Prime Ministers and Some Others
9781465596437
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Lord John Russell was born in 1792, and became Prime Minister for the first time in 1846. Soon after, Queen Victoria, naturally interested in the oncoming generation of statesmen, said to the Premier, "Pray tell me, Lord John, whom do you consider the most promising young man in your party?" After due consideration Lord John replied, "George Byng, ma'am," signifying thereby a youth who eventually became the third Earl of Strafford. In 1865 Lord John, who in the meantime had been created Earl Russell, became, after many vicissitudes in office and opposition, Prime Minister for the second time. The Queen, apparently hard put to it for conversation, asked him whom he now considered the most promising young man in the Liberal party. He replied, without hesitation, "George Byng, ma'am," thereby eliciting the very natural rejoinder, "But that's what you told me twenty years ago!" This fragment of anecdotage, whether true or false, is eminently characteristic of Lord Russell. In principles, beliefs, opinions, even in tastes and habits, he was singularly unchanging. He lived to be close on eighty-six; he spent more than half a century in active politics; and it would be difficult to detect in all those years a single deviation from the creed which he professed when, being not yet twenty-one, he was returned as M.P. for his father's pocket-borough of Tavistock. From first to last he was the staunch and unwavering champion of freedom—civil, intellectual, and religious. At the very outset of his Parliamentary career he said, "We talk much—and think a great deal too much—of the wisdom of our ancestors. I wish we could imitate the courage of our ancestors. They were not ready to lay their liberties at the foot of the Crown upon every vain or imaginary alarm." At the close of life he referred to England as "the country whose freedom I have worshipped, and whose liberties and prosperity I am not ashamed to say we owe to the providence of Almighty God." This faith Lord Russell was prepared to maintain at all times, in all places, and amid surroundings which have been known to test the moral fibre of more boisterous politicians. Though profoundly attached to the Throne and to the Hanoverian succession, he was no courtier. The year 1688 was his sacred date, and he had a habit of applying the principles of our English Revolution to the issues of modern politics. Actuated, probably, by some playful desire to probe the heart of Whiggery by putting an extreme case, Queen Victoria once said: "Is it true, Lord John, that you hold that a subject is justified, under certain circumstances, in disobeying his Sovereign?" "Well, ma'am, speaking to a Sovereign of the House of Hanover, I can only say that I suppose it is!" When Italy was struggling towards unity and freedom, the Queen was extremely anxious that Lord John, then Foreign Secretary, should not encourage the revolutionary party. He promptly referred Her Majesty to "the doctrines of the Revolution of 1688," and informed her that, "according to those doctrines, all power held by Sovereigns may be forfeited by misconduct, and each nation is the judge of its own internal government." The love of justice was as strongly marked in Lord John Russell as the love of freedom. He could make no terms with what he thought one-sided or oppressive. When the starving labourers of Dorset combined in an association which they did not know to be illegal, he urged that incendiaries in high places, such as the Duke of Cumberland and Lord Wynford, were "far more guilty than the labourers, but the law does not reach them, I fear."
