234
NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 s. iv. SEPT.,
Radical and proprietor of the then notorious
Weekly Dispatch, say, upon the committee
deciding against the views of the Alderman
' Thank God there is a House of Lords.' This is
long before either of the cases mentioned in The
Times of to-day."
This letter, not dated, no doubt refers to Mr. MacNeiU's letter.
Unfortunately, Mr. Wilde did not give the year when he heard Alderman Harmer' exclamation. The Houses of Parliament were burnt in October, 1834, in which year Mr. Samuel John Wilde, born 1820 (see 4 Men at the Bar,' by Joseph Foster, 2nd ed., 1885), was fourteen years old. If he meant that he heard the exclamation when he was practising as a barrister, it must have been after Lord Stanley's speech, seeing that the date of the speech is May 25, 1846, and Mr. Wilde was not called to the bar until Nov. 20, 1846. If he meant, writing from Serjeants' Inn, that he heard Alderman Harmer 's exclamation when he (Mr. Wilde) was a boy in his teens, possibly visiting the committee room with his father, who was a barrister, it may be presumed that he would have said so. His letter is so lacking in precision that I think it should be regarded as negligible.
I may here quote Lord Stanley's insissima v&rba as given in Hansard, 3rd series, vol. Ixxxvi. col. 1176 :
" Your best reward, my Lords, will be the approval of your own consciences ; but doubt not that you will have a farther reward in the approbation of a grateful and admiring nation, to which you will have given just cause to exclaim, ' Thank God, we have a House of Lords.' " Debate on the Corn Importation Bill.
This was the peroration of a three hours' speech. Palmerston told Greville that it was far the best speech that Stanley ever made, and that nobody could make a better. Lord Lansdowne told somebody that it was the finest speech that he ever heard in Parliament. See ' Greville Memoirs,' 2nd part, vol. ii. p. 395.
That Lord Stanley (later 14th Earl of Derby), who had been raised to the peerage in 1844 as Lord Stanley of Bickerstaffe, invented the saying in this speech cannot be maintained.
In The Edinburgh Review of July, 1836 (all but ten years before the speech, and when Wilde was aged sixteen), vol. Ixiii. p. 375, s.v. ' Correspondence relating to the Slave Trade,' is the following :
" Did not the beginning of this century witness the avowed hostility of their opponents ? and at the end of the last were not the abolitionists called levellers and anarchists ? Let us take, as an instance, Boswell, a man probably not behind the
current humanity of his age, who, after con-
demning the wild and dangerous attempt of
abolishing the slave trade, ascribing the advocacy
of it to a love either of temporary popularity or
of general mischief, then in his imbecile en-
thusiasm thanks God that there was a House of
Lords wise and independent enough to stand up
for a traffic which God had sanctioned and man
continued (Boswell's ' Life of Johnson,' vol. vii.
p. 23, 1835)."
In the 1822 edition the reference is vol. iii. p. 207, or generally near the end of Johnson cetat. 68, year 1777. The assertion that Boswell thanked God that there was a House of Lords, &c., is merely the reviewer's interpretation of Boswell's sentiment. What Boswell writes about the House of Lords at the references given, after protesting in strong words (some of which are quoted by the Edinburgh reviewer) against the aboli- tion of the slave trade, is simply :
" Whatever may have passed elsewhere con- cerning it [the slave trade], the House of Lords is wise and independent :
Intaminatis fulget honoribus,
Nee sumit aut ppnit secures
Arbitrio popularis auree."
In the article in The Edinburgh Peview there is nothing to mark the saying " Thank God," &c., as a quotation nothing to show that it was not the invention of the reviewe"; published in July, 1836.
ROBERT PrERPorar.
MARKSHALL AND THE HONYWOOD
FAMILY.
(See 10 S. ix. 144 ; 12 S. iii. 53.)
So much of interest attaches to the bygone owners of Markshall, Essex, that perhaps I may be allowed to add the following to the notes that have already appeared.
The Honiwoods* were Lords of the Cinque Ports, and, according to Hasted's History of Kent,' two families descended Tom John Honiwood of Hunwood, viz., Tohn his heir, the progenitor of the line of jaronets ; and Robert, the ancestor of the amily of Charing (Kent) and Markshall Essex). The latter, who died in 1576, married Mary, daughter of John Waters of "-enham (later celebrated for the number of ler descendants). Their son and heir another Robert, born 1545, died 1627) was
- wice married
- first, to Dorothy Crook, by
- See Hasted's ' History of Kent,' Morant's
History of Essex,' ' The Visitation of Essex,' Dale's ' Annals of Coggeshall,' ' Ancient Sepul- hral Monuments of Essex,' ' A Short History of he Mildmay Family,' and ' The Beauties of Eng- and and Wales.'
