Confidential. July 26, 1886.
I accepted yesterday the Queen's commission to form a Government. It is a task full of difficulties; and I would have gladly seen Lord Hartington undertake it. This, however, he could not be induced to do; and the duty falls upon me. One of my first thoughts is to provide a Foreign Secretary for the new Government: for I could not, with any hope of carrying it through successfully, repeat the experiment of last summer by uniting the Foreign Secretaryship with the Premiership.
There is no one possessing the experience and knowledge of Foreign Affairs which you have, and no one whose appointment would exercise so great a moral authority in Europe. And we certainly have not in our political ranks any one who could claim a tithe of the fitness for the office which every one would acknowledge in your case. I earnestly hope the proposal may be not unacceptable to you. If that should happily be the case, a great difficulty in our way will have been most successfully removed.
As there is much to be said on the matter which it would be too long to write, Currie has very kindly undertaken to take this letter over and discuss the matter with you. We have talked it over very fully.
If you should be in need of any interval of repose, I could easily take the seals for a few weeks.
Lord Lyons to Lord Salisbury.
Paris. July 27, 1886.
Currie brought me your letter early this morning. In answer to it I sent you at 11.30 a.m. the following telegram:—
'I am very much gratified, and I am very grateful for the kind consideration with which your proposal is accompanied, but my age and the state of my health make it quite impossible for me to undertake the office.'
I hope I need not assure you that I am fully sensible of the kindness of your letter, and that if I cannot feel that I merit all you say of me, I am at least grateful for your good opinion.
The truth is, that I could not now undertake new and laborious duties with any confidence that I could discharge them efficiently. I feel the need of rest, and I am not equal to beginning a new life of hard work. I could not conscientiously assume the great responsibility which would be thrown upon me.
If the post of Foreign Secretary has ever been offered during the last hundred years to any other person outside the ranks of orthodox party politicians the secret has been well kept, and it might perhaps be suggested that few people would be found with sufficient strength of mind to decline so glittering a prize. Lord Lyons, however, as is sufficiently evident, found no difficulty in at once deciding upon the refusal of an offer which the ordinary mediocrity would have accepted with avidity. In the above letter he founded his refusal upon grounds of age and ill-health, and in private he used to express the opinion that after the age of forty a man's faculties began and continued to deteriorate. But it is not in the least likely that he would have accepted the honour which it was proposed to bestow upon him, at any period of his life. His extreme modesty and diffidence have already been dwelt upon, but a more valuable quality than these is a man's realization of his own limitations, and it is probable that Lord Lyons, by the exercise of his exceptionally impartial judgment, was able to form a more correct opinion as to his own potentialities than Lord Salisbury. A thorough and profound knowledge of foreign politics is not the sole necessary qualification of an English Foreign Secretary; had such been the case, Lord Lyons would have been an ideal occupant of the post; but in England, where the value of Ministers is gauged chiefly by the fallacious test of oratorical capacity, the Foreign Secretary is constantly obliged to make speeches in defence of or in explanation of his policy, and although the House of Lords is the most long-suffering and good-natured assembly in the world, it would have been no easy task for a man of sixty-nine, who had never put two sentences together in public, to suddenly appear in Parliament as the representative of one of the most important departments, to say nothing of public meetings, deputations, banquets, etc. It may also be doubted whether, in spite of his many admirable qualities, he was really adapted for the post. All his life, he had been merely an instrument—a highly efficient instrument—of the existing Government, and had received instructions, which had invariably been carried out with singular skill and intelligence. But the responsibility had not been his, and as Foreign Secretary the initiative as well as the responsibility which would have rested upon him might have imposed too formidable a strain upon one of so cautious a temperament. Taking into consideration these doubts, his advanced age, failing health, and the effect of depression caused by the recent death of his much loved sister, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, the refusal of the Foreign Office by Lord Lyons was only an additional instance of that robust common sense which was one of his most pronounced characteristics. Lord Rosebery, at all events, thought that he had decided wisely.