Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Labouchere, Henry Du Pré
LABOUCHERE, HENRY DU PRÉ (1831–1912), journalist and politician, was born in London 9 November 1831. He came of a French protestant stock established in Holland since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. His grandfather, Pierre César Labouchere, was head of the great financial house of Hope, at Amsterdam, and left a very large fortune. The first of the family to settle in England, Pierre Labouchere purchased the estates of Hylands, Essex, and Over Stowey, Somerset, and married Dorothy Elizabeth, third daughter of Sir Francis Baring [q.v.]. The elder of their two sons was the whig politician, Henry Labouchere [q.v.], who held office in several governments, and was created Baron Taunton in 1859. His brother John, of Broome Hall, Dorking, was a partner in the firm of Hope, and later a partner in the bank of Williams, Deacon, Thornton, and Labouchere. He married Mary Louisa, second daughter of James Du Pré, of Wilton Park, Buckinghamshire. Henry Du Pré Labouchere was the eldest child of their family of three sons and six daughters.
All his life Labouchere was a rebel against constituted authority. He was educated at Eton, and afterwards went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where in two years he ran up debts amounting to £6,000. At the age of twenty-one he was sent to South America, where his family had important commercial interests. He found his way to Mexico and there wandered about for a year or two, fell in love with a circus lady, and joined the troupe. For six months he lived in a camp of Chippeway Indians.
Meanwhile, without his knowledge, his family had secured for Labouchere a place in the diplomatic service, and he learned, while in Mexico in 1854, that he had been appointed an attaché at Washington. He remained in the service for ten years and, after leaving Washington, was stationed in succession at Munich, Stockholm, Frankfort, St. Petersburg, Dresden, and Constantinople. According to his own accounts, he was insubordinate and indolent; and his passion for gambling shaped and coloured this period of his life wherever he went. But a man of his independence of mind would not have remained in the service for ten years unless he were really interested in it. The end came oddly. In 1864, at Baden-Baden, he was informed by the foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, of his appointment to a second secretaryship at Buenos Aires. He replied accepting the post, if he could fulfil the duties of it at Baden-Baden. This was not the first joke that he had tried on Lord John, and he was dismissed the service. It was his impish way of resigning. He had inherited a great fortune from his uncle, Lord Taunton, and his mind was turning to a political career.
In 1865 Labouchere was elected member of parliament for Windsor, in the liberal interest, but was unseated on petition. Two years later he was returned for Middlesex. He lost this seat in 1868, failed at Nottingham in 1874, and had to wait till 1880 before he was again in the House of Commons. Meanwhile, he won fame as a journalist. He wrote much for the Daily News, of which he had become part-proprietor; his letters from Paris during the siege of 1870 were republished as The Diary of a Besieged Resident (1871). For The World, founded (1874) and edited by his friend Edmund Yates [q.v.], he wrote on finance. Then, in 1876, he established a weekly journal, Truth, which for many years was by far the most successful of personal organs in the press. Labouchere was a first-class journalist. His reputation as a wit was well established; he had an easy style unsurpassed in clearness, and he wrote with candour about his own adventurous life and the follies and failings of his contemporaries. Above all, Truth won admiration and gratitude by its fearless exposure of fraudulent enterprises of all sorts. This brought upon him a long series of libel actions. Most of them he won, and they were such good advertisements of his paper that he could afford to be indifferent to his irrecoverable costs amounting to scores of thousands of pounds.
