The Remarkable Lushington Family. David Taylor

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      It has been said that wherever social conscience and reform needed to be stirred into action, a Lushington could usually be found. Like others within the “intellectual aristocracy,” the Lushingtons married into families who shared their interests and political views—the Carrs, the Mowatts, the Massingberds, and the Maxses. But although the name Lushington can be found in the accounts of the lives of many of the well-known figures of the nineteenth century: writers, artists, musicians, politicians, and social reformers, it is usually there only as a footnote leaving the reader wanting to know more.

      Except for a volume on Stephen Lushington’s political and legal career,⁴ and a privately printed early history of the Lushington family,⁵ no biography of any of the family has been published. This book seeks to redress the situation by bringing to the center stage of the social, artistic, and political life of nineteenth-century Britain the three generations of this remarkable family whose lives were interwoven with those of so many well-known and truly eminent Victorians, and whose own lives uniquely contributed to the cultural, spiritual, and political world in which they lived.

      NOTES

      1. “The long nineteenth century” was coined by the Marxist historian and author Eric Hobsbawm.

      2. Noel Annan, “The Intellectual Aristocracy,” in Studies in Social History, ed. J.H. Plumb (Longmans, 1955).

      3. Ibid.

      4. S.M. Waddams, Law, Politics and the Church of England: The Career of Stephen Lushington 1782–1873 (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

      5. Sir John Lushington Bt., From Gavelkinders to Gentlemen: A History of the Lushington Family in East Kent from 1200 to 1700 (Published by the author, 2011).

Part I

       STEPHEN

       (1782–1873)

      He seems the most gentlemanlike, clear headed and clever Man I ever met with.

      He is the most rising Man in the Spiritual Court and the Man most looked up to . . . his Character as a man stands high.

      —Lady Judith Milbanke to Lady Byron, from Malcolm Elwin, Lord Byron’s Wife (Macdonald & Co., 1962), pp. 375 and 37

      Dr Lushington, a singular, eager man.

      —Queen Victoria, Thursday May 29, 1845, Vol. 19, pp. 207–29, online

      Introduction

      In April 1891, Thomas Hardy attended a small dinner party in London’s fashionable Kensington Square at the invitation of His Honor Judge Vernon Lushington.¹ The evening appears to have made little impression on Hardy save for the fact that, as he later noted in his diary, he had “looked at the portrait of Lushington’s father, who had known Lady Byron’s secret.”² The portrait which attracted Hardy’s attention was the brilliant likeness of Dr. Stephen Lushington painted by the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt in 1862.³ Hunt later boasted to his friend Frederic Stephens, “I think it the best portrait of modern times.”

      

      Stephen Lushington by William Holman Hunt 1862. © The National Portrait Gallery.

      Stephen Lushington’s craggy features, deep set eyes, and thoughtful expression, so wonderfully captured by Hunt, must have set Hardy’s imagination racing. Hardy’s novels reveal his intense curiosity in the unusual and the bizarre. His keen sense of observation and inquisitiveness are perfectly captured in his biographical poem “Afterwards” in which he is the “man who noticed such things.” For Hardy, the unusual, the strange, and the macabre were the stuff of life which he used to add color and human interest to his writing.

      For decades rumors had been rife concerning “the Byron secret”—the truth behind the separation of Lord and Lady Byron, and it continues to attract interest. George Gordon Byron was famously described as “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” Stories abounded of his infidelities and a possible incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, but the only person outside the marriage who knew all the facts was Lady Byron’s lawyer and confidante—Stephen Lushington.

      Lady Byron’s mother, after her initial consultation with Lushingtonopined that he was “the most gentlemanlike, clear headed and clever Man I ever met with” and was relieved to place her daughter in his hands. His services to Lady Byron earned him her greatest respect and the deepest trust, and he remained her life-long friend and confidante. Whatever Lushington knew of “the Byron secret,” he took it to his grave leaving Hardy and others to speculate.

      Ultimately, Lushington’s services to Lady Byron and her family brought him more than the usual financial rewards. It was through her that he met his future wife and through her son-in-law Lord Lovelace, he and his family were provided with a home at Ockham Park, deep in the Surrey countryside. However, the troublesome affairs of not only Lady Byron but also her daughter Ada Lovelace, and her grandchildren, continued to plague Lushington and his family for many years.

      NOTES

      1. Thomas Hardy’s friendship with Vernon Lushington almost certainly resulted his brief interest in the Positivism of Auguste Comte and his Religion of Humanity. Hardy and his wife, Emma, attended several Positivist meetings in London but found it stretched belief too far to be able to join the group of which Lushington was then a leading member. Hardy’s first recorded visit to the Lushingtons was in April 1888 when another guest, A. J. Munby, described him as “small, brown bearded, kindly, shrewd.” Hardy continued to enjoy hospitality at 36 Kensington Square, despite the public reaction following the publication of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and, later, Jude the Obscure. Lushington’s daughter Susan, after reading one of Hardy’s novels given to her by her friend Gertrude Bell, wrote that she was “absolutely scandalized with it. It was hatefully improper from beginning to end—and not the least interesting or clever—immorality, fine and simple, is so cheap. It has gone on since the world began & will go on till the end & if you have got nothing new to say about it, you had much better not say anything about it at all. I was horrified & so disappointed too as it is the first of his I had ever read.” After visiting Manchester Library, Susan’s sister Margaret, a deeply committed Christian, wrote, “I rashly took out Jude the Obscure by Hardy—however c[ou]ld we tolerate that man—I think it’s the most revolting inhuman disgusting book I ever read—impossibly repulsive—I should like to have burnt it & Hardy with it & rejoiced in his crackling.” SHC7854/4/5/125.

      2. Florence Emily Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1891 (Macmillan & Co. Ltd, 1928). Hardy visited the Lushingtons again in 1906 and again saw the portrait.

      3. In 1892, Hunt wrote to Lushington suggesting that this portrait be exhibited at the Victorian Exhibition. “I shall not have any other portrait there for the one of Rossetti done at second hand is not quite satisfactory and altho’ your Father’s was done when the size if the life work was strange to me, I am not out of humour with it.”

Chapter 1

       “The Ls Are a Good Race”

      Stephen Lushington could trace his family’s origins back to fourteenth-century Kent and, writing from that county in 1905, his son, Vernon, proudly announced, “Here I am in Kent, as my forefathers were men of Kent. From this place we were digged.”¹ After a visit to the Lushingtons in 1860, Edward Lear commented, “The Ls are a good race.”² Perhaps he had heard the family legend that the Lushingtons were once the Lusignans, ancient kings of Jerusalem and related by marriage to the Plantagenet kings, Henry II and John.