# Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament/Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke

* related authors: Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843-1911).
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IV.
SIR CHARLES W. DILKE.
In treating of Gladstone, Bright, and Taylor, who have preceded the senior member for Chelsea in this series, I have in some measure felt on sure ground,—the ground of history or accomplished fact. The youngest of the above trio is sixty, and had entered the arena of public life ere the subject of this memoir had well left his cradle. One could, consequently, speak of them almost with as much confidence as of the dead. Their lengthened past was a clear index to their necessarily briefer future. In due course they will pass over to the majority-, and the places that know them now will know them no more. With Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke it is altogether different. He belongs exclusively to the immediate present. It will take him thirty-five more years to attain the venerable age of the woodcutter of Hawarden. He is emphatically a contemporary, as fine an example as can well be found of the culture and aspirations of this generation. It is his future that is most important, and it is full of promise.
As Mr. Gladstone in his youth was pronounced "the rising hope of Toryism," so Sir Charles W. Dilke may ​with better assurance be hailed as the rising hope of Radicalism,—of all that is sincere, capable, and of good repute in English politics. The odds are heavily in his favor. He has youth, health, wealth, birth, strength, talent, industry, firmness of character, special training, and moral courage of a very high order on his side. Such a combination of advantages seldom fails. If he is spared to his country for the next twenty years, he will almost certainly be able to say with regard to her fortunes, whatever these may be, Magna pars fui. "Never prophesy," said the wise Quaker, "unless thou knowest!" Nevertheless, I venture to predict, that, sooner or later, Charles Wentworth Dilke will be called upon by the people of England to take a very high place,—it may be the highest,—and he will succeed, too, by the right of the fittest. Like his friend Gambetta, he has been tried in the fiery furnace of political calumny and social hate, and has not been found wanting. "Society" undertook to put him down, and he has put down society. Of the two he has proved himself the stronger, and a better proof of capacity to serve the nation it would be impossible to adduce.
"That which is bred in the bone," says the proverb, "will come out in the flesh." The anti-monarchical sympathies of the Dilkes, like those of the Taylors, are at least as much inherited as acquired. No fewer than three of the Dilke ancestry were among the judges of Charles I.; viz., the resolute Bradshaw, who presided over the High Court of Justice, Sir Peter Wentworth, and Cawley. All were stem foes of "one-man government," whether that one man were the "divine right" Charles Stuart, or the Puritan Bonaparte, Oliver ​Cromwell. "For what king's majesty," asks the immortal defender of the regicides, Milton, "sitting on an exalted throne ever shone so brightly as that of the people of England then did, when, shaking off that old superstition which had prevailed a long time, they gave judgment on the king himself, or rather upon an enemy who had been their king, caught, as it were, in a net by his own laws, and scrupled not to inflict on him, being guilty, the same punishment which he would have inflicted on any other? … This is the God," he continues, "who uses to throw down proud and unruly kings … and utterly to extirpate them and their family. By his manifest impulse being set at work to recover our almost lost liberty, we went on in no obscure but an illustrious passage pointed out and made plain to us by God himself."
At his trial Charles vainly declined to recognize the authority of the court, on the silly pretext that he himself was "the fountain of all law." "If you are the fountain of all law," curtly observed Bradshaw, "the people are the source of all rights." When the Cromwellian coup d'etat took place. Sir Peter Wentworth was, I think, the last man in the House to protest against the violence offered to the representatives of the people; and Bradshaw afterwards told the military usurper to his face, "We have heard what you did, and all England shall know it. Sir, you are mistaken in thinking Parliament is dissolved. No power under heaven can dissolve them but themselves. Take you notice of that."
One of Sir Peter Wentworth's sisters was married to Bradshaw's brother; while another, Sybil Wentworth, became the wife of Fisher Dilke, from which ​union the distinguished representative of Chelsea in Parliament is lineally descended.
The Dukes were probably of Danish origin, and are to be found settled at Kirby Mallory, in Leicestershire, as early as the middle of the sixteenth century.
Fisher Dilke was a Puritan of the Puritans, much given to angling, and piety of an extravagant kind. He was a Fifth Monarchy man, and, like his sect, would have prepared the ways of King Christ, and made the paths of his speedy return straight by first abolishing all existing authority and cancelling all bonds of human allegiance. He was doomed to sore disappointment. His co-sectaries mustered strong in Barebone's Parliament, but in the eyes of the pious Lord Protector did no good whatever, though they never deliberated without meanwhile setting apart a committee of eight of their number to seek the Lord in prayer. Their mittimus came speedily from the Protector in the memorable words, "You may go elsewhere to seek the Lord, for to my certain knowledge he has not been here for many years."
