The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  But on his return to England in 1866, Eyre found a country divided around the issue. At Southampton where he docked, a huge dinner was given in his honour – with speeches in his praise by the Earl of Cardigan, ‘hero’ of the Light Brigade, the Earl of Shrewsbury and Talbot, and rather surprisingly, the Rev. Charles Kingsley, since 1860 regius professor of history at Cambridge. Others dubbed the dinner ‘the Banquet of Death’, and a mob collected in Southampton High Street. In London, there was more mob violence, denouncing ‘the Monster, ex-Governor Eyre’ – for the poor fellow, entirely dependent on his salary, had been deprived of his governorship. The Jamaica Committee was formed, with such worthies as Thomas Hughes, lately elected MP for Lambeth, and John Stuart Mill, believing that Eyre had no more right to declare martial law in Jamaica than he would in England. The fact that he deliberately moved Gordon from a civil legislature to a place where he could be condemned without a proper trial was seen by Eyre’s critics as murder. When he had retreated to Market Drayton in Shropshire, Eyre was indeed forced to stand before local magistrates and face charges of murder. They were rejected by the justice and the bells of Market Drayton rang out in consequence.

  The liberals then tried to assign on murder charges Colonel Alexander Abercromby Nelson – he it was who had confirmed the capital sentence which hanged Gordon – and Colonel Brand, who had presided at that court martial. Once more, magistrates rejected the lengthy legal arguments in favour of prosecution. For Mill and the Liberals, the question was, ‘Who are to be our masters: the Queen’s Judges and a jury of our countrymen, administering the laws of England, or three military or naval officers, two of them boys, administering as the Chancellor of the Exchequer tells us, no law at all?’

  For Eyre’s supporters – Tennyson, Ruskin and, most eloquent of them all, Carlyle – it was clear that the governor had been justified in restoring order, even if his justice had been rough:

  The English nation never loved anarchy, nor was wont to spend its sympathy on miserable mad seditions, especially of this inhuman and half-British type; but have always loved order and the prompt suppression of seditions, and reserved its tears for something worthier than promoters of such delirious and fatal enterprises who had got their wages from their sad industry. Has the English nation changed then altogether?

  It was largely through the influence of Carlyle that Parliament voted the ex-governor a pension. But the answer to the question was, yes, England had changed, and the Eyre controversy was but a symptom of it. The mobs who called Eyre a murderer were concerned less with the fate of a few seditious Jamaicans than they were with what Eyre represented – the suppression of fair government. Old Palmerston had died days after the Jamaican rebellion. The successive governments of Russell, who took over as prime minister, and Derby, who became Tory prime minister in 1866, had to face the question of how to extend the franchise without losing the aristocratic balance. (That they very largely did so was one of the triumphs of the Conservatives, and of Derby himself.)

  Meanwhile, the attitude displayed at this time by the British towards blacks, and towards the subject peoples of the Empire in general, showed that there had been a perceptible change. The ‘burden’ of Empire coarsened public sympathy. The nation which at the beginning of the century had prided itself on the moral beauty of the anti-slavery cause had the greatest sympathy with a man who had flogged, tortured, burned and hanged the descendants of slaves whose rebellion Dr Johnson himself would have applauded. Was this because they wanted such rough justice applied in England? Or was it that, in imperial times, they had come to believe that there was one law for the white man, and another for the black? Eyre himself, who had defended the Australian aborigine, had come to the view that Caribbean aspirations to freedom were illegitimate, based on ‘the indolence, apathy, improvidence, profligacy and crime which characterize the mass of the people’.46 This view of black people, so widespread among the white Europeans of the coming decades, was believed to justify, even to necessitate, the subjugation and conquest of Africa itself.

  ‘We are too tender to our savages,’ Tennyson protested to Gladstone when they quarrelled over Governor Eyre. ‘We are more tender to blacks than to ourselves … niggers are tigers, niggers are tigers.’47

  Is it entirely accidental that the European ‘Scramble for Africa’ began only after such views had become entrenched, in the decades which followed the supposed ‘emancipation’ of the friends and family of Uncle Tom?

  fn1 Compare Carlyle’s squib ‘Ilias (Americana in Nuce) [America in a Nutshell]’.

  PETER of the North (to PAUL of the South) ‘Paul, you unaccountable scoundrel, I find you hire your servants for life, not by the month or year as I do! You are going to Hell you____!’

  PAUL ‘Good words, Peter! The risk is my own … Hire you your servants by the month or the day, and get straight to Heaven; leave me to my own method.’

  PETER ‘No, I won’t. I will beat your brains out first!’ (And is trying dreadfully ever since but cannot yet manage it.)

  Macmillan’s Magazine, August 1863, p.301

  fn2 Women of doubtful reputation.

  18

  The World of School

  WHEN THE PRINCE Consort died, his son Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales – Bertie – was not yet twenty-one; and by German standards his education was far from complete. In boyhood, he had developed a mastery of German and French, but to his parents’ dismay he had no taste for history, or book learning, or mathematics, or science. He spent part of 1860 as an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, where Dean Liddell – joint compiler of the Greek Lexicon and father of Alice – was the head of house, and where his tutor was the professor of ecclesiastical history, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. Then in the fateful year of his father’s demise Bertie had a spell at Cambridge, where his tutor was the regius professor of history, Charles Kingsley. Earnestly as Prince Albert had chosen Stanley and Kingsley for their progressive religious views, Bertie, with his incorrigible amiability, had developed no spiritual or intellectual interests, preferring hunting, drinking and, when occasion presented itself, wenching. It must have taxed the ingenuity of Oxford’s chancellor, Lord Derby, to find reasons why Bertie should be made a doctor of civil law in 1863 – a ceremony which took place after Bertie had married Princess Alexandra of Denmark. In a speech of his own composing (how many twentieth- or twenty-first-century prime ministers could pen Latin prose which was praised for its ease and excellence by professional scholars?)1 the three-times prime minister chancellor of Oxford wisely chose to dwell on Princess Alexandra’s enchanting beauty rather than the Prince’s academic attainments.fn1

  One can be perfectly certain that amiable Bertie did not understand a word of it. After his father’s death, his mother made no attempt to restrain her feelings of bitterness against the young man; she irrationally blamed him for Albert’s death, since the Prince Consort had made the trek to Cambridge when he was going down with his last illness, to admonish Bertie for his part in the Nellie Clifden affair. Now the Queen was ‘Alone!’ She said of Bertie, ‘If he turns obstinate I will withdraw myself altogether and wash my hands of him, for I cannot educate him.’2

  It was proposed that a tour of the Levant, scheduled before the Prince Consort’s death, should go ahead as a way of rounding off Bertie’s formal education. The entourage was to be led by the Prince’s governor, Colonel Robert Bruce – who had already accompanied the young man to Canada, the United States and Prussia. The unfortunate Bruce – son of the 7th Earl of Elgin, and aged a mere forty-nine at the beginning of the tour – was destined to contract a fever in the marshes of the Upper Jordan from which he died on 27 June 1862.3

  Given the heterogeneity of temperament, and varieties of intellectual attainment of the royal entourage, everyone in the party acquitted themselves creditably. They included a medic, Dr Minter, various equerries, and the Prince’s Oxford tutor, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. As they drifted down the Nile in their boat, Bertie persuaded the eminent ecclesiasti
cal historian to read Mrs Henry Wood’s trashy novel, East Lynne, ‘which I did in three sittings. Yesterday I stood a tolerable examination in it. A brisk cross-examination took place between HRH, APS, Meade and Keppell [two equerries]. I came off with flying colours, and put a question which no one could answer: “With whom did Lady Isobel dine on the fatal night?” It is impossible not to like him [the Prince] and to be constantly with him brings out his astonishing memory of names and persons.’4

  This delightful holiday snapshot reveals the true Bertie. We can imagine what his father would have thought of their all reading East Lynne: Albert forbade Bertie to read any novels – even Sir Walter Scott had been deemed too ‘demoralising’.5

  As they approached the fateful marshes on those reaches of the Jordan which were to prove Colonel Bruce’s undoing, there occurred one of those mildly ridiculous incidents which remind one how tightly knit was the Victorian ‘upper ten thousand’, that is, the aristocracy, the literary and political classes, and those educated at the universities, and one sees that much of the point of ‘education’ for the Victorians was not merely to impart knowledge but to create a class who, regardless of social, ethnic or religious origin, were all part of the same club.

  The royal party were eating a picnic near the ford of Jabbock when a number of mounted Arabs came galloping down to the ford, headed by their sheikh. A messenger came to the royal tent, crossing the water with a man in a flat boat. His request was a surprising one – could the sheikh please meet with Dr Stanley. Everyone had been alarmed by the arrival of the warlike Arabs; Colonel Bruce had fingered his pistol; but the courageous Arthur Stanley, a small man with a delicate quiet charm, walked over unarmed to his interview with the ‘sheikh’. The sheikh had dismounted from his great charger and laying both hands on his shoulders, said, ‘Arthur Penrhyn Stanley.’ The professor, after a moment of confusion caused by the Arab costume and the deep sunburn of the sheikh’s face, recognized his old Oxford friend William Gifford Palgrave – who had been up at Trinity when Stanley was collecting all the prizes at Balliol.

  Palgrave’s own journeys, spiritual and geographical, could fill a book. His grandfather, Meyer Cohen, had been a successful member of the London Stock Exchange. His father, Sir Francis, had, on his marriage to a Gentile, changed his name to Palgrave. A distinguished antiquarian, he had been one of the founding fathers of the Public Record Office, and as such surely deserves a statue in London. Sir Francis’s most celebrated son, also called Francis, edited The Golden Treasury of best songs and Lyrical poems in the English language, and was the friend of Gladstone, Tennyson and literary London. Gifford had stranger lands to travel in. Always drawn to the East, he had served a commission in the 8th Bombay Native Infantry. On his way home he learnt Arabic, and developed the desire to convert the Arabs to Roman Catholicism, a religion he had recently embraced himself. At the time that Stanley met him dressed as a sheikh, Gifford Palgrave, or the Abbé Sohail as he liked to be known, was a Jesuit priest. He lived much in the desert, and in 1858 had gone to the Palace of the Tuileries dressed as an Arab to tell Emperor Napoleon III about the plight of the Syrian Christians. He changed his name several times, sometimes in his letters home signing himself Michael Cohen. Not long after meeting Stanley and the Prince of Wales, he put himself at the service of the Prussian court as a diplomat, and left both the Jesuits and the Catholic Church. Shortly thereafter he joined the British diplomatic service and, having been consul in the Virgin Islands, he was destined to die as Our Man in Montevideo. Having returned to the Judaism of his forefathers, and dabbled in Islam and Shintoism, he was reconverted to Roman Catholicism at the end. He crammed a wealth of experience into sixty-two years.

  Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, in his lifetime (1815–81) so infinitely more celebrated than Gifford Palgrave, has sunk to a comparable obscurity in the minds of many twenty-first-century readers. Indeed, if he is remembered at all he is, for many people, best known as a character in fiction – the delicate young Arthur in Tom Brown’s Schooldays who dares to risk the sneering laughter and hurled bedroom-slippers of the bullies by kneeling down in a dormitory and saying his prayers – ‘a snivelling young shaver’ – before getting into bed. ‘It was no light act of courage, in those days, my dear boys, for a little fellow to say his prayers publicly, even at Rugby. A few years later, when Arnold’s manly piety had begun to leaven the school, the tables turned; before he died, in the school-house at least, and I believe in the other houses, the rule was the other way.’6

  In this, the most celebrated of many Victorian school stories (published in 1857), Arthur expounds the scriptures to Tom Brown and his madcap friend East. ‘The first night they happened to fall on the chapters about the famine in Egypt, and Arthur began talking about Joseph as if he were a living statesman; just as he might have talked about Lord Grey and the Reform Bill; only that they were much more living realities to him.’7 There were clearly only the smallest of differences between young Arthur the schoolboy and Arthur Penrhyn Stanley who, in 1864 became dean of Westminster, appointed by Queen Victoria herself. Like the Queen, and like his hero, Dr Thomas Arnold of Rugby, Stanley was Broad Church, a variety of Christian which has all but died out, which is a puzzle, since in many respects it seems the most obvious sort of Christian to be. He sat light to doctrines. Many of his contemporaries doubted whether he was worthy to be counted a Christian at all. ‘In Westminster Abbey,’ wrote his biographer, ‘he found the material embodiment of his ideal of a comprehensive national church, an outward symbol of harmonious unity in diversity, a temple of silence and reconciliation which gathered under one consecrated roof every variety of creed and every form of national activity, whether lay or ecclesiastical … He insisted that the essence of Christianity lay not in doctrine, but in a Christian character.’8 This was the essence of Dr Arnold’s teaching at Rugby when ‘little Arthur’ was a boy there.

  In the novel, Thomas Hughes makes Arthur into the son of a ‘clergyman of a parish in the Midland counties, which had risen into a large town during the [Napoleonic] war, and upon which the hard years which followed had fallen with a fearful weight’. This gives Hughes, a socialist, the chance to explain Arthur’s virtues by allusion to the ‘manliness’ of his father’s parish experiences. (The clergyman has died of typhus fever among his poor parishioners.) Stanley’s father was actually the bishop of Norwich, a scion of the Stanleys of Alderley, a cadet branch of the family of the earls of Derby.9 When Derby became chancellor at Oxford the professor of poetry had apostrophized him as the

  True Heir of England’s old Nobility!

  The Stanleys of Alderley could claim descent or collateral relationship with the Stanley who fought at Flodden (‘“Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on!” were the last words of Marmion’); he had been a pall-bearer of Edward IV: his father at Bosworth Field had taken the crown of England from Richard III’s corpse and placed it on the head of Henry Tudor (King Henry VII), who was his stepson. In Victoria’s reign, three hundred and fifty years after Bosworth, the Stanleys were still powers in the land. Derby was the first Victorian prime minister to hold office three times. The Stanleys of Alderley, though not like the earls of Derby ‘kings of Lancashire’, were considerable magnates in neighbouring Cheshire, chairmen of the Quarter Sessions, and related to many of the powerful aristocracy. (The second Lord Russell, for example, who succeeded to the prime minister’s earldom, was via his mother the grandson of the 2nd Baron Stanley of Alderley.)10 When Arthur Stanley was installed as dean of Westminster, having married Lady Augusta Bruce (sister of the unfortunate colonel who had accompanied him to the Holy Land), the postmaster general was his brother-in-law, the 8th Lord Elgin; the foreign secretary Lord Russell was a cousin, as was the next prime minister, Lord Derby, and the next foreign secretary, Lord Stanley.

  It was, presumably, the high reputation of Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), who became headmaster of Rugby in 1828, which persuaded Bishop Stanley to educate his delicate little son at the famously rough Midlan
d boarding school.11 ‘Unfortunately,’ Arthur wrote home to his sister in his first term there, ‘the writing master here is called Stanley, and so I think I shall get the nickname of Bob Stanley’s son.’ It showed a charming optimism. When they saw the tiny lad, in his blue many-buttoned jacket and grey trousers adorned by a pink watch-ribbon, the boys devised a somewhat better nickname. They called him Nancy.

  One of the mysteries of English life, from the 1820s to the present day, is why otherwise kind parents were prepared to entrust much-loved children to the rigours of boarding-school education. Stanley’s mother remarked, ‘Arthur says he doesn’t know why, but he never gets plagued in any way like the others; his study is left untouched, his things unbroken, his books undisturbed.’12 Stanley himself considered it all the more remarkable ‘considering what I am’. His fastidious loathing of ragging, fisticuffs and the rough fights which form a part of daily existence at boys’ boarding schools is perhaps reflected in his description of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. In his Historical Memorials of Canterbury Cathedral Stanley bemoans Becket’s use of strong language to his assassins13 – ‘I will not fly, you detestable fellow!’ exclaims the resolute archbishop, like a plucky junior resisting the bullies of the Fifth at Rugby. Stanley sadly admits that ‘the violence, the obstinacy, the furious words and acts, deformed even the dignity of his last hour, and well nigh turned the solemnity of his “martyrdom” into an unseemly brawl’.14

  A school moment. By contrast, the death of Dr Arnold of Rugby is full of dignity, offering instruction and edification to the last. Even as his wife read to him from the ‘Visitation of the Sick’, the great headmaster said emphatically ‘Yes’ at the end of many of the sentences, as though the Book of Common Prayer were school work submitted for his approval.15