Chapter II: The Man (1)

Richard Southwell Bourke, sixth Earl of Mayo, was born in Dublin on the 21st of February, 1822. He came of a lineage not unknown throughout the seven centuries of unrest, which make up Irish history. Tracing their descent to the ancient Earls of Comyn in Normandy, the de Burghs figured as vigorous instruments in the English conquest of Ireland from the Strongbow invasion downwards. From the William Fitzadelm de Burgh, commissioned to Ireland by Henry II to receive the allegiance of the native kings, sprang a number of warlike families, now most prominently represented, after many mischances of forfeiture and lapse, by the Earls-Marquesses of Clanricarde and the Earls of Mayo.

Like other Norman barons in Ireland, the de Burghs gradually fell into the rough ways of the tribes whom they subdued. One of them married a granddaughter of Red-Hand, the old King of Connaught, and the family name naturalised itself into the Irish forms of Bourke, Burke, or Burgh, which it has since retained. {18} They adopted the conquered country as their own, and each subsequent wave of English invaders found the Bourkes as intensely Irish as the old Celtic families themselves. I trouble the reader with these matters, not from an idle love of genealogy, but because the past history of the family did much to mould the character of the Bourke who forms the subject of this volume. His was a nature into which an ancient descent infused no tincture of any ignoble pride of birth. But its memories lit within him an unquenchable love of the people among whom his ancestors had so long borne a part--a sentiment which, after blazing up once or twice in his youth, shone calmly through his life, and went with him to the grave.

'I come of a family,' he said on one occasion in the House of Commons, 'that cast in their lot with the Irish people.' To that people he devoted his whole English career. The only parliamentary office which he accepted was the Chief Secretaryship for Ireland; and this office he held thrice. He spoke so seldom on any but Irish questions as to be little known to the English public. Amid the splendid cares of India his letters break out into longings for his Irish home. It was an Irish cross that he placed on the plain of Chilianwala over the unnamed dead. In his Will, he begged that his body might be conveyed to Ireland, and laid in a humble little churchyard in the centre of his own estates, with only an Irish cross to mark his grave.

{19} As in the feuds and rebellions of Ireland, from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, the Bourkes bore a boisterous part, so, during the eighteenth century they emerge as active prelates and politicians. John Bourke of Kill and Moneycrower, an ambitious and hard-working member of the Irish Parliament, was created Baron Naas in 1776, Viscount Moneycrower in 1781, and finally Earl of Mayo in 1785. The third Earl held the Archbishopric of Tuam and gave a clerical turn to the younger branches of the family, among whom the Bishop of Waterford and the Dean of Ossory left well-remembered names. The fourth Earl has a surer hold on the public memory in Praed's verse. The fifth Earl was the father of Lord Mayo the subject of this memoir.

Hayes, the scene of Lord Mayo's early years, was an unpretending country house in Meath, about twenty-two miles from Dublin. Here, in the earlier part of the century, lived the second son of the fourth Earl of Mayo, the Honourable Richard Bourke, Bishop of Waterford and Lismore, with his wife Mary, daughter of Robert Fowler, Archbishop of Dublin. In 1820 their eldest son Robert, afterwards fifth Earl, wedded Anne Charlotte Jocelyn, a granddaughter of the Earl of Roden; and the Bishop, retiring to his see-residence at Waterford, gave up his family house of Hayes to the newly-married pair. Of this marriage Richard Bourke, whose life I am about to relate, was the eldest son.

At Hayes they lived for over forty years, bringing {20} up a family of eight[1] children in a quiet religious fashion, and upon such means as fall to the son of a younger son. In 1849 Mr. Robert Bourke succeeded to the earldom, and afterwards took his seat in Parliament as a representative peer. But long before that time, Richard and the other elder children were out in life. It was the Hayes influence that moulded their characters and shaped their careers, and it was Hayes that they always thought of as their home.

[Footnote 1: Of ten children born to them, one daughter died in infancy and one son in boyhood.]

As the Hayes income did not permit of a public school education, the father set about the task of home-training with steadfastness of purpose. In his youth he had passed a couple of years at Oxford, but his own up-bringing had been mainly a domestic and evangelical one, characteristic of an Irish see-house sixty years ago. His marriage confirmed this cast of thought by closely associating him with the evangelical leaders of the time. The tutor and governess formed important figures in the life of that quiet household, in which few events took place to mark the march of time, save the father's periodical absence at assizes, or on county business. This monotone of boyhood, little broken by the usual external influences, gave a singular force to the family tie among the young group at Hayes.

The house became a well-known resort of the evangelical clergy, and figures somewhat prominently in the religious biography of that time. One clergyman {21} has left behind a picture of his warm welcome on reaching Hayes belated--his postillions having lost their way and entangled the carriage in a wood--and how the nursery turned out a little battalion, which had retired for the night, but now streamed forth 'wrapped in shawls and cloaks' to greet the family friend. Nor does the narrative fail to notice 'the asylum established within the grounds for persecuted Protestants.'

The sobriety of tone at Hayes was brightened by the delight which the father took in the outdoor life of his children. Walking expeditions, long rides, cricket, swimming matches on the Boyne, and every form of robust companionship which endears Englishmen to each other--in all these the father and sons bore an equal part. The talent at Hayes came from the mother. But to the father they owed the ideal and standards in life which result from growing up as the dearest friends of a single-minded and tenderly considerate man.

'My father,' writes one of the sons, 'brought us all up with the idea that we should have to make our own way in the world. But at the same time, every one of us felt that what little he could do for us he would do to the last penny. His generosity used to break out unconsciously in a hundred details. During the Indian Mutiny, I gave a little lecture to the tenants and neighbours on what the army was then doing in the East. Unmeritorious as the performance undoubtedly was, I remember my father coming into {22} my room early next morning, and saying, with tears in his eyes, that he felt proud of it, and that he was not a rich man, but begged me to accept a twenty-pound note.'

Of the mother, the same son writes. 'What strikes me most in looking back, was her earnest love for her children; an inexhaustible fund of common sense; a contempt for everything mean or wrong; and a firm belief that her daily prayers for us would be answered, and that we would be a blessing and comfort to her through life.

'She it was who really enabled my father to pull through the many difficulties of his married life, between 1820 and 1849. She was never idle--always writing, doing accounts, or working; had little time for reading, but constantly did her best to get us to take an interest in books. Her mission, she used to say, was _work_. She devoted much of her time to the cottages of the sick, to clothing clubs, and the hundred little charities which crowd round the wife of an Irish squire who tries to do his duty. I never knew any one who _worked harder_. Two days a week she gave up to standing at the door of her medicine-room, dispensing drugs, and, when necessary, warm clothes to the poor. And day after day, in bad seasons week after week, the dinner-bell rang before she got a drive or a walk. Often have I thought that poor Mayo inherited from her that conscientiousness in the discharge of minute duties which to me seemed one of the characteristics of his official life, both in England and in India.'

{23} The mother stands out in this and other documents which have come into my hands, a figure of gentle refinement among the robust open-air group at Hayes; recognised by it as something of a paler and more spiritual type than the warm colouring of the life around her. Into that life she managed to infuse a consciousness that, somehow, there was a higher and more beautiful existence than the vigorous animalism of boyhood dreamed of. Richard as the eldest cherished her memory with a touching retentiveness. A thoroughly manly boy, the leader in all the pastimes and mischief of Hayes, his childhood reflected the more retired aspects of his mother's nature, not less than his father's love of out-door sports. There remains a little collection of sermons written by him before the age of twelve, and instinct with the pathos of an imaginative child under strong religious impressions. These discourses, chiefly upon texts dear to the evangelical mind, dwell with a quaint earnestness on such subjects as the doctrine of grace, the worthlessness of this world, and the glories and terrors of the next.

The taste for history soon began to mingle with his meditations, and his twelfth year produced a little book in a straggling boyish hand, entitled, 'A Preface to the Holy Bible, by R. S. B. of H----': with the motto, '_Multae terricolis linguae, coelestibus una_.' In this fasciculus he gives a historical introduction to each of the books of the Old Testament as far as the Psalms, with notices of their authors and contents. {24} His boyish letters breathe the pronounced Protestantism of the people among whom he lived. At fifteen he writes to his father: 'There is a poor man here on the verge of the grave just come out of Popery. Lord Roden' (the relative with whom he was then staying), 'has received alarming letters from M. Caesar Malan of Geneva, giving an alarming account of the increase of Popery on the Continent.' Such sentences contrast curiously with the tolerant sobriety of Lord Mayo's maturer mind. But they illustrate that ready sympathy with his surroundings, which won for him in later life the love of his own countrymen, and produced so deep an impression among the princes and peoples of India.

With one more quotation I must bid good-bye to the home-life at Hayes. It is a letter written to his mother on his thirty-seventh birthday, when he was Chief Secretary for Ireland for the second time, amid the distracting cares of Phoenix Park agitations, and the coming defeat of his party in Parliament.

'MY DEAREST MOTHER,--I am very thankful for your motherly letter and all the good advice it contains. I have had many blessings in my time, and I am most thankful for them in my heart, though I may not make any great demonstration of my thoughts. We are all getting on in years, and are, I hope, setting our faces homewards. My life is, at the very most, more than half over, even supposing that I should live to be old. And how many chances there are against that! This time thirty-seven years {25} ago I was a small thing. How much smaller in one sense shall I be thirty-seven years hence! How much greater, we may hope, in another!'

In 1838, Richard being then sixteen, the Hayes family went abroad for a couple of years. The first year they spent in Paris, the tutor and governess living as usual in the house. But for the first time in their lives, the boys bent their necks to the discipline of exact teaching, beginning with the French professor at 8 A.M. and ending with the dancing-master at 7 in the evening. For these long hours in the schoolroom they took a sufficient revenge out of doors. One can picture the torrent of thick-booted Irish boys, each accustomed to do battle for his own branch in the great laurel at home, ravaging among the miniature embellishments of a Champs Elysees garden. They set up a swing, wore the grass into holes, swarmed up the delicately-nurtured cedar, and trampled the flower-beds. At the end of six months, when the family left, Mr. Bourke had to pay the outraged proprietor a bill of five hundred francs, for '_degradation du jardin_.'

In the summer of 1839 the family rolled southwards to Switzerland, and had four months of climbing. The next winter, passed in Florence, opened up a new world. The French and Italian masters went on as before, and Richard took lessons in singing and on the violoncello, for both of which he had early disclosed an aptitude. But another sort of education also began. At first half holidays, then whole days, {26} were spent in the galleries; the mother now as ever leading him on in all noble culture. 'Richard,' writes his brother, 'intensely enjoyed the artistic atmosphere of the place.' He learned to recognise the different schools and artists by patiently looking at their works.

At Florence, too, Richard first entered the world. The mother took care that the best houses should be open to her son. So to balls, Richard Bourke and his next brother went; and to all the haunts of men and women in that friendly society of winter refugees. 'Before he returned to England,' writes his brother, 'he had become a man.'

This was in May 1840. Richard, now in his nineteenth year, set up a hunter out of his slender allowance, with an occasional second horse--a sufficiently unpretending stud, but one which he made the most of by hard riding and knowledge of the country. In December he received a captain's commission in the Kildare Militia, of which his great-uncle, the Earl of Mayo, was colonel. In 1841 he entered Trinity College, Dublin, but did not reside; and, after the usual course of study with a tutor, took an uneventful degree. During this time he lived much with his grand-uncle, the Earl of Mayo, at Palmerstown, in County Kildare. Hayes and County Meath begin to fade into the distance. But in 1842 the death of a dearly-loved brother, from the after-effects of a Roman fever, called forth a burst of home feeling, and is recorded in a little poem, which retains the pathos of {27} the moment. Next year, 1843, Richard Southwell Bourke came of age.

His hostess at Palmerstown, the Countess of Mayo, lived in the bright world which still sparkles in Praed's _vers de societe_, and, childless, clever, and kind, did what such a lady can do to make a young relative's entrance into life pleasant. Her twin-sister had married a Mr. Smith, a gentleman who, having made his fortune in the West Indies, resided at Bersted Lodge, Sussex. The Countess of Mayo's duties at Court, as Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Adelaide, kept the Palmerstown family much in England; and the twin-sisters, both childless, carried through life a peculiarly strong and tender attachment to each other. One year the Earl and Countess, with their grand-nephew, lived at Bersted Lodge; the next year Mrs. Smith paid a long visit to Palmerstown; and Richard Bourke thus saw a more varied society than usually falls to the lot of a young Irish squire.

The next couple of seasons, Mr. Bourke devoted to the art of making himself agreeable in London society. A fragment of drift-wood, cast ashore from the old letters of the period, shows in what guise he flitted before contemporary faces. 'A very young man, with a fine bearing; one of the best waltzers in town, and a great deal made of.' By this time his frame had expanded itself to the commanding stature with the air of robust strength, by which he was known through life.

{28} In 1845 his great-aunt, Lady de Clifford, died, and Mr. Bourke, not being able to go out much, devoted the summer to a tour in Russia. Armed with introductions to a Court and society then famous for its hospitality to Englishmen, he saw what was best worth seeing, and made the personal acquaintance of many European statesmen and diplomatists who had hitherto been to him only names. His letters give one the impression of a keen young intelligence looking for its first time on unfamiliar objects, and of immense powers of physical enjoyment. On his return from his tour he published an account of it in two volumes.[2] They are a very fair specimen of a young man's travels--modestly written, full of eyesight, and not overlaid with general reflections. His descriptions of Russian life are quiet and realistic, and had at the time a novelty which they do not now possess.

[Footnote 2: _St. Petersburg and Moscow. A Visit to the Court of the Czar._ By Richard Southwell Bourke, Esq. 2 vols. Henry Colburn, 1846.]

The Russians of that day appeared to him to be essentially in the imitative stage, both as regards art and letters; and he supports this position by well-chosen examples of pictorial design and by the statistics of the book-trade, contrasting the enormous number of volumes imported with the few original works produced in the country. He was particularly struck by the absence of a middle class. 'In no country,' he says, 'except, perhaps, in Ireland, is the transition from the palace to the cabin more {29} abrupt, or the difference between the peer and the peasant more wide. This is mainly owing to the want of a middle class--that cement of the social state ... which is so indispensable to the wellbeing of a commonwealth. The serf in his sheepskin may walk into the palace of his lord, or may watch by his master's gate; but no feeling in his breast tells him that he is born of the same race or formed for the same purposes. And the great lord, knowing his superiority of birth, education, and descent, looks forth on his horde of slaves with all benignity and kind attention. But it is the affection of a good heart for a noble and faithful beast, whose involuntary service may sometimes command the solicitude of the master, but never the least participation in a single right of fellowship or friendship.'[3]

[Footnote 3: Vol. i, pp. 154-155.]

And here are the results: 'We see perfectly devised plans of Government placed among a tangled web of complicated and clumsy political institutions. We see one race of men enjoying all the benefits and exhibiting all the graces of enlightened education, while the other and inferior class are sunk in deep ignorance, rudeness, and slavery. We see the palace towering by the cabin, the rod of bondage lying beside the sceptre of righteousness. The rivers flow at one moment among stately fanes and Grecian porticos; at another, wander through the savage forest and uncultivated morass. All is incongruous; the {30} social edifice is yet unbuilt, and the materials for its erection lie in splendid confusion on desert ground.'[4]

[Footnote 4: Vol. i, pp. 273-274. It should be remembered that these remarks apply to Russia in 1845.]

Mr. Bourke gives several pages to the protective system with a pleasing candour, considering the last desperate stand which at that very time was being made for it at home. After speaking of the disabilities of the merchants, and the high price alike of the luxuries and of the necessaries of life in St. Petersburg, he says: 'I fancy the real secret of the unhealthy state of the commercial interest in Russia is the incompetency of the rulers to legislate properly on this most important branch of political economy. It is impossible that men totally unacquainted with the commonest details of trade can devise measures that would rectify the present system. As long as the Government is entirely in the hands of men selected mostly from the highest class of the nobles, a really enlightened Commercial Minister will be in vain hoped for.'

But Protection and official control, he points out, were not confined to commerce. They penetrated into every nook and corner of Russian life--cramping the education, shackling the handicrafts, and interfering with the amusements, of the people. Here is how 'Protection' of the drama practically acted in Russia half a century ago: 'I never saw the Government management appear so palpably as to-night. For the performance did not commence till the Governor had taken his seat, some time after the hour {31} announced; and then the second act of the opera was delayed three-quarters of an hour, in order to permit Prince Frederick to hear as small a portion of Russian as possible. There is no use in drawing comparisons: I have avoided measuring things in other countries by our British standard of excellence, for travellers should leave as many of their patriotic prejudices as possible at home. But I could not help thinking, that were we in the Strand, instead of the Great Place of the city of Moscow, the probabilities are that the interior decorations of the theatre would, before the three-quarters of an hour had elapsed, have adorned the streets outside; and that Governor, performers, Prince, and all, would most likely have taken themselves off, in the shortest manner, or have had to await the consequences of a regular row. Be that as it may, no rebellious tongues among the small audience here dared to express even impatience, and they sat as silently and quietly doing nothing as if they had been in a conventicle.'[5]

[Footnote 5: Vol. ii, pp. 125-126.]

The pictures of the Russian husbandman might have been sketched in a Bengal rice-field, with the single change of plough bullocks for the Muscovite pony. 'I often saw a man sallying forth to his day's work, carrying his plough in one hand, and leading the little shaggy pony that was to draw it, with the other. This tool would startle a Lothian farmer, being little more than a strong forked stick, one point of which is shod with iron, and scratches the ground as the pony pulls it along, while the other is held in the {32} man's hand. The whole turn-out is very like representations I have seen in old pictures of the progress of domestic arts in the time of the Saxon Heptarchy. They do not seem to think that straight ploughing at all adds to the fertility of the soil, for they wander about in every direction, and score the ground as best suits their fancy. The animals are fed in the summer in the forest, and in winter are kept in the large stables attached to every cottage.'[6]

[Footnote 6: Vol. ii, p. 38.]

It may well be imagined that a mind trained on the Hayes standard of the responsibilities attached to property saw much that was painful in serf-life. Mr. Bourke admits, however, that the praedial bondsman, under a good master, lived 'free from want and care'; and compares the worst sort of the Russian nobles, governing 'by bad and cruel intendants, and regardless of aught but the money derived from their distant lands,' to the absentee proprietors of his own country. He describes the average serf as following some handicraft during the six winter months; tilling the ground and tending the flocks during the short summer; on the whole, well fed by his master, or enjoying a fair share of the produce of his toil, and with few wants beyond his log-hut, stove, and sheepskin; but 'languid, and rarely practising the athletic sports in which the peasants of other lands delight.'

'This, then, is the life of the Russian serf. He knows no law save the will of his master; and "the Father," as he calls the Emperor, is in his idea the {33} personification of all earthly greatness. When well treated, the serfs are affectionate and grateful, hospitable to strangers, and quiet among themselves; but the ban of slavery lies heavy upon them, and all their actions betoken a mute and almost sullen submission. Their devotion to their hereditary lords is worthy of a better cause, and merits in many instances the name of virtue. When Napoleon offered them freedom, if they would fight against their country, they indignantly refused it; and scarcely ever in the course of the war did the cause of patriotism suffer from the treason of a slave. They cheerfully sacrificed their lives and properties at the bidding of "the Father." The hand of the serf often fired his whole property, and leaving the home of his childhood, he has wandered with his family, houseless and starving, to the forest rather than the invading Gaul should find food and shelter in the land of the Emperor.' 'The Russian troops were shot down by thousands; they never thought of leaving the ground they stood on, or deserting the post assigned them. But they seldom made a brilliant charge or dashed impetuously on the foe. It was the heroism more of the martyr than the soldier; the spirit of slavery enabled them to suffer cheerfully, but did not prompt them to act as if victory depended on their own exertions.'[7]

[Footnote 7: Vol. ii, p. 53.]