At the restoration of the monarchy Fisher Dilke is said to have died of sheer grief, having first dug his own grave.
Of all Sir Charles's ancestors, however, the most remarkable was Peter Wentworth, the grandfather of Sybil, wife of Fisher Dilke, leader of the Puritan opposition in Parliament in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and brother-in-law to the famous Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham. This Peter and his brother Paul were seldom out of trouble. Hallam calls them "the bold, plain-spoken, and honest, but not very judicious Wentworths, the most undaunted assertors of civil liberty in his reign."
​In the Parliament of 1575 Peter made a stiff speech in defence of the rights and privileges of the Commons. It is on record. "I find," said he, "within a little volume these words in effect: 'Sweet is the name of liberty, but the thing itself a value beyond all estimable treasure.' So much the more it behooveth us to take great care lest we, contenting ourselves with the sweetness of the name, lose and forego the thing. … Two things do great hurt in this place. The one is a rumor which runneth about saving, 'Take heed what you do: the queen liketh not such a matter. Whoso preferreth it she will be offended with him.' The other, a message is brought into the House either commanding or inhibiting, very injurious to the freedom of speech and consultation. I would to God these rumors and messages were buried in hell; for wicked they are: the Devil was the first author of them, from whom proceedeth nothing but wickedness."
And so on he went reprobating the venal flatterers of royalty who "make traitorous, sugared speeches," "send to her Majesty a melting heart that will not stand for reason," and who blindly follow their leaders instead of voting "as the matter giveth cause."
Peter was not permitted to finish his speech, but was given into the custody of the sergeant-at-arms, pending an examination of the delinquent by a committee of the House."
His apology is recorded: "I heartily repent me that I have hitherto held my peace in these causes, and I do promise you all, if God forsake me not, that I will never during my life hold my tongue if any message is sent in wherein the liberties of Parliament are impeached; and every one of you ought to repent you of these faults, and amend them."
​He was, of course, sent to the Tower, where he remained over a month, when "her Majesty was graciously pleased to remit her justly occasioned displeasances."
He returned to the House; but in the following session he was recommitted for a similar offence. Indeed, he appears latterly to have spent more of his time in the Tower than at St. Stephen's; and in the Tower the stout-hearted, liberty-loving man is believed ultimately to have perished.
His plainness of speech had aroused against him more than royal ire. He and Paul were both at constant feud with the prelates. On one occasion the Archbishop of Canterbury announced, in the hearing of Peter, that it was the function of Parliament to pass articles of religion approved of by the clergy without note or comment. "No," said the indomitable iconoclast, "by the faith we bear to God, we will pass nothing before we understand what it is; for that were but to make you popes. Make you popes who list, we will make you none."
Through the member for Chelsea, Elizabethan Peter yet speaketh. And how modern is it all! How little real progress have the English people made in liberty since these indignant words were uttered three centuries ago! Nay, may it not even be doubted whether in some respects we have not even lost ground? Have we not still bishops thrusting down our throats articles of religion which neither they nor we can understand? Have we not likewise our royal "messages" respecting manifold dowries and annuities, duly heralded by sinister "rumors" of royal "displeasance," which incontinently convert honorable members into a troop of court ​flunkies, and make even Liberal Ministers deliver themselves of " ti'aitorous, sugared speeches," enough to make Peter and Paul Wentworth turn in their coffins?
"Age, thou art shamed! Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods! Oh! you and I have heard our fathers say There was a Brutus once, that would have brook'd The eternal devil to keep his state in Rome As easily as a king."
Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, M.P., is the eldest son of Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, first baronet, and grandson of Charles Wentworth Dilke, the celebrated critic, whose literary judgment and administrative talent were the chief stock in trade both of "The Athenaeum" and "The Daily New" in their younger days.
Sir Charles's father, as is well known, was much devoted to matters affecting art and industry, and was a leading promoter of the great Exhibition of 1851. As some acknowledgment of his eminent services, he was offered, and accepted, contrary to the advice of his father the critic, a baronetcy. The old gentleman was an inflexible Radical; and Sir Charles may be said, in all his mental and moral characteristics, to be the son of his grandfather rather than of his father. He was the preceptor and companion of Dilke's youth. He was an antiquary as well as a critic, and loved to trace the descent of grandson "Charley's" mother from the gentle and unselfish regicide Cawley as a noble pattern for her to set before her son.
The future member for Chelsea was born in the borough which he now represents in September, 1843. He is consequently in his thirty-seventh year. At the second of two private schools which he attended in the ​metropolis, he displayed mathematical talent; and in due course he matriculated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, with the intention of pursuing with assiduity his favorite study, in which he obtained a scholarship. He soon, however, changed his mind, and betook himself to law, as calculated to bear more directly on a parliamentary career, for which he very early determined to qualify himself. He worked hard, and was easily senior in the Law Tripos for 1865.
In 1866 he was called to the bar by the Honorable Society of the Middle Temple. Shortly afterwards he started on a "round the world" journey of two years' duration. The trip bore excellent fruit in the well-known work "Greater Britain," which, in the first year of its publication, ran through four editions. In 1868 he was returned to Parliament for Chelsea by a majority of nearly two to one; and again in 1874 he headed the poll, notwithstanding an opposition of unexampled violence.
Sprung from a race of journalists and littérateurs, his pen is never long idle. Since the publication of "Greater Britain" he has found time to publish the "Fall of Prince Florestan of Monaco," and to edit, under the title "Papers of a Critic," his grandfather's chief contributions to the pages of "The Athenæum," which paper he owns and occasionally edits.
Since his former travels he has been "round the world" a second time, his chief object being to acquaint himself with the state and prospects of Japan. He has visited every English-speaking corner of the globe, is thoroughly conversant with the condition of our Indian Empire, and is better acquainted with the language, literature, people, and government of Russia than any man in the House.
​He is perhaps the first thoroughly competent Englishman who has ever seen and described the men. manners, and institutions of the United States as they really are, and not as they are wont to appear to the jaundiced e^e of national jealousy and aristocratic aversion. The American Republic is substantially Sir Charles's "Greater Britain," to which he foresees the hegemony of the English-speaking race is ultimately destined to fall. He believes in the possibility of one omnipotent, all-embracing federation of English-speaking men, of which the United States shall at once supply both the nucleus and the model.
In the study of foreign affairs he has taken nothing for granted. Every thing he has examined on the spot and verified with his own eyes. As Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and mouthpiece of the Government in that department of state in the House of Commons, Sir Charles inspires universal confidence. Like Mr. Gladstone, he is an untiring toiler, and from the first he has worked on the most profitable lines. Whether as law-student, traveller, author, journalist, or politician, whatever he has done, he has done faithfully and well. Every recess he shuns delights, and spends laborious holidays at his romantic provincial retreat at La Sainte Campagne, near Toulon, in digesting materials for a magnum opus, "The History of the Present Century."
He is personally a total abstainer, though opposed to the Permissive Bill, and is in all things a pattern of method and regularity of habits.
At Cambridge he was a finished oarsman. He is likewise a vigorous long-distance walker, a good marksman, and a deft fencer.
​In nothing has he shown such marked improvement as in his style of public speaking. Though twice president of the Union Debating Society at Cambridge, he was at first a most unimpressive speaker: I hesitate to use his own term, "lugubrious:" But now it is not so. He is fluent, easy, and agreeable,—one of the best level business speakers in Parliament. As for the matter, that has at all, times been such as to redeem the worst faults of manner; just a little too much of it at a time, perhaps,—more, at least, than can be well digested by a mass meeting even of Chelsea electors,—but not one word in bad taste, "nothing extenuated, nothing set down in malice."
When he has been reviled,—and who ever was more villanously overwhelmed by a hurricane of abuse?—he reviled not again. Like the soul of honor that he is, he has never stooped to personal invective. Under the severest provocation he has said nothing to wound the susceptibilities of the most sensitive. In this respect he has set an example to some of our foremost public men. Comes this extraordinary forbearance of grace or of nature? it maybe asked. By nature, I should say. To him opposition from men or things is of exactly the same character. It is something to be overcome by patience and pressure in the line of the least resistance. In other words, the member for Chelsea is lacking in sympathy. He is fitted to become a great parliamentary leader rather than a popular agitator. His political aims, it is true, are much the same as were those of passionate old Peter Wentworth, his ancestor; but it would never for a moment occur to him to wish that the most impudent of royal begging messages should be incontinently buried in ​hell. Indeed, if in insisting on some explanations being given with respect to the monstrous abuses of the civil list, and if in affirming his preference for a constitutional republic based on merit to a monarchy, however limited, founded on birth, he had shown more anger and less reason, sneers would have been regarded as the only weapon necessary to employ against him. It was the very fact that he used arguments which every snob in England knew to be unanswerable that the royalist tempest—what I may call the "white terror"—was evoked.
It may here be convenient to consider the republican episode in his career. There can be no doubt that royalty was alarmed, that its numerous hangers-on were alarmed, and that the privileged classes generally, whose own existence depends on the maintenance of the monarchical superstition as an article of the popular faith, were thoroughly alarmed.
"Kings most commonly," says Milton, "though strong in legions, are but weak at argument, as they who have ever been accustomed from their cradle to use their will only as their right hand, their reason always as their left. Whence, unexpectedly constrained to that kind of combat, they prove but weak and puny adversaries." The Royalists made up for the weakness of their arguments by the weight of their brickbats. At Bolton, while Sir Charles was addressing a large audience admitted by ticket, the place of meeting was assailed by a furious mob of Royalists, who succeeded in murdering one peaceable Radical, William Scofield, a working-man, and wounding several others. The magistrates and the police both scandalously failed in their duty on the occasion, and to this day their conduct has never been adequately explained.
​If the blood of an innocent man had been shed by republican hands, what a howl for vengeance would there not have been heard! At Reading, the late Mr. George Odger, than whom a more able and upright politician never lived, was within an ace of meeting the fate of Scofield.
The leading organ of the "party of order," "The Standard," threatened the representative of Chelsea with physical violence. "The attachment of Englishmen for the royal family," it said, "may take an unpleasantly practical form if Sir Charles Dilke should ever insult a party of gentlemen by repeating in their presence calumnies such as he was permitted to utter with impunity before the 'roughs' of Newcastle." It is here worth putting on record the worst that Sir Charles did say in the famous address alluded to. The meeting was held in November, 1871; Mr. Joseph Cowen in the chair. This was the head and front of his offending: "There is a widespread belief that a republic here is only a matter of education and time.
It is said that some day a commonwealth will be our form of government. Now, history and experience show that you cannot have a republic without you possess at the same time the republican virtues; but you answer, Have we not public spirit? have we not the practice of self-government? are not we gaining general education? "Well, if you can show me a fair chance that a republic here will be free from the political corruption that hangs about a monarchy, I say for my part,—and I believe that the middle classes in general will say,—Let it come."
The answer should have been. We Englishmen have not public spirit; we have not the practice of ​self-government; we do not possess the republican virtues of independence and self-respect, without which there can be no genuine republic. We love to deceive both ourselves and others. It is the "name" of liberty that we affect: the "thing" itself is unknown to us.
Is it to be wondered at that Sir Charles Dilke, fresh from brighter countries, like the United States, where self-government is a reality, should have misconstrued the reply of an oracle so ambiguous and untrustworthy? But no harm has been done by his miscalculation,—rather much good. The country has been made to know that it has at least one public man of first-rate ability and dauntless courage, who is not afraid to reconcile administrative practice with the best political theory whenever the people are prepared to abandon their unworthy idols, and to look the facts of history, experience, and common sense straight in the face.
And, as for Sir Charles, he is an imperturbable, good-natured man, who doubtless considers that he took ample revenge on his unscrupulous calumniators when he published anonymously his clever brochure, the "Fall of Prince Florestan of Monaco." Several leading Tory journals advised him to lay the lessons taught by the Radical Prince of Monaco to heart. How he must have chuckled! It is only natures of the largest and healthiest mould that are thus capable of looking amusedly at the comical aspect of their own doings. In the domain of current domestic legislation. Sir Charles has played no unimportant part. It is to him we owe the popular constitution of our school boards, it having been Mr. Forster's original intention to intrust the duties of school management to committees of boards of guardians.
​His also was the clause which conferred the municipal franchise on female ratepayers. He procured for the working-men of London a most desirable boon in the extension of the hours of polling; and in every thing appertaining to the better representation of the people in Parliament he has taken a leading part. On the all-important question of the redistribution of political power in particular, he is, it is not too much to say, the greatest authority in the House. Like John Bright, he loves the big constituencies, and would, as far as possible, make them all numerically equal.
He is not ordinarily an amusing speaker; but one of his speeches on the unreformed corporations will rank among the wittiest delivered by any member since he entered the House. His collected speeches on electoral reform, the civil list, free trade, free land, and free schools, are a ready repertory of trustworthy facts, which ought to be in the hands of every reformer. With respect to the Zulu war, in the session of 1879, he was intrusted with the lead in opposition to the Government policy,—a sufficient indication of the respect entertained for his judgment in critical issues.
In every department he is a friend of economy. In Parliament he is ever vigilant, and never fussy. When he speaks, it is always to contribute some new fact or unused argument to the debate; and he never fails to catch the ear of the House, which is never insensible to straightforwardness, manly bearing, and unremitting attention to parliamentary duty. He is well versed in the forms of the House. Above all, he has honesty and excellent common sense to guide his steps aright.
​If, with all these endowments, he should fail in the not distant future to achieve great things for his country, both I and many other observant sympathizere, "whose judgment cries in the top of mine," will feel just cause for sore disappointment.