MY DEAR MISS SKENE,
A happy Xmas to you. Mine is comfortable, if not merry nor ideal. Let me say in black and white that I mean to pay for the meat and wine ordered by the doctor for the poor woman you mention.... Money I cannot send. I have little more than 100 to spend myself. My allowance is 2000, and I have overdrawn 1630, with a draft for 1000 coming due. I am trying to raise the wind here: it seems absurd that I should be "hard up," but it is a long story. I am only sorry that the offerings I should make at this time to the "Little Child of Bethlehem"
are not procurable.
Ever yours most truly, BUTE.
[Sidenote: 1865, At Dumfries House]
Bute had now finally left Galloway House, which had been his holiday residence during his Harrow days; and his home when not at Oxford was at Dumfries House, his Ayrshire seat, then in the occupation of Sir James and Lady Edith Fergusson. "I saw a good deal of him when he was living at Dumfries House under the tutelage of Sir James Fergusson,"
writes one who had known him from {33} childhood. "He used to come down to the smoking-room at night arrayed in a gorgeous garment of pale blue and gold: I think he said he had had it made on the pattern of a saintly bishop"s vestment in a stained gla.s.s window of the Harrow Chapel. Sir James was anxious to make a sportsman of Bute, and bought a hunter or two for him. I remember his coming out one day with Lord Eglinton"s hounds, but I never saw him take the field again." The tyro, as a matter of fact, got a toss in essaying to jump a hedge; and so mortified was he by this public discomfiture that he not only never again appeared in the hunting-field, but he never quite forgave Sir James for being the indirect cause of the misadventure.
Miss Skene not only acted to some extent as Bute"s almoner during his Oxford days (it is fair to say that the "hard-up" condition alluded to in the above letter was due at least as much to his lavish almsgiving as to any personal extravagance), but was his adviser in regard to other matters. "Mrs. Leighton [wife of the Warden of All Souls] has invited me," runs one of his notes, "to come and meet a Scottish bishop (St. Andrews) at dinner, and asks me in the same letter to give "out of my abundance" a cheque to enlarge the Penitentiary chapel. Now I dislike Scots Episcopalian bishops (not individually but officially), their genesis having been unblushingly Erastian, and their present status in Scotland being schismatic and dissenting; and my "abundance"
at present consists of a heavy overdraft at the bank. Read and forward the enclosed reply, unless you think the lady will take offence, which can hardly be."
He often copied for his friend extracts which {34} struck him from books he was reading. "I have transcribed for you," he wrote a few weeks after his nineteenth birthday, "the account of the death of Krishna from the Vishnu Purana. A hunter by accident shot him in the foot with an arrow. When he saw what he had done he prostrated himself and implored pardon. Krishna granted it and translated him at once to heaven. "Then the ill.u.s.trious Krishna, having united himself with his own pure, spiritual, inexhaustible, inconceivable, unborn, undecaying, imperishable and universal spirit, which is one with Vasundera, abandoned his mortal body and the condition of the threefold qualities." To my mind this description of the great Saviour becoming one with universal spirit approaches the sublime."
At the end of his first summer term (June, 1866) Bute made his second tour in the East--a more extended one this time, visiting not only Constantinople and Palestine, but Kurdistan and Armenia. His tutor, the Rev. S. Williams, accompanied him, as well as one or two friends, including Harman Grisewood, one of his a.s.sociates at the House, and one of the few with whom he maintained an intimacy after their Oxford days.
A diary kept by Bute of the first portion of this tour has been preserved: it describes his doings with great minuteness, and is a remarkable record for a youth of eighteen to have written. In Paris nothing seems to have much interested him except the churches, and long antiquarian conversations with the Vicomte de Vogue and others. "I again visited the Comte de V.,"[7] {35} runs one entry. "We got into the Cities of Bashan, and stayed there three or four hours." Many pages are devoted to a detailed description of Avignon, and later of St. John"s Church at Malta, of Syracuse, Catania, and Messina. At Malta he visited the tomb of his grandfather (the first Marquess of Hastings, who died when governor of Malta in 1826), and "was much pleased with it." Describing the high ma.s.s in the Benedictine Church at Catania, he says, "At the end, during the Gospel of St. John, the organist (the organ is one of the finest in the world) played a military march so well that I, at least, could hardly be persuaded that the loud clear clash, the roll of the drums, the ring of the triangle, and the roar of the bra.s.s instruments were false. It seemed to me that this pa.s.sage, which was admirably executed, harmonised wonderfully well with the awful words of the part of the Ma.s.s which it accompanied."
[Sidenote: 1866, Ascent of Mount Etna]
The young diarist"s vivid descriptive powers are well shown in his narrative of the ascent of Etna, and the impression it made on him:
We dined [at Nicolosi] on omelet, bread, and figs, and the nastiest wine, and at about 7 p.m. started on mules. These beasts had saddles more uncomfortable than words can describe. Their pace was about 2- miles per hour, which it was too easy to reduce, but quite impossible to accelerate. Mine had for bridle a cord three feet long, tied to one of several large rings on one side of its head. The journey lasted till 1.30 a.m. or later.... About {36} 1 in the morning, Mr. W. and one guide having long dropped far behind, where their shrieks and yells (now growing hoa.r.s.e from despair) could be faintly heard in the darkness far down the mountain, we emerged upon the summit between the peaks; and at the same time the full moon, silver, intense, rose from behind the lower summit, and shed a flood of light over the tremendous scene of desolation. As far as the eye could reach, there was nothing visible but cinders and sky. At every step we sank eighteen inches into the black dust as we stumbled on in single file in perfect silence. A couple of miles ahead rose the great crater peak, with patches of snow at its foot and the eternal white cloud emanating and writhing from the summit. After an hour"s rest at the Casa Inglese, a miserable hovel at the foot of the Cone, we started, wrapped in plaids, the cold being intense. Mr. W. had now rejoined us. The Cone is a hill about the size of Arthur"s Seat, covered with rolling friable cinders, from which rise clouds of white sulphureous dust. The ascent took rather more than an hour. Mr. W. gave out half-way up, declaring he should faint. The pungent sulphur-smoke came sweeping down the hill-side, choking and blinding one. Eyes were smarting, lungs loaded, throat burnt, mouth dry and nostrils choked. On we struggled till the very ground gave forth curling clouds of smoke from every cranny. A few more steps and we were on the summit, at the very edge of the crater, which yawned into perdition within a few inches of one"s foot.
It is an immense glen, surrounded by a chain of heights, with tremendously precipitous sides, bright yellow in the depths, whence rises continually the cloud of smoke. The whole scene is exactly like Dore"s ill.u.s.trations of the Inferno.... The sun rose over Italy as we sat with our heads wrapped up and handkerchiefs in our mouths; but there was no view at all, the height is too stupendous. The {37} horror of the whole place cannot be depicted. We were delighted to get back to the Casa Inglese, where we remounted our mules and crept away.
[Sidenote: 1866, Impressions of Eastern travel]
From Sicily the travellers visited Smyrna and Chios on their way to Constantinople. Pages of the diary are taken up with descriptions of churches, and functions attended in them, and it is of interest to note that, profoundly interested as Bute was in the Greek churches and the Greek liturgy, his religious sympathies were entirely with the Latin communion. The "spiritual deadness," as he calls it, of the schismatic churches of the East, repelled and dismayed him. "It strikes me as essentially dreadful," he writes of a visit to the Church of the Transfiguration at Syra, "that the Photian Tabernacle everywhere enshrines a deserted Saviour. The daily sacrifice is not offered; the churches are closed and cold, save for a few hours on Sunday and festivals; visits to the B. Sacrament are unknown. Pictures are exposed to receive an exaggerated homage, unknown and undreamt of in the West. But it is absolutely true to say that the Perpetual Presence (to which no reverence at all is offered, by genuflection or otherwise) receives less respect than one ordinarily pays to any place of worship whatever, even a meeting-house or synagogue." Later, recording a visit to the Greek cathedral at Pera, he describes the service there as "the most disagreeable function I ever attended: the church crammed with people in a state of restlessness and irreverence characteristic of Photian schismatics; and the whole service as much spoiled as slurring, drawling, utter irreverence, bad music, and bad taste could spoil it.
After breakfast I {38} attended the High Ma.s.s at the Church of the Franciscans--a different thing indeed from the Photian Cathedral; and I went back there in the afternoon for Vespers and Benediction."
It has been sometimes said that Bute, during the period immediately preceding his reception into the Catholic Church, was even more drawn towards the "Orthodox" form of belief than he was to the prevailing religion of Western Christendom. The above extracts show that the very reverse was the case. Genuine and earnest worship stirred and impressed him everywhere: thus he writes, after witnessing an elaborate ceremonial (including the dance of the dervishes) in a mosque at Constantinople: "I left the mosque very much wrought up and excited.
There are those who are not impressed by this. There are those also who laugh at a service in a language they do not know: there are those who see nothing august or awful even in the Holy Ma.s.s." Slovenliness, irreverence, tepidity in religion were what pained and repelled him; and finding those characteristics everywhere in the liturgical services of those whom he called the Photians, he was so far from being attracted towards any idea of joining their communion, that he returned to England, and to Oxford, after this Eastern journey, with the whole bent of his religious aspirations set more and more in the direction of the Catholic and Roman Church. His conversion was, in fact, accomplished before the end of this year, although circ.u.mstances, as will be seen, compelled the postponement for a considerable time of the public and formal profession of his faith.
[1] The _Scottish Review_, which Lord Bute controlled at this time, and to which he contributed many articles.
[2] This was the chapel on the edge of the sea, among the Mountstuart woods, which had been built for the convenience of the people living and working near the house. Lord Bute used it as a domestic chapel until the new chapel at Mountstuart was opened. He was buried there in 1900.
[3] Lord Bute"s only daughter, Lady Margaret Crichton-Stuart, then in her twelfth year, and under the tutelage of a Greek governess.
[4] Adam Hay Gordon married in 1873 the beautiful granddaughter of Sir Robert Dalrymple Horn Elphinstone, and died without issue, as above recorded, in July, 1894.
[5] ""Tis said that when upon a rocky sh.o.r.e The salt sea billows break with m.u.f.fled roar, And, launched in mad career, the thundering wave Leaps booming through the weedy ocean cave; Each tenth is grander than the nine before.
And breaks with tenfold thunder on the sh.o.r.e.
Alas! it is so on the sounding sea; But so, O England, it is not with thee!
Thy dec.u.man is broken on the sh.o.r.e: A peer to him shall lave thee never more!"
The text of the whole poem is given in Appendix I.
[6] The particulars of this whimsical incident in Bute"s university career have been kindly furnished by Mr. Algernon Turnor, C.B., who was his contemporary at Christ Church. It was he who rode--though not to victory--the steeplechaser mentioned in the text. Mr. Turner married in 1880 Lady Henrietta Stewart, one of Bute"s early playmates and companions at Galloway House.
[7] Eugene Vicomte de Vogue, whom Bute wrongly styles "Comte" in his diary, was a few months his junior. One of the most brilliant and charming men of his generation, he was in turn soldier, diplomatist, politician, and _litterateur_. He became a member of the Academy in 1888 and died in 1910. He published books and articles on a great variety of subjects, all marked with the profoundly religious feeling which characterised him.
{39}
CHAPTER III
RELIGIOUS INQUIRIES--RECEPTION POSTPONED--COMING OF AGE
1867, 1868
A well-meaning person thought well to compile and publish, some years ago, a volume in which a few distinguished Roman Catholics, and a great number of mediocrities, were invited to describe the process and motives which led them "to abandon" (as some cynic once expressed it) "the errors of the Church of England for those of the Church of Rome."
Lord Bute, who was among the many more or less eminent people who received and declined invitations to contribute to this symposium, was certainly the last man likely to consent to recount his own religious experiences for the benefit of a curious public. It is, therefore, all the more interesting that in a copy of the book above referred to, belonging to one of his most intimate friends,[1] was preserved a memorandum in Bute"s writing, which throws an interesting light on some, at least, of the causes which were contributory to his own submission to the Roman Church.
I came to see very clearly indeed that the Reformation was in England and Scotland--I had not studied it elsewhere--the work neither of G.o.d nor of the people, its real authors being, in the former country, {40} a l.u.s.tful and tyrannical King, and in the latter a pack of greedy, time-serving and unpatriotic n.o.bles. (Almost the only real patriots in Scotland at that period were bishops like Elphinstone, Reid, and Dunbar.)
I also convinced myself (1) that while the disorders rampant in the Church during the sixteenth century clamoured loudly for reform, they in no way justified apostacy and schism; and (2) that were I personally to continue, under that or any other pretext, to remain outside the Catholic and Roman Church, I should be making myself an accomplice after the fact in a great national crime and the most indefensible act in history. And I refused to accept any such responsibility.
[Sidenote: 1860, Attraction to Roman Church]
The late Jesuit historian, Father Joseph Stevenson, who spent a great number of years in laborious study (for his work in the Record Office) of the original doc.u.ments and papers of the Reformation period, frankly avowed that it was what he learned in these researches, and no other considerations whatever, which convinced him--an elderly Anglican clergyman of the old school--that the Catholic Church was the Church of G.o.d, and the so-called Reformation the work of His enemies. It was one of his colleagues in the Society of Jesus[2] who quoted this to Lord Bute, and his emphatic comment was, "That is a point of view which I thoroughly appreciate." As to Bute himself, there were undoubtedly many sides of his character to which the appeal of the ancient Church would be strong and insistent. Her august and venerable ritual, the ordered splendour of her ceremonial, the deep significance of her liturgy and worship, {41} could not fail to attract one who had learned to see in them far more than the mere outward pomp and beauty which are but symbols of their inward meaning. The love and tenderness and compa.s.sion with which she is ever ready to minister to the least of her children would touch the heart of one who beneath a somewhat cold exterior had himself a very tender feeling for the stricken and the sorrowful. The marvellous roll of her saints, the story of their lives, the record of their miracles, would stir the imagination and kindle the enthusiasm of one who loved to remember, as we have seen, that the blood of pilgrims flowed in his veins, and found one of his greatest joys in visiting the shrines, following in the footsteps, venerating the remains, and verifying the acts of the saints of G.o.d in many lands, even in the remotest corners of Christendom. His mind and heart and soul found satisfaction in all these things; but most of all it was the historic sense which he possessed in so peculiar a degree, the craving for an exact and accurate presentment of the facts of history, which was one of his most marked characteristics--it was these which, during his many hours of painful and laborious searching into the records of the past, were the most direct and immediate factors in convincing his intellect, as his heart was already convinced, that the Catholic and Roman Church, and no other, was the Church founded by Christ on earth, and that to remain outside it was, for him, to incur the danger of spiritual shipwreck.
Dr. Liddon, who was at this time a Senior Student of Christ Church, and resident in the college (he became Ireland Professor of Exegesis four years later, and a Canon of St. Paul"s in the same year), {42} was wont to say that Bute was far too busy, during his undergraduate career, in "reconsidering and reconstructing his religious position," to give more than a secondary place to his regular academic studies. His reading, which, undistracted by any of the ordinary dissipations of university life, he pursued with unflagging ardour, sitting at his books often far into the night, ranged over the whole field of comparative religion.
Every form of ancient faith, Judaism, Buddhism, Islamism, the beliefs of old Egypt, Greece and Rome, as well as the creeds and worship of Eastern and Western Christendom, were the subject of his studies and his thoughts; and the more he read and pondered, the more clear became his conviction that in the Roman Church alone could his mind, his heart, and his imagination find rest and satisfaction. No external influence of any kind helped to bring him to that conclusion. In the conduct of his studies and the arrangement of his reading he freely sought and obtained the advice and a.s.sistance of tutors and professors, both belonging to the House and outside it. But from no Roman Catholic source did he ask or receive counsel or direction at this time; and he once said that during the first year of his Oxford course he was not even aware of the existence of a Roman Catholic church in the university city. Two or three Catholic undergraduates were in residence at Christ Church in his time, but he was not intimate with any of them. He was fond of taking long walks, then, as always, almost the only form of bodily exercise he favoured, though he was a good swimmer and fencer; and it was in company with his most intimate friend, Adam Hay Gordon, that he once, after a visit to Wantage (the a.s.sociations {43} of which with King Alfred greatly interested him), penetrated to the ancient Catholic chapel of East Hendred, not far distant. He was greatly moved at learning that this venerable sanctuary was one of the very few in England in which, it was said, the lamp before the tabernacle had never been extinguished, and Ma.s.s had been celebrated all through the darkest days of penal times; and he knelt so long in prayer before the altar that he had twice to be reminded by his companion of the long walk home they had in prospect.
This pilgrimage--Bute always considered it as such, and spoke of it with emotion long years afterwards--took place in the autumn of 1866; and before he left Oxford for the Christmas vacation of that year he had made up his mind to seek admission without delay into the Catholic fold, and (as he hoped) to make his first communion as a Catholic before the Easter festival of the following year.
[Sidenote: 1866, Decision taken]
Absorbed in his studies, and cheered and encouraged by the dawn of religious certainty, and his growing confidence in the sureness of the ground on which his feet were placed, Bute had, it is probable, reckoned little, if at all, on the storm of opposition, protest, and resentment which was bound to break out the moment his proposed change of religion became known. Lady Edith Fergusson, his guardian"s wife, for whom he had a sincere affection, first learned his intention from himself during his Christmas sojourn at Dumfries House. The news came as a great blow to Sir James, who, with all his good qualities, had no intellectual equipment adequate to meeting the reasoned arguments of his young ward; and he fled up to London to take counsel with Bute"s English guardians. The tidings caused consternation in the {44} Lord Chancellor"s Court, and (it was said) in a Court even more august; and the cry was for a scapegoat to bear the brunt of the general wrath.
Who and where was the subtle Jesuit, the secret emissary of Rome, who had hatched the dark plot, had "got hold of" the guileless youth, and inveigled him away from the simple faith of his childhood? Public indignation was heightened rather than allayed by the impossibility of identifying this sinister conspirator. _Non est inventus_. He had, in fact, no more existence than Mrs. Harris. The circ.u.mstances of the case were patent and simple. A young man of strong religious instincts, good parts, and studious habits, had, after much reading, grave consideration (and, it might be added, earnest prayer, but that was outside the public ken), come to the conclusion that the religion of the greater part of Christendom was right and that of the British minority wrong. And what made matters worse was that he had in his const.i.tution so large a share of native Scottish tenacity, that there seemed no possibility of inducing him to change his mind. The obvious, and only alternative, policy was delay. Get him to put off the evil day, and all might yet be well. The _mot d"ordre_ was accordingly given; and a united crusade was entered on by kinsfolk and acquaintance, guardians, curators, and tutors-at-law, the Chancellor and his myrmidons, the family solicitors, and finally the dons and tutors at Oxford, to extract from the prospective convert, at whatever cost, a promise not to act on his convictions at least until after attaining his majority. After that--well, anything might happen; and if during the interval of nearly two years he were to take to drink or gambling, to waste his substance on riotous living (like his {45} unfortunate cousin), or generally to go to the devil--it would be of course very regrettable, but anyhow he would be rescued from Popery, and that was the only thing that really mattered.
[Sidenote: 1867, Oxford alarmed]
In the midst of these alarums and excursions the young peer returned to Christ Church for the Lent term of 1867, and found himself the object of much more public attention and solicitude than he at all appreciated. "Life is odious here at present," he wrote to the always faithful friend of whose sympathy he was sure, "and I am having a worse time even than I had during all the rows about my guardianship.
Luckily I am better able to bear it, and nothing will ever change my resolution."
Dr. Liddon concerned himself very actively with the project of getting Bute to agree to delay in carrying out his purpose; and with him was a.s.sociated Dr. Mansel, at that time a Fellow of St. John"s and Professor of Church History (he became Dean of St. Paul"s in 1868).
There were some advanced churchmen among the Senior Students[3] of that day, including the Rev. R. Benson, first superior of the Cowley brotherhood, and the Rev. T. Chamberlain of St. Thomas"s, who claimed to be the first clergyman to have worn a chasuble in his parish church since the Reformation.[4] Such men as these would naturally {46} point out that Bute could get all that he wanted in their section of the Anglican Church; but by another of the Students, Mr. Septimus Andrews, who afterwards followed Bute into the Catholic Church and became an Oblate of St. Charles, he was encouraged to remain faithful to his convictions, in spite of the strong pressure brought to bear on him from all quarters. It was even said that Dr. Pusey (who seems to have taken no part in the agitation of the time) was to be asked to approach Dr. Newman in his retirement at Edgbaston, and beg him to use his influence to secure the delay which was all that was now hoped for.
There is no evidence that this step was actually taken; but the success, such as it was, of these reiterated appeals for postponement of the final and definitive step is attested by the following deeply interesting letter, written by Bute to his friend at Oxford at the beginning of the Easter vacation of 1867.