"It is said that 'power corrupts', but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.”

David Brin, American Science Fiction Aurthor (1950-) from The Postman 1997

Alice Holt, an obscure Royal Forest on the borders of Hampshire and Surrey may seem like the ultimate historical backwater. But in the 1850's it seethed with accusations and counter-accusations which eventually drew in none other than William Ewart Gladstone, one of the towering political figures of the Victorian Era.

 

I was recently contacted by a helpful bookseller offering a range of parliamentary documents for sale. Among the various enclosure acts and such like was a slim folder containing...

"A copy of the Report from the Referees appointed by the Treasury on the 31st day of March last, to inquire into the Charges of Faud &c.,made against the Deputy Surveyors of Holt Forest, by Mr. Kennedy and by Mr. Brown, and of any Papers consequent thereon" addressed to The Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty's Treasury. London, 15 April 1854.

Victoria and Albert in 1854

Let's first set the scene. 1854 was the very cusp of the Modern Era.

Victoria, after a shaky start had been on the throne for 17 years, 14 of them with her beloved Albert by her side as Prince Consort. Charles Dickens was sitting down to commence his novel Hard Times and a grand ceremony was held to inaugurate the new Suez Canal.

But it was a testing time, with a cholera epidemic killing 10,000 and a disastrous fire destroying much of Newcastle and Gateshead. In Ireland, barely recovering from the great famine of the 1840's, Catholics under Cardinal Newman, freed from the restrictions of the previous 250 years founded their first University in Dublin.

Abroad, Britain became diverted from its steady path of imperial expansion around the globe by the stirrings of Boer resistance in South Africa (where the ill-fated Orange Free State was granted independence in February) and above all by the Crimean War, a painful episode of Continental entanglement that interrupted the preceding 40 years when the long "Balance of Power" kept us out of European wars and did so again until the cataclysm of 1914.

Lord Aberdeen was Prime Minister of a short-lived Peel-ite coalition. But this soon fell, as the Russian war failed to go smoothly, most notably with the ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in October of this year, influential as much for the presence for the first time of newspaper reporters armed with cameras to record the scene, as for Tennyson's famous poem..

From L to R: Cholera, in the form of a skeleton dispensing infected water from a pump. The original building of the Catholic University of Ireland (Now University College Dublin) on St Stephen's Green. Afrikaner Commandos of the Orange Free State, who later took up arms against the British. "The Valley of Death" at Balaclava in the Crimea; an early piece of war photo-journalism showing the ground where the Light Brigade had charged littered with deadly Russian canonballs.

 

In America, Texas was newly linked to the rest of the United States by telegraph via New Orleans, while Mexican troops were hammering William Walker, the eccentric Scots-descended freebooter or "filibuster" and sometime President of Nicaragua who was attempting to establish his own pro-slavery fiefdom of Sonora on Mexican territory in Lower California. The man who led the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery, Abraham Lincoln was representing Illinois in Congress for the Whig Party, although he was soon to join the Republican Party, which was formed and held its first convention in this year.

Australia too installed its first telegraph, an 8km stretch connecting Melbourne to booming Williamstown where Cornishmen and Californians alike were arriving in droves to stake their claims in the great Victoria goldrush.

From L to R:One of Filibuster William Walker's many engagements in Latin America. The young Abraham Lincoln addressing the crowd at Peoria, Illinois in 1854 at which he conceded, faced with baseless arguments from his Democrat opponent that "If a man will stand up and assert, and repeat, and re-assert, that two and two do not make four, I know nothing in the power of argument that can stop him." . The first Convention of the Republican Party, newly founded in 1854. Gold Rush in Australia as hopeful miners from all over the world head out from Melbourne, Victoria.

 

Back in sleepy Hampshire, the Royal Hunting Forest of Alice Holt had been "Inclosed" by act of Parliament in 1812 in response to the panic egendered by the french blockade of England in the Napoleaonic Wars and the Government's consequent determination to secure adequate supplies of prime oak timber for the Naval shipyards. 1600 acres had been fenced, cleared of deer, the ancient trees felled and new, straight oak saplings planted ver the next couple of decades.

By 1854 these trees would have been aged between 25 and 40 years olld, tall and straight but only about 6-12 inches in diameter at head height: nowhere near maturity. It's a fact often quoted by the current Director of the Forestry Commission at Alice Holt, David Williamson, that "Unfortunately Government policy changes alot quicker than trees can grow!" Already, oak was becoming obsolete in ship-building, with the launch is 1843 of the first iron-built ocean going ship, Isambard Kingdom Brunel's S.S. Great Britain, which saw active service transporting troops to the Black Sea for the war in the Crimea.

But the leather tanning industry, booming as Britain's burgeoning population required boots for their feet and harnesses for their horses consumed vast quantities of oak bark, which is rich in preservative tannins and was therefore an essential ingredient in the leathermaking process (along with urine and dog faeces!). A 30 year old oak has relatively little good heartwood (the outer, sapwood splits freely and rots rather easily) so the bark, which was best gathered from young, growing trees was generally worth a lot more than the meagre timber that could be won from these trees. And as the oaks grew, they needed to be thinned anyway, but this had to be done carefully to ensure the remaining trees grew straight and did not branch excessively but also to avoid them becoming spindly and "bark-bound" which restricts the steady expansion of the trunk.

The Forest at Alice Holt would have looked very much like much of the Straits Inclosure does today, with row upon row of healthy, straight young oak trees gradually maturing as they are thinned.

Left: Preparing hides at one of the thousands of tanneries that supplied Britain's demand for leather goods. Right: Peeling young oaks for bark to be used in the tanning process

Here's where our story starts....

The Report quotes sufficiently from preceeding correspondence for us to be clear that Mr Brown, a recently-appointed high up reporting to the Rt Hon Mr T F Kennedy, the Commissioner of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues of The Crown (A kind of forerunner of the Forestry Commission) had made some very specific allegations angainst Mr Higinbothom, the Deputy-Surveyor of Alice Holt and Woolmer Forests. Mr Kennedy was a lowland Scot, who'd made something of a name for himself as a moderniser in public service in Ireland. He had only been appointed in 1850 and was not a forester by background.

Brown's principal allegation arose from an initial inspection in November 1852: made in a report to Mr Kennedy dated March 12th 1853. It was that Higinbothom had deliberately grossly underestimated the number of young oak trees per acre in much of the Forest. He was doing this in order that he could get in and thin a lot of trees to sell the bark without the loss being recorded and that he had indeed already illicitly thinned some areas. Some had indeed been thinned, including after Brown's report in the summer of 1853. Higinbothom was not seemingly entirely up front about at this first, but then made no secret of it. And the dispute over the original number of trees present clearly meant that the number of trees removed could have been under-declared by Higinbothom and his men. Mr.Brown, an Edinburgh man was a rising star in the Commission of Woods etc under Mr Kennedy's intentionally radical regime, designed to shake up what he saw as a backward department occupied by too many "placemen" and unduly influenced by vested interests to the detriment of the public revenues. By the time of the report Brown had been newly appointed Deputy-Surveyor of the Forest of Dean, one of the largest Forests in England and important for its coal mines and quarries as well as its great expanses of timber.. He was the personal appointee of the Commissioner himself, against the better judgement and usual protocol of the officials at the Treasury to whom Kennedy reported; and Mr Kennedy accepted his accusations against Higinbothom at face value.

Higginbothom however did not take this lying down and vigorously defended himself against Brown and Kennedy on December 29th 1853, but this merely sparked further accusations in a response from Brown to Higinbothom on February 10th 1854, which Higinbothom again rebutted in a report of February 28th, including affidavits as to the truth of his statements and demands for a retraction of some of the more forceful statements. These complaints reached Whitehall via Kennedy who seemed zealous in alerting their Lordships at the Treasury of what he considered evidence of the fraud and mismanagement he was encountering among long-standing Forest officials. The Lords Commissioners of the Treasury thereupon set up an enquiry. They appointed three independent referees to determine the truth, or otherwise of Brown's report.

Accordingly, Messrs J Matthews, William Murton and William Menzies "Having perused the several Reports and corespondence, and ascertained the various points at issue...proceeded to the forests on the 5th instant (April) for the puropse of making a careful survey". Tempers must have been running high as the Referees note that " In obedience to your Lordships' suggestion, we have abstained from any intercourse either with Mr Higinbothom or with Mr Brown, or with the foreman of the forests; but we found it necessary to avail ourelves of the services of the woodmen ...for the purposes of cutting down a number of trees which we could scarcely entrust a stranger to do."

The high level to which this affair had been escalated proved it was not considered a petty matter, and the referees were keen to emphasise the diligence they had shown: "Impressed with a sense of the important objects of our mission, we trust that your Lordships will believe that we brought to this investigation as much of labour, patience and care as the subect demanded of us"

They laboriously counted and measured every tree in the disputed areas, cut a small selection to determine their age and performed a "minute examination" of the stumps where trees had been recently felled.

The easiest way to understand the nub of the arguments (which run to several pages in the orgiinal report, themselves the summary of reports and letters back and forth between the two parties) is to present the main disputed facts, together with the Referees own measurements as a table.

 

Brown 12/3/53

Brown 10/2/54

Higinbothom 29/12/53

Higinbothom 28/2/54

Referees' Verdict

Referees' Comments

 

 

Map showing the main "Inclosures" of Alice Holt Forest, as referred to in the table.

So, as the table shows, the referees came down decisively on the side of Mr Higinbothom. And given that they had counted and measured the relevant areas, tree-by-tree and noted every stump to account for where trees had been thinned since the original report by Brown, that seems definitive.

There were however further accusations made,which needed to be answered.

Firstly Brown had been scathing about some aspects of Higinbothom's general management, especially regarding the drainage which he considered "badly laid on, shallow, without sufficent fall, and consequently mere receptacles for retaining stagnant water" . The referees noted that, while darinage practice had moved on a little, the whole Forest's system was as well laid out as could be expected given the methods of the previous 40 years. They describe Brown's statement as giving a "most exaggerated and erroneous impression of the real facts". They heap further scorn on Brown by pointing out that his belief that the badly designed and maintained drainage had seriously impacted the growth of some of the oak was based mainly on his own incompetence in wrongly estimating the ages of many of the trees, thereby miscalculating their growth rates.

In general they were very positive about the state of Alice Holt overall.They payed special tribute to the excellence of the 1810's and 1820's plantings, which they said were done in such a way as to minimise the need for maintenance. They suggested the removal of oak from some of the very dry, stony soil on the tops of the Abbot's Wood and Glenbervie Inclosures where it was not doing well ; the areas to be planted with larch instead. (This actually was not got around to until the early 1880's when larch and Scots pine were planted in areas where the oak was doing poorly).
They also recommended deepening of the drains where possible and felt the system of allowing young cattle to browse in the plantations to keep them clear of undergrowth produced more loss in damage and trespassing than it gained in rent from the farmers.

So Mr Higinbothom came up more-or-less smelling of roses there.

Perhaps more directly serious allegations against Higinbothom had been made, on the basis of Brown's information by his boss; Mr Kennedy, the Commissioner, which the referees were also required to look into.

Unfortunately it seems Mr Kennedy was putting two and two together and largely by jumping to conclusions from Brown's figures. For example he accused Higinbothom of having secretly felled the "missing" trees (missing largely due to Brown's overestimation of the number there in the first place) and concluded for example that he'd removed 77 tons of bark from the Lodge and 28 tons from the Goose Green Inclosure,to the great detriment of the value of the Forest's stock. Whether he was merely making assumptions based on an erroneous calculation of "missing" trees, or whether he had any other evidence of bark being taken away is unclear, but he further compounded the accusations by his general tone. For example he accused Higinbothom in writing on January 26th 1854 of making "deceptive, fraudulent and untrue" statements. Kennedy repeated this allegation of deliberate deceit in a letter of February 18th.

Drying oak bark , peeled from young oaks such as those in Alice Holt at the time

The referees assured their Lordships at the Treasury that no large-scale, concealed thinning of the oaks had happened over the period between Brown's first and final reports. They did raise an eyebrow at the fact Higinbothom had not been entirely transparent with Kennedy about the relatively minor fellings of Summer 1853 . While they accepted that Higinbothom's silence on that point might have called for Kennedy to look into the matter further, such silence was not, they concluded "culpable". Damningly for Kennedy they pointed out that, even had any such supression been deliberate they were "decidely of the opinion that a practical man could not have been misled by the supression in these cases"...very much implying that Brown and Kennedy were not practical men and did not know their business.

The Lords Commissioners of the Treasury were convinced, accepting the report in full: on 25th April a Treasury Minute sets out explicitly their acceptance of the conclusion that Mr Higinbothom had been exonerated by the referees.

At this point things came unstuck for Brown. Their Lordships noted that this was not a dipute over "matters of mere opinion" but, in Kennedy's own words "matters ...in which the credit of the respective parties ins involved".

Their Lordships pointed out that, as Mr Brown's appointment to the Deputy-Surveyorship of the Forest of Dean had been made in January 1854, during the course of this dipute, it's confirmation had been made explicitly conditional on the outcome of this enquiry, and they issued instructions for Mr Kennedy to inform Brown forthwith that they were therefore unable to confirm his appointment and that his employment would cease immediately, which instruction Kennedy meekly confirmed he'd carried out on 28th April.

Furthermore in the same minute of the 25th they made some pretty worrying noises in the direction of Kennedy himself; clearly intimating that, having dealt with Brown, they would have more to say in due course to Kennedy, especially on matters where Kennedy's own opinions regarding Higinbothom's character and conduct had been added to Brown's erroneous facts.

As if firing Brown were not a bitter enough pill for Kennedy to swallow, he was not given any leeway in the matter of replacing him, but was instructed to temporarily re-appoint Edward Machen, Brown's predecessor to the Dean Forest job. Machen was no fan of Kennedy and had resigned the post in another dispute. So he took the opportunity to rub it in, writing that he was "..very reluctant to resume duties that for reasons I have before stated have lately become so irksome to me, and should have been most thankful to have been permitted to remain quiet" Nevertheless he took the moral high ground, accepting the job, not to please Kennedy but as it was his "duty to comply with the wish expressed by the Treasury, that the inconvenience arising from the want of a Deputy-Surveyor at this particular season may, in some degree, be obviated". Self-satisfied revenge for past wrongs almost drips from the page of Machen's note of acceptance!

Dealing with as senior a public servant as Kennedy was not something to be left to officials. The matter is referred to in a Treasury minute of 10th May in which "The Earl of Aberdeen (The Prime Minister, no less!) and the Chancellor of the Exchequer (William Gladstone, who was later to serve four terms as Liberal Prime Minister) call the attention of the Board again to the Report of the referees appointed to inquire into the matters in dispute....and into the charges brought against Mr Higinbothom by Mr. Kennedy". Some effort was being made to deal with the matter with due delicacy. Gladstone had, honourably taken the matter upon himself: "it appeared to the Chancellor of the Exchequer to be the most fitting and forbearing course that the views which Her Majesty's Government could not fail to entertain on the subject, and the necessary consequences of Mr. Kennedy's conduct, should be communicated to that officer in the first instance by a private communication from himself".

Gladstone showed the board the letter he'd sent Kennedy on 29th April. In this Gladstone referred to a history of previous wrangles within Kennedy's department, which Edward Machen's barbed letter above makes reference to in having found his position at the Forest of Dean to have become "irksome" ,causing his resignation. Machan was not the only one. Gladstone says "You are well aware of the state in which, when the present Board of Treasury was appointed (1852), they found relations between you and many of the principal officers of your department.....You will remember what took place on the resignation of Mr Machen; and in particular a long conversation which you held here with Mr.Wilson ( MP for Westbury and Financial Secretary to the Treasury) and myself, and in which you so strongly urged the substantive character of your appointment, its high responsibility, your claim to confidence, and your willingness to abide by results; all these arguments were applied by you to urge the appointment of Mr Brown." Gladstone refers to the "very painful impression" which Kennedy's accusations against Higinbothom made on him and with duly informs him, politely but very firmly that "after what has taken place it is plainly impossible that the affairs of the department can remain in your hands".

The letter from Gladstone was curtly acknowledged in a note from Kennedy from 25 Lowndes Square on 1st May. A substantial minute then takes great pains to record carefully their Lordships approval of the Chancellor's action and laying out their reasons, for the avoidance of doubt that "..my Lords consider that they should fail in their public duty if they hesitated to record their disapprobation of the conduct of the head of a pulic department in urging with such unjust severity against an officer placed under him, and therefore entitled to look to him or protection against injustice, charges which he was unable to substantiate, and with respect to which it is plain that if he had investigated them before impugning the conduct of his subordinate, he had it in his power easily to have discovered whether or not his suspicions were well founded."

With Kennedy's existing reputation as a person who could not get on with his officials their Lordships laboured the "people skills" aspects by saying the "terms applied were not such as could properly be used in a public correspondence" and "when they reflected that those objectionable expressions were directed against an old officer of hitherto unblemished character, upon mere suspicion, and even without any opportunity having been afforded him of explaining the circumstances...my Lords could not but feel that Mr. Kennedy has pursued a course which it would be difficult to justify."

The role of Commissioner having been split in two in 1850 (dividing Woods and Forests from Public Works), they placed the Forests temporarily under the care of Kennedy's colleague, the Commissioner for Public Works, Mr Gore, pending a suitable appointment to replace Kennedy.

Sir Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Treasury. Although widely regarded as the father of the modern Civil Service, he's probably best known, in an unfavourable light for his supposed lack of urgency in dealing with the great potato famines in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. His unfeeling comments regarding the plight of the Irish remain infamous. He later served as Governor of Madras and Indian Minister of Finance.

On receipt of an official follow up to Gladstone's letter, together with the above minutes, transmitted to him by Sir Charles Trevelyan, Mr Kennedy attempted to vindicate himself; claiming that the Treasury had based his dismissal entirely on one letter, in which he admitted he'd been "led into the use of expressions which I deeply regret" and demanding a wide-ranging public inquiry which would highlight that there was no fault to be found in his overall management of the Crown Forests and his general conduct towards his department.

The Treasury were not impressed: minuting on 23rd May that their Lordships had made clear the grounds for Kennedy's dismissal and, whilst they would consider an inquiry were there substantive matters not already laid before the public that needed investigation, they noted archly that Kennedy had "relieved them from this duty ..by intrusting to an independent Member of Parliament the presentation of a petition to the House of Commons to the same effect" Therefore they did not reply to Kennedy, who was in any case by now taking the matter up by writing, indignatly directly to the Prime Minister. Kennedy chased them for a reply on 23rd May, but they wrapped the matter up, receiving a summarised report of the referees into the general condition of Alice Holt, and asking that the contents be passed to Mr Gore, recommending he act to look into the referee's minor recommendations regarding improving the drainage and excluding the young cattle from the plantations and suggesting he take a look at Woolmer Forest as soon as possible to ascertain whether any of these recommendations could be applied there too. They signed off with an instruction to inform poor old Higinbothom of the conclusions and to make available to him all the papers.

However the matter did not rest there. Rt Hon. Mr Drummond, the Member for West Surrey had established a select Commitee looking into the management of the Crown Forests, continuing from a Committee headed by Lord Duncan. Although the details of this case were called for (and as far as I can see the document I have is the potted summary of the relevant letters and minutes which was printed by an order from the Commons made on the 10th May in response to Mr Drummond's request of the 4th May) the Committee decided not to consider within its remit the particular case of Mr Kennedy's dismissal, going rather into the general management of the Crown Forests and the proposals Kennedy had made to increase the revenues from the Forests by changing the cropping regime and generally reforming their management, and looking at the question of whether some of the smaller forests might be sold off by the Crown.

Kennedy was not going to let this rest. Hansard records that a debate in the House of Commons was initiated late in the session of 27th February 1855 . By this date the Earl of Aberdeen's Peelite coalition had been replaced by a Liberal-Peelite regime with Viscount Palmerston as Prime Minister. Gladstone had stayed on briefly as Chancellor but, along with the other Peelites in Palmerston's coalition he had resigned only a few days earlier after the Sebastopol Committee was formed to investigate the conduct of the war in the Crimea..

Loftus Bland, the Irish Member for King's County firesd the first volley, asking if the Goverment continued to pay Mr Kennedy's salary and, if so what he was being paid for.

Rt Hon James Wilson, MP. A self educated Quaker hatmaker from the Scottish Borders, he served as Financial Secretary to the Treasury under both Aberdeen and Palmerston. Among his othewr achievements was the founding of the magazine The Economist and the Standard Chartered Bank

Mr Wilson, still financial Secretary to the Treasury explained that, while Mr Drummond's Select Committee was in progress, the Treasury did not feel it should replace Mr Kennedy with a new appointment and furthermore had become aware that while the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury were within their rights to appoint the Commissioner of Woods and Forests, the relevant 1850 Act (14th and 15th Vict.cap 22 Section 5) was deliberate in its separation of Forests from Public Works and required them to appoint two Commissioners, not one. So giving the entire responsibility to Mr Gore was not allowable.Therefore until a new appointment was made they had no alternative but to keep Kennedy in place and had accordingly assigned him the (humiliatingly token) duties of managing soley the Manor of Lyndurst, in the New Forest for which he was still drawing his full salary of £1200 per annum.

This prompted a lengthy and at times indigestible set-piece speech from the Member for Westminster, The Rt Hon Sir James Shelley, Baronet. He made much of the awkward position of Kennedy, being paid a full salary for looking after a property that returned only £4 a year, and challenged to Government to admit it had already promised the job to Lord Courtenay, at the time administering Poor Law relief, insinuating strongly that this was political patronage at work. Shelley characterised Kennedy as a model civil servant, zealous in prosecuting his duties to reform and modernise a Forest esate that was not only a financial burden on the Nation, but had become the preserve of "jobbers" (meaning cronies and placemen).

He derided Higinbothom as an Irish surgeon & apothecary who'd only got his appointment through cronyism: he "had attended the family of Lord Duncannon, and that noble Lord, as first Commissioner of Woods and Forests, taking the first opportunity of placing him in a good berth, had appointed him to the deputy surveyorship" He acused Higinbothom of having his reports about the tree numbers etc in Alice Holt written for him ,as " up to that time he had been unable to produce anything like a clever report". He asserted that Wilson and others in the Treasury had been opposed to Kennedy largely on the grounds that he was rocking too many boats and generating complaints from people inside and outside the Government who didn't like his interference in their cushy little domains and schemes. He suggested that Brown, despite his reputation in Edinburgh as an eminent arboriculturalist had been deliberately ridiculed by the Treasury as a "mere Scotch gardener" who knew nothing about trees, mainly because he was Kennedy's man and selected independently against their preferred protocol.

He made a mockery of the referees, asking why the Treasury had not accepted Brown's proposal, made at the time of his exchange of claim and counter-claim with Higinbothom to bring in a group of independent experts. He objected to the presence among the three referees of Mr Menzies, who was reporting (in his capacity as Deputy-Surveyor of Windsor Forest) to both Higinbothom's son and son-in-law, and therefore could not be considered unbiased. He argued that banning the referees from meeting Brown or Higginbothom was wrong, implying that this was just a ruse to keep them from hearing the facts from Brown's side. Playing somewhat to the gallery he even recited a comical verse about Higinbothom.

He accused Gladstone of having overreached his authority in dismissing Brown and Kennedy, saying he'd done this without the knowledge of Lord Aberdeen the then Prime Minister (An inference made from the P.M.'s seemingly surprised reaction to the correspondence he received from Kennedy). He complained that Drummond's Committee was biased by the inclusion of Treasury men inimical to Kennedy, first the magnificently named Chichester Fortescue and subsequently Kennedy's enemy Wilson. At Wilson's instigation (he claimed) paragraphs in the Commitee's report, proposed by Shelley which were positive to Kennedy were voted out or otherwise dropped.

All-in-all he generally laid out the case that Kennedy was a wronged man, who's integrity had been unfairly besmirched and who'd been denied the right to answer for himself against those who were simply biased against his modernising tendencies. His request was for a further Select Committee to look into the matter, on top of that being run by Drummond.

A classic image of Gladstone in all his oratorial splendour on the floor of the Commons, in this case during one of his sadly doomed attempts as Prime Minister to deliver Irish Home Rule

"If, however, we speak of parliamentary strategy in its larger sense,
as covering familiarity with parliamentary forms and usages, the
powers of seizing a parliamentary situation and knowing how to deal
with it, the art of guiding a debate and choosing the right moment
for reserve and for openness, for a dignified retreat, for a
watchful defence, for a sudden rattling charge upon the enemy, no
one had a fuller mastery of it" - James Bryce 1898.

The great Gladstone then rose and made an equally lengthy speech which was classically well-crafted and well-prepared and more than a match for Shelley's rather rambling effort.

Furthermore he had little to lose right then, having newly resigned as Chancellor, to face four years out of high office. But as ever, he treated the debate as a battle of wits which he must and would be seen to win.

Gladstone affected the manner of one deeply offended by Shelley's assertion that he or Wilson had been in any way biased or improper in their actions and challenged Sheley to repeat these "rash" accusations in writing. Should Shelley do so, Gladstone said he would constitute a Select Committee in order to clear his name. Again and again, he goaded Shelley who naturally would make no such direct accusation of wrongdoing against one of such unimpeachable reputation as Gladstone. Gladstone made it plain that he would not agree to a committee to look into Kennedy's dismissal per se as the matter had been decided, correctly by those legally obliged and entitled to do so (namely himself) and with the full knowledge of the Prime Minister at the time. Furthermore he found Kennedy's actions in writing directly to the Prime Minister, laying a petition before Parliament and also publishing a pamphlet in his own defence had allowed him ample opportunity to justify his record as Commissioner, which he'd squandered by intemperately defending himself against attacks on his personal integrity, diligence and dedication to public service which Gladstone was at pains to point out had never in fact been made.

He reiterated that he'd been clear that he and his colleagues had dismissed Kennedy soley for the manner in which he'd handled the dispute between Brown and Higinbothom and for the fact that this came on top of his repeated disputes with other Forestry officials which had been a matter of concern which had been properly and openly laid before Kennedy before the Higginbothom dispute arose. He had not impugned Kennedy's integrity or honour, not his general record in managing the Crown Forests and had merely acted as it was his duty to do. Therefore there no case for him to answer (in the absence of any specific written accusation of personal corruption from Shelley)

But (and here Gladstone was adamant and emphatic) for the House to allow this Select Committee to scrutinise the rightful appointment or dismissal of a public servant by a Minister of the Crown would be to open up a whole can of constitutional worms, which would logically result in the executive losing the ability to govern effectvely and make all civil service appointments dependent on, and open to challenge by MPs in the Commons.

Having spoken at length Gladstone did not wait for a response but stomped out of the chamber, seriously wrong footing the (Liberal-leaning) Conservative Lord Stanley (Member for Kings Lynn) who was left to reply to an empty space on the benches opposite and merely repeated the generalised view that Kennedy had been denied a fair hearing, hyperbolising that "Before a court so constiuted, a common pickpocket would not be tried" and that even in that perfect model of despotic dictatorship, a naval man-o-war, the lowest officer was entitled to a court martial and was not subject to the arbitrary judgements of the Captain. It was a weak effort.

Mr Drummond, the Chairman of the Select Committee so disapproved of by Sir James Shelley then spoke. Like Gladstone he opposed the setting up of a new Committee for Kennedy on the grounds that Gladstone had mentioned: it would mean the Commons usurped the rightful power of the Executive to hire and fire senior Civil Servants. He emphasised that Kennedy was no forester, coming from "treeless" Ayrshire and having worked mainly in equally unwooded Ireland (that was a rather cheap and unfair jibe, especially as Ayrshire has some rather fine forrestry!), He noted some of Kennedy's wilder ideas such as trying to introduce Indian Deodera trees as a crop, his high handed treatment of officials such as Mr Minchin in the Forest of Dean and he emphasised the huge amount of material on Kennedy's ideas and proposed reforms to have already been sent to Lord Duncan's first committee of 1848, and passed on to his own Committee. He implied that if MPs would not (and indeed they would realistically not) take the trouble of reading this stack of "blue books", then they had better not pronounce on matters of Forestry, but should leave this to the properly constiuted channels in the Treasury and to the existing Select Committee.

Thr Member for Wallingford, Mr Malins, pitching in on Kennedy's side, wondered why Gladstone, if he could not consult his Prime Minister, did not discuss the matter more closely with the previous PM, Lord John Russell, who'd appointed Kennedy in the first place and noted too that Kennedy had turned an annual defecit for the Royal Forests of £6000 into a profit of £36,259 in 1853.

Lord Seymour, who'd actually made the appointment under Russell retorted that he was initially impressed by Kennedy and the work he'd done in Ireland, but that he'd been subsequently disappointed by his lack of judgement exhibited on more than one occasion.,The financial figures presented by Mr Malins were meaningless he said, just reflecting short term variations in cropping volumes and wood prices and not any significant long term trend in the good management of the Forests, which would take many years to become apparent.

Mr Strutt and Mr Whiteside, the members for Nottingham and Enniskillen respectively made short speeches on the side of Kennedy, James Wilson patiently defended the Treasury's choice of three referees, saying that Brown's own proposed team of experts included three of his friends and pointing out that he (Wilson) had been scrupulously fair and decided against including one refereee on the grounds that he might be biased against Kennedy, having had a dispute with him over the darinage works in Phoenix Park, Dublin. He reminded Sir John Shelley and others that Kennedy had been present when the referees were instructed in the terms of their inquiry, was copied on their documents and raised no objection to the selection of referees until after they had concluded their report.

John Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston who'd paid £1500 to buy the seat of Horsham in 1802 in the Reign of George iii. Disliked by Victoria for his occasionally maverick radicalism in foreign policy and his undecorous advances towards her ladies-in- waiting , he finally became Prime Minsiter at the age of 70 in 1855, following the collapse of Aberdeen's government over the conduct of the Crimean War.

Finally Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, seemingly weary of this debate and mildly suprised by the amount of time devoted to it, having made a summary of the Goverment's view that Ministers could not have their right to appoint or dismiss civil servants questioned by MPs , agreed to one of Sir John Shelley's requests that a written minute be made that, notwithstanding his unacceptable handling of Higinbothom, Kennedys general personal honour and integrity were not in question, whereupon Sir John withdrew his motion for a Select Committee to be set up and the House, no doubt with gratitude, adjourned at a quarter to one in the morning.

So, as far as I can see ended the affair of the missing trees of Alice Holt Forest, which for almost three years in the midst of war and other great affairs of State, had occupied not only the great Gladstone but two Prime Ministers.

 

 

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