Wives of the prime ministers, 1844-1906/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
FEW, we take it, would deny the influence that women, through the ages, have wielded in political life. Kings and potentates. Ministers of State and priests, have been guided by their counsels. Although such influence was indirect, it was nevertheless powerful, and produced both good and bad results. The published and unpublished diaries and letters of women of high position in the nineteenth century show their deep interest in political matters and their large knowledge of affairs from the inside. That knowledge was, of course, obtained from the communications of the men who were their relatives and friends, but the method of using it was determined by the woman herself. Doubtless the gain and loss of such influence neutralised each other. Whether, when women come to exercise direct influence through the vote, the gain will preponderate, remains to be proved.
Throughout the nineteenth century those women who were the wives of Ministers of State, or in other ways closely connected with them, could be counted on at elections to give as canvassers the most important and valuable assistance, and their help was often instrumental in securing their friends' return. Sometimes they even acted as the party whips. In 1805 Charles James Fox wrote from the House of Commons to the Duchess of Devonshire: "Pray speak to everybody you can to come down or we shall be lost on the Slave Trade. Pray, pray, send anybody you see." Members of Parliament on their way home from the House would call on their lady friends to give the result of the debates and divisions, and if these had already gone upstairs to bed, would send up a written statement by the servant. Lady Holland, as is well known, aspired to exercise great influence on politics. Holland House was the headquarters of the "Whig party. During the progress of the Reform Bill, Cabinet Ministers constantly dined with her and openly discussed the political situation during the meal. It is said that in 1828 she asked Lord John Russell to make her husband Foreign Secretary. "Why, they say, ma'am," replied Lord John, "that you open all Lord Holland's letters, and the foreign Ministers might not like that." Her diary is stuffed full of politics, and it is clear that she was in the confidence of all the men of her party in high office. It may be worth while to record here the impression that the interest in politics of highly placed English ladies made on a German lady of similar position. Gabriele von Bülow, the daughter of Wilhelm von Humboldt and the wife of the German ambassador to England, wrote to her sister in 1833: "The other day I was nearly frantic when the Marchioness of Salisbury said she did not in the least care whether the sun was shining or not; it was of far greater importance whether the Parliamentary sun was shining on the Whigs or the Tories!"
Every one cannot be a Lady Holland, but it is not only the women who are most in the public eye who exercise influence on affairs and on the actions of public men. Sometimes where it may seem, to an outside observer, that a woman is overshadowed by her husband, she may, as a matter of fact, have helped more to his success than the world will ever know. Nor is it necessarily the women of the highest intellectual endowments who possess the finest judgment and the best insight into the rightness and wrongness of actions. When a woman possesses such gifts by nature, they form an invaluable aid to all who in her circle seek her counsel.
The Prime Ministers of England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have, with the exception of Lord Melbourne,—and his wife died before he became Prime Minister,—been fortunate in their wives. They married women who, often beautiful, and always intelligent, devoted themselves to furthering both the political interests and the domestic happiness of their husbands. Their influence on public affairs varied in degree and kind, for their rôle was passive rather than active, and personality was their main asset. Now personality is an elusive thing and can never be absolutely reconstructed. Living witnesses can help us somewhat to form a mental picture that now and then gets near the truth; but to paint a portrait without the aid of such evidence, and without that of the written word in the form of diaries or letters, is no easy task. In the case of the wife of a great man it is rendered yet more difficult by the fact that in the care taken to preserve everything relating to his reputation, little survives about the wife whose career is naturally merged in that of her husband.
Most of the husbands of the women whose lives are sketched in this volume were men who would have been socially important if they had never entered politics or become Ministers of State. Some of them were peers of the realm, and members of great families like the Russells, Stanleys, Gordons, and Cecils. With the exception of Disraeli, they all had their roots deep in English soil. They were men of culture for the most part, and often had literary and artistic ability and tastes. Politics and Society were closely bound together in the nineteenth century, especially during the earlier part of it; it was not only at the dinner-tables and in the drawing-rooms of Ministers that political topics held the lion's share in the conversation. Public life was less of a trade or profession than it has since become, and the interest of the general family circle in the fate of a Bill, or in the doings of the House, was strong and intense. Disraeli's novels afford an admirable picture of the social side of the political life of his time.
As the memoir of Mrs. Gladstone in this volume amply proves, a wife's influence can keep her husband in power when he himself would be glad to relinquish it; and it has been said over and over again, by those in a position to judge, that had Lady Rosebery lived, Lord Rosebery's political career would have been very different. In every case in which we have the published letters of the husbands to the wives here commemorated, and wherever also we have been privileged to see unpublished letters of the kind, we realise how the wife was the confidante of all details concerning the high matters of State in which the husband was interested. The memoir of Lady Palmerston well brings out the important use a clever woman could make of such information, and it is quite certain that outside the Cabinet and the great Government Departments no one knew more about what was going on in the world than the wives of the Prime Ministers. A looker-on can see more of the game than one actively engaged in it, and a statesman's wife in the Victorian age was sufficiently removed from the excitement of the arena to be able to bring calm and reasoned judgment to bear on the issues involved.
The wives of Lord Melbourne,[1] Lord Aberdeen,[2] and Lord Rosebery[3] died before their husbands actually attained the Premiership; therefore they can scarcely be logically called wives of Prime Ministers. But it has been thought well to include a memoir of Lady Caroline Lamb, because the facts of her picturesque and agitated career are not accessible in any one complete account, and because it throws a good deal of light on the social and domestic aspects of political life in the early nineteenth century.
With regard to Lord Aberdeen, it is abundantly clear that his first marriage had a lasting effect on his heart and mind. He fell passionately in love when only twenty-one years of age with Lady Catherine Hamilton, eldest daughter of the first Marquis of Abercorn. She was a beautiful girl, and worshipped him as much as he worshipped her. They were married on 28th July 1805. Their domestic life was so happy that Lord Aberdeen cared little for public affairs. He considered his wife to be "the most perfect creature ever formed by the power and wisdom of God." Three daughters were born in 1807, 1808, and 1809. A son, born in 1810, died soon after his birth. From that time Lady Aberdeen's health, never robust, drooped, and she died on 29th February 1812. Her husband, who survived her for nearly fifty years, married secondly, in 1815, Harriet Douglas, the widow of Viscount Hamilton. Lord Abercorn seeing his granddaughters on the one hand, the children of his daughter, deprived of their mother, and on the other his grandsons, the children of his son, deprived of their father, thought it would be an admirable arrangement to marry the widower to the widow. Although Lord Aberdeen never forgot his first wife, he had a strong affection for his second, and his letters to her are full of loving tenderness. Unhappily his daughters all died young, and Lady Aberdeen herself on 26th August 1833. Lord Aberdeen's political career can scarcely be said to have begun in real earnest until 1834, but the gentle melancholy that was so marked a characteristic of his temperament may well be traced to his early experiences of love and marriage.
Lord Rosebery married in 1878 Hannah de Rothschild, only child of Baron Meyer de Rothschild and his wife Juliana Cohen. She was an accomplished woman, loving art and music. She assisted her father in collecting objects of art for Mentmore, the house he began to build in 1857, and there she had unique opportunities for intercourse with the best minds in English and continental society. She learned to judge things in the large spirit usually associated with the masculine mind alone. She had always taken a great interest in politics, and at once set herself to assist and second her husband in his political interests. She instituted at Lansdowne House a salon for the Liberal party, which became the focus of social liberalism and an important element in the organisation of the party. Lansdowne House was also a general centre of hospitality, for Lady Rosebery believed in bringing together in social intercourse men of widely divergent views, so that the edges of their differences, so to speak, might gradually be rubbed smooth.
Her activities were not solely political. She was keen for the improvement of female industrial conditions, and took part in various public philanthropic enterprises to that end. Her private charities were at once generous and discriminating.
Lady Rosebery died of typhoid fever at Dalmeny Park, 19th November 1890.
It has not been possible to include any memoir of Lady Derby, wife of the "Rupert of debate." Information, without which any sketch must perforce be inadequate, has not been obtainable from the only source whence it could be drawn. Lady Derby was the second daughter of the first Lord Skelmersdale, and was married on 31st May 1825. It was a romantic attachment on the part of young Stanley, who was only twenty-four years of age. His father did not approve, and sent him away for a year, hoping that absence might cure him of his affection, but on his return the young man went first to Miss Wilbraham, who was a girl of twenty, obtained her consent to be his wife, and then reported himself to his family. Lady Derby died on 26th April 1876; her husband pre-deceased her in 1869.
Sainte-Beuve has said that a woman "quand elle est restée femme par les qualités essentielles," is, even after she is dead, "un peu notre contemporaine toujours." This statement seems especially to apply to the women whose lives I have here attempted to sketch, and I venture to think that their share in shaping the history of their country, through the great men whose companions they were, claims from the present generation a grateful recognition of their qualities of head and heart. Women are expecting in the future to play a much more prominent and important part in public life. Therefore it is perhaps a fitting moment to put on record how their sisters of an earlier epoch performed their allotted part on life's stage.