_The beginning of the war—A sketch of Sidney Herbert._
It was on April 11, 1854, that war was declared by Russia, and four days
later the invasion of the Ottoman Empire began. England and France were
the sworn allies of Turkey, and though the war had begun with a quarrel
about “a key and a trinket,” the key and the trinket were, after all,
symbols, just as truly as the flags for which men lay down their lives.
England had entrusted the cause of peace to those faithful lovers of
peace, Lord Aberdeen, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Cobden, and Mr. Bright; but no
single man in our “constitutional” Government is in reality a free agent,
and the peace-loving members of the Cabinet had been skilfully handled
by the potent Lord Palmerston, and did not perceive soon enough that the
understanding with Turkey and with France, into which they had drifted,
must endanger the peace of Europe because the other Powers were ignored.
If the English people had been secretly longing for war—and it is said
that they had—then the terrible cup they had desired was to be drunk to
the lees: the war on which they were entering was a war of agony and
shame, a war in which men died by hundreds of neglect and mismanagement,
before a woman’s hand could reach the helm and reform the hospital
ordinances in the ship of State.
Meanwhile, before we plunge into the horrors of the Crimean War we may
rest our minds with a few pages about Miss Nightingale’s friend, Mr.
Sidney Herbert, who became an active and self-sacrificing power in the
War Office.
When Florence Nightingale was born, Sidney Herbert—afterwards Lord
Herbert of Lea—was already a boy of ten.
Those who know the outlook over the Thames, from the windows of Pembroke
Lodge at Richmond, will realize that he too, like Florence Nightingale,
was born in a very beautiful spot. His father, the eleventh Earl of
Pembroke, had married the daughter of Count Woronzow, the Russian
Ambassador, and, in Sidney’s knowledgeable help afterwards at the War
Office during the Crimean War, it is not without interest to remember
this.
His birth had not been expected so soon, and there were no baby clothes
handy at Pembroke Lodge, where his mother was staying. It would seem
that shops were not so well able to supply every need with a ready-made
garment as they are in these days; so the first clothes that the baby boy
wore were lent by the workhouse until his own were ready.
In later days, when he cared for the needs of all who crossed his path,
until his people feared—or pretended to fear—that he would give away all
he had, his mother used to say that workhouse clothes were the first he
had worn after his birth, and were also clearly those in which he would
die.
He had good reason to rejoice in his lineage, for he was descended from
the sister of Sir Philip Sidney, after whom he was named. He too, like
his great namesake, was all his life full of that high courtesy which
comes of loving consideration for others rather than for self, and is
never more charming than in those who, being in every sense “well-born,”
have seen it in their fathers, and in their fathers before them,
notwithstanding that in those others who, less fortunate, whether they be
rich or poor, having come of an ill brood, are yet themselves well-bred,
such courtesy is of the courts of heaven.
The boy’s father had much individuality. Being the owner of some thirty
villages, and lord-lieutenant of the county, he was naturally a great
magnate in Wiltshire. He was very fond of dogs, and his favourites among
them sat at his own table, each with its own chair and plate.
Sidney was almost like an only son at home, for his elder brother,
who was, of course, the heir to Lord Herbert’s patrimony, had married
unhappily and lived abroad.
The little boy seems to have been really rather like the little angels
in Italian pictures, a child with golden curls and big brown eyes, with
the look of love and sunshine gleaming out of them that he kept all his
life, and there is a letter of his mother’s, describing a children’s
fancy dress ball, at which she dressed him up as a little cupid, with
wings and a wreath of roses, and was very proud of the result. He was
either too little to mind, or if he hated it, as so many boys would,
he bore with it to please his mother, who, we are told, made as much
of an idol of him as did the rest of his family. And indeed it is most
wonderful, from all accounts, that he was not completely spoiled. Here is
his mother’s letter about it:—
“I never did see anything half so like an angel. I must say
so, although it was my own performance. He had on a garland of
roses and green leaves mixed; a pair of wild duck’s wings, put
on wire to make them set well; a bow and arrow, and a quiver
with arrows in it, tied on with a broad blue ribbon that went
across his sweet neck.”
In another of her letters we are told of a visit paid, about this time,
to Queen Charlotte, and how the child “Boysey” climbed into the Queen’s
lap, drew up and pulled down window-blinds, romped at hide-and-seek with
the Duke of Cambridge, and showed himself to be not in the slightest
degree abashed by the presence of royalty.
Lord Fitzwilliam, a friend and distant relation, used often to stay at
Pembroke Lodge and at Wilton, and seems to have been pleased by the boy’s
courteous ways and winning looks; for, having no children of his own,
when he left most of his property to Lord Pembroke, the “remainder,”
which meant big estates in Ireland and Shropshire, was to go to his
second son, Sidney.
