36 



CAVENDISH 



chief-justice Sir John Cavendish, who in 1381 was 

 beheaded at Bury St Edmunds by Jack Straw's 

 followers ; and from Sir William Cavendish of 

 Cavendish, Suffolk (circa 1505-57), a brother of 

 Wolsey's biographer. His third wife, the cele- 

 brated ' Bess of Hard wick,' afterwards Countess of 

 Shrewsbury, brought Chatsworth (q.v. ) into the 

 family ; and William, their second son, was in 1618 

 made Earl of Devonshire. His great-grandson, 

 William (1640-1707), was, under the last two 

 Stuarts, a steadfast member of the Whig opposi- 

 tion, Russell's friend to the death, and an active 

 promoter of the Habeas Corpus Act. He succeeded 

 as fourth earl in 1684, ana, for his services at the 

 Revolution, was in 1694 raised to be Duke of 

 Devonshire and Marquis of Hartington. His 

 great-grandson, William (1720-64) succeeded as 

 fourth duke in 1755, and was prime-minister from 

 November 1756 to the following May. William, 

 fifth duke (1748-1811), was a bit of a poet; but 

 is less remembered than his beautiful duchess, 

 whom Gainsborough and Reynolds painted. Wil- 

 liam, sixth duke (1790-1858), was chiefly distin- 

 guished by his sumptuous embassy to St Petersburg 

 (1826). William, seventh duke (born 1808), had 

 for twenty-four years been Earl Burlington when 

 he succeeded his cousin in the ducal title. He died 

 21st December 1891, and was succeeded by his 

 eldest son, SPENCER COMPTON CAVENDISH, ninth 

 Duke of Devonshire, born 23d July 1833, and edu- 

 cated at Trinity College, and for thirty-three years 

 known as Marquis of Hartington. He entered 

 parliament in 1857, being first returned for North 

 Lancashire, then in 1869 for the Radnor boroughs, 

 in 1880 for North-east Lancashire, and in 1885 

 for the Rossendale division of that county. The 

 representative of a great Whig house, he was chosen 

 as early as 1859 to move the vote of want of confi- 

 dence that overthrew the Derby government, and 

 between 1863 and 1874 held office as a Lord of the 

 Admiralty, Under-secretary for War, War Secre- 

 tary, Postmaster-general, and, from 1871, Chief- 

 secretary for Ireland. Neither a born statesman 

 nor great orator, he had yet shown an ' infinite 

 capacity for taking pains,' when, in February 1875, 

 on Mr Gladstone's temporary abdication, he was 

 chosen leader of the Liberal opposition. He led it 

 admirably, and in the spring of 1880, on the down- 

 fall of the Beaconsfield administration, was invited 

 by the Queen to form a ministry. He rejected the 

 oner, and served under Mr Gladstone, first as Secre- 

 tary of State for India, and then as War Secretary 

 from 1883 to 1885. But he wholly dissented from 

 Mr Gladstone's scheme of Irish Home Rule ; and 

 from 1886, as head of the Liberal Unionists, he 

 firmly supported Lord Salisbury, both when in 

 power and in opposition. 



His younger brother, Lord FREDERICK CAVEN- 

 DISH, was born 30th November 1836, and was also 

 educated at Trinity, taking his B.A. in 1858. He 

 sat in parliament as Liberal member for the 

 northern division of the West Riding of Yorkshire 

 from 1865 till the spring of 1882, when he succeeded 

 Mr Forster as Chief-secretary for Ireland. Between 

 seven and eight o'clock, on the evening of 6th May, 

 having only that morning reached Dublin, he and 

 Mr Burke, an unpopular subordinate, were stabbed 

 to death in the Phoenix Park. Eight months later, 

 twenty ' Irish Invincibles ' were tried for the 

 murder, and, Carey and two others having turned 

 Queen's evidence, five of the rest were hanged, 

 three sentenced to penal servitude for life, and the 

 remaining /line to various terms of imprisonment. 

 Carey himself disappeared ; but in July news came 

 from the Cape that he had been shot dead by an 

 Irishman named O'Donnell on board an emigrant 

 ship. O'Donnell was brought back to London, 

 and hanged. 



Cavendish, GEORGE, the biographer of Wolsey, 

 was born about 1500, and became Wolsey's gentle- 

 man-usher at least as early as 1527. He remained 

 in close attendance upon his great master till the 

 end (November 28, 1530), after which he retired to 

 his house at Glemsford, in Suffolk, where he lived 

 quietly with his wife, a niece of Sir Thomas More, 

 till the close of his own life in 1561 or 1562. His 

 affection for the great cardinal was most devoted 

 he had attached himself to his household, in 

 Wolsey's own words, ' abandoning his own country, 

 wife, and children, his own house and family, his 

 rest and quietness, only to serve me. ' He never 

 laid aside his loyalty to his memory, but in the 

 quiet meditation of after-years brooded over his 

 fall, and from it learned for himself ' the blessed- 

 ness of being little. ' Thirty years after he wrote 

 his Life of Cardinal Wolsey, one of the most in- 

 teresting short biographies in the English language. 

 Its pensive wisdom and simple sincerity reflect a 

 pleasing picture of the gentle and refined nature of 

 its author, and enable us to see intimately with our 

 own eyes, but with singular clearness, the outlines 

 of one of the grandest figures in our history. The 

 book, written by a devout Catholic, full of regrets for 

 the past, could not well be printed in Elizabeth's 

 reign, but circulated pretty freely in manuscript 

 copies, as many as twelve of which are still extant. 

 It is almost certain that Shakespeare had read it 

 before writing or collaborating in Henry VIII., as 

 all the redeeming features in the picture of the great 

 cardinal, and the lesson of his fall as a solemn 

 homily upon human ambition, are directly due to 

 the tender and loyal touch of Cavendish. The 

 book was first printed imperfect, for party purposes, 

 in 1641. The best edition is that of S. W. Singer 

 (2 vols. 1815), the text of which was reprinted 

 with a good introduction in Professor Henry 

 Morley's ' Universal Library ' (1886). 



Cavendish, HENRY, natural philosopher, eldest 

 son of Lord Charles Cavendish, and a grandson of 

 the second Duke of Devonshire, was born at Nice, 

 October 10, 1731. From a school at Hackney he 

 passed in 1749 to Peterhouse, Cambridge, but 

 quitted it three years later without a degree ; 

 thereafter he devoted the whole of his long life 

 to scientific investigations, a large fortune be- 

 queathed him by an uncle enabling him to 

 follow uninterruptedly his favourite pursuits. A 

 silent, solitary man, he hated so to meet strangers, 

 that he had his library a magnificent one 

 in London, four miles from his residence on Clap- 

 ham Common, so that he might not encounter 

 persons coming to consult it ; whilst his female 

 domestics had orders to keep out of his sight, on 

 pain of dismissal. His dinner he ordered daily by a 

 note placed on the hall-table. He died, unmarried, 

 at Clapham, 10th March 1810, leaving more than a 

 million sterling to his relatives. As a philosopher, 

 Cavendish is entitled to the highest rank. To him 

 it may almost be said we owe the foundation of 

 pneumatic chemistry, for prior to his time it had 

 hardly an existence. In 1760 he discovered the 

 extreme levity of inflammable air, now known as 

 hydrogen gas a discovery which led to balloon 

 experiments and projects for aerial navigation ; 

 and later, he ascertained that water resulted from 

 the union of two jjases a discovery which has 

 erroneously been claimed for Watt ( q. v. ; see also 

 WATER ). The famous Cavendish Experiment was 

 an ingenious device for estimating the density of 

 the Earth ( q.v. ). The accuracy and completeness of 

 Cavendish's processes are remarkable. So high an 

 authority as Sir Humphry Davy declared that they 

 ' were all of a finished nature, and though many of 

 them were performed in the very infancy of chemi- 

 cal science, yet their accuracy and their beauty 

 have remained unimpaired. ' Cavendish also wrote 



