skill. Knowledge, ability, earnestness, without tact, will not make a career in the diplomatic world. Lord Brougham, for an example, could never have been a successful diplomatist. It is told of him that, when he was visiting Stuttgart, he was taken round the royal stables by the King of Würtemberg’s Master of the Horse. The King was very proud of his magnificent stud of Arab horses, which he had procured at great expense from Syria. The day was bitterly cold, and Brougham, who was lightly clad, and ‘with trousers scarcely reaching to his ankles’, ran hurriedly through the stables, never (it is said) looked at a horse, and on coming out reduced the Master of the Horse to silence by merely remarking that ‘the money spent on the stables would be more advantageously spent in building a suitable university for the education of the nobility’.[1] Brougham, disputatious and cantankerous, would have borne himself ‘more like a pedant than an ambassador’, in Bacon’s description of a learned ecclesiastic who was a member of an unsuccessful mission from Charles VIII of France to Henry VII of England.[2]
History, perhaps, does not reveal to us any diplomatist who combines the manners and tact, in high degree, and, in less degree, the subtlety of a John Churchill with the political penetration, firmness and force of mind (the other qualities we omit) of a Bismarck; and the types, when thus personally presented, are almost mutually exclusive. But that is the combination that has proved desirable for the eminently successful diplo-
- ↑ Lord Augustus Loftus, Diplomatic Reminiscences, 1837-77 (l892, 1894), i. ch. vii.
- ↑ Gagvien (Gaguin), ‘who, when he turned his back, more like a pedant than an ambassador, dispersed a bitter libel, in Latin verse, against the King; unto which the King, though he had nothing of a pedant, yet was content to cause an answer to be made in like verse; and that as speaking in his own person, but in a style of scorn and sport.’—Bacon, History of the Reign of King Henry VII, ed. by Lumby, 88.
