Harcourt and Son. A Political Biography of Sir William Harcourt, 1827-1904 (review)

In 1873, shortly before she married Richard Jebb, Caroline Slemmer rode back to Cambridge from a dinner party in Grantchester with William Harcourt who was then solicitor general. She described his philosophy as the philosophy of a man of the world. She regarded him as a charming man who rejoiced in the power his knowledge of life gave him over clever men. His worldliness contained personal defects of which he was only too well aware. As Harcourt admitted, his mental powers were not great. They were those of 'illustration rather than imagination'. He had a disposition to 'vanity, willfulness, and exaggeration'. An overbearing man, nature had given him '[a] queer jumble of good and bad' attributes which 'I have done too little to alter' (p. 31). Patrick Jackson, the author of political biographies of W. E. Forster and Hartington, turns his attention in this volume to Harcourt.

From a distinguished family, Harcourt was the younger son of a younger son who had to claw out a place for himself in the professional and political world. He inherited the family estates only very late in life, retaining 'the instincts and tastes' of a younger son for whom 'the pomp of the unhappy landowner' was unattractive (p. 328). In the 1870s he accepted the knighthood customary for law officers only reluctantly because it was 'horribly vulgar — almost as bad as being a Baronet' (p. 49). He refused a viscountcy from Edward VII because he was too much of a house of commons man to leave it after his 34 years there. In manner and disposition he was very much an intellectual rather than a landed aristocrat. Raised in a Yorkshire vicarage, and after a period of time in very minor boarding schools, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where his friends included Fitzjames Stephen, the future 15th earl of Derby, and Julian Fane. He left Cambridge as eighth Classic in 1851 and read for the bar. During his legal studies and as he sought to establish himself as a barrister, and this is part of the normal clawing into a profession, Harcourt wrote for the Morning Chronicle and the Saturday Review. Later he was able to establish a reputation for himself as an author on international law after writing a series of articles for the Times which he signed as 'Historicus', articles dealing with points of law concerning the relations between neutral nations and nations at war. In 1869 he was appointed to the newly created Whewell chair of international law at Cambridge, a position he held until 1887. By 1859 Harcourt established his position at the parliamentary bar, earning £20,000 and allowing him the independence to enter politics.

From the time of his earliest political yearnings, Harcourt, rejecting Palmerstonian bellicosity, felt himself drawn to Mr Gladstone and broke with his family's tory tradition. He entered parliament in 1868. A curious mixture of whig and radical, Harcourt rose to prominence as an indispensable leader of the Liberal party during the period of Disaeli's premiership from 1874 to 1880. In fact, this period in opposition, like the periods in opposition after 1886 and 1895, drew out Harcourt's strongest political qualities. He distrusted executive power and used the techniques open to him in opposition to restrain it. He established himself as a skilled parliamentarian, as a forceful man on the hustings, and as a valuable intermediary among various factions of the Liberal party.

In government, Harcourt, as home secretary, insisted on the rule of law to restrain revolutionary impulses of the sort nationalism produced. He led the majority in favour of the Coercion Bill in 1881 despite Gladstone's, Bright's and Chamberlain's opposition, joking 'coercion is like caviare: unpleasant at first to the palate, it become agreeable with use' (p. 100). But he became increasingly pessimistic about governing Ireland, and, though his views of home rule were...