new position. Brief as was his tenure of the office, he proved himself well worthy of it. He was dignified without pompousness, quick without being irritable, and masterful without tyranny. He was scrupulously punctual. Suitors and hearers could not but be impressed by the manifest determination of the lord chief justice to get at the truth, and to do so without waste of time. If this was a fault, it was that of excessive zeal for despatch. When, occasionally, there were flashes of impatience, they were elicited by the exhibition, as he deemed it, of want of preparation, or slovenliness, or verbosity on the part of the advocate before him. Even the youngest and most obscure practitioner could always count upon the assiduous attention of the lord chief justice to a pertinent and thoughtful argument. In 1896 Lord Russell (Pollock B. and Hawkins J. being on this occasion his colleagues on the bench) presided at the trial at bar of the leaders of the Jameson Raid. It was a state trial of grave importance. Russell’s conduct of it, in the midst of much popular excitement, was by itself sufficient to establish his reputation as a great judge. One other event at least in his career while lord chief justice deserves a record, namely, his share in the Venezuela Arbitration in 1899. Lord Herschell, who had been nominated to act with Lord Justice Collins (afterwards Master of the Rolls), as a British representative on the Commission of Arbitration, of which the distinguished Russian jurist M. Martens was president, died somewhat suddenly in America before the beginning of the proceedings. The lord chief justice accepted the invitation to take the vacant place, and performed his very onerous duty with conspicuous ability.
Nor was it only on the bench, or as an international judge that Lord Russell of Killowen sought, during the last years of his busy life, to do service to his country. He signalized his zeal as a law reformer by the public advocacy of radical changes in the system of legal education in the Inns of Court, and by the promotion of measures to put down the vice of secret and illicit commissions in commercial and business life. On the former subject he delivered in 1895 an address in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, under the auspices of the Council of Legal Education, which was afterwards printed and published. In 1899, dealing with the latter question, he introduced in the House of Lords a bill, which had its first reading. He again introduced a bill in the session of 1900, which was read a second time, but did not become law. On the 10th, of August 1900 the great advocate and great judge passed quietly away at his London residence, after a short illness due to an internal malady
In private as in public life Russell was always strenuous, and most attracted by things that called for the exercise of activity, whether bodily or intellectual. Inaction he disliked both for himself and in others. Though not an athlete, he took an interest in manly pastimes: he was fond of riding and of breeding horses; he liked being on the racecourse; and he enjoyed games, both of skill and of chance. A student of books he was not; he could lay no claim to wide learning or elegant scholarship; but he could appreciate a good book; he was versed in Shakespeare; and he knew and loved the poetry and the songs of his native land. When he wrote, his style, inornate, clear and forcible, reflected the character of his thought. He was a staunch and sympathetic friend, ever ready, in an unostentatious way, to help, where help was really needed. While he undoubtedly exhibited at times, chiefly during the earlier part of his career, a certain brusqueness and impetuousness of speech and demeanour, those who came into contact with him recognized that such occasional outbursts never sprang from any desire to hurt, or from any unkindness of disposition. In his contests at the bar he never made an enemy. He was a strong man, and he liked to have his way; but he was also large-hearted and without a tinge of rancour in his disposition. He was never offended by opposition. Whilst he did not himself shine as a wit or a humorist in conversation or in after-dinner oratory, he heartily enjoyed fun and humour in others; and, wherever he was, the force and distinctness of his personality never failed to impress his company. Probably no English lawyer ever excited abroad the admiration which was accorded to Lord Russell of Killowen, alike on the continent of Europe and in America. To the United States he paid two visits, the first in 1883 and the second in 1896. On both occasions he won golden opinions, which were manifested in widespread and warm expressions of sympathy and regret when the news of the death of Lord Russell of Killowen passed across the Atlantic. Between 1894 and 1897 Lord Russell of Killowen received the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa from the universities of Dublin, Edinburgh and Cambridge, and from the Laval university, Quebec. In 1892 he was treasurer of Lincoln’s Inn. He left surviving him, besides his widow, five sons and four daughters. His sister Katherine (in religion, Sister Mary Baptist Joseph), pioneer sister of mercy in California, had died two years before at San Francisco. (W. R. K.)
RUSSELL OF THORNHAUGH, WILLIAM, 1st Baron
(c. 1558–1613), English soldier, was a younger son of Francis
Russell, 2nd earl of Bedford, and was educated at Magdalen
College, Oxford. After spending a few years abroad, he went
to Ireland in 1580, and having seen some service in that country
he was knighted in September 1581. In 1585 he joined the
English forces in the Netherlands, being made lieutenant-general
of cavalry; in September 1586 he so distinguished himself
at Zutphen that the Spaniards pronounced him “a devil and
not a man”; and in 1587 he became governor of Flushing
in succession to his late friend, Sir Philip Sidney. He differed
with the estates of Holland and with his, superior, Lord
Willoughby de Eresby; consequently, on his own initiative,
he was recalled to England in July 1588. In May 1594 Russell
was made lord deputy of Ireland in place of Sir William Fitzwilliam.
He relieved Enniskillen, but his attempts to capture
the insurgent leaders, Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, and Fiagh
MacHugh O’Byrne, came to nothing. In May 1595 Sir John
Norris landed in Ireland, his orders being to help the lord deputy
in his difficult task. Russell was somewhat chagrined at the
choice, as he and Norris were not very good friends, but for a
short time they acted together against the rebels in the N.
of Ireland. Russell then led an expedition into Connaught,
but soon he and Norris were at variance. Having captured
O’Byrne in May 1597, Russell laid down his office and left Ireland
later in the month. In 1603 he was created Baron Russell
of Thornhaugh, and he died on the 9th of August 1613. In
1627 his only son Francis succeeded his cousin Edward as
4th earl of Bedford.
Russell’s Journal of his doings in Ireland is in the Carew MSS., and many of his letters are in the British Museum. See J. H. Wiffen, Historical Memoirs of the House of Russell (1833), and R. Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors, vol. iii. (1890).
RUSSIA (Rossiya), the general name for the European and Asiatic dominions of the “Tsar of All the Russias.” Although the name is thus correctly applied, both in English and Russian, to the whole area of the Russian empire, its application is often limited, no less correctly, to European Russia, or even to European Russia exclusive of Finland and Poland. The use of the name in its most comprehensive sense dates only from the expansion of the empire in the 19th century; to the historian who writes of the earlier growth of the empire, Russia means, at most, Russia in Europe, or Muscovy, as it was usually called until the 18th century, from Moscow, its ancient capital. The origin of the term “Russia” has been much disputed. It is certainly derived, through Rossiya, from Slavonic Rus or Ros (Byzantine Ῥῶς or Ῥώσοι), a name first given to the Scandinavians who founded a principality on the Dnieper in the 9th century; and afterwards extended to the collection of Russian states of which this principality formed the nucleus. The word Rus, in former times wrongly connected with the tribal name Rhoxolani, is more probably derived from Ruotsi, a Finnish name for the Swedes, which seems to be a corruption of the Swedish rothsmenn, “rowers” or “seafarers.”
