Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  This was not merely an extraordinary confession, but also a formidable indictment. Mill moved, once and for all, far beyond his Victorian setting. All the seeds of later and passionately held beliefs were germinated here. The hatred of paternal or state authority which crushed instead of protecting freedom; the acute sensitiveness to social pressures; the intense loathing of those qualities in bourgeois English life which ground down high aspirations and feelings to trivial domestic conventions; and finally, the dawning realization of the oppression of women in society – the insidious moral oppression of the typical marriage of unequals, and the loveless, destructive influences unleashed by the tacit assumption of female inferiority. Mill knew he had been damaged by all these, and against them he raised one standard: a radical conception of the free growth of the individual in society.

  But in his own case it was love, not philosophy, that now brought him into the light. He met her first in 1830 – he just twenty-three, she two years younger. Harriet Taylor was a pale, willowy, huge-eyed woman with her hair in dark, luxuriant ringlets; but no conventional drawing-room beauty. Her Unitarian upbringing had given her exceptional independence of mind: forceful, sharp-spoken, with strong egalitarian leanings, and the quick, direct temperament of the feminist. When they met at a dinner party in north London, the recognition was instantaneous. Carlyle, for all his mockery, caught and remembered something of the flash.

  She had dark, black, hard eyes, and an inquisitive nature, and was ponderin’ on many questions that worried her, and could get no answers … [she heard] there was a young philosopher of remarkable qualities … and so Mill with great difficulty was brought to see her, and that man, who up to that time had never looked a female creature, not even a cow, in the face, found himself opposite those great dark eyes, that were flashing unutterable things, while he was discoursing unutterables concernin’ all sorts o’ high topics.

  There was only one difficulty. Harriet Taylor was married and sat at her husband’s table with two children sleeping peacefully in the room above.

  It was an age and a society where divorce was a ruinous abomination and only husbands had the right to friendships beyond the domestic hearth. Over the next four years an intense struggle of loyalties and emotions took place – secret letters, confessions, denials, confrontations. Mill was honourable but indefatigable in his suit. He rowed with his father, quarrelled with acquaintances, treated the husband, John Taylor, with icy courtesy, and communed – oblivious to the world – with Harriet.

  Mill’s powers of imagination flourished, his independence grew, his political outlook was revolutionized. He walked in the country and wrote notes about the unfathomable darkness of the sea. Harriet confirmed his nascent feminist views, and eagerly discussed socialist and cooperative ventures, the St Simonian experiments in France, the philosophical poetry of Shelley. Mill went to Paris after the summer insurrection of 1830, and the following year cast his eyes round London. ‘I should not care though a revolution were to exterminate every person in Great Britain and Ireland who has £500 a year.’ This angry, faintly Jacobin fuse lit by Harriet was never entirely extinguished in Mill’s mind, and sixteen years later, on the eve of 1848, he noted in private that the English ruling classes still averted political change with soup kitchens.

  I often think that a violent revolution is very much needed, in order to give that general shake-up to the torpid mind of the nation which the French Revolution gave to Continental Europe. England has never had a general break-up of old associations and hence the extreme difficulty of getting any ideas into its stupid head.

  In 1834, Mill and Harriet slipped away to Paris – city of love and rebellion – in an attempt to solve the deadlock, while John Taylor sombrely awaited the outcome in London. In the event a strange – but for that period not altogether exceptional – compromise was reached. It was an unofficial ménage à trois, with Harriet remaining as Taylor’s wife in public, and as Mill’s intimate in private. Mill visited at Kent Terrace, while Taylor went to the club at St James’s. But one condition was rigid: Harriet had no sexual relations with either man. The arrangement lasted until Taylor’s death fifteen years later in 1849, a frosty sunlight.

  But even in that cold springtime, Mill blossomed. At twenty-nine he shared the editorship of the new London Review, and championed the cause of the Philosophical Radicals, a group that under his influence moved from strict Utilitarianism to wider, more humane attitudes. Mill directed attention to practical politics and contemporary literature, giving space to the young Coleridgean and conservative writers in an attempt to dissolve sectarian animosities and speed the cause of radical reform. He himself gave large reviews to Tennyson’s early poetry, Alfred de Vigny, and Carlyle’s French Revolution which – having burnt the first manuscript by mistake – he established as ‘a great epic poem’.

  Two paired essays in the London Review, on ‘Bentham’ (1838) and on ‘Coleridge’ (1840), first set forth Mill’s matured attack on those rigid masculine forces which his father represented philosophically, and attempted to soften and combine them with the meditative, imaginative and feminine principles of conservation and growth which he now recognized in Coleridge. ‘By Bentham, beyond all others, men have been led to ask themselves, Is it true? and by Coleridge, What is the meaning of it? … Whoever could master the premises and combine the methods of both, would possess the entire English philosophy of his age.’ This was Mill’s first masterpiece, a dazzling historical portrait and analysis of the conflicts inherited from eighteenth-century ideology. It contained some of the operatic, virtuoso dialectic of Peacock’s novels of debate and crotchety eccentricities. But it was deepened, shaded and haunted by its autobiographical presences.

