Part 21 (1/2)
Nearly two years later, Lord John Russell, in a letter to his brother, the Duke of Bedford, said:
... The question with me was how to resist Roebuck's motion. I do not think I was wrong in substance, but in form I was. I ought to have gone to the Cabinet and have explained that I could not vote against inquiry, and only have resigned if I had not carried the Cabinet with me. I could not have taken Palmerston's line of making a feeble defence.
How absurd it is to suppose that cowardice could have dictated Lord John's decision at this time, his behaviour in circ.u.mstances to be recounted in the next chapter shows. Unpopular as his resignation made him with politicians, it was nothing to the storm of abuse which he was forced to endure when he chose, a few months later, to stand--now an imputed trimmer--for the sake of preserving what was best in a policy he had not originally approved.
The troubles and differences of the Coalition Ministry did not lessen Lord John's regard for Lord Aberdeen, of whom he wrote in his last years: ”I believe no man has entered public life in my time more pure in his personal views, and more free from grasping ambition or selfish consideration.”
Mr. Rollo Russell, on the publication of Mr. John Morley's ”Life of Gladstone,” wrote the following letter to the _Times_ in vindication of his father's action with regard to Mr. Roebuck's motion:
DUNROZEL, HASLEMERE, SURREY, _November,_ 1903
SIR,--In his admirable biography of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Morley has given, no doubt without any intention of injury, an impression which is not historically correct by his account of my father's resignation in January, 1855, on the notice of Mr. Roebuck's motion for a Committee of Inquiry. I do not wish to apply to his account the same measure which he applies by quoting an ephemeral observation of Mr. Greville to my father's speech, but I do maintain that ”the general effect is very untrue.”
Before being judged a man is ent.i.tled to the consideration both of his character and of the evidence on his side. In the chapter to which I allude there is no reference to the records by which my father's action has been largely justified. There is no mention, I think, of these facts: that my father had again and again during the Crimean War urged upon the Cabinet a redistribution of offices, the more efficient prosecution of the war, the provision of proper food and clothing for the Army, which was then undergoing terrible privations and sufferings, a better concert between the different Departments, and between the English and French camps, and, especially, the appointment of a Minister of War of vigour and authority. ”As the welfare of the Empire and the success of the present conflict are concerned,” he wrote at the end of November to the head of the Government, ”the conduct of the war ought to be placed in the hands of the fittest man who can be found for the post.” He laid the greatest stress on more efficient administration.
The miseries of the campaign increased. On January 30, 1855, Lord Malmesbury wrote: ”The accounts from the Crimea are dreadful. Only 18,000 effective men; 14,000 are dead and 11,000 sick. The same neglect which has. .h.i.therto prevailed continues and is shown in everything.”
He held very strong views as to the duty of the House of Commons in regard to these calamities. ”Inquiry is the proper duty and function of the House of Commons.... Inquiry is at the root of the powers of the House of Commons.”
He had been induced by great pressure from the highest quarters to join the Cabinet, and on patriotic grounds remained in office against his desire. He continually but unsuccessfully advocated Reform. Several times he asked to be allowed to resign.
When, therefore, Mr. Roebuck brought forward a motion embodying the opinion which he had frequently urged on his colleagues, he could not pretend the opposite views and resist the motion for inquiry.
The resignation was not so sudden as represented. On the 6th of December, 1854, when the Cabinet met, he declared that he was determined to retire after Christmas; after some conference with his colleagues, he wrote on December 16th to Lord Lansdowne: ”I do not feel justified in taking upon myself to retire from the Government on that account [the War Office] at this moment.” It is not the case that a severe judgment was p.r.o.nounced upon these proceedings by the ”universal” opinion of his contemporaries. His brother. Lord Wriothesley Russell, wrote: ”It makes one sad to hear the world speaking as if straightforward honesty were a thing incredible, impossible.” And the Duke of Bedford: ”My mind has been deeply pained by seeing your pure patriotic motives maligned and misconstrued after such a life devoted to the political service of the public.” But the whole world was not against him. Among many letters of approval, I find one strongly supporting his action with regard to the Army in the Crimea and his course in quitting the Ministry, and quoting a favourable article in _The Examiner;_ another strongly approving, and stating: ”I have this morning conversed with more than fifty gentlemen in the City, and they _all_ agree with me that in following the dictates of your conscience you acted the part most worthy of your exalted name and character.... We recognize the importance of the principle which you yourself proclaimed, that there can be no sound politics without sound morality.” Mr. John Dillon wrote: ”To have opposed Mr. Roebuck's motion and then to have defended what you thought and knew to have been indefensible would have been not a fault but a crime.”
Another wrote expressing the satisfaction and grat.i.tude of the great majority of the inhabitants of his district in regard to his ”efforts to cure the sad evils encompa.s.sing our brave countrymen;”
and another wrote: ”The last act of your official life was one of the most honourable of the sacrifices to duty which have so eminently distinguished you both as a man and a Minister.”
There was no doubt a common outcry against the act of resignation at the time, but the outcry against certain Ministers of the Peelite group was still louder, and their conduct, as Mr. Morley relates, was p.r.o.nounced to be ”actually worse than Lord John's.”
”Bad as Lord John's conduct was,” wrote Lord Malmesbury on February 22, 1855, ”this [of Graham, Gladstone, and Herbert] is a thousand times worse.”
The real question, however, is not what the public thought at the time, but what a fuller knowledge of the facts will determine, and I contend that my father's dissatisfaction with the manner in which the war was conducted, and his failure to induce the Cabinet to supply an effective remedy, justified if it did not compel his resignation.
Mr. Roebuck's motion accelerated a resignation which the Prime Minister knew had been imminent during the preceding ten weeks.
My father himself admitted that he made great mistakes, that for the manner of his resignation he was justly blamed, and that he ought never to have joined the Coalition Ministry. He had a deep sense, I may here say, of Mr. Gladstone's great generosity towards him on all occasions. At this distance of time the complication of affairs and of opinions then partly hidden can be better estimated, and the conduct of seceders from the Government cannot in fairness be visited with the reprobation which was natural to contemporaries. The floating reproaches of the period in regard to my father's action seem to imply, if justified, that he ought to have publicly defended the conduct of military affairs which he had persistently and heartily condemned. It appears to me that not only his candid nature, but the story of his life, refutes these reproaches, as clearly as similar reproaches are refuted by the life of Gladstone.
Yours faithfully,
ROLLO RUSSELL
CHAPTER VIII
1855
The debate upon Roebuck's motion of inquiry lasted two nights, and at its close the Aberdeen Ministry fell, beaten by a majority of 157. Historians have seen in this incident much more than the fall of a Ministry.