Life of Lord Courtney

Front matter

A^

AA i-'

Utfi*„QV s

Preface

Shortly after Lord Courtney's death I accepted Lady Courtney's request to write his hfe. While hghtening my labour in every possible way and allowing me to make unrestricted use of her Journal, she has left me an absolutely free hand in the selection of material and the expression of opinion. To her, to Mrs. Oliver, Lord Courtney's sister, and to Professor George Unwin, for eight years his secretary, I am indebted for reading the book in proof and for valuable criticisms and suggestions.

Relations and friends have earned my gratitude by their ready response to appeals for assistance, and I regret that the exigencies of space have prevented the use of all the information and comment which have been supplied. His oldest surviving friend, Mr. Wilham Stabbing, compiled a brief^emoir of the highest value, from which I have made copious extracts. The Master of St. John's has kindly examined the CoUege books for the details of his academic career, while Dr. Liveing, Dr. Bonney and Mrs. Bushell have supplied personal recollections of the young Cambridge student. Mr. William Latey has investigated his connection with the Hardwicke Society in its earUest days, and Sir Edward Clarke has given me his impressions of his share in its debates. The Times has generously permitted me to reveal Leonard Courtney's authorship of many of its leading articles, and Sir J. Thursfield and Dean Wace have answered questions relating to Printing House Square.

Contents

CHAP.

3. Lincoln's Inn . .'

4. Politics, Economics and Journalism

Index

. 621

ILLUSTRATIONS

A Portrait of Lord Courtney from a Photograph by

Elliott & Fry .... . Frontispiece

Which is the " Sage of Chelsea " ? . . . Face page ■^lo

Chapter I

On February 20, 1901, Leonard Courtney dictated some recollections of his boyhood. Though already in his sixtyninth year, his memory was singularly tenacious ; and the biographer is fortunate in possessing a record at once so vivid and so detailed of the earhest stages of his career.^

" My father was bom in Ilfracombe, as his father and grandfather and other forbears before him. Nearly forty years ago I examined the parish register and found that, with very Mttle difficulty, the hne could be traced back about two centuries. They were modest townfolk, frequently ship -masters and probably owning in part or altogether the craft they sailed. My great-grandfather was thus the captain of a small vessel. My grandfather was lame from his youth through one leg being shorter than the other, and he obtained an appointment as officer in the Excise. His wife was a Cotton, daughter of a family long settled in north and east Cornwall, producing from time to time a clergyman or doctor, but in the main farming from father to son. I think my grandfather and grandmother must have met at Stratton, where she had relations ; but he took her to Ilfracombe, where, as I have said, my father was bom. My grandfather was presently moved to Bristol, where other children were born. He was never to my knowledge intemperate ; but he was a clubbable man after the t5rpe of the eighteenth century, strong and clear

''■ The narrative has been sUghtly abridged and broken up into paragraphs.

I B in his grasp of things, terse and vigorous in expression when he met his friends at the tavern and discussed the affairs of town and country. My grandmother, a quiet, home-keeping little woman, must soon have learnt the pressure of indebtedness ; and before her eldest son was many years old, he shared her experiences and lightened them with S3mipathy if not otherwise. I think throughout life he carried with him the marks of this early education. He had a great horror of debt. As a married man he practically never went abroad ; and there was a reserve, a silence, a caution in the expression of opinion which strongly contrasted with the bold and combative quahties of my grandfather's temperament. The family hved on in Bristol several years, and my father, taken away early from school, got employment as a clerk in a succession of merchants' offices. He did not, however, cease to educate himself. Nature had given him under all his reserves the sensibihties and tastes of an artist. He read whatever he could put his hands upon, and I have heard him tell how for three successive days he practically went without his dinner to read one of Scott's novels, just out, which he had a chance to devour at his dinner-time. As a lad in Bristol he began to play the violin, and music remained the solace of his Hfe.

" The difficulties of the Bristol home did not grow less, and somewhere about 1823 it was broken up altogether. The appointment in the Excise was lost, and the whole family removed to Falmouth, where my grandfather set up a private school, my father for some time assisting him and obtaining supplementary employment as accountant or book-keeper to tradesmen and others wanting assistance. This led to his moving a few years later to Penzance. An adventurous linen-draper had come from one of the remote centres of EngUsh activity and started shops in two or three of the Cornish towns, with Penzance as his headquarters ; and my father joined him as accountant at Penzance, making business visits to the other places. It was there he met my mother. She was a native of ScUly, where her father was drowned, leaving a widow and three daughters, the oldest, my mother, barely four years old.

Her mother was a woman of parts, quick intelligence and self-reliance. She hved long enough to read the story of Adam Bede, taking great delight in Mrs. Poyser. The widow's resources were of the smallest ; but she bravely faced the world by opening a small shop for groceries, by means of which she maintained herself and reared her children. It is an illustration of the simpUcity and frugahty of life in the SciUy Islands, about the time of the close of the Great War, that my mother has told me that she and other children were taught to write by tracing letters in sand. A submissive piety was the note of the household ; and in the later years in which I knew it (the two daughters remaining at home) it was their custom to read the Bible through year by year at the rate of two or three chapters a day. My mother, the eldest, was sent to Penzance, where she grew up and became an assistant in the shop in which my father was accountant. Their marriage was most happy for both. My father's larger experience must doubtless have had an attraction, and his appearance was unhke other men. He had long black hair falling back from a very sloping forehead, an aquiline nose, and a saUow complexion. He was broad-chested and strong, but with limbs that seemed to move together (in which respect Mr. Goschen has sometimes reminded me of him) ; and a casual observer might be excused if, seeing him play the violin, he thought he might be a Jewish musician. My mother, on the other hand, had a rather bonny Enghsh face ; whilst her nature, pious, dutiful and loving, yet with some sense of humour and a large measure of economic aptitude, made her the best of wives for her husband and a most beloved mother. In trying to realise the circumstances of the pair I feel that they had great faith when they set up their small household. My father had not, I think, whoUy given up his work with the adventurous linen-draper ; but before I was bom he had set up a smsill day-school, for which, indeed, he was admirably qualified.

" I was bom at Penzance on July 6, 1832, my parents' first child. An old friend, not long dead, who must have been a favourite pupU, has told me how he had a glass of wine given him to drink my health on the occasion of my birth. I cannot remember anything connected with my father's school, partly because,, when my eldest sister succeeded me, I was soon removed to my grandfather's at Falmouth, where I spent the greater part of some five years, and partly because, before that time had passed, my father had given up school-keeping and had become cashier in the Bohthos' Bank, where, with increasing responsibihty, he remained all the active years of his Mfe. I must have been between five and six when I was brought back to Penzance to remain permanently at home.^ My uncle and godfather, Leonard, was a navigating officer on board the Briseis, one of the lo-gun brigs which in those days carried the mails from England to Halifax. My earUest recollections are associated with him. The brigs had an unhappy notoriety in that one of them disappeared almost every winter ; and there was a continual anxiety over every prolonged voyage, hope gradually djdng away and at last giving place to despair. The Briseis disappeared in this fashion, among the results being a complete change in my grandfather's household and my return to Penzance. It is an illustration of my absence from home that I remember being presented to my father on my return and looking upon him with curiosity as a complete stranger, not in the least hke the men to whom I was accustomed.

" From this time forward I lived whoUy at Penzance, never going farther than Falmouth, to which I paid frequent Christmas visits, until my nineteenth year, when I went to Cambridge. For seven years or more we hved in the Bank House. My father was a very home-keeping man, and his love of music was the only thing that drew him away from his fireside. He was a member of a small society which for several winters gave philharmonic concerts in the Assembly Rooms ; and when this society was broken up the parish organist arranged concerts in subsequent winters to which my father gave his assistance. In

^ As Margaret Courtney was born nearly two years after her brother Leonard must either have spent three years at Falmouth or have returned to Penzance at the age of seven or eight.

later years a choral society was established and flourished ; but at the time of which I speak the philharmonic concerts held their own though with some difficulty. My father used to take me to these concerts from about my ninth or tenth year. They were always arranged on the same plan : the programme contained two parts, each beginning with an overture from some opera of Mozart, Donizetti or Rossini, and more rarely Weber, or a symphony' or sonata, when Haydn most frequently appeared, perhaps a vioUn solo and a couple of songs. I must confess that although I generally kept awake during the first part, I generally feU asleep during the overture which began the second. Except for this relaxation my father's home-keeping was complete, his hours out of the bank being occupied with books and the education of his children, to whom his sympathy was a constant stimulus.

