From first to last he was the staunch and unwavering champion of freedom—­civil, intellectual, and religious.  At the very outset of his Parliamentary career he said, “We talk much—­and think a great deal too much—­of the wisdom of our ancestors.  I wish we could imitate the courage of our ancestors.  They were not ready to lay their liberties at the foot of the Crown upon every vain or imaginary alarm.”  At the close of life he referred to England as “the country whose freedom I have worshipped, and whose liberties and prosperity I am not ashamed to say we owe to the providence of Almighty God.”

This faith Lord Russell was prepared to maintain at all times, in all places, and amid surroundings which have been known to test the moral fibre of more boisterous politicians.  Though profoundly attached to the Throne and to the Hanoverian succession, he was no courtier.  The year 1688 was his sacred date, and he had a habit of applying the principles of our English Revolution to the issues of modern politics.

Actuated, probably, by some playful desire to probe the heart of Whiggery by putting an extreme case, Queen Victoria once said:  “Is it true, Lord John, that you hold that a subject is justified, under certain circumstances, in disobeying his Sovereign?” “Well, ma’am, speaking to a Sovereign of the House of Hanover, I can only say that I suppose it is!”

When Italy was struggling towards unity and freedom, the Queen was extremely anxious that Lord John, then Foreign Secretary, should not encourage the revolutionary party.  He promptly referred Her Majesty to “the doctrines of the Revolution of 1688,” and informed her that, “according to those doctrines, all power held by Sovereigns may be forfeited by misconduct, and each nation is the judge of its own internal government.”

The love of justice was as strongly marked in Lord John Russell as the love of freedom.  He could make no terms with what he thought one-sided or oppressive.  When the starving labourers of Dorset combined in an association which they did not know to be illegal, he urged that incendiaries in high places, such as the Duke of Cumberland and Lord Wynford, were “far more guilty than the labourers, but the law does not reach them, I fear.”

When a necessary reform of the Judicature resisted on the ground of expense, he said: 

“If you cannot afford to do justice speedily and well, you may as well shut up the Exchequer and confess that you have no right to raise taxes for the protection of the subject, for justice is the first and primary end of all government.”

Those are the echoes of a remote past.  My own recollections of my uncle begin when he was Foreign Secretary in Lord Palmerston’s Government, and I can see him now, walled round with despatch-boxes, in his pleasant library looking out on the lawn of Pembroke Lodge—­the prettiest villa in Richmond Park.  In appearance he was very much what Punch always represented him—­very short, with a head and shoulders which might have belonged to a much larger frame.  When sitting he might have been taken for a man of average height, and it was only when he rose to his feet that his diminutive stature became apparent.