An interesting episode in Motley’s life was his election in 1849 to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He does not seem to have been well adapted for a legislator and never sought a re-election. The incident which he most vividly remembered in this connection was his careful preparation of a report from the Committee on Education, of which he was chairman, proposing measures which he had convinced himself were for the best, and the apparent ease with which a country member, Geo. S. Boutwell, who afterwards distinguished himself in the field of national politics, demolished his arguments, and convinced everybody, including the author of the report of the opposite view.
Mr. Motley began the collection of materials for his “History of Holland” about 1846. He devoted ten years to its preparation, making careful researches at Berlin, Dresden, the Hague and Brussels. When finally he had brought it to a conclusion he did not find it easy to make satisfactory arrangements for its publication. The leading house in London declined it, and it was finally published at the expense of the author. It was another and most marked example of the occasional lack of insight on the part of the wisest and best trained publishers, for the book which had gone begging to be printed was received everywhere with acclamations. Guizot, perhaps the foremost historian of modern times, personally supervised the translation into French, and wrote the introduction. The book had a large sale on both sides of the Atlantic, and Mr. Motley was at once recognized as a great historian. Mr. Froude has very justly said that this history is as “complete as industry and genius can make it,” and “one which will take its place among the finest stories in this or any other language.” Motley lived for the next two years in Boston, taking much interest in the “Atlantic Monthly,” though he was too much engaged with historical study to contribute very frequently to its columns. In 1858 he returned to England, where he lived for most of his remaining life, visiting America only three times, and making on each occasion a comparatively short stay. He found residence abroad more convenient for historical research. His position in English society was an enviable one, and his daughters were all married to Englishmen, one of them to Sir William Vernon Harcourt. This residence in England, however, did not wean his heart from America or its institutions or make him any less an ardent patriot, and perhaps he never rendered his country a more signal service than when, on finding that the higher classes in England sympathized with the South, he addressed two letters to the London “Times,” which did much to bring about a change of sentiment, and which remained as monuments to his loyalty and to his ability as an advocate.
Mr. Motley had been appointed Secretary of the American Legation at St. Petersburg in 1841, but had found the climate too rigorous and had continued at his post only a few months before tendering his resignation. He was now to undertake a more serious task in diplomacy. President Lincoln appointed him, in 1861, Minister to Austria. He was so absorbed in the great struggle going on in his own country that he gave up for the time the historical studies which made so large a part of his ordinary life, and “lived only in the varying fortunes of the day, his profound faith and enthusiasm sustaining him and lifting him above the natural influence of a by no means sanguine temperament.” He continued Minister to Austria, performing the difficult service of that office with discretion and with credit until 1867, when, in consequence of a letter received by President Johnson from some obscure source, inquiries were made which Mr. Motley considered insulting, and he at once tendered his resignation.
He had published in 1860 two volumes of his “History of the United Netherlands,” and they had been received with all the favor that had greeted his former great work. The American war had delayed the completion of the book, but in 1868 he published the other two volumes. An article from the “Edinburgh Review” discussing the first two volumes says: “Mr. Motley combines as an historian two qualifications seldom found united—to a great capacity for historical research he adds much power of pictorial representation.”
This is the secret of his great success. Men who excel in the use of language are too often unwilling to undertake the drudgery which research entails, while those who are able and willing to read voluminous correspondence and con over numberless dispatches in order to establish some historical fact, are frequently unable to clothe the fact in words which will so illumine and illustrate the truth as to make it really live in the mind of the reader. That Motley possessed both of these abilities along with those others which made him to a very wide circle in both Europe and America a much loved man, is sufficient reason for the place that has been given him in the history of men of letters.
Probably, at the request of Senator Sumner, Mr. Motley was in 1869 appointed Minister to England. The position was in many respects most agreeable to him. It gave him a post of great influence in a society in which he was known and admired, and opened possibilities of high service to the country which he loved with an ardor that amounted to enthusiasm. The Alabama claims were being urged upon the British Government, and the difficulties and responsibilities were very great. He was suddenly recalled in 1870 under circumstances that wounded him so deeply that it may be said he never recovered from the cruel surprise. The most probable explanation of President Grant’s course seems to be that it was the outcome of his difficulty with Mr. Sumner over his San Domingo policy, and that Mr. Motley’s tastes and the pursuits to which he had devoted his life made him a man with whom the President could not in any large measure sympathize. When, therefore, the President found his favorite measure defeated largely by the influence of Mr. Sumner, he ceased to have cause to retain Mr. Sumner’s friend in so responsible a post. The whole matter looks, at this distance, discreditable, but it was probably the system of political favoritism then in vogue rather than either the President or his Secretary of State that was to blame.
Mr. Motley had intended to devote his last years to a “History of the Thirty Years’ War,” but before undertaking it he wrote “The Life and Death of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland, with a View of the Primary Causes and Movements of the Thirty Years’ War,” which has been recognized as the most classical of his productions. It was his last work. Even before the death of Mrs. Motley in 1874, he was in somewhat feeble health, and while he did not abandon literary labor, he gave up at this time any hope of being able to engage in protracted effort. He spent a part of the year 1875 in Boston, returning to his daughter’s residence in Devonshire, where he died in 1877. Dean Stanley spoke of him as “one of the brightest lights of the Western Hemisphere, the high-spirited patriot, the faithful friend of England’s best and purest spirits; the brilliant, the indefatigable historian.” A distinguished countryman of his own had once introduced him to an audience as one “whose name belongs to no single country and to no single age: as a statesman and diplomatist and patriot, [♦]he belongs to America; as a scholar, to the world of letters; as a historian, all ages will claim him in the future.”
[♦] ‘be’ replaced with ‘he’
BISMARCK.[¹]