A HAPHAZARD VICEROY
When the Government came into office, they were sorely puzzled where to find a Lord-Lieutenant for Ireland. It is, unhappily, a post that the men most fitted for generally refuse, while the Cabinet is besieged by a class of applicants whose highest qualification is a taste for mock-royalty combined with an encumbered estate.
Another great requisite, beside fortune and a certain amount of ability, was at this time looked for. The Premier was about, as newspapers call it, ‘to inaugurate a new policy,’ and he wanted a man who knew nothing about Ireland! Now, it might be carelessly imagined that here was one of those essentials very easily supplied. Any man frequenting club-life or dining out in town could have safely pledged himself to tell off a score or two of eligible Viceroys, so far as this qualification went. The Minister, however, wanted more than mere ignorance: he wanted that sort of indifference on which a character for impartiality could so easily be constructed. Not alone a man unacquainted with Ireland, but actually incapable of being influenced by an Irish motive or affected by an Irish view of anything.
Good-luck would have it that he met such a man at dinner. He was an ambassador at Constantinople, on leave from his post, and so utterly dead to Irish topics as to be uncertain whether O’Donovan Rossa was a Fenian or a Queen’s Counsel, and whether he whom he had read of as the ‘Lion of Judah’ was the king of beasts or the Archbishop of Tuam!
The Minister was pleased with his new acquaintance, and talked much to him, and long. He talked well, and not the less well that his listener was a fresh audience, who heard everything for the first time, and with all the interest that attaches to a new topic. Lord Danesbury was, indeed, that ‘sheet of white paper’ the head of the Cabinet had long been searching for, and he hastened to inscribe him with the characters he wished.
‘You must go to Ireland for me, my lord,’ said the Minister. ‘I have met no one as yet so rightly imbued with the necessities of the situation. You must be our Viceroy.’
Now, though a very high post and with great surroundings, Lord Danesbury had no desire to exchange his position as an ambassador, even to become a Lord-Lieutenant. Like most men who have passed their lives abroad, he grew to like the ways and habits of the Continent. He liked the easy indulgences in many things, he liked the cosmopolitanism that surrounds existence, and even in its littleness is not devoid of a certain breadth; and best of all he liked the vast interests at stake, the large questions at issue, the fortunes of states, the fate of dynasties! To come down from the great game, as played by kings and kaisers, to the small traffic of a local government wrangling over a road-bill, or disputing over a harbour, seemed too horrible to confront, and he eagerly begged the Minister to allow him to return to his post, and not risk a hard-earned reputation on a new and untried career.
‘It is precisely from the fact of its being new and untried I need you,’ was the reply, and his denial was not accepted.
Refusal was impossible; and with all the reluctance a man consents to what his convictions are more opposed to even than his reasons, Lord Danesbury gave in, and accepted the viceroyalty of Ireland.
He was deferential to humility in listening to the great aims and noble conceptions of the mighty Minister, and pledged himself—as he could safely do—to become as plastic as wax in the powerful hands which were about to remodel Ireland.