Lord Palmerston

“ Lord Palmerston, during his whole life after he had come to think of these things, and especially during the strongest part of his life in which he presided at the Foreign Office, held the British view, and would not allow himself to be driven from it for a moment. A constitutional king did not, as he thought, rule in the sense of holding the strings of national policy in his own hands. In defence of his view, he was authoritative, imperious, arrogant,—sometimes even tyrannical, if you will. The bull-dog can hardly hold tight by his bone without crushing it. ”

“ I know that will is that England, having engaged in a war necessary and just, in concert with our great ally and neighbour, France, must and shall succeed.’ From the moment he was Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston felt that he held a trust higher than the interests of party, and not in the utmost fervour of debate, not in the most unguarded moment of social converse, could an expression pass his lips which, in discrediting his adversaries, cast a slur upon the name of England. ”

“ Lively, well-bred, and unaffected, Lord Palmerston is a man that is so well acquainted with the routine of official duties, performs them so readily and pleasantly, and is so free from the assumption of self-importance that too frequently appertains to adepts in them, that, whether Whig or Tory government has the ascendant in England, his services will be always considered a desideratum to be secured if possible. ”

“ And a thorough loyalty to a party of nearly a quarter of a century’s duration may serve to make a man a Whig or Tory, as far as the name goes. Lord Palmerston had, almost by accident, fallen among the Whigs, having submitted himself to the genius of Mr. Canning, who, though influenced by liberal ideas, was no Whig; and then, on Canning’s death, had leagued himself with Huskisson, upon whose shoulders as much of Canning’s mantle had fallen as they were able to carry. ”

“ There is not a province in our vast colonial empire, and there are few civilised nations in the world, which will hear without an emotion of regret that Lord Palmerston no longer guides the policy of England. Never again will that familiar voice be heard in the councils of Europe, or in the British Senate, of which he almost seemed a part, never again will that native gaiety of spirits enliven the social circle in which he loved to move. ”

“ No schoolboy was ‘so fond of a breaking-up as Lord Palmerston is of a junket and pleasuring.’ Their life is made a ‘toil of pleasure.’
Early in April 1802 Palmerston was very ill, but ‘in good spirits, cracking his jokes and reading from morning to night.’ He died of an ossified throat at his house in Hanover Square, London, on 16 April 1802. His widow died at Broadlands (the family seat near Romsey, Hampshire, which Palmerston had greatly enlarged and adorned) on 20 Jan. ”

“ At a recent meeting in London to protest against the action of the British Embassy in the present controversy between Russia and Turkey, a gentleman who presumed to find special fault with Lord Palmerston was saluted and silenced by a storm of indignant hisses. The meeting evidently thought that if Russia had a friend in the ministry, it was not the noble viscount, and would no doubt have rent the air with cheers had some one been able to announce that his lordship had become prime minister. ”

“ We find no fault with other nations for pursuing their interests; and they ought not to find fault with us, if, in pursuing our interests, our course may be different from theirs.’
Lord Palmerston held that the real policy of this country was to be the champion of justice and right, though professing no sympathy with the notion that England ought to become, to borrow his own expression, the Quixote of the world. ”

“ My noble friend [Lord Palmerston] has spoken of the miseries of civil war, as well he may; but no word has ever fallen from his lips which implies that anyone was entitled to cast censure on the American Government for the contest in which they are engaged.
Who are we that we should speak of civil war as in no circumstance possible or permissible? Do we not remember that our own liberties have been secured through every form and variety of civil war? How much blood has been shed in the streets of this ancient capital of Edinburgh! ”

“ Objections to Lord John’s proposals for Parliamentary reform at best only half explains the position, and behind such repugnance lay hostility to Lord Aberdeen’s vacillating policy on [238] the Eastern Question. The nation accepted Lord Palmerston’s resignation in a matter-of-fact manner, which probably surprised no one more than himself. The Derbyites, oddly enough, made the most pother about the affair; but a man on the verge of seventy, and especially one like Lord Palmerston with few illusions, is apt to regard the task of forming a new party as a game which is not worth the candle. ”

