Prime Ministers and Some Others Part 1

Prime Ministers and Some Others.

by George W. E. Russell.

I

PRIME MINISTERS

_LORD PALMERSTON_

I remember ten Prime Ministers, and I know an eleventh. Some have pa.s.sed beyond earshot of our criticism; but some remain, pale and ineffectual ghosts of former greatness, yet still touched by that human infirmity which prefers praise to blame. It will behove me to walk warily when I reach the present day; but, in dealing with figures which are already historical, one's judgments may be comparatively untrammelled.

I trace my paternal ancestry direct to a Russell who entered the House of Commons at the General Election of 1441, and since 1538 some of us have always sat in one or other of the two Houses of Parliament; so I may be fairly said to have the Parliamentary tradition in my blood. But I cannot profess to have taken any intelligent interest in political persons or doings before I was six years old; my retrospect, therefore, shall begin with Lord Palmerston, whom I can recall in his last Administration, 1859-1865.

I must confess that I chiefly remember his outward characteristics--his large, dyed, carefully brushed whiskers; his broad-shouldered figure, which always seemed struggling to be upright; his huge and rather distorted feet--"each foot, to describe it mathematically, was a four-sided irregular figure"--his strong and comfortable seat on the old white hack which carried him daily to the House of Commons.

Lord Granville described him to a nicety: "I saw him the other night looking very well, but old, and wearing a green shade, which he afterwards concealed. He looked like a retired old croupier from Baden."

Having frequented the Gallery of the House of Commons, or the more privileged seats "under the Gallery," from my days of knickerbockers, I often heard Palmerston speak. I remember his abrupt, jerky, rather "bow-wow"-like style, full of "hums" and "hahs"; and the sort of good-tempered but unyielding banter with which he fobbed off an inconvenient enquiry, or repressed the simple-minded ardour of a Radical supporter.

Of course, a boy's attention was attracted rather by appearance and manner than by the substance of a speech; so, for a frank estimate of Palmerston's policy at the period which I am discussing, I turn to Bishop Wilberforce (whom he had just refused to make Archbishop of York).

"That wretched Pam seems to me to get worse and worse. There is not a particle of veracity or n.o.ble feeling that I have ever been able to trace in him. He manages the House of Commons by debauching it, making all parties laugh at one another; the Tories at the Liberals, by his defeating all Liberal measures; the Liberals at the Tories, by their consciousness of getting everything that is to be got in Church and State; and all at one another, by subst.i.tuting low ribaldry for argument, bad jokes for principle, and an openly avowed, vainglorious, imbecile vanity as a panoply to guard himself from the attacks of all thoughtful men."

But what I remember even more clearly than Palmers ton is appearance or manner--perhaps because it did not end with his death--is the estimation in which he was held by that "Sacred Circle of the Great-Grandmotherhood" to which I myself belong.

In the first place, it was always a.s.serted, with emphasis and even with acrimony, that he was not a Whig. Gladstone, who did not much like Whiggery, though he often used Whigs, laid it down that "to be a Whig a man must be a born Whig," and I believe that the doctrine is absolutely sound. But Palmerston was born and bred a Tory, and from 1807 to 1830 held office in Tory Administrations. The remaining thirty-five years of his life he spent, for the most part, in Whig Administrations, but a Whig he was not. The one thing in the world which he loved supremely was power, and, as long as this was secured, he did not trouble himself much about the political complexion of his a.s.sociates. "Palmerston does not care how much dirt he eats, so long as it is gilded dirt;" and, if gilded dirt be the right description of office procured by flexible politics, Palmerston ate, in his long career, an extraordinary amount of it.

Then, again, I remember that the Whigs thought Palmerston very vulgar. The newspapers always spoke of him as an aristocrat, but the Whigs knew better. He had been, in all senses of the word, a man of fas.h.i.+on; he had won the nickname of "Cupid," and had figured, far beyond the term of youth, in a raffish kind of smart society which the Whigs regarded with a mixture of contempt and horror.

