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| Gordon |
It's another lesson in how inbred and interconnected were those British dukes, generals, and civil servants who served as Canadian governors general until 1952. Writing Three Weeks in Quebec City, I alluded to a connection of Governor General Lord Monck named Ponsonby as belonging to an Anglo-Irish political family, without realizing another in the Ponsonby line was the Earl of Bessborough, great Irish landlord and Canadian GG in the 1930s.
Strong-Boag's detailed and rather vivid account of Aberdeen makes clear that he did actually stand out somewhat among his fellows, not least by his liberalism. He tilted toward Laurier and the Liberals as much as predecessors like Dufferin had leaned to Macdonald and the Conservatives. Aberdeen was like Dufferin in still presuming upon a governor-general's independent authority in Canadian politics. Strong-Boag notes how Aberdeen made Mackenzie Bowell prime minister when no one else would have dreamed of doing so, partly because the GG and his wife, the proto-feminist Ishbel Marjoribanks, disapproved of the "carnal masculinity" of the leading candidate, Charles Tupper.
(Strong-Boag may here be quietly taking issue with the DCB biography of Tupper, which robustly declares that Tupper's relations with women other than his wife were never "anything more than mildly flirtatious.")
The biography also reinforces David Cannadine's argument in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy that in the post-confederation era, many of the GGs took the job because they needed the money. The vice-regal salary was substantial, and the Aberdeen fortune was in serious decline.
Update, September 25: And here's the companion biography: Ishbel Marjoribanks, Lady Aberdeen.
