AT WORK AND PLAY.
The Queen’s Administrative Work--The “Condition of England”
Question--The Court and the Working Classes--Royal Plans for
Ameliorating the Lot of Labour--Threatened Attacks on the
Queen--The Demagogues Abashed--A Royal-Hearted Speech--The Queen’s
Private Correspondence--A Pension Fund for the Working
Classes--Pauperism among Domestic Servants--Prince Albert’s Relief
Plan--The Court at Osborne--Birth and Christening of the Princess
Louise--Removal to Balmoral--The Queen at Kirk--A Royal
Geologist--Sir Charles Lyell’s Anecdotes of the Royal Family--An
Accident in the Solent--Prince Albert as a University
Reformer--Death of Lord Melbourne and Lord George Bentinck.
To the Queen and the Prince Consort the year of the Revolution brought
many domestic anxieties which the Court newsman of the day could not
chronicle. We have seen, from some expressions in her Majesty’s own
letters, how sharply her heart was touched by the misfortunes of her
French friends and her German kinsfolk. But the public business
connected with the distressing and alarming state of affairs abroad
condemned both the Queen and her husband to the severest toil.
Twenty-eight thousand despatches were received by or sent out from the
Foreign Office during 1848, and most of these had to be studied closely,
and annotated and advised on either by her Majesty or Prince Albert.
Lord Palmerston’s irrepressible restlessness and boyish imprudence kept
the Queen in a state of feverish anxiety, for she never knew when some
fresh freak of the Foreign Secretary might not make her appear
ridiculous to Continental Courts.
Moreover, it occurred to the Royal pair that the troubles at home might
perchance be smoothed if the influence of the Crown were judiciously and
delicately applied to promote a peaceful solution of many alarming
social problems. Mr. Carlyle was then thundering forth anathemas against
the governing orders of England for neglecting what he called “the
Condition of England Question,” and accusing them of abdicating their
natural position as leaders and guides of the people. Had he suspected
what was going on in the Royal circle, he would have known that this
charge did not at all events lie against the highest of all the
governing orders in the State. The “Condition of England Question,” in
fact, had now become a subject of engrossing interest to the Queen and
her consort.
Prince Albert’s letters to Baron Stockmar indicate that he
over-estimated the power and significance of the Chartist organisation.
But they show that he did not under-estimate the disastrous effect of
popular discontent on the commerce and industry of the nation. Her
Majesty and the Prince seemed to have arrived at a very clear idea as to
how far they could either of them affect the crisis. Personally, the
Sovereign at such a time could not with propriety mingle in the social
warfare waged between rich and poor. But much might be done through
Prince Albert to show that the Crown was not unmindful of the claims of
Labour, and to indicate that her Majesty bated not one jot or tittle of
her sympathy for that class of our community, which, as Prince Albert
pithily said, in a speech he delivered on the 18th of May, “has most of
the toil, and least of the enjoyments, of life.”
As far back as 1844 he had become President of a Society for the
Improvement of the Condition of the Working Classes. This apparently was
an organisation somewhat of the dilettante type, but it now occurred to
the practical mind of the Prince that it might be turned at such a
crisis to a useful purpose. He seized the opportunity afforded by an
invitation to preside at one of its public meetings, for carrying out
the cherished design of the Court, and it is curious to note that when
this intention was bruited about, the strongest objections were made to
it. Violent demagogues, he was told, would attend and say rude things
about the Sovereign. Lord John Russell sent him a copy of a book
containing a ribald attack on the Royal Family; and it is not pleasing
to recollect that if the Court had permitted itself to be overruled by
the Government, this golden chance of conciliating contending classes
would have been lost at a critical moment in the history of the English
people. But neither the Queen nor the Prince was to be daunted. These
attacks, they said, merely convinced them all the more that the time had
come when they should put themselves in touch with the great interests
of Labour, and show that the Royal Family was not, as was alleged,
living on the earnings of a people, for whose sufferings it had no
sympathy, and to whose welfare it was indifferent. What the Prince
called “a tangible proof” of the desire of the Queen and her family to
co-operate in any scheme for lightening and brightening the lot of her
poorer subjects was needed, and he meant to give that proof.
A sour critic would perhaps say that in analysing the Royal ideas on the
“Condition of England” Question a good deal of State Socialism lurked in
them. They suggest undoubtedly the influence of many German writers on
State Socialism; but Prince Albert, so far as he was the exponent of her
Majesty’s thoughts, seems to have been careful to burn much incense on
the altar of Voluntaryism, before which all the prominent economic
writers of the day bowed down. If he roused their suspicions by denying
that the people should be let alone, and left to help themselves in what
Mr. Carlyle calls “the desolate freedom of the wild ass,” he deferred to
their prejudices by proposing that the help and guidance which they
needed should come not from Government, but from voluntary combinations
of individuals. It is possible that he might have gone farther if he had
dared. As it was, the position of the Court in relation to the social
question at this time seems to have been midway between that of the
younger school of sociologists in our day, and the almost defunct school
whose principle and shibboleth were _laissez faire_.
According to the Prince’s speech at the meeting of the Association for
Improving the Condition of the Working Classes, on the 18th of May, two
objects should be kept in view. Firstly, Society, through individual and
associated effort, should show what _can_ be done by model
lodging-houses, improved dwellings, loan funds, allotments, and the
like, to ameliorate the lot of the poor. Secondly, the poor must be
taught that all the work of amelioration cannot be done by
Society--that, in fact, they must, by their cultivation of the homely
virtues of thrift, honesty, diligence, and self-denial, help themselves
into the condition in which it is possible for others, either by
individual or associated effort, to help them. He implored the country
to think more of the identity than the rivalry of class interests, and
contended that it was the imperative duty of the rich, each one in his
sphere, “to show how man can help man, notwithstanding the complicated
state of Society.” Self-reliance in the individual, and confidence
between individuals--these were the moral forces which Prince Albert
seems to have thought it was the mission of all good citizens to evoke.
It has been hinted that such utterances are mere platitudes, and hardly
worth recording. As David Hume observed, the truths that are prized as
discoveries by a few philosophers in one generation become the
commonplaces of their grandchildren. Had the ideas of the Queen and her
husband on the Social Problem been platitudes among statesmen in 1848,
Revolution would not have fallen on Europe like “a bolt out of the
blue,” nor would the panic-stricken kings and princes of the Continent
have been flying, as Mr. Carlyle put it, “like a gang of coiners when
the police had come among them.”[112] Nothing could be more gratifying
to the Queen than the universal approval that greeted this address. It
struck the true note of sympathy with Labour that should ever ring
through “the sad, sweet music of Humanity.” Her Majesty said, in a
letter to Stockmar, “the Prince made a speech on Thursday which has met
with more general admiration from all classes and parties than any I can
remember;” and it
[Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE. (_After the Medallion by T. Woolner_,
1855.)]
is in truth impossible to give a juster idea of the effect which it
produced all over the English-speaking world.
It is curious to observe that all through the Queen’s correspondence
during the most alarming year of her reign, there is expressed a feeling
of proud confidence in the stability of the British Monarchy, and an
abiding certitude that under her rule no effort will be spared to
minimise the sufferings or better the lot of the poor. Bolingbroke’s
“patriot King” could not have more completely identified Sovereignty
with national life and national yearning. That the Revolution had no
perceptible effect on England, one can now see was mainly due to the
fact that alike in the repeal of the Corn Laws, and in the encouragement
of schemes for social improvement, the Monarchy
[Illustration: CHRISTENING OF THE PRINCESS LOUISE IN BUCKINGHAM PALACE
CHAPEL.]
became almost guilty of partisanship in espousing the popular cause. The
air was indeed full of such schemes, and it is hardly a breach of
confidence now to say that but for the risk of incurring the reproach of
infecting England with German ideas, the Court would have marched in
advance of its advisers. It was generally believed at this time that the
Queen and Prince Albert were first struck with the inadequacy of the
provision made in England to mitigate the painful chancefulness of life
among the artisan classes. It has been, in fact, supposed that it was in
a special sense for her Majesty’s perusal that the late Dr. Farr then
investigated the problem, from a point of view which was as essentially
German as it was antagonistic to the ideas of the English _laissez
faire_ school. Our Poor Law, Dr. Farr argued, is really a great scheme
for insuring every man’s life against the risk of starvation. In those
days to die from starvation was an accident in England. In the countries
which were swept by the Revolution, however, to be succoured from death
by starvation was the accident. The Poor Law had, therefore, with other
influences, saved Society in England. Whether, in these circumstances,
it might not be well to develop the beneficent idea underlying it, was a
question often thoughtfully pondered in the Royal Family.
For this reason it may not be amiss to call attention to what Dr. Farr
laid down for the guidance of those who at this anxious time had the
destinies of the people in their hands. He pointed out that “Society
without a legal system of relief for destitution can be scarcely said to
exist, as it leaves the protection of life against the most imminent
calamity unprovided for.”[113] Insecurity of life among the masses, he
contended, naturally weakens their instinctive conservatism. It drives
them into communism and anarchy, which are the rank and unwholesome
outgrowths of a state in which Property is too selfish to appropriate a
small portion of its profits as a life insurance premium for Labour--and
where the State has not yet discovered that the insurance of the life of
all is the insurance of the property of all. The Poor Law to a certain
extent made this appropriation. But the objection to it was its
cast-iron administration; its indiscriminating application to the good
and the bad, the industrious and the idle, the worthy and the worthless.
Was it not, then, possible to make Poor Law Relief bear some proportion
to the ratepayer’s previous contributions to the Insurance fund against
destitution? Could not the whole country be converted into a gigantic
Friendly Society, of which the rich should be, so to speak, honorary
members, but capable without the least shame or humiliation of becoming
benefiting members, should sudden misfortune hurl them from the heights
of opulence to the depths of destitution? Many philanthropic firms of
employers co-operated at this time with their workmen in founding
benefit societies for the purpose of insurance against sickness or
accident. Why, it was asked, could they not develop this idea, and
insure their workpeople against the consequences of that infirmity
which is the result of old age? In other words, could not the Friendly
Society be also made a Pension Club? The practical difficulty obviously
lay in the complicated account-keeping which was necessary for the
success of such schemes, and which private firms could hardly be
expected to undertake. It was, however, shown by Dr. Farr, in the letter
which has been quoted, and which is one of the most curious and
characteristic products of a time of social turmoil, that the Government
could alone with advantage receive small deposits of money in the early
life of a generation, invest them at compound interest, and pay the
accumulated amounts at short intervals to the aged and infirm survivors.
Each establishment might, according to Dr. Farr’s idea, organise three
insurance funds--a Pension Fund, a Health Fund, and a Life Fund--the
premiums to be paid to the Government, who should conduct the whole
business for the parties interested on fair and easy terms.
It is curious that though the Chartists and a large number of the
Tories--notably the remnants of the “Young England” Party, led by Mr.
Disraeli and Lord John Manners--sympathised with these ideas, they were
coldly frowned down by the Whigs and the Manchester School of Radicals.
The argument against the social reformers was that employers did enough
for their “hands” when they bought their labour and paid for it in the
open market. It was for the workpeople to spend their money as they
pleased--if in insurance against sickness and old age, so much the
better; if not, so much the worse. But even in the last case no real
harm, it was urged, could come to them, for there was always “the
parish” to fall back upon. In a word, Capital argued that it did enough
for Labour when it paid wages and poor rates. On the other hand, it
might be retorted, that by helping on schemes for promoting the
permanent comfort of his workpeople the employer is only paying wages in
the way which pays all parties best in the long-run. Such an employer,
it might be said, gets the strongest command of the labour market, and
the best and most efficient service from his men. His prestige becomes
lustrous like that of a general who refuses to desert his wounded on the
field where he wins his victorious laurels, or of a conquering king who
refuses to let the veterans perish, whose valour has widened the range
of his dominion. Often did the Queen and Prince Albert ponder these
things in their hearts. Hence their eagerness to seize every
opportunity, not of pressing schemes such as these on a Society whose
economic prejudices were antipathetic to them, but for stimulating the
upper and middle classes in such voluntary movements for ameliorating
the lot of Labour, as were possible and practicable in these “bad old
times.” It was in this spirit that they even studied the barren
statistics of Pauperism, and that their discovery, in 1849, of the fact
that the great majority of the poor people in London workhouses had been
domestic servants, prompted Prince Albert to stimulate the Servants’
Provident and Benevolent Society to find a remedy for such a
distressing state of things. “The appalling pauperism of this class,” as
the Prince described it in a memorable speech, he strove to arrest by
inducing servants to invest their savings under the Deferred Annuities
Act, through the agency of the Society.[114]
On the 18th of March the Princess Louise was born, and on the 13th of
May she was baptised in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace, being
[Illustration: VIEW IN LOCHNAGAR.]
named after Prince Albert’s mother and the Queen of the Belgians. The
Prince himself adapted the music of a chorale he had composed for the
Baptismal Service. “The Royal christening,” writes Bishop Wilberforce to
Miss Noel, “was a very beautiful sight in its highest sense of that word
beauty; the Queen, with the five Royal children around her, the Prince
of Wales and Princess Royal hand-in-hand, all kneeling down quietly and
meekly at every prayer, and the little Princess Helena alone _just_
standing and looking round with the blue eyes of gazing innocence.” This
was the little Princess a peep at whom, Lady Lyttelton says, always
cheered her, for she was then “an image of life”--it is to be presumed
Lady Lyttelton means child-life--in its prime, with “cheeks like
full-blown roses, and her nose like a bud.” This month of May was
ostensibly a merry one at Court, though from the correspondence that
passed between the Queen and her half-sister, it is quite evident that
her Majesty went through the festal pageant of Court balls and Royal
birthday fêtes with her heart heavy from the anxieties of the times.
In July the Royal circle was broken up by the departure of Prince
[Illustration: PROFESSOR ANDERSON AT BALMORAL.]
Albert to open the great Agricultural Show at York, where his speech,
identifying himself closely with the farming interest, gave the country
gentry and husbandmen of England the keenest delight. The Queen again
wrote to Stockmar and the King of the Belgians, expressing her personal
satisfaction with the Prince’s speeches at York, and her pleasure at
seeing him develop high gifts of oratory. The rest of the summer her
Majesty and her family spent at Osborne--a little anxious on account of
the feeble health of Prince Alfred (Duke of Edinburgh), whose removal to
the keen mountain air of the Highlands had been strongly pressed on them
by Sir James Clark. Her Majesty then came to town on the 5th of
September to prorogue Parliament. The present House of Lords was on that
occasion used for the first time, and this fact, together with the
interest excited by the appearance before her Senate of almost the only
great European Sovereign who at this time dared appear in public, caused
enormous crowds to assemble. The Queen was received by the mob who lined
the route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster in a delirium of
enthusiastic loyalty, and that she felt grateful for their greeting was
evident from the emotion with which she delivered those passages of her
Address, in which she referred to the mutual affection and trust that
linked Queen and country together in England.
No sooner had this function been discharged than the Royal Family made
haste to proceed to the Aberdeenshire Highlands, where, on the
recommendation of Sir James Clark, Prince Albert had leased the Balmoral
estate from the Earl of Aberdeen. Mountain air, at once dry and keen,
was, in Clark’s opinion, essential for the health of the Royal Family,
and Balmoral was the driest place in Deeside. Nobody has described this
romantic retreat better than the Queen herself. From the hill above the
house the view, she says, is charming. “To the left you look to the
beautiful hills surrounding Lochnagar, and to the right towards
Ballater, to the glen or valley along which the Dee winds, with
beautiful wooded hills, which reminded us very much of the Thuringian
Forest. It was so calm and so solitary, it did one good as one gazed
around, and the pure mountain air was most refreshing. All seemed to
breathe freedom and peace, and to make one forget the world and its sad
turmoils. The scenery is wild and yet not desolate; and everything looks
much more prosperous and cultivated than at Laggan.”[115]
The journey northward was made by sea to Aberdeen, and from thence to
Balmoral her Majesty met at every stage of the road with the warmest of
Highland welcomes. Balmoral has changed much since those days, when it
was the loveliest of mountain solitudes. The little whitewashed castle,
with its pepper-box turrets, reminded one of the feats of those old
Scottish architects who flourished at the period when the baronial wars
had ceased, but when the builders had not learnt to adapt their art to
peaceful or domestic purposes. It was not till after the fee-simple of
the property was bought by the Prince in 1852, that it became
transformed and transfigured by “improvements.” The Queen devoted
herself to holiday-making after the free and informal fashion that made
desolate Ardverikie a terrestrial Paradise. Her winning ways charmed the
cottagers and the peasantry, to whom she soon became a veritable Lady
Bountiful. As for Prince Albert, sport lightened the anxieties of
politics. The vast panorama of mountain, glen, and forest which unfolds
itself from the summit of dark Lochnagar invited him to resume the
geological studies which in his youth he had pursued with ardour, and
the greatest modern master of the science, Mr. (afterwards Sir Charles)
Lyell,[116] was his guest and guide. A pleasing and graphic sketch is
given by Sir Charles Lyell of the Royal Family in their Highland home.
“At Balmoral, the day I went to dine there,” he writes, “Saturday last,
I had first a long walk--Sir James Clark and I--with Mr. Birch and his
pupil,[117] a pleasing, lively boy, whose animated description of the
Conjurer, or ‘Wizard of the North,’[118] whom they had seen a few days
before, was very amusing. ‘He (the Wizard) had cut to pieces mamma’s
pocket-handkerchief, then darned it and ironed it, so that it was as
entire as ever; he had fired a pistol and caused five or six watches to
go through Gibb’s (one of their footmen) head, and all were tied to a
chair on Gibb’s other side,’ and so forth; ‘but papa (Prince Albert)
knows how all these things are done, and had the watches really gone
through Gibb’s head he would hardly have looked so well, though he was
confounded.’ Sometimes I walked alone with the child, who asked me the
names of plants, and to let him see spiders, &c., through my
magnifying-glass; sometimes with the tutor, whom I continue to like the
more as I become better acquainted. After our ramble of two hours and a
half through some wild scenery, I was sent for to join another party;
where I found the Queen, Prince, and Lord John by a deep pool on the
river Dee, fishing for trout and salmon. After the Queen had entered the
Castle the Prince kept me so long, and we kept one another so late,
talking on all kinds of subjects, that a messenger came from her
Majesty, saying it was only a quarter of an hour to dinner-time. After
the ladies had gone to the drawing-room we had much lively talk, which
the Prince promoted greatly, telling some amusing stories himself, and
encouraging others by laughing at theirs. Next day I went to church. The
prayer for the parish magistracy, Queen, and Royal Family, judges,
ministers of religion, Parliament, and the whole nation, was just such
as you would have liked, and in excellent taste, with nothing which a
Republican, jealous of equality, could, I think, have objected to, and
which, I believe, our Sovereign and her husband could thoroughly
appreciate the simplicity of. They shoved the box,[119] on the end of a
long pole, to the Queen and Prince, and maids of honour, as to all the
rest of the congregation, and each dropped in their piece of coin. After
church I had much conversation alone with Prince Albert, whose mind is
in full activity on a variety of grave subjects, while he is
invigorating his body with field sports.” Lyell, who was a very
observant man, and an astute judge of character, conceived a very high
opinion of the Prince from his conversations with him. After his death,
according to Sir Theodore Martin, he wrote a long letter to Mr. John
Murray, criticising the Prince’s abilities, and expressing his hope that
justice would be done to him in an _éloge_ in the _Quarterly_.
On the 28th of October the Queen and her retinue left Balmoral for
Osborne. On the 9th they left Osborne for London, and when crossing the
Solent they saw a boat full of women who had relatives on board the
_Grampus_ frigate, then coming into Portsmouth after a cruise in the
Pacific, capsized in a squall. Prince Albert gave the alarm, and the
Queen writes:--“I rushed out of the pavilion, and saw a man sitting on
something which proved to be the keel of a boat. The next moment Albert
called out in a horrified voice, ‘Oh, dear, there are more!’ which quite
overcame me.” Her Majesty stopped her yacht at once. A boat was lowered,
and three women--one still alive--were
[Illustration: THE OLD BRIDGE, INVERCAULD.]
rescued. But the sea ran so heavily that Lord Adolphus Fitzclarence
refused to let the yacht lie to any longer, and the Queen had to yield
to his determination to proceed without waiting for the return of the
boat. “It was,” she writes, “a dreadful moment too horrible to
describe.... It is a terrible thing, and haunts me continually.”
One more triumph over insular prejudice won by the Court during the year
of Revolution remains to be recorded. Prince Albert, very soon after his
election as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, alarmed the
Colleges by indicating that he had no intention of being merely an
ornamental official. His first demand to be supplied with a sketch of
the plan of academic study at Cambridge was ominous of interference. At
Cambridge everything was at this time sacrificed to mathematical
studies, and an idea of the state of mind in which University reformers
approached the Prince with suggestions may be found in Dr. Whewell’s
liberal proposal, that a century should pass before new discoveries
could be admitted into the academic curriculum. Nominally philosophy,
literature, and science were included in that curriculum, as the
[Illustration: THE VICTORIA TOWER, WESTMINSTER PALACE.]
table of studies prepared by Dr. Philpott for the Prince showed. But
there was no denying the truth of his Royal Highness’s trenchant
criticism on this document in his letter to Lord John Russell, in which
he said that all the activity in these departments was “on paper,” and
even if it had been real, the scheme was incomplete. After a long and
laborious correspondence with the best authorities on the subject, the
Prince succeeded in persuading the University to thoroughly modernise
its course of instruction, and his revised plan of studies was
triumphantly carried on the 1st of November, 1848. As _Punch_ in a
clever cartoon put it, H.R.H. Field-Marshal Chancellor Prince Albert
took the _pons asinorum_ after the manner of Napoleon at Arcola.
As winter drew on, the state of Ireland became increasingly distressful,
and the confusion on the Continent more and more ominous. In England
some faint signs of reviving trade were discernible, but only just
discernible. The death of Lord Melbourne, however, on the 24th of
November, painfully affected the Queen, whose affection for her first
guide in statecraft had never abated. “Truly and sincerely,” she writes
in her Diary, “do I deplore the loss of one who was a most kind and
disinterested friend of mine, and most sincerely attached to me. He was
indeed for the first two years and a half of my reign almost the only
friend I had, except Stockmar and Lehzen.” Her last letter to the aged
Minister, expressed in terms of simple but touching solicitude,
according to his sister, Lady Palmerston, did much to lift from his
wearied spirit the cloud of melancholy that had settled on it.
Melbourne’s character was rather misunderstood, for his whole life was a
conceited protest against affectation. He was one of those who get great
amusement out of life by treating it as a comedy, in which even in
withered age they persist in playing the _rôle_ of the _jeune premier_.
He toiled hard to persuade Society that he was an elegant idler, and
masked his vaulting ambition under the guise of a cynical indifference
to worldly pomp and power. His tastes were a little coarse--otherwise
his imposture would have been complete, and he would have perhaps
realised the “grandly simple ideal” of a perfect aristocratic character,
which the Earl of March imputed to George Selwyn. Melbourne’s first
impulse was usually to frivolity. But when he saw that business must be
attended to, no man could work harder or bring to bear on affairs of
State a keener intellect, a more astute judgment, or a craftier scheme
of strategy. His handsome person and his charm of manner rendered him in
his old age a _persona grata_ at the Court of the Queen, who treated him
with filial affection and respect. In him one often fancied the
characters of Walpole and Bolingbroke met in combination, and there is a
passage in his speech on the Indemnity Bill (11th of March, 1818) which
may be cited as strangely appropriate to his career. It is that in
which, after expatiating on the advantages which a soldier has whose
exploits are performed in the light of day, before his comrades and his
foes, and so publicly, that his valour and his virtues cannot be denied
or disputed before a world in which they receive bold advertisement, he
proceeds to show that it is far otherwise with the politician. “Not so
the services of the Minister,” exclaimed Melbourne, with a little
sub-acid cynicism; “they lie not so much in acting in great crises, as
in preventing those crises from arising; therefore they are often
obscure and unknown, subject to every species of misrepresentation, and
effected amidst obloquy, attack, and condemnation, whilst in
reality--entitled to the approbation and gratitude of the country--how
frequently are such services lost in the tranquillity which they have
been the means of preserving, and amidst the prosperity which they have
themselves created.”
Another stout political chieftain had passed away on the 21st of
September, when Lord George Bentinck died suddenly of heart disease. His
leadership of the Protectionists had latterly been imprudent and
unpopular, and he had indeed thrown it up during the Session, when it
was no longer possible to conceal the dissatisfaction which it created
among his followers. Lord George Bentinck was an able man, but like
Achilles, “iracundus, inexorabilis, acer.” Discredit has recently been
cast on his career on the turf, which too late in life he deserted for
politics. His indignation at “being sold,” as he phrased it, when Peel
abandoned Protection, flung him headlong into the civil strife of the
times, with all his prejudices thick upon him, and with a mind
ill-equipped by study or training for political controversy or the
practice of statecraft. Fury and rancour, and a strange confusion of
mind in marshalling his arguments, marked his harangues, and in strategy
his impulsiveness and his arrogance often led him into serious errors.
Yet he was popular on the whole in the House of Commons, for he was a
man of dauntless courage, and was supposed to be guided by honesty of
purpose in defending the interests of his order. If he had not been a
little too much given to trumpeting his personal integrity, his zeal and
self-sacrifice would have been better appreciated by his contemporaries,
who till his death did him less than justice.