Lord Palmerston

Prime minister of Great Britain (1855-1858, 1859-1865)

• Born: October 20, 1784
• Birthplace: Westminster, London, England
• Died: October 18, 1865
• Place of death: Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire, England

Palmerston made aggressive use of military and naval power to ensure security for British commerce, while attempting to work closely with France to avoid war.

Early Life

Born Henry John Temple, the future Lord Palmerston sprang from a long line of Anglican Irish aristocrats. His education at Harrow, Edinburgh University, and finally at St. John’s College, Cambridge, earned for him a nobleman’s degree, without examinations. He had no need, however, for such academic favors. His intelligence and talents would have ensured success even if he had been forced to compete for the prizes that the accident of noble birth thrust upon him.

Since the seventeenth century, the Temples had been Whigs. The reign of George III, however, had seen the emergence of the “king’s party.” Although under George I and George II (1714-1760) Toryism had been equated with treason, it enjoyed renewed respectability under George III (1760-1820). The road to any kind of patronage lay through personal loyalty to the king. He was determined to assert royal prerogative, as far as he could, without forgetting that since the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, British sovereigns had owed their crowns to Parliament rather than to divine right.

It is thus not a matter of an abandonment of Whig ideals, but a simple, pragmatic need to wear the king’s colors that made the second Viscount Palmerston identify with what came to be called the “New Tory” Party, for forty years. At the death of the second Viscount on April 17, 1802, Henry John Temple succeeded to his father’s title and estates as the third Viscount Palmerston. At the age of eighteen, he still had his university studies ahead of him. Appropriately, this scion of a Whig family was most profoundly influenced at Edinburgh by Professor Dugald Stewart, the leading Whig philosopher of the day.

It is, however, understandable that this bright, personable, and independently wealthy Irish peer chose to wear the Tory label when he first entered political life, in 1807. Whether as a Tory at the beginning of his career or as a Whig and a Liberal at the end, he was fundamentally an heir of the Glorious Revolution, mistrustful of royal power and devoted to a Parliament whose destinies were guided by educated and propertied aristocrats.

As an Irish peer, Lord Palmerston was eligible to seek election in the British House of Commons. At the age of twenty-two, he began his fifty-nine-year career in Parliament as the representative of a pocket borough whose voters had been bought by wealthy patrons on his behalf. It must be understood that no element of scandal attached to buying and selling votes in underpopulated boroughs. The rationale of the borough mongers asserted that only thus could able young politicians be recognized and helped to an early start in their careers.

Although almost immediately offered cabinet rank, Lord Palmerston contented himself with the noncabinet post of Secretary-at-War for twenty years, until 1828. He was apparently happy doing an efficient job at the War Office, showing no signs of ambition as he made his way through London society. He earned a name as a fashion setter, a womanizer, and a dilettante writer for political journals. He could have been dismissed as a brilliant young man who was wasting his talents and was destined to remain a second-rater. Although he made a few parliamentary addresses on foreign affairs, he took no real interest in diplomacy. It was to be the last thirty-five years of his long career that would earn for him the sobriquet “Most English Minister” and to identify him as the embodiment of John Bull.

Lord Palmerston delayed matrimony until 1839, when he was married to the widow of Lord Cowper, Emily, née Lamb, sister of Prime Minister Lord Melbourne. The newlyweds had long been intimate during the lifetime of Lord Cowper, and gossip ascribed the paternity of Lady Cowper’s younger children to Lord Palmerston. In any event, those children became his heirs.

Life’s Work

Lord Palmerston owed his first attainment of cabinet rank to the prime ministership of that arch Tory, the duke of Wellington. He resigned in 1828, in loyalty to his friend William Huskisson, who had been forced out of the cabinet after a major split with the Iron Duke. Thrown into opposition, Palmerston interested himself in diplomatic matters, for the first time. At last, the talented dabbler had found his forte. In June, 1829, he delivered one of the great parliamentary speeches of his career, establishing his reputation as a man who understood foreign affairs. Immediately, Lord Grey, the Whig leader, formed an alliance with the disaffected Tory. In September, 1830, Wellington invited Palmerston to return to the cabinet. The offer was refused, unless Wellington would include Lord Grey in a sort of Cabinet of National Unity. Wellington, quite predictably, declined the proposal. From that hour, most of Palmerston’s biographers count him as having returned to his ancestral Whig origins.

When in 1830 Lord Grey attained the prime ministership after forming his own coalition of Whigs and disaffected Tories, Palmerston attained the office of Foreign Secretary at last. He held it until 1841 and again in 1846-1852.

Lord Grey’s greatest achievement was the parliamentary Reform Bill of 1832. In Palmerston’s domain at the Foreign Office, his accomplishments assumed a gigantic stature of their own. In France, the senior line of the House of Bourbon was overthrown and replaced by its cadet branch, the House of Orleans, personified by Louis-Philippe, who reigned as king of France until overthrown in turn by the revolutions of 1848. Italian and Polish nationalists also made 1830 a revolutionary year, with suicidal results. Closer to Great Britain, however, a Belgian revolt against the king of the Netherlands required forceful British action, and it was the Belgian crisis that established Palmerston’s reputation for brilliance in statecraft.

