Chapter III: Travels and Diplomacy (2)

Having become third secretary in November, 1862, Labouchere was appointed to Constantinople. He wrote in _Truth_ nearly thirty years later: "I was once Secretary of Embassy at Constantinople and I passed my time reading up Lord Stratford's despatches before and during the Crimean War. No one could have recognised them as the originals from which Mr. Kinglake drew his material for a narrative of the Ambassador's diplomatic action. The fact was that Lord Stratford was one of the most detestable of the human race. {63} He was arrogant, resentful, and spiteful. He hated the Emperor Nicholas because he had declined to receive him as Ambassador to Russia, and the Crimean War was his revenge. In every way he endeavoured to envenom the quarrel and to make war certain. His power at Constantinople was enormous. This was because, whilst the Ambassadors of other Powers changed, his stay there seemed eternal. A Grand Vizier, or a Minister of Foreign Affairs, knew that, if he offended the English Ambassador, he would never cease plotting to drive him out, and to keep him out of power. He therefore thought it better to keep on good terms with him and to submit to his arrogance. But Lord Stratford never used his power for good. It was enough for him to get the Sultan to publish a decree. This he would send home as evidence of good government. He never, however, explained that the decree, when published, remained a dead letter. When Sir Henry Bulwer (Lord Dalling) was sent as Commissioner to the Principalities, he passed a considerable time (as indeed was necessary) at Constantinople. Lord Stratford knew that Sir Henry wanted to replace him, and he feared that he would succeed in doing so. His rage and indignation were therefore unbounded. One day the Ambassador and the Commissioner were together at the Embassy. 'I know,' said the Ambassador, 'that you are trying to get my place,' and he shook his fist in the face of Sir Henry, who mildly surveyed him and shrugged his shoulders."

Sir Horace Rumbold writes charmingly of Henry Labouchere at Constantinople in 1863. "In August," he says, "the torrid heat drove me to seek for a while the cool breezes of the Bosphorus, and I then, for the first time, became acquainted with the wonders of Constantinople. Here I found at the Embassy Edward Herbert and got to know that remarkable, _original_, and most talented and kind-hearted of would-be cynics, Henry Labouchere."[16] Later on, in the same volume of reminiscences, he gives another picture of {64} the young secretary, whose diplomatic career was, however, soon to come to a close. "The Pisani dynasty were still masters of the situation when I arrived. Under the, in many ways, unfortunate tenure of the Embassy by Sir Henry Bulwer, Alexander Pisani, best known as the 'Count,' who was simply the Keeper of the Archives, had been made head of the Diplomatic Chancellerie of the Embassy, to the intense disgust of successive secretaries properly belonging to the Service. Pisani, it was said, had extorted this abnormal appointment from his chief by threatening to resign and write his memoirs. Henry Labouchere, among others, greatly resented the arrangement. Some years before, he had a passage of arms with the 'Count,' who had reproved him, so to speak, officially for absenting himself for the day from the Chancery on some occasion, without applying to him for leave to do so. The ridiculous affair was referred to Sir Henry Bulwer, and gave my friend Labby a charming opportunity of describing the 'Count' in a formal letter to the Ambassador. 'It seems to me,' he wrote, 'a singular dispensation that places a Greek nobleman of Venetian extraction, who profited by the advantages of a Pera education, in authority over a body of English Gentlemen.'"

Mr. Labouchere was always very amusing on the subject of his chief at Constantinople. He said that Lord Balling could not understand the value of money. He was so generous that he was always in financial difficulties. At one time the Embassy was reduced to such straits that there was no money to buy any decent wine. The difficulty was met in the following manner: At official dinners the grand-looking _maître d'hôtel_ would solemnly say before pouring out the wine, "Château Lafitte '48," or "La Rose '52," and so on, all through dinner. As a matter of fact, the wine had really come from the neighbouring Greek isles, and had been doctored with an infusion of prunes to tone down the flavour of tar, which is inseparable from these insular vintages. Lord Dalling himself was so anxious to please that he would {65} quaff glass after glass of the horrible beverage, swallowing numberless pills the while as an antidote.

There are many versions of the incident with which Labouchere chose to conclude his relations with the Diplomatic Service. The Foreign Office records of the date are not yet available, but I am indebted to Sir Audley Gosling for his recollections of the affair as it happened. In the summer of 1864, Labouchere found himself at Baden-Baden, enjoying the relaxation of a little gambling after his strenuous work in the service of his country. While there he received from Lord Russell, the Foreign Secretary, the usual stereotyped announcement of his promotion in the Diplomatic Service. It ran: "I have to inform you that Her Majesty has, on my recommendation, been pleased to promote you to be a Second Secretary in the Diplomatic Service to reside at Buenos Ayres."

Labouchere is said to have replied as follows: "I have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your Lordship's despatch, informing me of my promotion as Second Secretary to Her Majesty's Legation at Buenos Ayres. I beg to state that, if residing at Baden-Baden I can fulfil those duties, I shall be pleased to accept the appointment." As this was the second joke he had played on Lord Russell, he was politely told that there was no further use for his services.[17]

A successful "system" is not an essential part of the educational equipment of a diplomat, but it may on occasion be a very useful extra to his other accomplishments. Mr. Labouchere found it so. "I used at one time," he said, "to take the waters every year at Homburg, and I invariably paid the expenses of my trip out of my winnings at the gambling-tables. It may have been luck, or it may have been system; but I give my system for what it is worth. I {66} used to write the following figures on a piece of paper: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. My stake was always the top and bottom figure added together. If I won, I scratched out these figures; if I lost, I wrote down the stake at the bottom of the figures, and I went on playing until all the figures on my piece of paper were erased. Thus my first stake (and I played indifferently on red or black) would be ten. If I won it, I scratched out three and seven. My next stake would be ten again, as four and six make ten. If I lost it, I wrote down ten at the bottom of my list of figures, and played fourteen, being the addition of the first and last figure on the list, viz. fourteen. The basis of the 'system' was this. Before reaching the maximum, I could play a series of even chances for about two hours, and if during these two hours I won one quarter as many times as the bank, plus five, all my figures were erased. During these two hours an even chance would be produced two hundred times. If, therefore, I won fifty-five times, and the bank won one hundred and forty-five times, I was the winner of twenty-five napoleons, florins, or whatever was my unit. Now let any one produce an even chance by tossing up a coin and always crying 'heads,' he will find that he may go on until Doomsday before the 'tails' exceed the 'heads,' or the 'heads' exceed the 'tails,' by ninety-five. I found this system in a letter from Condorcet to a friend, which I read in a book that I purchased at a stall on the 'Quai' at Paris. It may have been, as I have said, only luck; but all I can say is, that whenever I played it I invariably won."

One of Mr. Labouchere's oldest friends, Mrs. Crawford, recently wrote to me a letter in which she made the following lucid remarks about his career in the Diplomatic Service: "I was acquainted," she says, "with many of his diplomatic comrades, and they often spoke of him in chat with me. Some were friendly, some were not. He had a very unguarded tongue, and discharged his shafts of satire, irony, humour in all directions, and every arrow that hit made an {67} enemy. I, mentally, used to take this into account in judging of their judgments, and the habit, which does not exist in England, of searching for mitigating circumstances helped me to make a fair and true estimate of his complex nature. I think he rather enjoyed, but _passagèrement_, being thought a Richard III., an Iago--an inveterate gambler. I soon came to the conclusion that this was partly due to a reaction against the idolatrous attitude of the English middle class and religious people towards Victoria and Albert, for it was shockingly fulsome--and the Queen early showed hostility towards him. His uncle, Lord Taunton, reflected her known sentiments, and so did Lord Clarendon. He was wrong, very wrong, to have treated the vile crime of Grenville Murray, and committed too in an Office capacity, as a thing of no consequence and the stumble made by an exceedingly clever man--a too great rarity in the British Consular Service. I have some recollection that she was furious with the Prince of Wales, who had not the virtue, in his early years at any rate, of reticence in speaking, for, on the authority of Mr. Labouchere, taking Grenville Murray's part against the Foreign Office in her presence. This, however, was only one of the reasons of her fixed hostility...."

The crime to which Mrs. Crawford refers as having been committed by Grenville Murray in an official capacity was that of forwarding private news to the _Morning Post_ (to which paper he was secretly acting as correspondent) in the Foreign Office bag from Vienna, where he was an attaché in 1852, under Lord Westmorland. Mr. Labouchere declared in _Truth_ that Lord Palmerston, having a private grudge against Prince Schwarzenberg, the Prime Minister of Austria, and wishing for special information about him to reach the British public, had come to a private understanding with Grenville Murray that his journalistic correspondence would be winked at. Unfortunately the "copy" fell into the hands of Lord Westmorland, who demanded from Lord {68} Palmerston the instant dismissal of Murray. Murray was not dismissed, but in a year's time was transferred to Constantinople, where Lord Stratford de Redcliffe reigned supreme. He had, of course, heard from Lord Westmorland about Murray's journalistic indiscretions, and hated him accordingly. Murray retorted by holding up his chief to every sort of ridicule to the English magazine-reading public; for he was a clever writer, and contributed largely to _Household Words_, then under the editorship of Charles Dickens. The Foreign Office soon thought it necessary to remove him, and he was appointed to the consul-generalship of Odessa. At Odessa the consul was just as unpopular as the attaché had been at Vienna and Constantinople. The defence of Grenville Murray, to which Mrs. Crawford refers, was probably founded upon facts contained in the following passage of an "Anecdotal Photograph" of Lord Derby, published by Mr. Labouchere in an early number of _Truth_:

When Lord Derby was at the head of the Foreign Office, he left all the appointments in the Diplomatic Service to the permanent officials, and, owing to this pococurantism, he did an act of injustice to one of the most brilliant _littérateurs_ of the day. The gentleman in question had a consulship in the East. An able and brilliant man, he was naturally a _persona ingrata_ to the high priests of red tape, and between them and him there was perpetual war, which at length culminated in a determination to remove him _per fas_ or _per nefas_ from the service. Certain charges were accordingly brought against this gentleman, who was put on his defence. The accused, who was then in London, applied for copies of certain papers from the archives of the Foreign Office which he considered essential to his complete exculpation. The officials at first declined to grant them, but, after a long correspondence, admitted the justice of the claim. The papers were sent accordingly, together with two separate letters, both bearing the same date. One announced that the documents had been forwarded, the other that Lord Derby had made up his mind on the whole case, and his decision was in these words: "I have accordingly advised the Queen to cancel your {69} commission as ----, and it is hereby cancelled accordingly." The recipient of this interesting epistle was at first inclined to treat it as a bad joke, but soon found that it was an authentic fact.[18]

I have the great good fortune also to have received from Mr. Wilfrid Blunt a brief memoir of Mr. Labouchere, which commences in his early diplomatic days, and though it carries us on almost to the end of his life, I think that its publication here will enable those readers who did not know Mr. Labouchere personally to get a sincere impression of the whole of his career, which cannot fail to be of assistance to them in elucidating his curious original personality from the maze of dates and details which are the inevitable appendages of a comprehensive biography. Mr. Blunt writes as follows:

Feb. 13, 1913.

My acquaintance with Henry Labouchere dates, if I remember rightly, from the early spring of 1861. We were both then in the Diplomatic Service, and though not actually employed together, I had just succeeded him as unpaid attaché at the Frankfort Legation, and found him still lingering there when I came to take up my not very onerous duties that year under our chief, Sir Alexander Malet, Edward Malet's father. Labouchere's attraction to Frankfort was not Frankfort itself, but its close neighbourhood to Hombourg, where the gambling-tables still flourished, and where he spent nearly all his time. By rights he ought to have been at St. Petersburg, but pretended that he could not afford to travel to his new post except on foot, and so was staying on waiting to have his expenses paid by Government. His life at that time was an avowedly disreputable one, the society of Hombourg being what it was; and he was looked upon by the more strait-laced ladies of the Corps Diplomatique as something of a pariah. There was a good deal of talk about him, opinions being divided as to whether he was more knave or fool, greenhorn or knowing fellow, all which amused him greatly. He was in reality the good-hearted {70} cynic the world has since acknowledged him to be, with a keen appreciation of the _comédie humaine_, a contempt for aristocratic shams, and a philosopher's taste for low society.

I have a coloured caricature I made of him of that date, 1861, in which he is represented as undergoing a conversion to respectability at the hands of Countess d'Usedom, the Olympia of the Bismarck memoirs, and wife of the Prussian Ambassador, with her two Scotch nieces in the preposterous crinoline dresses of the time. He figures in it as a round-faced young man with highly coloured cheeks, and an air of mock modesty which is very characteristic. It is labelled "The Deformed Transformed."

Later, I used to see him pretty frequently in London at the St. James' Club, of which we were both members. He was already beginning to be a recognised wit, and a central figure among talkers in the smoking-room. But I remember old Paddy Green of Evans' still maintaining that he was for all that a simple-minded fellow, made to be the prey of rogues. It was as such that he had known him some years before when Labouchere first appeared in London life and took up his quarters at Evans' Hotel in Covent Garden. The good Irishman had dolorous stories of the way in which his protégé had then been fleeced. "Poor Labouchere, poor Labouchere," he used to say, in his paternally emotional voice; "a good young man, but always his own worst enemy." His own worst enemy he certainly often was. I remember his coming into the Club one evening, it must have been in 1865, when he had just been elected M.P. for Windsor, and boasting to all of us who would listen to him, with every detail, how he had bribed the free and intelligent electors of the Royal Borough, an imprudence which caused him the misfortune of his being unseated immediately afterwards on petition.

Of the years that followed, when he was making his name as a journalist, and his fortune on the Stock Exchange, I have nothing particular to record. I came once more into close connection with him in 1882, at the time of the trial of Arabi at Cairo after Tel-el-Kebir. Labouchere, during the early months of the year, had been among those Radicals who in the House of Commons had followed Chamberlain and Dilke in pressing intervention in Egypt on the Foreign Office, and he made no {71} secret of the reason--he was a holder of Egyptian Bonds. The bombardment of Alexandria and the massacre of Tel-el-Kebir, with the revelations which followed of the intrigues which had caused the war, proved, however, too much for his political conscience, which was really sound, and having unloaded his Egyptian stock, which had gone up to higher prices (for he was not a man to neglect a Stock Exchange opportunity), he frankly repented of his sin, and from that time onwards did his best to repair the wrong to Egypt he had joined in doing. He subscribed handsomely to the "Arabi Defence Fund," was always ready to ask questions in the House, and did not scruple to reproach the Grand Old Man with his lapses at Cairo and in the Soudan from his Midlothian principles. In this connection I saw much of him from 1883 to 1885, years during which Egypt occupied so large a share of public attention, and always found him interested in the Egyptian cause and helpful.

He was living then in Queen Anne's Gate, and I was pretty sure to find him in the morning, and often stayed to lunch with him and his wife. He was uniformly gay and pleasant and ready to give news. No one ever was more generous in sharing his political knowledge with his friends, and I could count on him to tell me the true and exact truth of what was going on in the directions that interested me, without regard to the rules of secrecy so many public men affect. Of his wit too he was copiously lavish, as only those are who have it in supreme abundance, giving of his very best to a single listener as freely as to a larger audience. This, I always think, is the test of genius in the department of brilliant talking, and no one ever shone there more conspicuously than he did. His worldly wisdom was wonderful. Nor was it confined to things at home, the House of Commons, and the intrigue of Downing Street. He was really the only English Radical, with Dilke, who had an accurate acquaintance with affairs abroad, and he had his Europe at his finger-ends. He would have made an admirable ambassador, where any difficult matters had to be carried through, and he ought certainly to have been given the Embassy he so much desired at Washington. It was always his ambition, even stronger I think than that of holding Cabinet Office, to go back to his old diplomatic profession and give serious proof of his capacity in a service {72} where, as a young man, he had played the fool. The Foreign Office would have found itself the stronger for his help.

Our sympathy, which had begun about Egypt, was carried on, I am glad to remember, during the years of stress which followed, also to Ireland; and from first to last my experience of his political action has been that of a man courageously consistent in his love of liberty, his hatred of tyranny, and his contempt of the insincerities of public life. He was never taken in by the false arguments with which politicians conceal their treacheries, and he was never himself a betrayer. If my testimony can be of any service to his memory as an honest man, I freely give it.

The last time I saw him was in the summer of 1902, when he came down with his wife and daughter to spend a week-end, July 12th to 14th, with me and my wife in Sussex. He had resolved to pass the rest of his days at Florence, and it was a farewell visit that he paid us. He had just bought Michael Angelo's Villa, and talked much about it and his design, philistine that he was, of turning it inside out, fitting it with electric light, and otherwise bedevilling it with modern improvements, uprooting the old trees in the _podere_ and planting new ones. On matters of this sort he was a terrible barbarian, and took delight in playing the vandal with places and things which the rest of the world held in reverence. "Old Michael," he explained, "knew nothing about the comforts of a modern establishment, and it was time that he should learn them." Apart from this little _méchanceté_, he proved himself a most delectable companion, giving us a true feast of wit and wisdom the whole Sunday through. Sibyl, Lady Queensberry, was of our party, and Colonel Bill Gordon, General Gordon's nephew, with whom he had much talk about Khartoum and Egypt. Gordon was a good talker on his own subjects, and they got on well together, sitting up till half-past one the first night, telling story after story. Among them, I remember, Labouchere gave us accounts of his adventures in Mexico, and also of a ride he had taken from Damascus to Palmyra with Lady Ellenborough and her Bedouin husband, Sheykh Mijwel el Mizrab, with reminiscences of the early days we had spent together in the Diplomatic Service, his gambling acquaintances at Hombourg, and his duel in Sweden. He was especially interested in this visit to the Weald of Sussex, and in {73} his having passed in the train almost within sight of Broome Hall, under Leith Hill, where he had lived as a boy. He had not been that way since, he said. The second evening he was less brilliant, as Hilaire Belloc had joined our party, a rival talker to whom he left the monopoly of our entertainment. But it was an altogether pleasant two days that we passed together. I am glad to have the recollection of them. Alas, they were the last we were to see of him, for he left England soon afterwards, and we never met again.

[1] Joseph Hatton, _Journalistic London_.

[2] Mrs. T. P. O'Connor, _I, Myself_.

[3] For the rest of this interesting letter see Chapter X.

[4] "Radical and Whigs," _Fortnightly Review_, Feb. 1, 1884.

[5] It is interesting to note that Mr. Crampton's proceedings in America did not stand in his way, so far as promotion in the service was concerned. He was appointed Envoy-Extraordinary at Hanover almost immediately; Lord Palmerston insisted upon his being made a K.C.B., and he became Ambassador at St. Petersburg in 1858. (_Dictionary of National Biography_.)

[6] _Truth_, May 23, 1878.

[7] _Truth_, Feb. 8, 1877.

[8] Busch, _Our Chancellor_.

[9] _Ibid._

[10] _Truth_, May 23, 1889.

[11] _Hansard_, July 14, 1884.

[12] Alexander II.

[13] _Truth_, July 16, 1877.

[14] _Truth_, May 23, 1878.

[15] _Florence Herald_, Dec. 28, 1909.

[16] Rumbold, _Recollections of a Diplomatist_, vol. ii.

[17] The letter, signed by Lord Russell, appointing Henry Labouchere Second Secretary is dated February 3, 1863, so that the one, referred to by Sir Audley Gosling, appointing him to Buenos Ayres, must have been of later date. The latter is not in my possession.

[18] _Truth_, Nov. 20, 1879.

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