Chapter I: His Life

Motley was born at Dorchester, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1814. His great-grandfather, John Motley, came from Belfast, Ireland, early in the Eighteenth Century, and settled at Falmouth, now Portland, Maine. His father, Thomas Motley, a prosperous merchant of Boston, married Anna Lothrop, daughter of the Reverend John Lothrop. The historian, the second-born of their eight children, was named in honor of his maternal grandfather.

After a course of study under Cogswell and Bancroft at the Round Hill School, Motley entered Harvard College and was graduated in 1831. He was noted both at Northampton and Cambridge for intellectual brilliancy rather than studiousness, for a regal manner which did not tend to make him universally popular, and for rare personal beauty as was becoming in a youth whose parents were reputed in their younger days ‘the handsomest pair the town of Boston could show.’ He was a wit. ‘Give me the luxuries of life and I will dispense with the necessaries,’ is one of his best-known sayings. His passions were literary, he admired Shelley and enjoyed the cleverness of Praed. Although fond of versifying, he seems to have printed little or nothing.

After graduation Motley spent two years (1832–33) at German universities. He went first to Göttingen, where he made the acquaintance of Bismarck. They were fellow-students the next year at Berlin. ‘We lived in closest intimacy, sharing meals and outdoor exercise,’ said Bismarck in a letter to Holmes.

His period of foreign study having come to an end, Motley read law in Boston and was admitted to the bar. In 1837 he married Miss Mary Benjamin, a young woman noted for her beauty, cleverness, and an open-hearted sincerity which ‘made her seem like a sister to those who could help becoming her lovers.’[46] Two years after his marriage Motley made his literary beginning by publishing a novel, _Morton’s Hope, or the Memoirs of a Provincial_, and in 1849 he published yet another, _Merry-Mount, a Romance of the Massachusetts Colony_. Neither was successful. Perhaps the second failure was required to emphasize the lesson taught by the first, that the author’s gifts were not for imaginative work.[47] He was more fortunate with a group of three essays printed in the ‘North American Review,’ one on ‘Peter the Great’ (1845), one on ‘Balzac’ (1847), the third on ‘The Polity of the Puritans’ (1849).

The first subject was suggested to Motley during a residence of several months in St. Petersburg as Secretary to the American Legation (1841–42). This taste of diplomatic life seems not to have been wholly relished. Motley’s wife could not accompany him, and homesickness and a Russian winter conspired to drive him back to America. He gained some knowledge of practical politics by serving a term in the Massachusetts legislature (1849). Neither law, nor diplomacy, nor yet politics, seemed at that time to offer a field in which he could work to best advantage. More and more he was tending towards literature. So absorbed had he become in the history of Holland that he felt it ‘necessary to write a book on the subject, even if it were destined to fall dead from the press.’ He had made some progress when he heard of Prescott’s projected history of Philip the Second. Thinking it ‘disloyal’ not to declare his ambition of invading a part of Prescott’s own domain, he went to lay his plan before the elder historian. Prescott immediately offered the use of books from his library and was in all ways cordial and enthusiastic.

It soon became evident that a history of Holland could not be written in America. In 1851 Motley took his family and went abroad, and for the next five years toiled unweariedly among the archives of Dresden, The Hague, Brussels, and Paris. His energy and plodding patience surprised the friends who remembered Motley for a brilliant young man who heretofore had played industriously at work rather than actually worked. ‘He never shrank from any of the drudgery of preparation,’ said his daughter, Lady Harcourt, in after years.

The three volumes of _The Rise of the Dutch Republic_ were at length ready for the press. Motley was forced to publish at his own expense. Notwithstanding hostile criticisms, the success was undeniable. The book was immediately translated into French, German, and Dutch. Of two French versions the one published in Paris was edited, with an introduction, by Guizot.

The historical series as we have it comprises nine volumes. The works appeared in the following order: _The Rise of the Dutch Republic_, 1856; _History of the United Netherlands_, 1860–68; _The Life and Death of John of Barneveld_, 1874. Motley’s plan included a history of the Thirty Years’ War. But he was not to be granted length of days sufficient for the writing of this ‘last act of a great drama.’

Among many scholastic honors which in the nature of things fell to Motley’s share may be mentioned the conferring of the degree of D. C. L. by Oxford, and the election to full membership in the Institute of France.

Shortly after the fall of Fort Sumter, Motley published in the London ‘Times’ two letters on the significance and justice of the war. They had a marked effect in England and were reprinted in America. In June, 1861, the Austrian government having refused to accept the minister sent to Vienna, Motley was accredited to the mission. After discharging the duties of his office with marked ability during the four troubled years of Lincoln’s administration, and through two years of Johnson’s, he resigned because of an affront offered him by his own government.[48]

During the political campaign of 1868 Motley gave an address in Music Hall, Boston, on ‘Four Questions for the People at the Presidential Election.’ On December 16, as orator at the sixty-first anniversary of the New York Historical Society, he spoke on ‘Historic Progress and American Democracy.’ In the spring of 1869 President Grant assigned Motley to the English mission, and in July, 1870, recalled him. The reasons given for this summary act have never been satisfactory to Motley’s friends. It is a question for experts. If Motley’s indiscretion (or offence) was great, his punishment was severe, and the manner of it not undeserving of the epithet brutal.[49]

Motley’s health is believed to have been affected by distress of mind over the recall. But the real disaster of his latter years was the loss of his wife. He survived her only two and a half years. His death occurred at Kingston Russell, near Dorchester, England, on May 29, 1877.

Dean Stanley in his tribute to Motley at Westminster Abbey used the striking phrase, ‘an historian at once so ardent and so laborious.’ J. R. Green, who heard the sermon, thought the phrase ‘most happy.’ Said Green: ‘I should have liked Stanley to have pointed out the thing which strikes me most in Motley, that alone of all men past and present he knit together not only America and England, but that Older England which we left on Frisian shores, and which grew into the United Netherlands. A child of America, the historian of Holland, he made England his adopted country, and in England his body lies.’