray, 287, 341-2 Thiers, 188, 219, 265, 299, 300, 301, 312 Times, The, 261-3, 271, 302 Tiverton, Palmerston at, 177 Torrens, W. McCullagh, 203 Trevelyan, Sir Charles, 134, 259 Trevelyan, H., loi Tuohy, J. M., 229 Urquhart, David, 189 Vanderwere, Sylvain, 197 Victoria, Queen, 117, 149, 196-7, 222-3, 243, 277 Villiers, Charles, 207 Voltaire, 321 Warburton, Elliot, 311 Waterloo, Battle of, 58-61 ; the Duke of Wellington on, 82 Webster, Lady Frances, 84 Welby, Lord, 308 Wellesley, Lord, 65 Wellington, ist Duke of (50-90) ; ancestry, 50-2 ; monument to, 51 ; amusements, 55 ; the Sage of Europe, 56 ; scheme for Defence of London, 62-3 ; as Premier, 63-4 ; oratory, 75 ; opinion of Talleyrand, 76 ; aris- tocratic principles, 81 ; his real sensibility, 82 ; as diplomatist, 89 ; buys the Embassy in Paris ; 89 ; q6 ; his idea of the British soldier, 131; 145; before San Sebastian, 152-3 ; his relations with Palmerston, 195-6 Wellington, 2nd Duke of, 50-1, 64, 67-70 ; his opinion of his father and Nelson, 71 ; 75-6 ; 145, 232 W^ells, H. G., 338 Westminster School, 95 Wetherall, Adjutant-General, 116- 117 Wetherell, Sir Charles, 28 White, Sir Wm., 172-5 Whyte-Melville, G. J., 330 Wilberforce, Bishop, 323-6, 359 Willoughby, Agnes, 205 Wilson, Harriett, 84 Wilson, John (" Christopher North"), 345 Wolff, Sir Henry Drummond, 225-6, 264-5, 291 Wolseley, Lord; 132-3, 137 ; not Irish, 141 ; intellectual powers, 142-3 ; reforms, 142 ; Con- tinental opinion of, 146, 147 ; gift of sleep, 151 ; tastes, 152-3 Wolseley, Lady, 150 Wombwell, Sir Charles, loi, 204 Wood, Sir Evelyn, 135 Yates, Edmund, 335, 346-7 VNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. RENEWALS ONLY—TEL. NO. 642-3405 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. PFCn LD JUN 2 70 -2 PM 7 r 1 ' ,}RlltrZ-rj^. Unl.^^^(fcu / ,^«' r ^ 774409 j^^^^l UNIVERSITY OF CAUFORNIA UBRARY