Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/452

 beginning of the next session (Feb. 1881) the need for legislation could no longer be evaded or denied, and in March the protection of property bill and the arms bill, after parliamentary scenes of great tumult, became law. In spite of the 'message of peace' offered by Gladstone in his land bill of the same session, the ensuing autumn showed no improvement in the condition of Ireland. Parnell and several of his colleagues were arrested and imprisoned, and the Land League was suppressed (Oct.). In the course of the winter the rift between the lord-lieutenant, who had the nominal responsibility without the power of control, and his chief secretary imperceptibly widened, although in the public interest a scrupulous silence was observed ; and Lord Cowper, feeling that he could no longer remain in office with satisfaction to his conscience, insisted upon resignation, which on this occasion was accepted by Gladstone (April 1882). Lord Spencer [q. v. Suppl. II] was appointed to succeed him, with a seat in the cabinet, the absence of which had been the chief stumbling-block to his predecessor. Then came the Kilmainham treaty and the release of Parnell, to which Lord Cowper's signature was appended under protest and when he was really functus officio. To Parnell's release Forster was not privy, and the event brought about his resignation. Lord Cowper left Dublin on 4 May, and two days later Lord Frederick Cavendish [q. v.], the new chief secretary, and Mr. Burke, the permanent under-secretary, were murdered in Phœnix Park (6 May 1862). The need for a strong Coercion Act, which had been so often and ineffectually pressed by the retiring viceroy, was universally admitted ; and the draft bill prepared by him was accepted by the government and passed at once into law. Thus Lord Cowper had the melancholy satisfaction of seeing conceded to his successor the powers which had been persistently denied to himself.

Returning to England, he resumed the happy domestic existence, the local obligations, and the more tranquil public duties, for which two years of Irish tumult had given him if possible a greater zest. In his county he devoted himself to his functions as lord-lieutenant of Bedfordshire, and later on became chairman of the Hertfordshire county council. He was a frequent and facile contributor to the magazines: notably the 'Nineteenth Century,' in which a number of his articles may be found between 1883 and 1887, and to 'The Times,' which in 1885 and subsequent years printed many of his letters on public events. He spoke in the House of Lords on a great variety of subjects, but perhaps with less ease and distinction than he wrote. Among his literary contributions was the preface to the volume of Lord Melbourne's Letters edited by Mr. L. C. Sanders (1889). In 1885 he joined the Naval Volunteer Association, and spoke in the House of Lords and attended public meetings on the necessity of providing for the defence of our national harbours.

But it was when Gladstone announced his conversion to home rule and introduced the first home rule bill of 1886 that Lord Cowper's strong convictions, fortified by an exceptional experience, brought him again into the fighting line, and drew from him a series of letters and public speeches that lasted throughout the controversy, until it faded away in the defeat of the second home rule bill in 1893. He was chosen by virtue of his character quite as much as his previous official position to preside at the famous meeting at Her Majesty's Theatre in the Haymarket, London, on 14 April 1886, where he was supported on the one side by Lord Salisbury, W. H. Smith, and Mr. D. Plunket, and on the other by Lord Hartington (afterwards duke of Devonshire), George Joachim (afterwards Lord) Goschen, and the duke of Fife. In another respect his high character and personal charm enabled him to render conspicuous public service. In 1885 he presided over the Manchester Ship Canal commission. In 1886 he was asked by Lord Salisbury to undertake the chairmanship of the royal commission on the working of the Irish Land Acts of 1881 and 1885, which, after six months' hard work, reported in February 1887. He was also chairman in 1892 of the commission to create a teaching university for London.

In such capacities he continued to serve his country, although becoming, as time went on, an increasing martyr to gout, which caused him intervals of excruciating pain. Amid the ordered gardens and canals of Wrest, or in the more purely English surroundings of Panshanger, where the beauties of nature were rivalled by the masterpieces of art collected by his ancestors, he dispensed a hospitality free from ostentation, and surveyed the world with kindly but critical eye. When he passed away at Panshanger on 19 July 1905 there lingered in the minds of his contemporaries a picture of a vanishing type the great English nobleman of high lineage and broad possessions, of chivalrous manners