The loved and honoured friend whose name stands at the head of this section was the fourth son and, youngest child of Dr. George Butler, Dean of Peterborough, and sometime Head Master of Harrow.  Montagu Butler was himself-educated at Harrow under Dr. Vaughan, afterwards the well-known Master of the Temple, and proved to be in many respects the ideal schoolboy.  He won all the prizes for composition, prose and verse, Greek, Latin, and English.  He gained the principal scholarship, and was Head of the School.  Beside all this, he was a member of the Cricket Eleven and made the highest score for Harrow in the match against Eton at Lord’s.

In July, 1851, Montagu Butler left Harrow, and in the following October entered Trinity College, Cambridge, as a Scholar.  He won the Bell University Scholarship, the Battie University Scholarship, the Browne Medal for a Greek Ode twice, the Camden Medal, Porson Prize, and First Member’s Prize for a Latin Essay, and graduated as Senior Classic in 1855.  Of such an undergraduate career a Fellowship at Trinity was the natural sequel, but Butler did not long reside at Cambridge.  All through his boyhood and early manhood he had set his heart on a political career.  He had a minute acquaintance with the political history of modern England, and his memory was stored with the masterpieces of political eloquence.

In 1856 he accepted the post of Private Secretary to the Right Hon. W. F. Cowper, afterwards Lord Mount Temple, and then President of the Board of Health in Lord Palmerston’s Administration.  In this office he served for two years, and then, retiring, he spent eleven months in foreign travel, visiting in turn the Tyrol, Venice, the Danube, Greece, Rome, Florence, and the Holy Land.  During this period, he changed his plan of life, and in September, 1859, he was ordained Deacon by Bishop Lonsdale of Lichfield, on Letters Dimissory from Bishop Turton of Ely.  His title was his Fellowship; but it was settled that the College should present him to the Vicarage of Great St. Mary’s, Cambridge; and till it was vacant he was to have worked as a classical tutor in Trinity.  Then came another change.  “Dr. Vaughan’s retirement,” he wrote, “from the Head Mastership of Harrow startled us.  We all took quietly for granted that he would stay on for years.”  However, this “startling” retirement took place, and there was a general agreement among friends of the School that Vaughan’s favourite pupil, Montagu Butler, was the right man to succeed him.  Accordingly, Butler was elected in November, 1859, though only twenty-six years old; and, with a view to the pastoral oversight of Harrow School, he was ordained priest, again by Bishop Lonsdale, at Advent, 1859.

In January, 1860, Montagu Butler entered on his new duties at Harrow, and there he spent five-and-twenty years of happy, strenuous, and serviceable life.  He found 469 boys in the School; under his rule the numbers increased till they reached 600.