1888, Hospitalities in London
That Bute did know "a lot about most things" was undoubtedly true; and what used often to strike those who were intimate with him was the singular orderliness of his knowledge. "His memory was prodigious," writes one who often consulted him on points of history, "and he seemed to me to keep everything which he had ever learned or read stored away, so to speak, in watertight compartments of his brain, ready for instant use when called for." But he never paraded his knowledge of history or anything else, and one of his most engaging characteristics was the extreme respect and, indeed, deference which he paid to acknowledged masters of any branch of learning or science. He welcomed the opportunity which his occasional periods of residence in London afforded him of offering hospitality to such. "My experience of men of intellectual eminence," he once said, "has been that they are not only interesting, but as a rule extremely agreeable." Among those who from time to time were his guests at St. John's Lodge were men of such varied distinction as Lord Halsbury, Lord Rosebery, Mr. W. H. Mallock, Sir Ernest A. W. Budge, F.S.A., Cardinal Vaughan, Sir William Huggins, Mr. Walter Birch, Mr. Westlake, Sir William Crookes, Mr. F. W. H. Myers, etc. Later on, after the presentation of his only daughter, his charming house in Regent's Park (which, as well as its spacious gardens, he did much to improve and adorn) became the centre of much agreeable hospitality of a more general kind. Bute himself was pleased to think that the entertainments given there in the beautiful ball-room—lit from garlands of Venetian glass, and opening on to the illuminated grounds—were popular and appreciated by society. "I really think," he wrote, "that people enjoy making up parties to come to us on these occasions. Regent's Park is a terra incognita to a great many Londoners; and there is perhaps a certain piquancy about a place which almost simulates to be a country house and is yet only a shilling cab-fare from Piccadilly Circus."
In 1888, the same year in which he acquired his London residence, Bute paid his first visit to Falkland, his new possession in Fife—his first, that is, as owner of the estate and keeper of the ancient palace; for (as he notes in his diary) he had visited it as a boy of thirteen, nearly thirty years previously, in the company of Lady Elizabeth Moore, and had been there before more than once with his mother. The firstfruits of his new connection with the place was a carefully-written paper on "David Duke of Rothesay," the hapless heir of Robert III., said to have been starved to death in Falkland Palace in March, 1402.[[9]] Of this article the friendly critic already quoted[[10]] appreciatively writes:
Lord Bute's qualities as a historian appear conspicuously in the lecture on David Duke of Rothesay, where the scanty material available about this unfortunate prince is treated in a truly scientific spirit. The zeal for truth shown in it is only equalled by his noble desire, even at the eleventh hour, to do justice to the poor lad so cruelly murdered by his contemporaries and misrepresented by posterity.
A rumour had been widely current, in the year of Queen Victoria's golden jubilee, that Bute was to be created "Jubilee" Duke of Glamorgan. It is permissible to question whether his patriotism would have allowed him to consent to the merging of his historic Scottish title in a brand-new one derived from a Welsh county; but his only written reference to the matter appears in a letter to a friend who had sent him a newspaper-cutting on the subject:
I cannot believe that there is anything in the report to which you have called my attention. Were it so, I imagine that I should have heard of it before now through some other channel than the Society columns of a halfpenny newspaper.
In the spring of 1890 the office of Lord-Lieutenant of Glamorganshire, then vacant, was offered to him by the Prime Minister (Lord Salisbury), but he did not see his way to accept it. A single line in his diary records the fact; but there is a brief further mention of it in a letter written at the time:
I have little or no acquaintance with the county, or with "them that dwell therein" beyond the limits of Cardiff and of my own property. For this and other more personal reasons, I have—in, I hope, a not unbecoming letter—begged leave to decline the honour.
1890, Mayor of Cardiff
With another offer made to him a little later in the same year Bute found himself able to comply, much to the satisfaction of all concerned. This was a requisition that he should allow himself to be nominated as Mayor of Cardiff for 1890-91. It is a point of considerable interest, and one certainly illustrative of the strong sense of duty which always animated him, that the first peer to hold the highest municipal office in any English or Welsh borough for several generations—certainly since the Reform Bill—should have been one whom his natural love of retirement, and aversion from public display, might have prompted to refuse any office of the kind. Once elected, he attended with sedulous care to such duties as devolved on him in virtue of his office; and early in 1891 he wrote to his old friend Miss Skene, giving a cheerful account of his stewardship. The last part of this letter, in which some of his deeper feelings are touchingly disclosed, would have appealed with very special force to his correspondent, one of the chief works of whose life at Oxford was the rescue of girls and women; and for that reason a portion of her reply is appended: