John Patrick, Third Marquess of Bute, K.T. (1847-1900) Part 19

135), and is also referred to in Mr. Myers' obituary notice (_post_, Appendix V.). He was not, of course, unaware that the _practice_ of astrology had been forbidden to the Christians of the early Church, and condemned by a sixteenth-century Pope. But he also had the authority of St. Thomas for believing, if he desired to do so, that the heavenly bodies do influence the bodies of men, and so indirectly their pa.s.sions and their conduct. This is a matter of science, not of theology, which forbids, not the study of the science, but the belief, once so widely current, that the astrologer can predict with certainty the course of events and man's future actions.

[13] _Notes from a Diary_ (1873-1881), vol. ii. p. 101.

{179}

CHAPTER X

FREEDOM OF GLASGOW--BENEFACTIONS TO WALES--LORD RECTOR OF ST. ANDREWS

1891-1894

An incident which gave Bute sincere pleasure, during the year of his mayoralty of Cardiff, was the presentation to him of the freedom of the city of Glasgow, which took place on October 7, 1891. The honour was conferred on him, according to the burgess-ticket which he received, "in recognition of the distinguished services he has rendered to Scotland, by erecting and gifting[1] to Glasgow the Bute Hall, by his personal contributions to literature, and by the warm sympathy he has ever shown in whatever is fitted to promote the interests of art and science."

Bute replied to the presentation in a speech which he himself described in antic.i.p.ation as "maddeningly dull," but which was nevertheless very well received; and on the same day he performed the opening ceremony of the new Mitch.e.l.l Library, delivering an address which he thought, in contrast with the other, appeared "almost lively, with a tendency even to flippancy." It was not his first public appearance in Glasgow; for some time before this he had made an oration at the opening {180} of the new Jesuit College of St. Aloysius, and had warmly congratulated Scottish Catholics on taking another step in the resumption of a tradition which identified higher culture with the Catholic Church.[2]

Cherishing as he did, to the end of his life, feelings of grateful affection towards all those who had shown him kindness during his somewhat solitary childhood, Bute was sincerely grieved to hear, in the autumn of 1892, of the death of Lady Elizabeth Moore, one of his earliest and most devoted friends. The temporary estrangement between them caused by his change of religion had long pa.s.sed away; and only nine days before her death, on the occasion of her eighty-eighth birthday, his daughter had written to her a letter of good wishes which Lord and Lady Bute and all their children signed. He wrote thus feelingly of this loss:

Of her affection for me, and mine for her, I cannot speak too strongly.

It is an event which finally cuts me off (till my own death) from the generation to which my mother belonged, and in which I was born.... A great friend of my mother's, and a second mother to me; and I am ever grateful to her for her defence of me against General Stuart and others in 1860.

By a strange coincidence, General Stuart himself died two days later.

The death of Colonel J. B. Crichton Stuart, Bute's former tutor-at-law, had occurred in the previous year; and the Lord-Lieutenancy of Buteshire, which he had held since 1859, {181} was in due course offered to Bute and accepted by him. He performed all the duties pertaining to the office with the scrupulous conscientiousness which characterised him; and he told a friend, some time afterwards, that he had been particularly gratified by the Lord Chancellor expressing his approbation of the care which he (Bute) had exercised in the recommendation of persons for the commission of peace in his t.i.tular county.

[Sidenote: 1892, Benefactions to South Wales]

In September, 1892, Bute attended the meeting of the National Eisteddfod, and delivered an address with which he was himself extremely dissatisfied, though it is only fair to say that on such occasions he was the severest critic of his own orations, with which his audiences appeared well content. He had always been warmly interested in the Eisteddfodan, had subscribed liberally to their funds, and had presided and given an address at a previous meeting held at Cardiff in 1882. He also gave generous a.s.sistance to the Cymrodorion Society for its publication of Welsh Records, and enabled the Cardiff Library, by his subscription of 1000, to acquire the valuable MSS. which had belonged to Sir Thomas Phillips. Nor was it only the cause of learning which he a.s.sisted by his judicious benefactions. Every scheme set on foot for the benefit of the districts with which he was connected found in him a generous supporter. To King Edward VII.'s Hospital (then the Glamorgan and Monmouthshire Infirmary) he gave a site for the new building worth some 5000, having before this paid off the debt on the inst.i.tution. For many years he maintained entirely a cottage hospital at Aberdare; he gave a large donation to the building fund of the Merthyr Hospital, and a still larger one to the Seamen's {182} Hospital at Cardiff, and contributed liberally both to the "Rest" at Porthcawl, and to the Miners' Relief Fund for Monmouthshire and South Wales.

Unostentatious as were his innumerable charities, it is right that these things (which include his benefactions in South Wales alone) should be recorded. Bute's name was known in his lifetime, and has been handed down to posterity, as that of a munificent patron of scholarship and learning, of science and architecture and art. He richly deserves this tribute; but it is not to be forgotten that he was also a wise, discriminating,[3] and most generous benefactor of a score of inst.i.tutions designed only for the relief of the distressed, the needy, and the suffering. Every one knew him to be a scholar, and a friend and patron of scholars, but it was only his innermost circle of friends, and the countless beneficiaries of his far-reaching generosity, who knew how truly, how continually, his heart was open to the calls of mercy and of charity.

Bute never hesitated about expressing his opinion of men whom the world called famous, but whose claim to any such distinction he failed to recognise. Writing of Lord Randolph Churchill, whom he had met at luncheon in September, 1892, he says:

He seemed to me ill-informed, ill-mannered, and stupid. I used to know him slightly at Oxford, and thought little of him there. I wonder whether his wife writes his speeches.

{183} His notes on Royalties are, on occasion, quite as frank as on any one else. After attending the Lord Mayor's dinner in October, 1892, he wrote:

The Maharajah of Baroda (it is a mere ignorant vulgarism to call him "the Gaikwar") spoke, I found, much better English than the Duke of ----. The latter went off home from the Lady Mayoress's boudoir, whither we men were taken to smoke, without returning to the drawing-room to wish her good-night.

[Sidenote: 1892, Relations with Universities]

The closing weeks of 1892 were marked by an event which brought Bute into intimate connection with the oldest of the four Scottish Universities, namely, his unanimous election as Lord Rector of St.

Andrews. The honour was one which he very greatly appreciated, and the duties of the office would have been not only extremely interesting, but altogether congenial to him, had he not been involved by the peculiar circ.u.mstances of the time in a series of highly contentious questions, which, in his somewhat enfeebled state of health, caused him for a period of time extending over several years considerable trouble and anxiety.

Bute's keen and practical interest in educational matters, and especially in the promotion of higher studies throughout the country, had naturally brought him into relation, at different times of his life, with several of the national universities. With Oxford, since his student days there at the most memorable crisis in his life, he had little subsequent connection. He refers occasionally in his letters to the disadvantage which he had suffered from having been prevented by circ.u.mstances from taking his degree; and Oxford never saw fit to honour him, {184} or herself, by conferring on him an honorary degree in recognition of his services to learning and scholarship. He never, however, lost his interest in his original _Alma Mater_; and nothing gave him greater pleasure, during the closing years of his life, than the news of the removal of the restrictions which had hitherto prevented Roman Catholic students from frequenting the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. A friend, head of one of the Oxford Halls, was visiting him in London some time subsequently, and informed him that there were already, in consequence of this change of policy, more than seventy Catholic undergraduates in residence at that university. Bute, who was at that time quite an invalid, raised himself on his couch, and said with the quiet emphasis with which he always spoke when strongly moved: "I wish there were seven hundred." He only visited Oxford once or twice after his marriage, but his continued affection for it was evinced in many ways; and the Catholic church and mission there, as in so many places, benefited by his munificence.[4]

The establishment of a University College at Cardiff was to Bute naturally a matter of great interest, of which he gave many practical proofs. He accepted the presidency of the inst.i.tution in 1890, when he contributed generously to the foundation of a chair of engineering; and six years later he gave a special donation of 10,000 to the funds.

Besides his inaugural address, he gave another, in 1891, to the pupils of the science and art schools. His many gifts to the college included a complete {185} set of the valuable _Acta Sanctorum_ of the Bollandists; and he was particularly gratified by the very appreciative acknowledgment of this present which he received from the librarian.

Bute proposed Mr. Gladstone as the first Chancellor of the University of Wales. Although profoundly opposed to some of the political views of that statesman, he had an admiration for his character and attainments; and he looked on it as a special honour, some years later, to receive the Honorary Doctorate of St. Andrews on the same occasion as the veteran Liberal leader.

[Sidenote: 1892, Honorary Doctorates]

The first of the Scottish universities with which Bute found himself practically connected was that of Glasgow, to which he presented in 1877 the n.o.ble hall, for graduation and other ceremonies, since known as the Bute Hall. Two years later, in recognition of this splendid gift, which is said to have cost him nearly 50,000, the Honorary Doctorate of Laws was bestowed on him by the university. He received the same honour from Edinburgh in 1882, and from St. Andrews in 1893, the first year of his rectorship. In 1883 he was invited to stand for the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow University, being nominated in the Conservative interest against Mr. Fawcett as the Liberal candidate.

John Ruskin was also nominated. A regrettable element of religious animus was introduced into the contest, but the leading Glasgow journal warmly supported Bute. Mr. Fawcett was elected, the figures being--Fawcett 796, Bute 690, Ruskin 329.

By his appointment in 1889 as a member of the Scottish Universities Commission, Bute came, of course, into intimate relation with the affairs of all the four universities. He was an active member of the Commission, attending its meetings regularly, {186} and giving much time and attention to the important questions which came up for discussion and solution. But as a member of a mixed body of this kind, of which some--and these not the least distinguished--were sure to hold, and to express, views sharply conflicting with his own, Bute was not, it must be frankly said, at his best or happiest. The candid biographer must admit that, with all his admirable qualities, he was not of a temperament that could easily or patiently brook opposition to his matured views. The absolute impartiality and freedom from prejudice with which, as we have seen, he approached the consideration of any subject, literary or other, on which he had to form an opinion, made him, perhaps not unnaturally, all the more tenacious of that opinion when once formed. "I know no one," remarked one of his friends and admirers, "to whom the description of Horace, _Justum et tenacem propositi virum_, could be applied with greater truth"; and the tribute was a deserved one. But he did not always find it easy to realise that the views of those opposed to him might be as considered and as conscientious as his own; and he was, perhaps, too apt to regard their opposition in the light of personal hostility to himself. "It might, I think, have been observed," he wisely says in one of his university addresses, with reference to Peter de Luna's disputed claim to the Papacy, "that where so many learned and able persons were divided in opinion, a difference of judgment from one side or the other did not necessarily imply moral obliquity." It is not suggested that Bute imputed "moral obliquity" to those who differed from him either on the Universities Commission, or afterwards in the vexed questions which he had to encounter at St. Andrews. But {187} that he resented their action, and in some cases even with a certain bitterness, is clear from many pa.s.sages of his correspondence; and this feeling was in one instance sufficiently acute to interrupt and suspend a friendship which had lasted for nearly a quarter of a century, though it is pleasant to add that the breach was entirely healed, and cordial relations resumed, long before his death.

[Sidenote: 1892, Rectorial address]

Bute's election to the Lord Rectorship of St. Andrews took place on November 24, 1892. "I had great difficulty in accepting," he wrote to his friend Dr. Metcalfe, "because I had already declined Glasgow[5] on the grounds of want of unanimity and probable inability to fulfil the duties, and only accepted St. Andrews on an a.s.surance of unanimity, and that the duties are almost nominal." The latter hope was disproved by the event; but whether light or heavy, Bute entered on the duties of his office with his usual conscientious resolve to fulfil them all to the utmost of his ability,[6] and for the benefit of the ancient seat of Scottish learning which he had loved and venerated from his earliest years. He alluded in his inaugural address, with charming simplicity, to these childish memories, "a.s.sociated with that of the only parent whom I ever knew, and with those of friends of hers, nearly all of whom are now pa.s.sed away":

I dimly recall the old garden of St. Leonard's and a variety of mechanical toys working by wind and water, with which Sir Hugh Playfair had adorned it. I remember gazing from St. Andrews at the {188} great comet which there was about the time of the Indian Mutiny; and when we were living in the Princ.i.p.al of St. Mary's House, my kinsman, Charles MacLean,[7] came home wounded from India and stayed with us, and with his maimed hand gave me some elementary lessons in fortification, with wet sand in a box. I find in my diary, under date of July 20, 1889: "To St. Andrews ... saw the last of the old garden of St. Mary's College, where I used to play (and eat unripe pears) as a child: they are going to build the library extension over it." Well, I can only hope that the fruits of the tree of knowledge, to the cultivation of which that spot is now dedicated, may prove less crude and more wholesome than the grosser dainties, to the attractions of which I there formerly yielded.

It was an undoubted satisfaction to the new Lord Rector to be able to nominate, as he did in the month following his own election, to the office of his a.s.sessor his old friend and fellow-worker on the _Scottish Review_. He gives his reasons, with his usual clearness, in a letter addressed to Dr. Metcalfe himself:

I have come to the conclusion to nominate you, because you are a man of public position versed in these matters--you are (if you will allow me to say so) on most friendly and even intimate terms with me for years past--we are, I believe, after many conversations with you, quite at one upon University questions--and you are almost bound to be _persona grata_, having quite recently received the Honorary Doctorate of the University. Besides which, I think that an outside expert is better adapted to see questions fairly than somebody who is necessarily inside some local groove.

{189}

[Sidenote: 1892, St. Andrews and Dundee]

Dr. Metcalfe was duly appointed to the a.s.sessorship; and with one at his side in whose sound judgment as well as his personal attachment to himself he had the fullest confidence, Bute was greatly encouraged in the a.s.sumption of his important duties with regard to the university, in which he had already shown his practical interest by giving it, at a time of some financial distress, very timely and welcome help. This help had been all the more welcome in view of the unsympathetic att.i.tude of successive Governments towards St. Andrews. Mr. Arthur Balfour had indeed during his Rectorship (1886-1889) persuaded the administration of which he was a member to build the addition to the library to which Bute refers in the extract from his diary quoted above. But, generally speaking, Tories and Liberals alike had shown towards the premier university of Scotland the minimum of interest and generosity. This was the more remarkable, inasmuch as the patronage of the princ.i.p.alships of the United College as well as of St. Mary's, and also of the chairs of Church History, Biblical Criticism, and Hebrew and Oriental Languages, was vested in the Crown. In 1889 Parliament had actually entrusted to the newly appointed Universities Commission powers to abolish St. Andrews University altogether--a proposal which found a certain measure of support in Dundee, where University College had been founded in the same year. The relations of this new college to the ancient university were still indeterminate when Bute took office in 1892; but its medical possibilities, situated as it was in the heart of a populous and growing city, had of course become quickly apparent to its managers.

It must be borne in mind that medical degrees had all along been granted by St. Andrews itself after due {190} examination by the professors of the university, who were a.s.sisted by external examiners of high distinction. The number of such degrees, originally unlimited, had been afterwards reduced to ten. At the time of Bute's coming into office there were two main contentions as to medical teaching at St.

Andrews. The first was that provision should be made for one _annus medicus_ only, so that practically the whole weight of medical teaching should be thrown on Dundee. The second was that there should be two complete _anni medici_ in St. Andrews; but this was at the time impracticable, owing to the insufficiency of adequate medical teaching.

Bute saw clearly that if, as was his great desire, the science of medicine should be worthily represented in the university, proper provision for the teaching of that science must be made in St. Andrews itself, and students of medicine must be encouraged to come to St.

Andrews for the completion of their medical course. At no stage of the long controversy between St. Andrews and Dundee did he ever seek or propose to establish a complete medical school at St. Andrews; and he would have been the first, with his robust common sense, to see the absurdity of such a proposal as regarded the university city, where there was not even a hospital, and therefore no opportunity for the necessary clinical instruction. Unguarded language on this subject may have been employed by some of his supporters, but never by himself. He aimed only at what was practicable and desirable, and this he made it possible to attain by inst.i.tuting a lectureship (now the Bute professorial chair) of Anatomy, by promoting the refoundation of the Chair of Physiology,[8] and by {191} building at his own cost the new medical school, the completion of which, though he did not live to see it, was a source of satisfaction to him only a few weeks before his death. It would have been not less gratifying to him to foresee, had that been possible, the natural result and development of his enlightened munificence, as shown in the following figures. The number of students of anatomy in the Bute Medical School was, in 1914, eighteen; in 1915-16 thirty; in 1916-17 thirty-seven; in 1917-18 fifty-four; and in 1919-20 ninety.

It would be doing Bute a great injustice to suppose that in his att.i.tude towards Dundee he was actuated by any feeling of hostility towards the newly-founded college. The very contrary was indeed the case. Keenly interested as he was in the higher education of the people, especially in large centres of population, he was naturally as favourably disposed towards University College, Dundee, as he had shown himself to be towards University College, Cardiff. But he could not view with equanimity the prospect which was, as he well knew, hopefully contemplated by some of the supporters of the new college, namely, that of its ultimately not only absorbing the ancient university to which it had been united within the last three years, but even possibly of crushing it out of existence altogether. Of this prospect he wrote on March 12, 1893:

The object of the Dundee people is evidently to obtain entire command of the university, which they {192} will employ by secularising St.

Mary's and translating all the Science subjects to Dundee, as well as starting, I take it, a complete Arts curriculum there, possibly allowing the United College to exist as a kind of outhouse.

"It has been said, and said publicly, by one of that party," he wrote on another occasion, "'Give us two years more of the union, and we will drag St. Andrews at our chariot wheels.'" To Bute, with his almost pa.s.sionate veneration for the ancient university, which for centuries had been the chief home of religion and learning in Scotland, it was intolerable to think of St. Andrews being deposed from its pride of place and sinking into a decaying village, a mere resort of sea-bathers and golfers. From this fate he was resolute, if possible, to save the "House of the Apostle" (as he loved to call it), at whatever cost to himself. "For months past," he wrote a little later, "I have been slaving for St. Andrews. The people--or some of them--may not be worth saving, but the place surely is. My vital force is, it is plain to myself, much diminished by all this anxiety and strain; but I shall work on as long as I have strength to do so."

In the long and elaborate memorandum which he drew up in the second year of his Rectorship, on the four possible relations in which the University of St. Andrews and the college at Dundee might conceivably stand to one another, Bute gives clear evidence of his genuine desire that the cause of education and learning should flourish equally in both inst.i.tutions. But both he and those who thought and acted with him were perfectly convinced that this would never be so long as Dundee continued its intrigues to become the predominant partner in {193} what he calls the "ill-a.s.sorted union" between them; and he was equally convinced that an absolutely essential preliminary step in this direction was the dissolution of the Order of the University Commission of March 21, 1890 (_dies nefastus_, as Bute calls it in one of his notes), by which the existing union between St. Andrews and Dundee had been brought about. It was with this object that an action was brought in the Court of Session in July, 1894, for the "reduction" of the union in question, and also that a bill was introduced into the House of Lords by the Chancellor of the university, the Duke of Argyll, whose sympathies were entirely with Bute in the question at issue.[9]