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CHAPTER XXIII.

DISRUPTION AND COALITION.

I cannot say that the new year is a happy one to me: political troubles are too thick for my weak sight to penetrate them. But we all rest in the mercy of God, who will dispose of us as He thinks best.

In these words Lord John acknowledged his stepdaughter's (Mrs. Maurice Drummond's) congratulations on the first day of 1852.

Political troubles were very thick. The removal of Lord Palmerston from the Foreign Office had fatally weakened the Administration. Lord John failed to secure elsewhere the help which he sorely needed; he was unable to enlist the Duke of Newcastle, or Sir James Graham, or any other prominent member of Sir Robert Peel's party, in the ranks of his Administration. His inability to do so proved the hopelessness of his task. His fall was only a question of

time.

During the few weeks, indeed, through which his Ministry survived, Lord John showed no outward evidence of failure. He had the satisfaction, during their course, of introducing a new Reform Bill. He never made a better or more successful speech than that in which, on the first night of the session, he explained the history of his difference with Lord Palmerston. He never made a more brilliant apology for a friend than his defence of Lord Clarendon on the eve of his fall. Of the first of these speeches Mr. Greville said

In all my experience I never recollect such a triumph as John Russell achieved, and such a complete discomfiture as Palmerston's. Lord John made a very able speech, and disclosed as much as was necessary, and no more.

Of the second of these speeches Lord Clarendon said

I have had nearly forty letters from persons of very different opinions, but all agreeing that your speech on Thursday night was not only one of the most effective you ever made, but one of the finest that was ever heard in Parliament.

On the evening that succeeded this speech, Lord John was defeated by a small majority in a small House, and at once resigned office.

The cause of his resignation is so well known that it is hardly necessary to restate it. The coup d'état in France had been followed by what Mr. Cobden called the second of his famous three panics; and Lord John, though far from sharing the universal alarm, brought forward the scheme, which had been matured four years before, for reorganising the local militia. Lord Palmerston, in perfect consistency with the opinion which he had expressed in the Cabinet in 1848, moved an amendment to extend the operation of the measure. As he said, in his own light-hearted way

I have had my tit-for-tat with John Russell, and I turned him out on Friday last.

Lord John's Administration had lasted almost exactly five years and eight months; a period which exceeds by eleven months that during which his rival, Sir Robert Peel, had held office. During the whole of it he had been exposed to difficulties from which Sir Robert had been free. In the Parliament of 1841 the Conservatives had enjoyed a predominating majority. In the Parliament of 1847 Lord John could only secure a majority in the Commons by the combination of various and not always concurring parties. During much of the time, moreover, his wife's health and his own delicate constitution forced him to abstain from many of those social gatherings by which public men in England do so much to conciliate and consolidate their followers. His own fortune, though sufficient for the modest requirements of his household, was hardly equal to the exigencies of his position; and it is a well-known fact that Lord John stated openly to a committee of the House of Commons that he had never been in debt till he had become Prime Minister of

England.' The members of his Cabinet, too, were rather attached as friends than united in policy; and Lord John was not always able to carry in Council the measures which he would have liked to bring forward in the Senate.

Few Prime Ministers had ever done more to encourage letters, science, and art. He gave the Royal Society,1000/. of public money to be spent on scientific research; he made Sir John Herschel Master of the Mint; he made Mr. Tennyson Poet Laureate. A man of letters himself before he was a statesman, he was always seeking for literary society, and striving to reward literary merit. Just as in his youth he had delighted in the company which had gathered round the tables of Holland House, so in his age he would temper his dull political dinners by inviting such a man as Mr. Dickens to his table. Nothing so flat,' so he used to say, 'as the cream by itself. It has been well described to be like table-land, high and flat.'2 No man ever placed the claims of literature on a higher level. Soon after he became Prime Minister the students of Glasgow desired to elect him their Lord Rector. He wrote

Downing Street: November 13, 1846.

Dear Rutherford,-I should be very sorry to be the cause of preventing the election of Mr. Wordsworth as Lord Rector of Glasgow. Cannot you represent to the students that I think this would be a good opportunity of making the distinction purely literary? It is a great honour to be thought of for the honour, but I should greatly prefer seeing it conferred on Mr. Wordsworth, whose genius has performed so much in which men of all political parties find delight. I remain, &c.,

J. RUSSELL.

No man ever took more pains that the pensions which the Crown is enabled to bestow should be conferred on desert. A writer in Blackwood' has recently mentioned that, when Lord John heard that Mrs. Somerville was in pecuniary difficulty, he contrived to increase by 100l. the pension which Sir

The exact words of his evidence are, I know, for my own part, that I never had a debt in my life till I was First Lord of the Treasury. I have now paid it off; so that it was no great encumbrance to me.'

2 Lord Morpeth's Diary, p. 103. the author of this excellent saying.

VOL. II.

Lady Russell thinks that Mr. Moore was

L

Robert Peel had conferred on her. In his first year of office he secured a pension of 2007. a year for Dr. Chalmers's widow ; he gave a pension of 300l. to Father Mathew; of 200l. to Mr. Leigh Hunt, telling him that 'the severe treatment he formerly received in times of unjust persecution of liberal writers enhanced the satisfaction' with which he made the announcement; he conferred a pension of 100%. on the children of Mr. Hood; in the following year, he conferred pensions on Mr. Adams the astronomer, on Mr. Sheridan Knowles, on Mr. Carleton the author of Irish Stories,' and on Professor McCullagh's sister; while in his last year of office he conferred a pension on Professor Wilson, he procured a grant for Mr. Hind, and he gave a pension to Mrs. Jameson. These are a few instances of the use which he made of the Pension list. Of the many applications which were made to him in connection with it, perhaps it is permissible to give a sample, which is too good a specimen of its author's skill to be buried for ever under the heavy mass of a Prime Minister's correspondence.2

Devonshire Terrace: Wednesday evening, December 18, 1850.

My dear Lord,-Allow me to thank you for your ready and kind reply to my note, and to put you in possession of the exact state of Mr. P's case.

For some few years past he has been living in a fifth story in a house in the Rue Neuve Luxembourg in Paris (on the proceeds of an amateur theatrical performance for his benefit, of which I undertook the management and stewardship, and which I have dispensed to him half-yearly); and such is the nervous affection, of his hands particularly, that, when I have seen him there, trembling and staggering over a small wood fire, it has been a marvel to me, knowing him to live quite alone, how he ever got into or out of his clothes. To the best of my belief, he has no relation whomsoever. He must either have starved or gone to the workhouse (and I have little doubt that he would have done the former) but for the funds I have doled out to him, which were exhausted before you generously

1 Years afterwards he used his influence successfully with Mr. Gladstone to obtain pensions for the Misses Somerville.

2 The candidates for pensions are, I presume, found in tolerably close array among the papers of Prime Ministers. It is more interesting to add that, among Lord J. Russell's papers, I have found a letter from Mr. Hallam, written after his son's death, resigning the pension for which he had no longer any need.

assisted him from the Queen's Bounty. He has no resource of any kind—of that I am perfectly sure. In the sunny time of the day he puts a melancholy little hat on one side of his head, and, with a little stick under his arm, goes hitching himself about the boulevards; but for any power he has of earning a livelihood he might as well be dead. For three years I have been in the constant expectation of receiving a letter from the portress of the house to say that his ashes and those of his wood-fire, both of a very shrunken description, had been found lying together on the hearth. But he has lived on; and for a few hours every day has so concealed his real condition out of doors that many French authors and actors (who treat him with deference as an English man of letters) would stand amazed to know what I now tell you. I have endeavoured to put him before you precisely as he is, and neither to exaggerate his claims nor to invest him with any interest that does not attach to him. He has lived in Paris, to make the least of his poverty and the most of his means. Mr. Justice Talfourd, Mr. Hardwick, the police magistrate, Mr. Forster, the editor of the 'Examiner,' and I, are (I think) his only English friends. We all know him, just as I have described him.

I do not think he would hold a small pension very long. I need not add that he sorely needs it-and I do not doubt that the public are well acquainted with his name and works.

With every apology I can offer for troubling you at this length, I am, my dear Lord, your very faithful and obedient servant,

The Lord John Russell.

Mr. Dickens had not long to wait.

CHARLES DICKENS.

Devonshire Terrace: December 24, 1850. My dear Lord,-I have conveyed to Mr. P. by to-night's post the joyful intelligence of her Majesty's gracious approval of your generous suggestion in his favour; and I do not doubt that he will endeavour to express to you (over that brighter fire) some of the happiness he owes to you. . .—I am, my dear Lord, your faithful and obliged servant,

CHARLES DICKENS.

While, however, Lord John was duly sensible of the claims of authors, some of whom were personally unknown to himself, he never forgot the poet who had been the friend of his youth and of his age; and who, more than twenty years before, had declared that the only place he desired of him was that little corner of his friend's honest heart, which