Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/342

 and wisdom. He had a thoughtful Irish face with the mouth of an orator. In appearance he was of middle height with broad shoulders and a pronounced stoop. His slight Irish accent added to the attraction of his low but most agreeable voice.

Knox-Little died at Worcester 3 February 1918, and is buried at Turweston. He married in 1866 Annette, eldest daughter of Henry Gregson, of Moorlands, Lancashire. They had ten children, six sons and four daughters, seven of whom survived their father.  KNUTSFORD, first Viscount (1825- 1914). [See Holland, Sir Henry Thurstan.]

LABOUCHERE, HENRY DU PRÉ (1831–1912), journalist and politician, was born in London 9 November 1831. He came of a French protestant stock established in Holland since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. His grandfather, Pierre César Labouchere, was head of the great financial house of Hope, at Amsterdam, and left a very large fortune. The first of the family to settle in England, Pierre Labouchere purchased the estates of Hylands, Essex, and Over Stowey, Somerset, and married Dorothy Elizabeth, third daughter of Sir Francis Baring [q.v.]. The elder of their two sons was the whig politician, Henry Labouchere [q.v.], who held office in several governments, and was created Baron Taunton in 1859. His brother John, of Broome Hall, Dorking, was a partner in the firm of Hope, and later a partner in the bank of Williams, Deacon, Thornton, and Labouchere. He married Mary Louisa, second daughter of James Du Pré, of Wilton Park, Buckinghamshire. Henry Du Pré Labouchere was the eldest child of their family of three sons and six daughters.

All his life Labouchere was a rebel against constituted authority. He was educated at Eton, and afterwards went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where in two years he ran up debts amounting to £6,000. At the age of twenty-one he was sent to South America, where his family had important commercial interests. He found his way to Mexico and there wandered about for a year or two, fell in love with a circus lady, and joined the troupe. For six months he lived in a camp of Chippeway Indians.

Meanwhile, without his knowledge, his family had secured for Labouchere a place in the diplomatic service, and he learned, while in Mexico in 1854, that he had been appointed an attaché at Washington. He remained in the service for ten years and, after leaving Washington, was stationed in succession at Munich, Stockholm, Frankfort, St. Petersburg, Dresden, and Constantinople. According to his own accounts, he was insubordinate and indolent; and his passion for gambling shaped and coloured this period of his life wherever he went. But a man of his independence of mind would not have remained in the service for ten years unless he were really interested in it. The end came oddly. In 1864, at Baden-Baden, he was informed by the foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, of his appointment to a second secretaryship at Buenos Aires. He replied accepting the post, if he could fulfil the duties of it at Baden-Baden. This was not the first joke that he had tried on Lord John, and he was dismissed the service. It was his impish way of resigning. He had inherited a great fortune from his uncle, Lord Taunton, and his mind was turning to a political career.

In 1865 Labouchere was elected member of parliament for Windsor, in the liberal interest, but was unseated on petition. Two years later he was returned for Middlesex. He lost this seat in 1868, failed at Nottingham in 1874, and had to wait till 1880 before he was again in the House of Commons. Meanwhile, he won fame as a journalist. He wrote much for the Daily News, of which he had become part-proprietor; his letters from Paris during the siege of 1870 were republished as The Diary of a Besieged Resident (1871). For The World, founded (1874) and edited by his friend Edmund Yates [q.v.], he wrote on finance. Then, in 1876, he established a weekly journal, Truth, which for many years was by far the most successful of personal organs in the press. Labouchere was a first-class journalist. His reputation as a wit was well established; he had an easy style unsurpassed in clearness, and he wrote with candour about his own adventurous life and the follies and failings of his contemporaries. Above all, Truth won admiration and gratitude by its fearless exposure of fraudulent enterprises of all sorts. This brought upon him a long series of libel actions. Most of them he won, and they were such good advertisements of his paper that he could afford to be indifferent to his irrecoverable costs  316