  Mill’s intimacy with Harriet became all-absorbing. She took a private retreat at Walton-on-Thames, where he attended discreetly at weekends. Frequently they holidayed together abroad. Intellectually and spiritually it was a brilliant match. Harriet edited his manuscripts, challenged his arguments, indicated more forceful positions. Her aggressive and imaginative conversation and letters stimulated Mill to his most significant work, giving him the confidence to write with a boldness and breadth and humanity that the Benthamites had never conceived. The direct results were the great essay ‘On Liberty’ (1859), and the fine complementary tract on freedom and oppression in the family, ‘The Subjection of Women’ (1869). He attacked with lasting effect the stereotyped social versions of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ character, and the oppression of frozen married relationships.

  I believe men are afraid, not lest women should be unwilling to marry, for I do not think that anyone in reality has that apprehension; but lest they should insist that marriage should be on equal conditions: lest all women of spirit and capacity should prefer almost anything else, not in their own eyes degrading, rather than marry, when marrying is giving themselves a master.

  Yet if Harriet gave Mill the key to his spiritual freedom, it was bought at a terrible price. Over the years the green baize door at India House became the portal to an anchorite’s cell; society was rigidly excluded. The ghost of his father still chained Mill to the family home, fulfilling the task of Marmontel’s boyish hero as head of the household – a household where Harriet was never mentioned. His life was split, his breakdowns recurred, and his right eye began its perpetual, jangling dance. Paradoxically, John Taylor’s death provided no solution. Mill married Harriet in 1851, but the wounds were too deep, they could not face a life in society and Mill abruptly and bitterly broke off all relations even with his own family.

  They retreated to a rambling house in Blackheath, with a white cat called Placidia, and a grand piano. Mill’s stepson vividly recalled him playing with extraordinary passion, ‘music entirely of his own composition, on the spur of the moment’, and when Harriet asked what it was about, it would be storms and battlefields and triumphal processions.

  The happiness they did achieve was brief. Both Mill and Harriet contracted consumption – anothe
r Benthamite inheritance – and only seven years after their long-sought marriage, Harriet died at Avignon on the way south to recuperate in 1858. Mill had been making the earliest draft of his Autobiography for their vindication, and the manuscript passages set forth her profound influence on his life and writing. A decade of puzzled textual scholars have found them strangely exaggerated for the ‘high priest of rationalism’, unaware in their own dryness that what Mill was writing was a love letter to his dying wife: ‘the best thing that I, in particular, could do for the world would be to serve as a sort of prose interpreter of her poetry’.

  In the year after Harriet’s death, ‘On Liberty’ was published, at first in a bound edition, and later in cheap copies for 1s 4d designed for working men and women and from which Mill refused to take a royalty. It had been completed in collaboration with Harriet, and everywhere it is resonant with the personal experience of their own struggles, Mill’s most profoundly radicalizing experience. It is a classic text, whose arguments have been compared to a line of Spartan infantry, any one of which may be demolished without breaking the stubborn fighting posture of the whole chain. No political policy or system can be based on Mill’s ‘Liberty’, but for precisely that reason wherever individuals or minorities are under legal or social pressure, Mill’s cold-eyed Spartans continue to be invoked. Mill wrote:

  The ‘Liberty’ is likely to survive longer than anything else that I have written … because the conjunction of her mind with mine has rendered it a kind of philosophic text-book of a single truth, which the changes progressively taking place in modern society tend to bring out into ever stronger relief: the importance, to man and society, of a large variety in types of character, and of giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions.

  Mill’s own life smouldered on for thirteen years after Harriet’s death. For one Parliamentary session he was MP for Westminster, and another year he toured the Cévennes in solitude. He had purchased a little whitewashed cottage at Avignon, from the back upper bedroom of which he could see Harriet’s grave in la cimetière St Veran, and it was here he came home to die in May 1873. The cottage was densely surrounded by willows and poplars which gave the evening air a chill dampness that precipitated his final and fatal attack of bronchitis. Mill had been advised to have the trees cut down, but the man of bronze could not bear to disturb the nightingales that sang among their branches long into the lonely night.

  LORD LISLE AND THE TUDOR NIXON TAPES

  HOW CLOSE can we really get to the ordinary men and women of the distant past? Can we know what they gossiped about each day and worried about each night? Can we catch the sound of their voices across the centuries? This is a question that has increasingly concerned modern historians like Laurence Stone, Barbara Tuchman and Richard Cobb, and it has led to the search for a new kind of documentary source that can take us more intimately into the recherche du temps perdu. The six volumes of The Lisle Letters, dating from the mid-sixteenth century, published recently by the University of Chicago Press, offer one of the greatest sources of ‘eavesdropping’ history ever discovered: to be compared with the seventeenth-century diaries of Samuel Pepys. But they are something more: a revelation of the world of power politics that could be more properly compared to the Nixon tapes.

  We owe the existence of the Lisle letters to a charge of conspiracy and high treason that burst upon the head of a distinguished and unsuspecting Tudor diplomat one spring evening in London some 441 years ago: which turns out to be little more than the day before yesterday. Listen for a moment to the tale. In April 1540, King Henry VIII of England, dangerously poised between the beds of his fourth and fifth wives, and between anti-Papist diplomatic alliances with France and the Habsburg Empire, recalled home to court one Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle, who had been serving for the past seven years as his lord deputy (or civilian governor) in Calais. The port of Calais, twenty-two miles across the channel from Dover Castle, was the last English outpost on the continent: a garrison town, a hotbed of customs evasion and political intrigue. As the historian A. L. Rowse has written, sixteenth-century Calais was exposed ‘to all the winds of doctrine that blew, whether from France or the Netherlands, from Rome or the obscure recesses of Germany’.

  Lord Lisle was really too nice a man for this sort of thing, and anyway close to retirement age. He was the illegitimate son of Edward IV, and thereby King Henry’s elderly uncle on the wrong side of the blanket. His career had been marked largely by avuncular festive duties: he had been a member of Henry’s Privy Chamber, an attendant at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and the Chief Panter at the wedding celebrations of poor Queen Anne Boleyn. He had served seven years in windy, woebegone Calais with great goodwill, and now he came home with hopeful heart, modestly expecting an earldom, a small slice of monastic lands, and an honourable semi-retirement to his estates in Hampshire and the West Country, with his wife, Honor Lisle, and his extensive family from their two previous marriages. He was an expatriate Englishman coming quietly home to his native land; English history had mercifully brushed him on the shoulder and passed him gently by.

  Lisle briefly took his seat in the House of Lords, and then boated down the Thames to attend the King and his first minister, Thomas Cromwell, for the Whit Sunday jollifications. It was the same fateful route taken just four years previously by another trusted servant of the King, Sir Thomas More. What happened next is recorded in a secret dispatch by Marillac, the French ambassador in London, dated May 21, 1540.

  Two days ago, at ten o’clock at night, my Lord Lisle, Deputy of Calais, uncle of this King, was led prisoner to the Tower, where before had been committed three of his servants, and similarly today a chaplain of his who is come out of Flanders in a ship. The cause thereof hath not yet been so certified unto me that I can write it for truth; but it is bruited that he is accused of having had secret intelligence with the Cardinal Pole who is his near relative, and of other practices to deliver up to him the town of Calais. Howsoever it may be, the said Lord Lisle is in a very strait prison, and from the which none escape save by miracle.

  Cardinal Reginald Pole, the detested nephew of the King, was based in Rome and credited with any subversive pro-Catholic scheme that Henry’s spies could unearth. The charge thus involved heresy, treason and family disloyalty, a lethal cocktail.

  Back in Calais, with the terrifying speed and ruthless efficiency that characterized the Tudor state machine, Lisle’s whole family, including Honor, was placed under house arrest. His goods were impounded ‘that afternoon, in the twilight’, and a general seizure of his private papers and correspondence began. Nothing in the end was missed except a few love letters, written by one of his stepdaughters to a secret French fiancé, which were ‘cast into the jakes’ (the toilet) by a servant girl at the very moment that the royal commissioners burst into the Lisle apartments. Ironically, this was the one act that could have seriously compromised Lisle, though it was utterly beyond his control.

  All the rest – some 3,000 letters, written almost daily during the seven crucial years of Henry VIII’s reign between March 1533 and April 1540 (both the letters from Calais and the replies from England), and covering every possible aspect of Tudor life, from the purchase of a red silk nightcap to the popular view of Anne Boleyn’s adulteries – were assembled in a massive dossier for the sifting of the King’s experts in treachery and disaffection, those twin obsessions of the Tudor monarchy. They were eventually filed in eighteen manuscript volumes in the Public Record Office, where they survived fire, flood and Hitler’s blitz, to find their destiny in the hands of a remarkable British scholar of grassroots history, Muriel St Clare Byrne.

  Miss Byrne, now eighty-six, began work on her edition of the Lisle letters half a century ago. The project was commissioned by T. S. Eliot, who was an editor at the British publishing firm of Faber and Faber. By the time it finally appeared last year (with the University of Chicago Press as co-publisher), the project had grown
to six volumes of letters and supporting documents. Altogether it amounts to nearly 4,000 pages, or close to two million words: a created world roughly equivalent to that of all Dickens’s major novels.

  Here is Miss Byrne’s initial reaction to the inventory of Lisle’s seized household goods, which to other historians might have been a mere lifeless list of chattels (twenty-one printed pages of it):