HL Deb 22 July 1873 vol 217 cc736-42
EARL GRANVILLE

My Lords, I wish to ask your Lordships to excuse me in saying a few words before we proceed to the Orders of the Day. I find that there is a general and not unnatural feeling of surprise at more not having been expressed in this House yesterday on the subject of the great losses which the House had sustained since their meeting on the previous Friday. The noble Duke opposite (the Duke of Richmond), indeed, took advantage of the only opportunity which he had of expressing with judgment and good feeling what were his impressions on that occasion; and not only what were his feelings, but what were the feelings of every one of your Lordships. If there was any omission it was entirely mine. My excuse is one which your Lordships can easily understand—at all events, it was not compatible with any indifference on my part to the losses which we have sustained; but still it was difficult for an independent Member of the House to speak without my having, in the official position I hold, given him the lead in the matter. I do it now without the slightest idea of making anything like a funeral oration over these remarkable men. Their works, their lives, and their great abilities are known to your Lordships. We all know, with regard to Lord Westbury, that, though it was hardly appreciated as it deserved, his kindliness of heart was remarkable; while with regard to the Bishop of Winchester, his genial disposition and urbane character made every person his devoted friend—even those who most differed from him. I will only add this:—We are sometimes in this House, and sometimes out of it, apt to depreciate ourselves; but I think it remarkable that two such remarkable men should have been lost to this Assembly within 24 hours, and yet have left this House not entirely bare of those attributes for which they were distinguished.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR

My Lords, perhaps I may be permitted to add a few words to those which have been so well spoken by my noble Friend. I am not at all sure that any mode of expressing the feelings which we all entertain upon the occasion of these great losses could have been more significant than the silence yesterday of those who were not compelled to speak, and the deviation from the natural course of the business of the evening which it was impossible for the noble Duke to avoid. I am one of those who have had very many opportunities of knowing both the great men whom we have lost. Of the right rev. Prelate I will not trust myself to speak after what has been said, because I feel that I am in the presence of some, besides my noble Friend, who did not perhaps value or love him more, but who are better entitled to speak of his public character than I am. But with respect to Lord Westbury, I should be sorry to lose the opportunity of saying a very few words. I think he was a man of as brilliant natural powers as any man he has left behind him. He was also a man who, from his activity and industry in the application of those powers, had acquired a very great breadth of view with regard to the science of jurisprudence, to which his life was devoted. He had all the qualities of an eminent Judge. Personally, I have to say that from the earliest part of my professional career I was indebted to him for notice and kindness, when I was young and obscure, and when notice and kindness from such a person were most valuable. I was also indebted to him when he became Lord Chancellor for my first introduction to the public service; and I was indebted to him for uniform confidence and consideration during the whole time of our official connection. I was no unconcerned—I will not call myself spectator, as I was in some sense an actor—in the Parliamentary struggles connected with his retirement from office, and never had I the smallest doubt, for a single moment, as to his personal purity or as to his freedom from anything inconsistent with high public and private honour, in regard to those transactions as to which he was thought by some to have failed in vigilance. No doubt or misgiving of the kind ever crossed my mind; and I could not but feel pained—more than I have ever yet up to this moment been able to express—that it was considered necessary to visit him with censure, which, so far as any public ground for it was then brought forward, was due, in my judgment, not to him but to others. Since that time he has performed in a dignified and most useful manner, his part in the judicial and other proceedings of your Lordships' House; nor did he ever show any feeling of resentment against those who had thought it their duty to oppose him. During the whole of this Session I have deeply lamented the absence of that assistance which he could have given to your Lordships' deliberations with regard to the great measure relating to our judicature, which has passed through your Lordships' House. I regretted his absence the more, because I had reason to believe that there were some points of importance on which his opinion was not entirely the same as my own. He was frank and kind in his communications with me; and his views, I need not say, were carefully considered; but his absence from your Lordships' House, especially with regard to the discussions on that Bill, was a great public loss; and the fact that we shall never again have that assistance will, I am sure, be most deeply regretted by all of your Lordships as well as by myself.

THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY

I am anxious, my Lords, to express my thanks and those of the right rev. Bench to my noble Friend on the Treasury bench for having recurred to this subject. As regards the noble and learned Lord (Lord Westbury) it is a circumstance which I cannot forget, that I believe I was the last of your Lordships who saw him and had a conversation with him between the last two meetings of your Lordships' House, and I can bear witness that his intellect was then quite as clear in the prospect of approaching death as when he last addressed your Lordships. With regard to the right rev. Prelate, I can well understand that my noble Friend should have found it impossible yesterday to address your Lordships, fresh as he then was from the scene of a great calamity—if we may call it a calamity for a man to be summoned away in the midst of his vigour in obedience to a voice which he had long expected, not unprepared, but ready for the summons. My Lords, I have known the right rev. Prelate for upwards of 30 years. I received from him long before I was a Bishop many marks of kindness, and for 17 years I have seen him almost daily in the discharge of our respective duties. It has been my misfortune to differ from him often, but I never knew an occasion on which his kindliness of heart did not overcome any difference which might have arisen from a divergence of opinion. I ask myself, what is the mark the right rev. Prelate will leave upon the Church and the people of England?—for I cannot doubt that one who filled so conspicuous a place in the public estimation, and who was seen and heard everywhere with pleasure and advantage, must leave a lasting mark behind him. He was not, indeed, the writer of a great work, nor, as far as I believe, was he the founder of any great school of thought; but he did set before the Church, of which he was an ornament, and the people of England the example of a life devoted to duty in its lowest and its highest phases. He was as ready to befriend the curate, whom no one knew but himself, as he was to place his services at the disposal of your Lordships, or of his Sovereign. No man could discharge such duties as he fulfilled in this spirit without leaving a lasting mark behind him. I believe I am only speaking the sentiments of my most rev. Brethren when I say that there is not one of us who does not feel that we owe to him a debt that we can never estimate fully in the example he has set us by his untiring energy. Many Bishops before him strove earnestly to perform their duty; but I believe that they, if living, would be as ready as myself to say that no one ever laboured so emphatically, or left behind him such an example of untiring industry in every department of work he undertook. It was this, my Lords, that gave him his surpassing influence. It was not merely an aptitude for business, and a devotion to the details of business, such as no man, perhaps, but himself in this generation ever showed, but it was that kindly sympathy with which he entered into the feelings of others—that readiness never to spare himself if he could do an act of kindness—which made him ever welcome wherever he showed himself. I am sure that, publicly and privately, all the people of this country will, for many a day to come, lament the misfortune which has deprived us of his presence and his services—though we cannot regret his departure for his own sake.

THE EARL OF CARNARVON,

who was very imperfectly heard, was understood to say that he trusted many years of friendship with the late Bishop would be his justification for saying a few words. If there was one striking quality which more than another distinguished the character of the late Bishop, it was his power of gaining the hearts of all with whom he came in contact, of keeping away from extremes, and holding an even balance between contending parties. He had never known a man more capable of inspiring affection. He was, no doubt, one of the olden school which was passing away in this country—a scholar, a gentleman, a statesman, and a Churchman; but, above all, he was a steady and consistent friend, full and overflowing with kindness and affection. He was ever ready to uphold his opinions, but he was incapable of the slightest particle of jealousy. There were men on both sides who might have thought that he went too far on some occasions; but there were none who doubted the sincerity of his convictions, and his justice of conduct in his high office, in which he acted with as much evenhandedness as imperfect human nature would allow. And, certainly, in private life, those who knew the history of himself and his family knew how at different periods of that life a severe strain was put upon him, and how manfully and steadily that pressure was borne. He believed that there was not a man who worked harder or more zealously, or who more laid on every power and effort of his mind for his work, than he did. In society the right rev. Prelate shone and sparkled beyond anyone he had ever known. And although his connection with the diocese of Winchester was brief, he had left in hundreds of places within that diocese marks of his justice and discretion, and of the vigour of his administration.

LORD CAIRNS

My Lords, if all among your Lordships who have been impressed by the lustre of the eloquence, the splendour of the talents, the unrivalled exertions, the energy in the discharge of public functions, displayed by the late right rev. Prelate were to rise in succession to bear their testimony to what he was, everyone of those whom I have now the honour of addressing would, in his turn, become a speaker. I rise, my Lords, to add a word to what has been said with regard to my late lamented Friend (Lord Westbury.) Those who, like myself, have had the opportunity of seeing him from day to day during the last few months, and witnessing the gravity of his illness and the extent of the suffering under which he laboured, could not but be apprehensive of the sad event which we all now deplore. My acquaintance with Lord Westbury is of something like 30 years' standing. I recollect when I, yet a young man, entered the profession of the law, Lord Westbury was in the full blaze of his career at the Bar, and I remember—as my noble and learned Friend on the Woolsack does—the kindness I received from him then, when kindness was most valuable. I remember with gratitude and gladness the unvarying manner in which that kindness was ever after extended to me. I say this because in the contemplation of the great talents of Lord Westbury, remembering the splendour of his judicial career, recollecting the power which he brought to bear in the performance of his duties as a Judge, and remarking, also, on those proofs of intellect which all of your Lordships must have noticed, we are apt to depreciate what I, at least, dwell upon with greater pleasure—namely, the goodness of heart which lay below those more splendid and attractive qualities—a goodness of heart which I am glad my noble and learned Friend on the Woolsack has alluded to in terms which I gladly endorse. I could not, on this melancholy occasion, say less in reference to the loss of one with whom I have been for so many years in the closest contact and intimacy.

LORD HATHERLEY

My Lords, as one who was often subjected to considerable criticism in this House, on the part of Lord Westbury, I am sincerely glad to bear my testimony in addition to that of my noble and learned Friends to his kindliness of heart. He evinced extreme kindliness towards myself during my occupancy of the Woolsack, and I think it only due to his memory to say that in the course of those inquiries which led to his retirement from office I never understood that there was any stain upon his personal honour. Whatever want of diligence there might have been on his part in reference to transactions in which other persons were concerned, that was not, in my judgment, nor in that of others, any reason for imputing a want of personal honour to Lord Westbury himself.

THE EARL OF FEVERSHAM

was understood to suggest a public funeral for the late Bishop of Winchester in Westminster Abbey.