Palmerston

“ Norman Court, June 16th.—Every day it appears more and more evident that Palmerston's political career is drawing to a close, and he alone seems blind to the signs which denote it. Few things are stranger than the violent reaction which has deprived him of his popularity, and made him an object of bitter aversion to a considerable part of the Liberals, not only to such men as Graham and Bright, but even to many of his former followers and adherents. ”

“ Does it not strike you that a good view of Palmerston’s character might be taken from considering how essentially the man was English, and that in no other assembly than a British House of Commons would his qualities have had the same sway and influence? All that intense vitality and rich geniality would have been totally powerless in Austria, France, Italy, or even America. None would have accepted the glorious nature of the man, or the element of statesmanship, as the House accepted it. ”

“ Palmerston, who is the most obstinate man alive in pressing any object he has once set his mind upon, was sure to press the French Government with the utmost vehemence and pertinacity as soon as he found there was a chance of making them yield to his will. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The situation, indeed, was just such a one as the soul of Palmerston loved. There was danger and excitement, the necessity of decision, the opportunity for action, on every hand. A disciple of Canning, with an English gentleman's contempt and dislike of foreign potentates deep in his heart, the spectacle of the popular uprisings, and of the oppressors bundled ignominiously out of the palaces they had disgraced, gave him unbounded pleasure, and he was determined that there should be no doubt whatever, all over the Continent, on which side in the great struggle England stood. ”

“ He also marked his sense of the loss which the nation had sustained, in the disappearance of an illustrious man, by giving his noble-minded and broken-hearted widow the refusal of a peerage.
Meanwhile, Lord Palmerston, on the strength of the vote of confidence in the Commons, was somewhat of a popular hero. People who believe that England can do no wrong, at least abroad, believed in him. His audacity delighted the man in the club. ”

“ After the death of Lord Palmerston an element of passion was infused into public life which was very uncongenial to his temperament, and English politics passed into phases in which caution, character, judgment, and knowledge were less prized than brilliant strokes that appealed to the popular imagination, clever coalitions, a skilful barter of principles for votes. ”

“ But his disagreement with the details of Palmerston's policy was in reality merely a symptom of the fundamental differences between the characters of the two men. In Albert's eyes Palmerston was a coarse, reckless egotist, whose combined arrogance and ignorance must inevitably have their issue in folly and disaster. Nothing could be more antipathetic to him than a mind so strangely lacking in patience, in reflection, in principle, and in the habits of ratiocination. ”

“ Disturbances in Canada during the early months of 1838 roused differences of opinion in the House of Commons, which imperilled their position, but the crisis passed. 'The queen is as steady to us as ever,' wrote Palmerston on 14 April 1838, 'and was in the depth of despair when she thought we were iu danger of being turned out. She keeps well in health, and even in London takes long rides into the country, which have done her great good' (Ashley, Life of Palmerston, i. 344) . ”

“ The one thing in the world which he loved supremely was power, and, as long as this was secured, he did not trouble himself much about the political complexion of his associates. "Palmerston does not care how much dirt he eats, so long as it is gilded dirt;" and, if gilded dirt be the right description of office procured by flexible politics, Palmerston ate, in his long career, an extraordinary amount of it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Palmerston, in whom his ancient Russian antipathies are revived, is for vigour, and as in former times 'leading John Russell by the nose,' Clarendon and Aberdeen for moderation; but he is beset by different opinions and written suggestions and proposals, and all this worries him exceedingly. ”

“ The first two volumes of a ‘Life of Viscount Palmerston’ appeared in 1870. Four years afterwards a third volume was issued from the press posthumously. He died very suddenly on 23 May 1872 at Naples. As he died without issue, his title became extinct. The sweetness of his disposition and his high-bred manner rendered him a universal favourite. Habitually sauntering through society with an air of languor, he veiled the keenest observation under an aspect of indifference. Whenever in his more delicate negotiations he was in reality the most cautious, he was seemingly the most negligent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ June 29th.—I have been for two days in the country, while 346 the great debate was going on. Palmerston came out the second night with prodigious force and success. He delivered an oration four hours and three-quarters long, which has excited unusual admiration, boundless enthusiasm amongst his friends, and drawn forth the most flattering compliments from every quarter. It is impossible to deny its great ability ”

“ Lord John knew, however, that the Liberal camp was full of politicians who were neither hot nor cold—men who had slipped into Parliament on easy terms, only to reveal the fact that their prejudices were many and their convictions few. They sheltered themselves under the great prestige of Lord Palmerston, and represented his policy of masterly inactivity, rather than the true sentiments of the nation. Lord Palmerston was as jaunty as ever; but all things are not possible even to the ablest man, at seventy-five. ”

“ The English public is another Ruggiero, and Palmerston is another Alcine. Although a septuagenarian, and since 1807 occupying the public stage almost without interruption, he contrives to remain a novelty, and to evoke all the hopes that used to centre on an untried and promising youth. With one foot in the grave, he is supposed not yet to have begun his true career. If he were to die to-morrow, all England would be surprised to learn that he had been a Secretary of State half this century.
If not a good statesman of all work, he is at least a good actor of all work. ”

“ Palmerston was weak and inefficient, and it is pretty certain that he was taken by surprise, and was unprepared for all that John Russell brought forward. Not a man of weight or influence said a word for him, nobody but Milnes and Dudley Stuart. The Queen's letter was decisive, for it was evident that his conduct must have been intolerable to elicit such charges and rebukes; and it cannot fail to strike everybody that no man of common spirit, and who felt a consciousness of innocence, would have brooked anything so insulting. ”

“ I find there are not two opinions about Palmerston's conduct, and those who think so are ignorant how bad it is, because they know nothing of what passed between Lord John 418 and him. I have had two long letters from Graham all about Palmerston and the new Reform Bill. With regard to the latter he is full of gloomy apprehensions, and seems in a state of contradiction with himself, desperately afraid lest John Russell should go too far, and equally afraid he should not go far enough. With all his ability he is a most strange and inconsistent politician. ”

“ Many politicians thought that this would be regarded by Austria as equivalent to a declaration of war. The Cabinet remonstrated, and Palmerston, to their relief and surprise, yielded. A day or two after this, Greville saw Lord John Russell and Palmerston at Windsor, “mighty merry and cordial, laughing and talking together. Those breezes leave nothing behind, particularly with Palmerston, [Pg 162] who never loses his temper, and treats everything with levity and gayety.” But Palmerston docile was more dangerous than Palmerston pugnacious. ”

“ It must be owned that Palmerston has conducted himself well under the circumstances, without any air of triumph or boasting either over his colleagues or his opponents or the French. He has deserved his success by the moderation with which he has taken it. I saw Bourqueney last night, delighted with all that was said in Parliament, especially, of course, by the Duke and Peel, but well satisfied with John Russell and Palmerston, and he owned the tone of the latter was unexceptionable. ”

“ As far as Palmerston himself is concerned, he will as usual escape unscathed, quite ready to plunge into any fresh scrape to-morrow, uncorrected and unchecked; he bears a charmed life in politics, he is so popular and so dexterous that he is never at a loss, nor afraid, nor discomposed. He is supported by his own party; the Peelites will not attack him for fear of hurting the Government; and he is the pet of the Radicals, to whom he pays continual court, giving them sops in the shape of Liberal speeches, Hungarian sympathies, and claptrap—unmeaning verbiage of different sorts. ”

“ In private life his gaiety, his buoyancy, his high breeding, made even his political opponents forget their differences; and even the warmest altercations on public affairs were merged in his large hospitality and cordial social relations. In this respect he was aided with consummate ability by the tact and grace of Lady Palmerston, the widow of the 5th Earl Cowper, whom he married at the close of 1839, and who died in 1869. She devoted herself with enthusiasm to all her husband's interests and pursuits, and she made his house the most attractive centre of society in London, if not in Europe. ”

“ He had wrestled with the terrible Lord Palmerston, the embodiment of {175} all that was most hostile to him in the spirit of England, and his redoubtable opponent had been overthrown. [27] Was England herself at his feet? It might be so; and yet ... it is said that the sons of England have a certain tiresome quality: they never know when they are beaten. It was odd, but Palmerston was positively still jaunty. Was it possible? Could he believe, in his blind arrogance, that even his ignominious dismissal from office was something that could be brushed aside? ”

“ 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. ”

“ No matter what storm raged, Palmerston always contrived to come to the surface again like a cork. He never lost his self-possession, and a profound sense of his own infallibility helped him, under difficulties and rebuffs which would have knocked the spirit out of other men, to adopt the attitude of the patriotic statesman struggling with adversity. When the session of 1849 closed he was in an extremely difficult position, in consequence of the growing dislike in high quarters to his policy, and the coolness which had sprung up between himself and the majority of his colleagues ”

“ 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. ”

“ But whenever they discover that he is not to be trusted, they take advantage of his first mistake to combine with his enemies and overthrow him. In the new Parliament of 1857, it was therefore clear that Palmerston’s personal ascendency would last till the party of Parliamentary Reform discovered that they had absolutely nothing to expect from him, save open or concealed hostility. It was because the Queen did not grasp this fact that she was startled to find, a few months after Parliament met, how rapidly Palmerston’s popularity was waning. ”