MANY names of persons who have played important, though subsidiary, parts in life have been omitted by the compilers of the biographical dictionaries, even though the question of the memoirs which should be inserted, as was the case with the “Dictionary of National Biography,” has been the subject of serious consideration on the part of many experts. The man who has filled the chief permanent post in a Government office for many years, and has been the guiding spirit of its representative in Parliament, either in the administration of its daily business or in the introduction of the measures which are required for the enlargement of its duties; the author whose works have been published without his name or without a blaze of advertisement; the trusted adviser behind the scenes in ecclesiastical or political life, specimens of all these classes may be searched for in such works without success. One such name is that of John Whishaw, author of a biography which

19

Whishaw Family

entranced adventurous youth some sixty years since, trusted counsellor of the Whig leaders in their long years of exclusion from office, and a familiar figure in their social life during the brightest days of Holland House and Lansdowne House.

The family of Whishaw was for several generations connected with Cheshire. “Hugh Whishaw, of Middlewich, pleb.,” is the first person of the name who is known to me as living in the county. His elder son, Hugh, matriculated from Brasenose College, Oxford, on March 26, 1697, took the usual degrees, and became an English clergyman, obtaining two livings in Shropshire and that of Dinton, in Lincolnshire (1731). The younger son, Thomas, matriculated from the same College in 1702, and after enjoying much preferment in the Church, held the first prebendal stall at Winchester Cathedral from 1739 until his death in 1756. Hugh Whishaw, the father of John Whishaw, practised as an attorney in Chester, and held the position of “seal-keeper of the county-palatine.” His wife, whom he married at Prestbury, on March 21, 1763, was Mary Glegg, younger daughter of John Baskervyle, of Old Withington and Blackden, in Cheshire, member of a very ancient family in the county, who married Mary, daughter and heiress of Robert Glegg, of Gayton-in-Wirrall, and on the father’s death took the name of Glegg. She was baptised at Chelford on July 23, 1736, and buried at Goostry on September 2, 1793. The death of her husband, Hugh Whishaw, is recorded in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1780.

John Whishaw, their eldest son, was born at Chester,

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probably in 1764. His primary education was at the free grammar school of the adjoining town of Macclesfield, which was founded by Sir John Percival, Lord Mayor of London, in 1503 to benefit the place of his birth. It was amply endowed and several Acts of Parliament have been passed for the administration of the property and the extension of its original purposes. From about 1775 to 1800 it was the school to which the chief families in Cheshire and the surrounding counties sent their sons. James Parke, Lord Wensleydale, was the most famous of its old boys.

On July 4, 1783, at the age of 18, Whishaw was admitted pensioner at Trinity College, Cambridge, and on April 8, 1785, he took the oaths as scholar of the College. His degrees were B.A. in 1788 and M.A. in 1792. The tripos verses which he wrote (March 2, 1786, in comitiis prioribus) on the lawn in the College court are still preserved (Bodleian Lib., Gough collection, Cambridge, 95). They are clever in composition. He descants on the fine piece of grass across which only children are allowed to run. The care taken to encourage its growth is notable; spade, rake, roller, and even subtler arts, have their place in the industry. The days of spring are anxious days, and sometimes a failure occurs, especially when ill-fortune sends a crowd of undergraduates over it.

“Sæpe etenim placidae per opaca silentia noctis (Ceu lemures quondam) saliunt effusa juventus, Thyrsigero stimulante Deo, pedibusque profanis Insultant campo passim, atque impune choreas

21

Whishaw at Cambridge

Exercent. Sæpe impransus festinat alumnus, Et metuens epulis, non fert assueta viarum Tædia, sed glebæ extremo vix margine cautum Radit iter.”

Whishaw had been intended for the Church, but the loss of a leg while at college made him “canonically ineligible to the service of the altar.” As he had inherited considerable property from his father, he never entered the lists in competition for a fellowship at Trinity. He obtained distinction both at the University and among the graduates resident at London by winning one of the members’ prizes for an essay in Latin prose in 1789 and again in 1790. His friend, John Heys, a fellow of the College, obtained the same prizes in the following years, and another friend and fellow, John Tweddell, the traveller, followed in their steps. The best-known wrangler in Whishaw’s year was Malthus, and with him, as with the other distinguished fellows of Trinity and Jesus at this period, he remained a staunch friend throughout life.

The subject of the essay for 1790 was the burning question whether the French Revolution was likely to prove advantageous or injurious to this country, and Whishaw’s essay contended that it would result in benefit to us. The then Mr. Samuel Romilly writing to Madame Gallois on August 20, 1790, drew from this fact an indication that public opinion in England

22

Whishaw at the Bar

leant to approval of the Revolution, and the line which the essayist adopted was certainly that maintained by the Whigs as a party. This competition probably influenced the tenour of Whishaw’s life. He remained until death a devoted supporter of that cause in politics. Five years before this date the competition for one of those prizes had decided the career of a more prominent man, and through him guided the action of the nation. Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare was set by old Peckard of Magdalene College, the Vice-Chancellor, as the subject of the contest in 1785, and the victory was gained by Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist, whose absorbing interest in the theme led him to devote his after-years to furthering the cause of freedom.

Without the tie of a fellowship or the necessity, through inadequate means, of taking pupils at the University so as to obtain the capital for his start in life, Whishaw came to London at once, was entered as a student at Gray’s Inn on October 20, 1789, and after eating the regulation-course of dinners, was called to the bar by that society on June 27, 1794. His branch of the profession was on the chancery side, and he soon found it necessary to have chambers near the scene of his labours. He was admitted at Lincoln’s Inn on October 27, 1794, and obtained rooms in New Square, where he dwelt until 1835, having for many years Francis Horner as his neighbour.

Whishaw quickly obtained considerable business in the courts. The principles and practice of equity were familiar to him, and he put his points with

23

Whishaw as an Official

clearness and without exaggeration. The judges listened to his arguments with respect, and Lord Eldon did not hesitate to praise both his knowledge of the law and his method of conducting his cases. But Whishaw was possessed of independent means, and desired a position of less labour, in which he could indulge his tastes more frequently, and not be restricted in the enjoyments of social life by the necessity of giving up long hours to the study of briefs. He consequently accepted, in October, 1806, from Lord Henry Petty, afterwards the Marquess of Lansdowne, the post of Commissioner for auditing the public accounts. The instincts of reform followed him into his new office. He strove, but strove in vain, to abandon the use of Roman numerals and bad Latin for Arabic figures and English words. Lord Grenville would hear of nothing so revolutionary as writing “hair powder duty” instead of debitum super pulverem crinalem.

Coming up to London with the reputation of possessing a competency and mental endowments of conspicuous merit, Whishaw was not long in becoming known to the leading reformers and in obtaining introductions to the salons of Whiggism. Sydney Smith, on settling in his modest establishment at Doughty Street in 1803, sought his acquaintance as one of the prominent lawyers living in that neighbourhood. Romilly, who had known him from 1790, confided to Dumont in 1803 his suspicion “that our friend Whishaw has contributed something to the merit” of Lord King’s celebrated pamphlet on the “Restriction of Payments in Specie” by the

24

Whishaw and Brougham

Bank of England, and rumour assigned to him a share in the brochures of Lord Holland. When Lord St. Vincent was sent by Mr. Fox on a mission in 1806 to the Court of Lisbon, with the object of counteracting the anticipated invasion of Portugal by the troops of Napoleon, Brougham, then a poor man, was selected for the post of secretary. Whishaw surmised that his friend was ill-provided with resources for the journey, and wrote him: “As your sudden journey and voyage may have involved you in some unexpected expenses, and it may happen that you have pecuniary demands for which you may not be altogether prepared ... I have money at my bankers’, and can, without any inconvenience, furnish you with any reasonable sum for which you may have temporary occasion.” Brougham never forgot this unsolicited kindness and recorded the act in his Life and Times, I. 37, with a short notice of the chief incidents in Whishaw’s career. Abercromby, afterwards the Speaker, and later on Lord Dunfermline, introduced him to Horner as a “very particular friend of mine of the name of Whishaw, whom I hold a most excellent critic and accurate in his opinions of character,” and from that time his name is often found in the letters and diaries of Horner. In 1806 Horner suggested his name to Jeffrey as a probable Edinburgh reviewer. This hint does not seem to have been adopted. Although Whishaw’s letters contain many references to the review, all of them allude to the writings of others, and he is not included by Doctor Copinger among the contributors to the “first hundred numbers.”

25

Whishaw and Slavery

By 1814 Whishaw’s ascendancy in Whig society was universal. Maria Stewart, daughter of Dugald Stewart, writing to her mother (April 21, 1814), describes a party at Mrs. Marcet’s. “Lady Romilly, Dr. Holland (afterwards Sir Henry), and I got a long chat with Mr. Whishaw, which I think was more than we were entitled to, considering we were none of the brightest. Mr. Whishaw seems as mad about the Emperor Alexander as his most devoted slave can be. It is said (I do not know who was Mr. Whishaw’s authority) that the Czar asked what was the meaning of Whig and Tory, and when he heard it, said he believed he was the only Whig in his dominions.”

The Act for the Abolition of Slavery provided that no vessel should clear out for slaves from any port in British dominions after May 1, 1807, and that no slaves should be landed in the Colonies after March 1, 1808. The African Institution was then formed to watch over and promote the operation of the Act, and to aid in the development of commerce and the spread of civilisation within the affected limits; but it was expressly laid down that the Association should not undertake any religious missions or engage in commercial speculations. The Duke of Gloucester, nephew and son-in-law of the King, was its first president, Henry Thornton its treasurer, and Zachary Macaulay acted gratuitously as its secretary for the first five years. When its first anniversary was celebrated, on March 25, 1808, Wilberforce noted in his diary with pride that “ten or twelve noblemen and forty or more M.P.’s attended.”

26

Whishaw and Mungo Park

From the seventh to the thirteenth report Whishaw’s name appeared on the list of directors, and although he was not on the Board on the fourteenth report (1820), his name reappears in later years.

The widow and children of Mungo Park, the African explorer, had been left by him without due provision for their welfare, and his journal and papers were handed by the Government to the African Institution for publication on behalf of the family. John Murray arranged with that body to publish them, and to pay £1,200 for the copyright, but it subsequently appeared that the most important section of the travels had already been published, whereupon he wrote to Whishaw, who had undertaken their editorship, asking that the contract might be rescinded. Matters, however, were subsequently arranged, and the volume was published by him in 1815. The reports of the Association more than once acknowledged the liberality of the publisher, and the sum of £1,200 was duly invested in public funds for the family’s benefit.

This publication, says the ninth report of the Institution in somewhat quaint language, “has been edited with great ability by a highly respectable member of this Board.” This was Whishaw, who wrote for it “An Account of the Life of Mr. Park,” which was based on papers supplied by Park’s brother-in-law, Mr. Archibald Buchanan, of Glasgow. Sixty years ago this memoir was devoured by many an English youth; it was often reprinted, and has formed the foundation of all that has been written on Park.

27

Whishaw and Smithson Tennant

Rarely indeed has a modest memoir been received with such a chorus of praise. The article by Sir John Barrow in the Quarterly Review (April, 1815) asserted that with the exception of one controversial paragraph, it had been “written with good taste, feeling, and judgment,” and in a later year (July, 1817) a second contribution to the same review owned that the world was indebted “to the classical pen” of Whishaw for all its information on Park. Brougham in the Edinburgh Review (February, 1815) boasted that the editor had produced a volume “at once instructive and entertaining in no common degree.” What these writers said in public, equally-distinguished critics remarked in private. Ward, afterwards Lord Dudley, wrote to Copleston, “Whishaw sent me two biographical memoirs, one on Mungo Park, the other on Tennant. Get a sight of them if you can. They are both extremely well done.”

Smithson Tennant, the chemist and mineralogist, became known to him at Cambridge, and for more than twenty years they remained the warmest of friends. A few papers scattered through the transactions of the learned societies are the sole records that bear witness to the talents of this University professor of chemistry. He delivered but one course of lectures, and then met his death while crossing a bridge near Boulogne. His body was laid at rest in the cemetery at Boulogne, with a Latin epitaph originally composed by Heys, a lay-fellow of Trinity, then revised by Whishaw, and supervised by Samuel Parr, who composed or corrected most of the classical epitaphs of his age. The memoir, “Some Account of

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Whishaw and Travel

the Late Smithson Tennant, Esq., F.R.S.,” appeared in two successive numbers of Dr. Thomson’s Annals of Philosophy, and a few copies were printed in 1815 for distribution among friends. It purported to have been drawn up by some of Tennant’s friends, but was in the main the composition of Whishaw.

One sentence in it troubled the sensitive mind of Burckhardt, the traveller in the East. Tennant was represented as having been at considerable pains to instruct him “in the principles of mineralogy,” but Burckhardt protested that Tennant had done nothing more than “to produce sometimes a few specimens and to ask whether I knew what they were.” He was apprehensive lest the public should expect from him, as the pupil of so distinguished a man of science, some “deep geological and mineralogical disquisitions on the African mountains,” and be disappointed through the absence of such information.

Horner urged Whishaw to publish the life with his name on the title-page, but this advice was never adopted, and at present his name finds no place in the voluminous catalogue of the British Museum Library.

Whishaw’s success with his memoirs led him to communicate to Parr his desire to preserve in print the memory of their excellent friend, John Tweddell. At another time he thought of arranging for publication some papers of William George Browne, the enthusiastic traveller in Syria and Persia, who was murdered while journeying late in the summer of 1813 towards Teheran. Browne’s chief friend at home was Tennant, to whose care these papers had been transmitted from Smyrna, and through whom

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Whishaw and Lucy Aikin

they had reached Whishaw. But nothing came of these projects.

John Aikin, the brother of Mrs. Barbauld, and the father of Lucy Aikin, practised at Chester and Warrington during the youth of Whishaw, and a community of feeling brought them into intimacy. Aikin in 1812 inscribed his lives of Selden and Usher to Whishaw, “as a testimony of cordial friendship and esteem,” and Lucy Aikin had known him from childhood. In her letters and memoirs anecdotes of him abound for years. She describes a dinner with the Carrs in May, 1815, to meet Sir Walter Scott, when she sat between Whishaw and Sotheby, and the former was full of laments over the return of his friend Dumont to Geneva. In July, 1815, he read to her “an agreeable letter from Miss Edgeworth about his life of Park, with a postscript by Edgeworth père on “the possibility of exploring Africa in balloons, which he knows the art of guiding—in perfectly calm air.” Lucy Aikin made in 1827 “a jaunt to Cambridge,” which was planned by Whishaw and his great friend, William Smyth, the professor of modern history in that University, and the Mallets, husband and wife, were included in the party. Whishaw took the two ladies in his carriage with “a very amiable young Romilly on the box,” and the Mallet husband went by coach. The trip lasted from Thursday to Sunday, and the professor gave “two good dinners” at which the “brightest stars of the University,” Kaye, the Bishop of Lincoln, Sedgwick, and Whewell, shed their light. Three years later she wrote to Dr. Channing that Whishaw’s

30

Whishaw and the Whigs

“literary opinions are heard in the most enlightened circles with a deference approaching that formerly paid to Johnson,” and after his death paid a tribute to “his wisdom, his knowledge, and his wit.” Perhaps the sharpest estimate of character by Whishaw recorded in these letters, and it is mentioned more than once, was “that Bentham was a schoolman, born some ages too late.”

Whishaw retired from his commissionership on a pension at the latter end of 1835, when he was more than 70 years old, and suffered from partial blindness. He had enjoyed his post for nearly 30 years, and his leisure hours in London with the holidays and the vacations yielded abundant opportunities for the pleasures of social life. His name occurs among the long list of guests at Holland House, which was drawn up by its imperious hostess, with the comment, “Whose sense made his opinions valuable to have and also difficult to obtain.” Tom Moore met him regularly at dinner at the town house of Lord Lansdowne and stayed with him at Bowood.1 They breakfasted several times with Rogers. Once, it was in 1832, when Macaulay, Luttrell, and Lord Kerry were present, they broke into “strong politics.” On another occasion “old Whishaw” gave them an amusing instance of Dr. Parr’s stilted phraseology. In addressing a well-known lawyer after some great forensic display, he said, “Sir, you are incapable of doing justice to your own argument; you weaken it by diffusion and perplex it by reiteration.” Jeremy

1Mr. Whishaw is still remembered (1905) as coming every Christmas to Bowood with his wards, “The Romilly boys.”

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Whishaw and Jeremy Bentham

Bentham wrote to Brougham to bring a gang to the Hermitage at Queen Street Place, “to devour such eatable and drinkables as are to be found in it.” Five members of the gang, Brougham, Denman, Hume, Mackintosh, and Ricardo, were to come from the House of Commons; the other selected members of the party, Whishaw and James Mill, were outside St. Stephen’s. It was, indeed, a company of giants.

In August, 1816, the Smiths of Easton Grey, in Wiltshire, friends and neighbours of Lord Lansdowne at Bowood, and Ricardo at Gatcombe, went with him to the Netherlands. “Madam” Smith, as she was called, left a great reputation for cleverness and learning; she collected autographs and Whishaw sent her many valuable letters from Scott, Byron, and other celebrities of English life. In the next autumn he was in Paris and “recommencing his journey.” He was on a visit to Ricardo at Gatcombe Park in the vacation of 1819, when host and guest had many and protracted conversations on Parliamentary Reform, and in company with Zachary Macaulay, Baptist Noel, and others he stayed at Lord Calthorpe’s country house at Ampton, near Bury St. Edmunds, which Wilberforce, another sojourner, called “an exquisite oasis.” In October, 1831, he had just returned from France.

In the autumn of 1826 Whishaw and Jeffrey were guests at Sydney Smith’s Yorkshire living of Foston-le-Clay, as it was appropriately called, and some years later (1832 and 1835) he stayed with the same cheerful host in the more beautiful scenes of Combe Flory, under the Quantock Hills. He did not,

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Whishaw and Sydney Smith

however, enjoy immunity from Sydney’s playful gibes. “Whishaw’s plan is the best,” he said; “he gives no opinion for the first week, but confines himself to chuckling and elevating his chin; in the meantime he drives diligently about the first critical stations, breakfasts in Mark Lane (with Ricardo), hears from Hertford College (Malthus), and by Saturday night is as bold as a lion and as decisive as a court of justice.” Later on, Sydney dubs him “a man of fashion,” and then describes Lady Holland “as cautious as Whishaw,” but in October, 1831, when the Whigs were in the plenitude of power, he showed his genuine estimate of his friend by advising Earl Grey to cultivate Whishaw; “He is one of the most sensible men in England, and his opinions valuable if he will give them.” When Whishaw did express himself, his confidence in his own opinions won for him the nicknames of “the Pope”1 and “the Mufti.”

In the midst of this chorus of praise there breaks in one jarring note—that of Thomas Carlyle. Troubled with that eternal want of pence which hinders the rise of mental “worth by poverty depressed,” and chafing inwardly at Jeffrey’s neglect to introduce him to his influential friends, he called one winter’s evening at the Lord Advocate’s rooms in Jermyn

1 This explains a reference in a letter of Lord Brougham to Creevey, in which he says, “Nothing can be more unpropitious than the plan of carrying on a party by a côterie at Lady Holland’s elbow, which cannot be submitted to for a moment, even I should think, by those who belong to her côterie; at least, I know no one but the Coles (the Abercrombies), Horner, and the Pope (who are of her household), who can bear it” (“Creevey Memoirs,” vol. i., p. 249).

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Whishaw and Thomas Carlyle

Street. All three—Jeffrey, his wife, and Carlyle—were sitting crooning over the fire when Whishaw was announced. The lady, in her anxiety to suit the room to her distinguished visitor, dashed about for a few seconds, removing, arranging, and re-arranging. The door opened and there “waddled in a puffy, thick-set vulgar little dump of an old man whose manners and talk . . . struck me as very cool, bid far enough from admirable.” Carlyle in his ire soon made himself scarce, but condescended long afterwards to ask old Sterling who the man was. “He’s a damned old humbug; dines at Holland House,” was the ready answer. This description of his person must be accepted as the truth. It is not unlike that given by Mrs. Le Breton, in her memories of her aunt, Lucy Aikin, whom he generally visited in company with Professor Smyth, both of them being adepts at conversation, full of anecdotes and interesting talk. Whishaw “was a short stout man with a cork leg, very lame, and with a rather surly manner.” Sydney Smith once pointed him out to a country cousin as “Hannibal who lost his leg in the Carthaginian war.” Another lady, Miss Fenwick, writing to Sir Henry Taylor, lauded him and Crabb Robinson as “two old bachelors preserving kindliness and courtesy, loving themselves, and making others love them.” Whishaw, she thought, preserved his benevolence “through the want of his leg,” the other through his ugliness.

Whishaw accompanied Brougham to the House of Peers on his first great speech, and contrasted the cold reception of the orator in his new position with

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Whishaw and the Romilly Family

Whishaw and the Romilly Family the tumultuous cheers which greeted and accompanied him in the other House. Brougham referred to him as the friend “long known intimately, and consequently most highly and justly esteemed,” whom Romilly made his executor, and to whom he entrusted the care of his children; and, as far as was possible, he supplied the place of their father. Romilly left materials for a work on criminal law, and his confidence in Whishaw’s judgment was such that the task of examining them and deciding whether they were worthy of publication was deputed to him. If he declined, the duty was assigned to Brougham. The decision of Whishaw to refrain from publishing these papers was the subject of some severe remarks in an article in the Quarterly Review, September, 1845, pp. 439-44. Strong condemnation of this article is expressed in Lord Cockburn’s Journal (1874), II., 128—9. When Whishaw retired from office, he moved to 29, Wilton Crescent, to live with the two youngest sons, Charles and Frederick, of Sir Samuel Romilly, or, to use Sydney Smith’s pleasantry, with “Romulus and Remus.”

A very kindly reference to his loss of sight and declining health was made by Jeffrey in 1837. “I was not at all aware that his sight was so very much decayed. But I think he is fortunate beyond most unmarried men, in being the object of more cordial kindness than such solitaries usually attract, and in having so great a society of persons of all ages, sexes, and occupations, willing to occupy themselves about him. His kindness, I do think, has fructified more than that of most people and been the cause of

35

Whishaw’s Varied Work

kindness in others to a larger extent.” With the attentions of his devoted friends, his last years glided quietly away. He was much affected in October, 1840, by the news of the death of Lord Holland, which was communicated to him somewhat abruptly by Sydney Smith. The shock gave him a slight stroke, but he lingered on until a quarter past three on the morning of December 21, 1840, when he passed away quietly and without suffering. His wish was to be buried as privately as possible at St. Peter’s Church, Eaton Square. Charles Romilly was his sole executor, and nearly the whole of the property was left to him.

Whishaw was at that date the senior bencher of Gray’s Inn, and he had been a member of the Athenæum Club from its foundation; he was also one of the select band in literature and science who formed, in the early years of the 19th century, the “King of Clubs.” He had been F.R.S. since 1815, and had acted with his accustomed vigour, as became a friend of Bentham and Brougham, on the Councils of the London University, and the Committee of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. His name follows those of George Grote and Zachary Macaulay in the list of the first Council of the University.

One of his colleagues at the Audit Office, Mr. J. L. Mallet (son of Mallet Du Pan), thus depicted his official character: “He carried with him in public life the same qualities which had always distinguished him; great strength of understanding, powers of reasoning, great industry, and clearness in the despatch of business, and perfect integrity of purpose;

36

Whishaw and Lord Dunfermline

nor was the happy influence he exercised for nearly thirty years in a very large department by his conciliating disposition and excellent sense less conspicuous than his able and conscientious discharge of his duties. Mr. Whishaw’s mind was amply stored with legal, practical, and literary knowledge; and no man was oftener consulted, or gave kinder and better advice.”

Lord Dunfermline, who as Mr. James Abercromby had known him from youth, sent to Mr. Charles Romilly the following tribute to his old companion: “You and your brothers have lost a most valuable friend. Whishaw exerted the duty towards you all, and what had been confided to him, with the greatest zeal and affection. But the day of his death was not the day from which his loss to you was to be dated. His means of usefulness had passed away, and it remained for you to repay his kindness by watching over him in his decline. Few men can have died more free from self-reproach or with so little to regret as Whishaw. His life was active, useful, and honourable, and passed in a free and rational indulgence of kind, benevolent, and sound feeling. He was very much valued and one of my oldest friends.”

Both eulogies were justified. In his old age the memory of Whishaw could dwell with proud satisfaction on a long life spent in honourable labour and in social intercourse with the noblest in our land.