FOOTNOTES

[3] ‘Jildi’—quick.

A PEEP AT AN OLD PARLIAMENT.

BY SIR HENRY LUCY.

A short time ago an unknown friend, ‘thinking it may interest you,’ sent me what turned out to be a precious volume. Its full title runs thus: ‘Random Recollections of the House of Commons from the Year 1830 to the Close of 1835, including Personal Sketches of the Leading Members of all Parties; by One of No Party.’ Readers of the Cornhill will be not the less attracted by it since, as the imprint shows, it was published in 1836 by the eminent firm of Smith, Elder & Co., at that date located at Cornhill.

Throughout the volume ‘One of No Party,’ whom, for the sake of brevity, I will in future refer to by the letter Q, preserves his anonymity. In a modest preface he describes himself as ‘during a very regular attendance in the House of Commons for several years past being in the habit of taking notes of what was most interesting in the proceedings, as well as of the personal and oratorical peculiarities of the leading members.’ As ‘One of No Party’ and all the historical personages who live again under the magic of his graphic pen have long since passed on to another state, it would not be indiscreet if the day-books of the old firm in Cornhill for the year 1835 were looked through and his identity revealed.

Alas, poor Yorick! The final—to be precise, the penultimate—chapter of the life-story of his book has something touching in its sadness. Its price on the day of publication is not mentioned. Pencil memoranda on the fly-sheet indicate that fourscore years later the second-hand bookseller to whom its possession fell temptingly offered it at the price of one shilling. There being apparently no bidding, the shilling was crossed out and sixpence substituted. Finally, oh ye who pass by remaining obdurate or worse still indifferent, the volume, with its old-fashioned brown paper back bound with a strip of cloth, was thrown into the fourpenny box, receptacle of many unrecognised but memorable treasures. As affording a vivid peep at an historic Parliament, few have exceeded the intrinsic value of this time-and-weather-stained volume.

Beginning his record in the Unreformed Parliament of 1830, Q indulged himself in the production of a series of thumb-nail sketches of eminent members long since gone to another place, whose names live in history. Here we have the men as they lived and dressed, moved or spoke, depicted by a keen-sighted independent looker-on. In this Parliament Sir Charles Wetherell, Member for Bristol, high Tory of a type now extinct, held a prominent and popular place.

‘He never opened his mouth,’ Q says, ‘but the House was convulsed with laughter, Wetherell himself preserving a countenance morose in its gravity.’

His personal appearance sufficed to attract attention.

‘His clothes are always threadbare. I never saw a suit on him for which a Jew old-clothes man would give ten shillings. They always look as if made by accident, hanging loosely about his tall figure. As for braces, he has an unconquerable aversion to them.’

There is a story about the famous Member for Bristol which Q must have heard but does not relate. When with frequent gestures he addressed the House his unbraced trousers parted from his waistcoat, displaying a considerable rim of shirt. A member, gravely rising to a point of order, once called the attention of the Speaker to the lapse. Manners Sutton, who filled the Chair at the time, with equal gravity declined to interfere. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘the hon. gentleman’s only lucid interval.’

Leaving the House at a quarter past seven one morning, having fought the Reform Bill in Committee through a long series of divisions, Wetherell discovered it was raining heavily. ‘By G—,’ he said, ‘if I had known this we would have had a few more divisions.’

A contemporary of Wetherell’s, an active fellow-worker against the Reform Bill, was Croker, object of Macaulay’s particular aversion, a prejudice shared by Disraeli. Q describes him as tall, well-made, full six feet in height.

‘He is bald-headed and has been so for ten or twelve years. He is about sixty years of age, for one half of which time he has been in Parliament. He is a very fluent speaker, but his elocution is impaired by the circumstance of his not being able to pronounce the letter R. His gestures are violent, often theatrically so. He makes infinitely varied evolution, wheeling his body round and round, by that means managing to address by turns not only every part of the House, but almost every member in it. Like a hen on a hot girdle, as an Irish member describes him.’

Through a series of weeks Croker spoke every night against clauses of the Reform Bill. Some nights he made as many as twenty speeches occupying three hours of the sitting. His apprehension of disastrous results accruing from the passing of the Bill, fear shared by Sir Charles Wetherell, was justified by the event. In both cases the enlarged constituencies rejected their candidature.

At the date of this fascinating record, which closes with the session of 1835, neither Disraeli nor Gladstone was yet in the House. Sir Robert Peel, unconscious of what was in store for him in the way of personal connection with them, was Leader of the Tory party in the House of Commons, a post to which he succeeded on the death of Canning. Q gives us one of his vivid sketches of the living man:

‘He is remarkably good-looking, rather above the usual size, and finely proportioned. He is of clear complexion, full round face, and red-haired. His usual dress is a green surtout, a light waistcoat, and dark trousers. He generally displays a watch-chain on his breast, with a bunch of gold seals of unusually large dimensions and great splendour. He can scarcely be called a dandy, and yet he sacrifices a good deal to these graces. I hardly know a public man who dresses in better taste. He is in the prime of life, being forty-seven years of age. His whole appearance indicates health. He is capable of undergoing a great deal of fatigue.’

It was Peel’s custom to remain in the House till one or two o’clock in the morning, later if necessary. Nor was he a quiescent listener, following the debate with tireless attention and occasionally intervening. In this respect Disraeli and Gladstone, brought up at his feet, were equally close in their attendance and attention. Up to the last both, whether in office or in Opposition, seated themselves when the Speaker took the Chair, and with brief interval for dinner remained till the House was up. The fashion of to-day is widely different, the habit of the Premier and the Leader of the Opposition (when there was one) being to withdraw to the privacy of their respective rooms as soon as questions are over, an example loyally followed by their colleagues.

I don’t know why, but it is something of a surprise to learn that Sir Robert Peel was a red-haired man. His son Arthur, who for many years added grace and authority to the Speaker’s Chair, had raven locks. The circumstance lends support to Q’s quaint theory that in the House of Commons red hair is the concomitant of supreme ability. There is none in the present House.

It is curious and interesting to find in this close contemporaneous study of Sir Robert Peel two mannerisms strongly marked in his most famous disciple when in due time he filled his master’s official place in the House of Commons. Q describes how Sir Robert, when speaking on any great question, was accustomed to strike at regular intervals the brass-bound box which lies on the table, in front of which a Minister is habituated to stand whilst addressing the House. Nothing if not precise, Q, with his eye on the clock, reckoned that Peel smote the box at the rate of two strokes a minute. Old members of the House of Commons will recall this curious habit as practised by Gladstone. It was occasionally varied by another trick of driving home his argument by smiting the open palm of his left hand with his right. The consequence was that he frequently drowned in the clamour the concluding words of his leading sentences.

Another trick of Peel’s, unconsciously imitated by his pupil, was that of turning his back on the Speaker and addressing passages of his speech directly to supporters on the bench behind him or seated below the gangway. This is a violation of the fundamental rule of order requiring a member on his legs to address himself directly to the Chair. In Gladstone’s case it afforded opportunity for welcome diversion on the part of members on the benches opposite, who lustily cried ‘Order! Order!’ Interrupted in the flow of his argument and not immediately recognising the cause, he added to the merriment by turning round with inquiring look at his tormentors.

‘Sir Robert is the idol of the Tory Party,’ writes this shrewd observer. ‘With the Conservatives in the House of Commons everything he says is oracular. He can do with them and make of them what he pleases. They are the mere creatures of his will, are as much under his control, and as ready to be formed and fashioned in any way he chooses, as is the clay in the hands of the potter.’

Ten years later Peel, counting upon this deference, and believing with Q that the Tory Party was in all matters submissive to his command, declared himself a Free Trader. Whereupon, as happened in the old potter’s shop visited by Omar Khayyam, there was revolt by the clay population.