" The only school to which I must refer is that to which I went from nine to thirteen and a half, when I left school. It was kept by a Mr. Barnes with a couple of ushers, and had something hke a hundred boys, three-fourths or more being day scholars, and the rest sons of farmers and yeomen in west Cornwall. The parents of most of the boys were Wesleyans ; but the divisions of sects were not in those days very sharply accentuated, and the religious education may be said to have been taken for granted. I remember no special instruction whatever ; and as there were some three or four Jews among the rest who were never to my knowledge separated from their fellows, I suspect I am right in saying there was no rehgious teaching in the school, it being assumed that each day boy was properly instructed at home. About two-thirds of the boys received a plain English education ; the remaining third were taught Latin and some Uttle Greek, while French was an optional subject for which there was a special French master giving us part of his time at an extra fee. I was on the English side tiU I was about twelve, when I had practically got to the top of the Enghsh boys, being by that time well advanced in Euclid and taking up algebra, though with very little understanding of it. I must have begim French whilst still on the English side ; but it would have been astonishing if much had been learnt, for no subject could be more negligently treated by pupils and master.

" I think I must have been just twelve when I began Latin and, of course, I was at first among much yotmger boys. But I advanced very rapidly and was soon among those at the top. The school was easy-going, but the tone was on the whole good and the boys honest children of the middle class. I had an abundance of multifarious reading at home, and one of my school-fellows and myself were energetic enough to undertake some work out of school. This was in the summer of 1844. Readers of Carlyle's Life of Sterling may remember a certain Polytechnic Society, established at Falmouth mainly through the influence of the Fox family, with a museum, lectures and an annual exhibition. This exhibition was in those days, as to some extent it still is, a great incentive to mental activity in Cornwall. Artists sent their work, engineers and inventors their miniature machines, women needlework and embroidery of all kinds, and schoolboys specimens of their progress in mapping and otherwise. My friend and myself conceived the idea of making out parallel chronological tables of the world's history, for which we had the good fortune to receive books, one of which, falling to my share, I still cherish. Encouraged by this, we undertook a larger enterprise in the following year — ^no less than a synthetic history of Cornwall, compiled from the various existing histories with scanty additions our own knowledge furnished. It was an audacious attempt. I attended the exhibition (1845) and passed through the grim experience of listening in the body of the haU to a severe criticism of our work by the judge of this branch on the platform.

" Another circumstance connected with my school life must be mentioned, as it practically shaped all the course of my later years. We had annual examinations at the school in which gentlemen of the town and neighbourhood were asked to come and test the work of the boys. I think it must have been in the summer of 1845 that Dr. WiUan, a Cambridge graduate, residing but scarcely practising in the town, came to an examination. He was attracted by my mastery of Euclid and perhaps something more, and showed a desire to assist me in going further. Some months later having, as I have hinted, but httle practice, he began to take youths to read with him two or three evenings a week in classics and mathematics ; and it was natural that I should be one of his first pupils. At Christmas 1845 1 left school and entered the bank ; but it was arranged by my father that I should do no evening work, which portion of the day I gave up alternately to reading with Dr. WiUan and study at home. From Christmas 1845 to Midsummer 1851 my life was thus passed, with never a break exceeding a fortnight, I think I might say a week, working at the bank during the day, and for, or with. Dr. WUlan ia the evening.

" These five years and a half of outwardly uneventful life were of the greatest importance in my growth and upbringing. As we had lived in the Bank House and I had often watched my father's work, I started with a considerable acquaintance with the routine of banking, and soon became familiar with its details. I could tiun my hand to anything, and if the old books could be inspected my handwriting would be detected up and down except in the posting of ledgers, to which I think I was never admitted. Somehow or other — ^it seems strange to me now — the correspondence of the place gradually fell upon me. Perhaps I may mention an illustration of my bank service which must have happened in the years 1849 and 1850, of which I stUl remain proud. The bank was understaffed, especially owing to the bad health of a partner who was supposed to give active personal assistance ; and the consequence was that the proper balancing of the bank's accounts with its London agents, so as to explain the apparent discrepancy between the accounts as kept in the bank-books and the accounts as rendered by their agents, had fallen into arrear. This was a negligence that could go on for a long time without impairing the general good management of a bank, and I remember we had some evidence that a similar negligence must have occurred in the management of another bank then and now of high repute in another county. It was, however, a bit of a private scandal, and I set myself to work to make out the formal reconciliation of the two sets of accounts — I may say of the four sets, because we had in fact two agents in London and the balances had not been properly adjusted in respect of either.

