Elgin: The Governor as the Body Politic

Abstract

In 1861, Cambridge University awarded Doctorates in Civil Law to three distinguished men: Lord Elgin, George Grote, and J. L. Motley. At first sight, Elgin’s was the least extraordinary of these degrees from what was usually a self-regarding institution. He was an Oxford graduate who had taken the best first in Classics in his year, and he had been a fellow of Merton College. Grote, who had not attended university at all, was a banker and politician who had left the House of Commons after 1832 because democracy seemed further away than ever after the first Reform Act. J. L. Motley was an American diplomat who had studied at Harvard and at several German universities. However, upon closer examination, Elgin’s honorary academic distinction was the most curious of the three. The other two were proven scholars; Motley had laboured for ten years on his History of The Dutch Republic (1856) and was highly regarded as a modern European historian, while Grote’s monumental History of Greece (1846–56) in twelve volumes had established him as the foremost English scholar of the ancient world. Elgin’s cultural achievements were of a different order than theirs.