Wives of the prime ministers, 1844-1906/Chapter 7
VII
LADY SALISBURY
LADY SALISBURY
After the portrait by Sir W. B. Richmond
Every year the Alderson family (which consisted of ten children besides Georgiana) used to spend their summer holidays at Lowestoft, where were other friends with young families, conspicuously the Palgraves. Of the Palgraves the best known was Francis, afterwards the editor of the Golden Treasury. There is in existence a little green-covered book called Lays of Lowestoft, which consists of parodies of mediæval ballads and heroic couplets something like the Ingoldsby Legends, though it is perhaps unfair to call into comparison these high-spirited, but naturally immature, productions with that brilliant collection of satirical verse. The jokes and allusions are rather obscure to the outsider, but the whole volume gives an impression of zest and great enjoyment. Georgiana opens the volume with a lively account of a cricket match, and there are descriptions of picnics and excursions of all sorts, to which the family drove in a donkey-cart, with tea, umbrellas, and "Tennyson's poems our hearts to affect." On another occasion they are all depicted as lying on the heather singing glees and part-songs (the Aldersons were very musical) while the sun went down. Two verses are sufficiently characteristic:
"Now sparkling hock and sparkling wit
Are vying with each other,
And one bright flash of repartee
Is followed by another.
And grave ecclesiastics too,
With lawyers shrewd and cunning,
Contend with squires and ladies fair
In the gay art of punning."
The whole book is full of the atmosphere of the irresponsible years between childhood and maturity. One feels it must all have been great fun.
Georgiana "came out," like other girls, when she grew up, and is generally believed to have enjoyed that also. Indeed, she might have taken as one of her secondary mottoes in life the old couplet:
"Pastime and good company
I love and shall until I die,"
with perhaps the rider that good company was the pastime best worth having. She had great vitality and a brilliant wit, and both made her such good company that a friend paraphrased Wilke's famous boast on her behalf and said that, given ten minutes' lead (to make up for her want of looks, for she was not considered pretty), she could be backed against the loveliest of her contemporaries. Undeniably some people found her formidable, for she was a person of very strong emotions and decided opinions, and was liable to come out suddenly with emphatic expression of her views in a way that less decisive natures found startling.
There are in existence some serious poems written by Miss Alderson at this date at which she used to laugh in later life, and which she was perhaps a little unreasonably proud of never having published. They are described as being characterised by a "sweet sentimental melancholy," which was a quality no one would have suspected in her. But she probably had her "summer of green-sickness" like other people, and one of her daughters describes her as liking "to give lip-service to a pretty sentiment, though always ready to laugh at herself for the indulgence."
Among Georgiana Alderson's greatest friends was Mary, Lady Salisbury (later Lady Derby), and it was at her house she met Lord Robert Cecil, Lady Salisbury's stepson. In appearance at any rate Lord Robert was very different from the massive figure familiar to the older of present-day politicians. Angular, thin, and rather ungainly, for the dozen years before he took office in 1866 he sat below the gangway in the House of Commons, the freest of free-lances, assailing his own leaders quite as often as the Liberal Government, with a bitterness and violence of language which rather scandalised his fellow-members. His elder brother, Lord Cranborne, being still alive, no one ever thought of his succeeding his father, while his constituency was one of the last of the pocket boroughs, so that he enjoyed every condition of irresponsibility and independence. Another element emphasised his detachment. The tendency of politics is to absorb the politician completely, and to shut out other interests and other questions. To Lord Robert politics was an occupation, while what old-fashioned people used to call philosophy—abstract thought on theology and science—was his abiding interest. He also was an advanced Tractarian, and this was probably the chief thing that first attracted him and Georgiana to each other.
The marriage was an extremely happy one. Both were deeply and devoutly religious; both were much interested in the philosophical questions that centred in religious controversy; both had keen, alert, and daring intelligences. Lady Robert, though a year or two older than her husband, was generally held to have the younger mind, and, if power to enjoy is the attribute of youth, then she certainly had a younger temperament. They were married in 1857, and lived in a little house in Half Moon Street. They were not at all well off, and Lord Robert supplemented a small income with his pen, writing in the Quarterly and the Saturday Review. Lady Robert also wrote in the Saturday, a fact considered more unusual then than it would be now. Owing to their both writing anonymously, rumour of course embellished the fact, and Lady Robert was credited with some of the political articles (of the type known as "trenchant") which, as a matter of fact, were written by her husband, she having performed only the important rôle of critic. Lady Robert's own articles, unfortunately never collected, were chiefly on literary subjects.
Their eldest son was not born till 1861, to be followed by a long family of four more sons and two daughters. The relations of the mother with her children were thoroughly characteristic. To outsiders she seemed to exercise very little restraint on them, and to give them a degree of liberty of action that most children do not get. They were also treated by both parents far more as equals than is usual, and allowed to take part and have their say in any discussion that was on foot, provided they put their points well and discussed fairly. But if she did not work her authority hard there could be no doubt of the strength of her influence, especially in the case of her sons. She was in their confidence, and her opinion had great weight with them to the end of her life. A very familiar sight in later years was Lady Salisbury driving in a high barouche with one or other of her sons, by that time grown men and public figures, absolutely absorbed in talk and both enjoying themselves.
The free-lance days came to an end in 1865, when Lord Robert's elder brother, Lord Cranborne, died and put him in the direct succession for a great fortune and one of the historical peerages of England. Further, in 1866 the Liberal Government fell, and, when the Conservatives came in under Lord Derby, the new Lord Cranborne was made Secretary of State for India. It was an interesting Parliament, the outstanding subject of interest being Reform. The career of the Government might indeed be described as more exciting than dignified. They came in disposed to pass no Reform Bill; they rapidly discovered that the country was determined to have some Reform Bill. They started with timid and limited measures, and were hustled from one halting-place to another, until the Bill they finally passed, amid clamorous denunciations and acclamations alike, was as wide as any Liberal had ever dreamed of.
It was when one of these limitations was removed, which in his opinion made the franchise dangerously wide, that Lord Cranborne and two of his colleagues, Lord Carnarvon and General Peel, resigned in 1867. Every one sincerely respected them for their sacrifice to their principles, but it made and could make no difference to the Bill, there being only one Bill possible under the circumstances. On the other hand a comment of Lady Cranborne's was felt to have some ground. She sat next Lord Derby at a dinner-party, and he asked her good-humouredly whether she was lying awake at night doing addition sums to see how many voters were coming in under the Bill, like her husband? "No; do you know, my sums are all subtraction," was Lady Cranborne's reply, "and I have come to the conclusion that three from twelve leaves nothing." Twelve was the number of the Derby Cabinet which, after a jolting and precarious career and a change of leadership from Lord Derby to Mr. Disraeli, fell to cureless ruin in 1868 after the new election.
Lord Cranborne had hardly been a year in office, but he had greatly increased in reputation. He had shown that when he was given responsibility he could rise to it, and his Parliamentary manner was admirable. He shot up automatically from the position of a lone hand, about whose prospects men shook their heads, to that of a coming man and a coming leader, and many regretted profoundly when his father's death in 1868 withdrew him from the House of Commons. One of the most interesting of minor political speculations is the consideration of what might have happened if his elder brother had lived and he had been compelled to pass his career in the comparative rough-and-tumble of the Commons. He was always of a very detached and aloof temperament, and might have absolutely refused to face the passion and blatancy of an ordinary contested election, as opposed to the foreseen "walks-over" of his elections at Stamford. But had he undergone it and been forced into more direct contact with the general mind of the people, it is impossible not to believe that this detachment might have been modified—and with advantage. As a leader he was always a good deal of an enigma even to his closest associates, and a complete puzzle to the rank and file of his party. In the House of Lords he seldom had to face real opposition, and the consciousness of a foregone conclusion to the discussions imparted a degree of languor to debate. Lord Salisbury himself complained that they were all too much of one mind. At any rate, for one reason or another, he grew more and more to despise public opinion because it was public opinion, an attitude very attractive to certain types of mind, but which is apt to leave a politician the dismal choice whether he will acquiesce or resign when overborne by a public opinion formed by some one else.
Lady Salisbury, as she now became, was very conscious of the drawbacks of this attitude, and set to work to try and modify them by taking on herself a large share of the duties of political hostess. The short sitting of the House of Commons in those days was on Wednesday, and she used to have parties in her house in Arlington Street on Wednesdays for members and their wives. She was a great believer in keeping in touch with members' wives as a means of keeping their husbands politically "straight." In addition, of course, she gave big garden-parties in the beautiful grounds at Hatfield, which were now her own, and these entertainments formed one of the outstanding social functions of each year. With only short intervals Lord Salisbury was in office for nearly thirty years, the intervals being, of course, 1880–85 and 1892–95, when Mr. Gladstone was Prime Minister. Consequently the work of "keeping the party together" was continuous. Lady Salisbury played her part entirely by entertaining. So far as I can find out she never made a speech on a platform in her life, and did not look with any approval on the political associations for women which began to form in her later years. In the sense that "everybody who was anybody" always came to her parties, they were, of course, extremely successful. Yet she can hardly be described as a born political hostess. Political entertaining is inevitably a rather wholesale business, and demands a certain amount of facile amiability that did not suit her direct and decisive personality, and she was a person of strong preferences which she was not always successful in concealing from the people that she did not prefer. In addition, she was very easily led into any conversation that interested her, and it was not an uncommon sight to see her shaking hands with head averted, absorbed in a discussion going on at her other elbow. (It is interesting to note that although her husband was twice Prime Minister she never lived at the historic No. 10 Downing Street.)
Lord Salisbury himself was a decidedly reluctant partner in these activities. He hated indiscriminate sociabilities, partly because his eyesight was bad and he had a difficulty in remembering faces. "Why should I spend my evening being trampled on by the Conservative party," he was heard to complain audibly one night while standing at the head of the stairs receiving his guests. Both were a great deal happier in their house-parties at Hatfield, where they could receive their personal friends. Here they could be in close touch with every one, and enjoy the play of minds which was the favourite entertainment of both. Lady Salisbury herself was a brilliant talker, quick, spontaneous, and epigrammatic, without any suggestion of premeditation. The element about her talk that most struck outsiders was perhaps its remorseless pressing home of her points, coupled with complete good temper when points were pressed equally hard against her. She never took offence at a shrewd hit, and greatly preferred a foeman worthy of her steel to a limp and unintelligent ally. One characteristic was very marked—gossip played small part in her talk, and "spicy" gossip none at all. The reason for this was not prudery. The terms are on record with which she rebuked some unlucky scandalmonger, and they are of an eighteenth-century plainness. She was fond of the saying that "nice" people are people with nasty minds, and altogether had a fine disgust for the prying censoriousness and debased curiosity which besets a certain form of conventional piety.
Convention, in fact, was her bane, and independence the prevailing colour of her mind. She was deeply and sincerely religious, and her religion was her touchstone for all conduct. But her inferences from her creed she held herself free to make independently, and she acted, approved, disapproved, and recommended on completely individual lines. Laid down as they were by a reckless and almost appallingly rational mind, they were no doubt sufficiently perplexing to many ordinary people. She saw no necessity to agree with every one she liked (nor, it may be added, to like every one with whom she agreed), and her friends were of every type and every shade of opinion. Dr. Liddon was one of the greatest, and with him she corresponded frequently, but she was also close friends with Dr. Tait, afterwards Primate, with Professor Tyndall, and with the late Duke of Devonshire, with all of whom Liddon probably disagreed as emphatically as possible. She had also many friends in the Liberal camp, notably Lady Rosebery. She had very strong affections, and her friendships went very deep.
Her last illness was long and harassing, lasting over two years. At first it was hoped that a change to the south of France, where Lord Salisbury had a villa, might cure her, and in 1898 she was operated on. But the dropsical symptoms recurred, and she was obliged to realise that medical skill could only modify her discomforts and not defer an inevitable end. She bore her illness with an unstinted courage that was characteristic, until she lapsed into an unconsciousness that lasted more or less all the last three weeks of her life. Perhaps in itself this was a merciful thing, for she was thus spared the knowledge that one of her sons, Lord Edward Cecil, was shut up in Mafeking, and that the family being unable to get news were in some anxiety about him. She died at Hatfield on 20th November 1899, and her death was a blow to her husband, from which it may be said that he never recovered. Her long illness had withdrawn her from her friends for some time before her death, but nevertheless the silencing of her vivid and positive personality came as a shock to many, and to a few with whom she had been intimate as one of the irreplaceable losses of their lives. She was buried at Hatfield, and four years later her husband was laid beside her.