Old Friends at Cambridge and Elsewhere

by John Willis Clark

‘How brilliant and amusing he was over the dinner-table or the breakfast-table was known to all his friends. Overflowing with information, his mind was lightened by a bright wit, whilst his immense stores of appropriate anecdotes enabled him to give point and colour to every topic which was brought under discussion’ (vol. i. p. 189).

At the same time he did not fall into the fatal error of taking the talk into his own hands, and delivering a monologue, as too many social celebrities have done before and since. He had the happy art of making his guests talk, while he listened, and threw in a remark from time to time, to give new life when the conversation seemed to flag. Carlyle, in a letter written to his wife during his first visit to Fryston, gives us a lifelike portrait of Milnes when thus engaged:

‘Richard, I find, lays himself out while in this quarter to do hospitalities, and of course to collect notabilities about him, and play them off one against the other. I am his trump-card at present. The Sessions are at Pontefract even now, and many lawyers there. These last two nights he has brought a trio of barristers to dine, producing champagne, &c.... Last night our three was admitted to be a kind of failure, three greater blockheads ye wadna find in Christendee. Richard had to exert himself; but he is really dexterous, the villain. He pricks you with questions, with remarks, with all kinds of fly-tackle to make you bite, does generally contrive to get you into some sort of speech. And then his good humour is extreme; you look in his face and forgive him all his tricks’ (vol. i. p. 256).

As a pendant to this we will quote Mr Forster’s description of Milnes and Carlyle together:

‘Monckton Miles came yesterday and left this morning—a pleasant, companionable little man—delighting in paradoxes, but good-humoured ones; defending all manner of people and principles in order to provoke Carlyle to abuse them, in which laudable enterprise he must have succeeded to his heart’s content, and for a time we had a most amusing evening, reminding me of a naughty boy rubbing a fierce cat’s tail backwards, and getting in between furious growls and fiery sparks. He managed to avoid the threatened scratches’ (vol. i. p. 387).

Milnes entered Parliament in 1837 as Conservative member for Pontefract. His friends were rather surprised at his selection of a party, for even then his views on most subjects were decidedly Liberal. Thirlwall, for instance, wrote:

‘I can hardly bring myself now to consider you a Tory, or indeed as belonging to a party at all; and although I am aware how difficult, and even dangerous, it is for a public man to keep aloof from all parties, still my first hope as well as expectation as to your political career is that it may be distinguished by some degree of originality’ (vol. i. p. 199).

These hopes were realized to an extent that none of Milnes’s friends would have expected or perhaps desired. From the outset he maintained an independence of thought and action which did him the utmost credit as a man of honour, but which ruined his chances of obtaining that success which is measured by the attainment of official dignity. And yet, as Mr Reid tells us, he was more ambitious of political than of literary distinction. But the fates were against him. In the first place, his oratorical style did not suit the House, though as an after-dinner speaker he was conspicuously successful. He ‘had modelled himself on the old style of political oratory, and gave his hearers an impression of affectation.’ Then he would not vote straight with his party. He took a line of his own about Canada and the Ballot; he voted on the opposite side to Peel on the question of a large remission of capital punishments; and he wrote One Tract More, ‘an eloquent and earnest plea for toleration for the Anglo-Catholic enthusiasm,’ which shocked the Protestants in general, and the electors of Pontefract in particular. Perhaps he was too much in earnest; perhaps he was not a sufficiently important person to be silenced by office; perhaps, as Mr Reid says, ‘public opinion in England always insists upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the man of letters and the man of affairs;’ but, whatever might be the reason, Sir Robert Peel passed him over when forming his Administration in 1841—nay, rather, appears never to have turned his thoughts in his direction. Milnes was grievously disappointed, but with characteristic lightheartedness set at once to work to make himself more thoroughly fit for the post he specially coveted, the Under-Secretaryship of Foreign Affairs. He went to Paris, got intimate with Guizot, De Tocqueville, Montalembert—‘that English aristocrat foisted into the middle of French democracy’—and other leading statesmen. Through them, and by help of his natural gift of knowing everybody he wished to know, he managed to include Louis Philippe among those by whom he was accepted as a sort of unaccredited English envoy. He kept Peel informed of the views of Guizot and the King, and Peel replied with a message to the former in a letter which shows that he was quite ready to make use of Milnes, though not to reward him. On his return he gave Peel a general support on the Corn Laws, while regretting that his ‘measures were not of a more liberal character;’ he interested himself in the passing of the Copyright Bill, a measure in respect of which he was accepted as the representative of men of letters; and he travelled in the East, no doubt to study Oriental politics on the spot. A letter he wrote to Peel from Smyrna is full of shrewd observation and far-reaching insight into the Eastern Question; but, on his return, he published a volume of poems called Palm Leaves. Now Peel, like a certain Hanoverian monarch who hated ‘boetry and bainters,’ hated literature; and, as Milnes’s father told him, ‘every book he wrote was a nail in his political coffin.’ Again, Milnes was in favour of the endowment of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, and had written a pamphlet called The Real Union of England and Ireland, on which, we may note, in passing, Mr Gladstone’s remark, that he had ‘some opinions on Irish matters that are not fit for practice.’ With these views he supported Peel’s grant to Maynooth, a step which brought him into such disgrace at Pontefract that he thought seriously of giving up parliamentary life altogether. In fact he applied for a diplomatic post, but without success. Before long we find him again running counter to his chief’s policy, supporting Lord Ashley against the Government, and seconding a motion of Charles Buller’s against Lord Stanley. After this it cannot excite surprise that Peel passed him over when he rearranged his Administration in 1845. With his second disappointment Milnes’s career as a professional politician came to an end. Ten years later Palmerston offered him a lordship of the Treasury, but he declined it. As he said himself in a letter written shortly afterwards:

‘Via media never answers in politics, and somehow or other I never can get out of it. My Laodicean spirit is the ruin of me. From having lived with all sorts of people, and seen good in all, the broad black lines of judgment that people usually draw seem to me false and foolish, and I think my own finer ones just as distinct, though no one can see them but myself’ (vol. i. p. 360).

Before long Milnes found a more congenial position on the opposite side of the House. But it must not be supposed that he rushed into sudden and rancorous opposition to his old leader. So long as Peel remained in office, he allowed no personal considerations to interfere with his support of him; and he steadily refused to join those who rebelled when he announced his conversion to Free Trade. Meanwhile, his interest in the burning question of the day being little more than formal, he turned his attention to a social question in which he had long been interested, and introduced a Bill for the establishment of reformatories for juvenile offenders. Among the many combinations of opposite tastes and tendencies with which Milnes was fond of startling the world, could one more curious be imagined than this—the literary exquisite and the criminal unwashed? But in fact this is only a single instance out of many which could be produced to show that the cynical selfishness he affected was only a mask which hid his real nature; perhaps assumed for the sake of concealing from his left hand what his right hand was doing so well. The proposal, we are told, ‘was scoffed at by many politicians of eminence when it was first put forward.’ But Milnes was not to be daunted by rebuffs, and ‘he persevered with his proposal, until he had the great happiness of seeing reformatories established under the sanction of the law, and of becoming himself the president of the first and greatest of these noble institutions, that at Redhill.’ His very genuine sympathy with the poor and the unfortunate, especially when young, is testified to by one of his intimate friends, Miss Nightingale: