Henry Du Pré Labouchère (9 November 1831 – 15 January 1912) was an English politician, writer, publisher and theatre owner in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. He is now most remembered for the Labouchère Amendment, which for the first time criminalised all male homosexual activity in the United Kingdom.

Labouchère, who came from a wealthy Huguenot banking family, was a junior member of the British diplomatic service before briefly serving in Parliament in 1865–68. He lived with the actress Henrietta Hodson from 1868, and they married in 1887. He made a name for himself as a journalist and theatre producer, first buying a stake in The Daily News and in 1876 founding the magazine Truth, which he bankrolled during an extensive series of libel suits.

In 1880, he returned to Parliament as the Liberal member for Northampton, and became a key figure in the radical Home Rule wing of the party. He was a controversial figure, and opposition from Queen Victoria as well as from senior Liberals ensured that he was never given a ministerial position. He became increasingly unpopular because of his opposition to the Second Boer War, and resigned from politics in 1906, when he left Britain and retired to Italy.

Early life

Labouchère was born in London to a family of Huguenot extraction, the eldest of three sons and six daughters His grandfather Pierre (Peter) César Labouchère was also a partner in Hope's, and married a daughter of Sir Francis Baring. His mother Mary was from an English nabob family, the daughter of James Du Pré MP, a nephew of Lord Caledon, and his wife Madeline Maxwell, a niece of the Duchess of Gordon.

Labouchère was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, where, he later said, he "diligently attended the racecourse at Newmarket", losing £6,000 in gambling in two years. He was accused of cheating in an examination, and his degree was withheld. Leaving Cambridge, he was sent to South America to look after family business interests there; however, he ended up working in a circus troupe in Mexico and lived for several months in an Ojibwe camp near Minneapolis.

The year after his dismissal, Labouchère was elected at the 1865 general election as a member of parliament (MP) for Windsor, as a Liberal. However, that election was overturned on petition, At the 1868 election he lost the seat by 110 votes. He did not return to the House of Commons for 12 years. A new company of players was formed, including Charles Wyndham, Henry Irving, J. L. Toole, Ellen Terry, and Henrietta Hodson. By 1868, Hodson and Labouchère were living together out of wedlock, as they could not marry until her first husband died in 1887. Labouchère bought out his partners and used the theatre to promote Hodson's talents; the theatre made a loss, Hodson retired, and the theatre closed in 1879. The couple finally married in 1887. They had one child together, Mary Dorothea (Dora) Labouchère (1884–1944). This series of articles helped restore the circulation of the Daily News, in which he had bought a stake in 1868. His unflinching style gained a large audience for first his reporting, and later his personal weekly journal, Truth (started in 1876), which was often sued for libel. With his inherited wealth, he could afford to defend such suits.

Labouchère was a vehement opponent of feminism; he campaigned in Truth against the suffrage movement, ridiculing and belittling women who sought the right to vote. He was also a virulent anti-semite, opposed to Jewish participation in British life, using Truth to campaign against "Hebrew barons" and their supposedly excessive influence, "Jewish exclusivity" and "Jewish cowardice".

Return to Parliament

1881 [[Punch (magazine)|Punch cartoon|left|thumb|upright]]

Labouchère returned to Parliament in the 1880 election, when he and Charles Bradlaugh, both Liberals, won the two seats for Northampton. (Bradlaugh's then-controversial atheism led Labouchère, a closet agnostic, to refer sardonically to himself as "the Christian member for Northampton".) In 1885, Labouchère, whose libertarian stances did not preclude a fierce homophobia,|group= n His amendment outlawed "gross indecency"; sodomy was already a crime, but Labouchère's Amendment now criminalised any sexual activity between men. Ten years later the Labouchère Amendment allowed for the prosecution of Oscar Wilde, who was given the maximum sentence of two years' imprisonment with hard labour. Her dislike of Labouchère stemmed from his editorship of Truth, which she felt had insulted the Royal Family. According to the historian Vernon Bogdanor, this was the last time a British monarch vetoed a prime minister's appointment of a cabinet minister. Roy Jenkins, however, notes that Attlee ignored the king's advice, which was given on 26 July 1945, and offered the foreign secretaryship to Dalton the following day, later changing his mind after receiving representations from Herbert Morrison and senior civil servants.|group= n However, Gladstone may have been happy to drop Labouchère given his lack of political support. A later pamphlet by Henry Hess of The Critic, in 1905, revealed further financial misdealings.

Further reading

  • "Henry Du Pre Labouchere". The Twickenham Museum.

Works (examples)

  • Diary of the besieged resident in Paris, Hurst and Blackett, London 1871
  • The Brown Man's Burden, a parody by Labouchère of Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden"; Truth and Literary Digest (Feb. 1899)

Notes and references

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