I took one in hand and patiently went over the transactions half-year by half-year, making the balances again at the end of every six months, tiU I brought down the work to a triumphant close. It was an exercise of merely careful patience and assiduity, a painstaking monotony of work ; but it was undertaken with the simple desire to remove irregularities, and it proved useful in bringing to light one or two errors which had been overlooked. I had £5 given me for this performance, and, looking back upon it, I think the honorarium was well deserved. But the work was certainly not undertaken with the view of any such reward, which I received, indeed, as something unexpected. I have sometimes wondered what would have happened if I had continued as banker's clerk. I might perhaps have followed my father in Penzance, or, hke my next brother, I might have been stirred to activity in some similar field and perhaps have drifted into bank management in the East, in the Colonies or even in London. My brother Mortimer has ended by becoming the permanent head of the Treasury at Ottawa. I might perhaps have attained to some well-paid post in the banking world ; but though I have ever retained the greatest respect for banking and bankers, I have never regretted the abandonment of the chance of acquiring a more lucrative position than has ever fallen to me.

"My bank work nominally absorbed the day from 9 to 4, but not unfrequently overflowed these hours. Three evenings a week I went to Dr. Willan for a couple of hours, and the other three I was supposed to be reading for him. We divided our time between classics and mathematics. I loved Euclid, and was so expert in geometry that I believe I solved every problem in deduction appended to Pott's Euclid. I natmrally took kindly to geometrical conic sections and to trigonometry. With algebra I did not so easily become familiar, but everything relating to nimibers I got under command, and I was ever fascinated with the elements of the Theory of Probabihties. Into Analytical Geometry I may be said only to have looked. It was not till after I went to Cambridge, and there, as it seemed, by some sudden penetration into a new world, that I became in any way a master of the methods of this latter learning. I read also with Dr. WiUan the elements of mechanics, and I even opened the pages of the more famihar books of Newton's Principia. It may be gathered that without any pretensions to real mathematical genius, to which I know I can make no claim, I was going to the full length of the lead which my beloved tutor could give me. In classical learning he would have led me much further than I reaUy went, and I am afraid I must accuse myself of some want of assiduity on this side. We read, indeed, Latin together until I got a real satisfaction in some of its literature. I had read some Caesar at school, and with Dr. Willan I took up SaUust, some Livy and some Tacitus, the Germania and Agricola of the last exciting my strong admiration. We read Horace and Virgil among the poets, but for the latter I had then no Uking. We went through also some haK-dozen of Juvenal's Satines, the Catiline Orations of Cicero, and the De Senectute and De Amicitia. I may perhaps venture to say that I felt a real sympathy with the Roman character, wMch led me in later years to take up other books, including the De Rerum Nattira, with its intermixture of noble and stately verse with the baldest prosaic argument. I never got any real facility in Greek, and, though we tried many authors, even attacking several plays, I did not get any real enjojmaent except in Herodotus and Homer. The outcome of all the hours I gave to Greek then and later may be best understood by the confession that, knowing the Authorised Version well, I could pretty easily stmnble along in the Greek Testament.

" I liad the run of the Penzance Library, even then fairly stocked with the best Enghsh literature, and a friend of my father left under his charge his own books whilst in Brazil. Of these too I had free range. They included the

Waverley Novels and Lockhart's Scott; and I think any taste I may have for fine books may be traced to copies of Lane's Arabian Nights and FaxreW s British Birds and British Fishes, which were in this collection. Much miscellaneous reading was thus accomplished, though looking back upon it I may perhaps regret that there was not more guidance directing my path. There was in those days also a Literary Institution in Penzance, at which during the winter months there were weekly lectures occup5dng about an hour, followed by discussions for about another hour. I used to go home after these lectures and give my father and mother a sufficiently animated report of what had happened. My father himself never went, although on at least one occasion he lectured himself, taking for his subject Carlyle's Past and Present. This Institution was greatly strengthened by the arrival in Penzcmce of William Willis, who presently joined the Society and lectured to our great advantage on several branches of Natural Science. This admirable man was by birth a member of the Society of Friends ; but having married out of the Society he became, according to the rule then obtaining, excluded from it. He etched and pub- Mshed drawings of all the antiquities in the immediate neighbourhood of Penzance, and his knowledge and taste and simple gentle manners strongly attracted me. After a time he started a botanical class, in the spring and summer getting a few of us youths to rise early in the morning and accompany him before breakfast along the lanes, fields and furzy moors of the neighbourhood, while he discovered to us a flora tiU then unknown and perhaps unsuspected. He left Penzance about the same time that I did, and presented me with pretty nearly a complete set of his etchings, which I stUl preserve.

