Constitutions of Clarendon (the provisions of which are then given).
Q. Did Henry II try to improve the government of the country or not?
A. Yes, throughout his busy reign he never forgot his work of reforming the
law. The itinerant justices grew in importance, and not only settled money
matters in the counties as at ?rst, but heard pleas and judged cases. It is to
Henry II’s reforms that we owe the ?rst clear beginnings of trial by jury.
The murder of Becket is not mentioned. The execution of Charles I is men-
tioned, but not blamed.
She remained unmarried, having once become engaged to a curate and
su?ered from insane delusions during her engagement, which led to its
being broken o?. She became a miser, living in a large house, but using few
of the rooms in order to save coal, and only having a bath once a week for the
same reason. She wore thick woollen stockings which were always coming
down in rumples over her ankles, and at most times talked sentimentally
about the extreme goodness of certain people and the extreme wickedness of
certain others, both equally imaginary. Both in my brother’s case and in
mine, she hated our wives so long as we lived with them, but loved them
afterwards. When I ?rst took my second wife to see her, she put a photograph
of my ?rst wife on the mantelpiece, and said to my second wife: ‘When I see
you I cannot help thinking of dear Alys, and wondering what would happen
should Bertie desert you, which God forbid.’ My brother said to her once:
‘Auntie, you are always a wife behind.’ This remark, instead of angering
her, sent her into ?ts of laughter, and she repeated it to everybody. Those who
thought her sentimental and doddering were liable to be surprised by a
sudden outburst of shrewdness and wit. She was a victim of my grand-
mother’s virtue. If she had not been taught that sex is wicked, she might have
been happy, successful, and able.
My brother was seven years older than I was, and therefore not much of
a companion to me. Except in holiday time he was away at school. I admired
him in the way natural to a younger brother, and was always delighted when
he returned at the beginning of the holidays, but after a few days I began to
wish the holidays were over. He teased me, and bullied me mildly. I remem-
ber once when I was six years old he called in a loud voice: ‘Baby!’ With great
dignity I refused to take any notice, considering that this was not my name.
He afterwards informed me that he had had a bunch of grapes which he
would have given me if I had come. As I was never in any circumstances
allowed to eat any fruit at all, this deprivation was rather serious. There was
also a certain small bell which I believed to be mine, but which he at each
return asserted to be his and took from me, although he was himself too old
to derive any pleasure from it. He still had it when he was grown-up, and
childhood 15I never saw it without angry feelings. My father and mother, as appears from
their letters to each other, had considerable trouble with him, but at any rate
my mother understood him, as he was in character and appearance a Stanley.
The Russells never understood him at all, and regarded him from the ?rst as a
limb of Satan.
2
Not unnaturally, ?nding himself so viewed, he set out to live
up to his reputation. Attempts were made to keep him away from me, which
I resented as soon as I became aware of them. His personality was, however,
very overpowering, and after I had been with him some time I began to feel
as if I could not breathe. I retained throughout his life an attitude towards
him consisting of a?ection mixed with fear. He passionately longed to be
loved, but was such a bully that he never could keep the love of anyone.
When he lost anyone’s love, his heart was wounded and he became cruel and
unscrupulous, but all his worst actions sprang from sentimental causes.
During my early years at Pembroke Lodge the servants played a larger part
in my life than the family did. There was an old housekeeper named Mrs Cox
who had been my grandmother’s nurserymaid when my grandmother was a
child. She was straight and vigorous and strict and devoted to the family and
always nice to me. There was a butler named MacAlpine who was very
Scotch. He used to take me on his knee and read me accounts of railway
accidents in the newspaper. As soon as I saw him I always climbed up on him
and said: ‘Tell me about an accident-happen.’ Then there was a French cook
named Michaud, who was rather terrifying, but in spite of her awe-inspiring
qualities I could not resist going to the kitchen to see the roast meat turning
on the old-fashioned spit, and to steal lumps of salt, which I liked better than
sugar, out of the salt box. She would pursue me with a carving knife, but
I always escaped easily. Out-of-doors there was a gardener named MacRobie
of whom I remember little as he left when I was ?ve years old, and the lodge-
keeper and his wife, Mr and Mrs Singleton, of whom I was very fond, as they
gave me baked apples and beer, both of which were strictly forbidden.
MacRobie was succeeded by a gardener named Vidler, who informed me that
the English are the lost Ten Tribes, though I do not think I quite believed him.
When I ?rst came to Pembroke Lodge, I had a German nursery governess
named Miss Hetschel, and I already spoke German as ?uently as English. She
left a few days after my arrival at Pembroke Lodge, and was succeeded by a
German nurse named Wilhelmina, or Mina for short. I remember vividly the
?rst evening when she bathed me, when I considered it prudent to make
myself sti?, as I did not know what she might be up to. She ?nally had to
call in outside assistance, as I frustrated all her e?orts. Very soon, however,
I became devoted to her. She taught me to write German letters. I remember,
after learning all the German capitals and all the German small letters, saying
to her: ‘Now it only remains to learn the numbers’, and being relieved and
surprised to ?nd that they were the same in German. She used to slap me
the autobiography of bertrand russell 16occasionally, and I can remember crying when she did so, but it never
occurred to me to regard her as less of a friend on that account. She was with
me until I was six years old. During her time I also had a nursery maid called
Ada who used to light the ?re in the morning while I lay in bed. She would
wait till the sticks were blazing and then put on coal. I always wished she
would not put on coal, as I loved the crackle and brightness of the burning
wood. The nurse slept in the same room with me, but never, so far as my
recollection serves me, either dressed or undressed. Freudians may make
what they like of this.
In the matter of food, all through my youth I was treated in a very Spartan
manner, much more so, in fact, than is now considered compatible with
good health. There was an old French lady living in Richmond, named
Madame D’Etchegoyen, a niece of Talleyrand, who used to give me large
boxes of the most delicious chocolates. Of these I was allowed only one on
Sundays, but Sundays and week-days alike I had to hand them round to the
grown-ups. I was very fond of crumbling my bread into my gravy, which I
was allowed to do in the nursery, but not in the dining-room. I used often to
have a sleep before my dinner, and if I slept late I had dinner in the nursery,
but if I woke up in time I had it in the dining-room. I used to pretend to sleep
late in order to have dinner in the nursery. At last they suspected that I was
pretending, and one day, as I was lying in my bed, they poked me about. I
made myself quite sti?, imagining that was how people would be if they
were asleep, but to my dismay I heard them saying: ‘He is not asleep, because
he is making himself sti?.’ No one ever discovered why I had pretended to be
asleep. I remember an occasion at lunch when all the plates were changed and
everybody except me was given an orange. I was not allowed an orange as
there was an unalterable conviction that fruit is bad for children. I knew I
must not ask for one as that would be impertinent, but as I had been given a
plate I did venture to say, ‘a plate and nothing on it’. Everybody laughed, but
I did not get an orange. I had no fruit, practically no sugar, and an excess of
carbohydrates. Nevertheless, I never had a day’s illness except a mild attack of
measles at the age of eleven. Since I became interested in children, after the
birth of my own children, I have never known one nearly as healthy as I was,
and yet I am sure that any modern expert on children’s diet would think that
I ought to have had various de?ciency diseases. Perhaps I was saved by the
practice of stealing crabapples, which, if it had been known, would have
caused the utmost horror and alarm. A similar instinct for self-preservation
was the cause of my ?rst lie. My governess left me alone for half an hour with
strict instructions to eat no blackberries during her absence. When she
returned I was suspiciously near the brambles. ‘You have been eating black-
berries’, she said. ‘I have not’, I replied. ‘Put out your tongue!’ she said.
Shame overwhelmed me, and I felt utterly wicked.
childhood 17I was, in fact, unusually prone to a sense of sin. When asked what was my
favourite hymn, I answered ‘Weary of earth and laden with my sin’. On one
occasion when my grandmother read the parable of the Prodigal Son at
family prayers, I said to her afterwards: ‘I know why you read that – because
I broke my jug.’ She used to relate the anecdote in after years with amuse-
ment, not realising that she was responsible for a morbidness which had
produced tragic results in her own children.
Many of my most vivid early memories are of humiliations. In the summer
of 1877 my grandparents rented from the Archbishop of Canterbury a house
near Broadstairs, called Stone House. The journey by train seemed to me
enormously long, and after a time I began to think that we must have reached
Scotland, so I said: ‘What country are we in now?’ They all laughed at me and
said: ‘Don’t you know you cannot get out of England without crossing the
sea?’ I did not venture to explain, and was left overwhelmed with shame.
While we were there I went down to the sea one afternoon with my grand-
mother and my Aunt Agatha. I had on a new pair of boots, and the last thing
my nurse said to me as I went out was: ‘Take care not to get your boots wet!’
But the in-coming tide caught me on a rock, and my grandmother and Aunt
Agatha told me to wade through the water to the shore. I would not do so,
and my aunt had to wade through and carry me. They supposed that this
was through fear, and I never told them of my nurse’s prohibition, but
accepted meekly the lecture on cowardice which resulted.
In the main, however, the time that I spent at Stone House was very
delightful. I remember the North Foreland, which I believed to be one of the
four corners of England, since I imagined at that time that England was a
rectangle. I remember the ruins at Richborough which greatly interested me,
and the camera obscura at Ramsgate, which interested me still more. I remember
waving corn-?elds which, to my regret, had disappeared when I returned to
the neighbourhood thirty years later. I remember, of course, all the usual
delights of the seaside – limpets, and sea-anemones, and rocks, and sands,
and ?shermen’s boats, and lighthouses. I was impressed by the fact that
limpets stick to the rock when one tries to pull them o?, and I said to my
Aunt Agatha, ‘Aunty, do limpets think?’ To which she answered, ‘I don’t
know’. ‘Then you must learn’, I rejoined. I do not clearly remember the
incident which ?rst brought me into contact with my friend Whitehead.
I had been told that the earth was round, and had refused to believe it. My
people thereupon called in the vicar of the parish to persuade me, and it
happened that he was Whitehead’s father. Under clerical guidance, I adopted
the orthodox view and began to dig a hole to the Antipodes. This incident,
however, I know only from hearsay.
While at Broadstairs I was taken to see Sir Moses Monte?ore, an old and
much revered Jew who lived in the neighbourhood. (According to the
the autobiography of bertrand russell 18Encyclopaedia, he had retired in 1824.) This was the ?rst time I became
aware of the existence of Jews outside the Bible. My people explained to me
carefully, before taking me to see the old man, how much he deserved to be
admired, and how abominable had been the former disabilities of Jews,
which he and my grandfather had done much to remove. On this occasion
the impression made by my grandmother’s teaching was clear, but on other
occasions I was puzzled. She was a ?erce Little Englander, and disapproved
strongly of Colonial wars. She told me that the Zulu War was very wicked,
and that it was largely the fault of Sir Bartle Frere, the Governor of the Cape.
Nevertheless, when Sir Bartle Frere came to live at Wimbledon, she took me
to see him, and I observed that she did not treat him as a monster. I found this
very di?cult to understand.
My grandmother used to read aloud to me, chie?y the stories of Maria
Edgeworth. There was one story in the book, called The False Key, which she
said was not a very nice story, and she would therefore not read it to me.
I read the whole story, a sentence at a time, in the course of bringing the
book from the shelf to my grandmother. Her attempts to prevent me from
knowing things were seldom successful. At a somewhat later date, during Sir
Charles Dilke’s very scandalous divorce case, she took the precaution of burn-
ing the newspapers every day, but I used to go to the Park gates to fetch them
for her, and read every word of the divorce case before the papers reached her.
The case interested me the more because I had once been to church with
him, and I kept wondering what his feelings had been when he heard the
Seventh Commandment. After I had learnt to read ?uently I used to read
to her, and I acquired in this way an extensive knowledge of standard English
literature. I read with her Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Cowper’s Task,
Thomson’s Castle of Indolence, Jane Austen, and hosts of other books.
There is a good description of the atmosphere of Pembroke Lodge in
A Victorian Childhood by Annabel Huth Jackson (née Grant Du?). Her father was
Sir Mountstuart Grant Du?, and the family lived in a large house at Twicken-
ham. She and I were friends from the age of four until she died during the
second world war. It was from her that I ?rst heard of Verlaine, Dostoevsky,
the German Romantics, and many other people of literary eminence. But it is
of an earlier period that her reminiscences treat. She says:
My only boy friend was Bertrand Russell, who with his grandmother old Lady
Russell, Lord John’s widow, lived at Pembroke Lodge, in Richmond Park.
Bertie and I were great allies and I had an immense secret admiration for his
beautiful and gifted elder brother Frank. Frank, I am sorry to say, sympathised
with my brother’s point of view about little girls and used to tie me up to trees
by my hair. But Bertie, a solemn little boy in a blue velvet suit with an equally
solemn governess, was always kind, and I greatly enjoyed going to tea at
childhood 19Pembroke Lodge. But even as a child I realised what an unsuitable place it
was for children to be brought up in. Lady Russell always spoke in hushed
tones and Lady Agatha always wore a white shawl and looked down-trodden.
Rollo Russell never spoke at all. He gave one a handshake that nearly broke
all the bones of one’s ?ngers, but was quite friendly. They all drifted in and
out of the rooms like ghosts and no one ever seemed to be hungry. It was a
curious bringing up for two young and extraordinarily gifted boys.
Throughout the greater part of my childhood, the most important hours of
my day were those that I spent alone in the garden, and the most vivid part of
my existence was solitary. I seldom mentioned my more serious thoughts to
others, and when I did I regretted it. I knew each corner of the garden, and
looked year by year for the white primroses in one place, the redstart’s nest in
another, the blossom of the acacia emerging from a tangle of ivy. I knew
where the earliest blue-bells were to be found, and which of the oaks came
into leaf soonest. I remember that in the year 1878 a certain oak tree was in
leaf as early as the fourteenth of April. My window looked out upon two
Lombardy poplars, each about a hundred feet high, and I used to watch the
shadow of the house creeping up them as the sun set. In the morning I woke
very early and sometimes saw Venus rise. On one occasion I mistook the
planet for a lantern in the wood. I saw the sunrise on most mornings, and on
bright April days I would sometimes slip out of the house for a long walk
before breakfast. I watched the sunset turn the earth red and the clouds
golden; I listened to the wind, and exulted in the lightning. Throughout my
childhood I had an increasing sense of loneliness, and of despair of ever
meeting anyone with whom I could talk. Nature and books and (later) math-
ematics saved me from complete despondency.
The early years of my childhood, however, were happy and it was only as
adolescence approached that loneliness became oppressive. I had govern-
esses, German and Swiss, whom I liked, and my intelligence was not yet
su?ciently developed to su?er from the de?ciency of my people in this
respect. I must, however, have felt some kind of unhappiness, as I remember
wishing that my parents had lived. Once, when I was six years old, I
expressed this feeling to my grandmother, and she proceeded to tell me that it
was very fortunate for me that they had died. At the time her remarks made a
disagreeable impression upon me and I attributed them to jealousy. I did not,
of course, know that from a Victorian point of view there was ample ground
for them. My grandmother’s face was very expressive, and in spite of all her
experience of the great world she never learned the art of concealing her
emotions. I noticed that any allusion to insanity caused her a spasm of
anguish, and I speculated much as to the reason. It was only many years later
that I discovered she had a son in an asylum. He was in a smart regiment, and
the autobiography of bertrand russell 20went mad after a few years of it. The story that I have been told, though
I cannot vouch for its complete accuracy, is that his brother o?cers teased
him because he was chaste. They kept a bear as a regimental pet, and one day,
for sport, set the bear at him. He ?ed, lost his memory, and being found
wandering about the country was put in a workhouse in?rmary, his identity
being unknown. In the middle of the night, he jumped up shouting ‘the
bear! – the bear!’ and strangled a tramp in the next bed. He never recovered
his memory, but lived till over eighty.
When I try to recall as much as I can of early childhood, I ?nd that the ?rst
thing I remember after my arrival at Pembroke Lodge is walking in melting
snow, in warm sunshine, on an occasion which must have been about a
month later, and noticing a large fallen beech tree which was being sawn into
logs. The next thing I remember is my fourth birthday, on which I was given
a trumpet which I blew all day long, and had tea with a birthday cake in a
summer-house. The next thing that I remember is my aunt’s lessons on
colours and reading, and then, very vividly, the kindergarten class which
began just before I was ?ve and continued for about a year and a half. That
gave me very intense delight. The shop from which the apparatus came was
stated on the lids to be in Berners Street, Oxford Street, and to this day, unless
I pull myself together, I think of Berners Street as a sort of Aladdin’s Palace. At
the kindergarten class I got to know other children, most of whom I have
lost sight of. But I met one of them, Jimmie Baillie, in 1929 at Vancouver as
I stepped out of the train. I realise now that the good lady who taught us had
had an orthodox Froebel training, and was at that time amazingly up-to-date.
I can still remember almost all the lessons in detail, but I think what thrilled
me most was the discovery that yellow and blue paints made green.
When I was just six my grandfather died, and shortly afterwards we went
to St Fillans in Perthshire for the summer. I remember the funny old inn with
knobbly wooden door-posts, the wooden bridge over the river, the rocky
bays on the lake, and the mountain opposite. My recollection is that the time
there was one of great happiness. My next recollection is less pleasant. It is
that of a room in London at No. 8, Chesham Place, where my governess
stormed at me while I endeavoured to learn the multiplication table but was
continually impeded by tears. My grandmother took a house in London for
some months when I was seven years old, and it was then that I began to see
more of my mother’s family. My mother’s father was dead, but my mother’s
mother, Lady Stanley of Alderley, lived in a large house, No 40, Dover Street,
3
with her daughter Maude. I was frequently taken to lunch with her, and
though the food was delicious, the pleasure was doubtful, as she had a caustic
tongue, and spared neither age nor sex. I was always consumed with shyness
while in her presence, and as none of the Stanleys were shy, this irritated her.
I used to make desperate endeavours to produce a good impression, but they
childhood 21would fail in ways that I could not have foreseen. I remember telling her that
I had grown 2? inches in the last seven months, and that at that rate I should
grow 42
/ 7 inches in a year. ‘Don’t you know’, she said, ‘that you should
never talk about any fractions except halves and quarters? – it is pedantic!’
‘I know it now’, I replied. ‘How like his father!’ she said, turning to my Aunt
Maude. Somehow or other, as in this incident, my best e?orts always went
astray. Once when I was about twelve years old, she had me before a roomful
of visitors, and asked me whether I had read a whole string of books on
popular science which she enumerated. I had read none of them. At the end
she sighed, and turning to the visitors, said: ‘I have no intelligent grand-
children.’ She was an eighteenth-century type, rationalistic and unimagina-
tive, keen on enlightenment, and contemptuous of Victorian goody-goody
priggery. She was one of the principal people concerned in the foundation of
Girton College, and her portrait hangs in Girton Hall, but her policies were
abandoned at her death. ‘So long as I live’, she used to say, ‘there shall be
no chapel at Girton.’ The present chapel began to be built the day she died.
As soon as I reached adolescence she began to try to counteract what she
considered namby-pamby in my upbringing. She would say: ‘Nobody can say
anything against me, but I always say that it is not so bad to break the Seventh
Commandment as the Sixth, because at any rate it requires the consent of the
other party.’ I pleased her greatly on one occasion by asking for Tristram Shandy
as a birthday present. She said: ‘I won’t write in it, because people will say
what an odd grandmother you have!’ Nevertheless she did write in it. It was
an autographed ?rst edition. This is the only occasion I can remember on
which I succeeded in pleasing her.
She had a considerable contempt for everything that she regarded as silly.
On her birthday she always had a dinner-party of thirteen, and made the
most superstitious member of the party go out ?rst. I remember once an
a?ected granddaughter of hers came to see her, bringing a lap dog which
annoyed my grandmother by barking. Her granddaughter protested that the
dog was an angel. ‘Angel? – angel?’ said my grandmother indignantly. ‘What
nonsense! Do you think he has a soul?’ ‘Yes, grandmama’, replied the young
woman pluckily. Throughout the rest of the afternoon, during which her
granddaughter remained with her, she informed each visitor in turn: ‘What
do you think that silly girl Grisel says? She says dogs have souls.’ It was her
practice to sit in her large drawing-room every afternoon while streams of
visitors, including the most eminent writers of the time, came to tea. When
any of them left the room, she would turn to the others with a sigh and say:
‘Fools are so fatiguin.’ She had been brought up as a Jacobite, her family
being Irish Dillons, who ?ed to France after the Battle of the Boyne and had a
private regiment of their own in the French army. The French Revolution
reconciled them to Ireland, but my grandmother was brought up in Florence,
the autobiography of bertrand russell 22where her father was Minister. In Florence she used to go once a week to visit
the widow of the Young Pretender. She used to say that the only thing she
regarded as stupid about her ancestors was their having been Jacobites.
I never knew my maternal grandfather, but I heard it said that he used to
brow-beat my grandmother, and felt that, if so, he must have been a very
remarkable man.
4
She had an enormous family of sons and daughters, most
of whom came to lunch with her every Sunday. Her eldest son was a
Mohammedan, and almost stone deaf. Her second son, Lyulph, was a free-
thinker, and spent his time ?ghting the Church on the London School Board.
Her third son, Algernon, was a Roman Catholic priest, a Papal Chamberlain
and Bishop of Emmaus. Lyulph was witty, encyclopaedic, and caustic.
Algernon was witty, fat, and greedy. Henry, the Mohammedan, was devoid of
all the family merits, and was, I think, the greatest bore I have ever known. In
spite of his deafness, he insisted upon hearing everything said to him. At the
Sunday luncheons there would be vehement arguments, for among the
daughters and sons-in-law there were representatives of the Church of
England, Unitarianism, and Positivism, to be added to the religions repre-
sented by the sons. When the argument reached a certain pitch of ferocity,
Henry would become aware that there was a noise, and would ask what it was
about. His nearest neighbour would shout a biased version of the argument
into his ear, whereupon all the others would shout ‘No, no, Henry, it isn’t
that!’ At this point the din became truly terri?c. A favourite trick of my Uncle
Lyulph at Sunday luncheons was to ask: ‘Who is there here who believes in
the literal truth of the story of Adam and Eve?’ His object in asking the
question was to compel the Mohammedan and the priest to agree with each
other, which they hated doing. I used to go to these luncheons in fear and
trembling, since I never knew but what the whole pack would turn upon me.
I had only one friend whom I could count on among them, and she was not
a Stanley by birth. She was my Uncle Lyulph’s wife, sister of Sir Hugh Bell. My
grandmother always considered herself very broad-minded because she had
not objected to Lyulph marrying into what she called ‘trade’, but as Sir Hugh
was a multi-millionaire I was not very much impressed.
Formidable as my grandmother was, she had her limits. Once when
Mr Gladstone was expected to tea, she told us all beforehand how she was
going to explain to him exactly in what respects his Home Rule policy was
mistaken. I was present throughout his visit, but not one word of criticism
did she utter. His hawk’s eye could quell even her. Her son-in-law, Lord
Carlisle, told me of an even more humiliating episode which occurred at
Naworth Castle on one occasion when she was staying there. Burne-Jones,
who was also staying there, had a tobacco pouch which was made to look like
a tortoise. There was also a real tortoise, which strayed one day by mistake
into the library. This suggested a prank to the younger generation. During
childhood 23dinner, Burne-Jones’s tobacco pouch was placed near the drawing-room ?re,
and when the ladies returned from dinner it was dramatically discovered that
this time the tortoise had got into the drawing-room. On its being picked up,
somebody exclaimed with astonishment that its back had grown soft. Lord
Carlisle fetched from the library the appropriate volume of the Encyclo-
paedia, and read out a pretended passage saying that great heat sometimes
had this e?ect. My grandmother expressed the greatest interest in this fact
of natural history, and frequently alluded to it on subsequent occasions.
Many years later, when she was quarrelling with Lady Carlisle about Home
Rule, her daughter maliciously told her the truth of this incident. My grand-
mother retorted: ‘I may be many things, but I am not a fool, and I refuse to
believe you.’
My brother, who had the Stanley temperament, loved the Stanleys and
hated the Russells. I loved the Russells and feared the Stanleys. As I have
grown older, however, my feelings have changed. I owe to the Russells
shyness, sensitiveness, and metaphysics; to the Stanleys vigour, good health,
and good spirits. On the whole, the latter seems a better inheritance than the
former.
Reverting to what I can remember of childhood, the next thing that is
vivid in my memory is the winter of 1880–81, which we spent at Bourne-
