X
"WILL" GLADSTONE
"He bequeathed to his children the perilous inheritance of a name which the Christian world venerates." The words were originally used by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce with reference to his father, the emancipator of the negro. I venture to apply them to the great man who, in days gone by, was my political leader, and I do so the more confidently because I hold that Gladstone will be remembered quite apart from politics, and, as Bishop Westcott said, "rather for what he was than for what he did." He was, in Lord Salisbury's words, "an example, to which history hardly furnishes a parallel, of a great Christian, Statesman." It was no light matter for a boy of thirteen to inherit a name which had been so nobly borne for close on ninety years, and to acquire, as soon as he came of age, the possession of a large and difficult property, and all the local influence which such ownership implies. Yet this was the burden which was imposed on "Will" Gladstone by his father's untimely death. After an honourable career at Eton and Oxford, and some instructive journeyings in the East and in America (where he was an attaché at the British Embassy), he entered Parliament as Member for the Kilmarnock Boroughs. His Parliamentary career was not destined to be long, but it was in many respects remarkable.
In some ways he was an ideal candidate. He was very tall, with a fair complexion and a singular nobility of feature and bearing. To the most casual observer it was palpable that he walked the world
"With conscious step of purity and pride."
People interested in heredity tried to trace in him some resemblance to his famous grandfather; but, alike in appearance and in character, the two were utterly dissimilar. In only one respect they resembled each other, and that was the highest. Both were earnest and practical Christians, walking by a faith which no doubts ever disturbed, and serving God in the spirit and by the methods of the English Church. And here we see alike Will Gladstone's qualifications and his drawbacks as a candidate for a Scottish constituency. His name and his political convictions commended him to the electors; his ecclesiastial opinions they could not share. His uprightness of character and nobility of aspect commanded respect; his innate dislike of popularity-hunting and men-pleasing made him seem for so young a man—he was only twenty-seven—austere and aloof. Everyone could feel the intensity of his convictions on the points on which he had made up his mind; some were unreasonably distressed when he gave expression to that intensity by speech and vote. He was chosen to second the Address at the opening of the Session of 1912, and acquitted himself, as always, creditably; but it was in the debates on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill that he first definitely made his mark. "He strongly supported the principle, holding that it had been fully justified by the results of the Irish Disestablishment Act on the Irish Church. But, as in that case, generosity should characterize legislation; disendowment should be clearly limited to tithes. Accordingly, in Committee, he took an independent course. His chief speech on this subject captivated the House. For a very young Member to oppose his own party without causing irritation, and to receive the cheers of the Opposition without being led to seek in them solace for the silence of his own side, and to win general admiration by transparent sincerity and clear, balanced statement of reason, was a rare and notable performance."
When Will Gladstone struck twenty-nine, there were few young men in England who occupied a more enviable position. He had a beautiful home; sufficient, but not overwhelming, wealth; a property which gave full scope for all the gifts of management and administration which he might possess; the devoted love of his family, and the goodwill even of those who did not politically agree with him. His health, delicate in childhood, had improved with years. "While he never neglected his public duties, his natural, keen, healthy love of nature, sport, fun, humour, company, broke out abundantly. In these matters he was still a boy"—but a boy who, as it seemed, had already crossed the threshold of a memorable manhood. Such was Will Gladstone on his last birthday—the 12th of July, 1914. A month later the "Great Tribulation" had burst upon the unthinking world, and all dreams of happiness were shattered. Dreams of happiness, yes; but not dreams of duty. Duty might assume a new, a terrible, and an unlooked-for form; but its essential and spiritual part—the conviction of what a man owes to God, to his fellow-men, and to himself—became only more imperious when the call to arms was heard: Christus ad arma vocat.
Will Gladstone loved peace, and hated war with his whole heart. He was by conviction opposed to intervention in the quarrels of other nations. "His health was still delicate; he possessed neither the training nor instincts of a soldier; war and fighting were repugnant to his whole moral and physical fibre." No one, in short, could have been by nature less disposed for the duty which now became urgent. "The invasion of Belgium shattered his hopes and his ideals." He now realized the stern truth that England must fight, and, if England must fight, he must bear his part in the fighting. He had been made, when only twenty-six, Lord-Lieutenant of Flintshire, and as such President of the Territorial Force Association. It was his official duty to "make personal appeals for the enlistment of young men. But how could he urge others to join the Army while he, a young man not disqualified for military service, remained at home in safety? It was his duty to lead, and his best discharge of it lay in personal example." His decision was quickly and quietly made. "He was the only son of his mother, and what it meant to her he knew full well;" but there was no hesitation, no repining, no looking back. He took a commission in the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and on the 15th of March, 1915, he started with a draft for France. On the 12th of April he was killed. "It is not"—he had just written to his mother—"the length of existence, that counts, but what is achieved during that existence, however short." These words of his form his worthiest epitaph.
XI
LORD CHARLES RUSSELL
A man can have no better friend than a good father; and this consideration warrants, I hope, the inclusion of yet one more sketch drawn "in honour of friendship."
Charles James Fox Russell (1807-1894) was the sixth son of the sixth Duke of Bedford. His mother was Lady Georgiana Gordon, daughter of the fourth Duke of Gordon and of the adventurous "Duchess Jane," who, besides other achievements even more remarkable, raised the "Gordon Highlanders" by a method peculiarly her own. Thus he was great-great-great-grandson of the Whig martyr, William, Lord Russell, and great-nephew of Lord George Gordon, whose Protestant zeal excited the riots of 1780. He was one of a numerous family, of whom the best remembered are John, first Earl Russell, principal author of the Reform Act of 1832, and Louisa, Duchess of Abercorn, grandmother of the present Duke.
Charles James Fox was a close friend, both politically and privately, of the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, and he promised them that he would be godfather to their next child; but he died before the child was born, whereupon his nephew, Lord Holland, took over the sponsorship, and named his godson "Charles James Fox." The child was born in 1807, and his birthplace was Dublin Castle.[*] The Duke of Bedford was then Viceroy of Ireland, and became involved in some controversy because he refused to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act. When Lord Charles Russell reached man's estate, he used, half in joke but quite half in-earnest, to attribute his lifelong sympathy with the political demands of the Irish people to the fact that he was a Dublin man by birth.
[Footnote *: He was christened from a gold bowl by the Archbishop of Dublin, Lord Normanton.]
The Duke of Bedford was one of the first Englishmen who took a shooting in Scotland (being urged thereto by his Highland Duchess); and near his shooting-lodge a man who had been "out" with Prince Charlie in 1745 was still living when Charles Russell first visited Speyside. Westminster was the Russells' hereditary school, and Charles Russell was duly subjected to the austere discipline which there prevailed. From the trials of gerund-grinding and fagging and flogging a temporary relief was afforded by the Coronation of George IV., at which he officiated as Page to the acting Lord Great Chamberlain. It was the last Coronation at which the procession was formed in Westminster Hall and moved across to the Abbey. Young Russell, by mischievousness or carelessness, contrived to tear his master's train from the ermine cape which surmounted it; and the procession was delayed till a seamstress could be found to repair the damage. "I contrived to keep that old rascal George IV. off the throne for half an hour," was Lord Charles-Russell's boast in maturer age.[*]
[Footnote *: J, W. Croker, recording the events of the day, says: "The King had to wait full half an hour for the Great Chamberlain, Lord Gwydyr, who, it seems, had torn his robes, and was obliged to wait to have them mended. I daresay the public lays the blame of the delay on to the King, who was ready long before anyone else,"—The Croker Papers, vol. i., p. 195.]
From Westminster Lord Charles passed to the University of Edinburgh, where his brother John had preceded him. He boarded with Professor Pillans, whom Byron gibbeted as "paltry"[*] in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," and enjoyed the society of the literary circle which in those days made Edinburgh famous. The authorship of the Waverley Novels was not yet revealed, and young Russell had the pleasure of discussing with Sir Walter Scott the dramatic qualities of The Bride of Lammermoor. He was, perhaps, less unfitted for such high converse than most lads would be, because, as Lord Holland's godson, he had been from his schooldays a frequenter of Holland House in its days of glory.[**]
[Footnote *: Why?]
