Frederick Temple Blackwood [Lord Dufferin] (1826-1902)
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Life
| [Frederick Temple Hamilton Temple Blackwood; 1st Marquis var. Marquess of Dufferin and Ava] b. 21 June, in Florence, son of Capt. Price Blackwood and Helen Blackwood [q.v.] and hence a descendent of R. B. Sheridan [q.v.]; ed. Eton, Christ Church, Oxford; president of Oxford Union; left after two years; succeeded his father as 5th Baron, 1841; Lord in Waiting to Victoria, 1949; wrote Narrative of a Journey from Oxford to Skibbereen in the Year of the Irish Famine (1847), while still at Oxford; also issued writings advocating emigration that drew nationalist fire; he won reputation as a celebrated wit; his Letters from High Latitudes (1859), a journal of yachting voyage to Iceland on board the Foam, which he commissioned in 1856, was a runaway Victorian success and is regarded as the pioneer comic travelogue; gave the inaugural address to the Social Science Congress, Belfast 18 Sept. 1867; wrote an introduction for W. Fraser Rae’s Sheridan: A Biography (1870); served as British Ambassador to many countries; became governor General of Canada, where Dufferin College was established in Ontario; |
| appt. 8th Viceroy of India, 1884; he was a subscribing patron to the Abbey theatre at its foundation; retired from public service, 1896; he lost much money in a mining company which collapsed in ignominy; his last years clouded by financial difficulties; d. 12 Feb. 1902, at Clandeboye, nr. Bangor, Co. Down; his memorial on the west side of the City Hall in Belfast, raised to ‘a great Irishman’, is a standing figure and elaborate plinth in memory of Frederick Temple, Ist Marquess Dufferin and Ava, KP, 1826-1902, Gov. Gen. of India, Viceroy [&] HM Lieutenant of Co. Down; his home, Clandeboye, contains an extensive armoury-cum-museum; there is monument to him at Belfast City Hall; an eldest son was killed in South Africa (Boer War); a second son, Basil Gawaine Blackwood, acted as Lord Wimbourne’s secretary in Ireland in 1916 and died at the Front, 1917; the novelist Caroline Blackwood [q.v.] was a grand-dg. CAB ODNB JMC OCIL |
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Works| Travel |
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| Emigration, tenure, &c. |
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| Speeches |
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| Miscellaneous |
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Bibliographical details
Letters from High Latitudes: being some account of a voyage in 1856 in the Schooner Yacht “Foam” to Iceland, Jan Mayen and Spitzbergen (London: John Murray 1857 [3 edns.]); Do. [3th to 11th edns.] (London: John Murray 1857, 1858, 1867, 1879, 1883, 1887, 1891, 1895, 1903), xxiii, 248pp.; Do. (NY: Worthington 1878), xvi, 268pp., ill. [1 port.; t.p. ‘a yacht voyage’]; Do. [copyright edn.; Coll. of British Authors, 2743] (Leipzig : Bernard Tauchnitz 1891), 302pp., and Do., with an introd. by R. W. Macan, and notes by F. A. Cavenagh (London: OUP 1910, 1915), xxxv, 322pp., ill. [16cm.]; Do. [another edn.], with an introduction by Jon Stefansson (London: J. M. Dent & Sons; NY: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1910)xv, 252, 8°; Do., with a foreword by V. Finnbogdottir [facs. of 11th Murray edn.] (London: Merlin 1990), 228pp.See also Travels by Land and Sea (London [1915]) - 3 pts. being extracts from works of three authors - viz., A Cruise in Northern Seas [from Letters from High Latitudes], by Lord Dufferin; In the Forests of Brazil, by H. W. Bates; A Trip up the Nile, by E. Warburton.)