There was the gravest danger that Austria, Russia, and Prussia might intervene with armed force to assist the king of the Netherlands to regain Belgium. After all, the union of all the Low Countries under the Dutch sovereign had been one of the achievements of the Congress of Vienna, designed to prevent either French or Prussian aggression across that natural military highway formed by the flat Netherlands. Seen in that way, Lords Grey and Palmerston would have preferred to see the unity of the Netherlands preserved. As a realist, however, Palmerston perceived that there was no way of forcing French-speaking Walloons and Flemish Belgians, almost entirely Roman Catholic, to accept the sovereignty of the Calvinist Protestant Dutch House of Orange, which had unwisely treated the Belgian provinces as subordinate appendages rather than as fully participating states in a United Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Palmerston and Grey were ready to settle for an independent Belgium, provided that Louis-Philippe did not regard it as a means to French aggrandizement. It took all Palmerston’s skill, and a neat balance of conciliatory gentleness and bullying firmness, to get an adventuresome French army withdrawn from Belgium and to persuade Louis-Philippe not to press the claims of one of his sons to be king of Belgium. At the same time, he had to restrain the Dutch from using force to repress the Belgian revolt, a repression that would have made it more difficult to control the French.

Fortunately for Great Britain, France, and the Belgians, the Polish and Italian revolts of 1830 kept Austria, Prussia, and Russia so preoccupied that Palmerston was able to create an independent Belgium . As a crowning touch, the London Conference of 1831 obtained the consent of all the major powers to the erection of an independent Belgium. The king selected for the new state was Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, the widowed former son-in-law of Great Britain’s King George IV. It was an incidental but significant bonus that Leopold was the uncle both of the future Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert. The queen selected for him, and imposed as an act of statecraft, was a daughter of Louis-Philippe, king of France. Thus, everyone obtained something, the appearance of Anglo-French entente was maintained, the Belgians were freed, yet British security in the Low Countries seemed assured. Only the king of the Netherlands might complain of unrequited loss.

Palmerston took an aggressive role in settling disputed claims to the Spanish and Portuguese thrones, and in finding husbands for Donna Maria of Portugal and Isabella of Spain who would pose no threat to British interests. Although sympathetic to the Greek struggle for independence from Turkey, he devoted the last thirty years of his life to building and protecting a strong Ottoman Turkish barrier against Russian and French expansion.

Palmerston interested himself in active support for Protestant missionaries in the Levant and briefly toyed with the idea of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. Even after he had abandoned that idea, he continued to offer the most aggressive protection to the Jews of that area. Palmerston saw no contradiction between his drive to protect minorities on Turkish soil, whether Jews, Protestants, Druze, Samaritans, or Armenians, and his determination to save the Turkish Empire. After all, France used its role as protector of Roman Catholicism, and Russia used its protectorate of Orthodox Christianity to build power bases in the East. Palmerston merely concluded that a strong British presence in the Levant was the best possible protection for Turkey against Russian or French ambitions.

When, from 1839 to 1841, Mehmet Ali, the viceroy of Egypt, threatened to rip Syria out of Turkish hands, in close alliance with Louis-Philippe’s France, Palmerston landed troops at Beirut and Acre, threatened to cut off the Egyptians, who were advancing against Turkey, and forced Egyptian retreat beyond the Sinai Desert. In the London Conference of 1841, he restored the sultan’s authority in Syria, Palestine, and the Sinai, repulsed the French, and closed the Bosphorus and Dardanelles to warships in peacetime. As usual, however, he allowed a small prize even to the losers, awarding the title of hereditary viceroys of Egypt to Mehmet Ali and his heirs.

Making what can only be described as high-handed use of British power, Palmerston did not hesitate to bombard the Greek port of Piraeus in 1850 and to rip Hong Kong from China, all in the name of the right of British merchants and seamen to pursue trade without danger to their persons or property, even if the trade was in opium. Even imperial Great Britain threatened him with censure for going too far with gunboat diplomacy, but Palmerston always managed to rescue himself with an appeal to British pride, comparing anyone who carried a British passport to St. Paul, who could say, Civis Romanus sum, or “I am a British subject,” and be sure that he could travel where he willed.

Palmerston, like his longtime rival and ultimate partner Lord John Russell, did not hesitate to ignore Queen Victoria’s clear constitutional right to be informed of all the details of foreign policy. Whether fearing that she would refuse her assent, or out of simple impetuosity, the great Liberal duet had no hesitation about showing the queen only as much as she might be expected to approve, and writing secret instructions to British envoys abroad on private stationery, bearing no indication of the writer’s cabinet office. The fact that Queen Victoria referred to Lords Palmerston and Russell as “those terrible old men” is scarcely surprising.

Most of Palmerston’s biographers bemoan the fact that he was not foreign secretary during the disaster known as the Crimean War. At the end of the war, when all that was left was to repair the damage as well as possible, he became prime minister at the age of seventy-one. He held that office for the first time in 1855-1858. His constant preoccupation for the rest of his life was to remain Napoleon III’s confidant and collaborator to avert any possibility that Bonapartist adventurism might start anew the wars he remembered clearly from his youth.

Palmerston was an enthusiastic supporter of Italian unification. He was one of the original authors of the intervention in Mexico and was also the first to abandon any military role in that country in 1862, though he did recognize Emperor Maximilian during his short-lived empire.

Palmerston proclaimed his neutrality during the American Civil War, but his every gesture offered moral and material support to the Confederacy. To ardent Northerners such as the historian George Bancroft, Palmerston came to personify British hostility toward the United States.

Palmerston’s second and final tenure of the prime ministership, 1859-1865, witnessed British ineffectiveness during the Polish Revolt of 1863 as well as the German-Danish war of 1864. To the end, however, Palmerston was in control of policy; on his deathbed he was engaged in checking, line by line, the text of a new Belgian treaty. He died, two days before his eighty-first birthday, on October 18, 1865.

Significance

Lord Palmerston remained a man of the eighteenth century whose unconcern for the rigid conventions of Victorian Great Britain never alienated the public. Perhaps, in a perverse sort of way, he charmed a generation of Englishmen who could not imagine behaving privately as he behaved so nonchalantly in public. He was the delight of cartoonists, always the bully prizefighter with his shirt off, ready to knock the crowns off the heads of kings. He was adept at manipulating the press. Throughout his later career, his financial interests in newspapers that carried his “leaked news” and “authentic” copies of state papers was a matter of debate. Above all else, this aristocrat, so hostile to democracy, understood the role of the printing press in exploiting public opinion.

It was his good fortune to live during Great Britain’s era of Splendid Isolation, when, safe behind her ocean wall and guarded by the greatest navy in the world, London needed neither allies nor long-term treaties to feel secure. In the springtime of free trade, British goods could undersell competitors, and no foreign products threatened British prosperity. Lord Palmerston dwelt in an age of optimism, fearless of the future.

Bibliography

Bell, Herbert C. F. Lord Palmerston. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1966. A solid two-volume study, giving a splendid overview of the life of the third Viscount Palmerston.

Blumberg, Arnold. The Diplomacy of the Mexican Empire, 1863-1867. Malabar, Fla.: Krieger, 1987. Makes use of British diplomatic correspondence that reveals Palmerston’s original authorship of the London Convention of 1861, authorizing British, French, and Spanish military intervention in Mexico. It traces the British withdrawal of 1862 and the subsequent British diplomatic attitude toward Maximilian’s empire.

Brown, David. Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy, 1846-1855. New York: Palgrave, 2002. An analysis of the conditions in Great Britain which influenced Palmerston’s foreign policy. Describes the impact of Palmerston’s foreign policy upon the development of the Liberal Party and how he mobilized public opinion in support of his foreign policy goals.

Case, Lynn M., and Warren F. Spencer. The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974. Reveals the close Anglo-French entente maintained by Lords Palmerston and Russell concerning the policy pursued toward the Union and the Confederacy.

Chambers, James. Palmerston, “The People’s Darling.” London: John Murray, 2004. Comprehensive biography tracing Palmerston’s life and career, describing the personal and professional characteristics that made him one of the most influential statesmen in British history.

Ingle, Harold N. Nesselrode and the Russian Rapprochement with Britain, 1836-1844. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Describes the brief period when Russia made a sincere effort to come to an amicable understanding with Great Britain for a division of the Near Eastern pie.

Southgate, Donald.“The Most English Minister”: The Policies and Politics of Palmerston. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966. This readable study brings Palmerston to life and describes the impact of the man on British policy.

Thomas, Daniel H. The Guarantee of Belgian Independence and Neutrality in European Diplomacy, 1830’s-1930’s. Kingston, R.I.: D. H. Thomas, 1983. Palmerston’s greatest accomplishment and his lifelong preoccupation were tied in with Belgian independence and neutrality. This massive volume is the best study of the subject.

Victoria, Queen of Great Britain. Regina v Palmerston: The Correspondence Between Queen Victoria and Her Foreign and Prime Minister, 1837-1865. Edited by Brian Connell. London: Evans Brothers, 1962. Uses the letters exchanged to trace the gradual deterioration of their personal relationship. Connell allows the correspondents to speak for themselves but intersperses his own comment, making the entire series understandable and entertaining for the amateur historian.

Webster, Sir Charles. The Foreign Policy of Palmerston, 1830-1841: Britain, the Liberal Movement, and the Eastern Question. 2 vols. New York: Humanities Press, 1969. This two-volume work deals only with Palmerston’s first term as Foreign Secretary. It is, nevertheless, the key to understanding his philosophy on international relations, applicable to his entire career. Making extensive use of unpublished primary sources, including Palmerston’s papers, this ambitious study is definitive.

Ziegler, Paul R. Palmerston. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Biography describing how Palmerston, though an aristocrat, identified with the people of Great Britain and helped usher them into the modern age.