Life of the Right Hon. Sir William Molesworth, Bart., M. P., F. R. S.

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Appendix

Descent of Sir William Mole«worth from Hender

MOLBSWORTH, THE FIRST BaRONBT

List of Sir Williau MoLEtwonTH's House of Commons Speeches oh Colonial Subjects

Chromolocical Table of Chief ErENTs in Sir William Molesworth's Lifb

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Right Hon. Sir William Molesworth, Bart.

M.P., 1854. From a Mezzotint Sir Arscott Ourry Molesworth, Bart. . Mary, Lady Molesworth ....

" The Pencatiow Academy " Caricature Sir William Molesworth, Bart., M.P., at the age of a

Sir Wiiiiara Molesworth, aged ii. Silhouecic

" A Leading Article of the Westminster Review.' Political Sketches, No. 535, by John Doyle

Charles Buller, M.P., Thomas Wooltcombe, Aracott Ourry Molesworth, John Temple Leader, M.P., "Greek" Trelawney, Sir William Molesworth, Bart., M.P.

Francis Alexander Molesworth .

Sir William Molesworth, Bart., M.P. .

The Right Hon. Sir William Molesworth, Bart. From the Bust by Behnes in Parliament House, Ottawa .....

Memorial Bronze Relief in St. George's Free Library, Souchwark, by George Frampton, A.R.A

Fronliipieie Face to

Introduction

It will be generally conceded that the most important political event of recent times is the demonstration of the strength of the tie which unites Great Britain with her Colonies, and that this tie is not only capable of bearing the tension of war, but has gathered strength through that very tension.

The great ditFerence in the reciprocal feelings between the mother country and the Colonies at the present moment, and even a few years ago, can be referred by almost every one to personal experience and memory. But the extraordinary difference in this feeling between the present time and fifty or sixty years ago can only be gathered by those who take the trouble to make themselves acquainted with events too recent for history and too remote for politics. Such books as Miss Martineau's History of the Thirty Tears' Peace,

1815-1845^ teem with evidence of Colonial discontent and disloyalty : discontent and disloyalty which should be entered in the National Ledger as " for value received." In one of Miss Martineau*s concluding chapters, she says : " Next to Ireland, our Colonies continue to be the opprobrium of our empire." The half- century which has passed since these words were written has converted the " opprobrium of our empire " into its greatest glory and pride. A group of men, represented inside Parliament by Lord Durham, Charles BuUer and Sir William Molesworth, and outside Parliament by Edward Gibbon Wakefield and John Stuart Mill, deserve the chief credit of this brilliant transformation. They saw, and gradually educated the public to see, that the true remedy for Colonial discontent could be found only by giving every Colony, as soon as circumstances rendered it possible, self-government and free representative institutions. When the small band of Colonial Reformers began their work they had against them the whole official class who believed that Colonial self-government would be inconsistent with the sovereignty of Great Britain, and also the popular political philosophy of the day, represented first by Bentham, and later by Cobden, which favoured the complete

INTRODUCTION relinquishment of that sovereignty. It says much for their practical sagacity and statesmanship that the Colonial Reformers were able to make way against such odds.

The settlement of Canada after the rebellion of 1837-38 was so brilliant an achievement, that the names of Lord Durham and of Charles Buller will always be illuminated by its fame. John Stuart Mill has so many claims on the remembrance and gratitude of the present generation that there is no need to light a taper at his shrine. Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Sir William Molesworth stand in a different category, and there appeared for some years a chance that the work of these two men as Colonial Reformers and as founders of the present Colonial system of Great Britain might fall into undeserved neglect. Dr. Richard Garnett has recently written an interesting monograph on Wakefield, and it is my desire to perform, however inadequately, the same office for Molesworth : to introduce him to the present generation and show them how much they owe to him. He belonged to the race of intrepid invalids. He hardly knew the meaning of the word health, and his life ended at the age of forty-five. But he was an incessant and indefat^able worker, and he has left his mark for all time on the Colonial history of Great Britain. He foresaw, as very few did in his time, that the root of Colonial loyalty could flourish only in Colonial freedom. In 1 8 5 1 , when actual experience of Colonial relations was one long record of discontent verging again and again on rebellion, he raised the question of Colonial expenditure in the House of Commons, and in the course of his speech used the following words : " Every such war " [with an external foe] " is necessarily an imperial war; the troops employed in it are employed for imperial purposes, and consequently their expenses ought to be paid by the Imperial Government ; though in certain cases it would not be unreasonable to expect that the Colonies should assist the Empire both with troops and with money, and I feel convinced thai if the Colonies were governed as they ought to be^ they would gladly and willingly come to the aid of the mother country in any just and necessary war : they would do as the men of our old North American plantations did during a war with France, when they willingly bore a large part of the burden of the contest with that monarchy and its Indian allies, and in every way proved themselves to be the hardy and generous sons of England."