His bearing towards the Queen, who abhorred him--not without good reason--was considered to be lamentably lacking in that ceremonious respect for the Crown which the Whigs always maintained even when they were dethroning Kings. Disraeli likened his manner to that of "a favourite footman on easy terms with his mistress," and one who was in official relations with him wrote: "He left on my recollection the impression of a strong character, with an intellect with a coa.r.s.e vein in it, verging sometimes on brutality, and of a mind little exercised on subjects of thought beyond the immediate interests of public and private life, little cultivated, and drawing its stores, not from reading but from experience, and long and varied intercourse with men and women."

Having come rather late in life to the chief place in politics, Palmerston kept it to the end. He was an indomitable fighter, and had extraordinary health. At the opening of the Session of 1865 he gave the customary Full-Dress Dinner, and Mr. Speaker Denison,[*]

who sat beside him, made this curious memorandum of his performance at table: "He ate two plates of turtle soup; he was then served very amply to cod and oyster sauce; he then took a _pate_; afterwards he was helped to two very greasy-looking entrees; he then despatched a plate of roast mutton; there then appeared before him the largest, and to my mind the hardest, slice of ham that ever figured on the table of a n.o.bleman, yet it disappeared just in time to answer the enquiry of the butler, 'Snipe or pheasant, my lord?' He instantly replied, 'Pheasant,' thus completing his ninth dish of meat at that meal." A few weeks later the Speaker, in conversation with Palmerston, expressed a hope that he was taking care of his health, to which the octogenarian Premier replied: "Oh yes--indeed I am. I very often take a cab at night, and if you have both windows open it is almost as good as walking home." "Almost as good!" exclaimed the valetudinarian Speaker. "A through draught and a north-east wind! And in a hack cab! What a combination for health!"

[Footnote *: Afterwards Lord Ossington.]

Palmerston fought and won his last election in July, 1865, being then in his eighty-first year, and he died on the 15th of October next ensuing. On the 19th the Queen wrote as follows to the statesman who, as Lord John Russell, had been her Prime Minister twenty years before, and who, as Earl Russell, had been for the last six years Foreign Secretary in Palmerston's Administration: "The Queen can turn to no other than Lord Russell, an old and tried friend of hers, to undertake the arduous duties of Prime Minister and to carry on the Government."

It is sometimes said of my good friend Sir George Trevelyan that his most responsible task in life has been to "live up to the position of being his uncle's nephew." He has made a much better job of his task than I have made of mine; and yet I have never been indifferent to the fact that I was related by so close a tie to the author of the first Reform Bill, and the chief promoter--as regards this country--of Italian unity and freedom.

II

_LORD RUSSELL_

Lord John Russell was born in 1792, and became Prime Minister for the first time in 1846. Soon after, Queen Victoria, naturally interested in the oncoming generation of statesmen, said to the Premier, "Pray tell me, Lord John, whom do you consider the most promising young man in your party?" After due consideration Lord John replied, "George Byng, ma'am," signifying thereby a youth who eventually became the third Earl of Strafford.

In 1865 Lord John, who in the meantime had been created Earl Russell, became, after many vicissitudes in office and opposition, Prime Minister for the second time. The Queen, apparently hard put to it for conversation, asked him whom he now considered the most promising young man in the Liberal party. He replied, without hesitation, "George Byng, ma'am," thereby eliciting the very natural rejoinder, "But that's what you told me twenty years ago!"

This fragment of anecdotage, whether true or false, is eminently characteristic of Lord Russell. In principles, beliefs, opinions, even in tastes and habits, he was singularly unchanging. He lived to be close on eighty-six; he spent more than half a century in active politics; and it would be difficult to detect in all those years a single deviation from the creed which he professed when, being not yet twenty-one, he was returned as M.P. for his father's pocket-borough of Tavistock.

From first to last he was the staunch and unwavering champion of freedom--civil, intellectual, and religious. At the very outset of his Parliamentary career he said, "We talk much--and think a great deal too much--of the wisdom of our ancestors. I wish we could imitate the courage of our ancestors. They were not ready to lay their liberties at the foot of the Crown upon every vain or imaginary alarm." At the close of life he referred to England as "the country whose freedom I have wors.h.i.+pped, and whose liberties and prosperity I am not ashamed to say we owe to the providence of Almighty G.o.d."

This faith Lord Russell was prepared to maintain at all times, in all places, and amid surroundings which have been known to test the moral fibre of more boisterous politicians. Though profoundly attached to the Throne and to the Hanoverian succession, he was no courtier. The year 1688 was his sacred date, and he had a habit of applying the principles of our English Revolution to the issues of modern politics.

Actuated, probably, by some playful desire to probe the heart of Whiggery by putting an extreme case, Queen Victoria once said: "Is it true, Lord John, that you hold that a subject is justified, under certain circ.u.mstances, in disobeying his Sovereign?" "Well, ma'am, speaking to a Sovereign of the House of Hanover, I can only say that I suppose it is!"

When Italy was struggling towards unity and freedom, the Queen was extremely anxious that Lord John, then Foreign Secretary, should not encourage the revolutionary party. He promptly referred Her Majesty to "the doctrines of the Revolution of 1688," and informed her that, "according to those doctrines, all power held by Sovereigns may be forfeited by misconduct, and each nation is the judge of its own internal government."

The love of justice was as strongly marked in Lord John Russell as the love of freedom. He could make no terms with what he thought one-sided or oppressive. When the starving labourers of Dorset combined in an a.s.sociation which they did not know to be illegal, he urged that incendiaries in high places, such as the Duke of c.u.mberland and Lord Wynford, were "far more guilty than the labourers, but the law does not reach them, I fear."

When a necessary reform of the Judicature resisted on the ground of expense, he said:

"If you cannot afford to do justice speedily and well, you may as well shut up the Exchequer and confess that you have no right to raise taxes for the protection of the subject, for justice is the first and primary end of all government."

Those are the echoes of a remote past. My own recollections of my uncle begin when he was Foreign Secretary in Lord Palmerston's Government, and I can see him now, walled round with despatch-boxes, in his pleasant library looking out on the lawn of Pembroke Lodge--the prettiest villa in Richmond Park. In appearance he was very much what _Punch_ always represented him--very short, with a head and shoulders which might have belonged to a much larger frame. When sitting he might have been taken for a man of average height, and it was only when he rose to his feet that his diminutive stature became apparent.

One of his most characteristic traits was his voice, which had what, in the satirical writings of the last century, used to be called "an aristocratic drawl," and his p.r.o.nunciation was archaic.

Like other high-bred people of his time, he talked of "cowc.u.mbers"

and "laylocks"; called a woman an "oo'man," and was much "obleeged"

where a degenerate race is content to be "obliged."

The frigidity of his address and the seeming stiffness of his manner were really due to an innate and incurable shyness, but they produced, even among people who ought to have known him better, a totally erroneous impression of his character and temperament.

In the small social arts, which are so valuable an equipment for a political leader, he was indeed deficient. He had no memory for faces, and was painfully apt to ignore his political supporters when he met them outside the walls of Parliament; and this inability to remember faces was allied with a curious artlessness which made it impossible for him to feign a cordiality he did not feel. In his last illness he said: "I have seemed cold to my friends, but it was not in my heart." The friends needed no such a.s.surance, for in private life he was not only gentle, affectionate, and tender to an unusual degree, but full of fun and playfulness, a genial host and an admirable talker. The great Lord Dufferin, a consummate judge of such matters, said: "His conversation was too delightful, full of anecdote; but then his anecdotes were not like those told by the ordinary raconteur, and were simply reminiscences of his own personal experience and intercourse with other distinguished men."

When Lord Palmerston died, _The Times_ was in its zenith, and its editor, J. T. Delane, had long been used to "shape the whispers"

of Downing Street. Lord Russell resented journalistic dictation.

"I know," he said, "that Mr. Delane is very angry because I did not kiss his hand instead of the Queen's" _The Times_ became hostile, and a competent critic remarked:"

"There have been Ministers who knew the springs of that public opinion which is delivered ready digested to the nation every morning, and who have not scrupled to work them for their own diurnal glorification, even although the recoil might injure their colleagues.

But Lord Russell has never bowed the knee to the potentates of the Press; he has offered no sacrifice of invitations to social editors; and social editors have accordingly failed to discover the merits of a statesman who so little appreciated them, until they have almost made the nation forget the services that Lord Russell has so faithfully and courageously rendered."

Of Lord Russell's political consistency I have already spoken; and it was most conspicuously displayed in his lifelong zeal for the extension of the suffrage. He had begun his political activities by a successful attack on the rottenest of rotten boroughs; the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the Middle Cla.s.s was the triumph of his middle life. As years advanced his zeal showed no abatement; again and again he returned to the charge, though amidst the most discouraging circ.u.mstances; and when, in his old age, he became Prime Minister for the second time, the first task to which he set his hand was so to extend the suffrage as to include "the best of the working cla.s.ses."

In spite of this generous aspiration, it must be confessed that the Reform Bill of 1866 was not a very exciting measure. It lowered the qualification for the county franchise to 14 and that for the boroughs to 7; and this, together with the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of lodgers, was expected to add 400,000 new voters to the list.

The Bill fell flat. It was not sweeping enough to arouse enthusiasm.

Liberals accepted it as an instalment; but Whigs thought it revolutionary, and made common cause with the Tories to defeat it. As it was introduced into the House of Commons, Lord Russell had no chance of speaking on it; but Gladstone's speeches for it and Lowe's against it remain to this day among the masterpieces of political oratory, and eventually it was lost, on an amendment moved in committee, by a majority of eleven. Lord Russell of course resigned. The Queen received his decision with regret. It was evident that Prussia and Austria were on the brink of war, and Her Majesty considered it a most unfortunate moment for a change in her Government.

She thought that the Ministry had better accept the amendment and go on with the Bill. But Lord Russell stood his ground, and that ground was the highest. "He considers that vacillation on such a question weakens the authority of the Crown, promotes distrust of public men, and inflames the animosity of parties."

On the 26th of June, 1866, it was announced in Parliament that the Ministers had resigned, and that the Queen had sent for Lord Derby. Lord Russell retained the Liberal leaders.h.i.+p till Christmas, 1867, and then definitely retired from public life, though his interest in political events continued unabated to the end.

Of course, I am old enough to remember very well the tumults and commotions which attended the defeat of the Reform Bill of 1866.

They contrasted strangely with the apathy and indifference which had prevailed while the Bill was in progress; but the fact was that a new force had appeared. The Liberal party had discovered Gladstone; and were eagerly awaiting the much more democratic measure which they thought he was destined to carry in the very near future.

That it was really carried by Disraeli is one of the ironies of our political history.

During the years of my uncle's retirement was much more in his company than had been possible when I was a schoolboy and he was Foreign Secretary or Prime Minister. Pembroke Lodge became to me a second home; and I have no happier memory than of hours spent there by the side of one who had played bat, trap and ball with Charles Fox; had been the travelling companion of Lord Holland; had corresponded with Tom Moore, debated with Francis Jeffrey, and dined with Dr. Parr; had visited Melrose Abbey in the company of Sir Walter Scott, and criticized the acting of Mrs. Siddons; had conversed with Napoleon in his seclusion at Elba, and had ridden with the Duke of Wellington along the lines of Torres Vedras. It was not without reason that Lord Russell, when reviewing his career, epitomized it in Dryden couplet: