The Remarkable Lushington Family. David Taylor

him & Montague Butler this morning—From them I learnt that I had passed the Little go safely—no great feat certainly, but still a satisfactory assurance—& that as far as they knew, all my friends likewise amongst them though with considerable danger.⁹

      Babington was one of Lushington’s closest colleagues at Cambridge and their friendship demonstrated how ties between the families in, or associated with, the Clapham Sect could extend into the third generation even though they no longer shared the same evangelical faith.¹⁰ In 1853, Lushington stayed with Babington and his family in Lichfield on his way home from a reading party in Ireland.¹¹ The next year, following another visit, Lushington wrote, “Babington & I are of course happy together. I like his father too—a kind, simple hearted old man, full of historical gossip, wh[ich] amuses me greatly—& evidently of kind generous feeling too.”¹² Babington’s sudden death in 1865 came as a great shock to all his old university friends and Montague Butler remarked:

      To poor Vernon it is almost the saddest loss that could have happened. He and Babington, thoroughly different, the one living in the active and fiery future, the other a truly noble specimen of the old chivalrous Tory (not Conservative), were everything to one another. Babington’s influence brought out in him his love for Wordsworth and Ruskin, and for outward nature, and indeed many of the gentler parts of his character.¹³

      Another of Lushigton's close, and life-long, friendships forged at Trinity was with Richard Buckley Litchfield who later married Charles Darwin’s daughter.¹⁴ In their bachelor days, the two men spent several walking holidays together, both in the United Kingdom and in Europe, and were invited to visit John Ruskin in Switzerland in 1859.¹⁵

      Wilfred Heeley, another of Lushington's contemporaries at Trinity, wrote:

      One of the jolliest men I know in Trinity . . . The young Lushington had been a middy for three years, cruising about in the Indian Ocean, having rencontres with Arabs &c, then comes up to Cambridge and takes up arms against a sea of troubles, classical and mathematical. He is thoroughly frank, open and sailor like, earnest and enthusiastic, extremely Radical, but not wildly, taking a great interest in all questions of political economy and moral philosophy, an ardent admirer of Plato, Wordsworth, and especially Ruskin.¹⁶

      It was Heeley who invited his old Birmingham school friend, Edward Burne-Jones, then at Oxford, to visit him at Cambridge and bring with him William Morris. Burne-Jones and Morris were in a “Set,” a group of like-minded, serious young men with a particular interest in the aesthetic side of religion, based at Pembroke College. Others in this Set were William Fulford, Richard Watson Dixon, Charles Faulkner, and Cormell Price.