(C. R. B.)
HAYWARD, ABRAHAM (1801-1884), English man of letters, son of Joseph Hayward, of an old Wiltshire family, was born at Wilton, near Salisbury, on the 22nd of November 1801. After education at Blundell’s school, Tiverton, he entered the Inner Temple in 1824, and was called to the bar in June 1832. He took part as a conservative in the discussions of the London Debating Society, where his opponents were J. A. Roebuck and John Stuart Mill. The editorship of the Law Magazine; or, Quarterly Review of Jurisprudence, which he held from 1829 to 1844, brought him into connexion with John Austin, G. Cornewall Lewis, and such foreign jurists as Savigny, whose tractate on contemporary legislation and jurisprudence he rendered into English. In 1833 he travelled abroad, and on his return printed privately a translation of Goethe’s Faust into English prose (pronounced by Carlyle to be the best version extant in his time). A second and revised edition was published after another visit to Germany in January 1834, in the course of which Hayward met Tieck, Chamisso, De La Motte Fouqué, Varnhagen von Ense and Madame Goethe. In 1878 he contributed the rather colourless volume on Goethe to Blackwood’s Foreign Classics. A successful translation was in those days a first-rate credential for a reviewer, and Hayward began contributing to the New Monthly, the Foreign Quarterly, the Quarterly Review and the Edinburgh Review. His first successes in this new field were won in 1835-1836 by articles on Walker’s “Original” and on “Gastronomy.” The essays were reprinted to form one of his best volumes, The Art of Dining, in 1852. In February 1835 he was elected to the Athenaeum Club under Rule II., and he remained for nearly fifty years one of its most conspicuous and most influential members. He was also a subscriber to the Carlton, but ceased to frequent it when he became a Peelite. At the Temple, Hayward, whose reputation was rapidly growing as a connoisseur not only of a bill of fare but also (as Swift would have said) of a bill of company, gave recherché dinners, at which ladies of rank and fashion appreciated the wit of Sydney Smith and Theodore Hook, the dignity of Lockhart and Lyndhurst and the oratory of Macaulay. At the Athenaeum and in political society he to some extent succeeded to the position of Croker. He and Macaulay were commonly said to be the two best-read men in town. Hayward got up every important subject of discussion immediately it came into prominence, and concentrated his information in such a way that he habitually had the last word to say on a topic. When Rogers died, when Vanity Fair was published, when the Greville Memoirs was issued or a revolution occurred on the continent, Hayward, whose memory was as retentive as his power of accumulating documentary evidence was exhaustive, wrote an elaborate essay on the subject for the Quarterly or the Edinburgh. He followed up his paper by giving his acquaintances no rest until they either assimilated or undertook to combat his views. Political ladies first, and statesmen afterwards, came to recognize the advantage of obtaining Hayward’s good opinion. In this way the “old reviewing hand” became an acknowledged link between society, letters and politics. As a professional man he was less successful; his promotion to be Q.C. in 1845 excited a storm of opposition, and, disgusted at not being elected a Bencher of his Inn in the usual course, Hayward virtually withdrew from legal practice. In February 1848 he became one of the chief leader-writers for the Peelite organ, the Morning Chronicle. The morbid activity of his memory, however, continued to make him many enemies. He alienated Disraeli by tracing a purple patch in his official eulogy of Wellington to a newspaper translation from Thiers’s funeral panegyric on General St Cyr. His sharp tongue made an enemy of Roebuck, and he disgusted the friends of Mill by the stories he raked up for an obituary notice of the great economist (The Times, 10th May 1873). He broke with Henry Reeve in 1874 by a venomous review of the Greville Memoirs, in which Reeve was compared to the beggarly Scot deputed to let off the blunderbuss which Bolingbroke (Greville) had charged. His enemies prevented him from enjoying a well-selected quasi-sinecure, which both Palmerston and Aberdeen admitted to be his due. Samuel Warren attacked him (very unjustly, for Hayward was anything but a parasite) as Venom Tuft in Ten Thousand a Year; and Disraeli aimed at him partially in Ste Barbe (in Endymion), though the satire here was directed primarily against Thackeray. After his break with Reeve, Hayward devoted himself more exclusively to the Quarterly. His essays on Chesterfield and Selwyn were reprinted in 1854. Collective editions of his articles appeared in volume form in 1858, 1873 and 1874, and Selected Essays in two volumes, 1878. In his useful but far from flawless edition of the Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs (Thrale) Piozzi (1861), he again appears as a supplementer and continuator of J. W. Croker. His Eminent Statesmen and Writers (1880) commemorates to a large extent personal friendships with such men as Dumas, Cavour and Thiers, whom he knew intimately. As a counsellor of great ladies and of politicians, to whom he held forth with a sense of all-round responsibility surpassing that of a cabinet minister, Hayward retained his influence to the last years of his life. But he had little sympathy with modern ideas. He used to say that he had outlived every one that he could really look up to. He died, a bachelor, in his rooms at 8 St James’s Street (a small museum of autograph portraits and reviewing trophies) on the 2nd of February 1884.
Two volumes of Hayward’s Correspondence (edited by H. E. Carlisle) were published in 1886. In Vanity Fair (27th November 1875) he may be seen as he appeared in later life.
(T. Se.)
HAYWARD, SIR JOHN (c. 1560-1627), English historian, was born at or near Felixstowe, Suffolk, where he was educated, and afterwards proceeded to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he took the degrees of B.A., M.A. and LL.D. In 1599 he published The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IV. dedicated to Robert Devereux, earl of Essex. This was reprinted in 1642. Queen Elizabeth and her advisers disliked the tone of the book and its dedication, and the queen ordered Francis Bacon to search it for “places in it that might be drawn within case of treason.” Bacon reported “for treason surely I find none, but for felony very many,” explaining that many of the sentences were stolen from Tacitus; but nevertheless Hayward was put in prison, where he remained until about 1601. On the accession of James I. in 1603 he courted the new king’s favour by publishing two pamphlets—“An Answer to the first part of a certaine conference concerning succession,” and “A Treatise of Union of England and Scotland.” The former pamphlet, an argument in favour of the divine right of kings, was reprinted in 1683 as “The Right of Succession” by the friends of the duke of York during the struggle over the Exclusion Bill. In 1610 Hayward was appointed one of the historiographers of the college which James founded at Chelsea; in 1613 he published his Lives of the Three Norman Kings of England, written at the request of James’s son, Prince Henry; in 1616 he became a member of the College of Advocates; and in 1619 he was knighted. He died in London on the 27th of June 1627. Among his manuscripts was found The Life and Raigne of King Edward VI., first published in 1630, and Certain Yeres of Queen Elizabeth’s Raigne, the beginning of which was printed in an edition of his Edward VI., published in 1636, but which was first published in a complete form in 1840 for the Camden Society under the editorship of John Bruce, who prefixed an introduction on the life and writings of the author. Hayward was conscientious and diligent in obtaining information, and although his reasoning on questions of morality is often childish, his descriptions are generally graphic and vigorous. Notwithstanding his imprisonment under Elizabeth, his portrait of the qualities of the queen’s mind and person is flattering rather than detractive. He also wrote several works of a devotional character.
HAYWOOD, ELIZA (c. 1693-1756), English writer, daughter of a London tradesman named Fowler, was born about 1693. She made an early and unhappy marriage with a man named Haywood, and her literary enemies circulated scandalous stories about her, possibly founded on her works rather than her real history. She appeared on the stage as early as 1715, and in 1721 she revised for Lincoln’s Inn Fields The Fair Captive, by a Captain Hurst. Two other pieces followed, but Eliza Haywood made her mark as a follower of Mrs Manley in writing scandalous and voluminous novels. To Memoirs of a certain Island adjacent to Utopia, written by a celebrated author of that country. Now translated into English (1725), she appended a key in which the characters were explained by initials denoting living persons. The names are supplied to these initials in the copy in the British Museum. The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania (1727) was explained in a similar manner. The style of these productions is as extravagant as their matter. Pope attacked her in a coarse passage in The Dunciad (bk. ii. 11. 157 et seq.), which is aggravated by a note alluding to the “profligate licentiousness of those shameless scribblers (for the most part of that sex which ought least to be capable of such malice or impudence) who in libellous Memoirs and Novels reveal the faults or misfortunes of both sexes, to the ruin of public fame, or disturbance of private happiness.” Swift, writing to Lady Suffolk, says, “Mrs Haywood I have heard of as a stupid, infamous, scribbling woman, but have not seen any of her productions.” She continued to be a prolific writer of novels until her death on the 25th of February 1756, but her later works are characterized by extreme propriety, though an anonymous story of The Fortunate Foundlings (1744), purporting to be an account of the children of Lord Charles Manners, is generally ascribed to her.
A collected edition of her novels, plays and poems appeared in 1724, and her Secret Histories, Novels and Poems in 1725. See also an article by S. L. Lee in the Dictionary of National Biography.