The boy loved his father with a very special intimacy and tenderness, as
we see by a letter written soon after he left Harrow and a little while
before he went up to Oxford, where at Oriel he at once made friends with
men of fine character and sterling worth. His father had died in 1827,
and he writes from Chilmark, where the rector, Mr. Lear, was his tutor,
and the Rectory was near his own old home at Wilton:—
“You cannot think how comfortable it is to be in a nice little
country church after that great noisy chapel. Everything is
so quiet and the people all so attentive that you might hear
a pin fall while Mr. Lear is preaching. I like, too, being so
near Wilton, so many things here ever bringing to mind all _he_
said and did, all places where I have ridden with _him_, and
the home where we used to be so happy. In short, there is not
a spot about Wilton now which I do not love as if it were a
person. I hope you will be coming there soon and get it over,
for seeing that place again will be a dreadful trial to you.”
Among his friends at Oxford were Cardinal Manning, Lord Lincoln, who
as Duke of Newcastle was afterwards closely associated with him at the
War Office; Lord Elgin, Lord Dalhousie, and Lord Canning, all three
Viceroys of India. It was there, too, that his friendship with Mr.
Gladstone began. Lord Stanmore says that Mr. Gladstone told him a year
or two before his death how one day at a University Convocation dealing
with a petition against the Roman Catholic Relief Bill, to which he
had himself gone as an undergraduate outsider, he had noticed among the
crowd of undergraduates in the vestibule of the Convocation House “a tall
and graceful figure, surmounted by a face of such singular sweetness
and refinement that his attention was at once riveted by it, and with
such force that the picture he then saw rose again as vividly before him
while talking as when first seen sixty-eight years before.” Mr. Gladstone
inquired the name of this attractive freshman. “Herbert of Oriel,” was
the answer. They became friends; but in those days friendships between
men of different colleges and different ages were not always easily kept
up. The more intimate relations between himself and Herbert date only
from a later time.
Herbert’s noble and beautiful life was to be closely intertwined with
that of his little friend and neighbour, in one of those friendships—holy
in their unselfish ardour of comradeship and service of others—which put
to shame many of the foolish sayings of the world, and prove that, while
an ideal marriage is the divinest happiness God gives to earthly life, an
ideal friendship also has the power to lift both joy and pain into the
region of heaven itself.
This was a friendship which, as we shall see, arose in the first
instance partly out of the fact that the two children grew up on
neighbouring estates, and were both what Mrs. Tollemache has called
“Sunday people”—people with leisure to give to others, as well as wealth;
and at the end of Sidney Herbert’s life it was said that the following
description of Sir Philip Sidney, after whom he was named, was in every
particular a description of him:—
“He was gentle, loving, compassionate, forgiving as a woman,
and yet had the dignity and valour of a man. His liberality was
so great that with him not to give was not to enjoy what he had.
“In his familiarity with men he never descended, but raised
everybody to his own level. So modest, so humble was he, and so
inaccessible to flattery, that he esteemed not praise except as
an encouragement to further exertion in well-doing. His tongue
knew no deceit, and his mind no policy but frankness, courage,
and sincerity, and ... England has had greater statesmen, but
never so choice a union of the qualities which make a Sidney.
His fame is founded on those personal qualities of which his
contemporaries were the best judges, although they may not
leave a trace in books or in history.”
And of both might it most emphatically have been said, as was said by Mr.
Gladstone of one of them: “Rare indeed—God only knows how rare—are men
with his qualities; but even a man with his qualities might not have been
so happy as to possess his opportunities. He had them, and he used them.”
The story of his betraying a State secret to that other friend, who was
the original of “Diana of the Crossways,” is a myth which has been more
than once disproved, and of which his biographer says that any one who
knew him, or knew the real “Diana,” would have treated it with derision.
But he was always ready to bear lightly undeserved blame, just as he took
it as of no account when credit that should have been his was rendered
elsewhere. Take, for instance, the warrant which relieved soldiers of
good conduct from the liability of punishment by flogging. He had worked
hard at this warrant, and it originated with him, although the Duke of
Cambridge supported him in it. But when one of his friends expressed
annoyance that the praise had come to the better-known man, he replied
impatiently: “What _does_ it matter who gets the credit so long as the
thing itself is done?”
Nor did he ever seem to care about mere material reward, and he simply
could not understand the outcry of one useful servant of the State who,
when likely to be left out of office in prospective Cabinet arrangements,
exclaimed, “And pray what is to become of _me_?”
