Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston, stands at the popular end of Victorian statesmen. Only Benjamin Disraeli’s Archie Rice act upstages him. Otherwise, he was more fun than William Ewart Gladstone or Robert Peel and unimaginably more interesting than Lord John Russell. In government, long before playing the press was the done thing, he did it. In an age of ministerial hauteur, he tickled the street and attracted affectionate nicknames, Lord Pumicestone for occasionally getting rough in debate, Lord Cupid for cheerful extra-maritalism and, more generally, Pam, (something which WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman, in 1066 and All That, turned into Pal).
He was, however, a comprehensive professional. How many Prime Ministers have begun their careers with nineteen continuous years in subordinate office? As naval, then military, junior from 1809 to 1828 (from the age of 25 to 44) Palmerston did. Though an MP – the title was Irish – and passing for a Tory, he was in effect a civil servant; he knew his subject. He was also extremely hardworking. All-night devotion to important papers was nothing unusual and, even on quiet days, hostesses were reconciled to not seeing him until after the soup.
He was, too, for all the Regency distractions, supremely well educated. A first-class scholar and polymath, he had already taken the high road leading discerning upper-class Englishmen to Scotland – studies with Dugald Stewart, supreme political thinker of Edinburgh. This made him an economic liberal and free trader, a commonplace of the time. But the ideas, later set out in Stewart’s moral and political treatise of 1828, also made him, not a democrat, but an optimist and a believer in serious, if too cautious, government obliged to the whole community.
By contrast, the ministries in which he served, those of Spencer Perceval and Lord Liverpool, were full of deteriorationists, dull, anxious, acceptance men: Viscount Sidmouth, the Earl of Eldon, JC Herries, to a degree Lord Castlereagh, people for whom the French Revolution and Napoleon’s victories had been Great Aunt Ada Doom’s woodshed. They had lived ever after frozen against all amendment.
Palmerston moved readily to the intelligent, idea-friendly end of the ministry, to William Huskisson, FJ Robinson and, supremely, George Canning. The great dividing issue of the mid-1820s was Catholic emancipation. Religious toleration would spark a wider disposition to liberalisation; and Palmerston, despite Irish landlordism – a large slice of County Sligo and a nice little holding outside Dublin – was unreservedly for emancipation. This put him onside and in government, with Lord Grey and the Whigs, made him a supporter of Parliamentary reform – and lost him his seat of 20 years, Cambridge University.
The rest is foreign policy, at the top, what Palmerston is famous for. Here, like George Bush and Tony Blair, he would be an interventionist. There is, though, a slight difference. Palmerston knew what he was doing, and most of his intervention was diplomatic – if sometimes rough diplomatic. He was, too, an outstandingly intelligent man. He devoured paper and drove his staff for more information where Bush liked a single paragraph inside a brightly coloured folder. (See Eliot Weinberger’s annihilating review of the Bush memoirs in The London Review of Books, January 6 2011).
He would, famously, be on terrible terms with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert: “She cannot conceal from him that she is ashamed of the policy we are pursuing in the Italian controversy in abetting wrong…” Victoria belonged to a trade union of emperors, kings and serene highnesses. Palmerston recognised a dynamic in history and Dugald Stewart’s prize pupil wanted a slow dynamic, neither inciting revolution nor provoking reaction. In the Revolutionary Year, 1848, he thought a government did better “to frame its measures of improvement with timely deliberation and to grant them with the grace of spontaneous concession, than to be compelled to adopt on the sudden, changes… wrung from them by the pressure of imperious circumstances…”
So in Austrian-dominated northern Italy, Palmerston favoured “abetting wrong” by preferring the minor and popular royal, Carlo Alberto of Savoy, shrewdly up for leading a united Italy, to the low-IQ Emperor Ferdinand, choice of God and Victoria. Two years on, in 1850, when the Austrians had taken back by force what by 1860 they would lose by force, General Julius Haynau, who had ordered Italian women flogged, came to London. Visiting a brewery, he was spotted, knocked about and chucked in a water trough. Palmerston, to the rage of all right-thinking people, refused an apology. This is the flash, populist aspect of the man, good politics and very enjoyable. But through the scattered headlines, David Brown, senior lecturer in History at the University of Strathclyde, sums up Palmerston’s thinking by analysing his reasoned arguments in an election debate of 1847 against the Chartist GJ Harney.
“Palmerston’s foreign policy was becoming more nuanced – or rather he was more conscious of the tensions between realpolitik and idealpolitik… Liberal constitutional regimes were always preferred by Palmerston, firstly as the outward expression of a Whiggish notion of improvement, secondly, but also concomitantly, as more (internally) stable diplomatic partners.” More plainly, he favoured Liberal regimes – warmly as desirable, coldly as helpful to Britain.
Brown has done distinguished work, read everything, assembled 63 pages of reference notes in eight point type and been distressingly meticulous. The quotations are many and illuminating, his judgment over all seems to me right. Palmerston, despite elements of showmanship and an eye for delightful opportunity, had an uneven thread of constructive liberalism – and he judged his own times extraordinarily well.
Against all this, one reservation stands. This is an academic’s book for academics. The language is heavy and sometimes clotted. Learned competition keeps popping up referentially at the turn of a page. “Kidd has remarked…”; “Ridley, by contrast…”; “Southgate feels…”; “In Bourne’s view…” Shades of the PhD surround the growing boy.
This is still an excellent study, but one hopes that the next fine work might indulge the general reader with a lighter touch.
