John Russell

“ RUSSELL, JOHN (1745–1806) , portrait-painter, born on 29 March 1745 at 32 High Street, Guildford, was the son of John Russell, book and print seller of Guildford, and five times mayor of that town; the father was something of an artist, and drew and published two views of Guildford. Russell was educated at the Guildford grammar school, and soon showed a strong inclination for art. In 1759 he gained a premium at the Society of Arts. ”

“ RUSSELL, Lord GEORGE WILLIAM (1790–1846) , major-general, was second son of John, sixth duke of Bedford, by Georgiana Elizabeth Byng, second daughter of the fourth viscount Torrington. Lord John Russell (afterwards Earl Russell) [q. v.] was his younger brother. He was born in Harley Street, London, on 8 May 1790, and was educated with Lord John successively at a private school at Sunbury, at Westminster for rather more than a year, and at Woodnesborough, near Sandwich. To his brother Lord John he was through life warmly attached. He entered the army as cornet in the 1st dragoons on 5 Feb. ”

“ LORD JOHN RUSSELL has that degree of imagination, which, though evinced rather in sentiment than expression, still enables him to generalise from the details of his reading and experience; and to take those comprehensive views, which, however easily depreciated by ordinary men in an age of routine, are indispensable to a statesman in the conjunctures in which we live. He understands, therefore, his position; and he has the moral intrepidity which prompts him ever to dare that which his intellect assures him is politic. ”

“ Lord John RussellSydney Smith said of little Lord John Russell, that he was "ready to undertake anything and everythingthing—to build St. Paul's,—cut for the stone,—or command the Channel fleet," and this satire of the wit was true. He tried politics and he tried literature, and few people will say that he was entirely successful at either. As a politician, for instance, his general capacity for getting himself and his party into a mess, earned from the most intellectually powerful of his political opponents the enduring title of "Lord Meddle and Muddle." ”

“ He declared that ‘there was no man in England whom he respected more in his public capacity, loved more in his private capacity, or from whom he had received more remarkable proofs of his honour and love of literature than Lord John Russell.’ The compliment took Lord Russell by surprise ”

“ Peel, his most formidable rival on the floor of the Commons, hinted that Lord John Russell was small in small things, but, he added significantly that, when the issues grew great, he was great also. Everyone who looks at Lord John’s career in its length and breadth must admit the justice of such a criticism. ”

“ A few days later Russell stated that Irish church reform was the principle on which the existence of the government depended; and the vigour with which he defended this principle greatly strengthened his influence with the radicals. In July Lord Grey resigned, and was succeeded by Lord Melbourne; and in November Lord Althorp, the leader of the House of Commons, succeeded to the peerage on the death of his father. The vacant leadership was offered to Lord John Russell; the king, however, strongly objected, and took the occasion summarily to dismiss his ministry (15 Nov.) ”

“ It has been the fashion, on the strength of a flippant saying of the late Sydney Smith, to talk of Lord John Russell as a man adequate, in his own conceit, to the conduct of any affair or enterprise, and rigidly and unalterably wedded to his own opinions. ”

“ The first Reform Bill, which had been drafted by Russell, and worked over by Lord Durham and other ministers, was presented to the Commons on March 1, 1831. Its provisions had been kept profoundly secret, and the house was thronged to hear them explained in the low and measured tones of Lord John Russell. The nation was as eager as the immediate auditory to know how far the government would go in granting the popular demand. Touching upon some of the existing anomalies the speaker imagined a foreigner visiting England ”

“ Lord John Russell once declared that he had no need to go far in search of happiness, as he had it at his own doors, and this was the impression left on every visitor to Pembroke Lodge. Lord Dufferin states that all his recollections gather around Lord John’s domestic life. He never possessed a kinder friend or one who was more pleasant in the retirement of his home. ”

“ After Lady John had recovered, they went down to Woburn, and later to stay with Lord Clarendon at The Grove. At both houses large parties were assembled, and Greville notes in his diary that Lord John was in excellent spirits. "Buller goes on as if the only purpose in life was to laugh and make others laugh," and he adds, "John Russell is always agreeable, both from what he contributes himself and his hearty enjoyment of the contributions of others." ”

“ The question of education lay always close to the heart of Lord John Russell, who found time even amid the stress of 1847 to advance it. The Melbourne Administration had vested the management of Parliamentary grants in aid of education in a committee of the Privy Council. In spite of suspicion and hostility, which found expression both in Parliament and in ecclesiastical circles, the movement extended year by year and slowly pervaded with the first beginnings of culture the social life of the people. ”

“ Before Parliament met in December, Lord John Russell, in despair of bringing matters to a practical issue, informed his colleagues that, though he was willing to remain in the Cabinet, and to act as Leader of the House during the short session before Christmas, it was his intention to relinquish office at the close of the year. The objection was raised that it was unconstitutional for him to meet Parliament in [251] a responsible position if he had arrived at this fixed but unannounced resolution. ”

“ Lord John Russell is precisely the person calculated to fill a high official situation. Well informed on all subjects, with an ardent love of his country, and an anxious desire to serve it, he has a sobriety of judgment and a strictness of principle that will for ever place him beyond the reach of suspicion, even to the most prejudiced of his political adversaries. ”

“ Henceforward, in any Liberal Administration, Lord John Russell can be little better than a cipher. Already there has been talk of deposing him—of electing new leaders for the conduct of the Opposition—of putting forward to the van men who are beset with less scruple, and unencumbered with aristocratic connection. The private history of Liberalism affords more than one instance of such depositions. Lord John must abdicate, or march onward at the head of the progressive democracy. ”

“ Even shrewd and well-informed observers were curiously oblivious, for the moment, of the signs of the times, for Greville wrote on February 27: ‘Nobody cares any longer for John Russell, everybody detests Gladstone; Disraeli has no influence in the country, and a very doubtful position with his own party.’ Yet scarcely more than a fortnight later this cynical, but frank scribe added: ‘Some think a reaction in favour of John Russell has begun. He stands for the City, and is in very good spirits, though his chances of success do not look bright ”

“ We have shown, by absolute demonstration, that it is not the result of Lord John Russell’s own Parliamentary experience—that, for twenty years of his public life, dating from 1832, he had failed to see the proper method of amending the representation of the people—and that he was at last enlightened by a series of articles, which display as little consistency as wisdom. ”

“ Speaking at a political meeting two days after the dissolution, Lord John Russell said that the electors in the approaching struggle were called on not merely to select the best men to defend their rights and interests, but also to give a plain answer to the question, put to the constituencies by the King in dissolving Parliament, Do you approve, aye or no, of the principle of Reform in the representation? ”

“ With Brougham in the upper House, Lord John Russell had become the most prominent man in the lower; but being comparatively a poor man, he was contented to be only paymaster of the forces,--the most lucrative office in the government. His successful conduct of the great Reform Bill gave him considerable prestige. In the second ministry of Lord Melbourne, 1834-1841, Lord Russell was at first colonial and afterward home secretary. ”

“ Lord Althorp and Lord John Russell were publicly thanked at this gathering for their action, and the reply of the latter is historic: ‘Our prospects are obscured for a moment, but, I trust, only for a moment; it is impossible that the whisper of a faction should prevail against the voice of a nation.’
Meanwhile Lord Ebrington, Lord John’s colleague in the representation of Devonshire, came to the rescue of the Government with a vote of confidence, which was carried by a sweeping majority. ”

“ There, in old age, Lord Russell loved to wander with wife or child or friend, and there, through the loop-holes of retreat amid his books and flowers, he watched the great world, and occasionally sallied forth, so long as strength remained, to bear his part in its affairs. ”

“ Still more important was the fact that Lord John Russell, who had distinguished himself already as the most devoted promoter of constitutional reform, was a man peculiarly qualified by intellect and by his skill in exposition to pilot such a measure through the House of Commons. ”

“ Sydney Smith in 1819 declared, ‘I think all wise men should begin to turn their minds Reformwards. We shall do it better than Mr. Hunt or Mr. Cobbett. Done it must and will be.’ In the following year Lord John Russell, at the age of twenty-eight, became identified with the question of Parliamentary Reform by bringing before the House of Commons a measure for the redress of certain scandalous grievances, chiefly at Grampound. ”

“ He was a moderate man, who never failed to do justice to his opponent’s case, and his influence was not merely [82] in the Commons; it made itself felt to good purpose in the Court, as well as in the country. He was a man of chivalrous instincts and unchallenged probity. It was one of his political opponents, Sir Henry Hardinge, who exclaimed, ‘Althorp carried the bill. His fine temper did it!’
Lord John Russell, like his colleagues, was fully alive to the gravity of the crisis. ”

“ He therefore determined to sound the Cabinet advocates of procrastination as to their real feeling about Reform, with the result that he saw clearly that Lord John Russell’s fears were not groundless, since Lord Palmerston and Lord Lansdowne bluntly declared that they meant to retire from office if the Government went forward with the Bill. ”

“ He had gone so far as to say that the wit of man could not have devised a better representative system than that which Lord John Russell, in the previous session, had attempted to alter by proposing to enfranchise Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham. But the election which followed the death of George IV on June 26th had not borne out the Duke's assertion; it had gone heavily against him. Lord Grey, forming his Ministry out of the old Whigs and the followers of Canning and Grenville, at once made Reform a Cabinet measure. ”

“ Yet, when all this is admitted, it does nothing towards proving that Lord John Russell was a mistaken alarmist. The Durham Letter and its impassioned protest have been justified by the logic of events. It is easy for men to be charitable who have slipped their convictions. ”

“ In most constituencies, however, the Liberals triumphed more easily, and when the new Parliament met they were in a majority of more than a hundred. In April Lord John Russell carried his motion for the appropriation of the surplus revenues of the Irish Church to general moral and religious purposes, so Peel resigned. Melbourne again became Prime Minister, and in the autumn of the same year, 1835, Lord Minto was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. ”

“ His easy nonchalance, sunny temper, and perfect familiarity with the ways of the world and the weaknesses of average humanity, gave him an advantage which Lord John, with his nervous temperament, indifferent health, fastidious tastes, shy and rather distant bearing, and uncompromising convictions, never possessed. Russell’s ethical fervour and practical energetic bent of mind divided him sharply from politicians who lived from hand to mouth, and were never consumed by a zeal for reform in one direction or another ”

“ Among the earliest friends of Lord and Lady John Russell were Sydney Smith, Thomas Moore, and Macaulay. There is a note in verse written by Lady John to Samuel Rogers, which will serve at least to suggest how readily her fancy and good spirits might run into rhyme on the occasion of some family rejoicing or for a children's play.
To Mr. Rogers, who was expected to breakfast and forgot to come
CHESHAM PLACE, 1843
When a poet a lady offends
Is it prose her forgiveness obtains? ”

“ The old judge took a fancy to the young clergyman, and pointed out, in a friendly spirit, how much he had lost by his devotion to Whiggism. In later life, Sydney Smith wrote to Lord John Russell [37] —"I remember with pleasure, thirty years ago, old Lord Stowell saying to me, 'Mr. Smith, you would have been a much richer man if you had joined us.'"
But the Tory table-talk of Earley [38] was powerless to seduce this staunch partisan from his political allegiance ”