With him, as with Miss Nightingale, giving was an untold and constant
joy, and he was able to be lavish because of his great personal economy
and self-denial. In all his beautiful home at Wilton, Lord Stanmore tells
us, his own were the only rooms that could have been called bare or
shabby, and when he was urged to buy a good hunter for himself, he had
spent too much on others to allow himself such a luxury. He delighted in
educating the sons of widows left by men of his own order without means.
“He maintained,” we read, “at one and the same time boys at Harrow,
Marlborough, and Woolwich, another in training for an Australian career,
and a fifth who was being educated for missionary work. And he expended
much in sending poor clergymen and their families to the seaside for a
month’s holiday.” And to gentlepeople who were poor we read that the help
of money “was given so delicately as to remove the burden of obligation.
A thousand little attentions in time of sickness or sorrow helped and
cheered them. In all these works his wife was his active coadjutor,
but” we read that “it was not till after his death that she was at all
aware of their extent, and even then not fully, so unostentatiously and
secretly were they performed. His sunny presence,” says his biographer,
“warmed and cheered all around him, and the charm of his conversation
made him the light and centre of any company of which he formed a
part.[6] There are, however, many men who are brilliant and joyous in
society, over whom a strange change comes when they cross their own
threshold. Sidney Herbert was never more brilliant, never more charming,
never more witty than when alone with his mother, his wife, his sisters,
or his children.
“Nowhere was he seen to greater advantage than in his own home. He
delighted in country life, and took a keen and almost boyish interest in
its sports and pursuits, into the enjoyment of which he threw himself
with a zest and fulness not common among busy men ... a good shot, a bold
rider, and an expert fisherman, he was welcomed by the country gentlemen
as one of themselves, and to this he owed much of his great popularity in
his own country. But it was also due to the unfailing consideration shown
by him to those of every class around him, and the sure trust in his
responsive sympathy which was felt by all, high and low alike, dwelling
within many miles of Wilton. By all dependent on him, or in any way under
his orders, he was adored, and well deserved to be so. The older servants
were virtually members of his family, and he took much pains in seeing
to their interests, and helping their children to start well in the
world.”
“Never,” says Lady Herbert, “did he come down to Wilton, if only for a
few days, without going to see Sally Parham, an old housemaid, who had
been sixty years in the family, and Larkum, an old carpenter of whom he
was very fond, and who on his death-bed gave him the most beautiful and
emphatic blessing I ever heard.”
Of his splendid work in the War Office, and for our soldiers long after
he had laid aside War Office cares, we shall read in its due place.
Meanwhile we think of him for the present as Florence Nightingale’s
friend, and her neighbour when in the south, for his beautiful Wilton
home was quite near to her own home at Embley.
Before the Crimean War began he was already giving his mind to army
reform, and while that war was in progress the horrors of insanitary
carelessness, as he saw them through Florence Nightingale’s letters, made
of him England’s greatest sanitary reformer in army matters, with the
single exception of Florence Nightingale herself.
The two had from the first many tastes in common, and among those of
minor importance was their great affection for animals. He was as devoted
to his horse Andover as she had been to the little owl Athene, of which
her sister, Lady Verney, in an old MS. quoted by Sir Stuart Grant Duff,
gives the following pretty history:—
“Bought for 6 lepta from some children into whose hands it had
dropped out of its nest in the Parthenon, it was brought by
Miss Nightingale to Trieste, with a slip of a plane from the
Ilissus and a cicala. At Vienna the owl ate the cicala and was
mesmerized, much to the improvement of his temper. At Prague
a waiter was heard to say that ‘this is the bird which all
English ladies carry with them, because it tells them when they
are to die.’ It came to England by Berlin, lived at Embley,
Lea Hurst, and in London, travelled in Germany, and stayed at
Carlsbad while its mistress was at Kaiserswerth. It died the
very day she was to have started for Scutari (her departure was
delayed two days), and the only tear that she had shed during
that tremendous week was when ⸺ put the little body into her
hand. ‘Poor little beastie,’ she said, ‘it was odd how much I
loved you.’”
And we read that before his death, Lord Herbert with a like tenderness
bade a special farewell to his horse Andover, kissing him on the neck,
feeding him with sugar, and telling him he should never ride again.
That was when he was already extremely ill, though not too ill to take
care that a young priest who was dying also, but too poor to buy all the
doctor had ordered, should be cared for out of his own purse.
With him, as with Florence Nightingale, giving and helping seem to have
been unceasing.
The friendship between them was very dear to both of them, and was warmly
shared by Lord Herbert’s wife. When they all knew that death was waiting
with a summons, and that Lord Herbert’s last journey abroad could have
but one ending, even though, as things turned out, he was to have just
a momentary glimpse of home again, Florence Nightingale was the last
friend to whom he bade farewell. But that was not till 1861, and in the
intervening years they worked incessantly together, for the good of the
army and the improvement of sanitary conditions.