Lady John Russell Part 17

In a letter written to Lady Mary Abercromby, more than two years before, she had expressed her feelings with regard to religious ceremonies. It is interesting that the word _mummeries_, which excited so much indignation in Lord John's Durham letter, occurs in this letter.

On January 13, 1848, she wrote:

Many thanks to you for the interesting account of the great ceremony on Christmas Day in St. Peter's, and of your own feelings about it. I believe that whatever is _meant_ as an act of devotion to G.o.d, or as an acknowledgment of His greatness and glory, whether expressed by the simple prayer of a Covenanter on the hill-side or by the ceremonies of a Catholic priesthood, or even by the prostrations of a Mahometan, or by the self-torture of a Hindoo, may and ought to inspire us with respect and with a devout feeling, at least when the worshippers themselves are pious and sincere. Otherwise, indeed, if the _mummery_ is more apparent than the solemnity, I do not see how respect can be felt by those accustomed to a pure worship, the words and meaning of which are clear and applicable to rich and poor, high and low....

_Lady John Russell to Lady Mary Abercromby_

LONDON, _April_ 11, 1851

I wonder what you will do with regard to teaching religion to Maillie when she is older. I am daily more and more convinced of the folly, or worse than folly, the mischief, of stuffing children's heads with doctrines some of which we do not believe ourselves (though we may think we do), others which we do not understand, while their hearts remain untouched.... Old as Johnny is, he does not yet go to church. I see with pain, but cannot help seeing, that from the time a child begins to go to church, the truth and candour of its religion are apt to suffer.... Oh, how far we still are from the religion of Christ! How unwilling to believe that G.o.d's ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts our thoughts!

How willing to bring them down to suit not what is divine, but what is earthly, in ourselves! Yet, happily, we do not feel or act in consistency with all that we repeat as a lesson upon the subject of our faith--for man cannot altogether crush the growth of the soul given by G.o.d--and I trust and believe a better time is coming, when freedom of thought and of word will be as common as they are now uncommon.

In May Lady John writes of a dinner-party in London where she had a long conversation with the Russian Amba.s.sador (Baron Brunow) on the Governments of Russia and England; she ended by hoping for a time "when Russia will be more like this country than it is now, to which he answered with a start, and lifting up his hands, 'G.o.d forbid! May I never live to see Russia more like this country! G.o.d forbid, my dear Lady _Joan!'"_

To follow the events which led to the fall of the Ministry it is necessary to look abroad. The power of the Whigs in the House of Commons, such as it was, was the result of inability of Tories to combine, owing to their differences concerning Free Trade. The strength of Lord John's Ministry in the country depended largely upon the foreign policy of Palmerston, who was disliked and mistrusted by the Court. While Palmerston was defending his abrupt, highhanded policy towards Greece in the speech which made him the hero of the hour, a war was going on between Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein, in which the Prince Consort himself was much interested. It was a question as to whether Schleswig-Holstein should be permitted to join the German Federation. Holstein was a German fief, Schleswig was a Danish fief; unfortunately an old law linked them together in some mysterious fashion, as indissolubly as Siamese twins. Both wanted to join the Federation. Holstein had a good legal claim to do as it liked in this respect, Schleswig a bad one; but the law declared that both must be under the same government. Prussia interfered on behalf of the duchies; England, Austria, France, and the Baltic Powers joined in declaring that the Danish monarchy should not be divided.

The Prince Consort had Prussian sympathies, and he therefore disapproved of the strong line which Palmerston took up in this matter. It was not only Palmerston's policy, however, but the independence with which he was accustomed to carry it out, which annoyed the Court. He was a bad courtier; he domineered over princelings and kings abroad, and his behaviour to his own Sovereign did not in any way resemble Disraeli's. He not only "never contradicted, only sometimes forgot"; on the contrary, he often omitted to tell the Queen what he was doing, and consequently she found herself in a false position.

At last the following peremptory reproof was addressed to him:

_Queen Victoria to Lord John Russell,_ [36]

Osborne, _August_ 12, 1850

... The Queen requires, first, that Lord Palmerston will distinctly state what he proposes in a given case, in order that the Queen may know as distinctly to what she has given her royal sanction; secondly, having once given her sanction to a measure, that it be not arbitrarily altered or modified by the Minister. Such an act she must consider as failing in sincerity towards the Crown, and justly to be visited by the exercise of her const.i.tutional right of dismissing that Minister. She expects to be kept informed of what pa.s.ses between him and Foreign Ministers before important decisions are taken, based upon that intercourse: to receive foreign dispatches in good time; and to have the drafts for her approval sent to her in sufficient time to make herself acquainted with their contents before they must be sent off. The Queen thinks it best that Lord John Russell should show this letter to Lord Palmerston.

[36] "Letters of Queen Victoria," vol. ii, chap. xix.

Palmerston apologized and promised amendment, but he did not resign, nor did the Prime Minister request him to do so. His foreign policy had hitherto vigorously befriended liberty on the Continent, and although the Queen and Prince Consort never strained the const.i.tutional limits of the prerogative, these limits are elastic and there was a general feeling among Liberals that the Court might acquire an overwhelming influence in diplomacy, and that certainly at the moment the Prince Consort's sympathies were too largely determined by his relationship to foreign royal families.

It is clear, however, that as long as the Crown is an integral part of the Executive, the Sovereign must have the fullest information upon foreign affairs. Palmerston had gone a great deal too far.

_Lady John Russell to Lady Mary Abercromby_

LONDON, _March_ 14, 1851

We have now heard from you several times since the _crisis_, [37] but not since you knew of our reinstatement in place and power, toil and trouble.... I should hardly have thought it possible that Ralph, hearing constantly from Lord Palmerston, had not discovered the change that has come over him since last year, when he took his stand and won his victory on the principles that became a Whig Minister, of sympathy with the const.i.tutionalists and antipathy to the absolutists all over Europe. Ever since that great debate he has gradually retreated from those principles.... I am not apt to be politically desponding, but the one thing which now threatens us is the loss of confidence of the House of Commons and the country....

[37] The defeat of the Government on Mr. Locke King's motion for the equalization of the county and borough franchise.

She was not right, however, in her estimate of the dangers which threatened the Ministry; they came from the Foreign Office and the Court, not from the Commons.

Kossuth, the leader of the Hungarian Revolution, had been received in England with great enthusiasm. He made a series of fiery speeches against the Austrian and Russian Governments, urging that in cases in which foreign Powers interfered with the internal politics of a country, as they had done in the case of the Revolution in Hungary, outside nations should combine to prevent it. This was thoroughly in harmony with Palmerston's foreign policy. He wished to receive Kossuth at his house, which would have been tantamount to admitting to a hostile att.i.tude towards Austria and Russia, who were nominally our friends. Lord John dissuaded him from doing this; but he did receive deputations at the Foreign Office, who spoke of the Emperors of Austria and Russia as "odious and detestable a.s.sa.s.sins." The Queen was extremely angry.

Windsor Castle, _November_ 13, 1851

The Queen talked long with me about Lord Palmerston and about Kossuth.

After accusing Lord Palmerston of every kind of fault and folly, public and private, she said several times, "I have the very worst opinion of him." I secretly agreed with her in much that she said of him, but openly defended him when I thought her unjust. I told her of his steadiness in friendship and constant kindness in word and deed to those he had known in early life, however separated from him by time and station. She did not believe it, and said she knew him to be quite wanting in feeling. This turned out to mean that his political enmities outlasted the good fortune of his enemies. She said if he took the part of the revolutionists in some countries he ought in all, and that while he pretended great compa.s.sion for the oppressed Hungarians and Italians, he would not care if the Schleswig-Holsteiners were all drowned. I said this was too common a failing with us all, etc. I allowed that I wished his faults were not laid on John's shoulders, and John's merits given to him, as has often been the case--and that it was a pity he sometimes used unnecessarily provoking language, but I would not grant that England was despised and hated by all other European countries.

The Kossuth incident was soon followed by a graver one. On December 1, 1851, Louis Napoleon carried out his _coup d'etat._ The Ministry determined to maintain a strict neutrality in the matter, and a short dispatch was sent to Lord Normanby instructing him "to make no change in his relations to the French Government." When this dispatch was shown to the French Minister, he replied, a little nettled no doubt by the suggestion that England considered herself to be stretching a point in recognising the Emperor, that he had already heard from their Amba.s.sador in London that Lord Palmerston fully approved of the change. In a later dispatch to Lord Normanby, which had not been shown either to the Queen or to the Prime Minister, Palmerston repeated his own opinion. Now this was precisely the kind of conduct for which he had been reproved: in consequence he was asked to resign. When it came to explanations before Parliament, Palmerston, to the surprise of everybody, made a meek, halting defence of his independent conduct. But he bided his time, and when the Government brought in a Militia Bill, intended to quiet the invasion scare which the appearance of another Napoleon on the throne of France had started, he proposed an amendment which they could not accept, and carried it against them. Lord John Russell resigned and Lord Derby undertook to form a Government.

Lady John wrote afterwards the following recollections of this crisis:

The breach between John and Lord Palmerston was a calamity to the country, to the Whig party, and to themselves. And although it had for some months been a threatening danger on the horizon, I cannot but feel that there was accident in its actual occurrence. Had we been in London, or at Pembroke Lodge, and not at Woburn Abbey at the time, they would have met and talked over the subjects of their difference. Words spoken might have been equally strong, but would have been less cutting than words written, and conciliatory expressions on John's part would have led the way to promises on Lord Palmerston's to avoid committing his colleagues in future, as he had done in the case of the coup d'etat, and also to avoid any needless risk of irritating the Queen by neglect in sending dispatches to the Palace. It was characteristic of my husband to bear patiently for a long while with difficulties, opposition, perplexities, doubts raised by those with whom he acted, listening to them with candour and good temper, and only meeting their arguments with his own; but, at last, if he failed to convince them, to take a sudden resolution--either yielding to them entirely or breaking with them altogether--from which nothing could shake him, but which, on looking back in after years, did not always seem to him the best course. My father, who knew him well, once said to me, half in joke and half in earnest: "Your husband is never so determined as when he is in the wrong." It was a relief to him to have done with hesitation and be resolved on any step which this very anxiety to have done with hesitation led him to believe a right one at the moment. This habit of mind showed itself in private as in public matters, and his children and I were often startled by abrupt decisions on home affairs announced very often by letter.

In the case of the dismissal of Lord Palmerston, there was but Lord Palmerston himself who found fault. The rest of the Cabinet were unanimous in approbation. But there was not one of them whose opinions on foreign policy were, in John's mind, worth weighing against those of Lord Palmerston. He and John were always in cordial agreement on the great lines of foreign policy, so far as I remember, except on Lord Palmerston's unlucky and unworthy sanction of the _coup d'etat_.

They two kept up the character of England as the st.u.r.dy guardian of her own rights against other nations and the champion of freedom and independence abroad. They did so both before and after the breach of 1851, which was happily closed in the following year, when they were once more colleagues in office. On matters of home policy Lord Palmerston remained the Tory he had been in his earlier days, and this was the cause of many a trial to John. Indeed, it was a misfortune to him throughout his public career that his colleagues almost to a man hung back when he would have gone forward; and many a time he came home dispirited from a Cabinet at which he had been alone--or with only the support of my father, who always stood stoutly by him while he remained Cabinet Minister--in the wish to bring before Parliament measures worthy of the Whig banner of Civil and Religious Liberty, Progress and Reform. Nothing could exceed John's patience under the criticisms of his colleagues, who were, most of them, also his friends, some of them very dear friends--nothing could exceed his readiness to admit and listen to difference of opinion from them; but it was trying to find the difference always in one direction, and that a direction hardly consistent with the character of a Whig Ministry.

The spirit which pervaded the foreign policy of Lord John Russell is shown in a letter from him to Queen Victoria dated December 29, 1851 [38]:

The grand rule of doing to others as we wish that they should do unto us is more applicable than any system of political science.

The honour of England does not consist in defending every English officer or English subject, right or wrong, but in taking care that she does not infringe the rules of justice, and that they are not infringed against her.

[38] "Letters of Queen Victoria," vol. ii, chap. xx.

Lord and Lady John often regretted that the duties of political life prevented them from having fuller intercourse with literary friends. There are short entries in her diaries mentioning the visits of distinguished men and women, but she seldom had time to write more than a few words. Her diaries--like her letters--were written with marvellous rapidity, and were, of course, meant for herself alone. In March, 1852, she writes: "Thackeray came to read his 'Sterne' and 'Goldsmith' to us--very interesting quiet evening." And a little later at Pembroke Lodge: "d.i.c.kens came to luncheon and stayed to dinner. He was very agreeable--and more than agreeable--made us feel how much he is to be liked." Rogers they also saw occasionally, and the letter which follows is a reply to an invitation to Pembroke Lodge. The second letter refers to a volume of poems in ma.n.u.script, written by Lady John and ill.u.s.trated by Lord John's stepdaughter, Mrs. Drummond. He had lent it to Rogers.

MY DEAR LADY JOHN,--Yes! yes! yes! A thousand thanks to you both! I need not say how delighted I shall be to avail myself of your kindness. I would rather share a crust with you and Lord John in your Paradise then sup in the Apollo with Lucullus himself--yes--though Cicero and Pompey were to be of the party.

Yours most sincerely,

SAMUEL ROGERS

_Mr. Samuel Rogers to Lord John Russell_

_April_ 15, 1852

MY DEAR FRIEND,--How could you entrust me with anything so precious, so invaluable, that when I leave it I run back to see if it is lost? The work of two kindred minds which nor time nor chance could sever, long may it live a monument of all that is beautiful, and long may _they_ live to charm and to instruct when I am gone and forgotten.

Yours ever,

S.R.

The next entry from Lady John's diary is dated March 14, 1852:

Yesterday John read a ballad in _Punch_ giving a very unfavourable review of his conduct in dismissing Lord Palmerston, in bringing forward Reform--indeed, in almost all he has done in office. He felt this more than the attacks of graver and less independent papers, and said, "That's hard upon a man who has worked as I have for Reform"; but the moment of discouragement pa.s.sed away, and he walked up and down the room repeating Milton's lines with the spirit and feeling of Milton:

"Yet hate I not a jot of heart or hope, But steer right onward."

PEMBROKE LODGE

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VI

My brother and I have here added a few recollections of our old home.