Part 1 (1/2)
Lady John Russell.
Edited by Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell.
PREFACE
The ma.n.u.scripts which have supplied the material for a memoir of my mother deal much more fully with the life of my father than with her own life.
Mr. Desmond MacCarthy has therefore linked into the narrative several important incidents in my father's career.
The greater part of the memoir is written by Mr. Desmond MacCarthy; the political and historical commentary is almost entirely his work. The impartial and independent opinion of one outside the family, both in writing the memoir and in selecting pa.s.sages from the ma.n.u.scripts for publication, has been of great value.
My grateful thanks are due to His Majesty the King for giving permission to publish letters from Queen Victoria.
I am also grateful to friends and relations who have placed letters at my disposal; especially to my brother, whose helpful encouragement throughout the work has been most valuable.
Mr. Justin McCarthy, who many years ago recorded his impressions of my mother in his Reminiscences, has now most kindly contributed to this book a chapter of Recollections.
My cordial thanks are also due to Mr. George Trevelyan for reading the proof sheets, and to Mr. Frederic Harrison for giving permission to publish his Memorial Address at the end of this volume.
AGATHA RUSSELL
ROZELDENE, HINDHEAD, SURREY
October, 1910
CHAPTER I
1815-34
On November 15, 1815, at Minto in Roxburghs.h.i.+re, the home of the Elliots, a second daughter was born to the Earl and Countess of Minto.
Frances Anna Maria Elliot, who afterwards became the first Countess Russell, was destined to a long, eventful life. As a girl she lived among those directing the changes of those times; as the wife of a Prime Minister of England unusually reticent in superficial relations but open in intimacy, in whom the qualities of administrator and politician overlay the detachment of sensitive reflection, she came to judge men and events by principles drawn from deep feelings and wide surveys; and in the long years of her widowhood, possessing still great natural vitality and vivacity of feeling, she continued open to the influences of an altered time, delighting and astonis.h.i.+ng many who might have expected to find between her and them the ghostly barrier of a generation.
She died in January, 1898. The span of her life covers, then, many important political events, and we shall catch glimpses of these as they affect her. Though the intention of the following pages is biographical, the story of Lady Russell's life, after marriage, coincides so closely with her husband's public career that the thread connecting her letters together must be the political events in which he took part. Some of her letters, by throwing light on the sentiments and considerations which weighed with him at doubtful junctures, are not without value to the historian. It is not, however, the historian who has been chiefly considered in putting them together, but rather the general reader, who may find his notions of past politics vivified and refreshed by following history in the contemporary comments of one so pa.s.sionately and so personally interested at every turn of events.
Another motive has also had a part in determining the possessors of Lady Russell's letters to publish them. Memory is the most sacred, but also the most perishable of shrines; hence it sometimes seems well worth while to break through reticence to give greater permanence to precious recollections. With this end also the following pages have been put together, and many small details included to help the subject of this memoir to live again in the imagination of the reader. For from brief and even superficial contact with the living we may gain much; but the dead, if they are to be known at all, must be known more intimately.
Minto House, where Lady f.a.n.n.y was born, is beautifully situated above a steep and wooded glen, and is only a short distance from the river Teviot.
The hills around are not like the wild rugged mountains of the Highlands, but have a soft and tender beauty of their own. Her childhood was far more secluded than the life that would have fallen to her lot had she been born in the next generation, for her home in Roxburghs.h.i.+re, in coach and turnpike days, was more remote from the central stir and business of life than any spot in the United Kingdom at the present time. Lady f.a.n.n.y used to relate what a great event it was for the household at Minto when on very rare occasions her father brought from London a parcel of new books, which were eagerly opened by the family and read with delight. Those were not the days of circulating libraries, and both the old standard books on the Minto library shelves and the few new ones occasionally added were read and re-read with a thoroughness rare among modern readers, surrounded by a multiplicity of books old and new.
They were a large, young family, five boys and five girls, ranging from the ages of three years old to eighteen in 1830, when her diaries begin, all eager, high-spirited children, and exceptionally strong and healthy. In her early diaries, describing day-long journeys in coaches, early starts and late arrivals, she hardly ever mentions feeling tired, and she enjoyed the old methods of travelling infinitely more than the railway journeys of later days, about which she felt like the Frenchman who said: ”On ne voyage plus; on arrive.” Long wild country walks in Scotland and mountain-climbing in Switzerland were particularly delightful to her.
This stock of sound vitality stood her in good stead all her life; only during those years which followed the birth of her eldest son does it seem to have failed her. Her life was an exceptionally busy one, and her strong feelings and sense of responsibility made even small domestic affairs matters for close attention; yet in the diaries and letters of her later life there are no entries which betray either the la.s.situde or the restlessness of fatigue. She was not one of those busy women who only keep pace with their interests by deputing home management to others. This power of endurance in a deeply feeling nature is one of the first facts which any one attempting to tell the story of her life must bring before the reader's notice.
There was much reading aloud in the fireside circle at Minto, and for the boys much riding and sport. Many hours were spent upon the heather or in fis.h.i.+ng the Teviot. Lady f.a.n.n.y herself cared little for sport, or only for its picturesque side. Near the house are the rocks known as Minto Crags, mentioned by Sir Walter Scott in the ”Lay of the Last Minstrel,” where many and many a time Lady f.a.n.n.y raced about on hunting days, watching the redcoats with childish eagerness--intensely interested in the joyousness and beauty of the sight, but in her heart always secretly thankful if the fox escaped. Fox-hunting on Minto Crags must indeed have been a picturesque sight, and there was a special rock overhanging a precipice upon which she loved to sit and watch the wild chase, men and horses appearing and disappearing with flas.h.i.+ng rapidity among the woods and ravines beneath.
The pleasures of an open-air life meant so much to her that, in so far as it was possible for one with her temperament to pine at all, she was often homesick in the town, longing for the peace and freedom of the country.