Bertrand
Russell was born on 18 May 1872 at Ravenscroft, Trellech, Monmouth
shire, into an influential and liberal family of the British aristocracy. His
parents, Viscount, and Viscounts Amberley, were radical for
their times. Lord Amberley consented to his wife's affair with their children's
tutor, the biologist Douglas Spalding. Both were early advocates of birth
control at a time when this was considered scandalous. Lord Amberley
was an atheist and his atheism was evident when he asked the
philosopher John Stuart Mill to act as Russell's secular godfather. Mill
died the year after Russell's birth, but his writings had a great effect on
Russell's life.
His
paternal grandfather, the Earl Russell, had been asked twice by Queen
Victoria to form a government, serving her as Prime Minister in
the 1840s and 1860s. The Russell’s had been prominent in England for several
centuries before this, coming to power and the peerage with the rise of the Tudor
dynasty (see: Duke of Bedford). They established themselves as one of
the leading British Whig families, and participated in every great
political event from the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536–40 to
the Glorious Revolution in 1688–89 and the Great Reform Act in
1832.
Lady
Amberley was the daughter of Lord and Lady Stanley of Adderley. Russell
often feared the ridicule of his maternal grandmother, one of the
campaigners for education of women.