INTRODUCTION j

The prophecy of 185 1 has been amply fulfilled in 1899 and 1901. Sir William Molesworth not only uttered the prophecy but rendered its fulfilment possible by helping to base our Colonial policy on broad and generous statesmanship. Such a man has a strong claim on the gratitude of the present generation. He and a handful of friends laboured, and we have entered into the fruits of their labours. An acknowledgment of what we owe to those who have gone before is one of the strongest of the links binding the present with the past. Is it permissible to refer to another small link in that chain, the interest in which is largely personal to myself? Almost exactly fortyone years ago (October i860) Henry Fawcett, young and unknown, offered himself as a parliamentary candidate for the borough of Southwark, the constituency which had been represented by Sir William Molesworth at the time of his death, five years earher. Henry Fawcett stood as an independent Radical in opposition to the official liberal candidate, and he described himself to the constituency as a political follower of Sir William Molesworth. Needless to say he was unsuccessful, but it was his introduction to practical political life, and it is a source of some interest that the younger man associated himself with the views and aims of the elder.

It is the object of the following pages to render accessible some account of the political work of Sir William Molesworth and to give a picture of his personality. My task has been greatly facilitated by the generous confidence of Sir William's only surviving sister, Mrs. Richard Ford of Pencarrow. She possesses a large collection of letters and other documents relating to her distinguished brother, which she has placed unreservedly at my disposal. It would have been impossible for me to have given even the barest outline of Sir William's life without her help and co-operation, for which I take this opportunity of expressing my sincere gratitude.

Chapter I Parentage And Education

The Molesworths of Pencarrow, in the county of Cornwall, are a family of genuine antiquity. One of their traditions is that an ancestor, Sir Walter de Mcleswcrth, accompanied Prince Edward, afterwards Edward I., to the Holy Land in 1270 ; another ancestor, John Molesworth, was certainly "Auditor of Cornwall" in the time of Queen Elizabeth. It was he who settled at Pencarrow. Hender Molesworth, grandson of this John, was President of the Council of Jamaica in 1684 and subsequently Governor of the island. He identified himself with the Whigs of 1688, and he is s^d to have been the first baronet created by William III, The patent is dated 19th July 1689. A succession of Molesworths (two Johns and a William) represented Cornish constituencies from the beginning of the eighteenth century till almost its close. The marriages of the Molesworths gener-

$ SIR WILLIAM MOLESWORTH chap.

ally added strength in the form of either money, brains or beauty to the original stock. One of the most notable of these unions was made in the eighteenth century, when the Sir William Molesworth of that day married Miss Ourry, a lady in whose veins ran Huguenot blood. She was descended from Louis Ourry, born at Blois in 1682, three years before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In 1707 hU fidelity to his religion drove him from his native country ; he came to England and received a commission in the English army. He and his wife left a position of wealth and influence in France. Of the many valuables in their possession, they were able to bring away only a pearl necklace ;* plate and other treasures were left concealed in France, The Ourrys quickly identified themselves with their adopted country. Louis, the original fujfitive, af has been seen, entered the British Army, ari/J fff hi« four sons, one followed his father's proff^ou and the other three entered the Navy. Fr^/ffi one of these latter, who to Huguenot blood M/UM the training and traditions of a British A/if/Mral, the subject of these pages was descended. th tb^ I Ave s of British Admirals^ wol. v. p. 113, fMy %u\\ \k rczd how, "in November 1760, Captain Ourry ^/f the Actaon chased a large privateer and i\ff9i*'. \wf //n *hore between Cape Barfleur and La

