Scottish Home Rule
A short time before writing this tribute to his old friend and fellow-worker, Bute had attended a meeting held at Dundee to advocate the claims of Scotland to Home Rule—a claim which he regarded with a great deal of interest and not a little sympathy, as is evident from the article he wrote for the Scottish Review (October, 1889) on "Parliament in Scotland." He thus gives his impressions of the meeting:
The Home Rule meeting in Dundee seemed to me to be really a sort of battle between Dr. Clark and the Edinburgh Executive on the one hand, who gave me the impression of being well-informed, able, and educated people, either Tories or very moderate Liberals, with whom I get on perfectly; and on the other hand the great body of delegates, who seemed to me to be extreme Radicals unconscious of their own ignorance. Mrs. Maxwell Scott has read the proof of my forthcoming article, and is exceedingly pleased with it. The Home Rule people all wanted to know whether the Scottish Review could not be turned into their monthly organ! but I replied that such a change would be equivalent to annihilation of what the S.R. was designed to be, has always been, and is.
Bute had already accepted an engagement to preside this year (1889) at the St. Andrew's Day dinner of the Scottish Corporation in London, but was extremely dubious as to what kind of reception he would have from a company of whom many were doubtless quite out of sympathy with the views on Scottish Home Rule set forth in this article. His letter on this subject, expressing his obvious relief at the manner in which things had turned out, makes amusing reading:
Chiswick House,
December 1, 1889.
The St. Andrew's Day dinner came off last night. I had been extremely nervous about it, so that I could really take up nothing else until it was over. This was folly, and really almost sinful folly, because the desire to be liked is only vanity at bottom, and vanity is a bastard cousin to pride. But I knew also (and there I was on fair enough ground) that, although politics were not to be mentioned, the thing was in fact to be a political demonstration, and that it was not yours truly, John M. of B., who was to be placed in the chair, but the author of "Parliament in Scotland"; and the question was, how the Scottish commercial colony in London would receive him. It had even been publicly suggested in print that the charity should be boycotted because I had been asked to take the chair, "although, no doubt," (the writer charitably added,) "that must have been done before the article appeared." Well, the festival duly came off, and I think I was never more cheered in my life. They cheered for quite long periods every time I had to come forward, from the time I entered the drawing-room before the dinner. And I will not quote the language which was used to me about the speech which I made.
The interest which Bute had always felt in St. Magnus of Orkney since his visit, or pilgrimage, to the scene of the saint's martyrdom in his under-graduate days,[[10]] was evinced by the new and careful investigations which he undertook in 1886, in view of an article on the subject in his Review. His cautious, yet reverent, attitude towards the supernatural is well shown in a passage of a letter to his publisher, relating to the local tradition about a perennially green spot of ground said to mark the site of Magnus's death in the isle of Egilsay:
I own that, with such information as I have ever had, together with my own recollections of the place, I am inclined to think that the phenomenon is, if not strictly miraculous, in the strongest sense of the word, a special intervention of Divine Providence, which may be called a preternatural testimony of God's favour towards His martyred servant.
Bute later entered into negotiations for the purchase of the site above referred to, with a view to its preservation; but this was not carried out. He also wrote at considerable length to his correspondents in Orkney, throwing great doubts (as he had done nineteen years previously) on the supposed bones (or "reliques," as he calls them) of St. Magnus preserved at Kirkwall—chiefly on account of the degenerate type of the skull. "It may be," he characteristically says, "that this only indicates a triumph of grace over nature. But it seems to me to be incompatible, I will not say with holiness, but with the intellectual, high-minded, and beautiful character and tastes of the Martyr." On these and other grounds he urges that the local photographer of the skull must be strictly enjoined not to circulate the photograph under false pretences.