Lord Lonsdale and His Protégés: William Wordsworth and John Hardie

Lord Lonsdale and His Protégés:

William Wordsworth and John Hardie

This essay is concerned with two poets working in the service of Sir William Lowther, second Earl of Lonsdale, both actively advancing his considerable interests in the politics of northwest England in the 1830s. One of the poets is, of course, William Wordsworth, who had been in the "pay" of Lonsdale since 1813. The other seems to have received nothing by way of financial or indeed any other kind of direct support from the earl, but nonetheless belongs sufficiently within the Lowther family's extensive sphere of influence to be described as a protégé of sorts.¹ His name is John Hardie (born c. 1782), a cabinetmaker and author of occasional poetry that was collected in a volume published at Whitehaven, thirty miles to the west of Rydal Mount, in 1839.² Both men wrote poems promoting Lord Lonsdale and endorsing the wider "Lowther interest," with a particular emphasis on the earl as an embodiment of "truth" and the ideal of aristocratic and paternalist masculinity. In so doing, Lonsdale's poets were trying to counter his very different representation in the hostile radical and reformist press; his political vulnerability after the passage of the reform bills that he had so aggressively opposed was an opportunity for radical opponents to question his honesty and even his noble masculine identity.

Lonsdale was a sometimes shrewd, sometimes far from subtle manipulator of the local press in the Lake Counties. His quest for influence dates back at least as far as 1818, and the election of that year, in which Henry Brougham first stood against the Lowther interest, challenging the complacent assumption that the earl's sons would be elected unopposed. Lord Lonsdale—like Wordsworth and Robert Southey—saw the urgent necessity of controlling the press. Not unlike the New Labour activists in the 2005 British general election, who filled local newspapers with letters purporting to be from politically neutral citizens concerned about opposition policy, Wordsworth and other Lonsdale supporters packed the pages of the Kendal Chronicle with apocalyptic warnings of Brougham's intentions. These letters are the basis of the pamphlet Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland, published during the fractious election campaign of 1818. As Stephen Gill notes, behind the scenes Wordsworth was attempting to "browbeat" the Chronicle's editor into renouncing his support for the Whig candidate.³ But perhaps today's political operatives would stop short of Wordsworth's suggestion to Lonsdale that he should expand a media portfolio that already included The Cumberland Pacquet—"Lord Lonsdale's mouth-piece," the Carlisle Journal called it—by simply buying out the owners of the Chronicle. In the end, Lonsdale established a rival newspaper, the Westmoreland Gazette, and Wordsworth was instrumental in Thomas De Quincey's appointment as its editor in July 1818. When De Quincey's performance "displeased" the proprietor, Gill observes, Wordsworth was deputed to "lean heavily" on him, too.⁴

The Lonsdale papers were notoriously partial in their reporting of stories that might undermine the Lowther interest. Little or nothing of the various disasters that occurred in the family's coal mines was reported, and details of the persistent and extensive anti-Lowther riots at Carlisle during the 1826 general election campaign were thoroughly suppressed. But there is a noticeable sophistication in Lord Lonsdale's technique of media control in the 1830s, as his implacable opposition to the reform bills brought him into conflict with a new generation of liberals and radicals. Lonsdale's need to manage the media was intensified by Whig incursions into his political territory in the 1830 election, after which the anti-Lonsdale newspapers and printers at Carlisle, Whitehaven, and Kendal lost their former timidity against a now-vulnerable rival. One Kendal printer perhaps discovered the consequences of crossing the Lowthers when in late 1831 Lord Lonsdale arranged to send in his heavies. The printer had dared...