Page:EB1911 - Volume 25.djvu/981

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
STONE, G.—STONE, M.
957

from 1840 onwards he contributed figure pictures, scenes from Shakespeare, scripture and sentimental subjects, many of which were engraved.


STONE, GEORGE (1708-1764), archbishop of Armagh, was the son of Andrew Stone, a London banker, and was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. Having taken holy orders his advancement in the Church was very rapid, mainly through the influence of his brother Andrew. Andrew Stone (1703-1773), who was five years older than George, became private secretary to the duke of Newcastle about 1729, and was for many years on the most intimate and confidential terms both with the duke and with his brother Henry Pelham. In 1734 he was appointed under-secretary of state, and he soon gained a position of great personal influence with George II. by whom he was made tutor to Prince George, afterwards George III. On the accession of the latter to the throne, Andrew Stone was appointed treasurer to Queen Charlotte, and attaching himself to Lord Bute he became an influential member of the party known as "the king's friends," whose meetings were frequently held at his house. He was, therefore, well able to promote the preferment of his brother George, who went to Ireland as chaplain to the duke of Dorset when that nobleman became lord-lieutenant in 1731. In 1733 George Stone was made dean of Ferns, and in the following year he exchanged this deanery for that of Derry; in 1740 he became bishop of Ferns, in 1743 bishop of Kildare, in 1745 bishop of Derry, and in 1747 archbishop of Armagh. During the two years that he occupied the see of Kildare he was also dean of Christchurch, Dublin.

From the moment that he became primate of Ireland, Stone proved himself more a politician than an ecclesiastic. " He was said to have been selfish, worldly-minded, ambitious and ostentatious; and he was accused, though very probably falsely, of gross private vice." 1 His aim was to secure political power, a desire which brought him into conflict with Boyle, the Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, who had organized a formidable opposition to the government. The duke of Dorset's reappointment to the lord-lieutenancy in 1751, with his son Lord George Sackville as secretary of state for Ireland, strengthened the primate's position and enabled him to triumph over the popular party on the constitutional question as to the right of the Irish House of Commons to dispose of surplus Irish revenue, which the government maintained was the property of the Crown. But when Dorset was replaced by the duke of Devonshire in 1755, Boyle was raised to the peerage as earl of Shannon and received a pension, and other members of the opposition also obtained pensions or places; and the archbishop, finding himself excluded from power, went into opposition to the government in alliance with John Ponsonby. These two, afterwards joined by the primate's old rival Lord Shannon, and usually supported by the earl of Kildare, regained control of affairs in 1758, during the viceroyalty of the duke of Bedford. In the same year Stone wrote a remarkable letter, preserved in the Bedford Correspondence (ii. 357), in which he speaks very despondingly of the material condition of Ireiand and the distress of the people. The archbishop was one of the " undertakers " who controlled the Irish House of Commons, and although he did not regain the almost dictatorial power he had exercised at an earlier period, which had suggested a comparison between him and Cardinal Wolsey, he continued to enjoy a prominent share in the administration of Ireland until his death, which occurred in London on the 19th of December 1764.

Although this "much-abused prelate," as Lecky calls him, was a firm supporter of the English government in Ireland, he was far from being a man of tyrannical or intolerant disposition. It was due to his influence that in the anti-tithe disturbances in Ulster in 1763 the government acted with conspicuous moderation, and that the movement was suppressed with very little bloodshed; he constantly favoured a policy of conciliation towards the Roman Catholics, whose loyalty he defended at 1 W. E. H. Lecky, Hist. of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (1892), i. 462. different periods of his career both in his speeches in the Irish House of Lords and in his correspondence with ministers in London. Archbishop Stone, who never married, was a man of remarkably handsome appearance; and his manners were " eminently seductive and insinuating." Richard Cumberland, who was struck by the "Polish magnificence" of the primate, speaks in the highest terms of his courage, tact, and qualities as a popular leader. Horace Walpole, who gives an unfavourable picture of his private character, acknowledges that Stone possessed "abilities seldom to be matched"; and he had the distinction of being mentioned by David Hume as one of the only two men of mark who had perceived merit in that author's History of England on its first appearance. He was himself the author of several volumes of sermons which were published during his lifetime.

See Richard Mant, History of the Church of Ireland, vol. it. (London, 1840); J. A. Froude,77(e English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (3 vols., London, 1872-1874) ; W. E. H. Lecky, History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (5 vols., London, 1892); J. R. O'Flanagan, Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal of Ireland (2 vols., London, 1870).; Richard Cumberland, Memoirs (London, 1806) ; F. Hardy, Memoirs of the earl of Charlemont (2 vols., 2nd. ed., London, 1812) ; Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of George II. (3 vols., London, 1846); Bedford Correspondence (3 vols., London, 1842-1846); Correspondence of Chatham (4 vols., London, 1838-1840).


STONE, LUCY [Blackwell] (1818-1893), American reformer, anti-slavery and woman's-rights leader, was born in West Brookfield, Massachusetts, on the 13th of August 1818. Her father refused her the college education that she so eagerly desired, but she earned enough to carry her through Oberiin College, where she graduated in 1847. She immediately went on the lecture platform as an advocate of abolition and of woman's rights, and her remarkable voice and commanding eloquence often held in check the most disorderly audiences. In 1855 she married Dr Henry B. Blackwell (1824-1909), a prominent abolitionist and advocate of woman's rights, who agreed that she should keep her maiden name; after 1870 he assisted his wife in the management of the Woman's Journal of Boston, of which she became editor in 1872. She allowed her New Jersey property to be sold for taxes, and then published a pamphlet on “taxation without representation.” She campaigned for woman's suffrage amendments in Kansas (1867), Vermont (1870), Michigan (1874), Colorado (1877) and Nebraska (1892). She died in Dorchester, Mass., on the 18th of October 1893. Her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell (b. 1857), carried on, with her father, the Woman's Journal after 1893, and in 1885-1905 edited the Woman's Column.

Her husband's sisters, Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910) and Emily Blackwell (1826-1910), were prominent physicians. The former graduated at the Geneva Medical College, Geneva, New York, in 1849, receiving the first physician's degree granted to a woman in the United States, and studied in Philadelphia, in Paris and in London, where she began to practise in 1869. She died at Hastings on the 1st of June 1910. Emily Blackwell graduated at the Medical Department of Western Reserve University in 1854; in 1853, with her sister, she founded the New York Infirmary for Women and Children; and she was for many years dean of the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary which she and her sister established in 1865.


STONE, MARCUS (1840-), English painter, son of Frank Stone, A.R.A., was trained by his father and began to exhibit at the Academy before he was eighteen; and a few years later he illustrated with much success books by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and other writers, friends of his family. He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1877, and academician in 1887. In his earlier pictures he dealt much with historical incidents, but in his later work he occupied himself chiefly with a particular type of dainty sentiment, treated with much charm, refinement and executive skill. One of his canvases is in the National Gallery of British Art. Most of his works have been engraved, and medals have been awarded to him at exhibitions in all parts of the world.

See the Life and Work of Marcus Stone, R.A., by A. L. Baldry (Art Journal office, 1896).