Palmerston: Foreign Secretary, Liberal imperialist

Lord Palmerston engraving
Public domain

If the 1840s was Peel's decade, the following decade belonged to  Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784-1865), Foreign Secretary in Lord John Russell’s Whig government and later Prime Minister.

Early career

Palmerston was the eldest of five children of the 3nd viscount. He inherited his peerage in 1802 at the age of seventeen, and as it was an Irish peerage, he always sat in the Commons. The family owned East Sheen in London, Broadlands in Hampshire and 10,000 acres in County Sligo. The name of the title was taken from the village of Palmerston on the family estates outside Dublin. 


Although he is always seen as a Victorian politician, intellectually and culturally he was a product of the Georgian age. He was educated first at Edinburgh University and then at St John’s College Cambridge, where he identified himself as a supporter of Pitt the Younger. In the general election of 1807 he contested Pitt's old seat, Cambridge University. He lost, but on the following day he was returned for Newport, a pocket borough on the Isle of Wight. However, he sat for the university from 1811 to 1831.


In 1809 he became secretary at war (a non cabinet post) in Spencer Perceval's Tory government. He continued to serve as secretary for war in the administrations of subsequent prime ministers, George Canning, Viscount Goderich and the duke of Wellington. But he resigned from Wellington’s government in May 1828 over its refusal to allow even moderate parliamentary reform. After twenty years of being continuously in government, he now found himself on the opposition benches. From being a Tory he became a Whig.

High society and marriage

In these years out of office he refused any post that would have taken him away from London society. His social life centred on Almack’s social club, and its three principal hostesses, all probably his mistresses: Lady Jersey, daughter-in-law of the Regent’s mistress, the Princess Dorothea Lieven, wife of the Russian ambassador, and the beautiful and vivacious Lady Cowper, born Emily Lamb, Lord Melbourne’s sister. He is thought to have been the father of three of her five surviving children. Unsurprisingly, he became known as 'Lord Cupid'.

Emily Cowper, née Lamb
by William Owen
Public domain

He married Emily in December 1839 a rather decorous two years after her husband's death, and perhaps because neither had great expectations of the other’s fidelity, the marriage worked very well.

In 1835 he became foreign secretary under Melbourne, but lost office with the Tory victory in 1841. By this time he represented the market town of Tiverton - his interests as a racehorse owner made this a very congenial constituency. When Peel fell and the Whigs returned to office, he became foreign secretary in Lord John Russell’s government.

Political Views

1. Liberalism and conservatism
Palmerston was a Whig – but a conservative one. The Reform Act of 1832 was too radical for his taste and he took care to stress its finality, proclaiming his confidence that the landed interest would continue to prevail in politics. But though he had his reservations about the act, he was convinced that it had prevented revolution and created social peace – and that this gave him the right to lecture 'less enlightened' foreign autocrats in order to persuade them to behave like 'sensible' Whigs.

2. Nationalism
Palmerston was a British nationalist. Towards the end of his life Gladstone told a story of 

'A Frenchman, thinking to be highly complimentary, said to Palmerston, “If I were not a Frenchman, I should wish to be an Englishman”: to which Pam replied, “If I were not an Englishman, I should wish to be an Englishman”.'

He declared that Britain had no permanent allies, only permanent interests. There were no 'special relationships'. For example, he supported Greek independence partly because it would weaken Turkey, and Belgian independence so long as it did not strengthen France. But he was initially lukewarm about Italian and Hungarian nationalism because he believed it was important to maintain Austria as a great power.

The only great powers he saw as a possible threat to British interests were Russia and France and it was his objective never to find them arrayed together against Britain. However he showed a more liberal face from 1849 in the wake of the failed revolutions of the previous year, when he supported liberal revolutions, and his belligerence earned him the hostility of the Queen and Prince Albert. Between themselves they called him 'Pilgerstein' (a rather heavy Germanic pun based on 'palmer' = 'pilgrim' + stone), and they dreaded the possibility that he might become Prime Minister.

The Don Pacifico Case

Don David Pacifico, who called himself the Chevalier Pacifico, was a Spanish Jewish merchant born in Gibraltar, with a British passport. But he had lived all his early life in Portugal and had become a naturalized Portuguese subject. In 1839 he had been appointed Portuguese Consul in Athens. On arriving in Athens, he had taken the precaution of applying to the British legation for a British passport, apparently without mentioning the fact that he had been naturalized Portuguese. In Easter 1847 his house was ransacked by an anti-Semitic mob, and his wife’s jewellery stolen – with the police looking on all the while.

The case was taken up by British officials, who on his behalf claimed financial compensation from the Greek government. When the government refused to give satisfaction, Pacifico wrote to Palmerston:

‘I am an English subject and of the Jewish religion.’

On 11 May 1847 Palmerston wrote to the Greek government warning them that if compensation were not paid to Pacifico, the British government would be reluctantly compelled to use force. Then no action was taken for two years.

At the end of 1849 a British fleet was in the eastern Mediterranean because of British fears about Turkey. This enabled Palmerston to revive the claims for Don Pacifico to be compensated. In January 1850 the fleet arrived off Piraeus and a note was sent to the Greek foreign minister telling him that unless compensation was paid the British Navy would act against Greek shipping. When the Greeks continued to refuse, the port was blockaded and Greek ships were seized. In spite of protests from Russia and France (they were co-protectors of the Greek state and their offer of mediation was ignored), the Greeks had to surrender in April. Don Pacifico them paid compensation to the individual Greeks who had suffered loss through the British action, and the blockade was called off.

On 17 June, the Conservative leader, Lord Stanley (soon to become earl of Derby and already a member of the Lords because of a peerage that had been granted him), moved a motion of censure on the government for their conduct towards Greece. This was carried 169/132. In response Palmerston backtracked somewhat and agreed to refer Pacifico’s case to arbitration. (In due course Pacifico’s compensation was greatly reduced.) He offered to resign, but Russell refused to accept his resignation in spite of pressure from the Queen – he knew that his government could not do without him. On 20 June Disraeli, the Conservative leader in the Commons, then called for Russell and his government to resign. Russell responded by calling  for a vote of confidence. He praised Palmerston, declaring that his foreign secretary

‘will not act as the Minister of Austria, or as the Minister of Russia or of France, or of any other country, but as the Minister for England’.

The debate began on 24 June, lasted four nights, and represented the greatest victory of Palmerston’s political career. Gladstone, Cobden, Disraeli and Peel all spoke against him. Gladstone accused him of

‘a rash desire, a habitual desire of interference’;

Peel (a few days before his death) accused him of converting diplomacy from a ‘costly engine for maintaining peace’ into an agency of ‘angry correspondence’. But Palmerston won by 310 votes to 264 after his remarkable civis Romanus sum speech delivered on 25 June. 

The problem for Palmerston's opponents was that so many inside and outside parliament approved of his posturings abroad, and his critics were limited to a small number of educated people. The great mass of the working classes were firmly convinced that the vote in the Lords against him was part of an upper-class and foreign conspiracy to get rid of him. Peel’s untimely death removed his only possible rival. So to the annoyance of Victoria and Albert, he remained in office.

General Haynau

Baron Julius Jacob von Haynau was the military governor of Lombardy, then an Austrian possession. Following the failed revolution of 1848, Haynau had retaliated by seizing hostages, imposing collective fines, and billeting troops on householders in streets where insurrections had occurred. In some cases he ordered men, and even women, to be flogged. The British press denounced these atrocities, and in spite of his pro-Austrian sympathies, Palmerston became very indignant. In the following year Hanyau repeated this conduct in central Italy as General Radetzky’s troops moved on Rome to suppress the Roman Republic.

General Haynau, the brutal
governor of Lombardy
Unknown painter
Public domain

In September 1850 Haynau visited England, where he was bitterly hated as ‘General Hyena’. When he visited the show-case modern brewery of Barclay, Perkins & Co in Southwark, he was set upon by the workers who shouted ‘Down with the Austrian Butcher’, gave him a sound thrashing, and hauled him through the streets by his famous gold moustaches. He fled to a public house where he was rescued by the river police. 

The Queen immediately demanded that the government should send an apology to the Austrian government for this outage against ‘one of the Emperor’s distinguished generals’. Palmerston, who was privately delighted at the attack, wrote an official dispatch to Vienna, in which he expressed regret but also stated that Haynau should never have come to England. He added that it would be foolish for the Austrian government to being a prosecution against the workers, as if they were put in trial the defence counsel would bring up all Haynau’s atrocities. The Queen was indignant at his language and demanded an unreserved apology – but Palmerston told her that the despatch had already been sent to Vienna. She then insisted that he send a new dispatch – which he did after previously telling Russell that he would resign rather than do so.

The Queen’s anger with Palmerston was understandable. In August Albert had drafted a memorandum, which she then sent to Russell. It demanded that Palmerston should give an undertaking not to send of any dispatches without consulting her and to give her an accurate summary of all his conversations with foreign ministers. Russell believed that this memorandum was so humiliating that Palmerston would never accept it – but he did and in a personal audience told Victoria how much he regretted offending her.

The (temporary) fall of Palmerston

On 2 December 1851, the anniversary of his uncle's victory at Austerlitz, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, President of the French Second Republic, mounted a coup, dissolving the National Assembly and arrested the Republican leaders. 

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte
nephew of the great Napoleon
Unknown artist
Public domain

The day after the coup Palmerston expressed ‘entire approbation’ to the French ambassador, not because he had a high opinion of Louis Napoleon, but because he though a stable France was in Britain’s interest. He also wrote a letter to the British ambassador in Paris expressing the same opinion. He carried out both these actions without consulting the Queen or the cabinet. The Queen demanded that Russell dismiss Palmerston. On 19 December Russell sent him a short note dismissing him, and replaced him by his friend, Lord Granville. Palmerston withdrew to Broadlands and did not hand over the seals of office until 26 December.

On 3 February 1852 the House re-assembled. Russell explained the reasons for Palmerston’s dismissal and read out the Queen’s memorandum of August 1850. Palmerston’s Radical supporters were deeply shocked and he gave a very halting speech in his defence. His dismissal from the Foreign Office ended his radical phase.

Palmerston did not take his dismissal lying down. He had his revenge against Russell, when on 16 February 1852 the government proposed a national militia (caused by fears of a revived France under Louis Napoleon). Palmerston put forward an amendment, the government refused to accept it, but it was nevertheless carried on 20 February by 13 votes. A humiliated Russell resigned. Palmerston wrote to his brother:

‘I have had my tit-for-tat for John Russell, and I turned him out on Friday last.’

Conclusion

1. Palmerston came late to Liberalism, having been a Tory for the early part of his political career. 
2. He specialised in flamboyant gestures which infuriated Victoria and Albert and sometimes created difficulties for British diplomacy.
3. He was the most popular politician of his day, his appeal crossing the normal political boundaries.