to history. He was the
son of the Speaker, and came to honour and affluence by a happy chance.
Stress of weather drove Philip, Archduke of Austria and, in right of his
wife, King of Castile, during a voyage from Flanders to Spain in the
year 1506, to take refuge at Weymouth. Sir Thomas Trenchard, Sheriff of
Dorset, entertained the unexpected guest, but he knew no Spanish, and
Philip of Castile knew no English. In this emergency Sir Thomas sent in
hot haste for his cousin, Squire Russell, of Barwick, who had travelled
abroad and was able to talk Spanish fluently. The Archduke, greatly
pleased with the sense and sensibility of his interpreter, insisted that
John Russell must accompany him to the English Court, and Henry VII., no
mean judge of men, was in turn impressed with his ability. The result
was that, after many important services to the Crown, John Russell
became first Earl of Bedford, and, under grants from Henry VIII. and
Edward VI., the rich monastic lands of Tavistock and Woburn passed into
his possession. The part which the Russells as a family have played in
history of course lies outside the province of this volume, which is
exclusively concerned with the character and career in recent times of
one of the most distinguished statesmen of the present century.

Lord John Russell was born on August 18, 1792, at Hertford Street,
Mayfair. His father, who was second son of Lord Tavistock, and grandson
of the fourth Duke of Bedford, succeeded his brother Francis, as sixth
Duke, in 1802, at the age of thirty-six, when his youngest and most
famous son was ten years old. Long before his accession to the title,
which was, indeed, quite unexpected, the sixth Duke had married the Hon.
Georgiana Byng, daughter of Viscount Torrington, and the statesman with
whose career these pages are concerned was the third son of this union.
He spent his early childhood at Stratton Park, Hampshire. When he was a
child of eight, Stratton Park was sold by the Duke of Bedford, and
Oakley House, which he never liked so well, became the residence of his
father. Although a shy, delicate child, he was sent in the spring of
1800, when only eight, to a private school at Sunbury--only a mile or
two away from Richmond, where nearly eighty years later he died. In the
autumn of 1801 he lost his mother, to whom he was deeply attached, and
almost before the bewildered child had time to realise his loss, his
uncle Francis also died, and his father, in c