" I had natmraUy some friends and associates, but looking back on the time they seem to me to have been very few. I have said that my father went very httle abroad, and we were as a family very home-keeping ; so that my elder sister may perhaps be said to be more associated with my reading and education than any other person of the

I PENZANCE II

same age. I recall, however, three lads who, during the latter part of my time, were in the habit of taking walks on Simday afternoons, when some volmne was brought and read in turns by us in some secluded comer in the neighbourhood of the town. They were all older than myself. One of them, Richard Ohver, emigrated to Melbourne in 1854, whence after a few years he moved to Dunedin, New Zealand, became very successful as a merchant, as a sheep fanner, and, indeed, in many forms of Colonial activity, becoming among other things a member of the Legislative Assembly and the Legislative Council, Postmaster-General and Minister of PubHc Works. Having married as his second wife my youngest sister in 1885, our intercourse, which was never broken, has again become extremely intimate, especially since he has returned to make England his home.^

" It is time to say something of our readings, which were almost exclusively of poetry. I had in early boyhood taken to Scott mainly for his spirited narrative. Thus I hastened through Marmion without reading the Introduction to the Cantos, which now gives me more delight than the Cantos themselves. My father had given me the collected edition of Bsrron in one volume when I was about fourteen, and I had read most of the book. Pocket volumes of Shakespeare I had also taken about with me in country walks, though to tell the truth the result was rather a succes d'estime. My father had also subscribed for Chambers' Cyclopaedia of English Literature when it was first pubhshed in monthly parts, and the book was a great favourite with me. Our Sunday afternoon readings were given to larger acquaintance with particular authors. We went through Milton's Paradise Lost, and no respect for his great name, nor appreciation of his high-strung verse could prevent us from scoflSng at the wars of the angels and, indeed, at not a Mttle of the theology of the book. I have never, indeed, become a great admirer of Milton, whom we Enghsh, as I think, habitually overrate. We read Cowper's Task and diversified his Poems with his Letters, to the merits of which

» The Hon. Richard Oliver died in 1910.

a neighbouring lecturer at the Literary Institution had called special attention. Wordsworth in the same way had his turn, but we unluckily gave too much attention to the Excursion. What is now scarcely credible, we read almost all Southey's long poems ; and if this seems to imply a very imperfect taste I may perhaps plead that Thalaba seems to have been the poem Scott most frequently called for in his Sunday evenings in Castle Street. Certain it is that we did enjoy Southey, and Madoc not the least. I can recall the glorious summer day when, walking across a furze-covered moor, the story of Madoc in the West got mixed with the glory of colour and the perfume of the furze with which it is stiU associated. Tennyson's Princess was one of our latest readings in those Sunday walks ; and I can claim for ourselves that the beauty of this poem was at once appreciated and, indeed, it got almost immediately re-read. One other book might perhaps be mentioned. I had purchased at a bookstall in Penzance market a copy of the first edition, in its original boards, of Keats' Lamia, Isabella, etc. This book, which I still possess, has become extremely rare ; but we read it with pleasure, if not with enthusiasm, in happy unconsciousness that it could ever be regarded as a prize by a bibliophile.

" It wiU be seen that apart from bank work and work for Dr. Willan, the main interest of my early hfe lay in literature ; and it may, indeed, appear remarkable how httle influence the outer poMtical world had upon one, the greater part of whose work in life has been occupied with pontics. Penzance itself was outside the political current, and my family and friends were apparently in the stillest part of this still pool. As a small boy I had been at Falmouth during contested elections ; but the experience reeked of bribery and of unintelligible personal disputes. Similar airs seemed to hang about what we heard of electioneering at St. Ives. In the County Division of West Cornwall there was no such thing as a contested election and a poll during the whole of its existence from 1832 to 1885, and our hfe was therefore never ruffled by the agitations of a fight. The Repeal of the Com Laws in 1846, just after I left school, was, however, an event that excited emotion in our still Ufe, and I remember having to read to my father and mother the report of Sir Robert Peel's speech in making this great proposal. I should add that my father was one of those who, having passed through a period of speculative activity in early manhood, become sceptically conservative in later years ; and his example did not stimulate me to feel any interest in pohtical movements. Nevertheless, in less than two years after the Repeal of the Com Laws my companions, whom I have already named, and myself were much excited by the French Revolution of 1848, heartily sympathising with the rising which drove Louis Philippe from France ; ^ though from lack of knowledge perhaps more than lack of feeling we were less stirred by the movements in Italy, in Hungary and in Prussia. Not that we were left wholly without knowledge of the wider movements on the Continent. From my earhest memory Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, as it was then called, had been taken in month by month. To its eminently sober and instructive pages there was added in the years of Revolution the People's Journal and afterwards Hewitt's Journal ; and in these, especially in the latter, we were introduced to the RepubMcan heroes of Europe. Indifference in respect of home politics was thus not incompatible with a keen sympathy for much of the Continental movement.