' %ti,\ K f^ y**^m\tm of their detcendantt, the Min Lemprieres of

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1 PARENTAGE AND EDUCATION 9

Hogue, and his cutter scoured the coast and took or destroyed forty vessels of considerable burden which carried on a great fishing near Dieppe." Admiral Ourry was afterwards made Commissioner of Plymouth ; his wife was a Cornish heiress and their daughter married Sir William Molesworth, the sixth baronet, and became the mother of Sir Arscott Ourry Molesworth, the father of our Sir William.

Sir Arscott Ourry Molesworth did not neglect the tradition of his race, that the marriages of the family should bring new vigour to the Molesworth stock. His wife was a Scottish lady descended from the Hume family, of which David Hume, the historian, was the most brilliant ornament. Our Sir William always took a special pleasure in this connection, and referred to it with well-founded pride when the freedom of the city of Edinburgh was conferred on him in 1854, the year before his death. Sir William's mother brought to the family into which she married the inheritance of beauty as well as that of mental distinction. She was the daughter of a celebrated Edinburgh beauty, "Betsy Hume." The story is that the beautiful Betsy Hume was engaged to her cousin. Sir Alexander Kinloch, but in spite of this was besieged by another assiduous lover. Captain Brown, who toasted her at every supper party in Edinburgh. When asked how long and how often he would lo SIR WILLIAM MOLESWORTH chap.

do this, he replied, ^^ I shall toast her till I make her Brown." Such importunity did not remain unrequited. Sir Alexander Kinloch was gathered to his fathers before he had led his bride to the altar ; the beautiful Betsy Hume became the beautiful Betsy Brown and mother of the lady who married Sir Arscott Ourry Molesworth and ir course of time grandmother of the subject of thf pages, who was born in London on 23rd ^ 1 8 10.

The Molesworths were a short-lived family ; the eighteenth century baronet succeeded baronet at short intervals. But the Scotch marriage of Sr Arscott Ourry Molesworth brought into the family a strain of much stronger physical vitality. The mother of Sir William Molesworth had a physical constitution which prolonged her life in unimpaired vigour to extreme old age ; she had also the moral qualities of self-reliance, sound judgment, and unbending determination characteristic of her country ; and these made her first a competent guardian, and to the end of his life the trusted friend and confidante of her son. He inherited many of his mental qualities from his mother : in her splendid physical constitution he had unhappily no share. His father. Sir Arscott Ourry Molesworth (of whom Pencarrow boasts a ♦plcndid full-length portrait by Raeburn), died at the age of thirty-two, on 26th December 1823, k

I PARENTAGE AND EDUCATION ii

leaving five children, three sons and two daughters.^ William Molesworth was thus left, at the age of thirteen years, the eighth baronet of his line, the head of an ancient family, the owner of great estates,^ in possession of mental vigour far beyond his years and an extremely delicate physical constitution : a perilous conjunction notwithstanding all that an able and conscientious mother could do to reduce its dangers.

The state of his health rendered the discipline which a public school would have afforded entirely out of the question. He was indeed entered for Eton, but it was impossible for him to go there. In 1824, shortly after his father's death. Lady Molesworth consulted some of the leading physicians of the day on the possibility of letting him go to Eton. The verdict was, '* You might as well hang him up at the Cross of Edinburgh." Fragile health was a burden which he carried with him from the cradle to the grave. But his exceptional mental capacity manifested itself also from his earliest years. When he was hardly more than a baby his sister's governess gave him some of her sums to work out, thinking to distract the mind of the ailing child from his physical sufferings ; he quickly showed his innate interest in study and

1 William, born 1810, died 1855; EHzabeth, born 1812, died 1836; Arscott Oarry, bom 1814, died 1842 ; Mary, born 18x6, ttill living j Francis Alexander, bom 18 18, died 1846.

