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Victorian worthies

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Title: Victorian worthies
        sixteen biographies

Author: George Henry Blore


        
Release date: December 26, 2006 [eBook #20196]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

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VICTORIAN WORTHIES

Sixteen Biographies

by

G. H. BLORE

Assistant Master at Winchester College







'We have undertaken to discourse here for a little on
Great Men, their manner of appearance in our world's
business, how they shaped themselves in the world's
history, what ideas men formed of them, what work they
did;--on Heroes, namely, and on their reception and
performance.'--CARLYLE.



Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
London Edinburgh Glasgow New York Toronto
Melbourne Cape Town Bombay Calcutta
1920
Printed in England
at the Oxford University Press




CONTENTS


INTRODUCTION: THE VICTORIAN ERA
1. THOMAS CARLYLE. Prophet
2. SIR ROBERT PEEL. Statesman
3. SIR CHARLES NAPIER. Soldier
4. THE EARL OF SHAFTESBURY. Philanthropist
5. LORD LAWRENCE. Administrator
6. JOHN BRIGHT. Tribune
7. CHARLES DICKENS. Novelist and Social Reformer
8. LORD TENNYSON. Poet
9. CHARLES KINGSLEY. Parish Priest
10. GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS. Artist
11. BISHOP PATTESON. Missionary
12. SIR ROBERT MORIER. Diplomatist
13. LORD LISTER. Surgeon
14. WILLIAM MORRIS. Craftsman
15. JOHN RICHARD GREEN. Historian
16. CECIL RHODES. Colonist
INDEX




PREFACE


Some excuse seems to be needed for venturing at this time to publish
biographical sketches of the men of the Victorian era. Several have been
written by men, like Lord Morley and Lord Bryce, having first-hand
knowledge of their subjects, others by the best critics of the next
generation, such as Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Clutton-Brock. With their
critical ability I am not able to compete; but they often postulate a
knowledge of facts which the average reader has forgotten or has never
known. Having written these sketches primarily for boys at school I am
not ashamed to state well-known facts, nor have I wished to avoid the
obvious.

Nor do these sketches aim at obtaining a sensation by the shattering of
idols. I have been content to accept the verdicts passed by their
contemporaries on these great servants of the public, verdicts which, in
general, seem likely to stand the test of time. Boys will come soon
enough on books where criticism has fuller play, and revise the
judgements of the past. Such a revision is salutary, when it is not
unfair or bitter in tone.

At a time when the subject called 'civics' is being more widely
introduced into schools, it seems useful to present the facts of
individual lives, instances chosen from different professions, as a
supplement to the study of principles and institutions. There is a
spirit of public service which is best interpreted through concrete
examples. If teachers will, from their own knowledge, fill in these
outlines and give life to these portraits, the younger generation may
find it not uninteresting to 'praise famous men and our fathers that
begat us'.

It seems hardly necessary in a book of this kind to give an imposing
list of authorities consulted. In some cases I should find it difficult
to trace the essay or memoir from which a statement is drawn; but in the
main I have depended on the standard Lives of the various men portrayed,
from Froude's _Carlyle_ and Forster's _Dickens_ to Mackail's _Morris_
and Michell's _Rhodes_. And, needless to say, I have found the
_Dictionary of National Biography_ most valuable. If boys were not
frightened from the shelves by its bulk, it would render my work
superfluous; but, though I often recommend it to them, I find few signs
that they consult it as often as they should. It may seem that no due
proportion has been observed in the length of the different sketches;
but it must be remembered that, while short Lives of Napier and Lawrence
have been written by well-known authors, it is more difficult for a boy
to satisfy his curiosity about Lister, Patteson, or Green; and of Morier
no complete life has yet been published.

I am indebted to Mr. Emery Walker for assistance in the selection of the
portraits.

Three of my friends have been kind enough to read parts of the book and
to give me advice: the Rev. A. T. P. Williams and Mr. C. E. Robinson, my
colleagues here, and Mr. Nowell Smith, Head Master of Sherborne. I owe
much also to the good judgement of Mr. Milford's reader. If I venture to
thank them for their help, they are in no way responsible for my
mistakes. Writing in the intervals of school-mastering I have no doubt
been guilty of many, and I shall be grateful if any reader will take the
trouble to inform me of those which he detects.

G.H.B.

WINCHESTER,

_April 1920._




LIST OF PORTRAITS


Thomas Carlyle
  From the painting by G. F. WATTS in the National Portrait Gallery.

Sir Robert Peel
  From the painting by J. LINNELL in the National Portrait Gallery.

Sir Charles Napier
  From the drawing by EDWIN WILLIAMS in the National Portrait Gallery.

Lord Shaftesbury
  From the painting by G. F. WATTS in the National Portrait Gallery.

Lord Lawrence
  From the painting by G. F. WATTS in the National Portrait Gallery.

John Bright
  From the painting by W. W. OULESS in the National Portrait Gallery.

Charles Dickens
  From the painting by DANIEL MACLISE in the National Portrait Gallery.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
  From the painting by G. F. WATTS in the National Portrait Gallery.

Charles Kingsley
  From a drawing by W. S. HUNT in the National Portrait Gallery.

George Frederick Watts
  From a painting by himself in the National Portrait Gallery.

John Coleridge Patteson
  From a drawing by WILLIAM RICHMOND.
  (_By kind permission of Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd._)

Sir Robert Morier
  From a drawing by WILLIAM RICHMOND.
  (_By kind permission of Mr. Edward Arnold._)

Lord Lister
  From a photograph by MESSRS. BARRAUD.

William Morris
  From the painting by G. F. WATTS in the National Portrait Gallery.

John Richard Green
  From a drawing by FREDERICK SANDYS.
  (_By kind permission of Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd._)

Cecil Rhodes
  From the painting by G. F. WATTS in the National Portrait Gallery.




INTRODUCTION

THE VICTORIAN ERA


We like to fancy, when critics are not at our elbow, that each Age in
our history has a character and a physiognomy of its own. The sixteenth
century speaks to us of change and adventure in every form, of ships and
statecraft, of discovery and desecration, of masterful sovereigns and
unscrupulous ministers. We evoke the memory of Henry VIII and Elizabeth,
of Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, of Drake and Raleigh, while the gentler
virtues of Thomas More and Philip Sidney seem but rare flowers by the
wayside.

The glory of the seventeenth century shines out amid the clash of arms,
in battles fought for noble principles, in the lives and deaths of
Falkland and Hampden, of Blake, Montrose, and Cromwell. If its nobility
is dimmed as we pass from the world of Shakespeare and Milton to that of
Dryden and Defoe, yet there is sufficient unity in its central theme to
justify the enthusiasm of those who praise it as the heroic age of
English history.

Less justice, perhaps, is done when we characterize the eighteenth
century as that of elegance and wit; when, heedless of the great names
of Chatham, Wolfe, and Clive, we fill the forefront of our picture with
clubs and coffee-houses, with the graces of Chesterfield and Horace
Walpole, the beauties of Gainsborough and Romney, or the masterpieces of
Sheraton and Adam. But each generalization, as we make it, seems more
imperfect and unfair; and partly because Carlyle abused it so
unmercifully, this century has in the last fifty years received ample
justice from many of our ablest writers.

Difficult indeed then it must seem to give adequate expression to the
life of a century like the nineteenth, so swift, so restless, so
many-sided, so full of familiar personages, and of conflicts which have
hardly yet receded to a distance where the historian can judge them
aright. The rich luxuriance of movements and of individual characters
chokes our path; it is a labyrinth in which one may well lose one's way
and fail to see the wood for the trees.

The scientist would be protesting (all this time) that this is a very
superficial aspect of the matter. He would recast our framework for us
and teach us to follow out the course of our history through the
development of mathematics, physics, and biology, to pass from Newton to
Harvey, and from Watt to Darwin, and in the relation of these sciences
to one another to find the clue to man's steady progress.

The tale thus told is indeed wonderful to read and worthy of the
telling; but, to appreciate it fully, it needs a wider and deeper
knowledge than many possess. And it tends to leave out one side of our
human nature. There are many whose sympathies will always be drawn
rather to the influence of man upon man than to the extension of man's
power over nature, to the development of character rather than of
knowledge. To-day literature must approach science, her all-powerful
sister, with humility, and crave indulgence for those who still wish to
follow in the track where Plutarch led the way, to read of human
infirmity as well as of human power, not to scorn anecdotes or even
comparisons which illustrate the qualities by which service can be
rendered to the State.

To return to the nineteenth century, some would find a guiding thread in
the progress of the Utilitarian School, which based its teaching on the
idea of pursuing the greatest happiness of the greatest number, the
school which produced philosophers like Bentham and J. S. Mill, and
politicians like Cobden and Morley. It was congenial to the English
mind to follow a line which seemed to lead with certainty to practical
results; and the industrial revolutions caused men at this time to look,
perhaps too much, to the material conditions of well-being. Along with
the discoveries that revolutionized industry, the eighteenth century had
bequeathed something more precious than material wealth. John Wesley,
the strongest personal influence of its latter half, had stirred the
spirit of conscious philanthropy and the desire to apply Christian
principles to the service of all mankind. Howard, Wilberforce, and
others directed this spirit into definite channels, and many of their
followers tinged with a warm religious glow the principles which, even
in agnostics like Mill, lent consistent nobility to a life of service.
The efforts which these men made, alone or banded into societies, to
enlarge the liberties of Englishmen and to distribute more fairly the
good things of life among them, were productive of much benefit to the
age.

Under such leadership indeed as that of Bentham and Wilberforce, the
Victorian Age might have been expected to follow a steady course of
beneficence which would have drawn all the nobler spirits of the new
generation into its main current. Clear, logical, and persuasive, the
Utilitarians seemed likely to command success in Parliament, in the
pulpit, and in the press. But the criterion of happiness, however widely
diffused (and that it had not gone far in 1837 Disraeli's _Sybil_ will
attest), was not enough to satisfy the ardent idealism that blazed in
the breasts of men stirred by revolutions and the new birth of Christian
zeal. In contrast to the ordered pursuit of reform, the spirit of which
the Utilitarians hoped to embody in societies and Acts of Parliament,
were the rebellious impulses of men filled with a prophetic spirit,
walking in obedience to an inward voice, eager to cry aloud their
message to a generation wrapped in prosperity and self-contentment. They
formed no single school and followed no single line. In a few cases we
may observe the relation of master and pupil, as between Carlyle and
Ruskin; in more we can see a small band of friends like the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the leaders of the Oxford Movement, or the
scientific circle of Darwin and Hooker, working in fellowship for a
common end. But individuality is their note. They sprang often from
surroundings most alien to their genius; they wandered far from the
courses which their birth seemed to prescribe; the spirit caught them
and they went forth to the fray.

The time in which they grew up was calculated to mould characters of
strength. Self-control and self-denial had been needed in the protracted
wars with France. Self-reliance had been learnt in the hard school of
adversity. Imagination was quickened by the heroism of the struggle
which had ended in the final victory of our arms. And to the generations
born in the early days of the nineteenth century lay open fields wider
than were offered to human activity in any other age of the world's
history. Now at last the full fruits of sixteenth-century discovery were
to be reaped. It was possible for Gordon, by the personal ascendancy
which he owed to his single-minded faith, to create legends and to work
miracles in Asia and in Africa; for Richard Burton to gain an intimate
knowledge of Islam in its holiest shrines; for Livingstone, Hannington,
and other martyrs to the Faith to breathe their last in the tropics; for
Franklin, dying, as Scott died nearly seventy years later, in the cause
of Science, to hallow the polar regions for the Anglo-Saxon race.
Darkest Africa was to remain impenetrable yet awhile. Only towards the
end of the century, when Stanley's work was finished, could Rhodes and
Kitchener conspire to clasp hands across its deserts and its swamps: but
on the other side of the globe a new island-empire had been already
created by the energy of Wakefield, and developed by the wisdom of
Parkes and Grey. In distant lands, on stricken fields less famous but no
less perilous, Wellington's men were applying the lessons which they had
learnt in the Peninsula. On distant seas Nelson's ships were carrying
explorers equipped for the more peaceful task of scientific observation.
In this century the highest mountains, the deepest seas, the widest
stretches of desert were to reveal their secrets to the adventurers who
held the whole world for their playground or field of conquest.

And not only in the great expansion of empire abroad but in the growth
of knowledge at home and the application of it to civil life, there was
a field to employ all the vigour of a race capable of rising to its
opportunities. There is no need to remind this generation of such names
as Stephenson and Herschel, Darwin and Huxley, Faraday and Kelvin; they
are in no danger of being forgotten to-day. The men of letters take
relatively a less conspicuous place in the evolution of the Age; but the
force which they put into their writings, the wealth of their material,
the variety of their lives, and the contrasts of their work, endow the
annals of the nineteenth century with an absorbing interest. While
Tennyson for the most part stayed in his English homes, singing the
beauties of his native land, Browning was a sojourner in Italian palaces
and villas, studying men of many races and many times, exploring the
subtleties of the human heart. The pen of Dickens portrayed all classes
of society except, perhaps, that which Thackeray made his peculiar
field. The historians, too, furnish singular contrasts: the vehement
pugnacity of Freeman is a foil to the serene studiousness of Acton; the
erratic career of Froude to the concentration of Stubbs. The influence
exercised on their contemporaries by recluses such as Newman or Darwin
may be compared with the more worldly activities of Huxley and Samuel
Wilberforce. Often we see equally diverse elements in following the
course of a single life. In Matthew Arnold we wonder at the poet of
'The Strayed Reveller' coexisting with the zealous inspector of schools;
in William Morris we find it hard to reconcile the creative craftsman
with the fervent apostle of social discontent. Perhaps the most notable
case of this diversity is the long pilgrimage of Gladstone which led him
from the camp of the 'stern, unbending Tories' to the leadership of
Radicals and Home Rulers. There is an interest in tracing through these
metamorphoses the essential unity of a man's character. On the other
hand, one cannot but admire the steadfastness with which Darwin and
Lister, Tennyson and Watts, pursued the even tenor of their way.

Again we may notice the strange irony of fortune which drew Carlyle from
his native moorlands to spend fifty years in a London suburb, while his
disciple Ruskin, born and bred in London, and finding fit audience in
the universities of the South, closed his long life in seclusion amid
the Cumbrian fells. So two statesmen, who were at one time very closely
allied, present a similarly striking contrast in the manner of their
lives. Till the age of forty Joseph Chamberlain limited himself to
municipal work in Birmingham, and yet he rose in later life to imperial
views wider than any statesman's of his day. Charles Dilke, on the other
hand, could be an expert on 'Greater Britain' at thirty and yet devote
his old age to elaborating the details of Local Government and framing
programmes of social reform for the working classes of our towns.
Accidents these may be, but they lend to Victorian biography the charm
of a fanciful arabesque or mosaic of varied pattern and hue.

Eccentrics, too, there were in fact among the literary men of the day,
even as there are in the fiction of Dickens, of Peacock, of George
Meredith. There was Borrow, who, as an old man, was tramping solitarily
in the fields of Norfolk, as earlier he wandered alone in wild Wales or
wilder Spain. There was FitzGerald, who remained all his life constant
to one corner of East Anglia, and who yet, by the precious thread of his
correspondence, maintained contact with the great world of Victorian
letters to which he belonged.

Some wandered as far afield as Asia or the South Seas; some buried
themselves in the secluded courts of Oxford and Cambridge and became
mythical figures in academic lore. Not many were to be found within hail
of London or Edinburgh in these forceful days. Brougham, the most
omniscient of reviewers, with the most ill-balanced of minds, belongs
more properly to the preceding age, though he lived to 1868; and it is
from this age that the novelists probably drew their eccentric types.
But between eccentricity and vigorous originality who shall draw the
dividing line?

Men like these it is hard to label and to classify. Their individuality
is so patent that any general statement is at once open to attack. The
most that we can do is to indicate one or two points in which the true
Victorians had a certain resemblance to one another, and were unlike
their successors of our own day. They were more evidently in earnest,
less conscious of themselves, more indifferent to ridicule, more
absorbed in their work. To many of them full work and the cares of
office seemed a necessity of life. It was a typical Victorian who, after
sixteen years of public service, writing a family letter, says, 'I feel
that the interest of business and the excitement of responsibility are
indispensable to me, and I believe that I am never happier than when I
have more to think of and to do than I can manage in a given period'.
Idleness and insouciance had few temptations for them, cynicism was
abhorrent to them. Even Thackeray was perpetually 'caught out' when he
assumed the cynic's pose. Charlotte Brontë, most loyal of his admirers
and critics, speaks of the 'deep feelings for his kind' which he
cherished in his large heart, and again of the 'sentiment, jealously
hidden but genuine, which extracts the venom from that formidable
Thackeray'. Large-hearted and generous to one another, they were ready
to face adventure, eager to fight for an ideal, however impracticable it
seemed. This was as true of Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, and all
the _genus irritabile vatum_, as of the politicians and the men of
action. They made many mistakes; they were combative, often difficult to
deal with. Some of them were deficient in judgement, others in the
saving gift of humour; but they were rarely petty or ungenerous, or
failed from faint-heartedness or indecision. Vehemence and impatience
can do harm to the best causes, and the lives of men like the Napiers
and the Lawrences, like Thomas Arnold and Charles Kingsley, like John
Bright and Robert Lowe, are marred by conflicts which might have been
avoided by more studied gentleness or more philosophic calm. But the
time seemed short in which they could redress the evils which offended
them. They saw around them a world which seemed to be lapped in comfort
or swathed in the dead wrappings of the past, and would not listen to
reasoned appeals; and it would be futile to deny that, by lifting their
voices to a pitch which offends fastidious critics, Carlyle and Ruskin
did sometimes obtain a hearing and kindle a passion which Matthew Arnold
could never stir by his scholarly exhortations to 'sweetness and light'.

But it would be a mistake to infer from such clamour and contention that
the Victorians did not enjoy their fair share of happiness in this
world. The opposite would be nearer the truth: happiness was given to
them in good, even in overflowing measure. Any one familiar with
Trevelyan's biography of Macaulay will remember with what fullness and
intensity he enjoyed his life; and the same fact is noted by Dr. Mozley
in his Essay on that most representative Victorian, Thomas Arnold. The
lives of Delane, the famous editor of _The Times_, of the statesman
Palmerston, of the painter Millais, and of many other men in many
professions, might be quoted to support this view. In some cases this
was due to their strong family affections, in others to their genius for
friendship. A good conscience, a good temper, a good digestion, are all
factors of importance. But perhaps the best insurance against moodiness
and melancholy was that strenuous activity which made them forget
themselves, that energetic will-power which was the driving force in so
many movements of the day.

How many of the changes of last century were due to general tendencies,
how far the single will of this man or that has seriously affected its
history, it is impossible to estimate. To many it seems that the rôle of
the individual is played out. The spirit of the coming era is that of
organized fellowship and associated effort. The State is to prescribe
for all, and the units are, somehow, to be marshalled into their places
by a higher collective will. Under the shadow of socialism the more
ambitious may be tempted to quit the field of public service at home and
to look to enterprises abroad--to resign poor England to a mechanical
bureaucracy, a soulless uniformity where one man is as good as another.
But it is difficult to believe that society can dispense with leaders,
or afford to forget the lessons which may be learnt from the study of
such noble lives. The Victorians had a robuster faith. Their faith and
their achievements may help to banish such doubts to-day. As one of the
few survivors of that Victorian era has lately said: 'Only those whose
minds are numbed by the suspicion that all times are tolerably alike,
and men and women much of a muchness, will deny that it was a generation
of intrepid efforts forward.' Some fell in mid-combat: some survived to
witness the eventual victory of their cause. For all might be claimed
the funeral honours which Browning claimed for his Grammarian. They
aimed high; they 'threw themselves on God': the mountain-tops are their
appropriate resting-place.




THOMAS CARLYLE

1795-1881

1795. Born at Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, December 4.
1809. Enters Edinburgh University.
1814-18. Schoolmaster at Annan and Kirkcaldy. Friendship with Edward
      Irving.
1819-21. Reading law and literature at Edinburgh and Mainhill.
1821. First meeting with Jane Welsh at Haddington.
1822-3. Tutorship in Buller family.
1824-5. German literature, Goethe, _Life of Schiller_.
1826. October 17, marriage; residence at Comely Bank, Edinburgh.
1827. Jeffrey's friendship; articles for _Edinburgh Review_.
1828-34. Craigenputtock, with intervals in London and Edinburgh;
      poverty; solitude; profound study; _Sartor Resartus_ written;
      reading for _French  Revolution_.
1834. Cheyne Row, Chelsea, permanent home.
1834. Begins to read for, 1841 to write, _Cromwell_.
1834-6. _French Revolution_ written; finished January 12, 1837.
1837-40. Four courses of lectures in London. (German literature, _Heroes_.)
1844. Changes plan of, 1845 finishes writing, _Cromwell_.
1846-51. Studies Ireland and modern questions; _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, 1849.
1851. Choice of Frederick the Great of Prussia for next subject.
1857. Two vols. printed; 1865, rest finished and published.
1865. Lord Rector of Edinburgh University.
1866. Death of Mrs. Carlyle, April 21.
1867-9. Prepares Memorials of his wife; friendship with Froude.
1870. Loses the use of his right hand.
1874. Refuses offer of Baronetcy or G.C.B.
1881. Death at Chelsea, February 5; burial at Ecclefechan.

THOMAS CARLYLE

PROPHET


North-west of Carlisle (from which town the Carlyle family in all
probability first took their name), a little way along the border, the
river Annan comes down its green valley from the lowland hills to lose
itself in the wide sands of the Solway Firth. At the foot of these hills
is the village of Ecclefechan, some eight miles inland. Here in the wide
irregular street, down the side of which flows a little beck, stands the
grey cottage, built by the stonemason James Carlyle, where he lived with
his second wife, Margaret Aitken; and here on December 4, 1795, the
eldest of nine children, their son Thomas was born. There is little to
redeem the place from insignificance; the houses are mostly mean, the
position of the village is tame and commonplace. But if a visitor will
mount the hills that lie to the north, turn southward and look over the
wide expanse of land and water to the Cumbrian mountains, then, should
he be fortunate enough to see the landscape in stormy and unsettled
weather, he may realize why the land was so dear to its most famous son
that he could return to it from year to year throughout his life and
could there at all times soothe his most unquiet moods. Through all his
years in London he remained a lowland Scot and was most at home in
Annandale. With this district his fame is still bound up, as that of
Walter Scott with the Tweed, or that of Wordsworth with the Lakes.

In this humble household Thomas Carlyle first learnt what is meant by
work, by truthfulness, and by reverence, lessons which he never forgot.
He learnt to revere authority, to revere worth, and to revere something
yet higher and more mysterious--the Unseen. In _Sartor Resartus_ he
describes how his hero was impressed by his parents' observance of
religious duties. 'The highest whom I knew on earth I here saw bowed
down with awe unspeakable before a Higher in Heaven; such things
especially in infancy, reach inwards to the very core of your being.'
His father was a man of unusual force of character and gifted with a
wonderful power of speech, flashing out in picturesque metaphor, in
biting satire, in humorous comment upon life. He had, too, the Scotch
genius for valuing education; and it was he who decided that Tom, whose
character he had observed, should have every chance that schooling could
give him. His mother was a most affectionate, single-hearted, and
religious woman; labouring for her family, content with her lot, her
trust for her son unfailing, her only fear for him lest in his new
learning he might fall away from the old Biblical faith which she held
so firmly herself.

Reading with his father or mother, lending a hand at housework when
needed, nourishing himself on the simple oatmeal and milk which
throughout life remained his favourite food, submitting himself
instinctively to the stern discipline of the home, he passed, happily on
the whole, through his childhood and soon outstripped his comrades in
the village school. His success there led to his going in his tenth year
to the grammar school at Annan; and before he reached his fourteenth
year he trudged off on foot to Edinburgh to begin his studies at the
university.

Instead of young men caught up by express trains and deposited, by the
aid of cabmen and porters, in a few hours in the sheltered courts of
Oxford and Cambridge, we must imagine a party of boys, of fourteen or
fifteen years old, trudging on foot twenty miles a day for five days
across bleak country, sleeping at rough inns, and on their arrival
searching for an attic in some bleak tenement in a noisy street. Here
they were to live almost entirely on the baskets of home produce sent
through the carriers at intervals by their thrifty parents. It was and
is a Spartan discipline, and it turns out men who have shown their grit
and independence in all lands where the British flag is flown.

The earliest successes which Carlyle won, both at Annan and at
Edinburgh, were in mathematics. His classical studies received little
help from his professors, and his literary gifts were developed mostly
by his own reading, and stimulated from time to time by talks with
fellow students. Perhaps it was for his ultimate good that he was not
brought under influences which might have guided him into more
methodical courses and tamed his rugged originality. The universities
cannot often be proved to have fostered kindly their poets and original
men of letters; at least we may say that Edinburgh was a more kindly
Alma Mater to Carlyle than Oxford and Cambridge proved to Shelley and
Byron. His native genius, and the qualities which he inherited from his
parents, were not starved in alien soil, but put out vigorous growth.
From such letters to his friends as have survived, we can see what a
power Carlyle had already developed of forcibly expressing his ideas and
establishing an influence over others.

He left the university at the age of nineteen, and the next twelve years
of his life were of a most unsettled character. He made nearly as many
false starts in life as Goldsmith or Coleridge, though he redeemed them
nobly by his persistence in after years. In 1814 his family still
regarded the ministry as his vocation, and Carlyle was himself quite
undecided about it. To promote this idea the profession of schoolmaster
was taken up for the time. He continued in it for more than six years,
first at Annan and then at Kirkcaldy; but he was soon finding it
uncongenial and rebelling against it. A few years later he tried reading
law with no greater contentment; and in order to support himself he was
reduced to teaching private pupils. The chief friend of this period was
Edward Irving, the gifted preacher who afterwards, in London, came to
tragic shipwreck. He was a native of Annan, five years older than
Carlyle, and he had spent some time in preaching and preparing for the
ministry. He was one of the few people who profoundly influenced
Carlyle's life. At Kirkcaldy he was his constant companion, shared his
tastes, lent him books, and kindled his powers of insight and judgement
in many a country walk. Carlyle has left us records of this time in his
_Reminiscences_, how he read the twelve volumes of Irving's _Gibbon_ in
twelve days, how he tramped through the Trossachs on foot, how in summer
twilights he paced the long stretches of sand at Irving's side.

It was Irving who in 1822 commended him to the Buller family, with whom
he continued as tutor for two years. Charles Buller, the eldest son, was
a boy of rare gifts and promise, worthy of such a teacher; and but for
his untimely death in 1848 he might have won a foremost place in
politics. The family proved valuable friends to Carlyle in after-life,
besides enabling him at this time to live in comfort, with leisure for
his own studies and some spare money to help his family. But for this
aid, his brother Alexander would have fared ill with the farming, and
John could never have afforded the training for the medical profession.

Again, it was Irving who first took him to Haddington in 1821 and
introduced him to Jane Baillie Welsh, his future wife. Irving's
sincerity and sympathy, his earnest enthusiasm joined with the power of
genuine laughter (always to Carlyle a mark of a true rich nature), made
him through all these years a thoroughly congenial companion. He really
understood Carlyle as few outside his family did, and he never grew
impatient at Carlyle's difficulty in settling to a profession. 'Your
mind,' he wrote, 'unfortunately for its present peace, has taken in so
wide a range of study as to be almost incapable of professional
trammels; and it has nourished so uncommon and so unyielding a
character, as first unfits you for, and then disgusts you with, any
accommodations which for so cultivated and so fertile a mind would
easily procure favour and patronage.' Well might Carlyle in later days
find a hero in tough old Samuel Johnson, whose sufferings were due to
similar causes. The other source which kept the fire in him aglow
through these difficult years was the confidence and affection of his
whole family, and the welcome which he always found at home.
Disappointed though they were at his failure, as yet, to settle to a
profession and to earn a steady income, for all that 'Tom' was to be a
great man; and when he could find time to spend some months at Mainhill,
or later at Scotsbrig,[1] a room could always be found for him, hours of
peace and solitude could be enjoyed, the most wholesome food, and the
most cordial affection, were there rendered as loyal ungrudging tribute.
But new ties were soon to be knit and a new chapter to be opened in his
life.

[Note 1: Farms near Ecclefechan to which his parents moved in 1814
and 1826.]

John Welsh of Haddington, who died before Carlyle met his future wife,
was a surgeon and a man of remarkable gifts; and his daughter could
trace her descent to such famous Scotsmen as Wallace and John Knox. Her
own mental powers were great, and her vivacity and charming manners
caused her to shine in society wherever she was. She had an unquestioned
supremacy among the ladies of Haddington and many had been the suitors
for her hand. When Irving had given her lessons there, love had sprung
up between tutor and pupil, but this budding romance ended tragically in
1822. Before meeting her he had been engaged to another lady; and when a
new appointment gave him a sure income, he was held to his bond and was
forced to crush down his passion and to take farewell of Miss Welsh. At
what date Carlyle conceived the hope of making her his wife it is
difficult to say. Her beauty and wit seem to have done their work
quickly in his case; but she was not one to give her affections readily,
for all the intellectual sympathy which united them. In 1823 she was
contemplating marriage, but had made no promise; in 1824 she had
accepted the idea of marrying him, but in 1825 she still scouted the
conditions in which he proposed to live. His position was precarious,
his projects visionary, and his immediate desire was to settle on a
lonely farm, where he could devote himself to study, if she would do the
household drudgery. Because his mother whom he loved and honoured was
content to lead this life, he seemed to think that his wife could do the
same; but her nature and her rearing were not those of the Carlyles and
their Annandale neighbours. It involved a complete renunciation of the
comforts of life and the social position which she enjoyed; and much
though she admired his talents and enjoyed his company, she was not in
that passion of love which could lift her to such heights of
self-sacrifice.

By this time we can begin to discern in his letters the outline of his
character--his passionate absorption in study, his moodiness, his fits
of despondency, his intense irritability; his incapacity to master his
own tongue and temper. In happy moments he shows great tenderness of
feeling for those whom he loves or pities; but this alternates with
inconsiderate clamour and loud complaints deafening the ears of all
about him, provoked often by slight and even imaginary grievances. It is
the artistic nature run riot, and that in one who preached silence and
stoicism as the chief virtues--an inconsistency which has amused and
disgusted generations of readers. It was impossible for him to do his
work with the regular method, the equable temper, of a Southey or a
Scott. In dealing with history he must image the past to himself most
vividly before he could expound his subject; and that effort and strain
cost him sleepless nights and days of concentrated thought. Nor was he
an easier companion when his work was finished and he could take his
ease. Then life seemed empty and profitless; and in its emptiness his
voice echoed all the louder. The ill was within him, and outward
circumstances were powerless to affect his nature.

At this time he was chiefly occupied in reading German literature and
spreading the knowledge of it among his countrymen. After Coleridge he
was the first of our literary men to appreciate the poets and mystics of
Germany, and he did more even than Coleridge to make Englishmen familiar
with them. He acquired at this time a knowledge of French and Italian
literature too; but the philosophy of Kant and the writings of Goethe
and Schiller roused him to greater enthusiasm. From Kant he learnt that
the guiding principle of conduct was not happiness, but the 'categorical
imperative' of duty; from Goethe he drew such hopefulness as gleams
occasionally through his despondent utterances on the progress of the
human race. He translated Goethe's novel, _Wilhelm Meister_, in 1823,
and followed it up with the _Life of Schiller_. There was no
considerable sale for either of these books till his lectures in London
and his established fame roused a demand for all he had written. In
these days he was practising for the profession of a man of letters, and
was largely influenced by personal ambition and the desire to earn an
income which would make him independent; he was not yet fired with a
mission, or kindled to white heat.

His long courtship was rewarded in October 1826. When the marriage took
place the bride was twenty-five years old and the bridegroom thirty. Men
of letters have not the reputation of making ideal husbands, and the
qualities to which this is due were possessed by Carlyle in exaggerated
measure. It was a perilous enterprise for any one to live with him, most
of all for such a woman, delicately bred, nervous, and highly strung.
She was aware of this, and was prepared for a large measure of
self-denial; but she could not have foreseen how severe she would find
the trial. The morbid sensitiveness of Carlyle to his own pains and
troubles, so often imaginary, joined with his inconsiderate blindness to
his wife's real sufferings, led to many heart-burnings. If she
contributed to them, in some degree, by her wilfulness, jealous temper,
and sharpness of tongue, ill-health and solitude may well excuse her.

His own confessions, made after her death, are coloured by sorrow and
deep affection: no doubt he paints his own conduct in hues darker than
the truth demands. Shallow critics have sneered at the picture of the
philosopher whose life was so much at variance with his creed, and too
much has, perhaps, been written about the subject. If reference must be
made to such a well-worn tale, it is best to let Carlyle's own account
stand as he wished it to stand. His moral worth has been vindicated in a
hundred ways, not least by his humility and honesty about himself, and
can bear the test of time.

For the first two years of married life Carlyle's scheme of living on a
farm was kept at bay by his wife, and their home was at Edinburgh.
Carlyle refers to this as the happiest period of his life, though he did
not refrain from loud laments upon occasions. The good genius of the
household was Jeffrey, the famous editor of the _Edinburgh Review_, who
was distantly related to Mrs. Carlyle. He made friends with the
newly-married pair, opened a path for them into the society of the
capital, and enabled Carlyle to spread the knowledge of German authors
in the _Review_ and to make his bow before a wider public. The prospects
of the little household seemed brighter, but, by generously making over
all her money to her mother, his wife had crippled its resources; and
Carlyle was of so difficult a humour that neither Jeffrey nor any one
else could guide his steps for long. Living was precarious; society made
demands even on a modest household, and in 1828 he at length had his way
and persuaded his wife to remove to Craigenputtock. It was in the
loneliness of the moors that Carlyle was to come to his full stature and
to develop his astonishing genius.

Craigenputtock was a farm belonging to his wife's family, lying seventy
feet above the sea, sixteen miles from Dumfries, among desolate moors
and bogs, and fully six miles from the nearest village. 'The house is
gaunt and hungry-looking. It stands with the scanty fields attached as
an island in a sea of morass. The landscape is unredeemed either by
grace or grandeur, mere undulating hills of grass and heather with peat
bogs in the hollows between them.' So Froude describes the home where
the Carlyles were to spend six years, the wife in domestic labours, in
solitude, in growing ill-health, the husband in omnivorous reading, in
digesting the knowledge that he gathered, in transmuting it and marking
it with the peculiar stamp of his genius. There was no true
companionship over the work. As the moorland gave the fresh air and
stillness required, so the wife might nourish the physical frame with
wholesome digestible food and save him from external cares; the rest
must be done by lonely communing with himself. He needed no Fleet Street
taverns or literary salons to encourage him. Goethe, with whom he
exchanged letters and compliments at times, said with rare insight that
he 'had in himself an originating principle of conviction, out of which
he could develop the force that lay in him unassisted by other men'.

Few were the interruptions from without. His fame was not yet
established. In any case pilgrims would have to undertake a very rough
journey, and the fashion of such pilgrimages had hardly begun. But in
1833 from distant America came one disciple, afterwards to be known as
the famous author Ralph Waldo Emerson; and he has left us in his
_English Traits_ a vivid record of his impression of two or three famous
men of letters whom he saw. He describes Carlyle as 'tall and gaunt,
with a cliff-like brow, self-possessed, and holding his extraordinary
powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent
with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming
humour, which floated everything he looked upon'.[2]

[Note 2: Emerson, _English Traits_, 'World's Classics' edition, p.
8.]

Much of his time was given to reading about the French Revolution, which
was to be the subject of his greatest literary triumph. But the
characteristic work of this period is _Sartor Resartus_ ('The tailor
patched anew'), in which Carlyle, under a thin German disguise, reveals
himself to the world, with his views on the customs and ways of society
and his contempt for all the pretensions and absurdities which they
involved. In many places it is extravagant and fantastic, as when 'the
most remarkable incident in modern history' proves to be George Fox the
Quaker making a suit of leather to render himself independent of
tailors; in others it rises to the highest pitch of poetry, as in the
sympathetic lament over the hardships of manual labour. 'Venerable to me
is the hard Hand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a
cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of this Planet.
Venerable, too, is the rugged face, all weather-tanned, besoiled, with
its rude intelligence; for it is the face of a Man living manlike. O,
but the more venerable for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity
as well as love thee! Hardly-entreated Brother! For us was thy back so
bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert
our Conscript on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so
marred.' It is through such passages that Carlyle has won his way to the
hearts of many who care little for history, or for German literature.

The book evidently contains much that is autobiographical, and helps us
to understand Carlyle's childhood and youth; but it is so mixed up with
fantasy and humour that it is difficult to separate fiction from fact.
Its chief aim seems to be the overthrow of cant, the ridiculing of
empty conventions, and the preaching of sincerity and independence. But
not yet was Carlyle's generation prepared to listen to such sermons.
Jeffrey was bewildered by the tone and offended at the style; publisher
after publisher refused it; and when at length it was launched upon the
world piecemeal in _Fraser's Magazine_, the reading public either
ignored it or abused it in the roundest terms. During all this time
Carlyle was anxiously looking for some surer means of livelihood, and
had not yet decided that literature was to be his profession. He had
hopes at different times of professorships in Edinburgh and St. Andrews,
and of the editorship of various reviews; but these all came to nothing.
For some posts he was not suited; for others his application could find
no support. He even thought of going to America, where Emerson and other
admirers would have welcomed him. But the disappointments in Scotland
decided him to make one more effort in London before accepting defeat,
and in 1834 he found a house at Chelsea and prepared to quit his
hermitage among the moors.

Cheyne Row, Chelsea, was to be his new home, a quiet street running
northward from the riverside in a quarter of London not then invaded by
industrialism. The house, No. 24, with its little garden, has been made
into a Carlyle museum, and may still be seen on the east side of the
street facing a few survivors of the sturdy old pollarded lime-trees
standing there 'like giants in Tawtie wigs'. His bust, by Boehm, is in
the garden on the Embankment not a hundred yards away. With this
district are connected other names famous in literature and art, but its
presiding genius is the 'Sage of Chelsea', who spent the last
forty-seven years of his life in it; and there, in a double-walled room,
in spite of trivial disturbances from without, in spite of far more
serious fits of dejection and discontent within, he composed his three
greatest historical books. At the outset his prospects were not bright,
and at the end of 1834 he confessed 'it is now twenty-three months
since I earned a penny by the craft of literature'. There was need of
much faith; and it was fortunate for him that he had at his side one who
believed in his genius and who was well qualified to judge. He must have
been thinking of this when he wrote of Mahomet in _Heroes_ and of the
prophet's gratitude to his first wife Kadijah: 'She believed in me when
none else would believe. In the whole world I had but one friend and she
was that!' In the same place he quoted the German writer Novalis: 'It is
certain my conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will
believe in it.'

So fortified, he worked through the days of poverty and gloom, with
groans and outbursts of fury, kindling to white heat as he imaged to
himself the men and events of the French Revolution, and throwing them
on to paper in lurid pictures of flame. One terrible misadventure
chilled his spirit in 1835, when the manuscript of the first volume was
lent to J. S. Mill, and was accidentally burnt; but, after a short fit
of despair, he set manfully to work to repair the loss, and the new
version was finished in January, 1837. This book marked an epoch in the
writing of history. Hitherto few had realized what potent force there
was in the original documents lying stored in libraries and record
offices. They were 'live shells' buried in the dust of a neglected
magazine; and in the hands of Carlyle they came to life again and worked
havoc among the traditional judgements of history. This book was also
the turning point in his career. Dickens, Thackeray, and others hailed
it with enthusiasm; gradually it made its way with the public at large;
and as in the following years Carlyle, prompted by some friends, gave
successful courses of lectures,[3] his position among men of letters
became assured, and he had no more need to worry over money. Living in
London he became known to a wider circle, and his marvellous powers of
conversation brought visitors and invitations in larger measure than he
desired. The new friends whom he valued most were Mr. and Lady Harriet
Baring,[4] and he was often their guest in London, in Surrey, in
Scotland, and later at The Grange in Hampshire. But he remained faithful
to his older and more humble friends, while he also made himself
accessible to young men of letters who seemed anxious to learn, and who
did not offend one or other of his many prejudices. Such were Sterling,
Ruskin, Tennyson, and James Anthony Froude.