“ On the contrary, take the case of Lord Palmerston. He is not implicitly trusted by any strong party in the state; and yet, in the House of Commons, no man can produce a greater effect, or possesses a larger personal influence. And why is this? Because he can carry an audience along with him—because he is never frigid, never dull, never addicted to circumlocution—because he possesses and exerts energy in a high degree; and is, in truth, what few of his contemporaries can claim to be—an orator. ”

“ At first his lordship was highly astonished that Sir Stratford's motion should be of "so trifling a character." "You," exclaimed Sir Robert Peel, "are the first English minister who dares to call trifles the protection of the British property and commerce." "No individual merchant," said Lord Palmerston, "was entitled to ask Her Majesty's Government to give an opinion on questions of such sort as the right of Russia to the sovereignty of Circassia, or to establish those customs and sanitary regulations she was enforcing by the power of her arms." ”

“ It was Under the Duke of Portland, as a special friend and follower of Canning, that Lord Palmerston took his place as a Government servant, in April, 1807. As such he remained, with six intervals, amounting in all to about nine years, till on 16th October, 1865, he died at Brocket Hall, in Hertfordshire, in the same house in which Lord Melbourne, whose brother-in-law he became, had previously died in 1848. For four or five months of his life,—in the winter of 1834-35,—he was without a seat in Parliament, till in the April of that year he found himself landed in a safe refuge in Tiverton. ”

“ The right thing to do must be the right thing, whether Lord Aberdeen or Lord Palmerston be in power. When some vital question comes up as to the spreading or confining the British Empire in India, and adding a new nation to our responsibilities, then there may be a difference in policy, and one set of Ministers may fail to carry out the projects of their predecessors. But in the ordinary affairs of European politics, in which clear-seeing eyes may certainly discern what honesty demands, Whigs and Tories, Liberals and Conservatives, will be found “acting very much alike.” ”

“ With none of her Ministers has the Queen ever been in sharper conflict than with Lord Palmerston. From his third Foreign Secretaryship in 1846 till his dismissal in 1852, the history of their relations was one long struggle.
Palmerston considered himself the political inheritor of Canning’s foreign policy, and that he was bound, as the representative of England to foreign Governments, to be the upholder of political liberty and the foe of tyranny and oppression all over Europe. In this he carried with him the whole-hearted sympathy of the mass of English public opinion. ”

“ It is now time to return to the performances of the noble lord in the foreign branch of policy.
In 1823, when, in consequence of the resolutions of the Congress of Vienna, a French army was marched into Spain, in order to overturn the Constitution of that country, and to deliver it up to the merciless revenge of the Bourbon idiot and his suite of bigot monks, Lord Palmerston disclaimed any "Quixotic crusades for abstract principles," any intervention in favour of the people, whose heroic resistance had saved England from the sway of Napoleon. ”

“ It is not in our power to command success, but it is enough for us to do all in our power to obtain it. That we have done. In a cause which we consider to be just, necessary, and honourable, we confidently place our trust in a Higher Power.’ Mr. Disraeli was beaten by a majority of one hundred, and{209} the Government confirmed in the hands of Lord Palmerston.
“From that night he was a kind of monarch in England. We learned to call him Old Pam, and to love him better than any Prime Minister was ever loved throughout the three kingdoms. ”

“ The prime minister was the Earl of Aberdeen; but Lord Palmerston was the commanding genius of the cabinet, controlling as foreign minister the diplomacy of the country in stormy times. He was experienced, versatile, liberal, popular, and ready in debate. His foreign policy was vigorous and aggressive, raising England in the estimation of foreigners, and making her the most formidable Power in Europe. His diplomatic and administrative talents were equally remarkable, so that he held office of some kind in every successive administration but one for fifty years. ”