' Tetcott in DeYonthire, and Pcncarrow in Cornwall.

a natural capacity for arithmetic, mathematics and scientific pursuits. He spent a short time in a preparatory school at Putney ; but he was too weakly to join in the games of the other boys and was thus thrown more than ever upon his books and his own thoughts. His mother probably did the best that could have been done imder the circumstances ; in 1824, when he was fourteen, she went to live in Edinburgh, taking him and her other children with her.

Another G^rnishman, destined like Molesworth to play a brief but distinguished part in political life, had received part of his education in Edinburgh, only just escaping being a contemporary of Sir William Molesworth there. Charles BuUer had been placed by his parents in Edinburgh, with Thomas Carlyle as his private tutor, in the years 1822-23. Carlyle described Charles Buller with unusual urbanity as *'a most manageable, cheery and altogether welcome and intelligible phenomenon : quite a bit of sunshine in my dreary Edinburgh element " ; and again, at the time of Buller's death, Carlyle wrote of him in the Examiner: "A sound, penetrating intellect, full of adroit resources, and loyal by nature itself to all that was methodic, manful, true." There is no evidence that Lady Molesworth was influenced by the Bullers to bring her son to Edinburgh. Her own Scottish connections and her appreciation of

^i^m&mifff^

Scottish university education afford a sufficient reason for her choice. Sir William joined many of the university classes ; he also studied modern languages in Edinburgh under first-rate professors, and became a good Italian and French scholar and gdned a fair acquaintance with German ; at a later period, a year's residence in Germany and an industrious course of study of German philosophy and metaphysics gave him a complete command of the language at a time when it was very little known in this country. During his residence in Edinburgh, boy as he was, he was a great deal noticed by many of the most distinguished men there, among whom he would sometimes mention in later life Sir Walter Scott, Sir William Hamilton, Jeffrey and the Professors Brewster, Leslie, Jamieson, Hope, etc. His Italian master in Edinburgh was a Signor Demarchi,^ a superior and able man who had been driven from his own country as a political refugee. Young Molesworth became not only his pupil but his friend, and this friendship strengthened the ardent opposition to political despotism which was so marked in Molesworth's after-life. He attached great importance himself to the bias given to his mind by the education he received in Edinburgh. His taste for science was manifested in the usual boyish way : he made himself a chemical laboratory

^ In 1 82 1 this gentleman became Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department in Piedmont.

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I and burnt holes in his sister's frocks and nearly poisoned himself by inhaling chlorine gas. At this early period of his life his family gave him the nickname of « the philosopher," which remained with him through life and the remembrance of which is perpetuated in the name of the " Philosophic Radicals," the political party with which he was identified on his first entrance into Parliament. More unusual than his chemical experiments was the passion he showed at a very early age for making libraries. Before he was fifteen, all his spare money was spent on books : and the love of books continued to the end of his life. Pencarrow contains three complete libraries, aflfbrding unmistakable evidence of what Sir William's tastes were, just as the three perfect cock-pits in the grounds immediately surrounding the house are indicative of the tastes of his ancestors. By his last will his libraries were strictly entailed ; no book forming part of them may be taken away from the house. While he was still very young he made great progress in his favourite study of mathematics, and it is said that before he left Edinburgh he had mastered the whole of Laplace's Mecanique Celeste.

Lady Molesworth, writing to Lord Erskine, Bi^tish Minister in Munich in 1828, described her son as having been from his infancy "more man than boy." It is rather consolatory, however, to

J^ see that " the boy " gained the upper hand of " the man " from time to time, as for instance in 1824, when he writes to his mother for his " Italian grammar, likewise my fishing-rod," and adds, " If there is any {ish\ng'tac/e (j/V), tell Cleve to bring it." Throughout life his spelling was most erratic, and in his letters on all sorts of learned subjects we come across many words in an orthography all his own. Correct spelling was still perhaps considered a more fitting accomplishment for an attorney's clerk than for a gentleman.

It was the one serious mistake which his mother made about his education, that when he was seventeen, on the advice of his uncle. Rev. W. Molesworth, rector of St. Breoke,Wadebridge, she entered him as an undergraduate of St. John's College, Cambridge. At Edinburgh he had been the friend and companion of its most eminent men at a time when it was the centre of the intellectual activity of the North : Cambridge at that date was sunk in sloth and routine. He who was already an advanced mathematician was put into a class that was grappling, not too successfully, with the first book of Euclid ; " an ennuis' he says, '' which I would not support for the fabled treasures of Croesus." The friend of Sir Walter Scott, Sir William Hamilton, etc., grumbled loud and long against the statu pupillari of the Cambridge of 1827. He did not feel that Cambridge was teaching him anything ; moreover, he did not consider himself treated like a gentleman. He especially declaimed against his own college. "They are not gentlemen," he writes to his mother of his pastors and masters, " nor do they in general possess the manners of gentlemen. ... I have now quarrelled with my tutor, Gwatkin, who did not certainly treat me in a gentlemanly manner. I have told them that I intend to leave my college for Trinity as soon as possible. ... If I was to remain at St. John's, I should be without doubt miserable." The migration to Trinity was therefore accomplished without delay. Sir William Molesworth was in good company in his complaints of the Cambridge of his day. Almost at the same time Charles Darwin and Alfred Tennyson were at the University, and their feeling towards her was very similar to Molesworth's. Tennyson expressed his feelings in a sonnet, printed in the present Lord Tennyson's Life of his father, vol. i. p. 67, vigorously denouncing the University. The concluding lines are —

You that do profess to teach And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart.

Some indication of the impression Molesworth made upon his contemporaries at Cambridge may be gathered from a slight satirical sketch, accompanied by a portrait, both probably contributed by n^

Thackeray to "The Maclise Portrait Gallery,"

which originally appeared in Erasers Magazine between 1830 and 1838. Thackeray was Molesworth's junior at Trinity only by one year, and was his intimate friend in later life. The sketch represents "our great statesman" in his closet meditating on " cosmogony, or the state of human afFairs," and gorgeously arrayed in damask dressinggown and embroidered Grecian cap. His various accomplishments are thus described : " Not political [studies] alone engage his mind ; he is a profound metaphysician ; as a linguist, stupendous ; as a mathematician, he has attained a depth which is more easily imagined than described. Sir Isaac Newton once said in our hearing, when Sir William, as a lad, came up to Trinity, * Dash my wig, Mr. Yorke ! that young man beats me all to shivers.' We speak within compass when we say that Sir William reads you ofF a page of Chinese with great ease and the true Pekin accent ... we have even heard that he not only admires, but understands, Jeremy Bentham. Our artist remarked nothing further . . . except that on his entrance Sir William was occupied reading an enormous folio of French mathematics, and that by the honourable baronet's side lay the ashes of fourand-twenty cigars. Trifling particulars ; but interesting to those who love to penetrate into human character, and are eager to know the

c smallest circumstances relating to good or great men." Most readers will agree that this is unmistakable " Michael Angelo Titmarsh." It bears his mark and so does the sketch. Both are characteristic of the good-humoured chafF with which one young man often regards the accomplishments of another.

Sir William's principal amusement at Cambridge was hunting ; his poor health did not prevent him from being a hard rider. Pencarrow is not in a good hunting country ; but Tetcott, the other estate, is, and during Sir William's minority the covers there used to be drawn by the famous hunting parson, the Rev. " Jack " Russell. Sir William, therefore, had great traditions to live up to in the hunting-field when he came to Cambridge, and he seems to have been worthy of them. On one occasion he rode for fifty miles after a fall in which he had broken his collar-bone. On another, he considered his life was saved by his friend Mr. Duppa, who came to his assistance at a critical moment when all the rest of the field had passed him by. This was the beginning of a long friendship which had many consequences.

At Cambridge and throughout nearly the whole of his life when he was away from home, it was his habit to write fully and frequently to his mother and sisters of everything he was doing. In a charming boyish letter to Lady Molesworth he tells her of his long runs and hairbreadth escapes and concludes : "If you do not wish me to have my neck broken you must consent to let me have good hunters, for not to hunt is out of the question."