[Note 3: The most famous course, on Hero-Worship, was delivered in
May, 1840.]

[Note 4: Afterwards Lord and Lady Ashburton.]

Despite these successes Carlyle's letters at this time are full of the
usual discontents. London life and society stimulated him for the time,
but he paid dearly for it. Late dinners and prolonged bouts of talk, in
which he put forth all his powers, were followed by dyspepsia and
lassitude next day; and the neighbours, who kept dogs or cocks which
were accused of disturbing his slumbers, were the mark for many plaints
and lamentations. He could not in any circumstances be entirely happy.
Work was so exciting with the imagination on fire, that it kept him
awake at night; idleness was still more fatal in its effects. And so,
after a few years of relative calm, in 1839 we find his active brain
struggling to create a true picture of Oliver Cromwell and to expound
the meaning of the Great Civil War.

It was to be no easy task. For nearly five years he was to wrestle with
the subject, trying in vain to give it adequate shape and form, and then
to scrap the labours of years and to start again on a new plan; but in
the end he was to win another signal victory. While the _French
Revolution_ may be the higher artistic triumph, _Cromwell_ is more
important for one who wishes to understand the life-work of Carlyle and
all for which he stood. The emptiness of political theories and
institutions, the enduring value of character, are lessons which no one
has preached more forcibly. In his opinion the success of the English
revolution, the blow to tyranny and misgovernment in Church and State,
was not due to eloquent members of the Long Parliament, but to plain
God-fearing men, who, if they quoted scripture, did so not from
hypocrisy but because it was the language in which they habitually
thought. Nor could they build up a new England till they had found a
leader. It was the ages which had faith to recognize their worthiest man
and to accept his guidance which had achieved great things in the world,
not those which prated of democracy and progress. To make his
countrymen, in this age of fluent political talk, see the true moral
quality of the men of the seventeenth century--this it was which
occupied seven years of Carlyle's life and filled his thoughts. It was
indeed a labour of Hercules. Much of the material was lost beyond
repair, much buried in voluminous folios and State papers, much obscured
by the cant and prejudice of eighteenth-century authors. To recall the
past, Carlyle needed such help as geography would give him, and he spent
many days in visiting Dunbar, Worcester, and other sites. To Naseby he
went in 1842, in company with Dr. Arnold, and 'plucked two gowans and a
cowslip from the burial heaps of the slain'. A more important task was
to recover authentic utterances of Cromwell and his fellow workers, and
to put these in the place of the second-hand judgements of political
partisans; and this involved laborious researches in libraries. Above
all, he had to interpret these records in a new spirit, exercising true
insight and sympathy, to put life into the dry bones and to present his
readers with the living image of a man. He combined in unique fashion
the laborious research of a student with the moral fervour of a prophet.

Despite the strain of these labours Carlyle showed few signs of his
fifty years. The family were of tough stock; and the years which he had
spent in moorland air had increased the capital of health on which he
could draw. The flight of time was chiefly marked by his growing
antipathy to the political movements of the day, and by a growing
despondency about the future. People might buy his books; but he looked
in vain for evidence that they paid heed to the lessons which he
preached. The year of revolutions, 1848, followed by the setting up of
the French Empire and the collapse of the Roman Republic, produced
nothing but disappointment, and he became louder and more bitter in his
judgements on democracy. 1849 saw the birth of the _Latter-Day
Pamphlets_ in which he outraged Mill and the Radicals by his scornful
words about Negro Emancipation, and by the savage delight with which he
shattered their idols. He loved to expose what seemed to him the
sophistries involved in the conventional praise of liberty. Of old the
mediaeval serf or the negro slave had some one who was responsible for
him, some one interested in his physical well-being. The new conditions
too often meant nothing but liberty to starve, liberty to be idle,
liberty to slip back into the worst indulgences, while those who might
have governed stood by regardless and lent no help. Such from an extreme
point of view appeared the policy of _laisser-faire_; and he was neither
moderate nor impartial in stating his case. 'An idle white gentleman is
not pleasant to me;... but what say you to an idle black gentleman, with
his rum bottle in his hand,... no breeches on his body, pumpkin at
discretion, and the fruitfullest region of the earth going back to
jungle round him?' In a similar vein he dealt with stump oratory, prison
reform, and other subjects, tilting in reckless fashion at the shields
of the reforming Radicals of the day; nor was he less outspoken when he
met in person the champions of these views. A letter to his wife in 1847
tells of a visit to the Brights at Rochdale; how 'John and I discorded
in our views not a little', and how 'I shook peaceable Brightdom as with
a passing earthquake'. From books he could learn: to human teachers he
proved refractory. Had he been more willing to listen to others, his
judgements on contemporary events might have been more valuable. All his
life he was, as George Meredith says, 'Titanic rather than Olympian, a
heaver of rocks, not a shaper'; and this fever of denunciation grew with
advancing years. But with these spurts of volcanic energy alternate
moods of the deepest depression. His journal for 1850 says, 'This seems
really the Nadir of my fortunes; and in hope, desire, or outlook, so far
as common mortals reckon such, I never was more bankrupt. Lonely, shut
up within my contemptible and yet _not_ deliberately ignoble self,
perhaps there never was, in modern literary or other history, a more
solitary soul, _capable_ of any friendship or honest relation to
others.' By this time he was feeling the need of another task, and in
1851 he chose Frederick the Great of Prussia for the subject of his next
book.

To this generation apology seems to be needed for an English author who
lavishes so much admiration on Prussian men and institutions. But
Carlyle, whose chief heroes had been men of intense religious
convictions, like Luther, Knox, and Cromwell, could find no hero after
his heart in English history subsequent to the Civil War. Eloquent Pitts
and Burkes, jobbing Walpoles and Pelhams, were to him types of
politicians who had brought England to her present plight. German
literature had always kept its influence over him and had directed his
attention to German history; Frederick, without religion as he was,
seemed at any rate sincere, recognized facts, and showed practical
capacity for ruling (essential elements in the Carlylean hero), and the
subject would be new to his readers. The labour involved was stupendous;
it was to fill his life and the lives of his helpers for thirteen
years. Of these helpers the chief credit is due to Joseph Neuberg, who
piloted him over German railways, libraries, and battle-fields in the
search for picturesque detail, and to Henry Larkin, who toiled in London
to trace references in scores of authors, and who finally crowned the
work by laborious indexing, which made Carlyle's labyrinth accessible to
his readers. There were masses of material hidden away and unsifted;
and, as in the case of Cromwell, only a man of original genius could
penetrate this inert mass with shafts of light and make the past live
again. The task grew as he continued his researches. He groped his way
back to the beginning of the Hohenzollerns, and sketched the portraits
of the old Electors in a style unequalled for vividness and humour. He
drew a full-length portrait of Frederick William, most famous of
drill-sergeants, and he studied the campaigns of his son with a
thoroughness which has been a model to soldiers and civilians ever
since. We have the record of two tours which he made in Germany to view
the scene of operations;[5] and it is amazing how exact a picture he
could bring away from a short visit to each separate battle-field. His
diligence, accuracy, and wide grasp of the subject satisfied the
severest judges; and the book won him a success as complete and enduring
in Germany as in England and America.

[Note 5: Froude, _Carlyle, Life in London_, vol. ii, pp. 100 and
217.]

When this was finished, Carlyle was on the verge of seventy and his work
was done; though the evening of his life was long, his strength was
exhausted. His wife lived just long enough to see the seal set upon his
fame, and to hear of his election to be Lord Rector of Edinburgh
University. But in April 1866, while he was in Scotland for his
installation, which she was too weak to attend, he heard the news of her
sudden death from heart failure in London; and after this he was a
broken man. By reading her journal he learnt, too late, how much his
own inconsiderate temper had added to her trials, and his remorse was
bitter and lasting. He shut himself off from all his friends except
Froude, who was to be his literary executor, and gave himself to
collecting and annotating the memorials which she had left. Each letter
is followed by some words of tender recollection or some cry of
self-reproach. He has erected to her the most singular of literary
monuments, morbid perhaps, but inspired by a feeling which was in his
case natural and sincere.

About 1870 he began to lose the use of his right hand and he found it
impossible to compose by dictation. Of the last years of his life there
is little to narrate. The offer of a baronetcy or the G.C.B. from Mr.
Disraeli in 1874 pleased him for the moment, but he resolutely refused
external honours. He took daily walks with Froude, daily drives when he
became too weak to go on foot. Towards the end the Bible and Shakespeare
were his most habitual reading. He had long ceased to be a member of any
church, but his belief in God and in God's working in history was the
very foundation of his being, and the lessons of the Bible were to him
inexhaustible and ever new. Death came to him peacefully in February,
1881; and as he had expressed a definite wish, he was buried at
Ecclefechan, though a public funeral in the Abbey was offered and its
acceptance would have met with the approval of his countrymen.

The very wealth of records makes it difficult to judge his character
fairly. Few men have so laid bare the thoughts and feelings of their
hearts. It is easy to blame the unmanly laments which he utters over his
health, his solitude, and his sufferings, real or imaginary; few
imaginative writers have the every-day virtues. His egotism, too, is
difficult to defend. If, as he himself admits, he invariably took an
undue share of talk, often in fact monopolizing it, wherever he was, we
must remember that the brilliance of his gifts was admitted by all;
less pardonable is his habit of disparaging other men, and especially
other men of letters. His pen-pictures of Mill, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
and others, are wonderfully vivid but too often sour in flavour; his
sketch of Charles Lamb is an outrage on that generous and kindly soul.
Too often he was unconscious of the pain given by such random words.
When he was brought to book, he was honourable enough to recant. Fearing
on one occasion to have offended even the serene loyalty of Emerson, he
cries out protestingly, 'Has not the man Emerson, from old years, been a
Human Friend to me? Can I ever forget, or think otherwise than lovingly
of the man Emerson?'

But whatever offence Carlyle committed with his ungovernable tongue or
pen, he had rare virtues in conduct. His generosity was as unassuming as
it was persistent; and it began at home. Long before he was free from
anxieties about money for himself, he was helping two of his brothers to
make a career, one in agriculture, and the other in medicine. In his
latter days he regularly gave away large sums in such a way that no one
knew the source from which they came. His letters show a deep tenderness
of affection for his mother, his wife, and others of the family; and the
humble Annandale home was always in his thoughts. His charity embraced
even those whose claim on him was but indirect. When his wife was dead,
he could remember to celebrate her birthday by sending a present to her
old nurse. He was scrupulous in money-dealing and frugal in all matters
of personal comfort; in his innermost thoughts he was always
pure-hearted and sincere; for nothing on earth would he traffic in his
independence or in adherence to the truth.

His style has not largely influenced other historians; and this is as
well, since imitations of it easily fall into mere obscurity and
extravagance. But his historical method has been of great value, the
patient study of original authorities, the copious references quoted,
the careful indexing, all being proof how anxious he was that the
subject should be presented clearly and veraciously, rather than that
the books should shine as literary performances. How far the principles
which he valued and taught have spread it is difficult to say. Party
politicians still appeal to the sacred name of liberty without inquiring
what true liberty means; publicists still speak as if the material gains
of modern life, cheap food and machine-made products, meant nothing but
advance in the history of the human race; but there are others who look
to the spiritual factors and wish to enlarge the bounds of political
economy.

The writings of Carlyle, and of Ruskin, on whom fell the prophet's
mantle, certainly made their influence felt in later books devoted to
that once 'dismal' science. Few can be quite indifferent to the man or
to his message. Those who demand moderation, clearness, and Attic
simplicity, will be repelled by his extravagances or by his mysticism.
Others will be attracted by his glowing imagination and by his fiery
eloquence, and will reserve for him a foremost place in their
affections. These will echo the words which Emerson was heard to say on
his death-bed, when his eyes fell on a portrait of the familiar rugged
features, '_That_ is the man, my man'.

[Illustration: SIR ROBERT PEEL

From the painting by J. Linnell in the National Portrait Gallery]




SIR ROBERT PEEL

1788-1850

1788. Born near Bury, Lancashire, July 5.
1801-4. Harrow School.
1805. Christ Church, Oxford.
1809. M.P. for Cashel, Ireland.
1811. Under-Secretary for the Colonies.
1812-18. Chief Secretary for Ireland.
1817. M.P. for Oxford University.
1819. President of Bullion Committee.
1820. Marriage to Julia, daughter of General Sir John Floyd.
1822-7. Home Secretary in Lord Liverpool's Government.
1827. Canning's short ministry and death.
1828-30. Home Secretary and leader in Commons under the Duke of Wellington.
1829. Catholic Emancipation carried.
1832. Lord Grey's Reform Bill carried.
1834-5. Prime Minister; Tamworth manifesto.
1839. 'Bedchamber Plot': Peel fails to form ministry.
1841-6. Prime Minister a second time.
1844. Peel's Bank Act.
1846. Corn Laws repealed. Peel, defeated on Irish Coercion Bill, resigns.
1850. Accident, June 29, and death, July 2.

SIR ROBERT PEEL

STATESMAN


In the years that lay between the Treaty of Utrecht and the close of the
Napoleonic wars British politics were largely dominated by Walpole and
the two Pitts: their great figures only stand out in stronger relief
because their place was filled for a time by such weak ministers as
Newcastle and Bute, as Grafton and North. In the nineteenth century
there were many gifted statesmen who held the position of first
minister of the Crown. Disraeli and Palmerston by shrewdness and force
of character, Canning and Derby by brilliant oratorical gifts, Russell
and Aberdeen by earnest devotion to public service, were all commanding
figures in their day, whose claims to the chieftainship of a party and
of a government were generally admitted. Gladstone, the most versatile
genius of them all, had abilities second to none; but his place in
history will for long be a subject of acute controversy. He stands too
close to our own time to be fairly judged. Of the others no one had the
same combination of gifts as Sir Robert Peel, no one had in the same
measure that particular knowledge, judgement, and ability which
characterize the _statesman_. His career was the most fruitful, his work
the most enduring: he has left his mark in English history to a degree
which no one of his rivals can equal.

The Peel family can be traced back to the misty days of Danish inroads.
Its original home in England is disputed between Yorkshire and
Lancashire; but as early as the days of Elizabeth the branch from which
our statesman was descended is certainly to be found at Blackburn, and
its members lived for generations as sturdy yeomen of that district. The
first of them known to strike out an independent line was his
grandfather, Robert Peel, who with his brother-in-law, Mr. Haworth,
started the first firm for calico-printing in Lancashire about the year
1760, ceasing the practice of sending the material to be printed in
France. This grandfather was a type of the men who were making the new
England, leading the way in the creation of industries that were to
transform the North and Midlands. The business prospered and he moved
from Blackburn to Burton-on-Trent, where he built three new mills. His
third son, named Robert, was also gifted with resource. Beginning as a
member of the family firm, he soon came to be its chief director, and
added another branch at Tamworth, where later he built the house of
Drayton Manor, the family seat in the nineteenth century. He was a Tory
and a staunch follower of the younger Pitt, who rewarded his services
with a baronetcy in 1800. He too was a typical man of his age and class,
an age of material progress and expansion, a class full of
self-confidence and animated by a spirit of stubborn resistance to
so-called un-English ideas. His eldest son, the third Robert and the
second baronet, is our subject. It is impossible to grasp the springs of
his conduct unless we know what traditions he inherited from his
forbears.

Peel's education was begun at home with a specific purpose. Though his
father had every reason to be satisfied with his own success, for his
son he cherished a yet higher ambition and one which he did not conceal.
He said openly that he intended him to be Prime Minister of his country.
The knowledge of this provoked many jests among the boy's friends and
caused him no slight embarrassment. It conspired with the shyness and
reserve, which were innate in him, to win him from the outset a
reputation for pride and aloofness. If he had not been forced to mix
with those of his own age, and if he had not resolutely set himself to
overcome this feeling, he might have grown into a student and a recluse.
Both at school and college he did 'attend to his book': at Harrow he
roused the greatest hopes. His brilliant schoolfellow, Lord Byron, while
claiming to excel him in general information and history, admits that
Peel was greatly his superior as a scholar. The working of their minds,
now and afterwards, was curiously different. Bagehot[6] illustrates the
contrast by a striking metaphor: Byron's mind, he says, worked by
momentary eruptions of volcanic force from within and then relapsed into
inactivity. Peel on the other hand steadily accumulated knowledge and
opinions, his mind receiving impressions from outward experience like
the alluvial soil deposited by a river in its course. But this is to
anticipate. At Oxford Peel was the first man to win a 'Double First'
(i.e. a first class both in classics and mathematics), in which
distinction Gladstone alone, among our Prime Ministers, equalled him.
But he also found time during the term to indulge in cricket, in rowing,
and in riding, while in the vacation he developed a more marked taste
for shooting, and thus freed himself from the charge of being a mere
bookworm. He was good-looking, rather a dandy in his dress, stiff in his
manner, regular in his habits, conforming to the Oxford standards of
excellence and as yet showing few signs of independence of character.

[Note 6: Walter Bagehot, _Biographical Studies_, p. 17 (Longmans,
1907).]

Peel went into Parliament early, after the fashion of the day. He was
twenty-one when, in 1809, a seat was offered him at Cashel in Ireland.
The system of 'rotten boroughs' had many faults--our text-books of
history do not spare it--but it may claim to have offered an easy way
into Parliament for some men of brilliant talents. Peel's family
connexions and his own training marked out the path for him. It was
difficult for the young Oxford prizeman not to follow Lord Chancellor
Eldon, that stout survival of the high old Tories: it was impossible for
his father's son not to sit behind the successors of Pitt. We shall see
how far his own reasoning powers and clear vision led him from this
path; but the early influences were never quite effaced. His first
patron was Lord Liverpool, to whom he became private secretary in the
following year. This nobleman, described by Disraeli in a famous passage
as an 'arch-mediocrity' was Prime Minister for fifteen years. He owed
his long tenure of office largely to the tolerance with which he allowed
his abler lieutenants to usurp his power: perhaps he owed it still more
to the victories which Wellington was then winning abroad and which
secured the confidence of the country; but at least he seems to have
been a good judge of men. In 1811 he promoted Peel to be
Under-Secretary for the Colonies, and in 1812 to be Chief Secretary for
Ireland. His abilities must have made a great impression to win him such
promotion: he must have had plenty of self-confidence to undertake such
duties, for he was only twenty-four years old. We are accustomed to-day
to under-secretaries of forty or forty-five; but we must remember that
the younger Pitt led the House of Commons at twenty-four and was Prime
Minister at twenty-five.

At Dublin Castle Peel was not expected to deal with the great political
questions which convulsed Parliament at different periods of the
century. He had to administer the law. It was routine work of a tedious
and difficult kind; it involved the close study of facts--not in order
to make a showy speech or to win a case for the moment, but in order to
frame practical measures which would stand the test of time. Peel
eschewed the usual recreations of Dublin society, and flung himself into
his work whole-heartedly. In Roman history we see how Caesar was trained
in the details of administration as quaestor, aedile, praetor, consul,
while Pompeius passed in a lordly progress from one high command to
another; how Caesar voluntarily exiled himself from Rome for ten years
to conquer and develop Gaul, while Cicero bewailed himself over a few
months' absence from the Forum. Of these three famous men only one
proved himself able to guide the ship of state in stormy waters. Analogy
must not be too closely pressed; but we see that, while Canning for all
his ability established no durable influence, and his oratory burnt
itself out after a brief blaze, while Wellington's fame paled year after
year from his inability to control the course of civil strife, Peel's
light burnt brighter every decade, as he rose from office to office and
faced one difficult situation after another with coolness and success.
He stayed at his post in Dublin for six years: he worked at the details
of his office--education, agriculture, and police--and brought in many
practical reforms. His beneficial activity is still better seen in the
years 1821 to 1827 when he was Home Secretary. To-day he is chiefly
remembered as the eponymous hero of our police; but in many other ways
his tenure of the latter office is a landmark in departmental work. It
may be that he originated little himself: that Romilly was the pioneer
in the humanizing of law, that Horner taught him the doctrines of sound
finance, that Huskisson led the way in freeing trade from the shackles
with which it had been bound. But Peel in all these cases lent generous
support and made their cause his own. He had a cool head and a warm
heart, a knowledge of Parliament and an influence in Parliament already
unrivalled. He saw what could be done, and how it could be done, and so
he was able to push through successfully the reforms which his
colleagues initiated. The value of his work in this sphere has never
been seriously contested.

The point on which Peel's enemies fastened in judging his career was the
number of times that he changed his convictions, abandoned his party,
and carried through a measure which he himself had formerly opposed. To
understand his claim to be called a great statesman it is particularly
necessary to study these changes.

The first instance was the Reform of the Currency. Early in the French
wars the London banks had been in difficulties. The Government was
forced to borrow large sums from the Bank of England in order to give
subsidies to our allies, and was unable to pay its debts. The Bank could
not at the same time meet the demands of the Government and the claims
of its private customers. Since a panic might at any moment cause an
unprecedented run on its reserves, Pitt suspended cash payments till six
months after the conclusion of peace. The Bank was thus allowed to
circulate notes without being obliged to pay full cash value for them
immediately on demand, and the purchasing power of these notes tended to
vary far more than that of a metal currency. Also foreigners refused to
accept a pound note in the place of a pound sterling; foreign payments
had to be made in specie, and the gold was rapidly drained abroad. When
the war was over, Horner and other economists began to draw attention to
the bad effect of this on foreign trade and to the varying price of
commodities at home, due to the want of a fixed currency. As Pitt had
allowed the system of inconvertible paper, the Tories generally
applauded and were ready to perpetuate it. The elder Sir Robert Peel had
been always a firm supporter of these views and his son began by
accepting them. He continued to acquiesce in them till his attention was
definitely turned to the subject. In 1819 he was asked to be a member of
a committee of very eminent men, including Canning and Mackintosh, which
was to investigate the question, and he was elected chairman of it. But,
though his verdict was taken for granted by his party, his mind was so
constituted that he could not shut it against evidence. He listened to
arguments, and judged them fairly; and, being by nature unable to palter
with the truth, once he was convinced of it, he threw in all his weight
with the reformers and reported in favour of a return to cash payments.
History has vindicated his judgement, and he himself crowned his
financial work by the famous Bank Act of 1844, passed when he was Prime
Minister.

The second question on which Peel's conduct surprised his colleagues was
that of Catholic Emancipation. Since 1793 Roman Catholic electors had
the parliamentary vote; but, since no Roman Catholic could sit in
Parliament, they had hitherto been content to cast their votes for the
more tolerant of the Protestant candidates. Pitt had failed to induce
George III to grant the Catholics civil equality, and George IV, despite
his liberal professions, took up the same attitude as his father on
succeeding to the throne. But the majority of the Whigs, and some even
of the Tories, such as Castlereagh and Canning, were prepared to make
concessions; and since 1820 the Irish agitation led by O'Connell had
been gaining in strength. Peel had several reasons for being on the
other side. His early training by his father, his friendship with Eldon
and Wellington, his attachment to the Established Church, all had
influence upon him. He saw clearly that Disestablishment would follow
closely in Ireland on the granting of the Catholic demands; and since
1817, when he became Member for Oxford University, he felt bound to
resist this. In taking this line he was no better and no worse than any
other Tory member of the day; and in later times many politicians have
allowed their traditions and prejudices to blind them to the existence
of an Irish problem.

For all that, Peel ought earlier to have recognized the facts, to have
looked ahead and formed a policy. As Chief Secretary for Ireland he had
unrivalled opportunities for studying the whole question; but he did not
let it penetrate beneath the surface of his mind. He had continued to
bring up the same arguments on the few occasions when he spoke at
Westminster, and had buried himself in administrative work. He seems to
have hoped that he could evade it. If the Whigs got a majority and
introduced an Emancipation Bill, he would have satisfied his
constituents by formally opposing the measure and would not have gone
beyond this. As he saw it gradually coming, he satisfied his own
conscience by retiring from Lord Liverpool's Government and by refusing
to join Canning, when he became Prime Minister in 1827. As a private
member he would only be responsible for his own vote, and would not feel
that he was settling the question for others. But Canning died after
holding office only a month, and a Government was formed by Wellington
in which Peel returned to office as Home Secretary and became leader of
the House of Commons. Now he had to pay the penalty for his lack of
foresight, and to deal with the tide of feeling which had been rising
for some years on both sides of the Irish Channel. At least he could see
facts which were before his eyes.

In 1828, before he had been twelve months in office, his decision was
aided by a definite event. A by-election had to be fought in Clare, Mr.
Fitzgerald seeking re-election on joining the Government. Against him
came forward no less a person than Daniel O'Connell himself, the most
eloquent and most popular of the Catholic leaders; and, although under
the existing laws his candidature was void, he received an overwhelming
majority. The bewilderment of the Tories was ludicrous. Fitzgerald
himself wrote, 'The proceedings of yesterday were those of madmen; but
the country is mad.' Peel took a careful view of the situation and
decided on his course. He certainly laid himself open to the charge of
giving way before a breach of the law, and the charge was pressed by the
angry Tories. But his judgement was clearly based on a complete survey
of all the facts. A single event was the candle which lit up the scene,
but by the light of it he surveyed the whole room. He still held to his
view about the dangers of Disestablishment ahead, but he maintained that
a crisis had arisen involving graver dangers at the moment, and that the
statesman must choose the lesser of two evils. There is no doubt that
the situation was critical. The Duke of Wellington and Lord Anglesey (a
Waterloo veteran, who was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland) both had fears of
mutiny in the army; and civil war was to be expected, if O'Connell was
not admitted to the House of Commons. Peel's personal consistency was
one matter; the public welfare was another and a weightier. His first
idea was to retire from office and to lend unofficial support to a
measure which he could not advocate in principle. But the only hope of
breaking down the old Tory opposition lay in the influence of the Tory
ministers; no Whig Government could prevail in the temper of that time;
and Wellington appealed in the strongest terms to Peel to remain in
office and to lead the House. Peel yielded from motives of public policy
and made himself responsible for a measure of Catholic Emancipation,
which he had been pledged to resist.

It was a surrender--an undisguised surrender--and Peel did not, as on
the Bullion Committee, profess to have changed his mind. But it was an
honest surrender carried out in the light of day; and, before Parliament
met, Peel announced his decision to resign his seat at Oxford and to
give his constituents the chance of expressing their opinion of his
conduct. The verdict was not long in doubt: the University, which in
1865 rejected another of its brilliant sons, gave a majority of one
hundred and forty-six against him, and his political connexion with
Oxford was severed. The verdict of posterity has been more liberal. The
chief fault laid to Peel's charge is that he should for so many years
have ignored all signs of the danger which was approaching, and not have
made up his mind in time. He could see the crisis clearly, when it came,
and could put the national interest above everything else: he could not
look far enough ahead.

It was a similar want of foresight that led to the fall of the Tory
Government in 1830. The Reform movement, so long delayed by the great
wars, had been gathering force again. Events in France, where Charles X
was driven from the throne and Louis Philippe proclaimed as
Citizen-king, gave it additional impetus. The famous lawyer Brougham was
thundering against the Government in Parliament, while throughout the
country the platforms from which Radical orators declaimed were
surrounded by eager throngs. The history of the movement cannot be told
here. Its chief actors were the Whigs, who on Wellington's resignation
formed a Government under Earl Grey at the end of 1830. Peel was
fighting a losing fight and he did not show his usual judgement or cool
temper. He opposed the Reform Bill to the last: he was haranguing
violently against it when Black Rod arrived to summon the Commons to the
presence of the King. William IV came down in person, at the instance of
the Whig ministers, to dissolve Parliament and so to stay all
proceedings by which, in the as yet unreformed Parliament, the Bill
might have been defeated. In the General Election of 1831 the Whigs
carried all before them, and in July, when Lord Grey carried the second
reading, he could command a majority of 136. Even then it took three
months of stubborn fighting to vanquish the Tory opposition in the House
of Commons. When the Peers rejected the Bill, the question was raised
whether a Tory Government could be formed; but Peel, however he might
dislike the Bill, could recognize facts, and his refusal to co-operate
in defying public opinion was decisive. Lord Grey returned to office
fortified by the King's promise to make any number of new peers, if
required; and the influence of Wellington was effective in dissuading
the Upper House from further futile resistance. Again Peel had shown his
good sense in accepting the situation. So far as he was concerned, there
was no talk of repeal. He explicitly said that he regarded the question
as 'finally and irrevocably disposed of', and he set to work to adapt
his policy to the new situation.

It might well seem a desperate one for the Tories. Here were three
hundred new members, most of whom had just received their seats from the
Whigs against the direct opposition of their rivals. Gratitude and
self-interest impelled them to support the Whig party; and its leaders,
who had for nearly fifty years been out in the cold shade of opposition,
might count on a long spell of power, especially as the Canningites,
stronger in talents than in numbers, joined them at this juncture.
Brougham had gone to the House of Lords, but three future Prime
Ministers--Stanley (afterwards Lord Derby), Lord John Russell, and
Palmerston--were in the House of Commons serving under Lord Althorp,
who, though gifted with no oratorical talent, by his good sense and
still more by his high character, commanded general respect. On the
other side there was only one figure of the first rank, and that was
Peel. Till 1832 he had not grown to his full stature: the Reformed
Parliament gave him his chance and drew forth all his powers. It
represented a new force in politics. No longer were the members sent to
Westminster by a few great land-holders, by the small market towns, and
by the agricultural labourers. The great industrial districts,
Lancashire, Yorkshire, and the Midlands, were there in the persons of
well-to-do citizens, experienced in business and serious in temper; and
Peel, who was himself sprung from a notable family of this kind, was
eminently the man to lead these classes and to win their confidence. It
was also a gain to him to stand alone. His judgement was ripened, his
confidence firm; and he could dominate his party, while the able and
ambitious leaders on the other side too often clashed with one another.
Above all, in the years 1832 to 1834, he showed that he had patience.
Instead of snatching at occasions to ally himself with O'Connell, who
was in opposition to every Government, and to embarrass the Whigs in a
factious party-spirit, he showed a marked respect for principle. He
supported or opposed the Whig bills purely on their merits, and
gradually trained his party to be ready for the inevitable reaction when
it should come.

By 1834 the tendencies to disruption in the victorious party were
clearly showing themselves. First Stanley, on grounds of policy, and
then Lord Grey, for personal reasons never quite cleared up, resigned
office. Soon after, Lord Althorp left the House of Commons on
succeeding to his father's earldom, and a little later Melbourne, the
new Premier, was unexpectedly dismissed by the King. At the time Peel,
expecting no immediate crisis, was abroad, in Rome; and we have
interesting details of his slow journey home to meet the urgent call of
Wellington, who was carrying on the administration provisionally. The
changes of the last few years were shown by the fact that the Tories
felt bound to choose their Premier from the Lower House. It was
Wellington who recommended Peel for the place which, under the old
conditions, he might have been expected to take himself. On his return,
Peel accepted the task of forming a ministry, and, conscious of the
numerical weakness of his own party, he made overtures to some of the
Whigs. But Stanley and Graham[7] refused to join him, and he had to fall
back on the Tories of Wellington's last Government. Before going to the
country he laid down his principles in the famous Tamworth Manifesto.[8]
This manifesto is important for its acceptance of the changes
permanently made by the Reform Bill, and for the clear exposition of his
attitude towards the important Church questions which were imminent. It
is an excellent document for any one to study who wishes to understand
the evolution of the old Tories into the modern Conservative party.

[Note 7: Sir James Graham, afterwards Home Secretary under Peel in
1841.]

[Note 8: Since his father's death, in 1830, Peel had been member for
Tamworth.]

Peel's first administration was not destined to last long. The Liberal
wave was not spent, and the Tories had little to hope for, at this
moment, from a General Election. As so often happened afterwards, when
the two English parties were evenly balanced, the Irish votes turned the
scale. Peel had been forced into this position by the King: his own
judgement would have led him to wait some years. He fought dexterously
for four months, helped in some measure by Stanley, who had left the
Whigs when they threatened the Established Church in Ireland; but it was
this question which in the end upset him. Lord John Russell, in alliance
with O'Connell, proposed the disendowment of that Church and defeated
Peel by thirty-three votes. It was a question of principle, though it
was raised in a factious way, and subsequent history showed that the
mover, after his tactical victory of the moment, could not effect any
practical solution. Peel was driven to resign. But in this short period,
so far from losing credit, he had won the confidence of his party and
the respect of his opponents; he had put some useful measures on the
Statute Book; and he had shown the country that a new spirit, practical
and enlightened, was growing up in the Tory party, and that there was a
minister capable of utilizing it for the general good.

In the Greville papers and other literature of the time we get many
references to the predominant place which he held in the esteem of the
House of Commons. An entry in Greville's journal for February 1834 shows
Peel's unique power. 'No matter how unruly the House, how impatient or
fatigued, the moment he rises, all is silence, and he is sure of being
heard with profound attention and respect.' Lady Lyttelton,[9] who met
him later at Windsor, shows us another aspect. His readiness and
presence of mind come out in the most trivial matters. When Queen
Victoria suddenly, one evening, issued her command that all who could
dance were to dance, the more elderly guests were much embarrassed. Such
an order was not to Peel's taste. 'He was, in fact, to a close observer,
evidently both shy and cross'; but he was 'much the best figure of all,
so mincing with his legs and feet, his countenance full of the funniest
attempt to look unconcerned and "matter of course".' Another time when
games were improvised in the royal circle, Lady Lyttelton was 'much
struck with the quickness and watchful cautious characteristic sagacity
which Sir Robert showed in learning and playing a new round game'. And
to the ladies-in-waiting he commended himself by his quiet courtesy.
'Sir Robert Peel', we read, 'was in his most conversable mood and so
very agreeable. I never enjoyed an evening more.'

[Note 9: _Correspondence of Sarah, Lady Lyttelton_, by Maud Wyndham
(Murray, 1912).]

Perhaps the best description to show how personally he impressed his
contemporaries at this time is given by Lord Dalling and Bulwer in his
memoir. Sir Robert Peel, he tells us, was 'tall and powerfully built,
his body somewhat bulky for his limbs, his head small and well-formed,
his features regular. His countenance was not what would be generally
called expressive, but it was capable of taking the expression he wished
to give it, humour, sarcasm, persuasion, and command, being its
alternate characteristics. The character of the man was seen more... in
the whole person than in the face. He did not stoop, but he bent rather
forwards; his mode of walking was peculiar, and rather like that of a
cat, but of a cat that was well acquainted with the ground it was moving
over; the step showed no doubt or apprehension, it could hardly be
called stealthy, but it glided on firmly and cautiously, without haste,
or swagger, or unevenness.... The oftener you heard him speak, the more
his speaking gained upon you.... He never seemed occupied with himself.
His effort was evidently directed to convince you, not that he was
_eloquent_, but that he was _right_.... He seemed rather to aim at
gaining the doubtful, than mortifying or crushing the hostile.' These
qualities appealed especially to the practical men of business whom the
Reform Bill had brought into politics. They were suited to the temper of
the day, and his speaking won the favour of the best judges in the
House of Commons. Though he disappointed ardent crusaders like Lord
Shaftesbury by his apparent coldness and calculating caution, he
impressed his fellow members as pre-eminently honest and as anxious to
advance in the most effective manner those causes which his judgement
approved. He was not the man to lead a forlorn hope, but rather the
sagacious commander who directed his troops through a practicable
breach.

He was to be in opposition for another six years; but during these years
the Whigs were in constant difficulties, and, as Greville notes, it was
often obvious that Peel was leading the House from the front Opposition
bench. Had he imitated Russell's conduct in 1834 and devoted his chief
energies to overthrowing the Whigs, he could have found many an
occasion. Sedition in Canada and Jamaica, rivalry with France in the
Levant and with Russia in the Farther East, financial troubles and
deficits, the spread of Chartist doctrine, all combined to embarrass a
Government which had no single will and no concentrated resolution. The
accession of Queen Victoria, in 1837, made no change for the moment. But
Wellington's famous remark that the Tories would have no chance with a
Queen because Peel had no manners and he had no small talk, is only
quoted now because of the falsity of the prediction; both politicians
soon came to form a better estimate of her judgement and public spirit.
It was some years before this could be fairly tested. The Tories, while
improving their position, failed to gain an absolute majority in the
elections, and Peel's want of tact in insisting on the Queen changing
all the ladies of her household delayed his triumph from 1839 to 1841.
Meanwhile he spent his energies in training his party and organizing
their resources. He studied measures and he studied men, and he
gradually gathered round him a body of loyal followers who believed in
their chief and were ready to help him in administrative reform when
the time should come. Among his most devoted adherents was Mr.
Gladstone, at this time more famous as a churchman than as a financier;
and even Mr. Disraeli, for all his eccentricities, accepted Peel's
leadership without question. Few could then foresee the very different
careers that lay before his two brilliant lieutenants.

By 1841 the power of the Whigs was spent. A vote of want of confidence
was carried by Peel, the King dissolved Parliament, and the Tories came
back with a majority of ninety in the new House of Commons. Now begins
the most famous part of Peel's career, that associated with the Repeal
of the Corn Laws, the third of his so-called 'betrayals' of his party.
No action of his has been so variously criticized, none caused such
bitterness in political circles. There is no space here to discuss the
value of Protection or the wisdom of the Anti-Corn-Law League, still
less the merits or demerits of a fixed duty as opposed to a
'sliding-scale'. We are concerned with Peel's conduct and must try to
answer the questions--What were Peel's earlier views on the subject?
What caused him to change these views? Was this change effected
honestly, or was he guilty of abandoning his party in order to retain
office himself?

The Corn Laws, introduced in 1670, re-enacted in 1815, forbade any one
to import corn into England till the price of home-grown corn had
reached eighty shillings a quarter. It is easy to attack a system based
on rigid figures applied to conditions varying widely in every century;
but the idea was that the English farmer should be given a decisive
advantage over his foreign rivals, and only when the price rose to a
prohibitive point might the interest of the consumer be allowed to
outweigh that of the producer. The revival of the old law in 1815 met
with strong opposition. England had greatly changed; the agricultural
area had not been widely increased, but there were many more millions of
mouths to feed, thanks to the growth of population in the industrial
districts. But while in 1815 the House of Commons represented almost
exclusively the land-owning and corn-growing classes, between 1815 and
1840 opposition to their policy had lately been growing and had been
organized, outside Parliament, by the famous league of which Richard
Cobden was the leading spirit. Peel, though he had been brought up by
his father a strong Protectionist and Tory, had been largely influenced
by Huskisson, the most remarkable President of the Board of Trade that
this country has ever seen, and had shown on many occasions that he
grasped the principle of Free Trade as well as any statesman of the day.
The Whigs had left the finances of the country in a very bad state, and
Peel had to take sweeping measures to restore credit. From 1842 to 1845
he brought in Budgets of a Free Trade character, designed to encourage
commerce by remitting taxation, especially on raw material; and he made
up the loss thus incurred by the Treasury, by imposing an income-tax. To
this policy there were two exceptions, the Corn Laws and the Sugar
Duties. On the latter he felt that England, since she had abolished
slave-owning, had a duty to her colonies to see that they did not suffer
by the competition of sugar produced by slave labour elsewhere. On the
former he held that England ought, so far as possible, to produce its
own food and to be self-sufficing; and as a practical man he recognized
that it was too much to expect of the agricultural interest, so strongly
represented in both Houses of Parliament, to pronounce what seemed to be
its death-warrant. But through these years he came more and more to see
that the interest of a class must give way to the interest of the
nation; and his clear intellect was from time to time shaken by the
arguments of the Anti-Corn-Law League and its orators. In 1845 he was
probably expecting that he would tide over this Parliament, thanks to
his Budgets and to good harvests, and that at a general election he
would be able to declare for a change of fiscal policy without going
back on his pledges to the party. Meanwhile his general attitude had
been noted by shrewd observers. Cobden himself in a speech delivered at
Birmingham said, 'There can be no doubt that Sir Robert Peel is at heart
as good a Free Trader as I am. He has told us so in the House of Commons
again and again.'

Among the causes which influenced Peel at the moment two are specially
noteworthy as reminding us of the way in which his opinion was changed
over Catholic Emancipation. Severe critics say that, to retain office,
he surrendered to the agitation of Cobden, as he had surrendered to that
of O'Connell. Undoubtedly the increasing size and success of Cobden's
meetings, which were on a scale unknown before in political agitation,
did cause Peel to consider fully what he had only half considered
before: it did help to force open a door in his mind, and to break down
a water-tight compartment. But Peel's mind, once opened, saw far more
than an agitation and a transfer of votes: it looked at the merits of
the question and surveyed the interest of the whole country. He had seen
that the fall of a Protestant Church was less serious than the loss of
Ireland: he now saw that a shock to the agricultural interest was less
serious than general starvation in the country. And as with the Clare
election, so with the Irish potato famine in 1845: a definite event
arrested his attention and clamoured for instant decision. Peel was as
humane a man as has ever presided over the destinies of this country,
and the picture of Ireland's sufferings was brought forcibly before his
imagination by the reports presented to him and by his own knowledge of
the country. His personal consistency could not be put in the balance
against national distress.

That the manner in which he made the change did give great offence to
his followers, there is no room to doubt. Peel was naturally reserved in
manner and in his Cabinet he occupied a position of such unquestioned
superiority that he had no need of advice to make up his mind, and was
apt to keep matters in his own hand. Whether he was preparing to consult
his colleagues or not, the Irish potato famine forced his hand before he
had done so. When in November 1845 he made suddenly in the Cabinet a
definite proposal to suspend the duties on corn, only three members
supported him. Year after year Peel had opposed the motion brought in by
Mr. Villiers[10] for repeal: only those who had been studying the
situation as closely as Peel and with as clear a vision--and they were
few--could understand this sudden declaration of a change of policy.
After holding four Cabinet councils in one week, winning over some
waverers, but still failing to get a unanimous vote, he expressed a wish
to resign. But the Whigs, owing to personal disagreements, could not
form a ministry and Queen Victoria asked Peel to retain office: it was
evident that he alone could carry through the measure which he believed
to be so urgent, and he steeled himself to face the breach with his own
party. As Lord John Russell had already pledged the Whigs to repeal, the
issue was no longer in doubt; but Peel was not to win the victory
without heavy cost. Disraeli, who had been offended at not being given a
place in the ministry in 1841, came forward, rallied the agricultural
interest, and attacked his leader in a series of bitter speeches,
opening old sores, and charging him with having for the second time
broken his pledges and betrayed his party. The Protectionists could not
defeat the Government. In the Commons the Whig votes ensured a
majority: in the Lords the influence of Wellington triumphed over the
resistance of the more obstinate landowners. The Bill passed its third
reading by ninety-eight votes.

[Note 10: The Right Hon. C. P. Villiers, M.P. for Wolverhampton,
began to advocate repeal in 1837, four years before Cobden entered
Parliament.]

But Peel knew how uncertain was his position in view of the hostility
aroused. At this very time the Irish question was acute, as a Coercion
Bill was under consideration, and this gave his enemies their chance.
The Protectionist Tories made an unprincipled alliance for the moment
with the Irish members; and on the very day when the Repeal of the Corn
Laws passed the House of Lords, the ministry was defeated in the
Commons. The moment of his fall, when Disraeli and the Protectionists
were loudest in their exultation, was the moment of his triumph. It is
the climax of his career. In the long debate on Repeal he had refused to
notice personal attacks: he now rose superior to all personal rancour.
In defeat he bore himself with dignity, and in his last speech as
minister he praised Cobden in very generous terms, giving him the chief
credit for the benefits which the Bill conferred upon his
fellow-countrymen. This speech gave offence to his late colleagues,
Aberdeen, Sidney Herbert, and Gladstone, and was interpreted as being
designed to mark clearly Peel's breach with the Conservative party. The
whole episode is illustrated in an interesting way in the _Life of
Gladstone_. Lord Morley[11] reports a long conversation between the two
friends and colleagues, where Peel declares his intention to act in
future as a private member and to abstain from party politics.
Gladstone, while fully allowing that Peel had earned the right to retire
after such labours ('you have been Prime Minister in a sense in which no
other man has been since Mr. Pitt's time'), pointed out how impossible
it would be for him to carry out his intentions. His personal
ascendancy in Parliament was too great: men must look to him as a
leader. But Peel evidently was at the end of his strength, and had been
suffering acutely from pains in the head, due to an old shooting
accident but intensified by recent hard work. For the moment repose was
essential.

[Note 11: Morley's _Life of Gladstone_, vol. i, pp. 297-300 (cf.
Gladstone's own retirement in 1874).]

It was Gladstone, Peel's disciple and true successor, who seven years
later paid the following tribute to his memory: 'It is easy', he said,
'to enumerate many characteristics of the greatness of Sir Robert Peel.
It is easy to speak of his ability, of his sagacity, of his
indefatigable industry. But there was something yet more admirable...
and that was his sense of public virtue;... when he had to choose
between personal ease and enjoyment, or again, on the other hand,
between political power and distinction, and what he knew to be the
welfare of the nation, his choice was made at once. When his choice was
made, no man ever saw him hesitate, no man ever saw him hold back from
that which was necessary to give it effect.' Though his own political
views changed, Gladstone always paid tribute to the moral influence
which Peel had exercised in political life, purifying its practices and
ennobling its traditions.

For the last four years of his life he was in opposition, but he held a
place of dignity and independence which few fallen ministers have ever
enjoyed. He was the trusted friend and adviser of Queen Victoria and the
Prince Consort; he was often consulted in grave matters by the chiefs of
the Government; his speeches both in the House and in the country
carried greater weight than those of any minister. Despite the
bitterness of the Protectionists he seemed still to have a great future
before him, and in any national emergency the country would unfailingly
have called him to the helm. But on July 29, 1850, when he was just
reaching the age of sixty-two, he had a fall from his horse which
caused very grave injuries, and he only survived three days.

The interest of Peel's life is almost absorbed by public questions. He
was not picturesque like Disraeli; he did not, like Gladstone, live long
enough to be in his lifetime a mythical figure; the public did not
cherish anecdotes about his sayings or doings, nor did he lend himself
to the art of the caricaturist. He was an English gentleman to the
backbone, in his tastes, in his conduct, in his nature. His married life
was entirely happy, he had a few devoted friends, he avoided general
society; he had a genuine fondness for shooting and country life, he was
a judicious patron of art, and his collection of Dutch pictures form
to-day a very precious part of our National Gallery. Just because of his
aloofness, his gravity, the concentration of his energies, he is the
best example that we can study if we want to know how an English
statesman should train himself to do work of lasting value and how he
should bear himself in the hour of trial. Within little more than half a
century three famous politicians, Peel, Gladstone, and Chamberlain, have
split their parties in two by an abrupt change of policy, and their
conduct has been bitterly criticized by those to whom the traditions of
party are dear. It is the glory of British politics that these
traditions remained honourable so long, and no one of these statesmen
broke with them lightly or without regret. For all that, let us be
thankful that from time to time statesmen do arise who are capable of
responding to a still higher call, of following their own individual
consciences and of looking only to what, so far as they can judge, is
the highest interest of the nation.




CHARLES JAMES NAPIER

1782-1853

1782. Born in London, August 10.
1794. Commission in 33rd Regiment.
1800. At Shorncliffe with Sir John Moore.
1809. Wounded and prisoner at Coruña.
1810-11. Peninsula War: Busaco, Fuentes d'Onoro, &c. Lieut.-Colonel, 1811.
1812-13. Bermuda and American War.
1815-17. Military College at Farnham.
1820. Corfu.
1822-30. Cephalonia.
1835. Living quietly in France and England.
1837. Major-General.
1838. K.C.B.
1839. Command in North of England. Chartist agitation.
1841. Command in India at Poona.
1842-7. War and organization in Sind.
1849-50. Commander-in-Chief in India.
1853. Died at Oaklands, near Portsmouth, August 29.

SIR CHARLES NAPIER, G.C.B.

SOLDIER


The famous Napier brothers, Charles, George, and William, came of no
mean parentage. Their father, Colonel the Hon. George Napier, of a
distinguished Scotch family, was remarkable alike for physical strength
and mental ability. In the fervour of his admiration his son Charles
relates how he could 'take a pewter quart and squeeze it flat in his
hand like a bit of paper'. In height 6 feet 3 inches, in person very
handsome, he won the admiration of others besides his sons. He had
served in the American war, but his later years were passed in
organizing work, and he showed conspicuous honesty and ability in
dealing with Irish military accounts. One of his reforms was the
abolition of all fees in his office, by which he reduced his own salary
from £20,000 to £600 per annum, emulating the more famous act of the
elder Pitt as Paymaster-general half a century before. Their mother,
Lady Sarah Lennox, daughter of the Duke of Richmond, had been a reigning
toast in 1760. She had even been courted by George III, and might have
been handed down to history as the mother of princes. In her old age she
was more proud to be the mother of heroes; and her letters still exist,
written in the period of the great wars, to show how a British mother
could combine the Spartan ideal with the tenderest personal affection.

[Illustration: SIR CHARLES NAPIER

From the drawing by Edwin Williams in the National Portrait Gallery]

Their father's appointment involved residence in Ireland from 1785
onwards, and the boys passed their early years at Celbridge in the
neighbourhood of Dublin. Here they were far from the usual amusements
and society of the time, but they were fortunate in their home circle
and in the character of their servants, and they learnt to cherish the
ancient legends of Ireland and to pick up everything that could feed
their innate love of adventure and romance. Close to their doors lived
an old woman named Molly Dunne, who claimed to be one hundred and
thirty-five years of age, and who was ready to fill the children's ears
with tales of past tragedies whenever they came to see her. Sir William
Napier tells us how she was 'tall, gaunt, and with high sharp
lineaments, her eyes fixed in their huge orbs, and her tongue
discoursing of bloody times: she was wondrous for the young and fearful
for the aged'.

Instead of class feeling and narrow interests the boys developed early a
great sympathy for the poor, and a capacity for judging people
independently of rank. Charles Napier himself, born in Whitehall, was
three years old when they moved to Ireland. He was a sickly child, the
one short member of a tall family, but equal to any of them in courage
and resolution. His heroism in endurance of pain was put to a severe
test when he broke his leg at the age of seventeen. It was twice badly
set. He was threatened first by the entire loss of it, next with the
prospect of a crooked leg, but he bore cheerfully the most excruciating
torture in having it straightened by a series of painful experiments,
and in no long time he recovered his activity. In the army he showed his
strength of will by rigid abstinence from drinking and gambling, no easy
feat in those days; and he learned by his father's example to control
all extravagance and to live contentedly on a small allowance. His
earliest enthusiasm among books was for Plutarch's _Lives_, the
favourite reading of so many great commanders. He had many outdoor
tastes: riding, fishing, and shooting, and he was soon familiar with the
country-side. There was no need of classes or prizes to stimulate his
reading, no need of organized games to provide an outlet for his
energies or to fill his leisure time.

The confidence that his father had in the training of his sons is best
shown by the early age at which he put them in responsible positions.
Charles actually received a commission in the 33rd Regiment at the age
of twelve, but he did not see service till he was seventeen. Meanwhile
the young ensign continued his schooling from his father's house at
Celbridge, to which he and his brother returned every evening, sometimes
in the most unconventional manner. Celbridge, like other Irish villages,
had its pigs. The Irish pig is longer in the leg and more active than
his English cousin, and the Napier boys would be seen careering along at
a headlong pace on these strange mounts, with a cheering company of
village boys behind them. They were Protestants among older Roman
Catholic comrades, but they soon became the leaders in the school, and
Charles, despite his youth and small stature, was chosen to command a
school volunteer corps at the age of fourteen. At seventeen he joined
his regiment at Limerick, and for six or seven years he led the life of
a soldier in various garrison towns of southern England, fretting at
inaction, learning what he could, and welcoming any chance of increased
work and danger. At this time his enthusiasm for soldiering was very
variable. In a letter written in 1803 he makes fun of the routine of his
profession, as he was set to practise it, and ends up, 'Such is the
difference between a hero of the present time and the idea of one formed
from reading Plutarch! Yet people wonder I don't like the army!'

But this was a passing mood. When stirring events were taking place, no
one was more full of ardour, and when he came under such a general as
Sir John Moore he expressed himself in a very different tone. In 1805
Moore was commanding at Hythe, and Charles Napier's letters are aglow
with enthusiasm for the great qualities which he showed as an
administrator and army reformer. Like Wolseley seventy or eighty years
later, Moore had the gift of finding the best among his subalterns and
training them in his own excellences. After his own father there was no
one who had so much influence as Moore in the making of Charles Napier.
In 1808 he sailed for the Peninsula with the rank of major, commanding
the 50th Regiment in the colonel's absence; he took an active part in
Moore's famous retreat at Coruña, and in the battle was taken prisoner
after conduct of the greatest gallantry in leading his regiment under
fire. Two months later he was released and again went to the front. In
1810 and 1811 he and his brothers George and William were fighting under
Wellington, and were all so frequently wounded that the family fortunes
became a subject of common talk. On more than one occasion Wellington
himself wrote to Lady Sarah to inform her of the gallantry and
misfortunes of her sons. At Busaco Charles had his jaw broken and was
forced to retire into hospital at Lisbon. In his haste to rejoin the
army, which he did when only half convalescent, he accomplished the feat
of riding ninety miles on one horse in a single day; and in the course
of his ride met two of his brothers being carried down, wounded, to the
base. But in 1811 promotion withdrew Charles Napier from the Peninsula.
A short command in Guernsey was followed by another in Bermuda, which
involved him in the American war. He had little taste for warfare with
men of the same race as himself, and was heartily glad to exchange back
to the 50th in 1813, and to return to England. He started out as a
volunteer to share in the campaign of Waterloo, but all was over before
he could join the army in Flanders, and this part of his soldiering
career ended quietly. He had received far more wounds than honours, and
might well have been discouraged in the pursuit of his profession.

But here we can put to the test how far Napier's expressions of distaste
for the service affected his conduct. He chafed at the inactivity of
peace; but instead of abandoning the army for some more profitable
career, he used his enforced leisure to prepare for further service and
to extend his knowledge of political and military history. He spent the
greater part of three years at the Military College, then established at
Farnham, varying his professional studies with sallies into the domain
of politics, and as a result he developed marked Radical views which he
held through life. His note-books show a splendid grasp of principles
and a close attention to facts; they range from the enforcing of the
death penalty for marauding to the details of cavalry-kit. His Spartan
regime became famous in later years; even now he prescribed a strict
rule, 'a cloak, a pair of shoes, two flannel shirts, and a piece of
soap--these, wrapped up in an oil-skin, must go in the right holster,
and a pistol in the left.' He took no opinions at second hand, but
studied the best authorities and thought for himself; he was as thorough
in self-education as the famous Confederate general 'Stonewall' Jackson,
who every evening sat for an hour, facing a blank wall and reviewing in
his mind the subjects which he had read during the day.

No opportunity for reaping the fruit of these studies and exercising his
great gifts was given him till May 1819. Then he was appointed to the
post of inspecting-officer in the Ionian Islands;[12] and in 1822 he was
appointed Military Resident in Cephalonia, the largest of these islands,
a pile of rugged limestone hills, scantily supplied with water, and
ruined by years of neglect and the oppression of Turkish pashas. So
began what was certainly the happiest, and perhaps the most fruitful,
period in Charles Napier's life. It was not strictly military work, but,
without the authority which his military rank gave him and without the
despotic methods of martial law, little could have been achieved in the
disordered state of the country. The whole episode is a good example of
how a well-trained soldier of original mind can, when left to himself,
impress his character on a semi-civilized people, and may be compared
with the work of Sir Harry Smith in South Africa, or Sir Henry Lawrence
in the Punjab. The practical reforms which he initiated in law, in
commerce, in agriculture, are too numerous to mention. 'Expect no
letters from me', he writes to his mother, 'save about roads. No going
home for me: it would be wrong to leave a place where so much good is
being done.... My market-place is roofed. My pedestal is a tremendous
job, but two months more will finish that also. My roads will not be
finished by me.' And again, 'I take no rest myself and give nobody else
any.' To his superiors he showed himself somewhat impracticable in
temper, and he was certainly exacting to his subordinates, though
generous in his praise of those who helped him. He was compassionate to
the poor and vigorous in his dealings with the privileged classes; and
he gave the islanders an entirely new conception of justice. When he
quitted the island after six years of office he left behind him two new
market-places, one and a half miles of pier, one hundred miles of road
largely blasted out of solid rock, spacious streets, a girls' school,
and many other improvements; and he put into the natives a spirit of
endeavour which outlived his term of office. One sign of the latter was
that, after his departure, some peasants yearly transmitted to him the
profits of a small piece of land which he had left uncared for, without
disclosing the names of those whose labours had earned it.

[Note 12: Ceded to Great Britain in 1815 and given by her in 1864 to
Greece.]

During this period, in visits to Corinth and the Morea, he worked out
strategic plans for keeping the Turks out of Greece. He also made
friends with Lord Byron, who came out in 1823 to help the Greek patriots
and to meet his death in the swamps of Missolonghi. Byron conceived the
greatest admiration for Napier's talents and believed him to be capable
of liberating Greece, if he were given a free hand. But this was not to
be. Reasons of State and petty rivalries barred the way to the
appointment of a British general, though it might have set the name of
Napier in history beside those of Bolivar and Garibaldi; for he would
have identified himself heart and soul with such a cause, and, in the
opinion of many good judges, would have triumphed over the difficulties
of the situation.

From 1830 to 1839 there is little to narrate. The gifts which might have
been devoted to commanding a regiment, to training young officers, or to
ruling a distant province, were too lightly rated by the Government, and
he spent his time quietly in England and France educating his two
daughters,[13] interesting himself in politics, and continuing to learn.
It was the political crisis in England which called him back to active
life. The readjustment of the labour market to meet the use of
machinery, and the occurrence of a series of bad harvests had caused
widespread discontent, and the Chartist movement was at its height in
1839. Labourers and factory owners were alarmed; the Government was
besieged with petitions for military protection at a hundred points, and
all the elements of a dangerous explosion were gathered together. At
this critical time Charles Napier was offered the command of the troops
in the northern district, and amply did he vindicate the choice. By the
most careful preparation beforehand, by the most consummate coolness in
the moment of danger, he rode the storm. He saw the danger of billeting
small detachments of troops in isolated positions; he concentrated them
at the important points. He interviewed alarmed magistrates, and he
attended, in person and unarmed, a large gathering of Chartists. To all
he spoke calmly but resolutely. He made it clear to the rich that he
would not order a shot to be fired while peaceful measures were
possible; he made it equally clear to the Chartists that he would
suppress disorder, if it arose, promptly and mercilessly. With only four
thousand troops under his command to control all the industrial
districts of the north, Newcastle and Manchester, Sheffield and
Nottingham, he did his work effectually without a shot being fired. 'Ars
est celare artem': and just because of his success, few observers
realized from how great a danger the community had been preserved.

[Note 13: His first wife, whom he married in 1827, died in 1832. He
married again in 1835.]

Thus he had proved his versatile talents in regimental service in the
Peninsula, in the reclamation of an eastern island from barbarism, and
in the control of disorder at home. It was not till he had reached the
age of sixty that he was to prove these gifts in the highest sphere, in
the handling of an army in the field and in the direction of a campaign.
But the offer of a command in India roused his indomitable spirit, the
more so as trouble was threatening on the north-west frontier. An
ill-judged interference in Afgh[=a]nist[=a]n had in 1841 caused the
massacre near K[=a]bul of one British force: other contingents were
besieged in Jal[=a]l[=a]b[=a]d and Ghazni, and were in danger of a
similar fate, and the prestige of British arms was at its lowest in the
valley of the Indus. Lord Ellenborough, the new Viceroy, turned to
Charles Napier for advice, and in April 1842 he was given the command in
Upper and Lower Sind, the districts comprising the lower Indus valley.
It was his first experience of India and his first command in war. He
was sixty years old and he had not faced an enemy's army in the field
since the age of twenty-five. As he said, 'I go to command in Sind with
no orders, no instructions, no precise line of policy given! How many
men are in Sind? How many soldiers to command? No one knows!... They
tell me I must form and model the staff of the army altogether! Feeling
myself but an apprentice in Indian matters, I yet look in vain for a
master.' But the years of study and preparation had not been in vain,
and responsibility never failed to call out his best qualities. It was
not many months before British officers and soldiers, Baluch chiefs and
Sindian peasants owned him as a master--such a master of the arts of war
and peace as had not been seen on the Indus since the days of Alexander
the Great.

First, like a true pupil of Sir John Moore, he set to work thoroughly to
drill his army. He experimented in person with British muskets and
Mar[=a]th[=a] matchlocks, and reassured his soldiers on the superiority
of the former. He experimented with rockets to test their efficiency;
and, with his usual luck in the matter of wounds, he had the calf of
his leg badly torn by one that burst. He would put his hand to any
labour and his life to any risk, if so he might stir the activity of
others and promote the cause. He convinced himself, by studying the
question at first hand, that the Baluch Am[=i]rs, who ruled the country,
were not only aliens but oppressors of the native peasantry, not only
ill-disposed to British policy, but actively plotting with the
hill-tribes beyond the Indus, and at the right moment he struck.

The danger of the situation lay in the great extent of the country, in
the difficulty of marching in such heat amid the sand, and in the
possibility of the Am[=i]rs escaping from his grasp and taking refuge in
fortresses in the heart of the desert, believed to be inaccessible. His
first notable exploit was a march northwards one hundred miles into the
desert to capture Im[=a]mghar; his last, crowning a memorable sixteen
days, was a similar descent upon Omarkot, which lay one hundred miles
eastward beyond M[=i]rpur. These raids involved the organization of a
camel corps, the carrying of water across the desert, and the greatest
hardships for the troops, all of which Charles Napier shared
uncomplainingly in person. Under his leadership British regiments and
Bombay sepoys alike did wonders. Who could complain for himself when he
saw the spare frame of the old general, his health undermined by fever
and watches, his hooked nose and flashing eye turned this way and that,
riding daily at their head, prepared to stint himself of all but the
barest necessaries and to share every peril? He had begun the campaign
in January; the crowning success was won on April 6. Between these dates
he fought two pitched battles at Mi[=a]ni and Dabo, and completely broke
the power of the Am[=i]rs.

Mi[=a]ni (February 17, 1843) was the most glorious day in his life. With
2,400 troops, of whom barely 500 were Europeans, he attacked an army
variously estimated between 20,000 and 40,000. Drawn up in a position,
which they had themselves chosen, on the raised bank of a dry river bed,
the Baluch[=i] seemed to have every advantage on their side. But the
British troops, advancing in echelon from the right, led by the 22nd
Regiment, and developing an effective musketry fire, fought their way up
to the outer slope of the steep bank and held it for three hours. Here
the 22nd, with the two regiments of Bombay sepoys on their left,
trusting chiefly to the bayonet, but firing occasional volleys, resisted
the onslaught of Baluch[=i] swordsmen in overwhelming numbers. During
nearly all this time the two lines were less than twenty yards apart,
and Napier was conspicuous on horseback riding coolly along the front of
the British line. The matchlocks, with which many of the Baluch[=i] were
armed, seem to have been ineffective; their national weapon was the
sword. The tribesmen were grand fighters but badly led. They attacked in
detachments with no concerted action. For all that, the British line
frequently staggered under the weight of their courageous rushes, and
irregular firing went on across the narrow gap. Napier says, 'I expected
death as much from our own men as from the enemy, and I was much singed
by our fire--my whiskers twice or thrice so, and my face peppered by
fellows who, in their fear, fired over all heads but mine, and nearly
scattered my brains'. Not even Scarlett at Balaclava had a more
miraculous escape. This exposure of his own person to risk was not due
to mere recklessness. In his days at the Royal Military College he had
carefully considered the occasions when a commander must expose himself
to get the best out of his men; and from Coruña to Dabo he acted
consistently on his principles. Early in the battle he had cleverly
disposed his troops so as to neutralize in some measure the vast
numerical superiority of the enemy; his few guns were well placed and
well served. At a critical moment he ordered a charge of cavalry which
broke the right of their position and threatened their camp; but the
issue had to be decided by hard fighting, and all depended on the morale
which was to carry the troops through such a punishing day.

The second battle was fought a month later at Dabo, near
Hyder[=a]b[=a]d. The most redoubtable of the Am[=i]rs, Sher Muhammad,
known as 'the Lion of M[=i]rpur', had been gathering a force of his own
and was only a few miles distant from Mi[=a]ni when that battle was
fought. Napier could have attacked him at once; but, to avoid bloodshed,
he was ready to negotiate. 'The Lion' only used the respite to collect
more troops, and was soon defying the British with a force of 25,000
men, full of ardour despite their recent defeat. Indeed Napier
encouraged their confidence by spreading rumours of the terror
prevailing in his own camp. He did not wish to exhaust his men
needlessly by long marches in tropical heat; so he played a waiting
game, gathering reinforcements and trusting that the enemy would soon
give him a chance of fighting. This chance came on March 24, and with a
force of 5,000 men and 19 guns Napier took another three hours to win
his second battle and to drive Sher Muhammad from his position with the
loss of 5,000 killed. The British losses were relatively trifling,
amounting to 270, of whom 147 belonged to the sorely tried 22nd
Regiment. They were all full of confidence and fought splendidly under
the general's eye. 'The Lion' himself escaped northwards, and two months
of hard marching and clever strategy were needed to prevent him stirring
up trouble among the tribesmen. The climate took toll of the British
troops and even the general was for a time prostrated by sunstroke; but
the operations were successful and the last nucleus of an army was
broken up by Colonel Jacob on June 15. Sher Muhammad ended his days
ignominiously at Lahore, then the capital of the Sikhs, having outlived
his fame and sunk into idleness and debauchery.

Thus in June 1843 the general could write in his diary: 'We have taught
the Baluch that neither his sun nor his desert nor his jungles nor his
nullahs can stop us. He will never face us more.' But Charles Napier's
own work was far from being finished. He had to bind together the
different elements in the province, to reconcile chieftain and peasant
Baluch, Hindu, and Sindian, to living together in amity and submitting
to British rule; and he had to set up a framework of military and
civilian officers to carry on the work. He held firmly the principle
that military rule must be temporary. For the moment it was more
effective; but it was his business to prepare the new province for
regular civil government as soon as was feasible. He showed his
ingenuity in the personal interviews which he had with the chieftains;
and the ascendancy which he won by his character was marked. Perhaps his
qualities were such as could be more easily appreciated by orientals
than by his own countrymen, for he was impetuous, self-reliant, and
autocratic in no common degree. He was only one of a number of great
Englishmen of this century whose direct personal contact with Eastern
princes was worth scores of diplomatic letters and paper constitutions.
Such men were Henry Lawrence, John Nicholson, and Charles Gordon; in
them the power of Great Britain was incarnate in such a form as to
strike the imagination and leave an ineffaceable impression. Many of the
Am[=i]rs wished to swear allegiance to a governor present in the flesh
rather than to the distant queen beyond the sea, so strongly were they
impressed by Napier's personal character.

He did not forget his own countrymen, least of all that valued friend
'Thomas Atkins' and his comrade the sepoy. By the erection of spacious
barracks he made the soldier's life more pleasant and his health more
secure; and in a hundred other ways he showed his care and affection for
them. In return few British generals have been so loved by the rank and
file. He also gave much thought to material progress, to strengthening
the fortress of Hyder[=a]b[=a]d, to developing the harbour at
Kar[=a]chi, and, above all, to enriching the peasants by irrigation
schemes. It was the story of Cephalonia on a bigger scale; but Napier
was now twenty years older, overwhelmed with work, and he could give
less attention to details. He did his best to find subordinates after
his own heart, men who would 'scorn delights and live laborious days'.
'Does he wear varnished boots?' was a typical question that he put to a
friend in Bombay, when a new engineer was commended to him. His own
rewards were meagre. The Grand Cross of the Bath and the colonelcy of
his favourite regiment, the 22nd, were all the recognition given for a
campaign whose difficulties were minimized at home because he had
mastered them so triumphantly.

Two other achievements belong to the period of his government of Sind.
The campaign against the tribes of the Kachhi Hills, to the north-west
of his province, rendered necessary by continued marauding, shows all
his old mastery of organization. Any one who has glanced into Indian
history knows the danger of these raids and the bitter experience which
our Indian army has gained in them. In less than two months
(January-March 1845) Napier had led five thousand men safely over
burning deserts and through most difficult mountain country, had by
careful strategy driven the marauders into a corner, forcing them to
surrender with trifling loss, and had made an impression on the hill
chieftains which lasted for many a year. This work, though slighted by
the directors of the Company, received enthusiastic praise from such
good judges of war as Lord Hardinge and the Duke of Wellington. The
second emergency arose when the first Sikh war broke out in the Punjab.
Napier felt so confident in the loyalty of his newly-pacified province
that within six weeks he drew together an army of 15,000 men, and took
post at Rohri, ready to co-operate against the Sikhs from the south,
while Lord Hardinge advanced from the east. Before he could arrive, the
decisive battle had been fought, and all he was asked to do was to
assist in a council of war at Lahore. The mistakes made in the campaign
had been numerous. No one saw them more clearly than Napier, and no one
foretold more accurately the troubles which were to follow. For all
that, he wrote in generous admiration of Lord Hardinge the Viceroy and
Lord Gough the Commander-in-Chief at a time when criticism and personal
bitterness were prevalent in many quarters.

After this he returned to Sind with health shattered and a longing for
rest. He continued to work with vigour, but his mind was set on
resignation; and the bad relations which had for years existed between
him and the directors embittered his last months. No doubt he was
impatient and self-willed, inclined to take short cuts through the
system of dual control[14] and to justify them by his own single-hearted
zeal for the good of the country. But the directors had eyes for all the
slight irregularities, which are inevitable in the work of an original
man, and failed entirely to estimate the priceless services that he
rendered to British rule. In July 1847 he resigned and returned to
Europe; but even now the end was not come. 'The tragedy must be re-acted
a year or two hence,' he had written in March 1846, seeing clearly that
the Sikhs had not been reconciled to British rule. In February 1849 the
directors were forced by the national voice to send him out to take
supreme military command and to retrieve the disasters with which the
second Sikh war began. They were very reluctant to do so, and Napier
himself had little wish for further exertions in so thankless a service.
But the Duke of Wellington himself appealed to him, the nation spoke
through all its organs, and he could not put his own wishes in the scale
against the demands of public service.

[Note 14: The dual control of British India by the Crown and the
East India Company lasted from 1778 to 1858.]

He made all speed and reached Calcutta early in May, but he found no
enemy to fight. The issue had been decided by Lord Gough and the hard
fighting of Chili[=a]nw[=a]la. He had been cheated by fortune, as in
1815, and he never knew the joy of battle again. He was accustomed to
settle everything as a dictator; he found it difficult to act as part of
an administrative machine. He was unfamiliar with the routine of Indian
official life, and he was now growing old; he was impatient of forms,
impetuous in his likes and dislikes, outspoken in praise and
condemnation. His relations with the masterful Viceroy, Lord Dalhousie,
were soon clouded; and though he delighted in the friendship of Colin
Campbell and many other able soldiers, he was too old to adapt himself
to new men and new measures. In 1850 the rumblings of the storm, which
was to break seven years later, could already be heard, and Napier had
much anxiety over the mutinous spirit rising in the sepoy regiments. He
did his best to go to the bottom of the trouble and to establish
confidence and friendly relations between British and natives, but he
had not time enough to achieve permanent results, and he was often
fettered by the regulations of the political service. His predictions
were as striking now as in the first Sikh war; but he was not content to
predict and to sit idle. He was unwearied in working for the reform of
barracks, though his plans were often spoiled by the careless execution
of others. He was urgent for a better tone among regimental officers
and for more consideration on their part towards their soldiers. If more
men in high position had similarly exerted themselves, the mutiny would
have been less widespread and less fatal. His resignation was due to a
dispute with Lord Dalhousie about the sepoys' pay. Napier acted _ultra
vires_ in suspending on his own responsibility an order of the
Government, because he believed the situation to be critical, while the
Viceroy refused to regard this as justified. His departure, in December
1850, was the signal for an outburst of feeling among officers,
soldiers, and all who knew him. His return by way of Sind was a
triumphal progress.

He had two years to live when he set foot again in England, and most of
this was spent at Oaklands near Portsmouth. His health had been ruined
in the public service; but he continued to take a keen interest in
passing events and to write on military subjects to Colin Campbell and
other friends. At the same time he devoted much of his time to his
neighbours and his farm. In 1852 he attended as pall-bearer at the Duke
of Wellington's funeral; his own was not far distant. His brother, Sir
William, describes the last scene thus: 'On the morning of August 29th
1853, at 5 o'clock, he expired like a soldier on a naked camp bedstead,
the windows of the room open and the fresh air of Heaven blowing on his
manly face--as the last breath escaped, Montagu McMurdo (his
son-in-law), with a sudden inspiration, snatched the old colours of the
22nd Regiment, the colour that had been borne at Mi[=a]ni and
Hyder[=a]b[=a]d, and waved them over the dying hero. Thus Charles Napier
passed from the world.'

He was a man who roused enthusiastic devotion and provoked strong
resentment. Like Gordon, he was a man who could rule others, but could
not be ruled; and his official career left many heart-burnings behind.
His equally passionate brother, Sir William, who wrote his life, took
up the feud as a legacy and pursued it in print for many years. It is
regrettable that such men cannot work without friction; but in all
things it was devotion to the public service, and not personal ambition,
that carried Charles Napier to such extremes. From his youth he had
trained himself to such a pitch of self-denial and ascetic rigour that
he could not make allowance for the frailties of the average man. His
keen eye and swift brain made him too impatient of the shortcomings of
conscientious officials. He was ready to work fifteen hours a day when
the need came; he was able to pierce into the heart of a matter while
others would be puzzling round the fringes of it. Rarely in his long and
laborious career did an emergency arise capable of bringing out all his
gifts; and his greatest exploits were performed on scenes unfamiliar to
the mass of his fellow countrymen. But a few opinions can be given to
show that he was rated at his full value by the foremost men of the day.

Perhaps the most striking testimony comes from one who never saw him; it
was written three years after his death, when his brother's biography
appeared. It was Carlyle, the biographer of Cromwell and Frederick the
Great, the most famous man of letters of the day, who wrote in 1856:
'The fine and noble qualities of the man are very recognizable to me;
his piercing, subtle intellect turned all to the practical, giving him
just insight into men and into things; his inexhaustible, adroit
contrivances; his fiery valour; sharp promptitude to seize the good
moment that will not return. A lynx-eyed, fiery man, with the spirit of
an old knight in him; more of a hero than any modern I have seen for a
long time.' A second tribute comes from one who had known him as an
officer and was a supreme judge of military genius. Wellington was not
given to extravagant words, but on many occasions he expressed himself
in the warmest terms about Napier's talents and services. In 1844,
speaking of the Sind campaign in the House of Lords, he said: 'My Lords,
I must say that, after giving the fullest consideration to these
operations, I have never known any instance of an officer who has shown
in a higher degree that he possesses all the qualities and
qualifications necessary to enable him to conduct great operations.' In
the House of Commons at the same time Sir Robert Peel--the ablest
administrative statesman of that generation, who had read for himself
some of Napier's masterly dispatches--said: 'No one ever doubted Sir
Charles Napier's military powers; but in his other character he does
surprise me--he is possessed of extraordinary talent for civil
administration.' Again, he speaks of him as 'one of three brothers who
have engrafted on the stem of an ancient and honourable lineage that
personal nobility which is derived from unblemished private character,
from the highest sense of personal honour, and from repeated proofs of
valour in the field, which have made their name conspicuous in the
records of their country'.

Indifferent as Charles Napier was to ordinary praise or blame, he would
have appreciated the words of such men, especially when they associated
him with his brothers; but perhaps he would have been more pleased to
know how many thousands of his humble fellow countrymen walked to his
informal funeral at Portsmouth, and to know that the majority of those
who subscribed to his statue in Trafalgar Square were private soldiers
in the army that he had served and loved.

[Illustration: LORD SHAFTESBURY

From the painting by G. F. Watts in the National Portrait Gallery]




ANTHONY ASHLEY COOPER

SEVENTH EARL OF SHAFTESBURY

1801-85


1801. Born in Grosvenor Square, London, April 28.
1811. His father succeeds to the earldom. He himself becomes Lord Ashley.
1813-17. Harrow.
1819-22. Christ Church, Oxford.
1826. M.P. for Woodstock.
1828. Commissioner of India Board of Control.
1829. Chairman of Commission for Lunatic Asylums.
1830. Marries Emily, daughter of fifth Earl Cowper.
1832. Takes up the cause of the Ten Hours Bill or Factory Act.
1833. M.P. for Dorset.
1836. Founds Church Pastoral Aid Society.
1839. Founds Indigent Blind Visiting Society.
1840. Takes up cause of Boy Chimney-sweepers.
1842. Mines and Collieries Bill carried.
1843. Joins the Ragged School movement.
1847. Ten Hours Bill finally carried.
1847. M.P. for Bath.
1848. Public Health Act. Chairman of Board of Health.
1851. President of British and Foreign Bible Society.
1851. Succeeds to the earldom.
1855. Lord Palmerston twice offers him a seat in the Cabinet.
1872. Death of Lady Shaftesbury.
1884. Receives the Freedom of the City of London.
1885. Dies at Folkestone, October 1.

LORD SHAFTESBURY

PHILANTHROPIST


The word 'Philanthropist' has suffered the same fate as many other words
in our language. It has become hackneyed and corrupted; it has taken a
professional taint; it has almost become a byword. We are apt to think
of the philanthropist as an excitable, contentious creature, at the
mercy of every fad, an ultra-radical in politics, craving for notoriety,
filled with self-confidence, and meddling with other people's business.
Anthony Ashley Cooper, the greatest philanthropist of the nineteenth
century, was of a different type. By temper he was strongly
conservative. He always loved best to be among his own family; he was
fond of his home, fond of the old associations of his house. To come out
into public life, to take his place in Parliament or on the platform, to
be mixed up in the wrangling of politics was naturally distasteful to
him. It continually needed a strong effort for him to overcome this
distaste and to act up to his sense of duty. It is only when we remember
this that we can do justice to his lifelong activity, and to the high
principles which bore him up through so many efforts and so many
disappointments. For himself he would submit to injustice and be still:
for his fellow countrymen and for his religion he would renew the battle
to the last day of his life.

His childhood was not happy. His parents had little sympathy with
children, his father being absorbed in the cares of public life, his
mother given up to society pleasures. He had three sisters older than
himself, but no brother or companion, and he was left largely to
himself. At the age of seven he went to a preparatory school, where he
was made miserable by the many abuses which flourished there; and it was
not till he went to Harrow at the age of twelve that he began to enjoy
life. He had few of the indulgences which we associate with the early
days of those who are born heirs to high position. But, thus thrown back
on himself, the boy nurtured strong attachments, for the old housekeeper
who first showed him tenderness at home, for the school where he had
learnt to be happy, and for the Dorset home, which was to be throughout
his life the pole-star of his affections. The village of Wimborne St.
Giles lies some eight miles north of Wimborne, in Dorset, on the edge of
Cranborne Forest, one of the most beautiful and unspoiled regions in the
south of England, which 'as late as 1818 contained twelve thousand deer
and as many as six lodges, each of which had its walk and its ranger'.
Here he wandered freely in his holidays for many years, giving as yet
little promise of an exceptional career; here you may find in outlying
cottages those who still treasure his memory and keep his biography
among the few books that adorn their shelves.

From Harrow, Lord Ashley went at the age of sixteen to read for two
years with a clergyman in Derbyshire; in 1819 he went to Christ Church,
Oxford, and three years later succeeded in taking a first class in
classics. He had good abilities and a great power of concentration.
These were to bear fruit one day in the gathering of statistics, in the
marshalling of evidence, and in the presentation of a case which needed
the most lucid and most laborious advocacy.

He came down from Oxford in 1822, but did not go into Parliament till
1826, and for the intervening years there is little to chronicle. In
those days it was usual enough for a young nobleman to take up politics
when he was barely of age, but Lord Ashley needed some other motive than
the custom of the day. It is characteristic of his whole life that he
responded to a call when there was a need, but was never in a hurry to
put himself forward or to aim at high position. We have a few of his own
notes from this time which show the extent of his reading, and still
more, the depth of his reflections. As with Milton, who spent over five
years at Cambridge and then five more in study and retirement at Horton,
the long years of self-education were profitable and left their mark on
his life. His first strong religious impulse he himself dates back to
his school-days at Harrow, when (as is now recorded in a mural tablet
on the spot) in walking up the street one day he was shocked by the
indignities of a pauper funeral. The drunken bearers, staggering up the
hill and swearing over the coffin, so appalled him that the sight
remained branded on his memory and he determined to devote his life to
the service of the poor. But one such shock would have achieved little,
if the decision had not been strengthened by years of thought and
resolution. His tendency to self-criticism is seen in the entry in his
diary for April, 1826 (his twenty-fifth birthday). He blames himself for
indulging in dreams and for having performed so little; but he himself
admits that the visions were all of a noble character, and we know what
abundant fruit they produced in the sixty years of active effort which
were to follow. The man who a year later could write sincerely in his
diary, 'Immortality has ceased to be a longing with me. I desire to be
useful in my generation,' had been little harmed by a few years of
dreaming dreams, and had little need to be afraid of having made a false
start in life.

When he entered the House of Commons as member for Woodstock in 1826,
Lord Ashley had strong Conservative instincts, a fervid belief in the
British constitution, and an unbounded admiration for the Duke of
Wellington, whose Peninsula victories had fired his enthusiasm at
Harrow. It was to his wing of the Conservative party that Ashley
attached himself; and it was the duke who, succeeding to the premiership
on the premature death of Canning, gave him his first office, a post on
the India Board of Control. The East India Company with its board of
directors (abolished in 1858) still ruled India, but was since 1778
subject in many ways to the control of the British Parliament, and the
board to which Lord Ashley now belonged exercised some of the functions
since committed to the Secretary of State for India. He set himself
conscientiously to study the interests of India, but over the work of
his department he had little chance of winning distinction. In fact his
first prominent speech was on the Reform of Lunatic Asylums, not an easy
subject for a new member to handle. He was diffident in manner and
almost inaudible. Without the kindly encouragement of friends he might
have despaired of future success; but his sincerity in the cause was
worth more than many a brilliant speech. The Bill was carried, a new
board was constituted, and of this Lord Ashley became chairman in 1829,
and continued to hold the office till his death fifty-six years later.
This was the first of the burdens that he took upon himself without
thought of reward, and so is worthy of special mention, though it never
won the fame of his factory legislation. But it shows the character of
the man, how ready he was to step into a post which meant work without
remuneration, drudgery without fame, prejudice and opposition from all
whose interests were concerned in maintaining the abuses of the past.

It was this spirit which led him in 1836 to take up the Church Pastoral
Aid Society,[15] in 1839 to found the Indigent Blind Visiting Society,
in 1840 to champion the cause of chimney-sweeps, and in all these cases
to continue his support for fifty years or more. We are accustomed
to-day to 'presidents' and 'patrons' and a whole broadsheet of
complimentary titles, to which noblemen give their names and often give
little else. Lord Ashley understood such an office differently. He was
regular in attendance at meetings, generous in giving money, unflinching
in his advocacy of the cause. We shall see this more fully in dealing
with the two most famous crusades associated with his name.

[Note 15: To help church work by adding to the number of clergy.]

Though these growing labours began early to occupy his time, we find the
record of his life diversified by other claims and other interests. In
1830 he married Emily, daughter of Lord Cowper, who bore him several
children, and who shared all his interests with the fullest sympathy;
and henceforth his greatest joys and his deepest sorrows were always
associated with his family life. At home his first hobby was astronomy.
At the age of twenty-eight he was ardently devoted to it and would spend
all his leisure on it for weeks together, till graver duties absorbed
his time. But he was no recluse, and all through his life he found
pleasure in the society of his friends and in paying them visits in
their homes. Many of his early visits were paid to the Iron Duke at
Strathfieldsaye; in later life no one entertained him more often than
Lord Palmerston, with whom he was connected by marriage. He was the
friend and often the guest of Queen Victoria, and in his twenty-eighth
year he is even found as a guest at the festive board of George IV.
'Such a round of laughing and pleasure I never enjoyed: if there be a
hospitable gentleman on earth it is His Majesty.' And at all times he
was ready to mix freely and on terms of social equality with all who
shared his sympathies, dukes and dustmen, Cabinet ministers and
costermongers.

In the holiday season he delighted to travel. In his journals he sets
down the impressions which he felt among the pictures and churches of
Italy, and in the mountains of Germany and Switzerland; he loves to
record the friendliness of the greetings which he met among the
peasantry of various lands. When he talked to them no one could fail to
see that he was genuinely interested in them, that he wanted to know
their joys and their sorrows, and to enrich his own knowledge by
anything that the humblest could tell him. Still more did he delight in
Scotland, where he had many friends. He was of the generation
immediately under the spell of the 'Wizard of the North', and the whole
country was seen through a veil of romantic and historical association.
There he went nearly every year, to Edinburgh, to Roslin, to Inveraray,
to the Trossachs, and to a hundred other places--and if his heart was
stirred with the glories of the past, his eye was quick to 'catch the
manners living as they rise'. As he commented caustically at Rome on
'the church lighted up and decorated like a ball-room--the bishop with a
stout train of canons, listening to the music precisely like an opera',
so at Newbattle he criticizes the coldness of the kirk, 'all is silent
save the minister, who discharges the whole ceremony and labours under
the weight of his own tautologies'. His bringing up had been in the
Anglican church; he was devoted to her liturgy, her congregational
worship, her moderation and simplicity combined with reverence and
warmth. Although these travels were but interludes in his busy life,
they show that it was not for want of other tastes and interests of his
own that his life was dedicated to laborious service. He was very human
himself, and there were few aspects of humanity which did not attract
him.

With his father relations were very difficult. As his interest in social
questions grew, his attention was naturally turned on the poor nearest
to his own doors, the agricultural labourers of Dorset. Even in those
days of low wages Dorset was a notorious example quoted on many a
Radical platform: the wages of the farm labourers were frequently as low
as seven shillings a week, and the conditions in which they had often to
bring up a large family of children were deplorable. If Lord Ashley had
not himself felt the shame of their poverty, their bad housing and their
other hardships, there were plenty of opponents ready to force them on
his notice in revenge for his having exposed their own sores. He was
made responsible for abuses which he could not remedy. While his father,
a resolute Tory of the old type, still lived, the son was unable to
stir. He sedulously tried to avoid all bitterness; but he could not,
when publicly challenged, avoid stating his own views about fair wages
and fair conditions of living, and his father took offence. For years it
was impossible for the son to come under his father's roof. When the old
earl died in 1851, his son lost no time in proving his sincerity as a
reformer; but meanwhile he had to go into the fray against the
manufacturers with his arms tied behind his back and submit to taunts
which he little deserved. That he could carry on this struggle for so
many years, without embittering the issues, and without open exposure of
the family quarrel, shows the strength of character which he had gained
by years of religious discipline and self-control.

Politics proper played but a small part in his career. The politicians
found early that he was not of the 'available' type--that he would not
lend himself to party policy or compromise on any matter which seemed to
him of national interest. Such political posts as were offered to him
were largely held out as a bait to silence him, and to prevent his
bringing forward embarrassing measures which might split the party.
Ashley himself found how much easier it was for him to follow a single
course when he was an independent member. Reluctantly in 1834 he
accepted a post at the Board of Admiralty and worked earnestly in his
department; but this ministry only lasted for one year, and he never
held office again, though he was often pressed to do so. He was attached
to Wellington; but for Peel, now become the Tory leader, he had little
love. The two men were very dissimilar in character; and though at times
Ashley had friendly communications with Peel, yet in his diary Ashley
often complains bitterly of his want of enthusiasm, of what he regarded
as Peel's opportunism and subservience to party policy. The one had an
instinct for what was practical and knew exactly how far he could
combine interests to carry a measure; the other was all on fire for the
cause and ready to push it forward against all obstacles, at all costs.
Ashley, it is true, had to work through Parliament to attain his chief
ends, and many a bitter moment he had to endure in striving towards the
goal. But if he was not an adroit or successful politician, he
gradually, as the struggle went on, by earnestness and force of
character, made for himself in the House a place apart, a place of rare
dignity and influence; and with the force of public opinion behind him
he was able to triumph over ministers and parties.

It was in 1832 that he first had his attention drawn to the conditions
of labour in factories. He never claimed to be the pioneer of the
movement, but he was early in the field. The inventions of the latter
part of the eighteenth century had transformed the north of England. The
demand for labour had given rise to appalling abuses, especially in the
matter of child labour. From London workhouses and elsewhere children
were poured into the labour market, and by the 'Apprentice System' were
bound to serve their masters for long periods and for long hours
together. A pretence of voluntary contract was kept up, but fraud and
deception were rife in the system and its results were tragic. Mrs.
Browning's famous poem, 'The Cry of the Children,' gives a more vivid
picture of the children's sufferings than many pages of prose. At the
same time we have plenty of first-hand evidence from the great towns of
the misery which went along with the wonderful development of national
wealth. Speaking in 1873 Lord Shaftesbury said, 'Well can I recollect in
the earlier periods of the Factory movement waiting at the factory gates
to see the children come out, and a set of dejected cadaverous creatures
they were. In Bradford especially the proofs of long and cruel toil were
most remarkable. The cripples and distorted forms might be numbered by
hundreds perhaps by thousands. A friend of mine collected together a
vast number for me; the sight was most piteous, the deformities
incredible.' And an eye-witness in Bolton reports in 1792: 'Anything
like the squalid misery, the slow, mouldering, putrefying death by which
the weak and feeble are perishing here, it never befell my eyes to
behold, nor my imagination to conceive.' Some measures of relief were
carried by the elder Sir Robert Peel, himself a cotton-spinner; but
public opinion was slow to move and was not roused till 1830, when Mr.
Sadler,[16] member for Newark, led the first fight for a 'Ten Hours
Bill'. When Sadler was unseated in 1832, Lord Ashley offered his help,
and so embarked on the greatest of his works performed in the public
service. He had the support of a few of the noblest men in England,
including Robert Southey and Charles Dickens; but he had against him the
vast body of well-to-do people in the country, and inside Parliament
many of the most progressive and influential politicians. The factory
owners were inspired at once by interest and conviction; the political
economy of the day taught them that all restrictions on labour were
harmful to the progress of industry and to the prosperity of the
country, while the figures in their ledgers taught them what was the
most economical method of running their own mills.

[Note 16: See articles in _D.N.B._ on Michael Thomas Sadler
(1780-1835) and on Richard Oastler (1789-1861).]

Already it was clear that Lord Ashley was no mere sentimentalist out for
a momentary sensation. At all times he gave the credit for starting the
work to Sadler and his associates; and from the outset he urged his
followers to fix on a limited measure first, to concentrate attention on
the work of children and young persons, and to avoid general questions
involving conflicts between capital and labour. Also he took endless
pains to acquaint himself at first hand with the facts. 'In factories,'
he said afterwards, 'I examined the mills, the machinery, the homes, and
saw the workers and their work in all its details. In collieries I went
down into the pits. In London I went into lodging-houses and thieves'
haunts, and every filthy place. It gave me a power I could not otherwise
have had.' And this was years before 'slumming' became fashionable and
figured in the pages of _Punch_; it was no distraction caught up for a
week or a month, but a labour of fifty years! We have an account of him
as he appeared at this period of his life: 'above the medium height,
about 5 feet 6 inches, with a slender and extremely graceful figure...
curling dark hair in thick masses, fine brow, features delicately cut,
the nose perhaps a trifle too prominent,... light blue eyes deeply set
with projecting eyelids, his mouth small and compressed.' His whole face
and appearance seems to have had a sculpturesque effect and to have
suggested the calm and composure of marble. But under this marble
exterior there was burning a flame of sympathy for the poor, a fire of
indignation against the system which oppressed them.

In 1833 some progress was made. Lord Althorp, the Whig leader in the
Commons, under pressure from Lord Ashley, carried a bill dealing indeed
with some of the worst abuses in factories, but applying only to some of
the great textile industries. That it still left much to be done can be
seen from studying the details of the measure. Children under eleven
years of age were not to work more than nine hours a day, and young
persons under nineteen not more than twelve hours a day. Adults might
still work all day and half the night if the temptation of misery at
home and extra wages to be earned was too strong for them. It seems
difficult now to believe that this was a great step forward, yet for the
moment Ashley found that he could do no more and must accept what the
politicians gave him. In 1840, however, he started a fresh campaign on
behalf of children not employed in these factories, who were not
included in the Act of 1833, and who, not being concentrated in the
great centres of industry, escaped the attention of the general public.
He obtained a Royal Commission to investigate mines and other works, and
to report upon their condition. The Blue Book was published in 1842 and
created a sensation unparalleled of its kind. Men read with horror the
stories of the mines, of children employed underground for twelve or
fourteen hours a day, crouching in low passages, monotonously opening
and shutting the trap-doors as the trollies passed to and fro. Alone
each child sat in pitchy darkness, unable to stir for more than a few
paces, unable to sleep for fear of punishment with the strap in case of
neglect, and often surrounded with vermin. Women were employed crawling
on hands and knees along these passages, stripped to the waist, stooping
under the low roofs, and even so chafing and wounding their backs, as
they hauled the coal along the underground rails, or carrying in baskets
on their backs, up steps and ladders, loads which varied in weight from
a half to one and a half hundredweights. The physical health, the mental
education, and the moral character of these poor creatures suffered
equally under such a system; and well might those responsible for the
existence of such abuses fear to let the Report be published. But copies
of it first reached members of Parliament, then the public at large
learnt the burden of the tale, and Lord Ashley might now hope for enough
support from outside to break down the opposition in the House of
Commons and the delays of parliamentary procedure.

'The Mines and Collieries Bill' was brought in before the impression
could fade, and on June 7, 1842, Ashley made one of the greatest of his
speeches and drove home powerfully the effect of the Report. His mastery
of facts was clear enough to satisfy the most dispassionate politician;
his sincerity disarmed Richard Cobden, the champion of the Lancashire
manufacturers and brought about a reconciliation between them; his
eloquence stirred the hearts of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort,
and drew from the latter words of glowing admiration and promises of
support. In August the bill finally passed the House of Lords, and a
second great blow had been struck. Practices which were poisoning at the
source the lives of the younger generation were forbidden by law; above
all, it was expressly laid down that, after a few years, no woman or
girl should be employed in mines at all. The influence which such a law
had on the family life in the mining districts was incalculable; the
women were rescued from servitude in the mines and restored to their
natural place at home.

There was still much to do. In 1844 the factory question was again
brought to the front by the demands of the working classes, and again
Ashley was ready to champion their cause, and to propose that the
working day should now be limited to eight hours for children, and to
ten hours for grown men. In Parliament there was long and weary fighting
over the details. The Tory Government did not wish to oppose the bill
directly. Neither party had really faced the question or made up its
mind. Expediency rather than justice was in the minds of the official
politicians.

Such a straightforward champion as Lord Ashley was a source of
embarrassment to these gentlemen, to be met by evasion rather than
direct opposition. The radical John Bright, a strong opponent of State
interference and equally straightforward in his methods, made a personal
attack on Lord Ashley. He referred to the Dorset labourers, as if Ashley
was indifferent to abuses nearer home, and left no one in doubt of his
opinions. At the same time, Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, did
all in his power to defeat Ashley's bill by bringing forward alternative
proposals, which he knew would be unacceptable to the workers. In face
of such opposition most men would have given way. Ashley, who had been a
consistent Tory all his life, was bitterly aggrieved at the treatment
which his bill met with from his official leaders. He persevered in his
efforts, relying on support from outside; but in Parliament the
Government triumphed to the extent of defeating the Ten Hours Bill in
March 1844 and again in April 1846. Still, the small majority (ten) by
which this last division was decided showed in which direction the
current was flowing, and when a few months later the Tories were ousted
from office, the Whigs took up the bill officially, and in June 1847
Lord Ashley, though himself out of Parliament for the moment, had the
satisfaction of seeing the bill become the law of the land.

There was great rejoicing in the manufacturing districts, and Lord
Ashley was the hero of the day. The working classes had no direct
representative in Parliament in those days: without his constant efforts
neither party would have given a fair hearing to their cause. He had
argued with politicians without giving away principles; he had stirred
the industrial districts without rousing class hatred; he had been
defeated time after time without giving up the struggle. Much has been
added since then to the laws restricting the conditions of labour till,
in the often quoted words of Lord Morley, the biographer of Cobden, we
have 'a complete, minute, and voluminous code for the protection of
labour... an immense host of inspectors, certifying surgeons and other
authorities whose business it is to "speed and post o'er land and ocean"
in restless guardianship of every kind of labour'. But these were the
heroic days of the struggle for factory legislation, and also of the
struggle for cheap food for the people. Reviewing these great events
many years later the Duke of Argyll said, 'During that period two great
discoveries have been made in the science of Government: the one is the
immense advantage of abolishing restrictions on trade, the other is the
absolute necessity of imposing restrictions on labour'. While Sir Robert
Peel might with some justice contest with Cobden the honour of
establishing the first principle, few will challenge Lord Ashley's right
to the honour of securing the second.

Of the many religious and political causes which he undertook during and
after this time, of the Zionist movement to repatriate the Jews, of the
establishing of a Protestant bishopric at Jerusalem, of his attacks on
the war with Sind and the opium trade with China, of his championship of
the Nestorian Christians against the Turk, of his leadership of the
great Bible Society, there is not space to speak. The mere list gives an
idea of the width of his interests and the warmth of his sympathy.

Some of these questions were highly contentious; and Lord Ashley, who
was a fervent Evangelical, was less than fair to churchmen of other
schools. To Dr. Pusey himself he could write a kindly and courteous
letter; but on the platform, or in correspondence with friends, he could
denounce 'Puseyites' in the roundest terms. One cannot expect that a man
of his character will avoid all mistakes. It was a time when feeling ran
high on religious questions, and he was a declared partisan; but at
least we may say that the public good, judged from the highest point,
was his objective; there was no room for self-seeking in his heart. Nor
did this wide extension of his activity mean neglect of his earlier
crusades. On the contrary, he continued to work for the good of the
classes to whom his Factory Bills had been so beneficial. Not content
with prohibiting what was harmful, he went on to positive measures of
good; restriction of hours was followed by sanitation, and this again by
education, and by this he was led to what was perhaps the second most
famous work of his life.

In 1843 his attention had already been drawn to the question of
educating the neglected children, and he was making acquaintance at
first hand with the work of the Ragged Schools, at that time few in
number and poorly supported. He visited repeatedly the Field Lane
School, in a district near Holborn notoriously frequented by the
criminal classes, and soon the cause, at which he was to work
unsparingly for forty years, began to move forward. He went among the
poor with no thought of condescension. Simple as he was by nature, he
possessed in perfection the art of speaking to children, and he was soon
full of practical schemes for helping them. Sanitary reform was not
neglected in his zeal for religion, and emigration was to be promoted as
well as better housing at home; for, till the material conditions of
life were improved, he knew that it was idle to hope for much moral
reform. 'Plain living and high thinking' is an excellent ideal for those
whose circumstances put them out of reach of anxiety over daily bread;
it is a difficult gospel to preach to those who are living in
destitution and misery.

The character of his work soon won confidence even in the most unlikely
quarters. In June 1848 he received a round-robin signed by forty of the
most notorious thieves in London, asking him to come and meet them in
person at a place appointed; and on his going there he found a mob of
nearly four hundred men, all living by dishonesty and crime, who
listened readily and even eagerly to his brotherly words.

Several of them came forward in turn and made candid avowal of their
respective difficulties and vices, and of the conditions of their lives.
He found that they were tired of their own way of life, and were ready
to make a fresh start; and in the course of the next few months he was
able, thanks to the generosity of a rich friend, to arrange for the
majority of them to emigrate to another country or to find new openings
away from their old haunts.

But, apart from such special occasions, the work of the schools went
steadily forward. In seven years, more than a hundred such schools were
opened, and Lord Shaftesbury was unfailing in his attendance whenever he
could help forward the cause. His advice to the managers to 'keep the
schools in the mire and the gutter' sounds curious; but he was afraid
that, as they throve, boys of more prosperous classes would come in and
drive out those for whom they were specially founded. 'So long', he
said, 'as the mire and gutter exist, so long as this class exists, you
must keep the school adapted to their wants, their feelings, their
tastes and their level.' And any of us familiar with the novels of
Charles Dickens and Walter Besant will know that such boys still existed
unprovided for in large numbers in 1850 and for many years after.

Thus the years went by. He succeeded to the earldom on his father's
death in 1851. His heart was wrung by the early deaths of two of his
children and by the loss of his wife in 1872. In his home he had his
full share of the joys and sorrows of life, but his interest in his work
never failed. If new tasks were taken up, it was not at the expense of
the old; the fresh demand on his unwearied energies was met with the
same spirit. At an advanced age he opened a new and attractive chapter
in his life by his friendly meetings with the London costermongers. He
gave prizes for the best-kept donkey, he attended the judging in person,
he received in return a present of a donkey which was long cherished at
Wimborne St. Giles. It is impossible to deal fully with his life in each
decade; one page from his journal for 1882 shows what he could still do
at the age of eighty-one, and will be the best proof of his persistence
in well-doing. He began the day with a visit to Greenhithe to inspect
the training ships for poor boys, at midday he came back to Grosvenor
Square to attend a committee meeting of the Bible Society at his home,
he then went to a public banquet in honour of his godson, and he
finished with a concert at Buckingham Palace, thus keeping up his
friendly relations with all classes in the realm. To the very last, in
his eighty-fifth year, he continued to attend a few meetings and to
visit the scenes of his former labours; and on October 1, 1885, full of
years and full of honours, he died quietly at Folkestone, where he had
gone for the sake of his health.

In this sketch attention has been drawn to his labours rather than to
his honours. He might have had plenty of the latter if he had wished. He
received the Freedom of the City of London and of other great towns.
Twice he was offered the Garter, and he only accepted the second offer
on Lord Palmerston's urgent request that he should treat it as a tribute
to the importance of social work. Three times he was offered a seat in
the Cabinet, but he refused each time, because official position would
fetter his special work. He kept aloof from party politics, and was only
roused when great principles were at stake. Few of the leading
politicians satisfied him. Peel seemed too cautious, Gladstone too
subtle, Disraeli too insincere. It was the simplicity and kindliness of
his relative Palmerston that won his heart, rather than confidence in
his policy at home or abroad. The House of Commons suited him better
than the colder atmosphere of the House of Lords; but in neither did he
rise to speak without diffidence and fear. It is a great testimony to
the force of his conviction that he won as many successes in Parliament
as he did. But the means through which he effected his chief work were
committees, platform meetings, and above all personal visits to scenes
of distress.

The nation would gladly have given him the last tribute of burial in
Westminster Abbey, but he had expressed a clear wish to be laid among
his own people at Wimborne St. Giles, and the funeral was as simple as
he had wished it to be. His name in London is rather incongruously
associated with a fountain in Piccadilly Circus, and with a street full
of theatres, made by the clearing of the slums where he had worked: the
intention was good, the result is unfortunate. More truly than in any
sculpture or buildings his memorial is to be found in the altered lives
of thousands of his fellow citizens, in the happy looks of the children,
and in the pleasant homes and healthy workshops which have transformed
the face of industrial England.




JOHN LAWRENCE

1811-79

1811. Born at Richmond, Yorkshire, March 4.
1823. School at Londonderry.
1827. Haileybury I.C.S. College.
1829. Goes out to India as a member of Civil Service.
1831. Delhi.
1834. P[=a]n[=i]pat.
1836. Et[=a]wa.
1840-2. Furlough and marriage to Harriette Hamilton.
1844. Collector and Magistrate of Delhi and P[=a]n[=i]pat.
1845. First Sikh War.
1846. Governor of J[=a]landhar Do[=a]b.
1848. Second Sikh War.
1849. Lord Dalhousie annexes Punjab. Henry and John Lawrence members
      of Punjab Board.
1852-3. New Constitution. John Lawrence, Chief Commissioner of Punjab.
1856. Oudh annexed. Henry Lawrence first Governor.
1857. Indian Mutiny. Death of Henry Lawrence at Lucknow (July). Punjab
      secured. Delhi retaken (September).
1858-9. Baronetcy; G.C.B. Return to England.
1864. Governor-General of India. Irrigation. Famine relief.
1869. Return to England. Peerage.
1870. Chairman of London School Board.
1876. Failure of eyesight.
1879. Death in London, June 27.

JOHN LAWRENCE

INDIAN ADMINISTRATOR


The north of Ireland and its Scoto-Irish stock has given birth to some
of the toughest human material that our British Isles have produced. Of
this stock was John Wesley, who at the age of eighty-five attributed his
good health to rising every day at four and preaching every day at
five. Of this was Arthur Wellesley, who never knew defeat and 'never
lost a British gun'. Of this was Alexander Lawrence, sole survivor among
the officers of the storming party at Seringapatam, who lived to rear
seven stout sons, five of whom went out to service in India, two at
least to win imperishable fame. His wife, a Miss Knox, came also from
across the sea; and, if the evidence fails to prove Mr. Bosworth Smith's
statement that she was akin to the great Reformer, she herself was a
woman of strong character and great administrative talent. When we
remember John Lawrence's parentage, we need not be surprised at the
character which he bore, nor at the evidence of it to be seen in the
grand rugged features portrayed by Watts in the picture in the National
Portrait Gallery.

[Illustration: LORD LAWRENCE

From the painting by G. F. Watts in the National Portrait Gallery]

Of these parents John Laird Mair Lawrence was the fourth surviving son,
one boy, the eldest, having died in infancy. He owed the accident of his
birth in an English town to his father's regiment being quartered at the
time in Yorkshire, his first schooling at Bristol to his father's
residence at Clifton; but when he was twelve years old, he followed his
elder brothers to Londonderry, where his maternal uncle, the Rev. James
Knox, was Headmaster of the Free Grammar School, situated within the
walls of that famous Protestant fortress. It was a rough school, of
which the Lawrence brothers cherished few kindly recollections. It is
difficult to ascertain what they learnt there: perhaps the grim
survivals of the past, town-walls, bastions, and guns, made the deepest
impression upon them. John's chief friend at school was Robert
Montgomery, whom, many years later, he welcomed as a sympathetic
fellow-worker in India; and the two boys continued their education
together at Wraxall in Wiltshire, to which they were transferred in
1825. Here John spent two years, working at his books by fits and
starts, and finding an outlet for his energy in climbing, kite-flying,
and other unconventional amusements, and then his turn came to profit by
the goodwill of a family friend, who was an influential man and a
director of the East India Company. To this man, John Huddlestone by
name, his brothers Alexander and George owed their commissions in the
Indian cavalry, while Henry had elected for the artillery. John hoped
for a similar favour, but was offered, in its place, a post in the
Indian Civil Service. This was a cruel disappointment to him as he had
set his heart on the army. In fact he was only reconciled to the
prospect by the influence of his eldest sister Letitia, who held a
unique place as the family counsellor now and throughout her life.

When he sailed first for India at the age of eighteen, John Lawrence had
done little to give promise of future distinction. He had strong
attachments to his mother and sister; outside the family circle he was
not eager to make new friends. In his work and in his escapades he
showed an independent spirit, and seemed to care little what others
thought of him; even at Haileybury, at that time a training-school for
the service of the East India Company, he was most irregular in his
studies, though he carried off several prizes; and he seems to have
impressed his fellows rather as an uncouth person who preferred mooning
about the college, or rambling alone through the country-side, to
spending his days in the pursuits which they esteemed.

When the time came for John Lawrence to take up his work, his brother
Henry, his senior by five years, was also going out to India to rejoin
his company of artillery, and the brothers sailed together. John had to
spend ten weary months in Calcutta learning languages, and was very
unhappy there. Ill-health was one cause; another was his distaste for
strangers' society and his longing for home; it was only the definite
prospect of work which rescued him from despondency. He applied for a
post at Delhi; and, as soon as this was granted, he was all eagerness to
leave Calcutta. But he had used the time well in one respect: he had
acquired the power of speaking Persian with ease and fluency, and this
stood him in good stead in his dealings with the princes and the
peasants of the northern races, whose history he was to influence in the
coming years.

Delhi has been to many Englishmen besides John Lawrence a city of
absorbing interest. It had even then a long history behind it, and its
history, as we in the twentieth century know, is by no means finished
yet. It stands on the Jumna, the greatest tributary of the Ganges, at a
point where the roads from the north-west reach the vast fertile basin
of these rivers, full in the path of an invader. Many races had swept
down on it from the mountain passes before the English soldiery appeared
from the south-east; its mosques, its palaces, its gates, recall the
memory of many princes and conquerors. At the time of Lawrence's arrival
it was still the home of the heir of Akbar and Aurangzeb, the last of
the great Mughals. The dynasty had been left in 1804, after the wars of
Lord Wellesley, shorn of its power, but not robbed of its dignity or
riches. As a result it had degenerated into an abuse of the first order,
since all the scoundrels of the district infested the palace and preyed
upon its owner, who had no work to occupy him, no call of duty to rouse
him from sloth and sensuality. The town was filled with a turbulent
population of many different tribes, and the work of the European
officials was exacting and difficult. But at the same time it gave
unique opportunities for an able man to learn the complexity of the
Indian problem; and the knowledge which John Lawrence acquired there
proved of incalculable value to him when he was called to higher posts.

At Delhi he was working as an assistant to the Resident, one of a staff
of four or five, with no independent authority. But in 1834 he was given
temporary charge of the district of P[=a]n[=i]pat, fifty miles to the
north, and it is here that we begin to get some measure of the man and
his abilities. The place was the scene of more than one famous battle in
the past; armies of Mughals and Persians and Mar[=a]th[=i]s had swept
across its plains. Its present inhabitants were J[=a]ts, a race widely
extended through the eastern Punjab and the western part of the province
of Agra. Originally invaders from the north, they espoused the religions
of those around them, some Brahman, some Muhammadan, some Sikh, and
settled down as thrifty industrious peasants; though inclined to
peaceful pursuits, they still preserved some strength of character and
were the kind of people among whom Lawrence might hope to enjoy his
work. The duties of the magistrate are generally divided into judicial
and financial. But, as an old Indian official more exhaustively stated
it: 'Everything which is done by the executive government is done by the
Collector in one or another of his capacities--publican, auctioneer,
sheriff, road-maker, timber-dealer, recruiting sergeant, slayer of wild
beasts, bookseller, cattle-breeder, postmaster, vaccinator, discounter
of bills, and registrar.' It is difficult to see how one can bring all
these departments under two headings; it is still more difficult to see
how such diverse demands can possibly be met by a single official,
especially by one little over twenty years of age coming from a distant
country. No stay-at-home fitting himself snugly into a niche in the
well-manned offices of Whitehall can expect to see his powers develop so
rapidly or so rapidly collapse (whichever be his fate) as these solitary
outposts of our empire, bearing, Atlas-like, a whole world on their
shoulders.

With John Lawrence, fortunately, there was no question of collapse till
many years of overwork broke down his physical strength. He grappled
with the task like a giant, passing long days in his office or in the
saddle, looking into everything for himself, laying up stores of
knowledge about land tenure and agriculture, training his judgement to
deal with the still more difficult problem of the workings of the
Oriental mind. He had no friends or colleagues of his own at hand; and
when the day's work was done he would spend his evenings holding an
informal durbar outside his tent, chatting with all and sundry of the
natives who happened to be there. The peoples of India are familiar with
pomp and outward show such as we do not see in the more prosaic west;
but they also know a man when they see one. And this young man with the
strongly-marked features, curt speech, and masterful manner, sitting
there alone in shirt-sleeves and old trousers as he listened to their
tales, was an embodiment of the British rule which they learnt to
respect--if not to love--for the solid benefits which it conferred upon
them. He had an element of hardness in him; by many he was thought to be
unduly harsh at different periods of his life; but he spared no trouble
to learn the truth, he was inflexibly just in his decisions, and his
reputation spread rapidly throughout the district. In cases of genuine
need he could be extremely kind and generous; but he did not lavish
these qualities on the first comer, nor did he wear his heart upon his
sleeve. His informal ways and unconventional dress were a bugbear to
some critics; his old waywardness and love of adventure was still alive
in him, and he thoroughly enjoyed the more irregular sides of his work.
Mr. Bosworth Smith has preserved some capital stories of the crimes with
which he had to deal, and how the young collector took an active part in
arresting the criminals--stories which some years later the future
Viceroy dictated to his wife.

But, after two years thus spent in constant activity and ever-growing
mastery of his work, he had to come down in rank; the post was filled by
a permanent official, and John Lawrence returned to the Delhi staff as
an assistant.

He soon received other 'acting appointments' in the neighbourhood of
Delhi, one of which at Et[=a]wa gave him valuable experience in dealing
with the difficult revenue question. The Government was in the habit of
collecting the land tax from the 'ryot' or peasant through a class of
middle-men called 'talukd[=a]rs',[17] who had existed under the native
princes for a long time. Borrowing perhaps from western ideas, the
English had regarded the latter as landowners and the peasants as mere
tenants; this had often caused grave injustice to the latter, and the
officials now desired to revise the settlement in order to put all
classes on a fair footing. In this department Robert Bird was supreme,
and under his direction John Lawrence and others set themselves to
measure out areas, to record the nature of the various soils, and to
assess rents at a moderate rate. Still this was dull work compared to
the planning of practical improvements and the conviction of dangerous
criminals; and as, towards the end of 1839, Lawrence was struck down by
a bad attack of fever, he was not sorry to be ordered home on long leave
and to revisit his native land. He had been strenuously at work for ten
years on end and he had well earned a holiday.

[Note 17: 'Talukd[=a]r' in the north-west, 'zam[=i]nd[=a]r' in
Bengal.]

His father was now dead, and his favourite sister married, but of his
mother he was for many years the chief support, contributing liberally
of his own funds and giving his time and judgement to managing what the
brothers put together for that purpose. In 1840 he was travelling both
in Scotland and Ireland; and it was near Londonderry that he met his
future wife, daughter of the Rev. Richard Hamilton, who, besides being
rector of his parish, was an active justice of the peace. He met her
again in the following summer, and they were married on August 26, 1841.
Their life together was a tale of unbroken happiness, which was only
ended by his death. A long tour on the Continent was followed by a
severe illness, which threatened to forbid all prospect of work in
India. However, by the end of that summer he had recovered his health
enough to contemplate returning, and in October, 1842, he set sail to
spend another sixteen years in labouring in India.

In 1843 he resumed work at Delhi, holding temporary posts till the end
of 1844, when he became in his own right Collector and Magistrate of
Delhi and P[=a]n[=i]pat. This time his position, besides involving much
familiar work, threw him in the way of events of wider interest. Lord
Hardinge, the Governor-General, on his way to the first Sikh war, came
to Delhi, and was much impressed with Lawrence's ability; and when he
annexed the Do[=a]b[18] of J[=a]landhar and wanted a governor for it, he
could find no one more suitable than the young magistrate, who had so
swiftly collected 4,000 carts and sent them up laden with supplies on
the eve of the battle of Sobraon.

[Note 18: 'Do[=a]b' = land between two rivers.]

This was a great step in advance and carried John Lawrence ahead of many
of his seniors; but it was promotion that was fully justified by events.
He was not wanting in self-confidence, and the tone of some of his
letters to the Secretary at head-quarters might seem boastful, had not
his whole career shown that he could more than make good his promise.
'So far as I am concerned as supervisor,' he says, 'I could easily
manage double the extent of country'; and then, comparing his district
with another, he continues: 'I only ask you to wait six months, and then
contrast the civil management of the two charges.' As a fact, during the
three years that he held this post, he was often acting as deputy for
his brother Henry at Lahore, during his illness or absence, and this
alone clears him of the charge of idle boasting. J[=a]landhar was
comparatively a simple job for him, whatever it might be for others; he
was able to apply his knowledge of assessment and taxation gained at
Et[=a]wa, and need only satisfy himself. At Lahore, on the other hand,
he had to consider the very strong views held by his brother about the
respect due to the vested rights of the chiefs; and he studiously set
himself to deal with matters in the way in which his brother would have
done. The Sirdars or Sikh chieftains had inherited traditions of corrupt
and oppressive rule; but the chivalrous Henry Lawrence always looked at
the noble side of native character; and, as by his personal gifts he was
able to inspire devotion, so he could draw out what was good in those
who came under his influence. The cooler and more practical John looked
at both sides, at the traditions, good and evil, which came to them from
their forefathers, and he considered carefully how these chiefs would
act when not under his immediate influence. Above all, he looked to the
prosperity and happiness of the millions of peasants out of sight, who
toiled laboriously to get a living from the land.

The second Sikh war, which broke out in 1848, can only be treated here
so far as it affected the fortunes of the Lawrences. Lord Gough's
strategical blunders, redeemed by splendid courage, give it great
military interest; but it was the new Viceroy, Lord Dalhousie, who
decided the fate of the Punjab. He was a very able, hard-working Scotch
nobleman, who devoted himself to his work in India for eight years with
such self-sacrifice that he returned home in 1856 already doomed to an
early death. But he was masterful and self-confident to a degree; and
against his imperious will the impulsive forces of Charles Napier and
Henry Lawrence broke like waves on a granite coast. He was not blind to
their exceptional gifts, but to him the wide knowledge, coolness, and
judgement of John Lawrence made a greater appeal; and when, after the
victory of Chili[=a]nw[=a]la and the submission of the Sikh army in
1849, he annexed the Punjab, he decided to rule it by a Board and not by
a single governor, and to direct the diverse talents of the brothers to
a common end. He could not dispense with Henry's influence among the
Sikh chieftains, and John's knowledge of civil government was of equal
value.

Each would to a certain extent have his department, but a vast number of
questions would have to be decided jointly by the Board, of which the
third member, from 1850, was their old schoolfellow and friend Robert
Montgomery. The friction which resulted was often intolerable. Without
the least personal animosity, the brothers were forced into frequent
conflicts of opinion; each was convinced of the justice of his attitude
and most unwilling to sacrifice the interests of those in whom he was
especially interested. After three years of the strain, Lord Dalhousie
decided that it was time to put the country under a single ruler. For
the honour of being first Chief Commissioner of the Punjab he chose the
younger brother; and Sir Henry was given the post of Agent in
R[=a]jput[=a]na, from which he was promoted in 1857 to be the first
Governor of Oudh.

It was a tragic parting. The ablest men in the Punjab, like John
Nicholson and Herbert Edwardes, regarded Sir Henry as a father, and many
felt that it would be impossible to continue their work without him. No
Englishman in India made such an impression by personal influence on
both Europeans and Asiatics. As a well-known English statesman said:
'His character was far above his career, distinguished as that career
was.' But there is little doubt, now, that for the development of the
new province Lord Dalhousie made the right choice. And there is no
higher proof of the magnanimity of John Lawrence than the way in which
he won the respect, and retained the services, of the most ardent
supporters of his brother. His dealings with Nicholson alone would fill
a chapter; few lessons are more instructive than the way in which he
controlled the waywardness of this heroic but self-willed officer, while
giving full scope to his singular abilities.

The tale of John Lawrence's government of the Punjab is in some measure
a repetition of his work at P[=a]n[=i]pat and Delhi. It had the same
variety, it was carried out with the same thoroughness; but on this vast
field it was impossible for him to see everything for himself. While
directing the policy, he had

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