“ Personally Lord Palmerston was the last man in London that a cautious private secretary wanted to know. Other Prime Ministers may perhaps have lived who inspired among diplomatists as much distrust as Palmerston, and yet between Palmerston’s word and Russell’s word, one hesitated to decide, and gave years of education to deciding, whether either could be trusted, or how far. ”

“ Lord Palmerston was too intent on public life to allow him a moment in which to hark back upon what was past I think it is the case that a statesman generally dies out of the memory of his contemporaries very quickly. Some savour of Palmerston and Peel does remain; but almost none of Melbourne and Aberdeen. Soon there will be but little of Disraeli. ”

“ The Queen concludes Lord John Russell has read the accounts of Kossuth's arrival in to-day's papers.
She wishes Lord John could still try to prevent Lord Palmerston from receiving him. The effect it will have abroad will do us immense harm. At all events, Lord John should take care to have it understood that the Government have not sanctioned it, and that it is a private act of Lord Palmerston's.
The Queen will else have again to submit to insults and affronts, which are the result of Lord Palmerston's conduct. ”

“ Or how shall a man tell a fact so as to induce belief unless he be instructed in the way of doing so? Such was Lord Palmerston’s oratory. In the longest, and most telling speeches which he made, he seems never to have thought of the reflex effect upon himself. In his great effort on the Don Pacifico impeachment, or in his reply to Mr. Disraeli in the attack made on Lord Russell in regard to Denmark, his object was to leave such an impression on men’s minds that they should ultimately be brought to show their agreement with his side of the question by the votes which they were to give. ”

“ As usual, Lord Palmerston had his own ideas and the courage of them. Within three weeks of the Russell Memorandum to the Cabinet he accordingly stood out in his true [173] colours as a frank opportunist. The guiding rule of his foreign policy, he stated, was to promote and advance, as far as lay in his power, the interests of the country as opportunity served and as necessity arose. ‘We have no everlasting union with this or that country—no identification of policy with another. We have no natural enemies—no perpetual friends. ”

“ Lord Palmerston's foreign policy was equally noteworthy in other quarters of the globe. If he could do little for the revolution in Poland, he could at least preserve constitutionalism in the Peninsula, where it was threatened by Dom Miguel in Portugal, and, after the death of Ferdinand in 1833, by Don Carlos in Spain. On the 22nd of April, 1834, Palmerston, in concert with Talleyrand, now French Minister in London, drew up the Quadruple Treaty, by which the two Powers undertook to deliver the Peninsula from the Absolutist pretenders. ”

“ Lord Palmerston is the man who has had the wisdom to discern how English society is to be ruled during the current decennial period.
In the absence of all strong political passions and feelings, the statesman who is a good-humoured embodiment of the public opinion of his country is our appropriate chief. When we are not running crazy about a war, or engaged in mad speculation, the characteristic of English society is common sense. Lord Palmerston is common sense personified. He knows how to deal with men, and therefore men like to deal with him. ”

“ The last really Tory Government in England, which had now become extinct, was that of Lord Liverpool and Lord Eldon; and even their Toryism grows pale when compared with that of the Ministers who had assisted George III. in taxing the Americans.
When Mr. Canning became Prime Minister, he was desirous of keeping the seals of the Foreign Office in his own hands, and with this object offered to Lord Palmerston the place of Chancellor of the Exchequer, with a seat in the Cabinet. ”

“ Lord John immediately resigned, by no means with the good-will of his colleagues. Lord John had been leader of the House, and on his desertion the defence of Lord Aberdeen and of the Duke of Newcastle was left to Lord Palmerston. He said, which was true enough, that our misfortunes had come from the inexperience caused by a long peace. The House divided on Mr. Roebuck’s motion, and the Ministry were defeated by a great majority. It was found that 305 members followed Mr. Roebuck into the lobby against only 148, who supported the Government. ”