In April 1828, when Sir William had been less than a year at Cambridge, his friend Duppa got into trouble with the college authorities in connection with some gambling scrape. Sir William took up his friend's cause with all the ardour of his nature, and probably made no secret of the sentiments with which Cambridge education and Cambridge dons had inspired him. In this quarrel he quickly exchanged the place of second for principal, with what seems now the absurd result that he sent a challenge to fight a duel to his college tutor, Mr. Henry Barnard. The first eflFect of this was that on 30th April 1828 he and Mr. Barnard were bound over by the Mayor of Cambridge to keep the peace for twelve months ; the second that Molesworth was expelled from Cambridge ; the third that his mother determined to continue his education in Germany, her kind old friend, General Sir Joseph Straton,^ acting as her son's guide, philosopher and friend.

' ^ sir Joseph Straton was a distinguished officer. During his active military career he was known as Joseph Muter. He changed his name to Straton in 18 16 on succeeding to some property. He served through three campaigns in the Peninsula. In 181 3 he was nominated to a Lieut.- Colonelcy in the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons and was promoted Colonel in i

TO SIR WILUAM MOLESWORTH chap.

During the twelve months in which the antagonists had been bound over to keep the peace, the laws of England prevented a hostile meeting ; at the very hour when the twelve months had expired, the laws of " honour '* demanded that they should try to kill each other. Therefore, on the 1st May 1829, Mr. Henry Barnard and Sir William Molesworth "met" at Calais and exchanged shots, without, however, doing each other any harm.

Sr William wrote on the following day to his mother : —

I am happy to inform you I am alive and well. . . . The distance from Munich to Calais is above 700 miles, and took me thirteen days all alone with my servant ; nothing but an affair would ever induce me to take such a journey alone. ... I agree with him [General Straton] in being most highly satisfied with your conduct throughout the affair.

There are several points in this note that help us to measure the distance between 1829 and 1901 — the days before railways are made visible to us : thirteen days' hard travelling between Munich and Calais ; we also perceive more clearly the stringency of the code of honour that made it necessary ffjr a boy of nineteen to undertake such a journey

3X14, He commanded the InnbkilUngs at Waterloo until the hll of M»'y/r'<frn€rz\ Sir William Ponsonby, when the command of the Union hr'*^i^, drrrA^ftd upon him. He was wounded at the doae of the battle. H« 'ikd in October 1840.

I* mmi in order to shoot at his former tutor ; and we can afford a smile at the lordly way in which he acquaints his mother that he was pleased to be satisfied with her conduct throughout the affair. The servant referred to in the foregoing letter was MacLean, a Highlander, who was devoted to his master, and remained with Sir William from his boyhood to the end of his life. The duel that ended so harmlessly might have resulted in an awful tragedy. MacLean told Lady Molesworth that he went to the " affair " with a loaded pistol in his pocket, and if Barnard had killed his master, MacLean had determined to murder Barnard.

Lady Molesworth's conduct in relation to the duel was shortly this : during the twelve months' compulsory peace between the antagonists, in December 1828, Lady Molesworth received a letter from the aunt of Mr. Henry Barnard, appealing to her to take steps to prevent the duel by giving information to the police of Calais, who, if duly warned, would arrest the principals on their arrival. The poor lady begins her letter by saying : " As a female, I may be excused the anxiety it causes me ; and as a Christian, I am bound to take any steps I can to prevent a duel." Lady Molesworth in reply played the part of a Roman matron. She sympathised with her correspondent's feelings as an aunt, and hinted that her own as a mother were not less acute ; but she added that there was only i

21 SIR WILUAM MOLESWORTH chap.

one wav in which the duel could be averted, and that one way would be for Mr. Henry Barnard to apologise : "* I tcel whatever influence I might possess over my son, I never could exercise it until such took place, for although his mother and a liix^man, I never could advise what hereafter might be deem'd injurious to his honour. It now rests entirely with your nephew's friends," etc. No wonder the young fellow was pleased when he knew what his mother had written. Twice in later life, in 1836 and 1837, Sir William came very near to fighting duels. The more interesting of these occasions was that in 1837, when he was called to account by Sir Hudson Lowe for having alluded to him in the House of Commons as " the gavJer of St. Helena." Seconds were appointed, but thn>ugh their efforts no actual encounter took place. Sir Hudson Lowe was pacified by the assurance that the expression complained of only referred to the oflice he had held, and not to himself ixrrsonally.