Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton (1809–85)
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 285-295.
Richard Monckton Milnes, known after his elevation to a peerage in 1863 as Lord Houghton, was an author, politician, and influential man of eclectic tastes with countless personal contacts, yet he is remembered largely today not for his poetry or for his twenty-five years as a Member of Parliament, but for having been first to champion in print the literary reputation of John Keats, and for his determined quest for the hand in marriage of Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), a protracted courtship that ended in 1848 with a final, unequivocal rejection. While Nightingale admired the affable Milnes well enough to maintain close contact with him in the years ahead, the pioneering nurse and social reformer had other priorities to pursue, goals of service that would achieve full flower less than a decade later as the legendary “Lady with the Lamp” tending wounded British soldiers during the Crimean War. “I have a moral, an active nature which requires satisfaction,” Nightingale wrote in her diary in 1849 of the decision to part ways with Milnes, “I could not satisfy this nature by spending a life with him in making society and arranging domestic things” (Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, 1913, I, 100).
The prospect of being the companionable enabler to a high-profile spouse’s busy social calendar was no small detail to weigh when considering a union with Milnes, a formidable host of power breakfasts and elegant dinner parties given routinely in London and later, over more extended stays, at Fryston Hall, the family seat near Wakefield, West Yorkshire. Not long after being rebuffed by Nightingale, the ever-sanguine Milnes turned his romantic aspirations elsewhere, exchanging vows finally on 31 July 1851 with Annabella Hungerford Crewe (1814–74) of Madeley Manor, Staffordshire, who he would come to describe as “a perfect woman,” her impeccable pedigree and agreeable disposition the ideal complements to his gregarious nature. Together, the couple had three children: Amicia Henrietta (afterwards FitzGerald, 1852–1902), Florence Ellen Hungerford (afterwards Henniker-Major, 1855–1923), and Robert Offley Ashburton (1858–1945), later (1911) 1st Marquess of Crewe.
Richard Monckton Milnes was born in Bolton Street, Mayfair, Westminster, in London on 19 June 1809, the son of Robert Pemberton Milnes (1784–1858), and Henrietta Maria Milnes (née Monckton-Arundell, 1780–1847), second daughter of the 4th Viscount Galway. Like his son after him, the elder Milnes attended Trinity College, Cambridge, and also, like his son after him, was a Member of Parliament representing Pontefract (1806–18). In 1835, Robert Milnes came into a substantial inheritance from his cousin the Dowager Viscountess Galway, who was also the stepmother of his wife; and upon the death of his own mother, he took possession of the Fryston Hall estate, which in turn would be passed on to his son Richard. The property first came into family possession in 1784 through Richard’s grandfather, Richard Slater Milnes (1759–1804), M.P. for York (1784–1802), the elder son of a prosperous cloth merchant and brick manufacturer of Wakefield. Richard Monckton Milnes had one sibling, a sister, Henrietta Eliza Monckton-Arundell, Viscountess Galway (1811–91).
Due to delicate health, Milnes was educated as a child mostly at home by a private tutor, though chiefly by his mother, who is credited with instilling in her son “a zest for living which she afterwards deliciously indulged in Milan, in Venice and Florence and Rome” in the 1830s, when the family lived in Italy for a period of years, according to James Pope-Hennessy, his most recent, and most objectively reliable biographer, in the first of his two-volume life, Monckton Milnes: The Years of Promise 1809–1851 (1949, p. 10). An early appetite for reading nurtured a love of books and literature that helped define the arc of young Richard’s life. In 1827, he matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and became a member of the ultra-exclusive Apostles Club, an undergraduate society of literary minded students established in 1820. Fellow members included such luminaries as Alfred Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, John Kemble, James Spedding, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Richard Chenevix Trench. After proceeding M.A. in 1831, he enrolled at the newly formed London University, followed soon thereafter by further study in Bonn University, and extensive travel through various parts of Europe, notably Greece, France, and Italy, where he lived with his parents and sister. This early exposure to multiple cultures formed a cosmopolitan perspective that remained with him throughout his life, and is manifestly evident in his poetry. He returned to England with “a gayety of spirit, a frankness of bearing, a lightness of touch which were quite un-English,” and an abiding taste for “French novels, French cookery, and French wines” (G.W.E. Russell, Collections and Recollections, New York, 1898, p. 46).
Milnes’s first volume of verse, Memorials of a Tour in Some Parts of Greece, Chiefly Poetical, appeared in 1834, and was followed in turn by Memorials of a Residence on the Continent, and Historical Poems (1838); Poems of Many Years (1838); and after revisiting Greece and parts of the Ottoman empire (1842–43), Palm Leaves (1844). He was motivated to take on what turned out to be his most consequential work, Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (2 vols., 1848), by his outrage at “how grievously” Keats had been “misapprehended even by many who wished to see in him only what was best” since his death in 1821 at twenty-five, and that even those “who heartily admired his poetry” regarded it “as the production of a wayward, erratic, genius, self-indulgent in conceits, disrespectful of the rules and limitations of Art, not only unlearned but careless of knowledge, not only exaggerated but despising proportion.” Keats’s standing had been devastated further, he maintained, by “a stupid, savage, article in a review, and to the compassion generated by his untoward fate he was held to owe a certain personal interest, which his poetic reputation hardly justified” (I, xvi–xvii). Milnes’s two-volume effort, principally a compilation of poetic and personal papers left by Keats interlaced with commentary, is often credited with having generated renewed attention to the poet’s body of work and having secured its place in the literary canon.
Milnes’s celebrated breakfasts began shortly after he moved into rooms at No. 26 Pall Mall in 1837, the same year he was elected to Parliament as what has been described as a “Liberal Conservative.” Matters in which he showed particular interest as a legislator included copyright law and the establishment of reformatory schools. He also took part in efforts to promote better care of the sick and wounded in the Crimean War, his concern there probably influenced by his friendship with Florence Nightingale. Milnes held the seat in Parliament until 1863, when he was elevated to a peerage by Prime Minister Lord Palmerston as First Baron Houghton—the very honor declined seven years earlier by his father, who had largely withdrawn from London society—at which point he was addressed going forward as Lord Houghton.
In the introduction to the American edition of T. Wemyss Reid’s Life, Letters, and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes, First Lord Houghton (2 vols., New York, 1891), Richard Henry Stoddard took note of the “diverse personalities” Monckton Milnes had projected during his lifetime as “poet,” “politician,” and “man of the world,” though acknowledging that while “not as eminent in either of these characters as some of his contemporaries, he was distinguished in all”—a gentle way of saying what so many others who knew Milnes also said less gracefully in private, that he had lived the life of a contented dilletante whose potential in a multitude of areas far exceeded his performance in any of them (I, v). The role Milnes was particularly suited to, however, according to Stoddard, was as “a man of society, to which he was drawn by his vivacious temperament, his love of enjoyment, his intellectual ambition, and his talent as a talker” (I, viii). Of the many other London hosts of his generation who entertained at a high level, none “was more hospitable than the bustling gentleman who gave breakfast at his bachelor rooms on Pall Mall,” and after his marriage, entertaining guests with his wife at 16 Upper Brook St., Mayfair, where they had moved, and at his old family home at Fryston. The London breakfasts were such, Stoddard wrote, that “everybody who was anybody was to be found at” them (I, viii). Prominent among these, on numerous occasions over the four decades of their friendship, was RB, once in company with EBB (see below). Notably, RB’s first ([?10] [March 1840]) and last (21 June 1881) recorded letters to Milnes are cordial responses to just such invitations, which make up the preponderance of their exchanges. In the first, RB adds, “I hope Sordello may please you, I am sure” (Letter 743), the reference to his narrative poem, issued a few days before.
