The Times Great Victorian Lives

For some 20 years, amid all sorts of changes, he held the same appointment. Lord Liverpool succeeded Perceval as Premier – still Palmerston held to the War-office. Canning reigned in the room of Lord Liverpool – still Palmerston was found at the War-office. Lord Goderich assumed the position of Canning-still Palmerston remained at the War-office. The Duke of Wellington displaced Lord Goderich – still Palmerston and the War-office seemed to be inseparable. The secret of this devotion to the one office is partly to be found in the Secretary’s want of ambition, but chiefly in his perfect mastery of the business of his office at a time when it was of peculiar importance to his colleagues that it should be well represented in the House of Commons. During the first few years of his appointment he was the financer of the army, while we were engaged in the most costly war on which this country had ever entered, and when it was of the greatest moment that our resources should be turned to the best account. When the war came to an end, the Whigs, who had always been lukewarm in supporting it, joined with the Radicals in their outcry against standing armies and in their demand for retrenchment. As in our time the Manchester school of politicians required that our military establishments should be reduced to their condition in 1835, so, on the conclusion of peace, the refrain of many a debate through many a year of Parliament was that we should reduce our military establishments to their condition in 1792. It was in urging this policy of retrenchment that Joseph Hume first signalized himself; and it must be evident that, to meet the attacks of such an opponent, Lord Palmerston had a still more difficult game to play than when, backed with all the enthusiasm of the nation, he regulated the expenses of an army whose victories continually appealed to the national pride. He fought the battle of the Government with consummate skill, and by the accuracy of his information, the readiness of his wit, and the abundance of his good humour, sorely troubled honest Joseph Hume, who, compelled to take his seat silenced and discomfited, but neither convinced nor discouraged, would return to the charge on the following night, would read out sum upon sum, and would announce the ‘tottle of the whole’ with all the assurance of a man born with the multiplication table in his head but only to undergo a renewal of the process at the hands of his adroit adversary. If Lord Palmerston was thus successful in parrying the thrusts of his arithmetical opponents, it was in a great measure because he had a good case to defend, and because, being, as Hume termed him, ‘the alpha and the omega of the War-office, ’ he had imbued that department with his own spirit, introducing order where before there had been only confusion, efficiency where there had been only stagnation, and economy where all hadbeen profusion and waste. On one occasion, in reply to the attack of his indefatigable foe, he had the satisfaction of announcing a miracle which so staggered honest Joseph that he refused to believe it. He said that, by a careful supervision of past accounts and calling-up of arrears, he had for the two previous years been able to conduct the enormous business of his office without cost or charge to the country. Poor Hume, who was in those days very unpopular in the House, could not understand it, and insisted that the expenses had been increased; but it was only to see Lord Palmerston get up, and hear him, to the enjoyment of his audience, quote in his airiest style the ancient saying that there are but two things over which the immortal gods have no control – past events and arithmetic. Although Mr. Hume refused what the immortal gods are compelled to accept, the announcement of Lord Palmerston regarding the management of the War-office is by no means incredible to any one acquainted with the financial position of the various public departments during the early years of the present century. The state of our accounts was disgraceful. When Lord Henry Petty was Chancellor of the Exchequer, in 1806, he brought forward a Bill for the better auditing the public accounts, and on that occasion somewhat startled the House of Commons by the assertion that in some of the offices there had been no audit for more than 20 years, that in all the offices the accounts were more or less in arrear and apparently without check, and that, taking altogether, public money had been expended to the amount of 455,000,000l. which had never been accounted for, a sum at that time larger than the National Debt. The arrear and confusion, the peculation and the waste which Lord Palmerston found at the War-office were but a part of this extravagant system. He brought his clear head and his vigorous habit to bear upon it, and succeeded in repelling the attacks of Hume not less by the fact that he had of his own accord effected the most important reforms in his department than by that art offence of which he had the most perfect mastery.

Lord Palmerston in those days, we have said, rarely opened his mouth in the House of Commons, unless to propose the Army Estimates or to answer some question relating to the army. Whatever he did in this way was always remarkable for clearness and brevity, but otherwise his colleagues obtained from him very little assistance in debate. Canning in vain expressed the wish that he could bring ‘that three-decker Palmerston into action.’ Palmerston held to his post, thought only of the army, and refrained from general discussion so entirely that one of the many names which in his lifetime have been given to him was ‘the silent friend.’ In his first 20 years of office he probably did not rise to address the House of Commons on any subject beyond his own department more than a dozen times; and, curiously enough, on those rare occasions, it was not to questions of foreign policy, in which as a War Minister it might be supposed that he would be chiefly interested, that his attention was turned. He spoke of the Catholic claims, of the law of copyright, of the game laws, of usury laws, of church extension, of slavery, of electioneering. Only once did he canvass our foreign policy, and that was in the first speech which he delivered in Parliament. The speech was a defence of the celebrated expedition to Copenhagen-an expedition of which the only defence that could then be offered to the country was that the result had been most successful, while the information on the strength of which it had been projected could not on any account be divulged. It was a good speech, terse, clear, forcible; and we may remark, as something characteristic of Lord Palmerston’s first Parliamentary effort, that it was not only devoted to a question of foreign policy, it was also devoted to a defence of official secrecy, and it was a following of Canning’s lead.

This portion of Lord Palmerston’s career may be dismissed with the record of two more facts. The first is that on the 8th of April, 1818, as he was mounting the stairs of the Horse Guards, a pistol was fired at him by a half-pay lieutenant named Davies. He was only slightly hurt, the ball striking him above the hip and causing nothing more serious than a contusion. It was said that had he not turned quickly round when passing the corner of the baluster the bullet must have taken a fatal direction. The would-be assassin was tried, proved to be insane, and confined for life in Bedlam, where he only recently expired. The other fact to which we have alluded is of higher biographical importance, although our information with respect to it is rather general than particular. It is that Lord Palmerston joined with Croker and Peel in producing that series of satires against the Parliamentary Opposition which was published under the title of the New Whig Guide. How much he contributed to this work, which, after all, perhaps, did not do the Whigs any great damage, it is difficult to say; nor are we well informed as to those squibs of his which appeared in the John Bull. On the whole, the satire in which the Tories indulged in those days was more remarkable for its personality and bluffness than for either wit or elegance, and very little of it deserves to live. Satire is the great weapon of Opposition, and when a party firmly seated in power resorts to it they are generally driven to extremities, and goaded into anger. In that case they are apt to be unsparing in their abuse, they are inclined to tread on the opponent whom they have managed to trip, and they hope to win by bullying what they lose in fair fight. This is the character of most of those shafts launched by the Tories against the Liberal party; and if we are forced to make such a statement with regard to men of great ability, it is but right to add that much of what is so distasteful to us now was due, not to the coarseness of the men, but to the temptations of their position; and that had they changed places with the Whigs, the latter, even with such men as Sydney Smith and Thomas Moore among their number, might have been guilty of the same excesses. The Whigs were at a discount in the eyes of the nation; they were therefore compelled to be circumspect; they found it necessary to guard against the imputation of using insolence for invective and personality for logic; they were obliged to rest their cause on its merits, and to attack the Government with genuine arguments and genuine wit; whereas the Tories, rioting in power, were less nice in their choice of missiles, and found it for their interest to show upon some occasions that the sole difference between them and their opponents was one of personalities.

The turning point in Lord Palmerston’s career was now fast approaching. Hitherto he had been a member of the Government only in a subordinate capacity; he had never been a member of the Cabinet. Lord Liverpool’s Ministry was in its later years divided into two sections, the principal point of difference being solicited by the claims of the Catholics to emancipation. At the head of the one section was Canning, and he had followers in Mr. Robinson (Lord Goderich), in Huskisson, in Sir John Copley, and in Lord Palmerston. At the head of the other section was the Premier himself, while among those who sided with him were Lord Eldon, the Duke of Wellington, and Mr. Peel. Canning, it is well known, was the advocate of Catholic Emancipation – therefore, up to a certain limit, of Constitutional Reform; while, on the other hand, Peel bore the standard of commercial and juridical reform. The Canning party fully accepted the Peel reforms, but the Peel party had the utmost horror of any attempt to meddle with the Constitution, and were determined to stop the way. Therefore, when Lord Liverpool was struck down by paralysis, and when Canning, as the most popular man in the Cabinet, was requested to form a Ministry, his colleagues, who were opposed to the very small measure of constitutional reform implied in Catholic Emancipation, refused to stand by him, and he was compelled to look for aid in the first place from the subordinates of the Government, among whom was Palmerston, and in the second place from the more moderate Whigs, among whom were Lord Lansdowne and W. Lamb, afterwards Lord Melbourne. It was under these difficult circumstances, which forced Canning to the dubious expedient of a coalition, that Lord Palmerston was called to the Cabinet and put upon his mettle. Unfortunately the Coalition Ministry of 1827 shared the fate of all coalitions, and after it had put Canning to death, and Goderich, his successor, to his wits’ end, it went the way of all flesh. It served its purpose, however, in preparing the way for a new race of Ministers, of whom by far the most remarkable was Lord Palmerston. Of all the Tory Ministers who on this occasion coalesced with the Whigs he was attached to his party by the fewest number of ties, and was drawn to his political opponents by the greatest number. He was ripe for a quarrel with the men who had hunted his friend Canning to death, and he was ripe for a union with the men who had been his own companions at College and had sat with him at the feet of the eloquent professor of Whiggism. At first, however, his junction with the Whigs was not such as to preclude, when the Coalition fell to pieces, an acceptance of office under the Duke of Wellington, whose Government was pledged to oppose Reform. In the Duke’s Cabinet the Canningites found that they occupied by no means so high a place as in the previous Government; but it was less on personal grounds than on grounds of principle that Lord Palmerston felt the necessity of seceding from it; and it may be worth while to trace the steps by which he was led finally to change sides.

The Canningites agreed with the Whigs in their desire to emancipate Dissenters, both Catholic and Protestant; but they agreed with the Tories in their opposition to Parliamentary Reform. It was the opinion of Huskisson and Palmerston that by mitigating the more palpable abuses – by, for example, giving a member to Manchester–it might be possible to stave off more Radical measure of Reform. ‘I am anxious,’ said the latter, ‘to express my desire that the franchise should be extended to a great town, not because I am a friend to Reform in principle, but because I am its decided enemy. I think that extending the franchise to large towns is the only mode in which the House can avoid the adoption at some time or other of a general plan of Reform.’ Therefore, when East Retford and Penryn were to be disfranchised, and the Opposition proposed that the power of electing members should be transferred to Manchester and Birmingham, it so happened that by a curious shuffling of the question at issue Huskisson and Palmerston found themselves in the division lobby voting against the Government of which they were members. The real point of difference between themselves and the Government was quite unimportant, since they were all agreed on the Tory side of the House to give to a large town – Birmingham was the favourite – the franchise which had been taken from one of the corrupt boroughs, and to give that which was taken from the other to the neighbouring hundred. But in the particular division to which we refer, Mr. Huskisson and the Canningites, as fate would have it, were found voting the franchise of East Retford to Manchester, while their colleagues were voting it to the hundred in which the borough was situate. Poor Huskisson, with considerable ability and the best possible intentions, was all his life a bungler. He was always in difficulties through his clumsiness, which was physical as well as moral. He was always stumbling over chairs, tripping against ropes as he landed from steamboats, breaking his shins upon stones, until at last he was knocked down and killed outright by the first railway train. On the present occasion he sent in his resignation and didn’t send it in, explained and tried to retract without retracting. ‘There is no mistake, there can be no mistake, there shall be no mistake,’ said the Duke, in his most oracular style. Palmerston and some others followed Huskisson, and it will be observed that they had the credit of retiring from the Ministry as the advocates of a certain measure of Reform. When afterwards Palmerston became the member of a Whig Cabinet pledged to Reform, he could say this in his defence, that he had been anxious to avoid a Radical measure by the application of partial remedies, but that the time had long passed for piecemeal legislation, and that nothing less than sweeping changes would satisfy the country.

To sit in the House of Commons no longer as a Minister was a novelty for Lord Palmerston. It was also a novelty that he now turned his attention especially to foreign politics. How came this about? The care of foreign politics devolved upon him as the ablest of Canning’s disciples. Upon him the mantle of the master fell. Add to this, that among the eventualities to be foreseen was the chance of his one day taking a seat in a Whig Cabinet. Which of the great offices of State could he hold in that Cabinet with most satisfaction to himself and to his colleagues? Evidently the post in which he should find himself most enjoying the sympathy of the party would be the Foreign Secretaryship. The Whigs were always enthusiastic in praise of Canning’s foreign policy, and they would back Palmerston as the successor of Canning. In quitting the Tory ranks however, he was not all at once committed to the Whigs. The Duke of Wellington tried to win him back to the Cabinet, but although he might conscientiously, and even triumphantly, have joined it when its leading members came round to his opinions on Catholic Emancipation, the position of the Government was so unsatisfactory that he deemed it better to maintain his independence. It was in this independent character that he made two very able speeches – the first (June 1, 1829) on our foreign relations generally, the second (March 10, 1830), on the affairs of Portugal in particular – which at once marked him out as the exponent of a Liberal foreign policy. Before the year in which the latter speech was delivered had expired, the Whigs, with Lord Grey at their head, found themselves unexpectedly in power, – and to whom should the seals of the Foreign-office be intrusted but to Lord Palmerston? He stepped into the post as unquestionably the right man in the right place, and during that 10 years’ run of power which the Reform Bill gave to the Whigs he stood forth as the most brilliant member of the Cabinet, the man of men, the Minister of Ministers, the type and the glory of England. No English Minister ever attained to more world-wide fame than he acquired in these and subsequent years of office. All over the globe his name was invoked as the symbol of English generosity and English omnipotence. The Bedouin of the Desert recognised in Palmerston Pasha a being whom Allah had endowed with more than mortal power. The negro on the Guinea Coast knew that Palmerston was his friend, and worked day and night against slavery. Brown in the back-woods of America, or in the gardens of Siam, felt that he had an infallible safeguard if he had Palmerston’s passport to show. Palmerston, it was imagined, would move the whole force of the British empire in order that this Brown – Civis Romanus – might not be defrauded of his Worcester sauce amid the ice of Siberia, or of his pale ale on the Mountains of the Moon. He could do anything, and he would do everything. Nothing great was accomplished without being attributed to him. He was supposed to have his pocket full of constitutions, to have a voice in half the Cabinets of Europe, to have monarchs past reckoning under his thumb. He humbled the Shah, he patronized the Sultan, he abolished the Mogul, he conquered the Brother of the Sun, he opened to the world the empire which had been walled round for centuries by impregnable barriers, he defied the Czar, and the Emperor of the French felt safe when he received the assurances of the brilliant Foreign Secretary.

The foreign policy of Lord Palmerston has given rise to much controversy. Many a fierce debate has it kindled in both Houses of Parliament. Its author was said to be the firebrand of Europe, the destroyer of peace, a luckless lucifer match, the plague of the world, the Jonah of England, which was always in a storm when he was in the Cabinet. The question has been so stirred by political passions, and has been whipt into such a froth by the eloquence of interminable discussions, that there are very few of us indeed who know what is the real point at issue. And the perplexity is heightened by the fact that, after 20 years of opposition to his policy, Lord Aberdeen, his great rival, coalesced with him in 1853, and defended the coalition with the memorable statement ‘that, though there may have been differences in the execution, according to the different hands intrusted with the direction of affairs, the principles of the foreign policy of the country have for the last 30 years been the same.’ The cardinal doctrine of our foreign policy in those years was, as it is now, the principle of non-interference. There was not one of our statesmen who did not give his adhesion to this principle; and where, then, it may be asked, was the ground of dispute ? In order to understand this fully from Lord Palmerston’s point of view we must grasp his ruling idea in politics. If anybody will take the trouble to read his speeches from beginning to end he will be struck with the prevalence of one great idea running through them all like a thread of gold, and serving as a clue to every inconsistency. He saw in Public Opinion a force and a meaning which no statesman before him had realized, and which Peel only of his contemporaries acknowledged with anything like the same clearness. On two great occasions Peel sacrificed to Public Opinion. But all through his political life Lord Palmerston bowed to this deity, recognized its power, and used it as he could. He saw that opinion often creates a right where no right previously existed, – that it not seldom makes good evil and evil good. It has this peculiarity, too, that, exerting an enormous power it acts informally, beyond control and beyond rebuke. All the armies in the world cannot put down an opinion, which is a silent influence that remains even when the holder of the opinion is down in the dust. We may compel our neighbours to change their tactics, but we cannot compel them to alter their estimate of us; we cannot even quarrel with them for thinking as they do. We must submit to opinion, and though there are men who do not care for what other people say, yet those in whom the social instinct is strong are powerfully moved by it. The sociable nature of Lord Palmerston felt this deeply. The force of Public Opinion was a great fact, and he raised it into a great doctrine. Opinions in his view were more than opinions – they were deeds – they were title-deeds. All through his speeches we find him insisting on opinion as the source of political power, a moral influence which survives every physical force, and which, although more formidable than armies, we can bring into action without danger of hostilities. People said, – ‘What is the use of his expressing sympathy for oppressed nationalities when he declines to fight for his opinions? He is a sham; he has only words to offer; he says one thing and does another; his talk is in favour of liberty, but his inaction is in favour of tyranny.’ Lord Palmerston, in effect, said, – ‘No, our principle is non-interference with foreign Governments; we have no right to appeal to the arbitrament of the sword; it is no business of ours to dictate to others. But we cannot help having our opinions; I express mine frankly; let it go for what it is worth; I believe that the opinion of an English Minister is worth something – is more than words, and, giving my voice to the side of freedom and justice, I leave the despots to their own intelligence, to conscience, and to God.’

And while thus, on the one hand, he was attacked by those who saw an inconsistency between his words and his work, and who wished him not only to sympathize with freedom but also to undertake a crusade in behalf of it, he was attacked, on the other hand, by those who, like Lord Aberdeen and Sir Robert Peel, agreed in the policy of non-interference, but thought that he was not consistent, that he was not honest in carrying out that policy, since he did not abstain from the expression of opinion as well as from the declaration of war. The expression of opinion, the offer of advice, they said, is in effect dictation and interference. There is no middle course. We have no right to interfere with the domestic affairs of other countries unless some clear and undeniable necessity arises from circumstances affecting the interests of our own country, and the attitude of non-interference is that of interested, it may be, but silent spectators. ‘It is my firm belief,’ said Peel, in the last speech which he delivered, ‘that you will not advance the cause of Constitutional Government by attempting to dictate to other nations. If you do, your intentions will be mistaken, you will rouse feelings upon which you do not calculate, you will invite opposition to Government; and beware that the time does not arrive when, frightened by your own interference, you withdraw your countenance from those whom you have excited, and leave upon their minds the bitter recollection that you have betrayed them. If you succeed, I doubt whether or no the institutions that take root under your patronage will be lasting. Constitutional liberty will be best worked out by those who aspire to freedom by their efforts. You will only overload it by your help.’ It was in this speech, delivered the day before he fell from his horse, that Sir Robert Peel, in spite of so emphatic a condemnation of Lord Palmerston’s policy, passed upon him, or rather upon the speech in which Lord Palmerston defended his policy, the cordial eulogium – ‘We are all proud of the man who delivered it.’ The House of Commons, by a majority of 46, pronounced against Sir Robert Peel, and in favour of the foreign policy which he condemned.