John Patrick, Third Marquess of Bute, K.T. (1847-1900) Part 2

Undemonstrative as he was by nature, Bute never forgot those who had shown him any kindness, and he always preserved a grateful affection for John Smith, who accompanied him more than once during the summer holidays to Glentrool, Lord Galloway's lodge among the Wigtownshire hills, and enjoyed some capital fishing there. Bute wrote to him in {21} later years from time to time, and during the sadly clouded closing period of the old man's life, when he was an inmate of St.

Luke's Hospital, he gave him much pleasure by sending him annually a palm branch which had been blessed in his private chapel. More than twenty years after Bute's Harrow days, he received this appreciative letter from his former master:

St. Luke's Hospital, Old Street, E.C., _Easter Tuesday_, 1887.

DEAR LORD BUTE,

I must try and write a few lines, asking you to pardon all defects.

The real Palm Branch was most welcome, with its special blessing: it is behind me as I write, and many happy thoughts and messages does it bring. G.o.d bless you for your most kind thought. I intend to forward it in due time to Gerald Rendall (late head of Harrow, then Fellow of Trin. Coll., Cambridge, now Princ.i.p.al of University College, Liverpool), as my share in furnishing his new home: he was married this vacation. The students, male and female, will be glad to see what a real Palm Branch is like. Your gift of last year is now in the valued keeping of Mrs. Edward Bradby, whose husband was a master of Harrow in your day, and, after fifteen years of hard and successful work at Haileybury, has taken up his abode at St. Katherine's Dock House, Tower Hill, with wife and children, to live among the poor and brighten their dull existence with music and pictures and dancing; besides inviting them, in times of real necessity, to dine with himself and his wife, in batches of eight and ten.

I look forward to the _Review_[1] with great interest. {22} I show it to the Medical Gentlemen here, read what I can, and then forward it to my sister at Harrow for friends there.

I try to realise the old chapel on the beach, in which the branches were consecrated,[2] but fail utterly to do so. _Whereabouts is it_?

I suppose you have a chapel in the house also, for invalids, &c., in bad weather.

G.o.d bless you all: Lady Bute and the children, especially the maiden who is working at Greek.[3]

Ever your grateful J. S.

From John Smith's _quasi_-parental care, Bute pa.s.sed in due time into the house of Mr. Westcott (afterwards Bishop of Durham), who occupied "Moretons," on the top of West Hill (now in the possession of Mr. M. C.

Kemp). The future bishop, with all his attainments, had not the reputation of a very successful teacher in cla.s.s, nor of a good disciplinarian; but as a house-master he had many admirable qualities, and was greatly beloved by his pupils. For him also Bute preserved a warm and lifelong sentiment of regard and grat.i.tude; and to him, as to John Smith, he was accustomed to send every Easter a blessed palm from his private chapel, which Dr. Westcott preserved carefully in his own chapel at Auckland Castle. "See that the Bishop of Durham gets his palm," were Lord Bute's whispered words as he was lying stricken by his last illness in the Holy Week of 1900. The tribute of affectionate {23} remembrance had been an annual one for more than thirty years.

[Sidenote: 1863, School friendships]

Of all Bute's contemporaries at the great school, there were perhaps only two with whom he struck up a real and close friendship. One was Adam Hay Gordon of Avochie (a cadet of the Tweeddale family), who was with him afterwards at Christ Church, and was one of his few intimate a.s.sociates there. The intimacy was not continued into later years, but the memory of it remained. "I heard with sorrow," Bute recorded in his diary on July 12, 1894, "of the death of one of my dearest friends, Addle Hay Gordon. Though at Harrow together, and very intimate at college, we had not met for many years. In my Oxford days I several times stayed in Edinburgh with him and his parents, in Rutland Square.

We were as brothers."[4]

An even more intimate, and more lasting, friendship was that with George E. Sneyd, who was at Westcott's house with Bute, and who afterwards became his private secretary, married his cousin, Miss Elizabeth Stuart (granddaughter of Admiral Lord George Stuart) in 1880, and died in the same year as Adam Hay Gordon. "It is difficult to say," wrote Bute in January, 1894, "what this loss is to me. He had been an intimate friend ever since we were at Westcott's big house at Harrow--one of my few at all, the most intimate (unless Addle Hay Gordon) and the most trusted I ever had. He had a very important place in my will. For these two I had prayed by name regularly at every Ma.s.s I have heard for many, many years."

{24}

A school contemporary, who records Bute's close friendship with George Sneyd, mentions (as do others) his fancy for keeping Ligurian bees in his tiny study-bedroom. "My only recollection of his room at Harrow, where I once visited him," writes Sir Herbert Maxwell, "is of an arrangement whereby bees entered from without into a hive within the room, where their proceedings could be watched." A brother of Sir Redvers Buller, who boarded in the adjoining house, has recorded that "Bute's bees" were a perfect nuisance to him, as they had a way of flying in at his window instead of their own, and disturbing him at his studies or other employments.

[Sidenote: 1863, Harrow school prizes]

"At Harrow," said one of Bute's obituary notices, "the young Scottish peer was as poetical as Byron." This rather absurd remark is perhaps to some extent justified by one episode in Bute's school career. "I have a general recollection of him," writes a correspondent already quoted, "as a very amiable, though reserved, boy, not given to games, who astonished us all by securing the English Prize Poem. He won this distinction (the a.s.signed subject was 'Edward the Black Prince') in the summer of 1863, when only fifteen years of age." "His winning this prize in 1863, when quite young," writes the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was in the same form as Bute at Harrow and knew him well, "was his most notable exploit. There is a special pa.s.sage about ocean waves and their 'dec.u.man,' which has often been quoted as a remarkable effort on the part of a young boy.[5] {25} He was very quiet and una.s.suming in all his ways."

A further honour gained by Bute in the same year (1863) was one of the headmaster's Fifth Form prizes for Latin Verse; but the text of this composition (it was a translation from English verse) has not been preserved. The fact of his winning these two important prizes is a sufficient proof that, if not "as poetical as Byron," he had a distinct feeling for poetry, and that generally his industry and ability had enabled him to make up much, if not all, of the leeway caused by the imperfect and desultory character of his early education. In other words he pa.s.sed through his school course with credit and even distinction; and that he preserved a kindly memory of his Harrow days is sufficiently shown by the fact that he took the unusual step--unusual, that is, in the case of the head of a great Roman Catholic family--of sending all his three sons to be educated at the famous school on the Hill.

Bute's career at Harrow, like his private school course, was an unusually short one, extending over only three years. He left the school in the first term of 1865, presenting to the Vaughan Library at his departure a small collection of books, which it may be of some interest to enumerate. They were Pierotti's _Jerusalem Explained_, 2 vols. folio; {26} Digby's _Broadstone of Honour_, 3 vols.; Victor Hugo's _Les Miserables_, 3 vols.; Miss Proctor's _Legends and Lyrics_; Gil Blas, 2 vols. (ill.u.s.trated); _Don Quixote_; Napier's _Memoirs of Montrose_, 3 vols.; and _Memoirs of Dundee_, 2 vols.

He further evinced his interest in his old school by presenting to it, five years after leaving, a portrait of John first Marquess of Bute (then Lord Mountstuart), wearing the dress of the school Archery Corps of that day (1759). This portrait (which is a copy of a well-known painting by Allan Ramsay) now hangs in the Vaughan Library.

[Sidenote: 1865, Pilgrimage to Palestine]

It was characteristic of the young Harrovian that, his school-days over, he took the very first opportunity to turn his steps towards the East, in which from his earliest boyhood he had always been curiously interested. It was not the first occasion of his leaving England, for he had visited Brussels and other cities several times with his mother during his childhood, and used in later years to note in his diary the half-forgotten recollections of places which he had seen in those early and happy days. But his visit to Palestine in the spring of 1865--the first of many journeys to the Holy Land--was an entirely new experience; and to this youth of seventeen, thoughtful and religious-minded beyond his years, it was no mere pleasure trip, but a veritable pilgrimage. "I am sending you a copy," he wrote to a friend at Oxford in the autumn of this year, "of a doc.u.ment which I value more than anything I have ever received in my life: the certificate of my visit to the Holy Places of Jerusalem given to me by the Father Guardian of the Franciscan convent on Mount Sion. Here it is:

{27}

[Ill.u.s.tration: Emblem]

In Dei Nomine. Amen. Omnibus et singulis praesentes literas inspecturis, lecturis, vel legi audituris, fidem notumque facimus Nos Terrae Sanctae Custos, devotum Peregrinum Ill.u.s.trissimum Dominum Dominum Joannem, Marchionem de Bute in Scotia, Jerusalem feliciter pervenisse die 10 Mensis Maii anni 1865; inde subsequentibus diebus praecipua Sanctuaria in quibus Mundi Salvator dilectum populum Suum, immo et totius generis humani perditam congeriem ab inferi servitute misericorditer liberavit, utpote Calvarium ... SS. Sepulchrum ... ac tandem ea omnia sacra Palestinae loca gressibus Domini ac Beatissimae ejus Matris Mariae consecrata, a Religiosis nostris et Peregrinis visitari solita, visita.s.se.

In quorum fidem has scripturas Officii Nostri sigillo munitas per Secretarium expediri mandavimus.

Datis apud S. Civitatem Jerusalem, ex venerabili Nostro Conventu SS.

Salvatoris, die 29 Maii, 1865.

L.S. De mandato Reverendiss. in Christo Patris

F. REMIGIUS BUSELLI, S.T.L., secret.

+ Sigillum Guardiani Montis Sion.

(There is an image of the Descent of the H. Spirit, and of the _Mandatum_.)

"It touched and interested me extremely," Bute said many years later, "to find myself described in this doc.u.ment as 'devotus Peregrinus,' and this for more than one reason. The phrase, in the first place, seemed to link me, a mere schoolboy, with the myriads of devout and holy men, saints and warriors, who had made the pilgrimage before me. 'Illuc enim ascenderunt tribus, tribus Domini.' And then I remembered that I descended lineally through my mother's family, the Hastings', from a very famous pilgrim, the 'Pilgrim of Treves,' the Hebrew who went to Rome during the great Papal Schism, sat himself down on one of the Seven Hills, and dubbed himself Pope. When Martin V. (Colonna) was recognised as lawful Pope, {28} my ancestor returned to Rome and, I believe, reverted to the Judaism from which he had temporarily lapsed.

But this celebrated journey earned him the t.i.tle, _par excellence_, of the Pilgrim of Treves; and the name of Peregrine has been borne since, all through the centuries, by many of his descendants, of whom I am one." All this is so curiously characteristic of Lord Bute's half serious, half whimsical (and always original) manner of regarding out-of-the-way corners of history and genealogy, that it seems worth reproducing in this place.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MARQUESS OF BUTE, aeT. 17.]

[Sidenote: 1866, Steeplechasing at Oxford]

Soon after his return from his Palestine journey, Bute was duly matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, and he went into residence in the October term. He was one of the last batch of peers who entered the university on the technical footing of "n.o.blemen," with the privilege of wearing a distinctive dress, sitting at a special table in hall, and paying double for everything. Among his contemporaries at the House were the Duke of Hamilton, Lord Rosebery, the seventh Duke of Northumberland, and Lords Cawdor, Doune, and Willoughby de Broke. His cousin, the fourth and last Marquess of Hastings, who was five years his senior, had not long before gone down from the university, had been married for a year, and was at the height of the meteoric career which came to a premature and inglorious end just when Bute attained his majority. The latter had that strong sense of family attachment which is so marked a characteristic of Scotsmen; and _n.o.blesse oblige_ was a maxim which for him had a very real and serious meaning. It is certain that the contemplation of his cousin's wasted life not only distressed him deeply, but tended to confirm in him an almost exaggerated {29} antipathy to the extravagant craze for racing, gambling and betting, which was the form of "sport" most prevalent among the young men of family and fashion who were his contemporaries at Oxford. Bute's entire want of sympathy with such pursuits and such ideals thus inevitably cut him off from anything like intimate intercourse with the predominant members of the undergraduate society of his college. He would not be persuaded to frequent their clubs or share in their amus.e.m.e.nts, which to him would have been no amus.e.m.e.nts at all; although he was elected a member of "Loders," to which the n.o.blemen and gentlemen-commoners of the House as a matter of course belonged. He was, however, induced, on the representations of one of his friends (probably Hay Gordon) to own and nominate a horse in the university steeplechases (or "grinds," as they were called). "Some one, I do not know who," writes one of his contemporaries, "had informed him that I was the proper person to ride his horse. When I interviewed him on the subject (which I did with some trepidation, as he was exceedingly shy and stiff with strangers), he evinced not the slightest interest either in his horse or the contest in which it was to take part. The animal came in only third, but Bute showed neither disappointment nor pleasure in anything it did or failed to do either on this or on subsequent occasions." Another anecdote in connection with this episode of "Bute's steeplechaser" is related by one of his fellow-undergraduates, who was charged, or had charged himself, with the duty of informing the owner of this unprofitable horse (for which, by the way, he had paid a good round sum) that it was among the "Also Rans" in the Christ Church {30} grinds. "Ah! indeed?" was his only comment; "but now I want to know," he continued eagerly, "if you can help me to solve a much more important question. What real claim had the [Greek: kremastoi kepoi]

(the hanging gardens) of Semiramis at Babylon, to be cla.s.sified, as they were in ancient times, among the Seven Wonders of the World?"

Whilst on the subject of Bute's diversions at Christ Church (though steeplechasing, even vicariously, can hardly be said to have been one of them), reference may appropriately be made to a rather remarkable entertainment which he gave by way of repaying the hospitalities extended to him by his companions, including some of his former school-fellows at Harrow. It took the form of a fancy-dress ball, which came off in the fine suite of rooms which he occupied in the north-west corner of Tom Quad (since subdivided). Here is the invitation card, surmounted with the emblazoned arms of the House, which was sent out:

MARQUESS OF BUTE AT HOME

La Morgue Bal Masque IV. I. Tom. R.S.V.P.

"La Morgue" was the room, adjacent to his own, which was, as a matter of fact, used as a mortuary when any death occurred within the college.

The young host received his guests at the entrance to this apartment in the character of his Satanic Majesty, attired in a close-fitting garment of scarlet and black, with wings, horn, and tail; and most of the guests figured as dons, eminent churchmen, and other well-known personages in the university, the stately dean being, of course, represented, as well as {31} Mrs. Liddell, who afterwards expressed regret that she had not been present in person. A fracas in the refreshment room resulted in a jockey (the Hon. H. Needham) being arrested by a policeman, who conducted him to the police-office before the culprit discovered that the supposed constable was one of his fellow-revellers. The affair was altogether so successful that Bute designed to repeat it a year later; but the authorities of the House, who had given no permission for the original entertainment, peremptorily forbade its repet.i.tion.[6]

[Sidenote: 1865, Oxford friends]

Bute had come into residence at Oxford a few weeks after his eighteenth birthday; and the above reminiscences show that with all his serious-mindedness he possessed, as indeed might have been expected, something also, at that period, of what Disraeli called "the irresponsible frivolity of immature manhood." His amiability of character and remarkable personal courtesy prevented him from being in any degree unpopular; but his intimate friends at Oxford were undoubtedly very few; and it is curious that the most intimate of them all was not an undergraduate, or an Oxford man at all, but a lady much his senior, Miss Felicia Skene, daughter of a well-known man of letters and friend of Walter Scott, long resident in Oxford. Miss Skene was herself a person of remarkable attainments and qualities, one of them being a rare gift of sympathy, which seems to have won the heart of the solitary young Scotsman from the first {32} day of their acquaintance.

Bute corresponded with her constantly and regularly, not only during his undergraduate days, but for many years subsequently; and his letters show to how large a degree he gave her his confidence in matters of the most intimate interest to himself. One of the earliest of these is dated from Dumfries House, Ayrshire, in the Christmas vacation following his first term at Oxford.

Dumfries House, c.u.mnock, _Christmas Day_ [1865].