'This,' he went on to say, 'might have taught the rulers a lesson.' I have quoted the foregoing passages at some length, because Lord Mayo proved, by his {34} subsequent work in India, how thoroughly he had learned that lesson himself. His whole official career, alike in Ireland and in the East, was one long protest against leaving any class outside the corporate community of the nation. In India, where he at length had a free hand, his efforts were from first to last directed to creating among the princes and peoples a sense of their solidarity under the British rule, and to developing a capacity among them for self-government, and for the effective management of their varying local interests.

One more page regarding a Russian execution by flogging to death, I must quote. For it concludes with an enunciation of the principle which, to the honour of the English name, was strictly enforced in the case of the assassin who, a quarter of a century afterwards, slew Lord Mayo himself.

'The slave who shot the Prince Gargarin some years ago suffered this terrible death. He was made a soldier for the purpose, as this is in a degree a military punishment. He was forced to walk up and down between the ranks of men, while the heavy whip of leather tore away the flesh at every stroke. At the hundred and twentieth lash he fell: his sentence was a thousand lashes. He was asked whether he would have the rest of it then, or wait for another day. He said he would have it then, knowing that to defer it would only prolong his agony. He was then set up, and received a few more blows till he fell again; they put him up a third time, when he fainted, and was {35} carried away insensible. He died the next day from the mortification of his wounds. This man was a criminal guilty of a heinous crime.' 'But it is on all sides agreed that the punishment of death is and ought to be considered as an example to the survivors, and not as a means of vengeance on the criminal. Such a scene as I have related is a disgrace to a country calling itself Christian, and contrary to all right principles of government.'[8]

[Footnote 8: Vol. ii, pp. 163-4.]

The writing of this book did much to mature Mr. Bourke's mind, and to bring it into contact with the serious aspects of life. And the aspects of life which awaited him on his return to Ireland were sufficiently serious. The potato disease and the famine years were upon the country. During those years Mr. Richard Bourke won for himself an honoured place among the hundreds of high-minded Irish gentlemen who tried to do their duty. For months he almost lived in the saddle--attending a public meeting in Kildare County one day, and another thirty miles off in Meath the next; looking after the charitable distributions; hunting out cases of starvation; buying knitting materials, and setting the women to work in their villages; arranging for the food-supply of outlying groups of huts; managing the relief lists, and doing what in him lay to calm panic, prevent waste, and battle with famine. Every now and then he would rush over to England with the sewed work, knitted shawls, and the little home-manufactures of the {36} cottagers, and get them sold at good prices through his fashionable London friends. He had a considerable gift for acting, and had been a welcome guest on that account, among others, at many a neighbour's in more prosperous times. He now turned this talent and his musical gifts to account, getting up charitable performances, or private theatricals at country houses, and a famous concert at Naas, to which half the county went or subscribed.

The popular esteem which Mr. Bourke won by his exertions during the famine was presently to bear fruit. In 1847 the two seats for County Kildare were contested by the Marquess of Kildare representing the Whigs, and Mr. O'Neill Daunt with Mr. John O'Connell for the Repealers. Mr. Richard Bourke came forward as a moderate Conservative. The return of the Marquess was a foregone conclusion; and it soon became apparent that the struggle for the second seat lay between Mr. O'Neill Daunt and Mr. Bourke.

While Mr. Bourke declared himself strongly for the Union, he was also in favour of legislation which would give 'compensation to improving tenants.' As regards the religious question, 'he knew that the Established Church was not the Church of the majority of the people; but it was the Church of the majority of the property of the country, and it was supported out of the pockets of the landlords, who were nine to one in favour of the Establishment.'

The election was conducted with amenities on both {37} sides, which contrast pleasantly with such contests at the present day. To these amenities, Mr. Bourke's personal popularity contributed in no small measure. 'I pledge you my honour,' shouted Mr. Daunt the Repealer, to certain of his followers who were interrupting the young Conservative candidate, 'I pledge you my honour I will leave the hustings if this gentleman is not heard.' 'I again declare,' Mr. Daunt exclaimed in another crisis of cat-calls, 'I will quit the Court-house if this gentleman does not get a fair hearing.'

The result of the poll was to return the Marquess of Kildare and Mr. Bourke to Parliament. So in the middle of his twenty-sixth year Mr. Richard Southwell Bourke entered the House of Commons for his own County--a moderate Conservative of the hereditary type, willing to go steadily with his party in English measures, and resolved, as far as in him lay, to secure their help in carrying Irish Land Reforms.

From 1847 to 1849 Mr. Bourke sat as a silent member. In 1848 he married Miss Blanche Wyndham; her father, afterwards Lord Leconfield, presenting the young couple with a town-house in Eccleston Square. Ever since his return from Russia, Mr. Bourke had been an active farmer and horse-breeder on his family lands in Ireland. In 1849 his father succeeded to the Earldom of Mayo, and Mr. Bourke became Lord Naas. But the new Earl, not liking the principal house of Palmerstown so well as his old residence at Hayes, gave up the Kildare mansion, with its large home-farm of 500 acres, to his son. {38} Lord Naas went with his usual energy into every detail of Irish agricultural life. The thorough knowledge which he acquired of farming and the breeding of improved stocks was destined to serve him in a very important, although altogether unexpected, manner in India.

In February, 1849, he delivered his maiden speech. 'My dear Mother,' he wrote in a hasty scribble, in the House of Commons Library, a few minutes afterwards, 'I have just made my first speech--went very well for a quarter of an hour, and was on the whole successful for a first attempt. Disraeli and others told me I did capitally. The subject was the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act' (Ireland). Throughout the next three years he steadily devoted himself, as before, to committees and the details of Parliamentary work--speaking on an average only four times a session, and keeping to the subjects which he knew best. Of these twelve speeches (1849-50-51), ten dealt exclusively with Irish questions; the two others referred to steam communication with Australia and India. The whole make but fifty-six columns of Hansard.

'During this period,' writes one who watched his career, 'he established for himself in Parliament the position of a sensible country gentleman, speaking from time to time on Irish affairs, and not mixing himself up with general politics. Indeed, this may be said of his whole public life; for, with the exception of one or two colonial matters, I do not {39} recollect any subject unconnected with Ireland on which he spoke.'

He had, however, attracted the notice of the chiefs of his party. He declared his views with much vigour on the necessity of giving improving tenants in Ireland some security for their outlay. The subject had been familiar to him from boyhood, and he brought to it a knowledge of details, obtained in the double capacity of a squire's son and of a practical farmer, willing to improve his land, but determined to make it pay.

In 1851 he supported his party by a great array of facts and figures concerning the Irish milling trade. This question also lay within his personal experience, both from the farmer's point of view and from the capitalist's. He knew the actual working of the system; and he succeeded in keeping the ear of the House through 16-1/2 columns of Hansard--the longest speech but one in his twenty-one years of Parliamentary life. An enthusiastic letter of thanks from a meeting of Irish millers rewarded the effort.

Next year the Conservatives came into power. People remarked at the time, that Lord Derby, in forming his Ministry, chose a larger proportion than usual of men untried in office. Lord Naas was one of them. To his surprise and delight, he received the offer of the Chief Secretaryship for Ireland--the highest Parliamentary appointment which an Irish commoner holds in his native country. He was but {40} thirty years of age, and he went at the outset by the name of the Boy-Secretary, a title which Sir Robert Peel and the late Earl Derby had borne before him. He wrote to his brother with diffidence as to his fitness, but very resolute as to trying to do his best: 'I am a new hand, but at any rate I am not afraid of the work.'

Having accepted office, Lord Naas went over to Ireland to seek re-election. But he found things changed in County Kildare since 1847. In that year the popularity which he had won during the famine just enabled him to turn the scale at the hustings. The ebullition of public feeling had naturally passed off by 1852, and Lord Naas found it prudent to content himself with the less difficult constituency of Coleraine. He sat for Coleraine in the north of Ireland from 1852 to 1857, when he came in for Cockermouth, in Cumberland, backed by the interest of his wife's family, the Wyndhams. This borough he continued to represent until he left for India in 1868.

During the short time which the Conservatives continued in power, after Lord Naas' appointment to the Irish Secretaryship, he brought forward, besides a Tenant-Right and a Tenants' Compensation Act, several very important Bills affecting Ireland. He spoke only on Irish questions; and after the resignation of his party, he steadily pursued the same system until the Conservatives again came into power, in 1858. During these six years he was practically the Parliamentary leader of the Conservative party in {41} Ireland, and of the Irish Conservatives in the House. His father sat as a representative peer in the Lords, voting with the Tories, but scarcely speaking, and taking little interest in politics.

The Crimean war brought deep anxiety to the Bourkes, as to most other families throughout the British Islands. The second son, Colonel the Honourable John Bourke, gave up his staff-appointment and joined his regiment, the 88th Connaught Rangers, on its being ordered to the seat of war. The Earl and Countess of Mayo were then residing in Paris, and it fell to Lord Naas to keep his parents informed of each crisis. His letters, full of that mingling of affectionate pride, heart-eating anxiety, and sternly subdued longing for the end, which form the true discipline of war to a nation, recall the family aspects of the struggle with a most affecting veracity. The 88th did its duty, and the names of 'Alma,' 'Inkermann,' and 'Sevastopol' figure in the proud roll on its colours. But the weary waiting for the lists of killed and wounded is the chief record which its achievements have left in these letters.

Lord Naas tried to comfort his mother in her painful suspense about her son by a mixture of religious consolation and the doctrine of chances. 'Keep up, and hope in God he may be safe. Two thousand men are about one in seven killed or wounded of those engaged; so even human chances are in our favour. But it is in the God of battles we must trust.' Then a few days later, 'My dearest {42} Mother,--The list of killed and wounded has just arrived. Thank God, our dear Johnny is safe. It is the greatest mercy our family has ever received, and I trust we may be thankful for it to the end of our lives. What an awful list!'

How the ever present anxiety of those winters penetrated the smallest details of life! 'I went to Ballinasloe last Monday,' he writes, 'and bought thirty-one heifers. The cost was enormous, 15 pounds 15_s._, and they never can pay unless prices keep up. But they were as cheap as any in the fair. I went over to Lord Cloncurry's for the night. John Burke, of Johnny's regiment, was there. He told me a great deal about him. He said he did his work well. He says he saw him telling off his company, after the battle of Inkermann, as coolly as if he had been on parade.'

Meanwhile Lord Naas was doing good work for his party during their six years in opposition. He had won the liking and confidence of the Irish Conservatives in the House; and Lord Derby, when he came into power in 1858, again offered Lord Naas the Chief Secretaryship for Ireland. A long list of measures in that and the following year bears witness to his activity.

One who was officially connected with him in two of his principal Bills thus writes: 'What struck me in my communications with him on these matters was this. After the Bills had been settled by those conversant with the legal part of the subject, he would detect errors which had escaped us all. He {43} swooped down upon a flaw like a scholar on a false quantity, and would sometimes break up a whole set of clauses with his own hand, and re-write them himself, saying, "There, now; you may put it into legal language, but that is the sense of the thing I want." Again, when a draftsman would produce something very symmetrical and beautiful in theory, he would say: "That's all very fine, but the House of Commons won't look at it." At this time he began to feel almost a despair of accomplishing any real work for Ireland, owing to the factions within herself and in Parliament. I do not think he had more respect for the ultra-Orange party than he had for the Fenians. He believed they were alike hurtful to the country, and that the opposition to be expected from one, or it might chance from both, made it hopeless to attempt anything sound or moderate.

'This feeling especially oppressed him with regard to his Tenant-Right Bills and his educational measures. He had at the same time so warm a regard for many friends of various shades of opinion, that it hurt him sorely when he felt it his duty to propose a policy which he knew they would not approve of. He would say to them: "Well, if you don't like my Bill, you'll have to swallow something much worse from the Radicals next year." His love for Ireland was inexhaustible, and alone carried him through the vexations of trying to work for her. He loved the people, he liked the climate (he hated an east wind or a frosty day), he liked the sport, and he loved his {44} friends and neighbours. I recollect his saying to me when a political opponent, Lord Dunkellin, died: "Dunkellin is a great loss; he loved Ireland so truly, and understood her so well, that he would have done real good for us all some day."'

A colleague, who afterwards came into the closest relations with Lord Naas in his Parliamentary work, writes to me thus: 'Lord Mayo lived too far ahead of his party for his own comfort. Though he was a member of a Tory Cabinet, I think that his opinions were shared to the full by only one member of that Cabinet, Mr. Disraeli. He was not entirely a Conservative of his own day; neither was he a Liberal, according to the tenets of the Liberal party of his time. He was a large-minded politician, who felt the necessity of belonging to one party or another if he were to effect anything practical. While revering the Established Church, he admitted the right of every man to choose his own creed, and denied to no faith a power to save. While he desired to maintain all rights essential to the security of landed property, he was anxious to do away with the legal or technical difficulties that stand between the tillers of the soil and the full enjoyment of the results of their labour. If he could only see a real reform in the state of the land and of the cultivator, he cared not whence or how it came. He believed that any permanent improvement of the land ought to be for the benefit alike of the owner and of the tiller of the soil. His idea was, "If you really improve my land, you shall {45} not lose by so doing, and any rule or law that says otherwise shall be done away with." He used to argue that, if you prevent such reforms you injure yourself as landlord, and you act unjustly to your fellow-men. Liberty of thought, of faith, and of action he loved more than life itself. The exercise of either spiritual or temporal power for purposes of intimidation or wrongful coercion was to him hateful. He had an unresting sympathy for all in want or in misery. For the lunatic poor, for prisoners, and for the fallen, his heart was always urging him to work; and for them he _did_ work, and did good work.'

Another of his colleagues, the Earl of Derby, has touched off his character as an official: 'I have known other men, though not very many, who were perhaps his equals in industry, in clearsightedness, and in the assemblage of qualities which, united, form what we call a good man of business; and I have known men, though but few, who possessed perhaps to an equal extent that generosity of disposition, that unfeigned good-humour and good temper, which were among the most marked characteristics of our lamented friend: but I do not know if I ever met any one in whom those two sets of qualities were so equally and so happily united. No discussion could be so dry, but Lord Mayo would enliven it with the unforced humour which was one of his greatest social charms. No question could be so complicated, but that his simple, straightforward way of looking at it was {46} quite sure of suggesting something of which you had not thought before.'

'He understood thoroughly,' continues Lord Derby, 'how important an element of administrative success is the conciliation of those with whom you have to deal; but the exercise of that power was with him not a matter of calculation, but the result of nature. He did and said generous things, not because it was politic, not because it was to his political interest, but because it was his nature, and he could not help it. I do not think he had in the world a personal enemy; and so far as it is possible to speak of that which is passing in another man's mind, I should say he had never known what it was to harbour against any person a feeling of resentment. We who acted with him in Irish matters can bear witness to his firmness when firmness was necessary, to the soundness of his judgment in difficulties--and difficulties just then were not unfrequent--and, above all, to that coolness which was never more marked than in critical moments.'

'As the chief of a great office,' writes one well competent to speak, 'he had the finest qualities. Early in his habits, regular in his work, and unceasing in industry, he set a great example; and he knew, somehow or other, the secret of getting out of every one under him the maximum of work which each might be capable of. He had a faculty which I have never observed so fully developed in any one else, of detecting a single blunder in the papers before {47} him. I have seen him open a large file of documents, and almost immediately hit upon an inaccuracy, either in the text or in the subject-matter. I once handed him a long Bill, revised with great care by the Crown lawyers, and saw him discover in almost an instant of time what proved to be the only clerical error in it. He was my idea of a great head of a department, knowing every branch of the work, familiar with almost everything that had been done by his predecessors, and always ready to meet and to overcome difficulties.'

This facility of work was no doubt largely due to the fact that Lord Naas held only one office, and that he held it each time when his party came into power during twenty years. He made Ireland his speciality from the first, and the Chief Secretaryship, with its rules, precedents, and every detail of its duties, sat as familiarly on him as the clothes he wore.

In 1859 his party went out, and during the next seven years Lord Naas was again the Parliamentary leader of the Irish Conservatives in opposition. He had no enemies except among the more extreme parties of his countrymen on either side. His political opponents frequently consulted him, and have been ready to acknowledge the practical hints which they obtained from him. The truth is, as the colleague already quoted says, that he was more anxious to obtain good measures for Ireland than careful as to the party whence they might come. Indeed, his maiden speech in 1849 had been in support of the {48} Ministry to whom he was politically opposed; and although his official connection with his own party afterwards placed a fitting reticence on his words when he disagreed with it, he was ever willing to help any one whom he thought was doing real work for Ireland.

During these years of opposition, he spoke vigorously upon the Irish prison system, poor relief, national and mixed education, police, agricultural statistics, registration Acts, and many other questions connected with his own country. He was not a brilliant orator, but he put forward his views with sense and firmness, and always spoke with a perfect knowledge of the facts. When the Conservatives again came into power in 1866, Lord Derby for the third time offered him the Chief Secretaryship, with a seat in the Cabinet, and in that office he remained until he left for India in 1868. This marks the period of his greatest political activity. A bare list of the measures which he introduced into Parliament, or carried out in his executive capacity, would fill many pages. The subjects were the same as before, and they dealt with almost every side of the condition and wants of Ireland. These years are chiefly remembered in England by the Fenian agitations, which, both before and after that time have, under one name or another, perplexed Irish Ministers. But in Ireland they are known as years of well-planned improvement in the practical administration.

'In 1867,' writes one of his colleagues during this {49} trying period, 'he had no fewer than thirty-five Bills in preparation. I often wondered how one man could carry so much in his head about matters so different in their nature and so difficult in themselves. Yet I always found him perfectly conversant with each, prepared on the moment to discuss any change I might suggest, and ready with a reason why he had not framed his instructions on the plan I might propose. He never lost his presence of mind. I well remember one morning in March, 1867, I received a message at an early hour from Lord Naas, saying that he would like to see me. When I entered his room at the Irish Office, he was sitting at a table writing a letter, looking uncommonly well and fresh, and quite composed and quiet. He handed me a telegram, and went on with his writing. I read that during the night there had been a rising of Fenians near Dublin. I confess I was considerably agitated, and did not conceal it. I shall never forget the demeanour of Lord Naas. He had lost not a moment in sending a copy of the telegram to Her Majesty, and preparing the case for the Cabinet. What puzzled him more than anything was the sudden stoppage of any further news. We telegraphed again and again, but it was not till late in the afternoon that any clear answers were received. He issued all the orders with the same quiet and precision as if dealing with ordinary work. He had at once determined to go that night to Ireland, and to remain there till order was restored.

{50} 'He had perfect confidence in his arrangements, and he declared that the insurrection could never assume any serious importance. But he was uneasy for the safety of persons living in isolated parts, and about the small bands of villains who would use a political disturbance as a shelter for local crimes. He said: "I dread more than anything else that a panic will be fed by newspaper reports, and that an outcry may get up that Ireland ought to be declared in a state of siege, and military law proclaimed. To this I will never yield, although I know my refusal will be misrepresented, and may for the moment intensify the alarm."'

It is unnecessary in a personal narrative to repeat what followed in the Fenian camp. 'The insurrection,' continues his colleague, 'if it may be dignified by that name, was immediately stamped out. Lord Naas put it down in his own way, yielding neither to threats nor entreaties; acting wisely and firmly, and allowing himself to be influenced neither by newspaper panics, nor by patriots in the House of Commons, nor by rebels outside it. When he returned to London, he went on with his Government Bills precisely as if nothing had happened, and no fewer than eighteen of his measures prepared in that year received the Royal assent.'

In January, 1867, his mother died. His father survived her only six months, and on 12th August, 1867, Lord Naas succeeded as sixth Earl of Mayo.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Ministry were in a {51} minority in the House of Commons. It became clear in 1868 that a general attack might be expected, and that the Opposition would select Irish ground. Accordingly, in that session Mr. Maguire, then member for Cork, moved for a committee of the whole House to consider the state of Ireland. On this occasion Lord Mayo was made the mouthpiece of the Government. His speech, although not successful as a Parliamentary utterance at the moment, forms a most valuable contribution to the political history of Ireland.