And suddenly one more impatient cried:

‘Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?’

The awkward question was answered by Peel’s former vassals uprising and turning out his Government.

The name of Colonel Sibthorpe lingers in the Parliamentary gallery of notabilities of the Unreformed Parliament. Q describes him as woefully deficient in judgment.

‘If there be a right and a wrong side to any subject he is sure to adopt the wrong one. He never makes a very long speech because he cannot. But he speaks on every subject, and in Committee it is no unusual thing for him to make fifteen or twenty speeches in one night.’

Like the maid in the pastoral poem, Colonel Sibthorpe’s face was his fortune, at least the early making of it.

‘Two or three Senators rejoice in tufts,’ Q writes, ‘and a few more in whiskers of decent proportions. Compared with the moustache and whiskers of the gallant Colonel one feels indignant that they should be dignified by the name. The lower section of his face, drawing a straight line from ear to ear immediately under his nose, is one great forest of hair. You hardly know whether he has a mouth or not, so completely is it buried amidst the surrounding crop of hair.’

This personal peculiarity elicited from O’Connell a fair example of the sort of humour that in these past times appealed to an assembly grateful for temporary deliverance from a state of boredom. Sibthorpe, making one of his incoherent attacks upon the Liberal majority, said:

‘I am no party man. I have never acted from party feelings, but I must say I do not like the countenances of hon. gentlemen opposite.’

O’Connell, following, retorted amid what Q describes as peals of laughter:

‘We who sit on this side certainly have not such remarkable countenances as that of the gallant Colonel. I would not abate him a single hair’—here resounded a peal of laughter—‘in good humour on this or any other ordinary occasion.’

Macaulay, seated in the Commons as Member for Leeds, a connection broken when he went out to India as a Member of Council, did not escape Q’s searching and shrewd observation. He gives a description of his personal appearance founded on the style of the ‘Police News’ circulating particulars respecting an absconded criminal:

‘His personal appearance is prepossessing. In stature he is about middle size and well formed. His eyes are of a deep blue and have a very intelligent expression. His complexion is dark, his hair of a beautiful jet black. His face is rather inclined to the oval form. His features are small and regular. He is now in the thirty-eighth year of his age.’

Passing through the stately hall of the Reform Club, I often stop to look at a portrait of Macaulay hung on the wall at the foot of the stairway. One would not recognise it from this minute description of the Member for Leeds who sat in the Parliament in the early ’thirties of the last century. But between the printed letter and the painted canvas a period of thirty years stretched.

In his incomparable biography of his uncle, Sir George Trevelyan tells of the success of his maiden speech. Q, who heard it, describes it as electrifying the House. He adds that by refraining from early reappearance in debate Macaulay shrewdly preserved his laurels.

‘He had no gift for extemporaneous speeches. His contributions to debate were carefully studied and committed to memory. He bestowed a world of labour on their preparation. In every sentence we saw the man of genius, the profound scholar, the deep thinker, the close and powerful reasoner. His diction was faultless. As a speaker, he was not forcible or vehement, carrying his audience away with him as by force. Rather, by his dulcet tones and engaging manner, he took his hearers with him willing captives.’

Whilst the late Duke of Devonshire sat in the House of Commons as Lord Hartington, I frequently found in him curiously close resemblance, mental and physical, to Lord Althorpe, Leader of the House of Commons during Lord Grey’s premiership, and the short duration of the first administration of Lord Melbourne. The impression is confirmed by Q’s description.

‘He was one of the worst speakers in the House. It was a truly melancholy spectacle to see him vindicating the Government when in the progress of the Irish Coercion Bill of 1833 it was assailed by O’Connell, Sheil, and other Irish Members. He could not put three or four sentences together without stammering, recalling his words over and over again.’

This is an exaggerated description of Lord Hartington’s manner of speech. In later days he with sedulous practice improved. His speeches, found to be surprisingly good when read from verbatim report, suffered considerably by ineffective delivery.

We come nearer to Lord Hartington as Q proceeds with his study of Lord Althorpe.

‘He has a sound judgment, which makes him invariably take the common-sense view of a subject. With all his faults as a speaker he was much esteemed by men of all parties. It was impossible for anyone, however much he might differ from him in sentiment, not to respect him. Nothing could make him lose his temper. In the most violent altercations, amid scenes of greatest uproar and confusion, there he stood motionless as a statue, his face shadowing forth the most perfect placidness of mind.’

This might have been written of Lord Hartington through many a stormy scene in the House of Commons, as he sat on the front Opposition Bench, one hand in his trouser pocket, his hat tilted over his nose, his face as stony as that of the Sphinx.

It is common experience in modern Parliaments that men who have attained the highest position at the Bar have been failures in the House of Commons. Illustrations of the rule are provided in the cases of Lord Davey and Lord Russell of Killowen. The former, who probably never opened his mouth in a Court of Law under a fee of one hundred guineas, when as Sir Horace Davey he spoke in the House of Commons was as successful as the traditional dinner bell in emptying the Chamber. During a long parliamentary career Sir Charles Russell only once rose to the height of his fame as an advocate at the Bar. It was when in debate he pleaded the cause of Home Rule, whose final triumph he did not live to see. Exceptions are found in the cases of Sir John Herschell, who, entering the House of Commons as an unknown barrister, won his way to the Woolsack, and Sir Edward Clarke, who, if he had set his mind on the same goal, would certainly have reached it.

That this state of things, though paradoxical, is not new appears from the case of Lord Jeffrey as narrated by this shrewd observer. Apart from his pre-eminence at the Scottish Bar, Jeffrey’s editorship of the ‘Edinburgh Review’ invested him with double personal interest. His maiden speech was looked forward to with absorbing interest. He rose in a crowded House. According to the implacable Q, the effort was a failure so lamentable that he never repeated it, content with briefly taking part in debate only when the duty was imposed upon him in connection with his office as Lord Advocate. In delivering his maiden speech he spoke for an hour and twenty minutes with unparalleled rapidity of delivery. Unfaltering, he proceeded to the end.

‘His manner was graceful, his voice clear and pleasant. Both lacked variety and flexibility. The discourse was as unintelligible to the majority of its auditory as if he had spoken some abstruse article intended for the “Edinburgh Review” in answer to Kant or some other German metaphysician.’

Jeffrey was approaching his fiftieth year when he entered Parliament. He is described as being

‘Below the middle size and slender in make. His face is small and compact, inclining to the angular form. His eyelashes are prominent. His forehead is remarkably low considering the intellectual character of the man. His complexion is dark and his hair black.’

Cobbett, who at the age of seventy-three sat in the same Parliament with Jeffrey, was of a different physical type. Six foot two in height, he was one of the stoutest men in the House.

‘His ruddy complexion was crowned by a shock of milk-white hair. His usual dress was a light grey coat, a white waistcoat, and kerseymere breeches of sandy colour, into whose pockets he used to thrust his hands when he walked about the House. There was something so dull and heavy about his whole appearance that anyone who did not know him would have set him down for a country clodpoll—to use a favourite expression of his own—who not only never read a book or had a single idea in his head, but was a mere mass of mortality without a particle of sensibility of any kind.’

Lord John Russell, at this time a member of Lord Melbourne’s Cabinet equally with Jeffrey, had nothing in common with Cobbett except a light-coloured waistcoat and kerseymere trousers of a sandy complexion. His height was even less than that attained by the famous editor of the ‘Edinburgh.’ Q describes him as

‘Considerably below middle size, slenderly made, and presenting the appearance of a person of weakened constitution. His features are large and broadly marked, his complexion pale, his countenance of a pensive cast. He scarcely ever indulges in a smile.’

He is roundly described as one of the worst speakers in the House. His voice was weak and his enunciation imperfect, hampered by stammer or stutter at every fourth or fifth sentence. He had a habit of repeating frequently three or four times the first two or three words of a sentence. His oratorical style was further embellished by a hesitating cough. Q supplies a verbatim note taken down as Lord John stood inanimate at the table, his voice inaudible to one-half of his audience. ‘I—I—I—hem—think the motion of the honourable member is—is ill-timed at the—at the—hem—present moment.’

Q is inexplicably hard on Palmerston, who at the early age of forty-five attained the position of Foreign Secretary.

‘The situation he fills in the Cabinet,’ he writes with solitary touch of personal rancour, ‘gives him a certain degree of prominence in the eyes of the country which he certainly does not possess in Parliament. His talents are by no means of a high order.’

He is described as an indifferent speaker, handicapped like his colleague Lord John Russell by a vocal trick of stuttering and stammering. ‘He is very indolent, irregular in his attendance upon his parliamentary duties, and when in the House by no means active in defence of his principles or his friends.’

Tall and handsome in person, he was always dressed in the height of fashion, a habit which we are told suggested to The Times the sobriquet of ‘Cupid,’ by which, with levity unknown in Printing House Square in these later days, it was accustomed to make editorial allusion to the Foreign Secretary.

Hume is described as head of the country Liberal Party.

‘He is short-necked, and his head is one of the largest I have seen. His hair, of dark brown tipped with grey, is long and bushy; his face fat and round, and his complexion has that rough, healthy aspect common among gentlemen-farmers.’

Hume was impervious to ridicule or sarcasm, heedless of abuse however virulent. It was calculated that in the course of a session he delivered more speeches than the aggregate of any other three members. On a May night, when the House was in Committee on Civil Service Estimates, he spoke for forty minutes. His hat played a prominent part in these parliamentary incursions. He invariably brought it into the House cram-full of papers. When he rose to speak he planted it out on the bench or floor within arm’s length, as if it were a cabbage. When he interposed to make a passing remark, he had an odd trick of putting his hat under his left arm at an angle that dexterously precluded its contents tumbling out on the floor. There is somewhere in existence a caricature sketch of him by H.B. thus possessed of his hat. In his ordinary attire he lightened up his speeches, which though learned were a little dull, by presentation of a compact costume of a blue coat, a tartan waistcoat, and the apparently popular light-coloured ‘cassimere trousers.’

Roebuck, in his thirty-third year, was a member of this House. Here is a pen-picture of him:

‘He is much under the middle size, so slender withal that he has quite a boyish appearance. His countenance is pale and sickly, with very little flesh on it. His nose is rather prominent; his eyes are disproportionately large and sunken. There is a scowl so visibly impressed on his brow that the merest novice in physiognomy must observe it. He is not a favourite in the House, and the limited popularity he has acquired out of doors seems to be on the decline.’

Q evidently did not like Roebuck, who, when more than forty years later he reappeared on the parliamentary scene as Member for Sheffield, disclosed a natural talent for getting himself disliked. He came back with the flood of Toryism that in the General Election of 1874 swamped Mr. Gladstone. Dillwyn, an old and generally esteemed member, secured the corner seat below the gangway on the Opposition side, a place made historic in a later Parliament by the occupancy of Lord Randolph Churchill. Roebuck hankered after this seat, which he might have obtained by the regulation process of attendance at prayer-time. He preferred to arrive later and turn out Dillwyn, making himself otherwise pleasant by prodding his stick along the back of the bench, regardless of the presence of honourable members.

Dillwyn stood this for a long time. At length his patience was exhausted. I remember one afternoon when Roebuck, arriving as usual midway in the course of questions, made for the corner seat and stood there expecting Dillwyn to rise. The Member for Swansea, studiously unaware of his presence, made no sign. After a pause watched with eager eyes by a crowded House, Roebuck turned about and amid a ringing cheer from the Ministerialists crossed over to the Tory camp, where politically he was more at home.

In the days when Roebuck represented Bath, Q describes him as

‘One of the most petulant, discontented, and conceited of men in the House. Full of airs, he was in his own estimation one of the most consequential men within the walls of Parliament. He spoke frequently, in a voice feeble but clear and distinct.’

‘A man of fair talent but nothing more,’ is Q’s summing-up of one who, alike in his early prime and in his old age, filled a prominent place in the House of Commons.

O’Connell was closer to Q’s heart. He devotes an exceptional number of pages to a study of the Great Beggarman. Tall and athletic in person, O’Connell’s complexion had about it a freshness and ruddiness indicative of good health and excellent spirits. In a voice clear and strong he spoke with broad Irish accent. Occasionally he stammered, not from physical defect, but because he had upon his mind two or more ideas struggling for priority of expression. He was known occasionally to break off in the middle of a sentence, leaving it unfinished whilst he expounded a brilliant thought that struck him as he spoke.

His gestures and attitude were of endless variety. He had a trick of stretching out his neck and making wry faces at the Speaker. The next moment his arms were raised above his head, his fists firmly clenched as he declaimed a passionate passage of denunciation. He wore a wig, which suffered greatly in the course of a busy session. He would suddenly seize it with both hands as if about to tear it to pieces. He was merely half-consciously intent upon adjusting it. During a memorable speech advocating the repeal of the Union in 1834 he amazed the House by untying his cravat, taking it off, and laying it on the bench beside him. In the height of oratorical happiness he felt incommoded by the tightening of his neckcloth, and the simplest thing to do obviously was to remove it.

Among Irish members of this epoch Sheil ranked next to O’Connell. His eloquence commanded attention on both sides of the House. It was, however, hampered by several eccentricities. Mr. Gladstone, who preserved to the last a vivid impression of him, told me that when addressing the House he started on a loud key and rather screeched than spoke. Another tradition coming down to modern Parliaments describes him as bending down to scrape the floor with his thumbnail and thanking God he had no gestures. This reads like fable, but it is confirmed from Q’s personal observation.

‘Sometimes,’ he wrote, ‘Mr. Sheil bends his body to such a degree that you are not without fear he may lose his equilibrium and fall head prostrate on the floor. At other times he advances to the table, gives three or four lusty strokes on the box, and then suddenly retreats backwards four or five steps. In a few seconds we see him by another sudden bound leaning over the table, stretching out his neck as if trying to reach some hon. member opposite. In addition to an unmelodious voice, Sheil’s articulation is indistinct, his utterance reaching a stage of amazing rapidity.’

Feargus O’Connor, best known in connection with the Chartist movement, by favour of O’Connell represented County Cork in the session of 1834. Among stories told in the smoking-room of the House of Commons during the Parliament of 1874-80 was one that does not seem to have reached Q’s ear. It ran to the effect that, strolling about behind the Speaker’s Chair in the old House of Commons, O’Connor observed through the open door of the Speaker’s private room preparations for the right hon. gentleman’s early evening meal. Feargus, so the story ran, whether in a moment of absence of mind or in a preliminary state of mental defection that some years later necessitated incarceration in an asylum for the insane, seated himself at the table and ate the Speaker’s chop.

Differing in all ways from these illustrious unconventional Irishmen was Edward Bulwer Lytton, who sat in the session of 1835 as Member for Lincoln. Q describes him as

‘Artificial throughout, the mere creature of self-discipline. A fine-looking man, tall and handsome, he always dressed in the extreme of fashion. His manner of speaking, like his manner in all other respects, was affected. He wrote his speeches out, learned them off by heart, and delivered them with great rapidity in a weak voice, made more difficult to follow by reason of affected pronunciation. He did not often speak, and was rewarded for his moderation in this respect by finding the benches crowded when he interposed in debate.’

LADY CONNIE.

BY MRS. HUMPHRY WARD.