From the obituary notices of the 9th Marquess of Oakham the following
selections have their interest: He succeeded to his father, then in
the Cabinet as Minister for Foreign Affairs, at the age of twenty-one.
His career was brief but singular, the early magnificence of the
younger Pitt offering a standard of comparison, though by no means a
parallel, to his short record of astonishing achievement. His effect
upon the world, first as Chief of the Government Labour Department and
subsequently as Home Secretary, and Minister of War, is described as
shattering, even cataclysmic. His public life lasted five years. He
died at the age of twenty-nine. His personality was revolutionary and
overwhelming.
For, judging by these extracts, he was a ‘Napoleonic figure whose
personal influence combined the impetus of Mirabeau and the dominance
of Alexander. His authority held an incalculable element, precisely
described as uncanny. His spirit was puissant, elemental, his activity
irresistible.’ Yet, according to another journal, ‘he was, properly
speaking, neither intellectual, astute, nor diplomatic, and possessed
as little subtlety as might be expected of a miner whose psychology was
called upon to explain the Trinity. In no sense was he Statesman, and
even less strategist, yet his name swept Europe, changed the map of
the Nearer East, its mere whisper among the Chancelleries convulsing
men’s counsels with an influence almost menacing.’
His enthusiasm appears to have been amazing. ‘Some stupendous and
untiring energy drove through him, paralysing attack, and rendering the
bitterest and most skilful opposition nugatory. His hand was imperious,
upsetting with a touch the chessboards set by the most able statecraft,
and his voice was heard with a kind of reverence in every capital.’
The brevity of his astonishing career called for universal comment, as
did the hypnotising effect of his singular ascendency. ‘In five short
years of power he achieved his sway. He rushed upon the world, he shook
it, he retired,’ as one journal picturesquely phrased it. ‘The manner
of his ending, moreover--a stroke of lightning,--seemed in keeping
with his life. There was neither lingering, delay, nor warning. Of
distinguished stock, noble, yet ordinary enough in all but name, his
power is unexplained by heredity; his family furnished no approach to
greatness, as history supplied no parallel to his dynamic intensity.
Nor, we are informed, among his near of kin, does any inherit his
volcanic energy.’
The world, however, was apparently well relieved of his tumultuous
presence, for his influence was generally surveyed as ‘destructive
rather than constructive.’ He was unmarried, and the title went to a
nephew.
The cheaper journals abounded, of course, in details of his personal
and private life that were freely copied into the foreign press, and
supply curious material for the student of human nature and the
psychologist. The amazing revelations no doubt were picturesquely
exaggerated, yet the sub-stratum of truth in them all was generally
admitted. No contradictions, at any rate, appeared. They read
like the story of some primitive, wild giant let loose upon the
world--primitive, because his specific brain power was admittedly of
no high order; wild, because he was in favour of fierce, spontaneous
action, and his mere presence, on occasions, could stir a nation,
not alone a crowd, to vehement, terrific methods. His energy seemed
inexhaustible, his fire inextinguishable.
Legends were rife, even before he died, among the peasantry of his
Scotch estates, that he was in league with the devil. His habit of
keeping enormous fires in his private rooms, fires that burned day and
night from January to December, and in open hearths widened to thrice
their natural size, stimulated the growth of this particular myth among
those of his personal environment. All manner of stories raged. But
it was his strange custom out-of-doors that provided the diabolical
suggestion. For, ‘behind a specially walled-in space on an open ridge,
denuded of pines, in a distant part of the estate, a series of gigantic
heaps of wood, all ready to ignite, were--it was said--kept in a state
of constant preparedness. And on stormy nights, especially when winds
were high, and invariably at the period of the equinoctial tempests,
his lordship would himself light these tremendous bonfires, and spend
the nocturnal hours in their blazing presence, communing, the stories
variously relate, with the witches at their Sabbath, or with hordes
of fire-spirits, who emerged from the Bottomless Pit in order to feed
his soul with their unquenchable supplies. From these nightly orgies,
it seems clear, at any rate, he returned at dawn with a splendour of
energy that no one could resist, and with a mien whose grandeur invited
worship rather than inspired alarm.’
His biography, it was further stated, would be written by Sir John
Hendricks, Bt., who began life as Private Secretary to his father, the
8th Marquess, but whose rapid rise to position was due to his intimate
association as trusted friend and adviser to the subject of these
obituary notices. The biography, however, had not appeared, within five
years of Lord Oakham’s sudden death, and curiosity is only further
stimulated by the suggestive whisper that it never will, and never can
appear.