Chapter 7

He was a man who roused enthusiastic devotion and provoked strong resentment. Like Gordon, he was a man who could rule others, but could not be ruled; and his official career left many heart-burnings behind. His equally passionate brother, Sir William, who wrote his life, took up the feud as a legacy and pursued it in print for many years. It is regrettable that such men cannot work without friction; but in all things it was devotion to the public service, and not personal ambition, that carried Charles Napier to such extremes. From his youth he had trained himself to such a pitch of self-denial and ascetic rigour that he could not make allowance for the frailties of the average man. His keen eye and swift brain made him too impatient of the shortcomings of conscientious officials. He was ready to work fifteen hours a day when the need came; he was able to pierce into the heart of a matter while others would be puzzling round the fringes of it. Rarely in his long and laborious career did an emergency arise capable of bringing out all his gifts; and his greatest exploits were performed on scenes unfamiliar to the mass of his fellow countrymen. But a few opinions can be given to show that he was rated at his full value by the foremost men of the day.

Perhaps the most striking testimony comes from one who never saw him; it was written three years after his death, when his brother's biography appeared. It was Carlyle, the biographer of Cromwell and Frederick the Great, the most famous man of letters of the day, who wrote in 1856: 'The fine and noble qualities of the man are very recognizable to me; his piercing, subtle intellect turned all to the practical, giving him just insight into men and into things; his inexhaustible, adroit contrivances; his fiery valour; sharp promptitude to seize the good moment that will not return. A lynx-eyed, fiery man, with the spirit of an old knight in him; more of a hero than any modern I have seen for a long time.' A second tribute comes from one who had known him as an officer and was a supreme judge of military genius. Wellington was not given to extravagant words, but on many occasions he expressed himself in the warmest terms about Napier's talents and services. In 1844, speaking of the Sind campaign in the House of Lords, he said: 'My Lords, I must say that, after giving the fullest consideration to these operations, I have never known any instance of an officer who has shown in a higher degree that he possesses all the qualities and qualifications necessary to enable him to conduct great operations.' In the House of Commons at the same time Sir Robert Peel--the ablest administrative statesman of that generation, who had read for himself some of Napier's masterly dispatches--said: 'No one ever doubted Sir Charles Napier's military powers; but in his other character he does surprise me--he is possessed of extraordinary talent for civil administration.' Again, he speaks of him as 'one of three brothers who have engrafted on the stem of an ancient and honourable lineage that personal nobility which is derived from unblemished private character, from the highest sense of personal honour, and from repeated proofs of valour in the field, which have made their name conspicuous in the records of their country'.

Indifferent as Charles Napier was to ordinary praise or blame, he would have appreciated the words of such men, especially when they associated him with his brothers; but perhaps he would have been more pleased to know how many thousands of his humble fellow countrymen walked to his informal funeral at Portsmouth, and to know that the majority of those who subscribed to his statue in Trafalgar Square were private soldiers in the army that he had served and loved.

ANTHONY ASHLEY COOPER

SEVENTH EARL OF SHAFTESBURY

1801-85

1801. Born in Grosvenor Square, London, April 28. 1811. His father succeeds to the earldom. He himself becomes Lord Ashley. 1813-17. Harrow. 1819-22. Christ Church, Oxford. 1826. M.P. for Woodstock. 1828. Commissioner of India Board of Control. 1829. Chairman of Commission for Lunatic Asylums. 1830. Marries Emily, daughter of fifth Earl Cowper. 1832. Takes up the cause of the Ten Hours Bill or Factory Act. 1833. M.P. for Dorset. 1836. Founds Church Pastoral Aid Society. 1839. Founds Indigent Blind Visiting Society. 1840. Takes up cause of Boy Chimney-sweepers. 1842. Mines and Collieries Bill carried. 1843. Joins the Ragged School movement. 1847. Ten Hours Bill finally carried. 1847. M.P. for Bath. 1848. Public Health Act. Chairman of Board of Health. 1851. President of British and Foreign Bible Society. 1851. Succeeds to the earldom. 1855. Lord Palmerston twice offers him a seat in the Cabinet. 1872. Death of Lady Shaftesbury. 1884. Receives the Freedom of the City of London. 1885. Dies at Folkestone, October 1.