In 1880, with Charles Bradlaugh [q.v.] as his colleague, Labouchere began his twenty-five years' parliamentary representation of Northampton. For a dozen years an influential section of the nonconformist electors of Northampton had successfully opposed the candidature of Bradlaugh because he preached atheism. Labouchere, too, was a lifelong agnostic, but a silent one, and these same people gave him enthusiastic support: in his scoffing way Labouchere used to call himself the ‘Christian member for Northampton’. He soon became one of the most powerful radicals in the Commons. His only hatred in politics was reserved for the whigs, who still retained an influence in the liberal party disproportionate to their numbers and to their support in the country. He attacked their methods and their purposes alike in home and foreign policy, and although publicly he always treated Gladstone with respect, privately he mocked at his fervour and ‘mystifications’. He did not object, he once said, to Gladstone's always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve, but only to his pretence that God had put it there. Throughout the parliament of 1880–1885 Labouchere worked for an ‘all-radical’ government with Joseph Chamberlain [q.v.] at its head. Even before Gladstone ‘flew’ his first Home Rule ‘kite’, towards the end of 1885, Labouchere exploited his intimacy with the Irish nationalists in his campaign against the moderate liberals. A resourceful intriguer, he employed all his arts in the early months of 1886 to bring Chamberlain, Gladstone, and the Irish nationalists into agreement, using each in turn to further his plan of ‘dishing the whigs’. When Chamberlain decided to vote against the first Home Rule Bill, it was the greatest disappointment of Labouchere's life, for it ruined his main enterprise. Thereafter his political zeal, though unabated, was diverted. The reorganization of the liberal party and doctrine, for which he had worked, and which might have altered the course of history, had become impossible. The cause of Home Rule owed much to him, and he assisted in exposing the forgeries of Richard Pigott [q.v.], by which it was sought to represent Parnell as inciting to assassination. Pigott's confession, after his cross-examination by Sir Charles Russell, was written at Labouchere's house.
If political services were the chief qualifications, there were strong reasons why Labouchere should have been given a place in the liberal government of 1892–1895. His exclusion, it was understood, was due to the objection of Queen Victoria, who held that the proprietor and editor of Truth ought not to be given office under the Crown. Shortly afterwards he suffered another rebuff. He intimated a desire to be ambassador at Washington, but Lord Rosebery, who was then foreign secretary, would not recommend the appointment. Even if it had been a suitable opportunity, it was scarcely reasonable to expect Lord Rosebery to appoint his most unsparing critic as the mouthpiece of his policy in the United States.
Labouchere gained distinction and notoriety by being unlike any English politician of his time. His scepticism and realism were of the French rather than of the English cast, and he was the only English politician of the nineteenth century who made himself popular by cynical wit. For the forms of the British constitution he had little respect. He was hostile to the royal prerogative, to hereditary legislators, and to the formalisms and circumlocutions of diplomacy; he instinctively distrusted the appeal of idealism. An industrious student of politics, he was an especially dangerous critic in foreign affairs. His parliamentary reputation was founded on the skill with which he attacked the Egyptian policy of Gladstone's second administration. Yet—in this respect true to the tradition of the radical school to which he belonged—Labouchere was never a ‘little Englander’; and in his advocacy of an independent Egypt he recognized the need for British control of the Suez Canal. The settlement for which he pleaded in the 'eighties was, indeed, much like that embodied in the treaty of forty years later. He was among the most extreme opponents of the Chamberlain-Milner policy in South Africa. He took a prominent part in the commission of inquiry into the Jameson Raid, and while he admitted that there was no proof of Colonial Office complicity, he complained that access to some important documents was denied. In the South African War he was one of the leaders of the peace party, and this was perhaps the only period of his career in which he was personally unpopular. His constituents mobbed him at Northampton, and the worries of the time injured his health. But politics had now become almost his only interest, and he went on until December 1905, when the Balfour ministry fell and Sir Henry CampbellBannerman formed his liberal government. He then withdrew from parliament and lived his remaining years near Florence. Although he said that he did not wish for office, he was disappointed that the liberal leader, whom he had staunchly supported, did not ask him to join the new government. His only political reward on retirement was a privy councillorship.
In spite of his brilliant gifts and of his industry for a quarter of a century, Labouchere has left no permanent mark on English politics; but his gay personality, his wit, and his unconventional ways are established in many legends. Of no other politician in his generation are so many stories told. In appearance as in mind he was more French than English. His slight, well-formed frame, shapely head and bearded face were familiar to the British public for a third of a century. Nothing seemed to ruffle his composure. The voice was gentle and the manner bland, and he delivered his witticisms in a drawl that caught the fancy of his audiences whether on the platform or in the House of Commons. In his personal relations he was kindly and sometimes generous.
Labouchere married in 1868 Henrietta Hodson [q.v.], an actress at the Queen's Theatre, Long Acre, opened in 1867 by a syndicate of which he was a member. They had one daughter, who married, first, the Marquis Carlodi Rudini, and secondly, Prince Gyalma Odescalchi. Labouchere died at the Villa Cristina, near Florence, 15 January 1912.
A portrait of Labouchere, painted by A. Baccani, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1882.
[Algar Labouchere Thorold, Life of Henry Labouchere, 1913.]