Lectures Delivered before the Dublin Young Men’s Christian Association: in connexion with the United Church of England and Ireland: during the year 1864 (Dublin: Hodges, Smith and Co., 104 Grafton Street, booksellers to the University, 1865), [i-v] vi-viii, [1-3] 4-356, [1-5] 6-32, [1] 2-3 [4] p., [1] leaf of plates : port. ; 20 cm. CONTENTS: Lord Dufferin, ‘Notes on Ancient Syria’; James Whiteside, ‘Cleanliness: Prudence: Industry’; Patrick Fairbairn, ‘The Christ of scripture, and the Christ of modern theorists’; Lord Archbishop of Dublin, ‘Gustavus Adolphus’; Sir William R. Wills Wilde, ‘Ireland-Past and present: the land and the people’; James M’Cosh, ‘The present tendancy of religious thought’; John Elliott Cairnes, ‘Colonization and colonial government’; William Alexander, ‘The apocryphal gospels’. Report of the association for 1863-64 [pag. separately and dated 1864]. Publisher’s catalogue (December 1864) on pp.[1-4], at end.
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Criticism
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Commentary
W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (IAP 1976; 1984), A. Lyall, The Life of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, 2 vols. (London 1905); includes account by Dufferin of his childhood indifference to Greek, and his learning it as any other modern language, and its becoming his chief delight, in adult life. Letter to his son’s tutor, Lyall, 1, p.27; also his rectorial address to Univ. of St. Andrews.
John Metcalf, ‘North Down’s Literary Associations’: Letters from High Latitudes, ‘being some account of a voyage in 1856 in the Schooner Yacht “Foam” to Iceland, Jan Meyn, and Spitzbergen’ (11th edn. held in Belfast Public Library) was a best seller-written in an enviably easy style. His mother’s marriage to the stolid Blackwood’s of Clandeboye alarmed the bridegroom’s parents. On completing Helen’s Tower, he invited Tennyson, Browning and others to contribute verses, now engraved on brass plaques in it. Harold Nicholson was a nephew. (Short notice in Supplement to Fortnight, Sept. 1993.)
James Godkin - “Lord Dufferin’s defence of the Irish landlord” Ireland and Her Churches (1867) by James Godkin [q.v.] includes a section on Lord Dufferin’s defence of the Irish landlords: ‘The Irish landlords heave found in Lord Dufferin a most ac complished advocate. No champion ever fought with more polished weapons, or used them more skilfully. We cannot but admire the force of his arguments, the masterly disposition of his materials, and the perfection of his rhetoric. If we are disappointed in anything, it is that a nobleman so singularly gifted, with a mind so well cultivated, so en lightened by travel, so just and kind as a landlord, so liberal in politics, and really so patriotic, does not always rise superior to the instincts of his order. There is no man in the peerage whom we should have regarded as so well quali fied to act as an arbitrator between the two classes - land lords and tenants in this country. I, for one, therefore, regretted that he took up the position of an advocate of one of the parties, and that his discussion of so great a question assumed the form of a plea for the Irish landlords.
[Cont.:] Not that he should be regarded as wanting in interest for the people, of whom he speaks so beautifully when he says: - “Yet, some human agency or other must be accountable for the perennial desolation of a lovely and fertile island, watered by the fairest streams, caressed by a clement at mosphere, held in the embraces of a sea whose affluence fills the noblest harbours of the world, and inhabited by a race - valiant, generous, tender - gifted beyond measure with the power of physical endurance, and graced with the liveliest intelligence.” Nor has the crushing commercial jealousy of England been ever more forcibly expressed by any Irish patriot than by Lord Dufferin in the following passage:- “From Queen Elizabeth’s reign until the Union the various commercial confraternities of Great Britain never for a moment relaxed their relentless grip on the trades of Ireland. One by one, each of our nascent industries was either [582] strangled in its birth, or handed over, gagged and bound, to the jealous custody of the rival interest in England, until at last every fountain of wealth was hermetically sealed, and even the traditions of commercial enterprise have perished through desuetude.”
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“I may be told,” his lordship adds, “this frantic clinging of the Irish to the land is natural to their genius, and not a result of commercial restrictions. History supplies the perfect refutation of such a theory. Though the hostile tariff of England comprehended almost every article produced in Ireland, one single exception was permitted; from the reign of William III. the linen trade of Ireland has been free; as a consequence, at this day Irish linens are exported in enormous quantities to every quarter of the globe, and their annual value nearly equals the entire rental of the island.” (p.583.)
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In allusion to the answers which his letters to the Times called forth, Lord Dufferin remarks - “If my language has betrayed too warm a sympathy with the class of which I am a member, the groundlessness of the accusations with which it has been assailed must plead my excuse. No such in stinctive partiality has extended to the disposition of my facts or the array of my arguments. If I seem to have sup pressed all cognizance of the instances of harshness and mismanagement laid to the charge of individual landlords by men of the highest honour, it is not because I do not acknowledge and deplore their existence, but because they are so manifestly exceptional as to have produced an inappreciable effect on the current of events we are considering. In dealing with the economic interests of a great country, it is on the essential forces which are producing specific results, rather than on the capricious accidents of the situation, that we must fix our attention.”
In the same letter he observes that the landlord of a hundred years ago may have been himself the creature of circumstances— that not he, but the middleman, was the rack-renter, who helped to produce a surplus population - and that of one thing alone can we be certain, “that in dealing with his property, he pursued his own advantage with more or less intelligence, and in doing so exercised a right not only legitimate in itself, but which has been universally recognised as the mainspring of human progress.” (p.584)—Available on Internet Archive - online; accessed 06.06.2024; see Godkin response - as infra; Note: Godkin also cites his own
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| On Irishmen as Rulers (A speech delivered at Quebec, September 6, 1878) |
| Gentlemen, - I hardly know in what terms I am to reply to the address I have just listened to, so signal is the honour which you have conferred upon me. That a whole province, as large, as important, as flourishing as many a European kingdom, should erect into an embassy the mayors of its cities, - the delegates of its urban and rural municipalities, - and dispatch them on a journey of several hundred miles, to convey to a humble individual like myself an expression of the personal good-will of the constituencies they represent, is a circumstance unparalleled in the history of Canada, or of any other colony. To stand as I now do in the presence of so many distinguished persons, who have put themselves to great personal inconvenience on my account, only adds to my embarrassment. And yet, gentlemen, I cannot pretend not to be delighted with such a genuine demonstration of regard on the part of the large-hearted inhabitants of the great province in whose name you have addressed me; for, quite apart from the personal gratification I experience, you are teaching all future administrators of our affairs a lesson which you may be sure they will gladly lay to heart, since it will show them with how rich a reward yon are ready to pay whatever slight exertions it may be within their power to make on your behalf. And when in the history of your Dominion could such a proof of your generosity be more opportunely shown? A few weeks ago the heart of every man and women in Canada [939] was profoundly moved by the intelligence, not only that the government of Great Britain was about to send out as England’s representative to this country one of the most promising among the younger generation of our public men, but that the Queen herself was about to entrust to the keeping of the people of Canada her own daughter. If you desired any illustration of the respect, the affection, the confidence with which you are regarded by your fellow-subjects and by your sovereign at home, what greater proof could you require than this, or what more gratifying, more delicate, more touching recognition could have rewarded your never-failing love and devotion for the mother country and its ruler? But though Parliament and the citizens of Canada may well be proud of the confidence thus reposed in them, believe me when I tell you that, quite apart from these especial considerations, you may well be congratulated on the happy choice which has been made in the person of Lord Lorne for the future Governor-General of Canada. It has been my good fortune to be connected all my life long with his family by ties of the closest personal friendship. Himself I have known, I may say, almost from his boyhood, and a more conscientious, high-minded, or better qualified viceroy could not have been selected. Brought up under exceptionally fortunate conditions, it is needless to say he has profited to the utmost by the advantages placed within his reach, many of which will have fitted him in an especial degree for his present post. His public school and college education, his experience of the House of Commons, his large personal acquaintance with the representatives of all that is most distinguished in the intellectual world of the United States, his literary and artistic tastes, his foreign travel, will all combine to render him intelligently sympathetic with every phase and aspect of your national life. Above all, he comes of good Whig stock - that is to say, of a family whose prominence in history is founded upon the sacrifices they have made in the cause of constitutional liberty. When a couple of a man’s ancestors have perished on the scaffold as martyrs in the cause of political and religious freedom, you may be sure there is little likelihood of their descendant seeking to encroach, when acting as the representative of the [940] Crown, upon the principles of Parliament or the independence of the people. As for your future princess, it would not become me to enlarge upon her merits - she will soon be amongst you, taking all hearts by storm by the grace, the sauvity, the sweet simplicity of her manners, life, and conversation. Gentlemen, if ever there was a lady who in her earliest youth had formed a high ideal of what a noble life should be - if ever there was a human being who tried to make the most of the opportunities within her reach, and to create (or herself, in spite of every possible trammel and impediment, a useful career and occasions of benefiting her fellow-creatures, it is the Princess Louise, whose unpretending exertions in a hundred different directions to be of service to her country and generation have already won for her an extraordinary amount of popularity at home. When to this you add an artistic genius of the highest order, and innumerable other personal gifts and accomplishments, combined with manners so gentle, so unpretending, as to put every one who comes within reach of her influence at perfect ease, you cannot fail to understand that England is not merely sending you a royal princess of majestic lineage, but a good and noble woman, in whom the humblest settler or mechanic in Canada will find an intelligent and sympathetic friend. Indeed, gentlemen, I hardly know which pleases me most, the thought that the superintendence of your destinies is to he confided to persons so worthy of the trust, or that a dear friend of my own like Lord Lorne, and a personage for whom I entertain such respectful admiration as I do for tbe Princess Louise, should commence their futnre labours in the midst of a community so indulgent, so friendly, so ready to take the will for the deed, so generous in their recognition of any effort to serve them, as you have proved yourselves to be. And yet, alas! gentlemen, pleasant and agreeable as is the prospect for you and them, we must acknowledge there is one drawback to tbe picture. Lord Lorne has, as I have said, a multitude of merits, but even spots will be discovered on the sun, and unfortunately an irreparable, and, as I may call it, a congenital defect attaches to this appointment. Lord Lorne is not an Irishman! It is not his fault - he did the best he could for himself - he came as near the [941] right thing as possible by being born a Celtic Highlander. There is no doubt the world is best administered by Irishmen. Things never went better with us either at home or abroad than when Lord Palmerston ruled Great Britain - Lord Mayo governed India - Lord Monck directed the destinies of Canada - and the Robinsons, the Kennedys, the Laffans, the Callaghans, the Gores, the Hennesys, administered the affairs of our Australian colonies and West Indian possessions. Have not even the French at last made the same discovery in the person of Marshal MacMahon? But still we must be generous, and it is right Scotchmen should have a turn. After all, Scotland only got her name because she was conquered by the Irish - and if the real truth were known, it is probable the house of Inverary owes most of its glory to an Irish origin. Nay, I will go a step further - I would even let the poor Englishman take an occasional turn at the helm - if for no better reason than to make him aware how much better we manage the business. But you have not come to that yet, and though you have been a little spoiled by having been given three Irish governor-generals in succession, I am sure yon will find that your new viceroy’s personal and acquired qualifications will more than counterbalance his ethnological disadvantages. And now, gentlemen, I must bid you farewell. Never shall I forget the welcome you extended to me in every town and hamlet of Ontario when I first came amongst you. It was in traveling through your beautiful province I first learned te appreciate and understand the nature and character of your destinies. It was there I first learned to believe in Canada, and from that day to this my faith has never wavered. Nay, the further I extended my travels through the other provinces the more deeply my initial impressions were confirmed; but it was amongst you they were first engendered, and it is with your smiling happy hamlets my brightest reminiscences are intertwined. And what transaction could better illustrate the mighty changes your energies have wrought than the one in which we are at this moment engaged? Standing, as we do, upon this lofty platform, surrounded by those antique and historical fortifications, so closely connected with the infant fortunes of the colony, one cannot help contrasting the [942] present scene with others of an analogous character which have been frequently enacted upon the very spot. The early Governors of Canada have often received in Quebec deputies from the very districts from which each of you have come, but in those days the sites now occupied by your prosperous towns, the fields you till, the rose -clad bowers, and trim lawns where your children sport in peace, were then dense wildernesses of primeval forest, and those who came from thence on an errand here were merciless savages, seeking the presence of the viceroy either to threaten war and vengeance, or at best to proffer a treacherous and uncertain peace. How little could Montmagny, or Tracy, or Vandreuil, or Frontenac, have ever imagined on such occasions that for the lank dusky forms of the Iroquois or Ottawa emissaries, would one day be substituted [by] the beaming countenances and burly proportions of English-speaking mayors and aldermen and reeves. And now, gentlemen, again good-bye. I cannot tell you how deeply I regret that Lady Dufferin should not be present to share the gratification I have experienced by your visit. Tell your friends at home how deeply I have been moved by this last and signal proof of tbeir good-will, that their kindness shall never be forgotten, and that as long as I live it will be one of the chief ambitions of my life to render them faithful and effectual service. |
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References
D. J. O’Donoghue, The Poets of Ireland: A Biographical Dictionary (Dublin: Hodges Figgis & Co 1912); lists Letters from High Latitudes (1857). See also Irish Book Lover, 1.
Bernard Share, ed., Far Green Fields, 1500 Years of Irish Travel Writing (Belfast: Blackstaff 1992), contains extract from Dufferin, Letters from High Latitudes, 11th ed. (London: Dent ‘Everyman’ 1903; first pub. 1857; also 1925 edn.).
Belfast Central Library holds Life of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, 2 vols. (1905), by Sir A. Lyall; also C. E. D. Black, The Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, 1906; also Irish Emigration and the Tenure of Land in Ireland (1867) [see Dalton’s answer, Irish Peers and Irish Peasants, an Answer to Lord Dufferin and the Earl of Rosse.
Linen Hall Library (Belfast) holds Letters from High Latitudes. [Ref. in Mark Bence-Jones, Viceroys of India (1982)]; also Irish Peers and Irish Peasants, an Answer to Lord Dufferin and the Earl of Rosse, by G. T. Dalton.
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Notes
Problem-solver: Lord Dufferin wrote a paper recommending emigration as a solution to the Irish land problem and was answered by G. T. D’Alton in Irish Peers and Irish Peasants, an Answer to Lord Dufferin and the Earl of Rosse (Belfast Linenhall Library) and Isaac Butt in Irish People, Irish Land, a letter to Lord Lifford ... comments on the publications of Lords Dufferin and Rosse (1867) [Copies in University of Ulster Central Library [HL257 I6 B98].)
Genealogy: Dufferin’s preface to his edition of the Poems of Lady Dufferin, his mother (q.v.), contains a history of the Sheridan family, incl. Thomas the Elder, Thomas the Younger, Richard, his son Thomas, Caroline and Helen Sheridan, his daughters.
Selling up: Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple Blackwood, Lord Dufferin, rooted in Co. Down; retired in 1880s to a comfortable but unpretentious late-Georgian house which he set about altering with wings extensions and alterations. Harold Nicholson visited at the turn of the century, and admired the Marquess’s curiosities including a Red Indian fertility god and a mummy case. The Dufferins had a foothold on another Co. Down seat at Killyleagh, the home of the Rowan-Hamilton. He ended a feud with them by giving up the house to the Rowan-Hamilton’s at a quit-rent of a pair of silver spurs each year (alternating with a gold rose), and married Archibald Rowan-Hamilton’s daughter. A silver Freedom Casket presented to Dufferin by the City of London is expected to fetch £12,000 at Sotheby’s (Auction notice, Irish Times, Sat. 1 Feb. 1992.)
Russian spy?: George “AE” Russell wrote to Madame H. P. Blavatsky in her capacity as editor of Lucifer (issue of 15 Jan. 1889) notifying her that a novel by A. de Grasse Stevens (Miss Hildreth: A Novel, 3 vols., London 1888) refers at p.141 to ‘a Russian spy who was ejected from India by Lord Dufferin’ and adds: ‘I have never before seen this curious slander in print, and, although you may consider it beneath contempot, I think it a pity to allow it altogether to escape notice.’ Russell upbraids the publishers for allowing an author ‘to libel a living person, and that person a woman’. Alan Denson, the editor of Russell’s letters, quotes that HPB’s signed “Reply” in a note: ‘As to the authoress of this would-be politico-social novel, a rather green than young American, it is said her exceptional claim to disctinction from other trans-Atlantic writers of her sex, would seem to be an intimate acquaintance with the lobby and the back stairs of politics’ - and further notes that Madame Blavatsky answered the libel in Pall Mall Gasette (3 Jan. 1889).
H. S. Cousins wrote a poem to dedicated a son of Dufferin who died in the Boer War, in Ben Madighan (1894); see also references to the management of his estate during the Land Acts in Mark Bence-Jones, Twilight of the Ascendancy; his grandson died in Burma in 1943, ironically near the Ava from which his title derives; the last holder of the title was portrayed by Derek Bell and died of AIDS in [?]1990.
Lost comment, ‘I received from him a copy of that delightful book of poems of Helen, Lady Dufferin, with a memoir written by him, in which I think there is the most charming and beautiful passage illustrative of the love of a son for his mother which has ever been written in the English language’ (Q. source.)
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High-time: Lord Dufferin liked Kipling’s mother and used to drop in for tea at Simla. (Cited in Tom Paulin, review of David Gilmour, The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, London: John Murray, in Times Literary Supplement 8 March 2002, p.4.)
Chancellor: James Joyce received his BA (Pass) degree from the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava on 30 [or 31] Oct. 1902. (See Peter Costello, James Joyce: The Years of Growth, 1992, p.181.)
Kith & Kin (1): Hans Blackwood, b.1758, 4th son of Sir John Blackwood; Irish MP and supporter of the Union; resided at 6 Harcourt St. with his American loyalist wife Mehetable Temple; grandfather of Frederick Temple Blackwood, Viceroy of Canada and India.
Kith & Kin (2): His second son Lord (Ian) Basil Gawaine Blackwood, who succeeded to the title, was a protegée of Kilmer in S. Africa; held various colonial offices in A. Africa; illustrated Belloc’s books as “BTB”; seriously wounded with the 9th Lancers in World War I, 1916; acted as sec. to Lord Wimbourne in Ireland, 1916, afterwards killed on returning to the Front in 1917.
Kith & Kin (3): A grandson was killed near Ava in Burma (ironically the locale of the family title) during the Second World War. Lady Dufferin, lived to old age and was the recipient of the ‘blessing’ of the women of India in verses by Rudyard Kipling (“Lady, lo, they know and love ...”). Caroline Blackwood, the novelist and sometime wife of Robert Lowell, was his grand-daughter; the life of one of her sons was blighted by heroine.
George Meredith: A copy of Diana of the Crossways (1891), the novel by Meredith, supposedly modelled on Lady Caroline Norton [q.v.] which was formerly owned by Lord Dufferin, is held in the British Library [or Oxford UL?]
Alfred Lord Tennyson: Tennyson’s younger son Lionel contracted fever in India and died in the Red Sea on shipboard while returning home. He was buried at seah ‘Beneath a hard Arabian moon / And alien stars.’ Tennyson took two years to recover from the loss sufficiently to write the elegy from which those lines are taken. H dedicated it to the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, who had been Lionel’s host in India. (See Poetry Foundation > Tennyson - online; accessed 18.04.2017.)
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