his Religion of Humanity. Hardy and his wife, Emma, attended several Positivist meetings in London but found it stretched belief too far to be able to join the group of which Lushington was then a leading member. Hardy’s first recorded visit to the Lushingtons was in April 1888 when another guest, A. J. Munby, described him as “small, brown bearded, kindly, shrewd.” Hardy continued to enjoy hospitality at 36 Kensington Square, despite the public reaction following the publication of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and, later, Jude the Obscure. Lushington’s daughter Susan, after reading one of Hardy’s novels given to her by her friend Gertrude Bell, wrote that she was “absolutely scandalized with it. It was hatefully improper from beginning to end—and not the least interesting or clever—immorality, fine and simple, is so cheap. It has gone on since the world began & will go on till the end & if you have got nothing new to say about it, you had much better not say anything about it at all. I was horrified & so disappointed too as it is the first of his I had ever read.” After visiting Manchester Library, Susan’s sister Margaret, a deeply committed Christian, wrote, “I rashly took out Jude the Obscure by Hardy—however c[ou]ld we tolerate that man—I think it’s the most revolting inhuman disgusting book I ever read—impossibly repulsive—I should like to have burnt it & Hardy with it & rejoiced in his crackling.” SHC7854/4/5/125.
2. Florence Emily Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1891 (Macmillan & Co. Ltd, 1928). Hardy visited the Lushingtons again in 1906 and again saw the portrait.
3. In 1892, Hunt wrote to Lushington suggesting that this portrait be exhibited at the Victorian Exhibition. “I shall not have any other portrait there for the one of Rossetti done at second hand is not quite satisfactory and altho’ your Father’s was done when the size if the life work was strange to me, I am not out of humour with it.”
Stephen Lushington could trace his family’s origins back to fourteenth-century Kent and, writing from that county in 1905, his son, Vernon, proudly announced, “Here I am in Kent, as my forefathers were men of Kent. From this place we were digged.”1 After a visit to the Lushingtons in 1860, Edward Lear commented, “The Ls are a good race.”2 Perhaps he had heard the family legend that the Lushingtons were once the Lusignans, ancient kings of Jerusalem and related by marriage to the Plantagenet kings, Henry II and John. However, this was mere wishful thinking. The surname has had a variety of spellings and only developed its present form in the seventeenth century. One of the earliest recorded members of the family was Thomas Lustenton of Standen, Kent who, in 1495, left instructions in his will that he should be buried in the churchyard of Hawkinge, near Folkestone.3
The Lushingtons were typical of the families that rose by their own enterprise from humble origins to form the growing middle classes of the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century, their social standing had risen indeed and several members of the family became Members of Parliament. Equally as important were the family’s developing links with the East India Company. For a profession, the family usually chose the law or the church. One who chose the latter was Thomas Lushington a controversial seventeenth-century author and theologian of whom it was said he was as “Audacious in the pulpit and unconventional out of it.”4 Thomas was accused of being a Socinian—an unorthodox form of nontrinitarianism that was developed around the same time as the Protestant Reformation. The Socinians believed that Jesus was merely human and held a rationalistic approach to Scripture and to faith. Socinianism has many similarities with Unitarian theology that holds that Christ is subordinate to God the father, and “far from being a substitute for the sins of humanity, [he is] the bringer of good news and forgiveness, the exemplar of God’s love for mankind.”5 Such a view was similar to that held by Vernon Lushington, two hundred years later after he adopted Auguste Comte’s Religion of Humanity.
Stephen Lushington was descended from another Stephen Lushington (1675–1718) of Rodmersham, near Sittingbourne, and Norton Court, near Faversham, both in the county of Kent. That Stephen was the son of Thomas Lushington (1628–1688), who was the heir of Thomas the theologian. Stephen of Rodmersham married twice and founded the two lines that produced most, if not all, the Lushingtons of any note. From his first marriage to Catherine Godfrey, there descended the Rt. Hon. Stephen Rumbold Lushington, a close friend and potential suitor of Jane Austen who confided to her sister Cassandra:
I like him [Lushington] very much. I am sure he is clever & a Man of Taste. He got a vol. of Milton last night & spoke of it with Warmth—He is quite an M.P.—very smiling, with an exceeding good address, & readiness of Language—I am rather in love with him—I dare say he is ambitious & Insincere . . . He has a wide smiling mouth, and very good teeth.6
Other descendants in this line were Edmund Law Lushington, who married Celia, the sister of Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Franklin Lushington, the close friend and executor of Edward Lear.7
Following Catherine’s death in 1700, Stephen Lushington remarried. His new wife was Jane (nee Petty), the widow of Edmond Fowler of Ash, near Sandwich, Kent, and from this marriage came the line from which the Lushingtons who are the subject of this book can trace direct descent. Stephen Lushington of Rodmersham’s son, the Reverend Henry Lushington (1709–1799), married Mary Altham, daughter of the Reverend Dr. Altham, and the couple had three sons who survived into adulthood—Stephen, William, and Henry.
The youngest son, Henry, on the staff of Robert Clive and survived the Black Hole of Calcutta only to be murdered in India in 1763. His brother William served with HEIC Bengal Service in India until 1773. On returning to England, he became an alderman of the City and Member of Parliament for London. Despite his independent and radical stance in politics, William tended to vote with the government and, although he believed that parliamentary reform was desirable, he felt it was not then practicable. In 1796, having invested heavily in the sugar trade in the West Indies, William spoke against the abolition of the slave trade while maintaining very real concerns about the living conditions of those in slavery. He almost certainly knew the young William Wilberforce, the man with whom his nephew Stephen later worked in the fight against slavery. By coincidence William’s daughter, Mary Elizabeth, married John William Gage who was a cousin of Anne Isabella Milbanke, later Lady Byron of whom more later.
Unlike his younger brothers, Stephen Lushington did not spend time in India with the East India Company. Instead, he was apprenticed to Roger Altham of Archers Court, Canterbury.8 He later married Hester Boldero, daughter of the banker John Boldero of Aspenden Hall, Hertfordshire. This was a wise choice in more ways than one as he subsequently joined his father-in-law’s bank and was taken into partnership. Boldero’s bank was a well-established institution having been founded in 1738 under the name of Thomas Miners. In 1742, it became Miners and Boldero. Stephen was later joined at the bank by his brother Henry.
Stephen was also a director of the East India Company, which had been created to trade in the Indian Ocean Region, initially with Mughal India and the East Indies. The Company eventually took control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent and Stephen served as its Chairman between 1790 and 1800. In 1791, he was created a baronet and, in 1796, following Company practice, he had a ship named after him.
In and Out of “the House”
In addition to pursuing his responsibilities within the East India Company, and a career in banking, Stephen still found time to enter Parliament where he represented various constituencies between 1783 and 1807. The two most powerful factions in the British Parliament at this time were the Tories and the Whigs. The Tories tended to support the monarchy and the Anglican Church, while the Whigs, whose origins lay in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when William of Orange was invited to become King, were opposed to absolute monarchy.