[Footnote **: On his first visit Lord Holland told him that he might order his own dinner. He declared for a roast duck with green peas, and an apricot tart; whereupon the old Amphitryon said: "Decide as wisely on every question in life, and you will never go far wrong.">[
On leaving Edinburgh, Lord Charles Russell joined the Blues, then commanded by Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, afterwards King of Hanover; and he was able to confirm, by personal knowledge, the strange tales of designs which the Duke entertained for placing himself or his son upon the throne of England.[*] He subsequently exchanged into the 52nd Light Infantry, from which he retired, with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, in order to enter Parliament. In December, 1832, he was returned at the head of the poll for Bedfordshire, and on Christmas Eve a young lady (who in 1834 became his wife) wrote thus to her sister:
"Lord Charles Russell is returned for this County. The Chairing, Dinner, etc., take place to-day. Everybody is interested about him, as he is very young and it is his first appearance in the character. His speeches have delighted the whole County, and he is, of course, very much pleased." This faculty of public speaking was perhaps his most remarkable endowment. He had an excellent command of cultivated English, a clear and harmonious voice, a keen sense of humour, and a happy knack of apt quotation.
[Footnote *: Cf. Tales of my Father, by A. F. Longmans, 1902.]
On the 23rd of February, 1841, Disraeli wrote, with reference to an impending division on the Irish Registration Bill: "The Whigs had last week two hunting accidents; but Lord Charles Russell, though he put his collar-bone out, and we refused to pair him, showed last night." He sate for Bedfordshire till the dissolution of that year, when he retired, feeling that Free Trade was indeed bound to come, but that it would be disastrous for the agricultural community which he represented. "Lord Charles Russell," wrote Cobden, "is the man who opposed even his brother John's fixed duty, declaring at the time that it was to throw two millions of acres out of cultivation." He returned to Parliament for a brief space in 1847, and was then appointed Serjeant-at-Arms—not, as he always insisted, "Serjeant-at-Arms to the House of Commons," but "one of the Queen's Serjeants-at-Arms, directed by her to attend on the Speaker during the sitting of Parliament." In 1873 the office and its holder were thus described by "Jehu Junior" in Vanity Fair:
"For the filling of so portentous an office, it is highly important that one should be chosen who will, by personal mien and bearing not less than by character, detract nothing from its dignity. Such a one is Lord Charles Russell, who is a worthy representative of the great house of Bedford from which he springs.
"For a quarter of a century he has borne the mace before successive Speakers. From his chair he has listened to Peel, to Russell, to Palmerston, to Disraeli, and to Gladstone, and he still survives as a depository of their eloquence. He is himself popular beyond the fair expectations of one who has so important a part to play in the disciplinary arrangements of a popular assembly; for he is exceptionally amiable and genial by nature, is an excellent sportsman, and has cultivated a special taste for letters.[*] It is rarely that in these times a man can be found so thoroughly fitted to fill an office which could be easily invested with ridicule, or so invariably to invest it, as he has, with dignity."
[Footnote *: He was the best Shakespearean I ever knew, and founded the "Shakespeare Medal" at Harrow. Lord Chief justice Coleridge wrote thus: "A munificent and accomplished nobleman, Lord Charles Russell, has, by the wise liberality which dictated the foundation of his Shakespeare Medal at Harrow, secured that at least at one great Public School the boys may be stimulated in youth to an exact and scholarlike acquaintance with the poet whom age will show them to be the greatest in the world.">[
Sir George Trevelyan writes: "You can hardly imagine how formidable and impressive Lord Charles seemed to the mass of Members, and especially to the young; and how exquisite and attractive was the moment when he admitted you to his friendly notice, and the absolute assurance that, once a friend, he would be a friend for ever."
Lord Charles Russell held the Serjeancy till 1875; and at this point I had better transcribe the record in Hansard:
Monday, April 5, 1875:
Mr. Speaker acquainted the House that he had received from Lord Charles James Fox Russell the following letter:
HOUSE OF COMMONS,
April 5th, 1875.
SIR,
I have the honour to make application to you that you will be pleased to sanction my retirement from my office, by Patent, of Her Majesty's Serjeant-at-Arms attending the Speaker of the House of Commons. I have held this honourable office for twenty-seven years, and I feel that the time is come when it is desirable that I should no longer retain it.
I have the honour to be, Sir,
Your very obedient servant,
CHARLES J. F. RUSSELL,
Serjeant-at-Arms.
THE RIGHT HONBLE. THE SPEAKER.
Mr. DISRAELI: I beg to move, Sir, that the letter addressed to you by Lord Charles Russell, the late Serjeant-at-Arms, be read by the Clerk at the Table.
Letter [5th April] read.
Mr. DISRAELI: Mr. Speaker, we have listened to the resignation of his office by one who has long and ably served this House. The office of Serjeant-at-Arms is one which requires no ordinary qualities; for it requires at the same time patience, firmness, and suavity, and that is a combination of qualities more rare than one could wish in this world. The noble Lord who filled the office recently, and whose resignation has just been read at the Table, has obtained our confidence by the manner in which he has discharged his duties through an unusually long period of years; and we should remember, I think, that occasions like the present are almost the only opportunity we have of expressing our sense of those qualities, entitled so much to our respect, which are possessed and exercised by those who fill offices attached to this House, and upon whose able fulfilment of their duties much of our convenience depends. Therefore, following the wise example of those who have preceded me in this office, I have prepared a Resolution which expresses the feeling of the House on this occasion, and I now place it, Sir, in your hands.
Mr. Speaker, read the Resolution, as follows: "That Mr. Speaker be requested to acquaint Lord Charles James Fox Russell that this House entertains a just sense of the exemplary manner in which he has uniformly discharged the duties of the Office of Serjeant-at-Arms during his long attendance on this House."
The MARQUESS OF HARTINGTON: Sir, on behalf of the Members who sit on this side of the House, I rise to second the Motion of the Right Hon. Gentleman. He has on more than one occasion gracefully, but at the same time justly, recognized the services rendered to the State by the house of Russell. That house will always occupy a foremost place in the history of the Party to which I am proud to belong, and I hope it will occupy no insignificant place in the history of the country. Of that house the noble Lord who has just resigned his office is no unworthy member. There are, Sir, at the present moment but few Members who can recollect the time when he assumed the duties of his office; but I am glad that his resignation has been deferred long enough to enable a number of new Members of this House to add their testimony to that of us who are better acquainted with him, as to the invariable dignity and courtesy with which he has discharged his duties.
The Resolution was adopted by the House, nemine contradicente.
Lord Charles now retired to his home at Woburn, Bedfordshire, where he spent the nineteen years of his remaining life. He had always been devoted to the duties and amusements of the county, and his two main joys were cricket and hunting. He was elected to M.C.C. in 1827, and for twenty years before his death I had been its senior member. Lilywhite once said to him: "For true cricket, give me bowling, Pilch in, Box at the wicket, and your Lordship looking on."[*] He was a good though uncertain shot, but in the saddle he was supreme—a consummate horseman, and an unsurpassed judge of a hound. He hunted regularly till he was eighty-one, irregularly still later, and rode till his last illness began. Lord Ribblesdale writes: "The last time I had the good fortune to meet your father we went hunting together with the Oakley Hounds, four or five years before his death. We met at a place called Cranfield Court, and Lord Charles was riding a young mare, five years old—or was she only four?—which kicked a hound, greatly to his disgust! She was not easy to ride, nor did she look so, but he rode her with the ease of long proficiency—not long years—and his interest in all that goes to make up a day's hunting was as full of zest and youth as I recollect his interest used to be in all that made up a cricket-match in my Harrow days."
[Footnote *: See Lords and the M.C.C., p. 86.]