Among the literary lions to sit often at table were Milnes’s devoted and loyal friends Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson, and Coventry Patmore, along with the no less worthy William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Walter Savage Landor, and so many more. Politicians, members of the nobility, statesmen, distinguished foreign visitors were all part of the mix too, the number attending typically ranging from fifteen to twenty guests. For general amusement, Milnes frequently sought out a diversity of personalities. In an unpublished memoir, the publisher George Murray Smith (1824–1901) recalled that Milnes “delighted in taking in a simple-minded acquaintance with some gravely-related and burlesque story,” and having him over for a late-morning repast (“Recollections of a Long and Busy Life,” chap. 23, p. 10, ms at Scotland). Thomas Carlyle is reported to have given Milnes the title of “President of the Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation Company” (Collections and Recollections, p. 48). Milnes’s sister Henrietta is said to have once expressed mock relief that an imprisoned murderer had not been reprieved because otherwise her brother “would have had him to breakfast the next morning” (The Years of Promise, p. 116). For a more comprehensive view of Milnes’s amalgamating breakfasts, see James Pope-Hennessy, Monckton Milnes: The Flight of Youth (1951), pp. 131–143.
Americans in particular liked Milnes, a genuine affection that he returned in kind, visiting the United States in 1875 a year after the death of his wife, calling on Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in Cambridge, and visiting the grave of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who on 11 July 1856 had been a breakfast guest of his at Upper Brook Street while in England serving as U.S. Counsel to Liverpool. Hawthorne wrote at some length in his English notebook of being seated at the “pleasant and sociable meal” with EBB, who he described as “a small, delicate woman, with ringlets of black hair,” a “pleasant, intelligent, sensitive face,” and “a low, agreeable voice,” leading him to regard her as being “more youthful and comely than I supposed, and very gentle and ladylike” (see SD1942 in vol. 23).
Monckton Milnes had been among the first critics in Britain to praise in print the writings of Emerson, and had arranged full reading privileges for him at the Athenaeum Club during his first visit to England, which did not go unappreciated. On meeting Milnes in 1848, Emerson recorded that he was “the most good-natured man in England,” that “he is everywhere, and knows everything,” that he “has the largest range of acquaintances, from the Chartist to the Lord Chancellor,” and that he was “fat, easy, affable, and obliging.” On the down side, Emerson wrote that Milnes’s “speeches in Parliament are always unlucky, and a signal for emptying the House” (Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, 10 vols., Boston, 1909–14, 7, 483).
George Murray Smith recalled Milnes as the author of “capital articles” for various journals, a man who “made excellent speeches in either French or English, had serious pretensions as a poet, and some real weight as a politician” (“Recollections,” chap. 23, p. 9). His range of interests was singularly wide. “He had a certain roughness and an apparent lack of refinement, both in appearance and manners; but when he was bent on pleasing, his courtesy was a fine instance of the old school” (p. 9). Smith recalled Thackeray as saying once that Milnes was “‘very kind to me until I made a success,’” and noted that he had “more interest in the rising, than in the risen” (p. 11). Benjamin Disraeli neither liked nor admired Milnes, according to James Pope-Hennessy (The Years of Promise, pp. 99–100). That antipathy did not stop the future prime minister from profiling him in the guise of Mr. Vavasour in the novel Tancred (3 vols., 1847) as “a real poet, quite a troubadour, as well as a member of Parliament; travelled, sweet-tempered, and goodhearted; very amusing and very clever … Mr. Vavasour saw something good in everybody and everything, which is certainly amiable, and perhaps just, but disqualifies a man in some degree for the business of life, which requires for its conduct a certain degree of prejudice. Mr. Vavasour’s breakfasts were renowned. Whatever your creed, class, or country, one might almost add your character, you were a welcome guest at his matutinal meal, provided you were celebrated. That qualification, however, was rigidly enforced” (I, 289–290).
In a private memorandum written in the 1860s that remained unpublished for more than forty years, Disraeli described Milnes more critically as being “a good-natured fellow, and not naturally bad-hearted,” but nonetheless “always ridiculous,—from an insane vanity. This excess of a sentiment, which, when limited, is only amusing, was accompanied by a degree of envy which made him unamiable.” After declining “a 1000 times” Milnes’s invitations to breakfast, Disraeli wrote of having attended just once, sometime “in the forties,” because one of the foreign guests had specifically requested his presence. Among those to attend that morning were the liberal politician and manufacturer Richard Cobden, the Egyptian-born general in Napoleon’s army, Suleiman Pasha, the amateur artist and man of fashion, Alfred, Count d’Orsay, and the future president of the French Second Republic, Louis Napoleon, with whom Disraeli spoke privately in “the recess of a window” (William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, Vol. 3, New York, 1914, pp. 51–54).
At Fryston Hall, guests were invited for extended stays that included accommodations and elegant meals. For those so disposed, there was plenty of free time to browse the host’s extraordinary collection of rare and valuable books. Isabel Burton, wife of the explorer and close friend of Milnes, Sir Richard Burton (1821–90), offered a first-hand appreciation of it in “Lord Houghton at Fryston Hall,” an article that appeared anonymously in The World on 20 June 1877, a year after a devastating fire on 17 November 1876 engulfed much of the manor house, destroying or severely damaging hundreds of the valuable books shelved there. The library, she recalled, was “a long, handsome, comfortable room, soft-carpeted, and replete with ottoman and sofa luxury, but walled with books, as indeed was the whole house, not in formal rows, but in separate cases, each with its own subject—Poetry, Magic, French Revolution, Oriental Thought, Theology and Anti-theology, Criminal Trials, Fiction from Manon Lescaut to George Eliot.” The essay was reprinted the following year in Celebrities at Home (1878, pp. 173–180), and attributed to Isabel Burton by Pope-Hennessy more than fifty years later in The Years of Promise (p. 84).
Not surprisingly, one category of books not included in Mrs. Burton’s overview of the Fryston library was what has been authoritatively described as “probably the largest collection of erotica ever assembled by a private collector or for that matter ever likely to be” (H. Montgomery Hyde, A History of Pornography, 1964, p. 14). In The Flight of Youth, Pope-Hennessy provided a more detailed bibliographical examination (pp. 113–126), including a full discussion of the erotica, which he characterized as “unrivaled upon earth—unequalled I should imagine in heaven.” Pope-Hennessy documented the clandestine ways the impassioned bibliophile recruited intermediaries in London and agents abroad to acquire these materials, and the clever ruses they often employed to get them by customs officials into England, including occasional use of the diplomatic pouch.
Milnes often referred jocularly to this sub rosa component of his library as the “Aphrodisiopolis.” Among those to have been allowed access to this collection were Sir Richard Burton, whose own fascination for pornography has been well documented, and a young Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), whose literary aspirations Milnes vigorously supported and furthered, and whose first exposure to the writings of the Marquis de Sade came during extended stays at Fryston. An early suggestion of these proclivities of Milnes is to be found in an 1895 biographical essay for the DNB by Thomas Bailey Saunders, who offered obliquely that Lord Houghton “was eminently a dilettante,” and that “while his interests were wide, he shirked the trouble necessary for judgments other than superficial. He had many fine tastes and some coarse ones.”
Though it is not known when or how RB and Milnes became acquainted, it was at one of the latter’s London breakfasts, in March of 1841, when RB and Alfred Tennyson “are thought to have met for the first time” (see Leonée Ormond, “Tennyson and the Brownings,” Tennyson Research Bulletin, 11, November 2020, 328). Of the several dozen letters and notes RB wrote to Milnes that have surfaced to date, only a few can be judged as being “of substance,” the first of these penned from Pisa on 31 March 1847 (letter 2665), six months after he and his new bride had left England for Italy. “Well—your good wishes for my sake have been wonderfully realised,” RB began in reply to a letter of congratulations Milnes had sent to him by way of his sister Sarianna. “My wife is quite well,” he continued, “and now that the weather permits, we begin our spring progress, Florence being the first stage, whence, when the heat obliges, we mean to go the round of Siena, Colle, Volterra, Lucca, Pescia, Prato, Pistoia—Bologna—and so get, at the year’s end, to Venice for the winter. Next winter to that—(if one dares look forward so far)—finding us in Rome.”
RB then took the opportunity to ask for the kind of help Monckton Milnes had become well-known for providing, “to mention in the proper quarter, should you see occasion,” that he be considered for an appointment as secretary to a rumored British mission to “this fine fellow, Pio Nono,” as Pope Pius IX was called, should such a legation to the Vatican be established. The likely trigger for this request was an article that had appeared a few days earlier, on 23 March 1847, in The Times, asserting that “a representation of this country at the Court of Rome is indispensable,” noting that “even Turkey” had sent an ambassador there, prompting RB to comment that England “must not loiter behind the very Grand Turk in policy.” Such a mission never materialized, though RB’s statement of his worthiness and determination to serve is instructive.
“I would be glad and proud to be the Secretary to such an Embassy, and to work like a horse in my vocation.” He reminded Milnes that “I have studied Italian literature sedulously,” and that he and his wife had scrupulously avoided seeking out governmental pensions awarded to poets. “We are quite independent [of them] … and trust to continue so. But, as I say, I should like to remember at a future day that I proposed—(and thro’ the intervention of such a person as yourself, if you will lend it to me) to deserve well of my generation by doing, in this matter, what many circumstances embolden me to think few others could do so well. One gets excited .. at least here on the spot .. by this tiptoe straining expectation of poor dear Italy,—and yet, if I had not known you, I believe I should have looked on with the other byestanders. It is hateful to ask .. but I ask nothing; indeed—rather I concede a very sincere promise to go on bookmaking (as my wife shall) to the end of our natural life,” and to do so “without a pretension to the pension list. Will you think of this and me? Whatever comes, I hope to remain in Italy for years—so let me shake your hand over the sea, and take that much by my motion.”
The first known reference to Milnes by either Browning came in April 1838 (letter 627) when EBB mentioned to Mary Russell Mitford of just having read Memorials of a Residence on the Continent, and Historical Poems, which had been lent to her by John Kenyon. “They are of the Tennyson school, to which you know (after all the harm we grave critics are obliged to say of schools) only poets can belong,—& very much delighted me. Some of them & those not a few, appear to me most exquisite.” In another lengthy post to Miss Mitford several weeks later (letter 636), EBB asks if Milnes “the poet” is the same person as Milnes “the member”—which, indeed he was, having been elected to Parliament the previous year. “Mr Kenyon tells me of his having printed an additional volume of poems,” Poems of Many Years (1838), which she had not yet seen, but led her to proclaim: “He was born a crowned poet!” Two months later, EBB expressed delight to several of her correspondents (letters 657–660) when Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (August 1838), reviewed Poems of Many Years alongside The Seraphim in the same article.
On 27 March 1841 (letter 803), EBB informed her brother George that their father had recently met “the poet Milnes” at John Kenyon’s home. EBB and Milnes were both among the contributors to R.H. Horne’s The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, Modernized (1841). EBB contributed material about Milnes for Horne’s A New Spirit of the Age (2 vols., 1844). Referring to some of Milnes’s works in a letter to Horne dated 22 December 1843, she said: “So now, if you please, I will make a few notes on them, which you will ‘improve’ (literally) to the edification of your readers afterwards” (letter 1467). The resulting published review is somewhat mixed, but it does say that “as a lyric and elegiac poet … Mr. Monckton Milnes takes his place among the distinguished writers of his age and country,” but that he has not “given evidence of a genius calculated for popular appeals” (I, 266).
In 1844, EBB took interest in a dispute between Milnes and William Wordsworth concerning expansion of railroads into the Lake District. Wordsworth feared that such expansion would ruin the area by flooding it with hordes of people. Milnes wrote a sonnet defending the expansion (“Projected Railways in Westmorland. In Answer to Mr. Wordsworth’s Late Sonnet,” The Morning Chronicle, 25 November 1844, p. 3), and made arrangements for railway companies to cross his estates. In a letter of 3 December 1844 to R.H. Horne, EBB noted approvingly that “Mon[c]kton Milnes … dares to oppose the master-poet front to front, and sonnet to sonnet” (letter 1775). In 1844 and 1845, Milnes and RB were among the writers contributing to Hood’s Magazine during the final illness of its proprietor, Thomas Hood, who died on 3 May 1845. There is no extant correspondence between Milnes and EBB.
RB’s first known reference to Milnes came in April 1839 when he asked Fanny Haworth: “Do you know Milnes’ Poems? or himself peradventure?” (letter 689). It is not known when RB himself became acquainted with Milnes, but it is clear from letters 743 and 754 that they were seeing each other socially by 1840. In the latter of these, written to Miss Haworth in May of that year, RB indulged in some name-dropping: “I won’t tell you what Milnes told me Carlyle told him the other day.”
While not explicitly discussed in their correspondence, a mutual love for Italy and its future undoubtedly figured into the good feelings the Brownings and Milnes expressed for each other. On 27 December 1852 (letter 3155), RB expounded at length on a “mass” of “official and private correspondence” relating to Filippo Antonio Gualterio (1660–1728), Nuncio in Paris (1700–06) and Camerlengo of the Sacred College of Cardinals (1712–13), who was named Cardinal Protector of Scotland in 1706 and Cardinal Protector of England in 1717, that was being offered for sale by Filippo Antonio Gualterio (1819–74), Marchese Gualterio, a friend of the Brownings. RB strongly recommended the archive be acquired by the British Museum, and to that end had arranged to send through the British legation’s diplomatic pouch samples of the contents and a précis for Milnes to look at, with copies to pass on to Lord Palmerston, a prominent supporter of the Italian cause, and Henry Hallam, a trustee of the museum, and the father of Arthur Hallam, a close friend of Milnes from their Apostles days at Cambridge. The British Museum purchased the archive in 1854 for £1,200. RB concluded his letter on a personal note: “I hope, and my wife, from our hearts that all your house prospers—will you remember us both to Mrs. Milnes? We have carried those pleasant sights of you a long way off, but we often refer to them and find them fresh and good as ever. We go on to Rome when we are well wearied from Florence (style of us family people!).”
The one hint of discord to be found in the correspondence came on 7 July 1863 (letter 5252) when RB wrote Milnes to clear the air about comments he had made the previous evening at a gathering, “when considerably surprised & a little annoyed,” he was asked to comment on the poetry of Swinburne, words he expressed that not only got back to the young poet’s patron, but apparently were relied on by the London publisher Edward Chapman to decline an opportunity to publish an edition of his work. RB confessed to “know next to nothing of Swinburne,” adding that he liked him “much,” and that he had “received courtesy from him, and been told that he feels kindly to me.” Of Swinburne’s poetry he added, “I know not a line,” except for one poem, “which I looked over a long while ago,” and several pieces recited aloud a few evenings earlier in the home of William Michael Rossetti. “I could only have an opinion, therefore, on these. I thought them moral mistakes, redeemed by much intellectual ability.”
When he was “abruptly” asked to provide an “estimate of Mr Swinburne’s powers,” RB continued, “I don’t know what I could do but say ‘that he had genius, and wrote verses in which to my mind there was no good at all.’” RB attributed his dismissive remarks partly to having “had for thirty years my own utter unintelligibility taught with such public & private zeal that I might be excused for fancying every young man’s knuckles wanted ‘dusting’—but I don’t fancy it. … It was a shame in this case for Chapman to quote my blame of two or three little pieces—given on a demand for unqualified praise which was impossible—as the reason for rejecting a whole bookful of what may be real poetry, for aught I am aware: but as I am in the habit of being as truthful as I like about the quality of certain other things which he patronizes, and as I never saw their titles disappear from his advertisements in consequence—I conclude that he only uses my witnessing when he wants to cover his own conviction.”
Whatever Milnes may have written to RB in response to this has not surfaced, though the matter did not end there. Writing to her sister Katherine Euphemia Wedgwood on 12 July 1863, the writer Julia Wedgwood described a dinner party she had attended the previous evening in which she found herself seated in “a very comfortable corner” between Milnes and RB, and witness to a “very loud & jovial” discussion in which the “great subject was this Mr. Swinburne’s poems,” with Milnes “attacking Browning for attacking them.” RB, she wrote, “defended himself very indignantly from the charge of having dissuaded the publisher from accepting them,” and that there was “not a word of truth” to the charge. He did acknowledge, however, to having judged the poems to be “a third-rate imitation of Byron, the sort of effusions which if a man believed he w[oul]d jump over Waterloo Bridge” (see SD2650 in vol. 30).
