Part 10

In this connexion it is proper to recall the devoted services which he rendered to the House of Mercy at Horbury, near Wakefield; and those who know what religious prejudice was in rural districts forty years ago will realize the value of the support accorded to an institution struggling against calumny and misrepresentation by the most popular and promising young man in the West Riding. There lies before me as I write a letter written by an Evangelical mother--Lady Charles Russell--to her son, then just ordained to a curacy at Doncaster.

"I want to hear more about Lord and Lady Halifax. I knew them pretty well as Sir Charles and Lady Mary Wood, but I have lived in retirement since before he was raised to the peerage. His eldest son was not only very good-looking, but inclined to be very good, as I dare say Dr. Vaughan may have heard. Do you know anything about him?"

That "very good" and "very good-looking" young man was now approaching what may be called the decisive event of his life. In April, 1867, Mr. Colin Lindsay resigned the Presidency of the English Church Union, and Mr. Charles Lindley Wood was unanimously chosen to fill his place. Eleven years later Dr. Pusey wrote: "As to his being President of the E.C.U., he is the sense and moderation of it." He has administered its affairs and guided its policy through fifty anxious years. Indeed, the President and the Union have been so completely identified that the history of the one has been the history of the other. His action has been governed by a grand and simple consistency. Alike in storms and in fair weather, at times of crisis and at times of reaction, he has been the unswerving and unsleeping champion of the spiritual claims of the English Church, and the alert, resourceful, and unsparing enemy of all attempts, from whatever quarter, to subject her doctrine and discipline to the control of the State and its secular tribunals. The eager and fiery enthusiasm which pre-eminently marks his nature awakes a kindred flame in those who are reached by his influence; and, even when the reason is unconvinced, it is difficult to resist the leadership of so pure and passionate a temper.

It would be ridiculous for an outsider, like myself, to discuss the interior working of the E.C.U., so I avail myself of the testimony which has reached me from within.

"Like most men of his temperament, Lord Halifax seems now and again to be a little before his time. On the other hand, it is remarkable that Time generally justifies him. There is no question that he has always enjoyed the enthusiastic and affectionate support of the Union as a whole."

It is true that once with reference to the book called Lux Mundi, and once with reference to the "Lambeth Opinions" of 1899, there was some resistance in the Union to Lord Halifax's guidance; and that, in his negotiations about the recognition of Anglican Orders, he would not, if he had been acting officially, have carried the Union with him. But these exceptions only go to confirm the general truth that his policy has been as successful as it has been bold and conscientious.

It is time to return, for a moment, to the story of Lord Halifax's private life. In 1869 he married Lady Agnes Courtenay, daughter of the twelfth Earl of Devon, and in so doing allied himself with one of the few English families which even the most exacting genealogists recognize as noble. His old tutor wrote on the 22nd of April:

"This has been a remarkable day--the wedding of Charles Wood and Lady Agnes Courtenay. It was in St. Paul's Church, Knightsbridge, which was full, galleries and all, the central passage left empty, and carpeted with red. It was a solemn, rapt congregation; there was a flood of music and solemn tender voices. The married man and woman took the Lord's Supper, with hundreds of witnesses who did not Communicate.... Perhaps a good many were Church Union folk, honouring their Chairman."

Of this marriage I can only say that it has been, in the highest aspects, ideally happy, and that the sorrows which have chequered it have added a new significance to the saying of Ecclesiastes that "A threefold cord is not quickly broken."

In 1877 Mr. Wood resigned his office in the household of the Prince of Wales. It was the time when the affairs of St. James's, Hatcham, and the persecution of Mr. Tooth, were first bringing the Church into sharp collision with the courts of law. The President of the Church Union was the last man to hold his peace when even the stones were crying out against this profane intrusion of the State into the kingdom of God; and up and down the country he preached, in season and out of season, the spiritual independence of the Church, and the criminal folly of trying to coerce Christian consciences by deprivation and imprisonment. The story went that an Illustrious Personage said to his insurgent Groom of the Bedchamber: "What's this I hear? I'm told you go about the country saying that the Queen is not the Head of the Church. Of course, she's the Head of the Church, just the same as the Pope is the Head of his Church, and the Sultan the Head of his Church.'" But this may only be a creation of that irresponsible romancist, Ben Trovato; and it is better to take Lord Halifax's account of the transaction:

"I remember certain remonstrances being made to me in regard to disobedience to the law and suchlike, and my saying at once that I thought it quite unreasonable that the Prince should be compromised by anyone in his household taking a line of which he himself did not approve; and that I honestly thought I had much better resign my place. Nothing could have been nicer or kinder than the Prince was about it; and, if I resigned, I thought it much better for him on the one side, while, as regards myself, as you may suppose, I was not going to sacrifice my own liberty of saying and doing what I thought right."

In those emphatic words speaks the true spirit of the man. To "say and do what he thinks right," without hesitation or compromise or regard to consequences, has been alike the principle and the practice of his life. And here the reader has a right to ask, What manner of man is he whose career you have been trying to record?

First and foremost, it must be said--truth demands it, and no conventional reticence must withhold it--that the predominant feature of his character is his religiousness. He belongs to a higher world than this. His "citizenship is in Heaven." Never can I forget an address which, twenty years ago, he delivered, by request, in Stepney Meeting-House. His subject was "Other-worldliness." The audience consisted almost exclusively of Nonconformists. Many, I imagine, had come with itching ears, or moved by a natural curiosity to see the man whose bold discrimination between the things of Cæsar and the things of God was just then attracting, general attention, and, in some quarters, wrathful dismay. But gradually, as the high theme unfolded itself, and the lecturer showed the utter futility of all that this world has to offer when compared with the realities of the Supernatural Kingdom, curiosity was awed into reverence, and the address closed amid a silence more eloquent than any applause."

"That strain I heard was of a higher mood."

As I listened, I recalled some words written by Dr. Pusey in 1879, about

"One whom I have known intimately for many years, who is one of singular moderation as well as wisdom, who can discriminate with singular sagacity what is essential from is not essential--C. Wood."

The Doctor went on:

"I do not think that I was ever more impressed than by a public address which I heard him deliver now many years ago, in which, without controversy or saying anything which could have offended anyone, he expressed his own faith on deep subjects with a precision which reminded me of Hooker's wonderful enunciation of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and of the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ."

After so solemn a tribute from so great a saint, it seems almost a profanity--certainly a bathos--to add any more secular touches. Yet, if the portrait is even to approach completeness, it must be remembered that we are not describing an ascetic or a recluse, but the most polished gentleman, the most fascinating companion, the most graceful and attractive figure, in the Vanity Fair of social life. He is full of ardour, zeal, and emotion, endowed with a physical activity which corresponds to his mental alertness, and young with that perpetual youth which is the reward of "a conscience void of offence toward God and toward man."

Clarendon, in one of his most famous portraits, depicts a high-souled Cavalier, "of inimitable sweetness and delight in conversation, of a glowing and obliging humanity and goodness to mankind, and of a primitive simplicity and integrity of life." He was writing of Lord Falkland: he described Lord Halifax.

LORD AND LADY RIPON[*]

The Character of the Happy Warrior is, by common consent, one of the noblest poems in the English language. A good many writers and speakers seem to have discovered it only since the present war began, and have quoted it with all the exuberant zeal of a new acquaintance. But, were a profound Wordsworthian in general, and a devotee of this poem in particular, to venture on a criticism, it would be that, barring the couplet about Pain and Bloodshed, the character would serve as well for the "Happy Statesman" as for the "Happy Warrior." There is nothing specially warlike in the portraiture of the man

"Who, with a toward or untoward lot, Prosperous or adverse, to his mind or not, Plays in the many games of life, that one Where what he most doth value must be won; Whom neither shape of danger can dismay, Not thought of tender happiness betray; Who, not content that former worth stand fast, Looks forward, persevering to the last, From well to better, daily self-surpast."

These lines always recurred to my memory when circumstances brought me into contact with the second Lord Ripon, whose friendship I enjoyed from my first entrance into public life.

I know few careers in the political life of modern England more interesting or more admirable than his, and none more exactly consonant with Wordsworth's eulogy:

"Who, not content that former worth stand fast, Looks forward, persevering to the last, From well to better, daily self-surpast."

The first Lord Ripon, who was born in 1782 and died in 1859, entered public life as soon as he had done with Cambridge, filled pretty nearly every office of honour and profit under the Crown (including, for four troubled months, the Premiership), and served impartially under moderate Whigs and crusted Tories, finding, perhaps, no very material difference between their respective creeds. The experiences of the hen that hatches the duckling are proverbially pathetic; and great must have been the perplexity of this indeterminate statesman when he discovered that his only son was a young man of the most robust convictions, and that those convictions were frankly democratic. To men possessed by birth of rank and wealth, one has sometimes heard the question addressed, in the sheer simplicity of snobbery, "Why are you a Liberal?" and to such a question Lord Goderich (for so the second Lord Ripon was called till he succeeded to his father's title) would probably have replied, "Because I can't help it." He was an only child, educated at home, and therefore free to form his own opinions at an age when most boys are subject to the stereotyping forces of a Public School and a University. Almost before his arrival at man's estate, he had clearly marked out his line of political action, and to that line he adhered with undeviating consistency.

He was supremely fortunate in an early and ideally happy marriage. Tennyson might well have drawn the heroine of The Talking Oak from Henrietta, Lady Ripon: