The little boy seems to have been really rather like the little angels in Italian pictures, a child with golden curls and big brown eyes, with the look of love and sunshine gleaming out of them that he kept all his life, and there is a letter of his mother’s, describing a children’s fancy dress ball, at which she dressed him up as a little cupid, with wings and a wreath of roses, and was very proud of the result. He was either too little to mind, or if he hated it, as so many boys would, he bore with it to please his mother, who, we are told, made as much of an idol of him as did the rest of his family. And indeed it is most wonderful, from all accounts, that he was not completely spoiled. Here is his mother’s letter about it:—
“I never did see anything half so like an angel. I must say so, although it was my own performance. He had on a garland of roses and green leaves mixed; a pair of wild duck’s wings, put on wire to make them set well; a bow and arrow, and a quiver with arrows in it, tied on with a broad blue ribbon that went across his sweet neck.”
In another of her letters we are told of a visit paid, about this time, to Queen Charlotte, and how the child “Boysey” climbed into the Queen’s lap, drew up and pulled down window-blinds, romped at hide-and-seek with the Duke of Cambridge, and showed himself to be not in the slightest degree abashed by the presence of royalty.
Lord Fitzwilliam, a friend and distant relation, used often to stay at Pembroke Lodge and at Wilton, and seems to have been pleased by the boy’s courteous ways and winning looks; for, having no children of his own, when he left most of his property to Lord Pembroke, the “remainder,” which meant big estates in Ireland and Shropshire, was to go to his second son, Sidney.
The boy loved his father with a very special intimacy and tenderness, as we see by a letter written soon after he left Harrow and a little while before he went up to Oxford, where at Oriel he at once made friends with men of fine character and sterling worth. His father had died in 1827, and he writes from Chilmark, where the rector, Mr. Lear, was his tutor, and the Rectory was near his own old home at Wilton:—
“You cannot think how comfortable it is to be in a nice little country church after that great noisy chapel. Everything is so quiet and the people all so attentive that you might hear a pin fall while Mr. Lear is preaching. I like, too, being so near Wilton, so many things here ever bringing to mind all he said and did, all places where I have ridden with him, and the home where we used to be so happy. In short, there is not a spot about Wilton now which I do not love as if it were a person. I hope you will be coming there soon and get it over, for seeing that place again will be a dreadful trial to you.”
Among his friends at Oxford were Cardinal Manning, Lord Lincoln, who as Duke of Newcastle was afterwards closely associated with him at the War Office; Lord Elgin, Lord Dalhousie, and Lord Canning, all three Viceroys of India. It was there, too, that his friendship with Mr. Gladstone began. Lord Stanmore says that Mr. Gladstone told him a year or two before his death how one day at a University Convocation dealing with a petition against the Roman Catholic Relief Bill, to which he had himself gone as an undergraduate outsider, he had noticed among the crowd of undergraduates in the vestibule of the Convocation House “a tall and graceful figure, surmounted by a face of such singular sweetness and refinement that his attention was at once riveted by it, and with such force that the picture he then saw rose again as vividly before him while talking as when first seen sixty-eight years before.” Mr. Gladstone inquired the name of this attractive freshman. “Herbert of Oriel,” was the answer. They became friends; but in those days friendships between men of different colleges and different ages were not always easily kept up. The more intimate relations between himself and Herbert date only from a later time.
Herbert’s noble and beautiful life was to be closely intertwined with that of his little friend and neighbour, in one of those friendships—holy in their unselfish ardour of comradeship and service of others—which put to shame many of the foolish sayings of the world, and prove that, while an ideal marriage is the divinest happiness God gives to earthly life, an ideal friendship also has the power to lift both joy and pain into the region of heaven itself.
This was a friendship which, as we shall see, arose in the first instance partly out of the fact that the two children grew up on neighbouring estates, and were both what Mrs. Tollemache has called “Sunday people”—people with leisure to give to others, as well as wealth; and at the end of Sidney Herbert’s life it was said that the following description of Sir Philip Sidney, after whom he was named, was in every particular a description of him:—