LAWLEY, Hon. Francis Charles (1825-1901), of Escrick Park, Yorks. and 29 Berkeley Square, London, Mdx.

A ‘handsome, pleasant, dashing, man about town’,1Baily’s Magazine (1902), lxxvii. 119. who was ‘tall and slight in build’ with a ‘kind, thoughtful face’, Lawley was a member of the Gladstone ‘cousinhood’, who became private secretary to Gladstone as chancellor of the exchequer soon after entering Parliament for Beverley as a Liberal in 1852.2A.H. Beavan, Imperial London (1901), 505. However, his fondness for the Turf embroiled him in gambling debts and stock market speculations which ended his promising political career in ignominy two years later.

Lawley’s father, Paul Beilby Lawley, had taken the surname of his uncle, Richard Thompson, on succeeding to his extensive Yorkshire estates in 1820. However, his children, whose mother was Catherine Gladstone’s aunt, kept his original surname. A ‘lifelong Liberal’, he sat for Wenlock, 1826-32, and the East Riding, 1832-7, and in 1839 was created Baron Wenlock, a family title which had been in abeyance since 1834.3HP Commons, 1820-32, vii. 421-3; Gent. Mag. (1852), i. 617-18. Lawley’s mother Caroline and Catherine Gladstone’s mother Mary were both the daughters of Lord Braybrooke.

Lawley, known to his friends as Frank, was educated at Rugby, where he won prizes for Greek iambics and Latin verse.4The Rugby register (2nd edn., 1847). He later lauded his schoolmaster, Dr. Arnold, as one of two ‘beacon lights’ whose ‘example and influence’ sustained him after his fall from grace, the other being Gladstone.5F.C. Lawley to W.E. Gladstone, 2 Aug. 1862, Add. MS. 44399, f. 61. After Rugby, Lawley went to Oxford, self-confessedly ‘wasting nearly four years’ before taking a second class degree in classics in 1848.6F.C. Lawley to A.H. Gordon, 15 Aug. 1854, BL Add. MS. 49234, f. 31; The Times, 21 Sept. 1901. He was elected as a Fellow of All Souls that November.7Morning Post, 6 Nov. 1848. He resigned his fellowship five years later: Ibid., 1 Nov. 1853. He began legal studies at the Inner Temple, but later admitted that he

found myself starting in life with no definite purpose – with no strong bias in favour of any profession – with no propensity that I can now recall except a partiality for strong and unwholesome excitements – which with a Yorkshireman’s tastes and opportunities, soon ripened into a passion for the Turf.8Lawley to Gordon, 15 Aug. 1854, BL Add. MS. 49234, f. 32.

Having previously gambled for amusement, Lawley in 1849 turned to the Turf to make money, having acted as security for a friend for a substantial debt which was now being called in.9Ibid. His horse Clincher, which he owned with the earl of Airlie, was favourite for the Derby in 1850, and when it finished third, Lawley lost thousands of pounds.10H.C.G. Matthew, ‘Lawley, Francis Charles’, Oxf. DNB [www.oxforddnb.com]. Lawley had an interest in Teddington, which won the Derby in 1851, and subsequently owned the prize-winning Gemma di Vergy. The latter was seized on behalf of Lawley’s creditors in February 1857, but it transpired that it no longer belonged to him at that point: Nottinghamshire Guardian, 12 Mar. 1857; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 15 Mar. 1857. Not wishing to alert his ailing father to his financial misfortunes, he borrowed ‘at enormous interest’ and ‘carried an immense and crushing pile of debt’ which consumed all of his income.11Lawley to Gordon, 15 Aug. 1854, BL Add. MS. 49234, ff. 32-4.

None of this, however, was public knowledge when Lawley came forward in April 1852 as Liberal candidate for Beverley, where he offered alongside his cousin, William Wells. He admitted that he and Wells were ‘entire strangers’, but addressed the voters as ‘brother Yorkshiremen’ and cited his family’s connection with the East Riding, noting that they ‘at many times, “in season and out of season,” have advocated principles of enlightened Liberal Reform’. He was ‘most emphatically, in every sense of the word, a free-trader’. Warning that the Derby government would attempt to re-impose the corn laws, he urged voters not to be ‘humbugged by some such word as a re-adjustment of taxation, or addition to the revenue’. He had heard Joseph Hume speak in the Commons the previous week on electoral reform, and declared his own support for household suffrage, recognising the importance of ‘timely concessions’ on this question. If elected to Parliament, he would not be ‘a drone in the hive’.12York Herald, 3 Apr. 1852. On the hustings at the general election that July Lawley’s proposer praised ‘his ingenuous disposition, his most undoubted talent, his persuasive eloquence’ and his advocacy of free trade. Lawley reiterated his commitment to free trade and ‘a just and full extension of the franchise’, and promised to support an inquiry into the Maynooth grant.13Daily News, 7 July 1852. He topped the poll, with Wells in second place. Shortly after his return he became the steward of Goodwood races, and was also steward at Lichfield and at Bibury and Stockbridge.14Morning Post, 26 July 1852; Nottinghamshire Guardian, 12 Aug. 1852; Hampshire Advertiser, 19 June 1852.

At Westminster Lawley generally voted with the Liberals, dividing in support of free trade, 27 Nov. 1852, and opposing Disraeli’s budget, 16 Dec. 1852. When Gladstone became chancellor of the exchequer that December, he appointed Lawley as his private secretary.15Gladstone noted in his diary, 28 Dec. 1852, ‘Saw F. Lawley (& began work)’: H.C.G. Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, iv. 482. As Gladstone later explained, Lawley’s secretarial duties precluded him from ‘acquiring distinction in the house so as to make himself well known’, and he was a silent member.16Hansard, 3 Aug. 1854, vol. 135, c. 1255. Nor was he a particularly assiduous attender, voting in 70 out of 257 divisions in the 1853 session.17Daily News, 21 Sept. 1853. He supported the removal of Jewish disabilities, 24 Feb., 11 Mar. 1853, and was in the minority for Sir William Clay’s motion to consider church rates, 26 May 1853. Gladstone asserted in 1854 that Lawley’s position as private secretary meant that he had ‘done more labour for the public during the last Session and the present, and acquired more experience in public business of an important and difficult character, than falls to the lot of most of those who sit here for, I do not say one or two, but who have sat five, six, or it may be ten, Sessions in this House’.18Hansard, 3 Aug. 1854, vol. 135, c. 1255. He also performed some unexpected duties, taking Gladstone’s place to host a dinner party while the chancellor attended the birth of his son Herbert, 7 Jan. 1854.19Gladstone Diaries, iv. 637. John Wood, chairman of the board of inland revenue, praised Lawley for ‘his talents, his indefatigable industry, and his singular aptitude for business. These qualities are enhanced by a most amiable temper and an earnest sincerity, which are peculiarly valuable in official life’.20Hansard, 3 Aug. 1854, vol. 135, c. 1245.

Lawley took the Chiltern Hundreds, 24 July 1854, in anticipation of his appointment as governor-general of South Australia, a position which he and his friends hoped would remove him from the temptations of ‘Newmarket and the clubs’.21Bury and Norwich Post, 2 Aug. 1854. See also Hansard, 3 Aug. 1854, vol. 135, c. 1228. He had already made arrangements to assist with the campaign of his successor as Liberal candidate at Beverley, the Hon. Arthur Hamilton Gordon, youngest son of the prime minister, Lord Aberdeen.22Lawley to Gordon, 22 July 1854, Add. MS. 49234, ff. 20-1. Speaking in Gordon’s support at an electors’ meeting, Lawley stated that he was about to transfer his ‘few energies and humble abilities’ to ‘an appointment opening up a future of great width, and of great magnitude’.23York Herald, 29 July 1857. Gordon, who easily saw off a Conservative challenger, wrote to Gladstone to praise Lawley’s electioneering efforts, declaring that

I cannot thank Lawley enough for his kindness in accompanying me everywhere, through tan yards & forges, shaking all the black grimey fellows by the hand, as if he were standing for a fresh election himself. His pleasant open manner has quite won the hearts of the good people here, & does me great service. I like him very much & wish I knew him better. Well I know he takes all this trouble for love of you.24A. Gordon to W.E. Gladstone, 27 July 1854, in P. Knaplund (ed.), ‘Gladstone-Gordon correspondence, 1851-1896: selections from the private correspondence of a British prime minister and a colonial governor’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 51 (1961), 16.

‘How admirably do all these events dove-tail!’, jibed the Daily News. ‘First, there is a Prime Minister wanting votes, with a son wanting a seat. Next there is a sporting gentleman wanting anything that a generous Government has to bestow, and possessing a seat which is the very thing for the Prime Minister’s son.’25Daily News, 4 Aug. 1854. However, this was as nothing compared with the revelations which led to Lawley’s gubernatorial appointment being rescinded, as the colonial secretary, Sir George Grey explained to the Commons, 3 Aug. 1854.26Grey’s statement pre-empted a move by Sir John Pakington to discuss the circumstances surrounding Lawley’s appointment. Lawley’s appointment had initially been offered to him by Grey’s predecessor, the duke of Newcastle. Handing over to Grey, Newcastle told him that the only possible objection to Lawley was his predilection for gambling, but they concurred that a fondness for the Turf was not in itself a bar to office. Encouraged by ‘the highest testimonials’ as to Lawley’s abilities and by assurances from Lawley’s brother-in-law, James Stuart Wortley MP that ‘there was not a single debt or liability outstanding to which Mr. Lawley was now subject, or in order to evade which he might be desirous of leaving this country on receiving the appointment’, Grey confirmed his predecessor’s choice. Fresh rumours then emerged that Lawley had incurred significant debts, and, more seriously, that he had used ‘official knowledge’ gained as Gladstone’s private secretary ‘to engage in extensive speculations on the funds’.27Hansard, 3 Aug. 1854, vol. 135, cc. 1226-35. Lawley initially denied this, both to Grey, and ‘to my good angel... Gladstone’, but subsequently confessed to Gladstone about ‘my wretched Fund Speculations’.28Ibid., c. 1235; Lawley to Gordon, 15 Aug. 1854, BL Add. MS. 49234, ff. 33-4. Gladstone’s diary noted that after Lawley’s ‘sad confession’, he discussed the best course of action with Lawley, Wortley and his brothers: Gladstone Diaries, iv. 638. However, they accepted Lawley’s assertion that he had not been using insider information, the proof of which was said to be that he had lost rather than made money through his transactions. Nonetheless, his appointment was revoked.29Hansard, 3 Aug. 1854, vol. 135, cc. 1235-8. The Times had no truck with the excuse that Lawley had lost money through his dealings, declaring that ‘the simple fact of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s private secretary having entered the arena of Bulls and Bears is sufficient to exclude him from office till at least he has gone through some sort of purgation’: The Times, 4 Aug. 1854.

Defending his brother-in-law during this debate, Wortley made it clear that Lawley’s family and friends had been kept in the dark about his speculations.30Hansard, 3 Aug. 1854, vol. 135, c. 1246. Gladstone, who wrote of this debate that it ‘was a day of much distress & anxiety: mitigated as far as it could be by the considerate kindness of the House’, expressed ‘a warm and affectionate interest’ in Lawley’s future, and urged fellow MPs that as Lawley was guilty only of ‘grave imprudence’ rather than ‘pecuniary corruption’, ‘the door of hope’ should ‘not be barred against him’.31Gladstone Diaries, iv. 638; Hansard, 3 Aug. 1854, vol. 135, c. 1258. Lawley later thanked Gladstone for ‘the extraordinary generosity of your conduct to me through the miseries of the last fortnight’: Lawley to Gladstone, Add. MS. 44382, f. 30. Although the Commons dealt with Lawley himself in a fairly measured way, critics of the government including Sir John Pakington and John Bright took the opportunity to insist that greater care should be exercised in appointing important colonial officers. Pakington argued that Lawley’s ‘age and position, and his limited experience in public affairs’ should in themselves have disqualified him.32Hansard, 3 Aug. 1854, vol. 135, c. 1240. For Bright’s speech, see Ibid., cc. 1249-51. Similar views abounded in the press, with the Daily News protesting that ‘a dirtier case never brought discredit on a Cabinet’, while The Times remarked,

Tell it not in Gath that England is so fallen, so degenerate, that, although the mother of fifty colonies, she is incapable of finding a better governor to fill a vacancy than a young man of twenty-eight, very gay in his habits, and almost totally destitute of official experience!33Daily News, 4 Aug. 1854; The Times, 4 Aug. 1854.

Gladstone noted in his diary the following day that ‘the solitude of my Private Secretary’s room which has been like a mill for 18 months was very melancholy... Pressure begins for F[rank] L[awley’]s immediately abandoning his office as Private Secretary. This again makes me sad, to part from the unhappy’.34Gladstone Diaries, iv. 639. Gladstone’s delay in removing Lawley, who only officially ceased his secretarial duties, 19 Aug. 1854, prompted a reprimand for the chancellor from The Times, which ‘grieved’ Lawley ‘deeply’, for although he thought it ‘wholesome and right… that I should continually be reminded of my folly and sin’, he disliked Gladstone’s name being blackened.35The Times, 19 Aug. 1854; Lawley to Gladstone, 19 Aug. 1854, Add. MS. 44382, ff. 59-60. After Lawley’s departure, Gladstone arranged for £300 to be paid to him from the secret service fund.36P. Magnus, Gladstone (1963), 116-17. Lawley had earlier received £100 from the same fund. Lawley initially resumed his legal studies in the hopes of making his profession at the bar, and in October 1854 planned to begin reading with a conveyancer.37Lawley to Gordon, 15 Aug. 1854, Add. MS. 49234, ff. 34-5; Lawley to Gordon, 24 Oct. 1854, Add. MS. 49234, ff. 42-3. However, his heart was not in it, and he wrote that December that his continued ‘intense interest’ in politics was acting ‘somewhat to the prejudice’ of his legal studies.38Lawley to Gordon, 7 Dec. 1854, Add. MS. 49234, f. 50. He remained mired in debt, and had been continuing to buy and sell racehorses, and using them as security for loans.39Reynolds’s Newspaper, 15 Mar. 1857; Daily News, 15 Jan. 1858. In 1856 he fled to the United States to escape his creditors,40B. Jenkins, ‘Frank Lawley and the Confederacy’, Civil War History, 23 (1977), 146; J.M. Rodas, ‘More than a Civil (War) Friendship. Anthony Trollope and Frank Lawley’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, 50 (1998), 57-8. who had him declared an outlaw the following year.41Bristol Mercury, 7 Feb. 1857. Lawley worked for some time in the British legation in Washington,42Matthew, ‘Lawley, Francis Charles’. and wrote for magazines in New York.43Jenkins, ‘Frank Lawley and the Confederacy’, 146. He visited France in 1860, but his family dissuaded him from visiting England. In 1861 he holidayed with his mother and sister in the Pyrenees, and also visited London and Yorkshire.44Ibid., 147. In January and February 1862, when he complained of ‘the weary distances of this country... such filth and discomfort’, he toured the American Mid-West with Anthony Trollope.45Rodas, ‘More than a Civil (War) Friendship’, 39, 42, 43. Trollope wrote about this tour in his 1862 work North America. The pair remained friends and later became related by marriage when Lawley’s nephew married Trollope’s niece. Rodas suggests that Lawley’s career may have provided some inspiration for Trollope’s Phineas Finn, although there are several other possible contenders, and for the character of Lord Silverbridge in The Duke’s Children: Ibid., 39-40, 54-5. He could not resist his old habits when he visited England later that year, losing £50 on the Derby.46Jenkins, ‘Frank Lawley and the Confederacy’, 147. Lawley saw Gladstone during this 1862 visit to England: Lawley to Gladstone, 2 Aug. 1862, Add. MS. 44399, f. 61.

In July 1862 Lawley began a new phase in his career, when he was appointed as a war correspondent for The Times in America in succession to William Howard Russell, at a salary of £1,000 per annum.47Jenkins, ‘Frank Lawley and the Confederacy’, 147. Lawley’s war reporting is examined in depth in W.S. Hoole, Lawley covers the Confederacy (1964). He was sent to report from the Confederate states, and although he had initially sympathised with the North, soon adopted a strong pro-Confederate stance, to the extent that The Times’s manager, Mowbray Morris chastised him for his ‘extravagant partiality to the Southern cause’.48M. Morris to F.C. Lawley, 24 Sept. 1863, cited in H. Dubrulle, ‘“We are threatened with... anarchy and ruin”: fear of Americanization and the emergence of an Anglo-Saxon confederacy in England during the American Civil War’, Albion, 33 (2001), 592. On Lawley’s switch from a pro-Northern to a pro-Southern viewpoint, see A. Foreman, A world on fire (2010), 229, 306. His charming manners helped him to gain ‘easy access to the Confederate leaders and generals’, whom he admired,49Matthew, ‘Lawley, Francis Charles’. and he travelled with the Confederate troops, being transported in an army ambulance on one occasion when he fell ill.50Jenkins, ‘Frank Lawley and the Confederacy’, 144. Lawley, who ‘played a part in Gladstone’s ill-judged support for the south’,51Matthew, ‘Lawley, Francis Charles’. Lawley urged Gladstone in December 1862 that ‘barring that one fatal obstacle of slavery there is nothing to prevent the most cordial relations between England and the South’: Lawley to Gladstone, 23 Dec. 1862, Add. MS. 44399, f. 294. hoped that his reports would provide ammunition for the pro-Confederate lobby in Britain, of which his friend William Gregory MP was a leading proponent.52Jenkins, ‘Frank Lawley and the Confederacy’, 150-1. When he returned to England on leave in 1864, he took the opportunity ‘to lobby on behalf of the South’,53Ibid., 158. Lawley had also lobbied key individuals such as Hartington, the under-secretary at war, in correspondence from America: Foreman, World on fire, 472. but kept a low profile to avoid his creditors.54Foreman, World on fire, 594. Despite his partiality, Lawley became ‘England’s premier Civil War correspondent’, and provided first-hand accounts of some of the key events of the war, including the battles of Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, and General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.55Rodas, ‘More than a Civil (War) Friendship’, 48. He left the South for New York after the fall of Richmond in April 1865, and his last report for The Times before returning to England was on Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.56Jenkins, ‘Frank Lawley and the Confederacy’, 159; Rodas, ‘More than a Civil (War) Friendship’, 49.

Gladstone, to whom Lawley remained close throughout his life, helped with Lawley’s ‘financial rehabilitation’ after his return home and during the 1866-7 reform crisis used him as an intermediary with the Adullamites.57H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809-1874 (1986), 161-2. See also D.F. Sheppard, ‘The Cave of Adullam, household suffrage and the passage of the Second Reform Act’, Parliamentary History, 14 (1995), 152-3. Although his name was mentioned as a possible candidate for Beverley in 1868,58Leeds Mercury, cited in Hull Packet, 3 July 1868. Lawley did not seek a return to Parliament until 1892 when he became Liberal candidate for Ludlow, but withdrew ‘on medical advice’ long before the general election.59The Times, 14 May 1892. Instead, he pursued a journalistic career. In 1866 he was appointed to the staff of the Daily Telegraph, for which he reported from a besieged Paris during the Franco-Prussian war.60The Times, 21 Sept. 1901; Newcastle Guardian, 3 Dec. 1870. He remained on the paper’s staff until 1897,61Glasgow Herald, 15 Mar. 1897. often acting as an obituary writer.62Beavan, Imperial London, 505-6. He also wrote for American papers, including the New York Sun, and according to one account, was the founder of the London-based Anglo-American Times.63The Graphic, 21 Dec. 1895; J.H. Barnes, Forty years on the stage: others, principally, and myself (1914), 194. He contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography, assisted with an edition of Lord Stratheden and Campbell’s speeches on the Eastern Question and wrote the preface for an edition of Gladstone’s 1888 speech on the Channel Tunnel.64The Times, 9 July 1897; H.G. Campbell, F.C. Lawley and C. Cowper (ed.), The Eastern Question: speeches delivered in the House of Lords by William Frederick, Lord Stratheden and Campbell, 1871-1891 (1894); W.E. Gladstone, Channel Tunnel. Great speech by the Right Hon. W.E. Gladstone in the House of Commons on June 27th 1888 (1888). Drawing on his unrivalled knowledge of the subject, the bulk of his journalistic output was on sporting matters, and above all, horseracing, with regular contributions to various newspapers and magazines, notably to Baily’s Magazine, writing with a ‘picturesque style and pungent wit’.65Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 21 Sept. 1901. Baily’s Magazine wrote of its former contributor that ‘he never touched a page that he did not adorn, and in all that he wrote we saw the authority, the scholar, and the gentleman’: Baily’s Magazine (1902), lxxvii. 119. He edited The Racing Life of Lord George Cavendish Bentinck (1892), but his most successful book was Life and Times of ‘The Druid’ (1895), on the noted sporting writer Henry Hall Dixon.66Matthew, ‘Lawley, Francis Charles’. Lawley began but never completed a biography of the Anglo-American lawyer Judah Benjamin: Glasgow Herald, 15 Mar. 1897. Despite his literary endeavours – and an inheritance of £10,000 from his mother in 186867Daily News, 5 Sept. 1868. – Lawley’s financial position was a precarious one, and meetings of his creditors were called in 1874 and 1881.68London Gazette, 3 Feb. 1874, 28 Oct. 1881.

Latterly resident at Woodlands, Station Road, Sidcup, Kent,69The Times, 24 Feb. 1902. Lawley was taken ill in the street, 18 Sept. 1901, and died that day at King’s College Hospital of an internal haemorrhage.70Matthew, ‘Lawley, Francis Charles’. He was buried at Otterbourne, Hants.71The Times, 20 Sept. 1901. He was survived by his wife, whom he left ‘in extremely poor circumstances’.72Baily’s Magazine (1902), lxxvii. 122. His estate was valued at just £70 3s. 9d.73Matthew, ‘Lawley, Francis Charles’. Legal wranglings after his death revealed that among other arrangements to settle his debts, Lawley had taken out a life insurance policy of £2,500 for the benefit of one of his creditors.74Manchester Evening News, 4 Nov. 1902; The Times, 5 Nov. 1902. His correspondence survives in several archives, including the British Library (with Gladstone), the Bodleian Library (with Lord Kimberley), the National Library of Scotland (with Lord Rosebery and with the publishing firm Blackwoods), Emory University (with Gregory) and Hull University Archives.