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.