LADY JOHN RUSSELL'S LETTERS.*

THE wife of a statesman is not as good a subject for the biographer as may at first be supposed. If she is interested in his work, and in full possession of his confidence, her diary, if she keeps one, may be almost a repetition of her husband's. But in that case it will either not be worth publishing, or, if it contains matter which he directed his executors to withhold from the printer, his wife's representatives are honourably bound by the same obligation. In the case of Lady John Russell her husband played a very great part in politics, and from the day of her marriage Lady Fanny Elliot threw herself unreservedly into all that he did. Happily her biographers have not been placed in any difficulty on this ground. Though there is a great deal of politics in the corre- spondence, the real interest is not political but personal. Iler acquaintance with her future husband begins in the second chapter. Lord Minto was at that time First Lord of the Admiralty, and the spring of 1840 was spent at Putney.

• Lady John Ewell a Memoir. Edited by Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Semen. London : Methuen and Co. [Ns. 6d. net.j

This is Lady Fanny's description of that then unspoiled suburb :—

" Out almost till bedtime—the river at night so lovely, so calm, still, undisturbed by anything except now and then a slow sleepy looking barge, gliding so smoothly along as hardly to make a ripple. Then the air is so delightfully perfumed with azalea, hawthorn, and lilac, and the nightingales sing so beautifully on the opposite banks that it is difficult to come in at all."

Here we make acquaintance with Lord John Russell, then a widower of nearly forty-eight. At first all went smoothly. We read of Lord John coming to Putney House with his step-children. " All the little Listers came. All very merry. Lord John played with us and the children at trap-ball, shooting, etc." A little later Lady Fanny dined at his house, and the entry in her diary is : "Utterly and for ever disgraced myself. Lord John begged me to drink a glass of wine, and I asked for cham- pagne when there was none l" Mrs. Drummond, then the eldest of "the little Listers," also describes the incident in a letter to Lady Agatha Russell with the additional touch: "Papa was sadly disconcerted, and replied humbly, Will hock do P " The love affair went on lines closely resembling those which are constantly met with among lovers of humbler position. On September 2nd Lord John says enough to make Lady Fanny tell her mother all she thought of him. " I could see that she was very glad I did not like him in that way." This discovery of her mother's views seems to have given a new direction to the daughter's feeling, for she adds : " I am sure I do [like him] in every other "; and of the night that followed she writes : "I dreamed about him and waked about him all night." On September 3rd Lord John left the house entrust- ing a note for Lady Fanny to Lady Minto's hands. It received an immediate answer begging him not to come back. For the time the lover was discouraged. In a letter which Lady Fanny describes as " so kind, but oh I so sad," he writes :- " There is nothing left to me but a constant and laborious atten- tion to public business, and a wretched sense of misery, which even the children can never long drive away. However, that is my duty and my portion, and I have no right to murmur at what no doubt is ordained for some good end. So do not blame yourself, and leave me to hope that my life may not be long."

Lady Fanny did better for him than not blaming herself. She kept playing with the idea of marrying him,—so much so that Lady Minto tells another daughter : "If you ask me my reasons why I cannot tell you, but I have a sort of feeling that she will marry him still I feel it in say skin." The winter passed without any change on either side. In March Lady Fanny writes to her sister, Lady Mary Abercromby :- "What a stone I am—but it is needless to speak of that. Only when I think of all his goodness and excellence, above all his goodness in fixing upon me among so many better fitted to him, I first wonder and wonder whether he can be really in earnest, then reproach myself bitterly for my hardness—and then the children! to think of rejecting an opportunity of being so useful—or at least of trying to be so ! All these, turned over and over in my mind oftener than I myself knew before we left Minto, did make me think that perhaps I had decided rashly."

As she had already admitted that had he been a younger man she would long ago have decided in his favour, the end was evidently not far off, and on June 11th Lady Minto writes "Fanny's happy face would, more than all I can write, convince you how perfectly satisfied and proud she is of the position she has put herself in ; how it delights her to think of the son-in-law she has given to your Father, and the friend she has given your brothers. To me he is everything that my proudest wishes could

have sought out for Fanny It is really balm to my heart to see the way in which he treasures every word she says, and laughs at the innocence and simplicity of her remarks and looks at her with such pride when he sees her keen and interested about the great and interesting events of the day, which most girls would neither know nor care about."

Lord John Russell could not have found a fitter time for testing this particular merit in his bride. Four days before the engagement Peel's want-of-confidence Motion was carried by a majority of one, and the Dissolution that followed placed the Government in a minority. By that time, however, the two were married, and Lady John Russell left behind her all the fears that had belonged to Lady Fanny Elliot. On her next birthday she writes to Lady Minto :-

"I should have rightly been punished by his thinking no more about me. He said a few days ago that he hoped it would be a happy birthday—said it as humbly as he always speaks of his powers of making me so—yet he must know that a brighter could not have dawned upon me, and that he is the cause."

A little later Lord Minto delivers his reasoned judgment on the case :- " Whatever misgivings I may have had from difference of age, or the cares of a ready-made nursery of children, have entirely gone off. I really never saw anybody more naturally and thoroughly happy She has drawn prizes too in the children, who are really as nice a little tribe as can be imagined, and I reckon myself a good judge of such small stock. They are very comfortably housed [in Chesham Place], much better than I ever hope to be in London, and Fanny seems to govern her establishment very handily. I don't know that she has yet quite brought herself to believe that there is anybody in the world so wicked as really to intend to cheat, or to overcharge, or to neglect her work for their own pleasure, but I suppose she will make this discovery in time."

We have dwelt on this passage in Lady John Russell's youth because to our thinking it is the most interesting part of the book. It lifts the curtain from an incident in a woman's life which is seldom dwelt on in biographies, and more seldom still in association with a great statesman. Mr. MacCarthy has spent much labour on keeping his readers informed of the successive stages of Lord John Russell's long career on the ground that " the thread connecting her letters together must be the political events in which he took part." But the thread might have been cut a great deal shorter, and some of the many letters in which the admiring wife plays the part of chorus to her husband's supremely wise words and acts might have been omitted. Had Sir Spencer Walpole never written Lord Russell's Life, future historians would have been grateful to Mr. MacCarthy for the information contained in his pages.

As it is, the charm of the non-political letters would have been still greater with a smaller percentage of political alloy. Occasionally even in her admiration of her husband the wife's letters clear up an obscurity. Thus the once famous Durham letter has generally been regarded as a mistaken bid for popu- larity. Lady John shows that it was rather a way of escape from a political tight place. That the Pope should have renamed his Vicars Apostolic, and defined the limits of their authority over their flocks by reference to the areas in which they lived, was not an act calculated to shock an ardent sup- porter of Catholic emancipation. And, in the first instance, "both he and I," writes his wife, "felt that the whole scheme was so ridiculous, the affectation of power so contemptible, the change of Vicars Apostolic into Bishops and Archbishops so impotent for evil to Protestants, while it might possibly be of use to Roman Catholics, that ridicule and contempt were the only fit arms for the occasion." Then the necessity of doing some- thing was pressed on him, and he tried in the Durham letter to make hostility to Tractarians fill the place of hostility to Roman Catholics. Had he valued consistency, this resolution would have been followed by a Bill dealing with what he honestly thought was the real evil of the moment. But as this would not have been enough to satisfy popular feeling, he was reduced to attacking something he thought harmless by way of sequel to an attack on something he thought harmful. Lady John says of the letter that " it has quieted men's fears with the Pope and directed them towards Tractarianism," a description which chimes in rather with her hopes than with the facts. But she was not quite easy about the position, and had to beg her sister "not to confound John's letter with the bigotry and intolerance of many speeches at many meetings." In the end the Ecclesiastical Bill proved equally harmless to the Roman Catholics, against whom it was in name directed, and to the Tractarians, who, according to Lady John Russell, were its real objects; and she herself makes the final and very sensible comment : "I have not yet quite succeeded in persuading myself, or being persuaded, that we might not have let the whole thing alone." That, indeed, is what was actually done, only it was done by leaving the Bill unenforced instead of by declining to pass it. Lady John Russell's dis- like to a Church which was comprehensive enough to contain Tractarians steadily increased, and in 1868 she writes :-

"I thought I was strongly for the connection (at least of a Church with the State, certainly not the Church of England as it now is), but reflection on what the history of our State Churches has been, the speeches in St. James's Hall [on the Irish Church Resolutions] of the Bishops fostered by the State, and Arthur Stanley's pamphlet, which says the best that can be said for con- nection, and yet seems to open my eyes to the fallacy of that best, and the conversations I hear, have opened my eyes to the bad principle at the very root of a State Church."

With this happy conversion on the one point on which she seems ever to have differed from her husband, we leave the letters of a very interesting woman.

Readers who wish to compare the estimate of Lady Russell which they derive from her letters with that formed of her by those who knew her will be helped to do so by Mr. Justin McCarthy's " Recollections " and by Mr. Frederio Harrison's Memorial Address, both of which are printed in an appendix.