If there were any lingering hard feelings, they are not evident in the continued invitations from Milnes that the two get together to share a meal. “My dear Houghton,” RB wrote on 6 June 1866, “A ‘private invitation’ from you is all the better when it brings a pleasure all the sooner in reach,—this time, however, it is out of reach, unluckily, as I am already engaged” (ms at Trinity). The following month, RB informed Milnes he was planning a trip to Guernsey, and asked if he could “give me a word of introduction” to the renowned French novelist Victor Hugo, who had been living on the island since 1855 (24 July 1866, ms at Trinity). Lord Houghton promptly responded with a cordial letter written in French on 1 August 1866, enclosed in an envelope postmarked the next day, and addressed to “Mon cher M. Victor Hugo” (ms at Rutgers). Translated, the letter reads in part: “I wish to present to you a person whose name must already be known to you—Mr. Robert Browning, admirable poet, educated—conservative, and who commands the attention and affection of a rather large public. You will therefore find him a charming man and one who appreciates the glories of French literature as his own. I take this opportunity to thank you for the friendship that you showed our young friend—Mr. Swinburne, who had just published a collection which will add much to his reputation: I beg you to guide him with your sound advice.”
RB did visit Jersey, shortly thereafter, but not Guernsey. In her Life and Letters of Robert Browning (new ed., rev., 1908), Alexandra Orr wrote that “for years” RB “carried about him a letter of introduction from Lord Houghton, always hoping for an opportunity of presenting it” to Hugo (p. 172). Responding to an inquiry from T. Wemyss Reid for any recollections of Milnes he could share for the posthumous biography he was then writing, RB replied, on 21 June 1889, that the letter of introduction to Hugo had remained in his possession still sealed, “as I never had an opportunity of profiting by it.” He added that he had “perhaps some recollections of Lord Houghton,—always pleasant in their various ways,—which might interest his biographer,” though there was no further follow-up to the offer (ms at SUNY-Buffalo).
Despite frequent invitations to visit Fryston, RB is not known to have made the trek up from London, though his son Pen did enjoy a pleasant stay over Christmas 1870, the culmination of several letters back and forth over the previous three weeks working out the fine details. “My dear Houghton,” RB began on 5 December, “I suppose this must be the third or fourth time that you have invited me to Fryston. If you do not understand that I am very sincerely grateful for this and much beside that has happened during what I shall venture to call our long friendship, it would be strange indeed.” While he personally could not make the trip, RB wondered, since the invitation extended to his son, if “it would suit you to receive him by himself, few circumstances would delight me more” (T. Wemyss Reid, Life, Letters, and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes, 1890, II, 243). The answer, of course, was in the affirmative. “I expected you & your family would be kind to Robert,” RB wrote on 31 December 1870, “but you have been miraculously kind,—he says: your reward must be in his thorough sense of it,—he is a grateful & loyal boy and sure to remember you all gratefully through life” (ms at Trinity).
Certainly the most poignant letter RB sent to Milnes was written on 28 February 1874, extending condolences on the recent death of Lady Houghton from pneumonia. “I can’t help saying—what all your friends must feel—(& I am getting to be a very old friend now)—how profoundly grieved I am at your loss and,—in a due but very appreciable degree,—my own. It is a comfort to think you have always been one of the kindest of men, besides something more (or less): and that will console you as it ought. My son is abroad,—but he forgets no favours done him, and he had much to remember after his visit to Fryston: I know how sorry he will be. Well, who is to go next? Let us hold hands in the meantime.” He added, as a postscript: “I hope the young people comfort you & are comforted by you in this calamity” (ms at Trinity). Houghton responded on 10 March 1874 with gratitude, calling RB’s letter “like a voice of your own pen in person. I remember well the year after my marriage taking a drive with you & our wives. I have them before me sitting side by side.” While his wife had “not gone away like yours with the trail of great memories,” Milnes continued, “she has left a sweet domestic fame & is regretted by you & Tennyson & other worthy men. My loss will be that of the every-day habit & comfort that nothing can restore, but it will be short: that of my children will be felt in every minute of their lives,—and they may be long” (ms at Rutgers).
