Ferdinand Mount was editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1991 to 2002. His memoir, Cold Cream, is just out in paperback.
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Vol. 27 No. 18 · 22 September 2005
pages 21-22 | 3463 words
Truffles for Potatoes
Ferdinand Mount
- Rosebery: Statesman in Turmoil by Leo McKinstry
Murray, 626 pp, £25.00, May 2005, ISBN 0 7195 5879 4
The schoolmaster William Johnson is remembered for three things, although not under that name. He wrote the most famous of all translations from Greek lyric verse, ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead’; he wrote the words of the ‘Eton Boating Song’; and in a letter to Francis Warre-Cornish, another Eton schoolmaster, he wrote of his pupil, the future Lord Rosebery: ‘I would give you a piece of plate if you would get that lad to work; he is one of those who like the palm without the dust.’ Ten years later, Johnson was sacked for fondling one pupil too many and changed his name to Cory. After his death, Warre-Cornish published his old friend’s letters and journals. Unfortunately, the collapse of Rosebery’s administration after only 15 months was all too fresh in people’s minds and Johnson/ Cory’s verdict stuck. No other prime minister in British history has surrendered power quite so limply, none more ignominiously except Anthony Eden after Suez.
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Letters
Vol. 27 No. 19 · 6 October 2005
From Colin Armstrong
In his review of Leo McKinstry’s Rosebery: Statesman in Turmoil, Ferdinand Mount asserts that the main sources of allegations that Lord Rosebery was a homosexual were ‘the notorious forger and fantasist Edmund Backhouse and the homophobe Lord Queensberry’ (LRB, 22 September). Matters are more complicated than either Mount or McKinstry supposes. As John Davis writes in his article on Rosebery in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘references to Rosebery in the diaries of the homosexual proselytiser George Ives and, however spuriously, in those of the fantasist Sir Edmund Backhouse suggest that Rosebery’s homosexuality was taken for granted in homosexual circles.’
Queensberry’s vendetta against Rosebery arose from his relationship with Lord Drumlanrig, Queensberry’s son and heir. Drumlanrig killed himself, according to society rumour, because of fear of blackmail over his relations with Rosebery. Queensberry was obviously a partisan witness but that by itself is not reason enough to dismiss his claims about Rosebery; he was after all correct in his allegations about Oscar Wilde.
McKinstry’s dismissive attitude to the case for Rosebery’s homosexuality goes against the grain of the evidence adduced in his biography. For example, McKinstry admits the ‘homoerotic undercurrent’ of Rosebery’s words about his murdered friend Frederick Vyner; but this is attributed by McKinstry to nothing more than ‘boyish companionship’, even though Rosebery was already in his twenties when he wrote about Vyner. The evidence is circumstantial but so abundant that the plausibility of the case is hard to doubt.
Colin Armstrong
Belfast
