Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/817

Rh D A L L I N Q 781 on the 7th July 1807, General Bulwer died prematurely at fifty-two at Heydon Hall. His young widow had then devolved upon her not only the double charge of caring for the estates in Herts and Norfolk, but the far weightier responsibility of superintending the education of her three sons, then in their earliest boyhood. She at once devoted herself with earnest solicitude to their instruction, and r&amp;lt;er qualifications for the duties of home instructress were certainly exceptional. For, besides having great natural gifts and instinctive refinement, she was a woman of cultured intel lect and rare accomplishments. Henry Bulwers first school was that of Dr Curtis in Sunbury, Middlesex. Thence, while yet a stripling, he was removed to Harrow, then presided over by Dr George Butler. His tutor there was the Eev. Mark Drury, a younger brother of the previous head master. At eighteen, Henry Bulwer was enrolled as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, removing thence soon afterwards to Downing College, where his university career was completed. At that turning-point in his history his maiden work was published. It was issued from the press in 1822 as a tiny volume of verse, commence ing with an ode on the death of Napoleon. It is chiefly interesting now for its fraternal dedication to Edward Lytton Bulwer, then a youth of nineteen, an inscription couched in terms of affectionate admiration. On leaving Cambridge in the autumn of 1824, Henry Bulwer signalized his entrance into public life by an adven ture. As emissary of the Greek Committee then sitting in London, he started for the Morea, carrying with him no less a sum than 80,000 sterling, which, immediately on his arrival at his destination, he handed over to Prince Mavrocordato and his calleagues, as the responsible leaders of the War of Independence. He was accompanied on this expedition by Mr Hamilton Browne, who, a twelvemonth before, had been despatched by Lord Byron to Cepha- lonia to treat with the insurgent Government. Shortly after his return to England in 1826, Bulwer published a record of this romantic excursion, under the title of An Autumn in Greece. Meanwhile, bent for the moment upon following in his father s footsteps, he had on the 19th October 1825, been gazetted as a cornet in the Second Life Guards. Within less than eight months, however, he had exchanged from cavalry to infantry, being enrolled on the 2d June 1826 as an ensign in the 58tb Regiment. That ensigncy he retained for little more than a month, obtaining another unattached, which he held until the 1st January 1829, when he finally abandoned the army. The court, not the camp, was to be the scene of his successes ; and for thirty-eight years altogether from the August of 1827 to the August of 1865 he contrived, while maturing from a young attache to an astute and veteran ambassador, to hold his own with ease, and in the end was ranked amongst the subtlest intellects of his time as a master of diplomacy. His first appointment in his new profession, at the date just mentioned, was as an attache at Berlin. In the April of 1830 he obtained his next step through his nomination as an attache at Vienna : Thence, exactly a year afterwards, he was employed nearer home in the same capacity at the Hague. As j-et, ostensibly, no more than a careless lounger in the salons of the Continent, the young ex-cavalry officer veiled the keenest observation under an air of indifference. His constitutional energy, which throughout life was exceptionally intense and tenacious, wore from the first a mask of languor. When in reality most cautious, he was seemingly most negligent. No matter what he hap pened at the moment to take in hand, the art he ap plied to it was always that highest art of all, the ars celare artem. His mastery of the lightest but most essential weapon in the armoury of the diplomatist, tact, came to him as it seemed intuitively, and from the outset was con summate. Talleyrand himself would have had no reason, even in Henry Bulwer s earliest years as an attache, to write entreatingly, &quot;Pas de zele,&quot; to one who concealed so felicitously, even at starting, a lynx-like vigilance under an aspect the most phlegmatic. Endowed thus highly both in intellect and in temperament, he had hardly reached his new post in the capital of the Netherlands when he found and immediately seized his opportunity. The revolutionary explosion of July at Paris had been echoed on the 25th August 1830 at Brussels by an equally startling outburst of insurrection. During the whole of September a succession of stormy events swept over Belgium, until the popular rising reached its climax on the 4th October in the declaration of Belgian independence by the Provisional Government. At the beginning of the revolution, the young attache was despatched by the then foreign secretary at Whitehall, Lord Aberdeen, to watch events as they arose and report their character. When he reached Ghent in the midst of the civil conflict, the com missionaire of his hotel was shot down at his elbow on the Grande Place. In the execution of his special mission he traversed the country in all directions amidst civil war, the issue of which was to the last degree problematic. Under those apparently bewildering circumstances, he was enabled by his sagacity and penetration to win his spurs as r. diplomatist. Writing almost haphazard in the midst of the conflict, he sent home from day to day a series of despatches which threw a flood of light upon incidents that would otherwise have appeared almost inexplicable. Scarcely a week had elapsed, during which his predictions had been wonderfully verified, when he was summoned to London to receive the congratulations of the Cabinet. He returned to Brussels no longer in a merely temporary or informal capacity. As secretary of legation, and afterwards as charge d affaires, he assisted in furthering the negotiations out of which Belgium rose into a king dom, and in so rising established for the first time on the European continent the adjusted fabric of a moderate con stitutional sovereignty. Scarcely had this been accom plished when he wrote what may be called the first chapter of the history of the newly created Belgian kingdom. It appeared in 1831 as a brief but luminous paper in the January number of the Westminster Review. And as the events it recorded had helped to inaugurate its writer s career as a diplomatist, so did his narrative of those occur rences in the pages of the Radical quarterly signalize in a remarkable way the commencement of his long and consist ent career as a Liberal politician. Shortly before his appear ance as a reviewer, and immediately prior to the carrying of the first Reform Bill, Bulwer had won a seat in the House of Commons as member for Wilton, afterwards in 1831 and 1832 sitting there as M.P. for Coventry. Nearly two years having elapsed, during which he was absent from the legislature, he was in 1834 returned to Westminster as the representative of the metropolitan borough of Maryle- bone, which, as it happened, was his birthplace. That position he retained during four sessions, winning consider able distinction as a debater by his undoubted gifts of wit and oratory. Within the very year in which he was chosen by the Marylebone electors, he brought out in two volumes, entitled France Literary, Social, and Political, the first half of a work which was only completed upon the publica tion, two years afterwards, of a second series, also in two volumes, under the title of The Monarchy of the Middle Classes. Through its pages he made good his claim to be regarded not merely as a keen-witted observer, but as one of the most sagacious and genial delineators of the generic Frenchman, above all of that supreme type of the race, with whom all through his life he especially delighted to hold