Of the few other letters Milnes wrote to RB that have surfaced, one, in particular, dated 15 January 1879, and posted from Fryston, discusses, very briefly, his own writing. “Your cordial and interesting letter delighted us all and my son will keep it as a memorial of the stay,” he began, the “stay” being referenced unclear, but likely the Christmas stay of Pen nine years earlier. “Thanks too for the good word about my literature. I think my name has had its due appreciation, perhaps a narrow one, but I am rather annoyed at my prose not being more esteemed: it seems to me much the better of the two. But it is observable in the criticism of our day, that no one cares for style: a book is dull or lively, ignorant or informing, new in whatever-place—but not a word of the great vehicle of language, of the value of which it is hardly an exaggeration that Style only lives. Style gives to Prose the fineness of Poetry & I have a style, which however no one cares for. After your encouragements you see how much I write” (ms at Rutgers).
On 19 June 1882, RB wrote a cover note for a copy of A Selection From the Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1880), asking: “Will you put the accompanying little book among the far prettier but not more affectionate gifts on your Daughter’s table? ‘The gift is small, the love is all’” (Bauman Rare Books, Philadelphia, Catalogue, 1995, item 38). It bears the inscription: “Miss Milnes, with the best wishes of her old friend Robert Browning, June 19 ’82.”
Two presentation copies from Milnes to RB have been traced: Palm Leaves (1844), inscribed “From the Author” (see Reconstruction, A1605), and Monographs, Personal and Social (1873), inscribed “To Robert Browning, with the author’s best regards” (see Reconstruction, A1604). Additionally, RB received a copy of Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848) from its publisher, Edward Moxon (see Reconstruction, A1603); and Some Writings and Speeches (1888) from Milnes’s sister (see Reconstruction, A1606).
A lifetime of eating well and drinking often—“my exit will be the result of too many entrées,” he once declared of himself—took its toll (The Flight of Youth, p. 250), as Milnes suffered severely from obesity and gout. He died on 10 August 1885 in France while visiting his sister in Vichy, the cause of death attributed to angina pectoris; he was seventy-six years old. Returned to England, Lord Houghton was buried on 20 August 1885 at St. Andrew’s Church, Ferry Fryston, in the family vault, alongside his wife and father.
Perhaps the most incisive appraisal of Lord Houghton’s place in Victorian England was offered by an American, Henry Adams, who observed Monckton Milnes up close in December 1862 during a stay at Fryston while in England serving as private secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain. Another houseguest at that visit was the poet Algernon Swinburne, then twenty-five years old. In his celebrated autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 1918), Adams wrote penetrating appraisals of both men, describing Monckton Milnes as “a social power in London, possibly greater than Londoners themselves quite understood, for in London society as elsewhere, the dull and the ignorant made a large majority, and dull men always laughed at Monckton Milnes. Every bore was used to talk familiarly about ‘Dicky Milnes,’ the ‘cool of the evening’; and of course he himself affected social eccentricity, challenging ridicule with the indifference of one who knew himself to be the first wit in London, and a maker of men—of a great many men. A word from him went far. An invitation to his breakfast-table went farther” (p. 124).
As a young man, Adams continued, Milnes “had written verses, which some readers thought poetry, and which were certainly not altogether prose. Later, in Parliament he made speeches, chiefly criticised as too good for the place and too high for the audience. Socially, he was one of two or three men who went everywhere, knew everybody, talked of everything, and had the ear of Ministers; but unlike most wits, he held a social position of his own that ended in a peerage, and he had a house in Upper Brook Street to which most clever people were exceedingly glad of admission. His breakfasts were famous, and no one liked to decline his invitations, for it was more dangerous to show timidity than to risk a fray. He was a voracious reader, a strong critic, an art connoisseur in certain directions, a collector of books, but above all he was a man of the world by profession, and loved the contacts—perhaps the collisions—of society” (Education, p. 124).
—Nicholas A. Basbanes
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