LORD SHAFTESBURY

PHILANTHROPIST

The word 'Philanthropist' has suffered the same fate as many other words in our language. It has become hackneyed and corrupted; it has taken a professional taint; it has almost become a byword. We are apt to think of the philanthropist as an excitable, contentious creature, at the mercy of every fad, an ultra-radical in politics, craving for notoriety, filled with self-confidence, and meddling with other people's business. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the greatest philanthropist of the nineteenth century, was of a different type. By temper he was strongly conservative. He always loved best to be among his own family; he was fond of his home, fond of the old associations of his house. To come out into public life, to take his place in Parliament or on the platform, to be mixed up in the wrangling of politics was naturally distasteful to him. It continually needed a strong effort for him to overcome this distaste and to act up to his sense of duty. It is only when we remember this that we can do justice to his lifelong activity, and to the high principles which bore him up through so many efforts and so many disappointments. For himself he would submit to injustice and be still: for his fellow countrymen and for his religion he would renew the battle to the last day of his life.

His childhood was not happy. His parents had little sympathy with children, his father being absorbed in the cares of public life, his mother given up to society pleasures. He had three sisters older than himself, but no brother or companion, and he was left largely to himself. At the age of seven he went to a preparatory school, where he was made miserable by the many abuses which flourished there; and it was not till he went to Harrow at the age of twelve that he began to enjoy life. He had few of the indulgences which we associate with the early days of those who are born heirs to high position. But, thus thrown back on himself, the boy nurtured strong attachments, for the old housekeeper who first showed him tenderness at home, for the school where he had learnt to be happy, and for the Dorset home, which was to be throughout his life the pole-star of his affections. The village of Wimborne St. Giles lies some eight miles north of Wimborne, in Dorset, on the edge of Cranborne Forest, one of the most beautiful and unspoiled regions in the south of England, which 'as late as 1818 contained twelve thousand deer and as many as six lodges, each of which had its walk and its ranger'. Here he wandered freely in his holidays for many years, giving as yet little promise of an exceptional career; here you may find in outlying cottages those who still treasure his memory and keep his biography among the few books that adorn their shelves.

From Harrow, Lord Ashley went at the age of sixteen to read for two years with a clergyman in Derbyshire; in 1819 he went to Christ Church, Oxford, and three years later succeeded in taking a first class in classics. He had good abilities and a great power of concentration. These were to bear fruit one day in the gathering of statistics, in the marshalling of evidence, and in the presentation of a case which needed the most lucid and most laborious advocacy.

He came down from Oxford in 1822, but did not go into Parliament till 1826, and for the intervening years there is little to chronicle. In those days it was usual enough for a young nobleman to take up politics when he was barely of age, but Lord Ashley needed some other motive than the custom of the day. It is characteristic of his whole life that he responded to a call when there was a need, but was never in a hurry to put himself forward or to aim at high position. We have a few of his own notes from this time which show the extent of his reading, and still more, the depth of his reflections. As with Milton, who spent over five years at Cambridge and then five more in study and retirement at Horton, the long years of self-education were profitable and left their mark on his life. His first strong religious impulse he himself dates back to his school-days at Harrow, when (as is now recorded in a mural tablet on the spot) in walking up the street one day he was shocked by the indignities of a pauper funeral. The drunken bearers, staggering up the hill and swearing over the coffin, so appalled him that the sight remained branded on his memory and he determined to devote his life to the service of the poor. But one such shock would have achieved little, if the decision had not been strengthened by years of thought and resolution. His tendency to self-criticism is seen in the entry in his diary for April, 1826 (his twenty-fifth birthday). He blames himself for indulging in dreams and for having performed so little; but he himself admits that the visions were all of a noble character, and we know what abundant fruit they produced in the sixty years of active effort which were to follow. The man who a year later could write sincerely in his diary, 'Immortality has ceased to be a longing with me. I desire to be useful in my generation,' had been little harmed by a few years of dreaming dreams, and had little need to be afraid of having made a false start in life.

When he entered the House of Commons as member for Woodstock in 1826, Lord Ashley had strong Conservative instincts, a fervid belief in the British constitution, and an unbounded admiration for the Duke of Wellington, whose Peninsula victories had fired his enthusiasm at Harrow. It was to his wing of the Conservative party that Ashley attached himself; and it was the duke who, succeeding to the premiership on the premature death of Canning, gave him his first office, a post on the India Board of Control. The East India Company with its board of directors (abolished in 1858) still ruled India, but was since 1778 subject in many ways to the control of the British Parliament, and the board to which Lord Ashley now belonged exercised some of the functions since committed to the Secretary of State for India. He set himself conscientiously to study the interests of India, but over the work of his department he had little chance of winning distinction. In fact his first prominent speech was on the Reform of Lunatic Asylums, not an easy subject for a new member to handle. He was diffident in manner and almost inaudible. Without the kindly encouragement of friends he might have despaired of future success; but his sincerity in the cause was worth more than many a brilliant speech. The Bill was carried, a new board was constituted, and of this Lord Ashley became chairman in 1829, and continued to hold the office till his death fifty-six years later. This was the first of the burdens that he took upon himself without thought of reward, and so is worthy of special mention, though it never won the fame of his factory legislation. But it shows the character of the man, how ready he was to step into a post which meant work without remuneration, drudgery without fame, prejudice and opposition from all whose interests were concerned in maintaining the abuses of the past.

It was this spirit which led him in 1836 to take up the Church Pastoral Aid Society,[15] in 1839 to found the Indigent Blind Visiting Society, in 1840 to champion the cause of chimney-sweeps, and in all these cases to continue his support for fifty years or more. We are accustomed to-day to 'presidents' and 'patrons' and a whole broadsheet of complimentary titles, to which noblemen give their names and often give little else. Lord Ashley understood such an office differently. He was regular in attendance at meetings, generous in giving money, unflinching in his advocacy of the cause. We shall see this more fully in dealing with the two most famous crusades associated with his name.

[Note 15: To help church work by adding to the number of clergy.]

Though these growing labours began early to occupy his time, we find the record of his life diversified by other claims and other interests. In 1830 he married Emily, daughter of Lord Cowper, who bore him several children, and who shared all his interests with the fullest sympathy; and henceforth his greatest joys and his deepest sorrows were always associated with his family life. At home his first hobby was astronomy. At the age of twenty-eight he was ardently devoted to it and would spend all his leisure on it for weeks together, till graver duties absorbed his time. But he was no recluse, and all through his life he found pleasure in the society of his friends and in paying them visits in their homes. Many of his early visits were paid to the Iron Duke at Strathfieldsaye; in later life no one entertained him more often than Lord Palmerston, with whom he was connected by marriage. He was the friend and often the guest of Queen Victoria, and in his twenty-eighth year he is even found as a guest at the festive board of George IV. 'Such a round of laughing and pleasure I never enjoyed: if there be a hospitable gentleman on earth it is His Majesty.' And at all times he was ready to mix freely and on terms of social equality with all who shared his sympathies, dukes and dustmen, Cabinet ministers and costermongers.

In the holiday season he delighted to travel. In his journals he sets down the impressions which he felt among the pictures and churches of Italy, and in the mountains of Germany and Switzerland; he loves to record the friendliness of the greetings which he met among the peasantry of various lands. When he talked to them no one could fail to see that he was genuinely interested in them, that he wanted to know their joys and their sorrows, and to enrich his own knowledge by anything that the humblest could tell him. Still more did he delight in Scotland, where he had many friends. He was of the generation immediately under the spell of the 'Wizard of the North', and the whole country was seen through a veil of romantic and historical association. There he went nearly every year, to Edinburgh, to Roslin, to Inveraray, to the Trossachs, and to a hundred other places--and if his heart was stirred with the glories of the past, his eye was quick to 'catch the manners living as they rise'. As he commented caustically at Rome on 'the church lighted up and decorated like a ball-room--the bishop with a stout train of canons, listening to the music precisely like an opera', so at Newbattle he criticizes the coldness of the kirk, 'all is silent save the minister, who discharges the whole ceremony and labours under the weight of his own tautologies'. His bringing up had been in the Anglican church; he was devoted to her liturgy, her congregational worship, her moderation and simplicity combined with reverence and warmth. Although these travels were but interludes in his busy life, they show that it was not for want of other tastes and interests of his own that his life was dedicated to laborious service. He was very human himself, and there were few aspects of humanity which did not attract him.

With his father relations were very difficult. As his interest in social questions grew, his attention was naturally turned on the poor nearest to his own doors, the agricultural labourers of Dorset. Even in those days of low wages Dorset was a notorious example quoted on many a Radical platform: the wages of the farm labourers were frequently as low as seven shillings a week, and the conditions in which they had often to bring up a large family of children were deplorable. If Lord Ashley had not himself felt the shame of their poverty, their bad housing and their other hardships, there were plenty of opponents ready to force them on his notice in revenge for his having exposed their own sores. He was made responsible for abuses which he could not remedy. While his father, a resolute Tory of the old type, still lived, the son was unable to stir. He sedulously tried to avoid all bitterness; but he could not, when publicly challenged, avoid stating his own views about fair wages and fair conditions of living, and his father took offence. For years it was impossible for the son to come under his father's roof. When the old earl died in 1851, his son lost no time in proving his sincerity as a reformer; but meanwhile he had to go into the fray against the manufacturers with his arms tied behind his back and submit to taunts which he little deserved. That he could carry on this struggle for so many years, without embittering the issues, and without open exposure of the family quarrel, shows the strength of character which he had gained by years of religious discipline and self-control.

Politics proper played but a small part in his career. The politicians found early that he was not of the 'available' type--that he would not lend himself to party policy or compromise on any matter which seemed to him of national interest. Such political posts as were offered to him were largely held out as a bait to silence him, and to prevent his bringing forward embarrassing measures which might split the party. Ashley himself found how much easier it was for him to follow a single course when he was an independent member. Reluctantly in 1834 he accepted a post at the Board of Admiralty and worked earnestly in his department; but this ministry only lasted for one year, and he never held office again, though he was often pressed to do so. He was attached to Wellington; but for Peel, now become the Tory leader, he had little love. The two men were very dissimilar in character; and though at times Ashley had friendly communications with Peel, yet in his diary Ashley often complains bitterly of his want of enthusiasm, of what he regarded as Peel's opportunism and subservience to party policy. The one had an instinct for what was practical and knew exactly how far he could combine interests to carry a measure; the other was all on fire for the cause and ready to push it forward against all obstacles, at all costs. Ashley, it is true, had to work through Parliament to attain his chief ends, and many a bitter moment he had to endure in striving towards the goal. But if he was not an adroit or successful politician, he gradually, as the struggle went on, by earnestness and force of character, made for himself in the House a place apart, a place of rare dignity and influence; and with the force of public opinion behind him he was able to triumph over ministers and parties.

It was in 1832 that he first had his attention drawn to the conditions of labour in factories. He never claimed to be the pioneer of the movement, but he was early in the field. The inventions of the latter part of the eighteenth century had transformed the north of England. The demand for labour had given rise to appalling abuses, especially in the matter of child labour. From London workhouses and elsewhere children were poured into the labour market, and by the 'Apprentice System' were bound to serve their masters for long periods and for long hours together. A pretence of voluntary contract was kept up, but fraud and deception were rife in the system and its results were tragic. Mrs. Browning's famous poem, 'The Cry of the Children,' gives a more vivid picture of the children's sufferings than many pages of prose. At the same time we have plenty of first-hand evidence from the great towns of the misery which went along with the wonderful development of national wealth. Speaking in 1873 Lord Shaftesbury said, 'Well can I recollect in the earlier periods of the Factory movement waiting at the factory gates to see the children come out, and a set of dejected cadaverous creatures they were. In Bradford especially the proofs of long and cruel toil were most remarkable. The cripples and distorted forms might be numbered by hundreds perhaps by thousands. A friend of mine collected together a vast number for me; the sight was most piteous, the deformities incredible.' And an eye-witness in Bolton reports in 1792: 'Anything like the squalid misery, the slow, mouldering, putrefying death by which the weak and feeble are perishing here, it never befell my eyes to behold, nor my imagination to conceive.' Some measures of relief were carried by the elder Sir Robert Peel, himself a cotton-spinner; but public opinion was slow to move and was not roused till 1830, when Mr. Sadler,[16] member for Newark, led the first fight for a 'Ten Hours Bill'. When Sadler was unseated in 1832, Lord Ashley offered his help, and so embarked on the greatest of his works performed in the public service. He had the support of a few of the noblest men in England, including Robert Southey and Charles Dickens; but he had against him the vast body of well-to-do people in the country, and inside Parliament many of the most progressive and influential politicians. The factory owners were inspired at once by interest and conviction; the political economy of the day taught them that all restrictions on labour were harmful to the progress of industry and to the prosperity of the country, while the figures in their ledgers taught them what was the most economical method of running their own mills.

[Note 16: See articles in _D.N.B._ on Michael Thomas Sadler (1780-1835) and on Richard Oastler (1789-1861).]

Already it was clear that Lord Ashley was no mere sentimentalist out for a momentary sensation. At all times he gave the credit for starting the work to Sadler and his associates; and from the outset he urged his followers to fix on a limited measure first, to concentrate attention on the work of children and young persons, and to avoid general questions involving conflicts between capital and labour. Also he took endless pains to acquaint himself at first hand with the facts. 'In factories,' he said afterwards, 'I examined the mills, the machinery, the homes, and saw the workers and their work in all its details. In collieries I went down into the pits. In London I went into lodging-houses and thieves' haunts, and every filthy place. It gave me a power I could not otherwise have had.' And this was years before 'slumming' became fashionable and figured in the pages of _Punch_; it was no distraction caught up for a week or a month, but a labour of fifty years! We have an account of him as he appeared at this period of his life: 'above the medium height, about 5 feet 6 inches, with a slender and extremely graceful figure... curling dark hair in thick masses, fine brow, features delicately cut, the nose perhaps a trifle too prominent,... light blue eyes deeply set with projecting eyelids, his mouth small and compressed.' His whole face and appearance seems to have had a sculpturesque effect and to have suggested the calm and composure of marble. But under this marble exterior there was burning a flame of sympathy for the poor, a fire of indignation against the system which oppressed them.