Lady John Russell - Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
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LADY JOHN RUSSELL
A Memoir with Selections from Her Diaries and Correspondence
EDITED BY
DESMOND MACCARTHY AND AGATHA RUSSELL
WITH TEN ILLUSTRATIONS, OF WHICH SIX ARE IN COLOUR
SECOND EDITION
1910
PREFACE
The manuscripts which have supplied the material for a memoir of my mother
deal much more fully with the life of my father than with her own life.
Mr. Desmond MacCarthy has therefore linked into the narrative several
important incidents in my father's career.
The greater part of the memoir is written by Mr. Desmond MacCarthy; the
political and historical commentary is almost entirely his work. The
impartial and independent opinion of one outside the family, both in
writing the memoir and in selecting passages from the manuscripts for
publication, has been of great value.
My grateful thanks are due to His Majesty the King for giving permission to
publish letters from Queen Victoria.
I am also grateful to friends and relations who have placed letters at my
disposal; especially to my brother, whose helpful encouragement throughout
the work has been most valuable.
Mr. Justin McCarthy, who many years ago recorded his impressions of my
mother in his Reminiscences, has now most kindly contributed to this book a
chapter of Recollections.
My cordial thanks are also due to Mr. George Trevelyan for reading the
proof sheets, and to Mr. Frederic Harrison for giving permission to publish
his Memorial Address at the end of this volume.
AGATHA RUSSELL
ROZELDENE, HINDHEAD, SURREY
October, 1910
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. 1815-34
Early years--Paris--Lord Minto appointed Minister at Berlin--
Germany--Return to Minto
CHAPTER II. 1835-41
Lord Minto First Lord of the Admiralty--Life in London--Bowood--Mrs.
Drummond's recollections--Friendship with Lord John Russell--Putney
House--Minto--Admiralty--Her engagement
CHAPTER III. 1841
Marriage--Sketch of Lord John's career before marriage--His conversation
with Napoleon--Moore's "Remonstrance"
CHAPTER IV. 1841-45
Wilton Crescent--Endsleigh--Chesham Place--Birth of her eldest
son--Anti-Corn Law agitation--Her illness--Lord John's letter from
Edinburgh--He is summoned to Osborne--Attempts to form a Ministry
CHAPTER V. 1846-47
Illness in Edinburgh--Letters between Lord and
Lady John--Repeal of the Corn Laws--Ireland and coercion--Lord John Prime
Minister
CHAPTER VI. 1847-52
Pembroke Lodge--Difficulties of the Ministry--Revolution in France
--Chartism--Petersham School founded by Lord and Lady John--The Papal
Bull--Durham Letter--The Queen and Lord Palmerston--The _Coup
d'Etat_--Breach with Palmerston--Defeat of the Russell
Government--Literary friends
CHAPTER VII. 1852-55
Lord Aberdeen Prime Minister--Lord John joins Coalition Ministry--Lady
John's misgivings--Gladstone's Budget--Death of Lady Minto--Samuel
Rogers--The Reform Bill--The Crimean War--Withdrawal of Reform--Roebuck's
motion--Lord John's resignation
CHAPTER VIII. 1855
Defeat of Aberdeen Ministry--Lord John's Mission to Vienna--He accepts
Colonial Office in Palmerston Government--Vienna Conference--His
resignation--Lady John's diary and letters
CHAPTER IX. 1855-60
Retirement and foreign travel--Palmerston and China--City election
--Reception at Sheffield--Orsini's attempt upon Napoleon III--Italy and
Austria--Lord John's share in the liberation of Italy--Lady John's
enthusiasm--Garibaldi at Pembroke Lodge
CHAPTER X. 1859-66
Death of Lord Minto--Lord John accepts peerage--American Civil War--Death
of Lord Palmerston--Lord Russell Prime Minister--Reform Bill of 1866--Mr.
Lowe and the "Adullamites"--Defeat and resignation of the Russell
Government
CHAPTER XI. 1866-70
Travel in Italy--Entry of Victor Emmanuel into Venice--Disraeli's Reform
Bill--Irish Church question--Gladstone Prime Minister--Winter at San
Remo--Paris--Dinner at the Tuileries--Return to England
CHAPTER XII. 1870-78
Franco-German War--Renens-sur-Roche--Education question--Cannes--Herbert
Spencer--Letters from Queen Victoria--Herzegovina--Death of Lord
Amberley--Nonconformist deputation at Pembroke Lodge--Death of Lord Russell
CHAPTER XIII. 1878-98
Lady Russell--Her love of children--Literary tastes--Friendships--
Correspondence--Haslemere--Death of Tennyson--England and Ireland--Last
meeting of Petersham Scholars--Illness and death
CHAPTER XIV
Letters from friends--Funeral at Chenies--Poem on Death
RECOLLECTIONS OF LADY RUSSELL. By JUSTIN MCCARTHY
MEMORIAL ADDRESS BY FREDERIC HARRISON
INDEX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
LADY JOHN RUSSELL AND HER ELDEST SON
From a miniature by Thorburn. 1844
Frontispiece
MINTO HOUSE, ROXBURGHSHIRE
From a photograph
THE COUNTESS OF MINTO, MOTHER OF LADY JOHN RUSSELL
From a miniature by Sir William Ross. 1851
LORD JOHN RUSSELL
From a portrait by G.F. Watts. 1852
PEMBROKE LODGE, EAST SIDE. FROM THE PARK
From a water-colour drawing by W.C. Rainbow. 1883
PEMBROKE LODGE. FROM THE SOUTH LAWN
From a photograph by Frida Jones. 1902
LADY JOHN RUSSELL AND HER DAUGHTER
From a water-colour drawing by Mary Severn. 1854
WILD HYACINTHS, PEMBROKE LODGE.
From a water-colour drawing by Fred Dixey. 1899
VIEW FROM THE WEST WALK, PEMBROKE LODGE
From an oil painting by Samuel Helstead. 1896
THE DOWAGER COUNTESS RUSSELL
From a photograph. 1884
LADY JOHN RUSSELL
CHAPTER I
1815-34
On November 15, 1815, at Minto in Roxburghshire, the home of the Elliots, a
second daughter was born to the Earl and Countess of Minto.
Frances Anna Maria Elliot, who afterwards became the first Countess
Russell, was destined to a long, eventful life. As a girl she lived among
those directing the changes of those times; as the wife of a Prime Minister
of England unusually reticent in superficial relations but open in
intimacy, in whom the qualities of administrator and politician overlay the
detachment of sensitive reflection, she came to judge men and events by
principles drawn from deep feelings and wide surveys; and in the long years
of her widowhood, possessing still great natural vitality and vivacity of
feeling, she continued open to the influences of an altered time,
delighting and astonishing many who might have expected to find between her
and them the ghostly barrier of a generation.
She died in January, 1898. The span of her life covers, then, many
important political events, and we shall catch glimpses of these as they
affect her. Though the intention of the following pages is biographical,
the story of Lady Russell's life, after marriage, coincides so closely with
her husband's public career that the thread connecting her letters together
must be the political events in which he took part. Some of her letters, by
throwing light on the sentiments and considerations which weighed with him
at doubtful junctures, are not without value to the historian. It is not,
however, the historian who has been chiefly considered in putting them
together, but rather the general reader, who may find his notions of past
politics vivified and refreshed by following history in the contemporary
comments of one so passionately and so personally interested at every turn
of events.
Another motive has also had a part in determining the possessors of Lady
Russell's letters to publish them. Memory is the most sacred, but also the
most perishable of shrines; hence it sometimes seems well worth while to
break through reticence to give greater permanence to precious
recollections. With this end also the following pages have been put
together, and many small details included to help the subject of this
memoir to live again in the imagination of the reader. For from brief and
even superficial contact with the living we may gain much; but the dead, if
they are to be known at all, must be known more intimately.
* * * * *
Minto House, where Lady Fanny was born, is beautifully situated above a
steep and wooded glen, and is only a short distance from the river Teviot.
The hills around are not like the wild rugged mountains of the Highlands,
but have a soft and tender beauty of their own. Her childhood was far more
secluded than the life that would have fallen to her lot had she been born
in the next generation, for her home in Roxburghshire, in coach and
turnpike days, was more remote from the central stir and business of life
than any spot in the United Kingdom at the present time. Lady Fanny used to
relate what a great event it was for the household at Minto when on very
rare occasions her father brought from London a parcel of new books, which
were eagerly opened by the family and read with delight. Those were not the
days of circulating libraries, and both the old standard books on the Minto
library shelves and the few new ones occasionally added were read and
re-read with a thoroughness rare among modern readers, surrounded by a
multiplicity of books old and new.
They were a large, young family, five boys and five girls, ranging from the
ages of three years old to eighteen in 1830, when her diaries begin, all
eager, high-spirited children, and exceptionally strong and healthy. In her
early diaries, describing day-long journeys in coaches, early starts and
late arrivals, she hardly ever mentions feeling tired, and she enjoyed the
old methods of travelling infinitely more than the railway journeys of
later days, about which she felt like the Frenchman who said: "On ne voyage
plus; on arrive." Long wild country walks in Scotland and mountain-climbing
in Switzerland were particularly delightful to her.
This stock of sound vitality stood her in good stead all her life; only
during those years which followed the birth of her eldest son does it seem
to have failed her. Her life was an exceptionally busy one, and her strong
feelings and sense of responsibility made even small domestic affairs
matters for close attention; yet in the diaries and letters of her later
life there are no entries which betray either the lassitude or the
restlessness of fatigue. She was not one of those busy women who only keep
pace with their interests by deputing home management to others. This power
of endurance in a deeply feeling nature is one of the first facts which any
one attempting to tell the story of her life must bring before the reader's
notice.
There was much reading aloud in the fireside circle at Minto, and for the
boys much riding and sport. Many hours were spent upon the heather or in
fishing the Teviot. Lady Fanny herself cared little for sport, or only for
its picturesque side. Near the house are the rocks known as Minto Crags,
mentioned by Sir Walter Scott in the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," where many
and many a time Lady Fanny raced about on hunting days, watching the
redcoats with childish eagerness--intensely interested in the joyousness
and beauty of the sight, but in her heart always secretly thankful if the
fox escaped. Fox-hunting on Minto Crags must indeed have been a picturesque
sight, and there was a special rock overhanging a precipice upon which she
loved to sit and watch the wild chase, men and horses appearing and
disappearing with flashing rapidity among the woods and ravines beneath.
The pleasures of an open-air life meant so much to her that, in so far as
it was possible for one with her temperament to pine at all, she was often
homesick in the town, longing for the peace and freedom of the country.
There were expeditions of other kinds too.
"Gibby [1] and I," she writes towards the end of one October, "up a
little after five this morning and up the big hill to see the sun
rise. It was moonlight when we went out, and all so still and
indistinct--for it was a cloudy moon--that our steps and voices
sounded quite odd. It was mild enough, but so wet with dew that our
feet grew very cold. We waited some time on the top before he rose
and had a long talk with the Kaims shepherd. It was well worth
having gone; though there was nothing fine in the sky or clouds
compared to what I have constantly seen at sunrise. But what I
thought beautiful was the entire change that his rising made in
everything. All we were looking at suddenly became so bright and
cheerful, and a hum of people and noises of animals were heard from
the village." "I wish people," she adds impetuously, "would shake
off sleep as soon as the blushing morn does peep in at their
windows."
[1] Her brother Gilbert.
The entries in these early diaries show a quality of clear authentic
vision, which was afterwards so characteristic of her conversation. For
those who remember their own youthful feelings, even the stiff occasional
scraps of poetry she wrote at this time glow with a life not always
discernible in the deft writing of more experienced verse-makers.
The household was a brisk, cheerful, active one, and ruled by the spirit of
order necessary in a home where many different kinds of things are being
done each day by its different inmates. The children were treated with no
particular indulgence, and the elder ones were taught to be responsible not
only for their own actions, but for the good behaviour, and, in a certain
measure, for the education of the younger ones. As a girl she writes down
in her diary many hopes and fears about her younger brothers and sisters,
which resemble those afterwards awakened in her by the care of her own
children. A big family in a great house, with all the different relations
and contacts such a life implies, is in itself an education, and Lady Fanny
seems to have profited by all that such experiences can give. If she came
from such a home anticipating from everybody more loyalty and consistency
of feeling than is common in human nature, and crediting everybody with it,
that is in itself a kind of generous severity of expectation which, though
it may be sometimes the cause of mistakes, helps also to create in others
the qualities it looks to find.
The children had plenty of outlets for their high spirits. There are some
slight records left of the opening of a "Theatre Royal, Minto," and of a
glorious evening ending in an "excellent country bumpkin," with bed at two
in the morning; of reels and dances, too, and many hours laconically summed
up as "famous fun" in the diary. Then there were such September days as
this:
"Bob'm [2] and I went in the phaeton to meet the boys. They were
very successful--about twelve brace. The heather was in full blow,
and in wet parts the ground white with parnassia. I never felt such
an air--it made me feel quite wild. The sunset behind the far hills
and reflected in the lonely little shaw loch most beautiful. When
we began our walk there was a fine soft wind that felt as if it
would lift one up to the clouds, but before we got back to the
little house it had quite fallen, and all was as still as in a
desert, except now and then the wild cry of the grouse and
black-cock. Bob'm mad with spirits, and talked nonsense all the way
home. Not too dark to see the beautiful outline of the country all
the way."
[2] Her sister Charlotte, afterwards Lady Charlotte Portal.
Such tired, happy home-comings stay in the memory; drives back at the end
of long days, when scraps of talk and laughter and the pleasure of being
together mingle so kindly with the solemnity of the darkening country;
drives which end in a sudden blaze of welcome, in fire-light and candles,
tea and a hubbub of talk, when everything, though familiar, seems to
confess to a new happiness.
Here is another entry a few days later:
"Beautiful day, but a very high, warm _real Minto_ wind. We
wandered out very late and sat under the lime, playing at being at
sea, feeling the stem rock above us as we lent against it and
hearing the roaring of the waves in the trees. No summer's day can
be better than such a day and evening as this--there was a cloudy
moon, too, above the branches. I wish I could express, but I never
can, the sort of feeling I have at times--now more than I ever had
before--which would sound like affectation if one talked of it. A
fine day, or beautiful country, or very often nothing but the sky
or earth or the singing of a bird gives it. One feels too much love
and gratitude and admiration, and something swells my heart so that
I do not know how to look or listen enough."
There was another kind of romance, too, in her young life, destined in
future to be at times a source of pain and anxiety, though also of keen
gratification and permanent pride. What can equal the romance of politics
when we are quite young, when "politics" mean nothing but "serving one's
country" and have no other associations but that one, when politicians seem
necessarily great men? The love-dreams of adolescence have often been
celebrated; but among young creatures whose lives give plenty of play to
their affections in a spontaneous way, such dreams seldom vie in intensity
with the mysterious call of religion or with the emotion of patriotism. It
stands for an emotion which seems as large as the love of mankind, and its
service calls for enthusiasm and self-devotion. The Mintos were in the
thick of politics and the times were stirring times. "Throughout the last
two centuries of our history," says Sir George Trevelyan in his Life of
Macaulay, "there never was a period when a man, conscious of power,
impatient of public wrongs, and still young enough to love a fight for its
own sake, could have entered Parliament with a fairer prospect of leading a
life worth living and doing work that would requite the pains, than at the
commencement of the year 1830." Her father was not only the most genial and
kindest of fathers, but he was to her something of a hero too. His
political career had not begun during these days at Minto; still he was in
the counsel of the leaders of the day--Lord Grey, Lord John Russell, Lords
Melbourne and Althorp--great names indeed to her. And the new Cabinet was
soon to appoint him Minister at Berlin.
The country was under the personal rule of the Duke of Wellington, who had
sorted out from his Cabinet any who were tainted with sympathy for reform;
but, as the election of July which resulted in his resignation showed, the
country, however one-sided its representation might have been in the House
of Commons, had been long in a state of political ferment. This state of
affairs, the gradual breaking up of the Tory party dating from the passing
of the Catholic Emancipation Bill, the brewing social troubles, and the
prospect of power crossing to the party which was determined on meeting
them with reform, made politics everywhere the most absorbing of themes.
In a country house like Minto, which was in close communication with the
statesmen of the time, discussions were of course frequent and keen. The
guests were often important politicians; and long before Lady Fanny saw her
future husband, she frequently heard his name as one whom those she admired
looked up to as a leader. In a girl by nature very susceptible to the
appeal of great causes, whose active brain made her delight in the
arguments of her elders, these surroundings were likely to foster a
passionate interest in public affairs; while other influences round her
were tending to increase in her a natural sense of the delicacy and
preciousness of personal relations. In the course of telling her story
occasions may come for remarking again on what was one of the chief graces
of her character; but in a book of this kind the sooner the reader becomes
acquainted with the subject of it, the more he is likely to see in what
follows. So let it be said of her at once that in all relations in which
affection was complicated on one side by gratitude, or on her side by
superiority in education or social position, she was perfect. She could be
employer and benefactress without letting such circumstances deflect in the
slightest degree the stream of confidence and affection between her and
another. She had the faculty of removing a sense of obligation and of
forgetting it herself. Such a faculty is only found in its perfection where
the mind is sensitive in perceiving the delicacy of the relations between
people; and it must be added that like most people who possess that
sensitiveness, she missed it acutely in those who markedly did not.
The life at Minto, with its many contacts, was a life in which such a
faculty could grow to perfection. The daughters, while sharing much of the
boys' lives at Minto, saw a great deal of the people upon the estate.
The intercourse between the family at the House and the people of Minto
village was of an intimate and affectionate nature. Joys and sorrows were
shared in unvarying friendliness and sympathy, and to the end of her life
"Lady Fanny" remembered with warm affection the old village friends of her
youth. Kindly, true-hearted folk they were, with a sturdy and independent
spirit which she valued and respected.
She only remembered seeing Sir Walter Scott on one occasion--when he came
to visit her parents. She was quite a child, and it was the day on which
her old nurse left Minto. She had wept bitterly, and when Sir Walter Scott
came she hardly dared even look at him with her tearful countenance. She
always remembered regretfully her indifference about the great man, whose
visit was ever after connected in her mind with one of the first sorrows of
her childhood. She regretted still more that in those days political
differences unhappily prevented the close and friendly intercourse which
would otherwise have undoubtedly existed between the Minto family and Sir
Walter Scott.
A word or two must be said upon the religion in which she was brought up,
for from her childhood she was deeply religious. Like her love for those
nearest to her, it entered into everything that interested or delighted her
profoundly; into her interest in politics and social questions and into her
enjoyment of nature.
The Mintos belonged to the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The doctrines
of this Church are not of significance here, but an indication of the
attitude towards dogma, history, and conduct which harmonizes with these
tenets is necessary to the understanding of her life. For this purpose it
is only necessary to say that this Church belongs to that half of
Protestantism which does not lay peculiar stress upon an inner conviction
of salvation. It differs from the evangelical persuasions in this respect,
and again from the Church of England in finding less significance in
ecclesiastical symbols, in setting less store by traditional usages, and in
a more constant and uncompromising disapproval of any doctrine which
regards the clergy as having spiritual functions or privileges different
from those of other men. In the latter half of her life she came gradually
to a Unitarian faith, which she held with earnestness to the last; and the
name "Free Church" became more significant to her through the suggestion it
carried of a religion detached from creeds and articles. Many entries occur
in her diaries protesting against what she felt as mischievous narrowness
in the books she read and in the sermons she heard. She sympathized
heartily with Lord John Russell's dislike of the Oxford movement. There are
many prayers in her diaries and many religious reflections in her letters,
and in all two emotions predominate; a trust in God and an earnest
conviction that a life of love--love to God and man--is the heart of
religion. Her religion was contemplative as well as practical; but it was a
religion of the conscience rather than one of mystical emotions.
Of personal influences, her mother's, until marriage, was the strongest.
There are only two long breaks in the diary she kept, when she had no heart
to write down her thoughts; one occurs during the year of Lady Minto's long
and serious illness at Berlin, which began in 1832, and the other after
Lord John Russell's death in 1878.
Lady Minto was not strong; bringing many sons and daughters into the world
had tried her; and her delicacy seems to have drawn her children closer
round her. Lady Fanny's references to her mother are full of an anxious,
protective devotion, as though she were always watching to see if any
shadow of physical or mental trouble were threatening her. So in imagining
the merry, active life of this large family, the presence of a mother most
tenderly loved, from whom praise seemed something almost too good to be
true, must not be forgotten.
In November, 1830 (the year Lady Fanny's diaries begin), the Duke of
Wellington resigned, having emphatically declared that the system of
representation ought to possess, and _did_ possess, the entire
confidence of the country. He had gone so far as to say that the wit of man
could not have devised a better representative system than that which Lord
John Russell, in the previous session, had attempted to alter by proposing
to enfranchise Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham. But the election which
followed the death of George IV on June 26th had not borne out the Duke's
assertion; it had gone heavily against him. Lord Grey, forming his Ministry
out of the old Whigs and the followers of Canning and Grenville, at once
made Reform a Cabinet measure. During the stormy elections of July the news
came from Paris that Charles X had been deposed, and unlike the news of the
French Revolution, it acted as a stimulus, not as a check, to the reforming
party in England.