In religion Lord Charles Russell was an Evangelical, and he was a frequent speaker on religious platforms. In politics he was an ardent Liberal; always (except in that soon-repented heresy about Free Trade) rather in advance of his party; a staunch adherent of Mr. Gladstone, and a convinced advocate of Home Rule, though he saw from the outset that the first Home Rule Bill, without Chamberlain's support, was, as he said, "No go." He took an active part in electioneering, from the distant days when, as a Westminster boy, he cheered for Sir Francis Burdett, down to September, 1892, when he addressed his last meeting in support of Mr. Howard Whitbread, then Liberal candidate for South Bedfordshire. A speech which he delivered at the General Election of 1886, denouncing the "impiety" of holding that the Irish were incapable of self-government, won the enthusiastic applause of Mr. Gladstone. When slow-going Liberals complained of too-rapid reforms, he used to say: "When I was a boy, our cry was 'Universal Suffrage, Triennial Parliaments, and the Ballot.' That was seventy years ago, and we have only got one of the three yet."
In local matters, he was always on the side of the poor and the oppressed, and a sturdy opponent of all aggressions on their rights. "Footpaths," he wrote, "are a precious right of the poor, and consequently much encroached on."
It is scarcely decent for a son to praise his father, but even a son may be allowed to quote the tributes which his father's death evoked. Let some of these tributes end my tale.
June 29th, 1894.
My DEAR G. RUSSELL,
I am truly grieved to learn this sad news. It is the disappearance of an illustrious figure to us, but of much more, I fear, to you.
Yours most sincerely,
ROSEBERY.
DEAR G. RUSSELL,
I saw with sorrow the announcement of your father's death. He was a good and kind friend to me in the days long ago, and I mourn his loss. In these backsliding days he set a great example of steadfastness and loyalty to the faith of his youth and his race.
Yours very truly,
W. V. HARCOURT.
July 31rd 1894.
DEAR RUSSELL,
I was very grieved to hear of your revered father's death.
He was a fine specimen of our real aristocracy, and such specimens are becoming rarer and rarer in these degenerate days.
There was a true ring of the "Grand Seigneur" about him which always impressed me.
Yours sincerely,
REAY.
July 1st, 1894.
My DEAR RUSSELL,
I thank you very much for your kindness in writing to me.
You may, indeed, presume that it is with painful interest and deep regret that I hear of the death of your father, and that I value the terms in which you speak of his feelings towards myself.
Though he died at such an advanced age, it is, I think, remarkable that his friends spoke of him to the last as if he were still in the full intercourse of daily life, without the disqualification or forgetfulness that old age sometimes brings with it.
For my part I can never forget my association with him in the House of Commons and elsewhere, nor the uniform kindness which he always showed me.
Believe me, most truly yours,
ARTHUR W. PEEL.
June 29th, 1894.
My DEAR RUSSELL,
I have seen, with the eyes of others, in newspapers of this afternoon the account of the death—shall I say?—or of the ingathering of your father. And of what he was to you as a father I can reasonably, if remotely, conceive from knowing what he was in the outer circle, as a firm, true, loyal friend.
He has done, and will do, no dishonour to the name of Russell. It is a higher matter to know, at a supreme moment like this, that he had placed his treasure where moth and dust do not corrupt, and his dependence where dependence never fails. May he enjoy the rest, light, and peace of the just until you are permitted to rejoin him. With growing years you will feel more and more that here everything is but a rent, and that it is death alone which integrates.
On Monday I hope to go to Pitlochrie, N. B., and in a little time to return southward, and resume, if it please God, the great gift of working vision.
Always and sincerely yours,
W. E. GLADSTONE.
III
RELIGION AND THE CHURCH
I
A STRANGE EPIPHANY
Whenever the State meddles with the Church's business, it contrives to make a muddle. This familiar truth has been exemplified afresh by the decree which dedicated last Sunday[*] to devotions connected with the War. The Feast of the Epiphany has had, at least since the fourth century, its definite place in the Christian year, its special function, and its peculiar lesson. The function is to commemorate the revelation of Christianity to the Gentile world; and the lesson is the fulfilment of all that the better part of Heathendom had believed in and sought after, in the religion which emanates from Bethlehem. To confuse the traditional observance of this day with the horrors and agonies of war, its mixed motives and its dubious issues, was indeed a triumph of ineptitude.
[Footnote *: January 6th, 1918.]
