“Lord Charles Russell is returned for this County.  The Chairing, Dinner, etc., take place to-day.  Everybody is interested about him, as he is very young and it is his first appearance in the character.  His speeches have delighted the whole County, and he is, of course, very much pleased.”  This faculty of public speaking was perhaps his most remarkable endowment.  He had an excellent command of cultivated English, a clear and harmonious voice, a keen sense of humour, and a happy knack of apt quotation.

[Footnote *:  Cf.  Tales of my Father, by A. F. Longmans, 1902.]

On the 23rd of February, 1841, Disraeli wrote, with reference to an impending division on the Irish Registration Bill:  “The Whigs had last week two hunting accidents; but Lord Charles Russell, though he put his collar-bone out, and we refused to pair him, showed last night.”  He sate for Bedfordshire till the dissolution of that year, when he retired, feeling that Free Trade was indeed bound to come, but that it would be disastrous for the agricultural community which he represented.  “Lord Charles Russell,” wrote Cobden, “is the man who opposed even his brother John’s fixed duty, declaring at the time that it was to throw two millions of acres out of cultivation.”  He returned to Parliament for a brief space in 1847, and was then appointed Serjeant-at-Arms—­not, as he always insisted, “Serjeant-at-Arms to the House of Commons,” but “one of the Queen’s Serjeants-at-Arms, directed by her to attend on the Speaker during the sitting of Parliament.”  In 1873 the office and its holder were thus described by “Jehu Junior” in Vanity Fair: 

“For the filling of so portentous an office, it is highly important that one should be chosen who will, by personal mien and bearing not less than by character, detract nothing from its dignity.  Such a one is Lord Charles Russell, who is a worthy representative of the great house of Bedford from which he springs.

“For a quarter of a century he has borne the mace before successive Speakers.  From his chair he has listened to Peel, to Russell, to Palmerston, to Disraeli, and to Gladstone, and he still survives as a depository of their eloquence.  He is himself popular beyond the fair expectations of one who has so important a part to play in the disciplinary arrangements of a popular assembly; for he is exceptionally amiable and genial by nature, is an excellent sportsman, and has cultivated a special taste for letters.[*] It is rarely that in these times a man can be found so thoroughly fitted to fill an office which could be easily invested with ridicule, or so invariably to invest it, as he has, with dignity.”

[Footnote *:  He was the best Shakespearean I ever knew, and founded the “Shakespeare Medal” at Harrow.  Lord Chief justice Coleridge wrote thus:  “A munificent and accomplished nobleman, Lord Charles Russell, has, by the wise liberality which dictated the foundation of his Shakespeare Medal at Harrow, secured that at least at one great Public School the boys may be stimulated in youth to an exact and scholarlike acquaintance with the poet whom age will show them to be the greatest in the world.”]