Yet another ridiculous reminiscence of the Court of Darmstadt, dating from his attaché days at Frankfort. Sir Alexander Malet was fond of whist, and it was felt, said Labouchere, that an English diplomatist could not be expected to play the game for less than florin points. Such stakes, however, the fortune of no Darmstadt nobleman could stand. A sort of joint purse was therefore formed, which was entrusted to the three best players of the grand-ducal Court, and these champions encountered the Englishman. "It was amusing," Labouchere would relate, "to watch the anxiety depicted on all countenances: when the Minister won all was gloom; when he lost, counts and countesses, barons and baronesses, skipped about in high glee, like the hills of the Psalmist."
Bismarck was Ambassador at St. Petersburg during the year that Labouchere was there as attaché in 1860, so it is very probable that he continued to imbibe wisdom from listening to the conversation of the great German, for whose powers of statecraft he always expressed the warmest admiration. The following amusing episode occurred during his year at St. Petersburg. He was in love with the wife of one of the gentlemen about the Court. So was a tall, smart young Frenchman. Labouchere was desperately jealous of his rival, but could think of no means of outwitting him. At a Court function they were both standing near the object of their admiration, the Frenchman making, it seemed to Labouchere, marked advances in the lady's favour. However he was soon called away for some reason or another. Labouchere, in his eagerness to seize the opportunity and advance his own suit, inadvertently tipped his cup of black coffee over the lady's magnificent yellow satin train. He was in despair, but, seeing that she had not yet perceived the tragedy, he slipped the cup and saucer into his tail-coat pocket, and then, with an air of commiseration, drew her attention to the ruined gown. "Who did it?" she exclaimed furiously. Labouchere put his finger to his lips, at the same time looking significantly at the form of his rival, at that moment disappearing through the doorway. "I know who did it," he said, "but wild horses would not induce me to tell you." Of course, the lady had followed the direction of his glance. She exclaimed: "That ruffian, I will never speak to him again as long as I live!" History does not relate how the adventure proceeded for the handsome Frenchman's rival.
Labouchere did not think much of the Russians. He used to say that they were like monkeys, eager to copy the manners of civilised Europe, but that the copy they succeeded in producing was a daub and not a picture, because they always exaggerated their originals. When they were polite, they were too polite; when they were copying Frenchmen, they were too much like dancing masters; and when they were copying Englishmen they were too much like grooms. He had an amusing account to give of a visit he once paid to a Russian country house. "Card-playing, eating and drinking—and more especially the latter," he related—"went on all day and nearly all night. I never could understand where my bedroom was, for the excellent reason, as I at length discovered, that I hadn't one. At a late hour I saw several of the guests heaping up in corners cushions which they had taken from sofas, to serve as beds, so I followed their example. When I woke up in the morning I could not see any apparatus to wash in, so I filled a china bowl with water, and, having dried myself with a tablecloth which I found in an adjoining room, I dressed." He gave a charming thumb-nail sketch of a Russian drawing-room, à propos of a visit of Mr. Augustus Lumley to the Russian capital. Mr. Lumley was a famous cotillon leader. "I was at St. Petersburg when Mr. Lumley arrived on a visit. He was solemnly introduced to the Russian leader of cotillons, who is invariably an officer of distinction, as a colleague. It was like the meeting between two famous generals, and reminded me of the pictures of Wellington and Blücher on the field of Waterloo. It took place at a ball, and the Russian, with chivalrous courtesy, offered to surrender to his English colleague the direction of the cotillon."
The Emperor of Russia[12] once stood beside Henry Labouchere whilst he was playing at écarté to watch his game. The occasion was a ball given by the Empress to the Emperor on his birthday. Labouchere and his adversary were both at four, and it was Labouchere's deal. "Now," said the Emperor, "let us see whether you can turn up the king." Labouchere dealt, and then held out the turn-up card, observing: "Your orders have been obeyed, sir." The Emperor asked him, as often as a dozen times subsequently, how he had managed it, and never could be persuaded that it was a mere coincidence, and that the young attaché had taken the chance of the card being a king. It was a trifling example of the luck, or its reverse, that seemed to be for ever crossing and recrossing Labouchere's path, in spite of his own belief in nothing but the logical sequence of events.
A popular anecdote of his Petersburg days is the following: A fussy German nobleman pushed his way into the Chancellerie, where Labouchere was working, asking to see the Ambassador. "Please take a chair," said the secretary; "he will be here soon." "But, young man," blustered the German, "do you know who I am?" And he poured out a string of imposing titles. Labouchere looked up in well-simulated awe. "Pray take two chairs," he remarked quietly, and went on writing.
When Khalil Pasha was recalled from being Ambassador in Paris, Labouchere published the following reminiscence of his year in the Russian capital: "Khalil Pasha once saved me from a heavy loss, and that is why I take an interest in him. He, a Russian, and I sat down one evening to have a quiet rubber. The Russians have a hideous device of playing with what they call a zero; that is to say, a zero is added to all winnings and losses, so that 10 stands for 100, etc. When Khalil and the Russians had won their dummies, I found to my horror that, with the zero, I had lost about £4000. Then it came to my turn to take dummy. I had won a game, and we were playing for the odd trick in the last game. If I failed to win it I should lose about £8000. Only two cards remained in hand. I had marked up six tricks and my opponents five. Khalil had the lead; he had the best trump and a thirteenth card. The only other trump was in the hands of the dummy. He had, therefore, only to play his trump and then the thirteenth card to win the rubber, when he let drop the latter card, for his fingers were of a very 'thumby' description. Before he could take it up I pushed the dummy's trump on it and claimed the trick. The Russian howled, Khalil howled; they said this was very sharp practice. I replied that whist is essentially a game of sharp practice, and that I was acting in accordance with the rules. The lookers-on were appealed to, and, of course, gave it in my favour. Thus did I make, or rather save, £8000 against Russia and Turkey in alliance, through the fault of the Turk; and it seems to me that the poor Ottoman, now that he is at war (1877) with his ally of the card-table, is losing the game, much as Khalil lost his game of whist to me. To have good cards is one thing, to know how to make use of them quite another."[13]
Labouchere used to tell a good story of how he got at the secrets of the Russian Government. His laundress was a handsome woman, and having made friends with her on other than professional grounds, she happened to mention that her husband was a compositor in the government printing office. The minutes of the Cabinet councils were printed in French, of which the printers, of course, understood nothing. Labouchere persuaded her, for a consideration, to obtain from her husband the loose sheets from which the minutes had been printed. They were brought to him by the faithful woman every week, concealed among his starched shirts and collars. As soon as Lord John Russell discovered the source of the interesting information that reached him from Petersburg, he put a stop to the simple intrigue. Labouchere would always wind up his narrative of this episode with the words: "For what reason, I wonder, did Russell imagine, diplomacy was invented?"
After Petersburg, Dresden was Labouchere's next appointment. He had previously assiduously studied the German language, in which, being a born linguist, he was remarkably proficient. He had been for a time to Marburg to reside in a German family for the purpose of acquiring conversational fluency. All through his life one of his fads consisted in working out on how small an income an economical family might live in comfort, and he used frequently to commend the management of means practised in the bourgeois family at Marburg where he boarded. It consisted of a mother, two daughters, a father, and an elementary maid-of-all-work. The daughters did the housework alternately. The daughter, whose turn it was to be the young lady, used to dress herself gorgeously every afternoon and evening, receiving visitors or paying calls. She would play Chopin and Beethoven on the pianoforte, and make herself an exceedingly agreeable social personage. The following week she would retire to the domestic regions and be an excellent servant, while her sister took her turn as femme du monde. Occasionally the whole family, including Labouchere, would be invited to a party. It was the custom on such occasions for both the daughters to be "young ladies." The maid-of-all-work would accompany them to the neighbour's house whither they had been bidden, carrying their suppers in paper bags—for the hospitality proffered at Marburg was intellectual, not material. All the guests brought similar paper bags, and at the conclusion of the repast the remains of the various meals were carefully collected by their respective owners, and carried home to figure at the next day's mittagessen. Labouchere used often to assert that the evening parties at Marburg were the most delightful and amusing ones he ever attended. While there he frequented the hospital, and attended the lectures given for the instruction of the medical students. He was always fond of developing extraordinary theories on the subject of medical science, more remarkable for their originality than for their probable ultimate utility. The authority upon which these theories would be based was invariably that of the lecturer at the Marburg Hospital. Even as late as 1905, Mr. Labouchere still remembered his medical student days. He wrote to one of his sisters in that year on the occasion of her son becoming a doctor: "A doctor is a good profession. I learnt doctoring at Marburg in order to learn German. I rather liked it, and have vainly offered to doctor people gratis since then, but no one seems inclined."
Between his diplomatic appointments at Frankfort and Petersburg, Labouchere spent several months at Florence, and he described in Truth how it was that he came to have a year's free time on his hands: "Once did I get the better of the Foreign Office. I was on leave in Italy when I received a notification that Her Majesty had kindly thought fit to appoint me Secretary of Legation to the Republic of Parana. I had never heard of this republic. After diligent inquiry, I learnt that Parana was a sort of Federal town on the River Plate, but that a few months previously the republic of that name had shared the fate of the Kilkenny cats. So I remained in Italy, and comfortably drew my salary like a bishop of a see in partibus infidelium. A year later came a despatch couched in language more remarkable for its strength than its civility, asking me what I meant by not proceeding to my post. I replied that I had passed the twelve months in making diligent inquiries respecting the whereabouts of the Republic of Parana, hitherto without success, but if his lordship would kindly inform me where it was, I need hardly say that I would hasten there!"[14]
While in Florence Labouchere witnessed the revolution which deposed the Grand Duke and provided Tuscany with a provisional government of her own choice, preparatory to the union of all the Italian States under the King of Sardinia. He was a personal friend of Mr. (afterwards Sir) James Hudson, the English Minister at Turin, whose Nationalist sympathies, like Labouchere's, were well known, and he was an invaluable reporter to the Liberals in Turin of the news of the struggle for liberty in Tuscany. On the morning of the revolution, after the Grand Duke and his family had left the Pitti Palace, he, with many of his revolutionary friends, entered the forsaken home of Austrian royalty, and had the astuteness to procure on the spot what was left of the famous Metternich Johannisberger for the newly founded Unione Club, of which he was a member. He had an amusing story to tell about the flight of the grand-ducal family from the City of Flowers, which is best repeated in his own words, as he used to relate it to his Florentine friends after he had returned to end his days in the place which he had loved so well in his youth. "The news was brought back here by some of the people who had seen them off the premises, that, on the road to Bologna, they all got out and stopped an hour or two at an inn, where they all sat in a row crying. After this had gone on for some time, it was discovered that the whole party had forgotten their pocket-handkerchiefs. Fortunately the Grand Duchess had on a white petticoat with very ample frills, so she went round to each of the grand-ducal family in turn, and wiped their eyes and noses for them in the frills of her petticoat. And then she did the same for the ladies and gentlemen in waiting."
"Do I think that incident really is true?" he would reply to his incredulous audience, "probably not. But from what I know of royalties in general, and from what I remember about the grand-ducal family of Tuscany in particular, I think that it is exceedingly probable that they would start out on an expedition of that kind without a pocket-handkerchief between them."[15] His personal reminiscences of Victor Emmanuel II. and of Cavour were of the raciest description and would enthral his hearers by the hour, told as only he could tell them, with all the decorative touches of local colour and local dialect.
He was also very fond of telling a story about an outrageous compliment he paid to a lady belonging to the Court of the Grand Duchess, which, if true, showed that at least one of the resolutions he had made in the inn at Quotla di Amalpas had been carried into successful practice: "The Grand Duchess of Tuscany had a venerable maid of honour above seventy years of age. She had piercing black eyes, and looked like an old postchaise, painted up and with new lamps. 'How old do you think I am?' she once asked me, with a simpering smile that caused my blood to run cold. I hesitated, and then said 'Twenty.' 'Flatterer,' she replied, tapping me with her fan, 'I am twenty-five.'
Having become third secretary in November, 1862, Labouchere was appointed to Constantinople. He wrote in Truth nearly thirty years later: "I was once Secretary of Embassy at Constantinople and I passed my time reading up Lord Stratford's despatches before and during the Crimean War. No one could have recognised them as the originals from which Mr. Kinglake drew his material for a narrative of the Ambassador's diplomatic action. The fact was that Lord Stratford was one of the most detestable of the human race. He was arrogant, resentful, and spiteful. He hated the Emperor Nicholas because he had declined to receive him as Ambassador to Russia, and the Crimean War was his revenge. In every way he endeavoured to envenom the quarrel and to make war certain. His power at Constantinople was enormous. This was because, whilst the Ambassadors of other Powers changed, his stay there seemed eternal. A Grand Vizier, or a Minister of Foreign Affairs, knew that, if he offended the English Ambassador, he would never cease plotting to drive him out, and to keep him out of power. He therefore thought it better to keep on good terms with him and to submit to his arrogance. But Lord Stratford never used his power for good. It was enough for him to get the Sultan to publish a decree. This he would send home as evidence of good government. He never, however, explained that the decree, when published, remained a dead letter. When Sir Henry Bulwer (Lord Dalling) was sent as Commissioner to the Principalities, he passed a considerable time (as indeed was necessary) at Constantinople. Lord Stratford knew that Sir Henry wanted to replace him, and he feared that he would succeed in doing so. His rage and indignation were therefore unbounded. One day the Ambassador and the Commissioner were together at the Embassy. 'I know,' said the Ambassador, 'that you are trying to get my place,' and he shook his fist in the face of Sir Henry, who mildly surveyed him and shrugged his shoulders."
Sir Horace Rumbold writes charmingly of Henry Labouchere at Constantinople in 1863. "In August," he says, "the torrid heat drove me to seek for a while the cool breezes of the Bosphorus, and I then, for the first time, became acquainted with the wonders of Constantinople. Here I found at the Embassy Edward Herbert and got to know that remarkable, original, and most talented and kind-hearted of would-be cynics, Henry Labouchere."[16] Later on, in the same volume of reminiscences, he gives another picture of the young secretary, whose diplomatic career was, however, soon to come to a close. "The Pisani dynasty were still masters of the situation when I arrived. Under the, in many ways, unfortunate tenure of the Embassy by Sir Henry Bulwer, Alexander Pisani, best known as the 'Count,' who was simply the Keeper of the Archives, had been made head of the Diplomatic Chancellerie of the Embassy, to the intense disgust of successive secretaries properly belonging to the Service. Pisani, it was said, had extorted this abnormal appointment from his chief by threatening to resign and write his memoirs. Henry Labouchere, among others, greatly resented the arrangement. Some years before, he had a passage of arms with the 'Count,' who had reproved him, so to speak, officially for absenting himself for the day from the Chancery on some occasion, without applying to him for leave to do so. The ridiculous affair was referred to Sir Henry Bulwer, and gave my friend Labby a charming opportunity of describing the 'Count' in a formal letter to the Ambassador. 'It seems to me,' he wrote, 'a singular dispensation that places a Greek nobleman of Venetian extraction, who profited by the advantages of a Pera education, in authority over a body of English Gentlemen.'"
Mr. Labouchere was always very amusing on the subject of his chief at Constantinople. He said that Lord Balling could not understand the value of money. He was so generous that he was always in financial difficulties. At one time the Embassy was reduced to such straits that there was no money to buy any decent wine. The difficulty was met in the following manner: At official dinners the grand-looking maître d'hôtel would solemnly say before pouring out the wine, "Château Lafitte '48," or "La Rose '52," and so on, all through dinner. As a matter of fact, the wine had really come from the neighbouring Greek isles, and had been doctored with an infusion of prunes to tone down the flavour of tar, which is inseparable from these insular vintages. Lord Dalling himself was so anxious to please that he would quaff glass after glass of the horrible beverage, swallowing numberless pills the while as an antidote.
There are many versions of the incident with which Labouchere chose to conclude his relations with the Diplomatic Service. The Foreign Office records of the date are not yet available, but I am indebted to Sir Audley Gosling for his recollections of the affair as it happened. In the summer of 1864, Labouchere found himself at Baden-Baden, enjoying the relaxation of a little gambling after his strenuous work in the service of his country. While there he received from Lord Russell, the Foreign Secretary, the usual stereotyped announcement of his promotion in the Diplomatic Service. It ran: "I have to inform you that Her Majesty has, on my recommendation, been pleased to promote you to be a Second Secretary in the Diplomatic Service to reside at Buenos Ayres."
Labouchere is said to have replied as follows: "I have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your Lordship's despatch, informing me of my promotion as Second Secretary to Her Majesty's Legation at Buenos Ayres. I beg to state that, if residing at Baden-Baden I can fulfil those duties, I shall be pleased to accept the appointment." As this was the second joke he had played on Lord Russell, he was politely told that there was no further use for his services.[17]
A successful "system" is not an essential part of the educational equipment of a diplomat, but it may on occasion be a very useful extra to his other accomplishments. Mr. Labouchere found it so. "I used at one time," he said, "to take the waters every year at Homburg, and I invariably paid the expenses of my trip out of my winnings at the gambling-tables. It may have been luck, or it may have been system; but I give my system for what it is worth. I used to write the following figures on a piece of paper: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. My stake was always the top and bottom figure added together. If I won, I scratched out these figures; if I lost, I wrote down the stake at the bottom of the figures, and I went on playing until all the figures on my piece of paper were erased. Thus my first stake (and I played indifferently on red or black) would be ten. If I won it, I scratched out three and seven. My next stake would be ten again, as four and six make ten. If I lost it, I wrote down ten at the bottom of my list of figures, and played fourteen, being the addition of the first and last figure on the list, viz. fourteen. The basis of the 'system' was this. Before reaching the maximum, I could play a series of even chances for about two hours, and if during these two hours I won one quarter as many times as the bank, plus five, all my figures were erased. During these two hours an even chance would be produced two hundred times. If, therefore, I won fifty-five times, and the bank won one hundred and forty-five times, I was the winner of twenty-five napoleons, florins, or whatever was my unit. Now let any one produce an even chance by tossing up a coin and always crying 'heads,' he will find that he may go on until Doomsday before the 'tails' exceed the 'heads,' or the 'heads' exceed the 'tails,' by ninety-five. I found this system in a letter from Condorcet to a friend, which I read in a book that I purchased at a stall on the 'Quai' at Paris. It may have been, as I have said, only luck; but all I can say is, that whenever I played it I invariably won."
One of Mr. Labouchere's oldest friends, Mrs. Crawford, recently wrote to me a letter in which she made the following lucid remarks about his career in the Diplomatic Service: "I was acquainted," she says, "with many of his diplomatic comrades, and they often spoke of him in chat with me. Some were friendly, some were not. He had a very unguarded tongue, and discharged his shafts of satire, irony, humour in all directions, and every arrow that hit made an enemy. I, mentally, used to take this into account in judging of their judgments, and the habit, which does not exist in England, of searching for mitigating circumstances helped me to make a fair and true estimate of his complex nature. I think he rather enjoyed, but passagèrement, being thought a Richard III., an Iago—an inveterate gambler. I soon came to the conclusion that this was partly due to a reaction against the idolatrous attitude of the English middle class and religious people towards Victoria and Albert, for it was shockingly fulsome—and the Queen early showed hostility towards him. His uncle, Lord Taunton, reflected her known sentiments, and so did Lord Clarendon. He was wrong, very wrong, to have treated the vile crime of Grenville Murray, and committed too in an Office capacity, as a thing of no consequence and the stumble made by an exceedingly clever man—a too great rarity in the British Consular Service. I have some recollection that she was furious with the Prince of Wales, who had not the virtue, in his early years at any rate, of reticence in speaking, for, on the authority of Mr. Labouchere, taking Grenville Murray's part against the Foreign Office in her presence. This, however, was only one of the reasons of her fixed hostility...."
The crime to which Mrs. Crawford refers as having been committed by Grenville Murray in an official capacity was that of forwarding private news to the Morning Post (to which paper he was secretly acting as correspondent) in the Foreign Office bag from Vienna, where he was an attaché in 1852, under Lord Westmorland. Mr. Labouchere declared in Truth that Lord Palmerston, having a private grudge against Prince Schwarzenberg, the Prime Minister of Austria, and wishing for special information about him to reach the British public, had come to a private understanding with Grenville Murray that his journalistic correspondence would be winked at. Unfortunately the "copy" fell into the hands of Lord Westmorland, who demanded from Lord Palmerston the instant dismissal of Murray. Murray was not dismissed, but in a year's time was transferred to Constantinople, where Lord Stratford de Redcliffe reigned supreme. He had, of course, heard from Lord Westmorland about Murray's journalistic indiscretions, and hated him accordingly. Murray retorted by holding up his chief to every sort of ridicule to the English magazine-reading public; for he was a clever writer, and contributed largely to Household Words, then under the editorship of Charles Dickens. The Foreign Office soon thought it necessary to remove him, and he was appointed to the consul-generalship of Odessa. At Odessa the consul was just as unpopular as the attaché had been at Vienna and Constantinople. The defence of Grenville Murray, to which Mrs. Crawford refers, was probably founded upon facts contained in the following passage of an "Anecdotal Photograph" of Lord Derby, published by Mr. Labouchere in an early number of Truth:
When Lord Derby was at the head of the Foreign Office, he left all the appointments in the Diplomatic Service to the permanent officials, and, owing to this pococurantism, he did an act of injustice to one of the most brilliant littérateurs of the day. The gentleman in question had a consulship in the East. An able and brilliant man, he was naturally a persona ingrata to the high priests of red tape, and between them and him there was perpetual war, which at length culminated in a determination to remove him per fas or per nefas from the service. Certain charges were accordingly brought against this gentleman, who was put on his defence. The accused, who was then in London, applied for copies of certain papers from the archives of the Foreign Office which he considered essential to his complete exculpation. The officials at first declined to grant them, but, after a long correspondence, admitted the justice of the claim. The papers were sent accordingly, together with two separate letters, both bearing the same date. One announced that the documents had been forwarded, the other that Lord Derby had made up his mind on the whole case, and his decision was in these words: "I have accordingly advised the Queen to cancel your commission as ——, and it is hereby cancelled accordingly." The recipient of this interesting epistle was at first inclined to treat it as a bad joke, but soon found that it was an authentic fact.[18]
I have the great good fortune also to have received from Mr. Wilfrid Blunt a brief memoir of Mr. Labouchere, which commences in his early diplomatic days, and though it carries us on almost to the end of his life, I think that its publication here will enable those readers who did not know Mr. Labouchere personally to get a sincere impression of the whole of his career, which cannot fail to be of assistance to them in elucidating his curious original personality from the maze of dates and details which are the inevitable appendages of a comprehensive biography. Mr. Blunt writes as follows:
Feb. 13, 1913.
My acquaintance with Henry Labouchere dates, if I remember rightly, from the early spring of 1861. We were both then in the Diplomatic Service, and though not actually employed together, I had just succeeded him as unpaid attaché at the Frankfort Legation, and found him still lingering there when I came to take up my not very onerous duties that year under our chief, Sir Alexander Malet, Edward Malet's father. Labouchere's attraction to Frankfort was not Frankfort itself, but its close neighbourhood to Hombourg, where the gambling-tables still flourished, and where he spent nearly all his time. By rights he ought to have been at St. Petersburg, but pretended that he could not afford to travel to his new post except on foot, and so was staying on waiting to have his expenses paid by Government. His life at that time was an avowedly disreputable one, the society of Hombourg being what it was; and he was looked upon by the more strait-laced ladies of the Corps Diplomatique as something of a pariah. There was a good deal of talk about him, opinions being divided as to whether he was more knave or fool, greenhorn or knowing fellow, all which amused him greatly. He was in reality the good-hearted cynic the world has since acknowledged him to be, with a keen appreciation of the comédie humaine, a contempt for aristocratic shams, and a philosopher's taste for low society.
I have a coloured caricature I made of him of that date, 1861, in which he is represented as undergoing a conversion to respectability at the hands of Countess d'Usedom, the Olympia of the Bismarck memoirs, and wife of the Prussian Ambassador, with her two Scotch nieces in the preposterous crinoline dresses of the time. He figures in it as a round-faced young man with highly coloured cheeks, and an air of mock modesty which is very characteristic. It is labelled "The Deformed Transformed."
Later, I used to see him pretty frequently in London at the St. James' Club, of which we were both members. He was already beginning to be a recognised wit, and a central figure among talkers in the smoking-room. But I remember old Paddy Green of Evans' still maintaining that he was for all that a simple-minded fellow, made to be the prey of rogues. It was as such that he had known him some years before when Labouchere first appeared in London life and took up his quarters at Evans' Hotel in Covent Garden. The good Irishman had dolorous stories of the way in which his protégé had then been fleeced. "Poor Labouchere, poor Labouchere," he used to say, in his paternally emotional voice; "a good young man, but always his own worst enemy." His own worst enemy he certainly often was. I remember his coming into the Club one evening, it must have been in 1865, when he had just been elected M.P. for Windsor, and boasting to all of us who would listen to him, with every detail, how he had bribed the free and intelligent electors of the Royal Borough, an imprudence which caused him the misfortune of his being unseated immediately afterwards on petition.
Of the years that followed, when he was making his name as a journalist, and his fortune on the Stock Exchange, I have nothing particular to record. I came once more into close connection with him in 1882, at the time of the trial of Arabi at Cairo after Tel-el-Kebir. Labouchere, during the early months of the year, had been among those Radicals who in the House of Commons had followed Chamberlain and Dilke in pressing intervention in Egypt on the Foreign Office, and he made no secret of the reason—he was a holder of Egyptian Bonds. The bombardment of Alexandria and the massacre of Tel-el-Kebir, with the revelations which followed of the intrigues which had caused the war, proved, however, too much for his political conscience, which was really sound, and having unloaded his Egyptian stock, which had gone up to higher prices (for he was not a man to neglect a Stock Exchange opportunity), he frankly repented of his sin, and from that time onwards did his best to repair the wrong to Egypt he had joined in doing. He subscribed handsomely to the "Arabi Defence Fund," was always ready to ask questions in the House, and did not scruple to reproach the Grand Old Man with his lapses at Cairo and in the Soudan from his Midlothian principles. In this connection I saw much of him from 1883 to 1885, years during which Egypt occupied so large a share of public attention, and always found him interested in the Egyptian cause and helpful.
He was living then in Queen Anne's Gate, and I was pretty sure to find him in the morning, and often stayed to lunch with him and his wife. He was uniformly gay and pleasant and ready to give news. No one ever was more generous in sharing his political knowledge with his friends, and I could count on him to tell me the true and exact truth of what was going on in the directions that interested me, without regard to the rules of secrecy so many public men affect. Of his wit too he was copiously lavish, as only those are who have it in supreme abundance, giving of his very best to a single listener as freely as to a larger audience. This, I always think, is the test of genius in the department of brilliant talking, and no one ever shone there more conspicuously than he did. His worldly wisdom was wonderful. Nor was it confined to things at home, the House of Commons, and the intrigue of Downing Street. He was really the only English Radical, with Dilke, who had an accurate acquaintance with affairs abroad, and he had his Europe at his finger-ends. He would have made an admirable ambassador, where any difficult matters had to be carried through, and he ought certainly to have been given the Embassy he so much desired at Washington. It was always his ambition, even stronger I think than that of holding Cabinet Office, to go back to his old diplomatic profession and give serious proof of his capacity in a service where, as a young man, he had played the fool. The Foreign Office would have found itself the stronger for his help.
Our sympathy, which had begun about Egypt, was carried on, I am glad to remember, during the years of stress which followed, also to Ireland; and from first to last my experience of his political action has been that of a man courageously consistent in his love of liberty, his hatred of tyranny, and his contempt of the insincerities of public life. He was never taken in by the false arguments with which politicians conceal their treacheries, and he was never himself a betrayer. If my testimony can be of any service to his memory as an honest man, I freely give it.
The last time I saw him was in the summer of 1902, when he came down with his wife and daughter to spend a week-end, July 12th to 14th, with me and my wife in Sussex. He had resolved to pass the rest of his days at Florence, and it was a farewell visit that he paid us. He had just bought Michael Angelo's Villa, and talked much about it and his design, philistine that he was, of turning it inside out, fitting it with electric light, and otherwise bedevilling it with modern improvements, uprooting the old trees in the podere and planting new ones. On matters of this sort he was a terrible barbarian, and took delight in playing the vandal with places and things which the rest of the world held in reverence. "Old Michael," he explained, "knew nothing about the comforts of a modern establishment, and it was time that he should learn them." Apart from this little méchanceté, he proved himself a most delectable companion, giving us a true feast of wit and wisdom the whole Sunday through. Sibyl, Lady Queensberry, was of our party, and Colonel Bill Gordon, General Gordon's nephew, with whom he had much talk about Khartoum and Egypt. Gordon was a good talker on his own subjects, and they got on well together, sitting up till half-past one the first night, telling story after story. Among them, I remember, Labouchere gave us accounts of his adventures in Mexico, and also of a ride he had taken from Damascus to Palmyra with Lady Ellenborough and her Bedouin husband, Sheykh Mijwel el Mizrab, with reminiscences of the early days we had spent together in the Diplomatic Service, his gambling acquaintances at Hombourg, and his duel in Sweden. He was especially interested in this visit to the Weald of Sussex, and in his having passed in the train almost within sight of Broome Hall, under Leith Hill, where he had lived as a boy. He had not been that way since, he said. The second evening he was less brilliant, as Hilaire Belloc had joined our party, a rival talker to whom he left the monopoly of our entertainment. But it was an altogether pleasant two days that we passed together. I am glad to have the recollection of them. Alas, they were the last we were to see of him, for he left England soon afterwards, and we never met again.
[1] Joseph Hatton, Journalistic London.
[2] Mrs. T. P. O'Connor, I, Myself.
[3] For the rest of this interesting letter see Chapter X.
[4] "Radical and Whigs," Fortnightly Review, Feb. 1, 1884.
[5] It is interesting to note that Mr. Crampton's proceedings in America did not stand in his way, so far as promotion in the service was concerned. He was appointed Envoy-Extraordinary at Hanover almost immediately; Lord Palmerston insisted upon his being made a K.C.B., and he became Ambassador at St. Petersburg in 1858. (Dictionary of National Biography.)
[6] Truth, May 23, 1878.
[7] Truth, Feb. 8, 1877.
[8] Busch, Our Chancellor.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Truth, May 23, 1889.
[11] Hansard, July 14, 1884.
[12] Alexander II.
[13] Truth, July 16, 1877.
[14] Truth, May 23, 1878.
[15] Florence Herald, Dec. 28, 1909.
[16] Rumbold, Recollections of a Diplomatist, vol. ii.
[17] The letter, signed by Lord Russell, appointing Henry Labouchere Second Secretary is dated February 3, 1863, so that the one, referred to by Sir Audley Gosling, appointing him to Buenos Ayres, must have been of later date. The latter is not in my possession.
[18] Truth, Nov. 20, 1879.
(1866-1869)
Being asked on some occasion, "Why do men enter Parliament?" Mr. Labouchere replied: "Some of them enter Parliament because they have been local Bulls of Bashan, and consider that in the localities where they have roared, and pawed the ground, they will be even more important than heretofore; some because they want to be peers, baronets, and knights; some because they have a fad to air; some because they want to have a try at climbing the greasy pole of office; some because they have heard that the House of Commons is the best club in London; some because they delude themselves that they are orators; some for want of anything better to do; some because they want to make a bit out of company promoting; and some because they have a vague notion that they are going to benefit their country by their devotion to legislative business." He frankly confessed, however, that none of the above considerations had influenced him in his own decision to enter upon a parliamentary life. Curiosity had been his inducement in the first place, and secondly, a conviction that the House would benefit considerably from contact with so sound a Radical as himself.
In the autumn of the year that he left the Diplomatic Service, it was suggested to Mr. Labouchere by several friends that he should come forward as a candidate in the next General Election for the borough of New Windsor. There was already another Liberal in the field—Mr. Flower of Stratford-on-Avon. Labouchere decided to confer with him on the subject. They met, accordingly, at the Reform Club, Labouchere having been previously warned by the Town Clerk of Windsor, Mr. Darvill, to act quite independently of Flower, as he was in the hands of agents, in whom the leading men of the place had little confidence. Mr. Labouchere describes in his own words the upshot of the interview: "We met at the Reform Club, in the presence of Mr. Grant (one of Flower's agents) and Mr. Darvill, junior. As, however, both of us evidently thought that only one Liberal could be returned at Windsor, and as each of us intended to be that Liberal, we separated without coming to any arrangement to act together."[1]
Labouchere then went abroad, returning to England in January for a fortnight, during which time he gave a dinner at Windsor, held a public meeting, and identified himself as much as it was possible to do, in so short a time, with the local interests of the borough. In May, 1865, Mr. Flower retired from the candidature, because he felt that his agents, Grant and Dunn, had compromised him by corrupt practices. As these gentlemen had hired as many as twenty public houses for committee rooms, a number ludicrously out of proportion to the size of the constituency, he acted wisely in doing so. He informed Labouchere of his decision. Mr. Darvill also wrote, recommending Labouchere to return to England, and if he really intended to stand for Windsor, to take some steps for insuring his return by appointing agents, and taking the usual preliminary precautions.
To continue the narrative in Mr. Labouchere's own words: "Sir Henry Hoare, a day or two after my return to England, called upon me to tell me that he had been in communication with Mr. Darvill, and that as Mr. Darvill had told me he thought that, if two Liberal candidates acted firmly together, both might be returned, he came to propose to me to make common cause with him. The next day we called together on Mr. Durrant, a London solicitor, who had acted for Sir Henry Hoare, and we begged him to go down to Windsor, and after seeing the principal Liberals, to report to us the state of affairs. This he did. He told us Mr. Flower had engaged twenty committee rooms—a number which was clearly too great, and he recommended us to take on nine of them. We sent him down to Windsor again to arrange about the committee rooms and about taking on agents, and he, in conjunction with Mr. Last, retained the usual Liberal agents, who were the same as had been engaged by Mr. Flower. It was distinctly understood at the same time, that we only took on nine committee rooms. Mr. Flower, after, I believe, a long correspondence with Mr. Cleave, agreed to pay for the eleven committee rooms which he had engaged. Sir Henry Hoare and I were both returned as members for Windsor."
It was an unfortunate action, however, on the part of the two Liberal candidates to make use of the same agents who had compromised Mr. Flower, and it cost them their seats. The election took place in November, 1865, and the result of the poll was as follows: