APPENDIX. | 353 |
Robert Ward was born in Mount Street, Grosvenor Square, on the 19th of March, 1765, on one of the occasional visits of his parents to this country—his father being a Spanish merchant, residing at Gibraltar, his mother a native Spanish lady of Jewish extraction. This lady died when her son Robert was only three years of age, and the child was taken under the special protection of the Hon. Mrs. Cornwallis, granddaughter of Charles, second Lord Townshend, and wife of the then Governor of Gibraltar, General Cornwallis, who was brother of Lord Cornwallis. The boy showed early signs of talent, and was, at the age of eight years, sent to England for education, under a sound but eccentric scholar, who kept a school at Walthamstow.
At the age of eighteen (in January, 1783), Robert was sent to Christ Church, Oxford, where he remained till 1787, and
contracted several distinguished friendships, which lasted during the lives of the parties
respectively, and some of which considerably influenced his future career. Among these
latter were those of the famous Dr. Cyril Jackson,
Master of Christ Church,
354 | APPENDIX. |
Shortly after quitting Oxford, young Ward was entered at the Inner Temple; but before being called to the bar his health induced a visit to the baths of Bareges; and the fascinations of French society detained him in France till the breaking out of the Revolution, when it appears, from a statement of his own, quoted by Mr. Phipps, that he “was arrested for having the same name and wearing the same coloured coat and waistcoat as another Ward, guilty of treason; was ordered without trial to Paris, to be guillotined; and only escaped by their catching the real traitor. I was, however, banished the Republic for my name’s sake.”
On the 18th of June, 1790, Mr. Ward
was called to the bar by the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, and commenced in
earnest those studies which would undoubtedly have led him to future eminence in his
profession, had he not been turned aside from the pursuit by circumstances which directed
his attention to political life. An accidental rencontre and discussion with one of the
têtes exaltés of the period led to an
inquiry before the Privy Council, in which young Ward’s
intellectual energy and sagacity attracted the attention of Pitt and Eldon (the latter then
Solicitor-General): and his publication, shortly afterwards, of a work entitled
“An Inquiry into the Foundation and
History of the Law of Nations, &c.,” secured to him the future support
and favour of those two distinguished menthe former of whom, not long afterwards, offered
him
APPENDIX. | 355 |
From the period of his entrance into Parliament, Mr. Ward devoted himself almost exclusively to politics—led thereto, no doubt, by the favourable position given to him by his family connexion with Lord Mulgrave, and by the steady friendship and affection evinced towards him by that distinguished nobleman during the whole of his life.
Mr. Ward’s first speech in Parliament was a
very successful one. It was on the abuses in naval affairs; and its marked opposition to
Canning and those with whom he then acted,
showed the tendency of the speaker’s views towards that great Tory party with which
he was ever afterwards allied. At this period, the head and soul of that party, Pitt, was not in power; but he succeeded to it shortly
afterwards, in the spring of 1804. Up to this moment, Mr. Ward had not
formally abandoned his profession, and there can be little doubt that the great law offices
of the Crown were open to him, had he chosen to make them the express object
356 | APPENDIX. |
Few and brief as were, the opportunities of official and other intercourse
between Pitt and his protegé,
Robert Ward, the great statesman had evidently
conceived not merely a high opinion of his capacity, but a strong regard for his character;
and perhaps the thing in the world which Mr. Ward most prized was a
paper, traced (for it cannot be said to be written—no single word of its three or four
sides being legible except the imperfect signature) on his death-bed. It appears that on
giving up his profession on his acceptance of office (and resigning a Welsh judgeship for
that purpose), a spontaneous promise had been made to Mr. Ward, that
the great pecuniary risks he ran, by changing what was now the certainty of success in his
profession for the precariousness of political office, should be compensated to him by an
adequate pension on his quitting office; but the necessary arrangements had not been
completed at the time when Mr. Pitt felt the hand of death to be upon
him; and even in that supreme moment he more than once alluded to the unfulfilled promise,
and at last, when, at the very point of death, and he could not articulate, he made signs
for
APPENDIX. | 357 |
The immediate advent to power of Pitt’s great rival, Charles Fox, displaced Mr. Ward from office; but Fox’s death, only a few months afterwards, opened the way for the Portland Administration, in which Lord Mulgrave accepted the office of First Lord of the Admiralty, and appointed Mr. Ward to a seat at the board. This was in the spring of 1807; and from this period till his final retirement from political life, in 1820, Mr. Ward continued to form part of the successive ministries of the Duke of Portland, Mr. Percival, and Lord Liverpool.
In May, 1810, Lord Mulgrave transferred
his services from the Admiralty to the Ordnance, of which he accepted the superintendence
as Master-General; and a year afterwards Mr. Ward
joined his friend as a member of that board. In this office—Clerk of the
Ordnance—Mr. Ward remained till his final retirement from
political life in 1823—the last five years of his official career being passed under the
great duke himself, who succeeded Lord
Mulgrave as Master-General of the Ordnance in. November, 1818. The death of
his beloved wife seems to have been the immediate cause of Mr.
Ward’s retirement from Parliament and from political life, which step
took place immediately after the close of the session of 1823. He shortly afterwards
received the appointment of Auditor of the Civil List, in token of the public services he
had rendered, and the pecuniary sacrifices he had made in so doing. This appointment, at
the time of its being conferred upon
358 | APPENDIX. |
Having now (in 1S23) retired to his residence, Hyde House, in Buckinghamshire, Mr. Ward commenced his novel of “Tremaine; or, the Man of Refinement,” which was completed and in the hands of its publisher, Mr. Colburn, in the summer of 1824, and was published anonymously early in the spring of 1825.
Before the conclusion of the same spring, Mr. Ward announced to the two or three private friends who were alone in his secret, that he had advanced far in another work of similar general character with “Tremaine.” This was published (also anonymously) in March, 1827, under the title of “De Vere; or, the Man of Independence.”
In the summer of 1828,* Mr. Ward married Mrs. Plumer Lewin, of Gilston Park, Herts. This lady was granddaughter to the seventh Earl of Abercorn. She had previously married Mr. Plumer, who was for forty years member for the county, and after his death (in 1822) Commander Lewin, of the Royal Navy, who died in 1827. On marrying Mrs. Plumer Lewin, Mr. Ward received the royal permission to take and use the name of Plumer, as a prefix to that of Ward. It was shortly after this marriage that the Whig Government
* I take this date from Mr. Phipps’s “Memoir” (ii. 172), but it seems scarcely consistent with subsequent pages of the same vol. (177 to 180), where Mr. Ward addresses and is addressed as R. Plumer Ward, under the dates of March and April, 1828. |
APPENDIX. | 359 |
During the years 1829-30, Mr. Ward was visited by a grievous series of domestic afflictions: he lost his two eldest daughters within two or three days of each other, and his wife within a few months afterwards; and in 1831 the same insidious disease, consumption, which had carried off his other daughters, attacked his youngest and only remaining one.
It was during the prostration of mind which followed these afflictions that Mr. Ward met the lady who afterwards became his third wife, Mrs. Okeover, the widowed daughter of the late gallant General Sir George Anson—a connexion which restored and secured to his declining years that happy buoyancy of spirit which had marked the whole of his previous life, with the exception of the two fatal years above alluded to, and the trying period immediately following the loss of his only remaining daughter in 1834. This last blow again drove Mr. Ward from England, and in all probability was the exciting cause to his again taking up his pen—his favourite succedaneum for all mortal ills.
In the course of the years 1836, 7, and 8, Mr. Ward wrote and published successively “Illustrations of Human Life” (three vols.), “Pictures of the World” (three vols.), and an “Essay on the Revolution of 1688,” (two vols.)
In the latter year (1838) the young son of Mrs.
Plumer Ward succeeded, by the will of his uncle, to the fine estate of
Okeover Hall, Staffordshire, and his mother
360 | APPENDIX. |
In the spring, of 1846, Mrs. Plumer Ward’s father, Lieutenant-General Sir George Anson, G.C.B., received the appointment of Lieutenant-Governor of Chelsea Hospital; and the official residence being a very capacious one, Mr. and Mrs. Ward were induced to leave Okeover, and reside there with her father; and here, on the 13th of August, 1846, Mr. Ward calmly closed his earthly career, at the age of eighty-one years, his faculties remaining unimpaired to the last.
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