Tennyson wrote of
"this northern island,
Sundered once from all the human race";
and when Christians first began to observe the Epiphany, or Theophany (as the feast was indifferently called), our own forefathers were among the heathen on whom the light of the Holy Manger was before long to shine. It has shone on us now for a good many centuries; England has ranked as one of the chiefest of Christian nations, and has always professed, and often felt, a charitable concern for the races which are still lying in darkness. Epiphany is very specially the feast of a missionary Church, and the strongest appeal which it could address to Heathendom would be to cry, "See what Christianity has done for the world! Christendom possesses the one religion. Come in and share its blessings."
There have been times and places at which that appeal could be successfully made. Indeed, as Gibbon owned, it was one of the causes to which the gradual triumph of Christianity was due. But for Europe at the present moment to address that appeal to Africa or India or China would be to invite a deadly repartee. In the long ages, Heathendom might reply, which have elapsed since the world "rose out of chaos," you have improved very little on the manners of those primeval monsters which "tare each other in the slime." Two thousand years of Christianity have not taught you to beat your swords into plough-shares. You still make your sons to pass through the fire to Moloch, and the most remarkable developments of physical science are those which make possible the destruction of human life on the largest scale. Certainly, in Zeppelins and submarines and poisonous gas there is very little to remind the world of Epiphany and what it stands for.
Thirty years ago the great Lord Shaftesbury wrote: "The present is terrible, the future far more so; every day adds to the power and facility of the means of destruction. Science is hard at work (science, the great—nay, to some the only—God of these days) to discover and concentrate the shortest and easiest methods to annihilate the human race." We see the results of that work in German methods of warfare.
Germany has for four centuries asserted for herself a conspicuous place in European religion. She has been a bully there as in other fields, and the lazy and the timid have submitted to her theological pretensions. Now, by the mouth of her official pastors she has renounced the religion of sacrifice for the lust of conquest, and has substituted the creed of Odin for the faith of Christ. A country which, in spite of learning and opportunity, has wilfully elapsed from civilization into barbarism can scarcely evangelize Confucians or Buddhists.
If we turn from the Protestant strongholds of the North to the citadel of Authority at Rome, the signs of an Epiphany are equally lacking. The Infallibility which did not save the largest section of Christendom from such crimes as the Inquisition and the massacre of St. Bartholomew has proved itself equally impotent in these latter days. No one could have expected the Pope, who has spiritual children in all lands, to take sides in an international dispute; but one would have thought that a divinely-given infallibility would have denounced, with the trumpet-tone of Sinai, the orgies of sexual and sacrilegious crime which have devastated Belgium.
Is the outlook in allied Russia any more hopeful than in hostile Germany and in neutral Rome? I must confess that I cannot answer. We were always told that the force which welded together in one the different races and tongues of the Russian Empire was a spiritual force; that the Russian held his faith dearer than his life; and that even his devotion to the Czar had its origin in religion. At this moment of perplexity and peril, will the Holy Orthodox Church manifest her power and instil into her children the primary conceptions of Christian citizenship?
And if we look nearer home, we must acknowledge that the condition of England has not always been such as to inspire Heathendom with a lively desire to be like us. A century and a half ago Charles Wesley complained that his fellow-citizens, who professed Christianity, "the sinners unbaptized out-sin." And everyone who remembers the social and moral state of England during the ten years immediately preceding the present War will be inclined to think that the twentieth century had not markedly improved on the eighteenth. Betting and gambling, and the crimes to which they lead, had increased frightfully, and were doing as much harm as drunkenness used to do. There was an open and insolent disregard of religious observance, especially with respect to the use of Sunday, the weekly Day of Rest being perverted into a day of extra amusement and resulting labour. There was a general relaxation of moral tone in those classes of society which are supposed to set a good example. There was an ever-increasing invasion of the laws which guard sexual morality, illustrated in the agitation to make divorce even easier than it is now. Other and darker touches might be added; but I have said enough to make my meaning clear. Some say that the war is teaching us to repent of and to forsake those national offences. If so, but not otherwise, we can reasonably connect it with the lessons of Epiphany.