4000 disaffected Boers, had been formed near Pretoria, and they were terrorizing the country. Frere visited them unarmed and practically alone. Even yet all might have been well, for he won the Boers’ respect and liking. On the condition that the Boers dispersed, Frere undertook to present their complaints to the British government, and to urge the fulfilment of the promises that had been made to them. They parted with mutual good feeling, and the Boers did eventually disperse—on the very day upon which Frere received the telegram announcing the government’s censure. He returned to Cape Town, and his journey back was in the nature of a triumph. But bad news awaited him at Government House—on the 1st of June 1879 the prince imperial had met his death in Zululand—and a few hours later Frere heard that the government of the Transvaal and Natal, together with the high commissionership in the eastern part of South Africa, had been transferred from him to Sir Garnet Wolseley.
When Gladstone’s ministry came into office in the spring of 1880, Lord Kimberley had no intention of recalling Frere. In June, however, a section of the Liberal party memorialized Gladstone to remove him, and the prime minister weakly complied (1st August 1880). Upon his return Frere replied to the charges relating to his conduct respecting Afghanistan as well as South Africa, previously preferred in Gladstone’s Midlothian speeches, and was preparing a fuller vindication when he died at Wimbledon from the effect of a severe chill on the 29th of May 1884. He was buried in St Paul’s, and in 1888 a statue of Frere upon the Thames embankment was unveiled by the prince of Wales. Frere edited the works of his uncle, Hookham Frere, and the popular story-book, Old Deccan Days, written by his daughter, Mary Frere. He was three times president of the Royal Asiatic Society.
His Life and Correspondence, by John Martineau, was published in 1895. For the South African anti-confederation view, see P. A. Molteno’s Life and Times of Sir John Charles Molteno (2 vols., London 1900). See also South Africa: History.
FRERE, JOHN HOOKHAM (1769–1846), English diplomatist and author, was born in London on the 21st of May 1769. His father, John Frere, a gentleman of a good Suffolk family, had been educated at Caius College, Cambridge, and would have been senior wrangler in 1763 but for the redoubtable competition of Paley; his mother, daughter of John Hookham, a rich London merchant, was a lady of no small culture, accustomed to amuse her leisure with verse-writing. His father’s sister Eleanor, who married Sir John Fenn (1739–1794), the learned editor of the Paston Letters, wrote various educational works for children under the pseudonyms “Mrs Lovechild” and “Mrs Teachwell.” Young Frere was sent to Eton in 1785, and there began an intimacy with Canning which greatly affected his after life. From Eton he went to his father’s college at Cambridge, and graduated B.A. in 1792 and M.A. in 1795. He entered public service in the foreign office under Lord Grenville, and sat from 1796 to 1802 as member of parliament for the close borough of West Looe in Cornwall.
From his boyhood he had been a warm admirer of Pitt, and along with Canning he entered heart and soul into the defence of his government, and contributed freely to the pages of the Anti-Jacobin, edited by Gifford. He contributed, in collaboration with Canning, “The Loves of the Triangles,” a clever parody of Darwin’s “Loves of the Plants,” “The Needy Knife-Grinder” and “The Rovers.” On Canning’s removal to the board of trade in 1799 he succeeded him as under-secretary of state; in October 1800 he was appointed envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary to Lisbon; and in September 1802 he was transferred to Madrid, where he remained for two years. He was recalled on account of a personal disagreement he had with the duke of Alcudia, but the ministry showed its approval of his action by a pension of £1700 a year. He was made a member of the privy council in 1805; in 1807 he was appointed plenipotentiary at Berlin, but the mission was abandoned, and Frere was again sent to Spain in 1808 as plenipotentiary to the Central Junta. The condition of Spain rendered his position a very responsible and difficult one. When Napoleon began to advance on Madrid it became a matter of supreme importance to decide whether Sir John Moore, who was then in the north of Spain, should endeavour to anticipate the occupation of the capital or merely make good his retreat, and if he did retreat whether he should do so by Portugal or by Galicia. Frere was strongly of opinion that the bolder was the better course, and he urged his views on Sir John Moore with an urgent and fearless persistency that on one occasion at least overstepped the limits of his commission. After the disastrous retreat to Corunna, the public accused Frere of having by his advice endangered the British army, and though no direct censure was passed upon his conduct by the government, he was recalled, and the marquess of Wellesley was appointed in his place.
Thus ended Frere’s public life. He afterwards refused to undertake an embassy to St Petersburg, and twice declined the honour of a peerage. In 1816 he married Elizabeth Jemima, dowager countess of Erroll, and in 1820, on account of her failing health, he went with her to the Mediterranean. There he finally settled in Malta, and though he afterwards visited England more than once, the rest of his life was for the most part spent in the island of his choice. In quiet retirement he devoted himself to literature, studied his favourite Greek authors, and taught himself Hebrew and Maltese. His hospitality was well known to many an English guest, and his charities and courtesies endeared him to his Maltese neighbours. He died at the Pietà Valetta on the 7th of January 1846. Frere’s literary reputation now rests entirely upon his spirited verse translations of Aristophanes, which remain in many ways unrivalled. The principles according to which he conducted his task were elucidated in an article on Mitchell’s Aristophanes, which he contributed to The Quarterly Review, vol. xxiii. The translations of The Acharnians, The Knights, The Birds, and The Frogs were privately printed, and were first brought into general notice by Sir G. Cornewall Lewis in the Classical Museum for 1847. They were followed some time after by Theognis Restitutus, or the personal history of the poet Theognis, reduced from an analysis of his existing fragments. In 1817 he published a mock-heroic Arthurian poem entitled Prospectus and Specimen of an intended National Work, by William and Robert Whistlecraft, of Stowmarket in Suffolk, Harness and Collar Makers, intended to comprise the most interesting particulars relating to King Arthur and his Round Table. William Tennant in Anster Fair had used the ottava rima as a vehicle for semi-burlesque poetry five years earlier, but Frere’s experiment is interesting because Byron borrowed from it the measure that he brought to perfection in Don Juan.
Frere’s complete works were published in 1871, with a memoir by his nephews, W. E. and Sir Bartle Frere, and reached a second edition in 1874. Compare also Gabrielle Festing, J. H. Frere and his Friends (1899).
FRÈRE, PIERRE ÉDOUARD (1819–1886), French painter,
studied under Delaroche, entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1836 and exhibited first at the Salon in 1843. The marked sentimental tendency of his art makes us wonder at Ruskin’s enthusiastic eulogy which finds in Frère’s work “the depth of Wordsworth, the grace of Reynolds, and the holiness of Angelico.” What we can admire in his work is his accomplished craftsmanship and the intimacy and tender homeliness of his conception. Among his chief works are the two paintings, “Going to School” and “Coming from School,” “The Little Glutton” (his first exhibited picture) and “L’Exercice” (Mr Astor’s collection). A journey to Egypt in 1860 resulted in a small series of Orientalist subjects, but the majority of Frère’s paintings deal with the life of the kitchen, the workshop, the dwellings of the humble, and mainly with the pleasures and little troubles of the young, which the artist brings before us with humour and sympathy. He was one of the most popular painters of domestic genre in the middle of the 19th century.
FRÈRE-ORBAN, HUBERT JOSEPH WALTHER (1812–1896),
Belgian statesman, was born at Liége on the 24th of April 1812. His family name was Frère, to which on his marriage he added his wife’s name of Orban. After studying law in Paris, he
