By 1820 Palmerston, who had inherited his dilettante father’s indebted estates and Irish title in 1802 and had sat, despite his pro-Catholic sentiments, for Cambridge University since 1811, was an odd amalgam of the Regency buck, whose boyish good looks had earned him the nickname ‘Lord Cupid’, and the inconspicuous, as yet apparently unambitious, bureaucrat.
The compromise with his Whig colleague still holding, Palmerston was returned unopposed for his university at the general election of 1820, when it was briefly rumoured that he would accept a United Kingdom peerage.
Palmerston voted for Catholic relief, 28 Feb., and, on presenting his constituents’ hostile petition, expressed his support for this and the intended securities, 16 Mar. 1821.
I am very glad to find Lord Palmerston has done himself such credit by the talent, discretion and temper he has displayed during all this time and if Hume has not managed to reduce the estimates, he has at least reduced the secretary at war, for he has grown as thin again as he was.
Lady Palmerston Letters, 79.
Nevertheless, that summer he gave Liverpool proposals for large additional savings, noting that the ones relating to three household cavalry regiments ‘are those which in all the discussions we have had in the House of Commons have excited the most attention and upon which we have had the least favourable divisions’.
Having spoken briefly against Hume’s amendment to the address, 5 Feb., Palmerston was, in Hudson Gurney’s* word, ‘wretched’ in his sneering defence against Sir Robert Wilson’s censure motion, 13 Feb. 1822; then, as on most occasions that the cases of aggrieved officers were brought before the House, he stood his ground wholly on the king’s prerogative to dismiss him from the army.
I have not had half the trouble with estimates this year that I had last year: indeed, we had made such large reductions, that little was left for Hume to object to, and the body of the Whigs did not support him much in his objections even to that little.
Bourne, 135-6; Ashley, i. 88.
In August 1822, in the aftermath of Lord Londonderry’s suicide, which he regretted - not least because it was a toss-up whether the more brilliant Canning, who became foreign secretary, or the more reliable Robert Peel, the home secretary, should succeed as leader of the House - he was considered for promotion, but John Wilson Croker*, who admitted his ‘readiness and nerve’, wrote to Peel that
Palmerston’s deficiency is exactly that which we are now considering how to supply - that flow of ideas and language which can run on for a couple of hours without, on the one hand, committing the government or, on the other, lowering by commonplaces the station of a cabinet minister.
Palmerston-Sulivan Letters, 151-3; Croker Pprs. i. 230-1.
He retained his office in the ensuing reshuffle, though he did himself no favours by exasperating Liverpool over another turf war with York early the following year.
Palmerston gave an account of his visit to Holland and Germany that autumn in a series of amusing letters to his sister Elizabeth. After an initial period of being ‘at slack water’ in the Commons, he recounted to her husband Laurence Sulivan, a subordinate at the war office, 26 Feb., that the ‘estimates went off like smoke from a steam engine’, but he was obliged to defend the practice of flogging in the army, 5, 11, 15 Mar. 1824.
Although in January 1825 he had found ‘things looking very prosperous’ at Cambridge University, his future prospects were soon reckoned to be so doubtful that he was expected to retreat to the Lords.
After a six months’ ‘nightmare’ of strenuous canvassing, including agonizing about how far to share splits with his rivals, Palmerston was returned in second place behind Copley at the general election of 1826, at the cost of at least £750.
As to the commonplace balance between opposition and government, the election will have little effect upon it. The government are as strong as any government can wish to be, as far as regards those who sit facing them; but in truth the real opposition of the present day sit behind the treasury bench; and it is by the stupid old Tory party, who bawl out the memory and praises of Pitt while they are opposing all the measures and principles which he held most important, it is by these that the progress of the government in every improvement which they are attempting is thwarted and impeded. On the Catholic question, on the principles of commerce, on the corn laws, on the settlement of the currency, on the laws regulating the trade in money, on colonial slavery, on the game laws ... on all these questions, and everything like them, the government find support from the Whigs and resistance from their self-denominated friends. However, the young squires are more liberal than the old ones, and we must hope that heaven will protect us from our friends, as it has from our enemies.
Broadlands mss, Palmerston to Liverpool, 31 May 1826; Bulwer, i. 167, 169-72, 374.
In July 1826 Canning suggested moving him to the post office with a peerage, and also raised the idea of his taking on Frederick John Robinson’s departmental and Commons duties at the exchequer, although he admitted that Palmerston’s ‘only fault is a habit of non-attendance on ordinary occasions, a fault wholly inconsistent with the existence of a chancellor’. Liverpool scotched this, and it was possibly at this time that Palmerston declined two offers of postings in India.
I can forgive old women like the chancellor [Eldon], spoonies like Liverpool, ignoramuses like Westmorland, old stumped-up Tories like Bathurst; but how such a man as Peel, liberal, enlightened and fresh minded, should find himself running in such a pack is hardly intelligible ... But the day is fast approaching, as it seems to me, when the matter will be settled, as it must be.
Such sentiments put him firmly on the reformist wing of the administration, although he hardly qualified as a Canningite.
Palmerston was privately delighted by Canning’s sterling pre-Christmas speech in favour of British intervention in Portugal.
Palmerston, who approved of Canning’s intention ‘to found his government upon public opinion rather than borough interests’, welcomed the exclusion of the bigoted Tories and the inclusion of moderate Whigs in subordinate roles.
Although, as Lady Cowper put it, Palmerston was ‘quite a late convert’, he was described by her to have been as ‘completely devoted’ to Canning as her brother William Lamb*, the Irish secretary, and he was consequently devastated by his death in August 1827.
By early September 1827, when he saw through the king’s rather too obvious flattery of him during an explanatory interview, he was content to remain where he was.
there are few things indeed in this world which I should so much dislike; even if I felt that I was fit for it. But in various ways I should be unequal to it. To go no further than one point, the person so placed must be in a perpetual state of canvass; and of all irksome slaveries there is none more difficult to me than that; besides the character of the government is, as it were, identified with the debating success of the individual.
Wellington mss WP1/895/15; Lonsdale mss, Croker to Lowther, 11 Aug. [1827]; Bulwer, i. 193-6.
The following month he escaped for a few weeks to Ireland, and that winter he took a close interest in foreign affairs, noting that the battle of Navarino ‘will smooth and not increase our difficulties’.
blamed me for not having stood out. He said if I had insisted upon the fulfilment of Goderich’s promise [of the exchequer], that promise would not have been retracted, especially as it had been spontaneously made, and Herries would not have been thrown like a live shell into the cabinet to explode and blow us all up. At the appointed time he did explode. He picked a quarrel with Huskisson ... Goderich had not energy of mind enough to determine in favour of one or the other ... and gave the king to understand that he had no advice to give, and did not know what to do. But George knew very well what he had to do: he bid Goderich go home ... and he immediately sent for the duke of Wellington ... The king was the great plotter, and [William] Holmes* and [Joseph] Planta* worked upon Goderich, and persuaded him he could never overcome the difficulties he would have to encounter.
Bulwer, i. 210, 378-9; E. Herries, Mem. of Public Life of Herries, i. 128-30, 162-3, 193-5, 234; ii. 77-86.
However, he yet again survived in the cabinet, to the despair of Mrs. Arbuthnot, who exclaimed that Palmerston, ‘the shabbiest of all’, had ‘told me himself that he was a Whig and would always remain so’.
Yet Palmerston’s course was governed less by love of place than by concern for public principles, for example the continuation of cabinet neutrality over Catholic relief, as guaranteed by the retention of a sufficient number of like-minded friends, or ‘liberals’, to counterbalance the extreme Tory ‘pigtails’. Following negotiations in January 1828 it was agreed, among other concessions, that Huskisson’s presence was essential, ‘as a security for the maintenance of those liberal principles which we both profess’. At the same time, although he regretted the retreat of Lord Lansdowne’s moderate Whigs (with whom he would not have sat in the Commons had he too left office), Palmerston judged Peel, the reinstated home secretary, to be ‘QUITE as liberal on every point except the Catholic question as Huskisson or Canning’, and considered that Lord Dudley’s
continuance in the foreign office ... would give a security that our foreign relations would be kept up in the same spirit as hitherto, while Huskisson’s superintendence of our colonial system and [the president of the board of trade Charles] Grant’s management of our commercial arrangements would preclude any departure from the much calumniated principles of free trade.
Broadlands mss PP/GMC/18; BR23AA/5/1, 5; Powis mss, Palmerston to Clive, 15 Jan. 1828; Bulwer, i. 217-20, 379-80.
Believing Wellington was ‘not a bigot’ over emancipation, he was cautiously prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt and, having persuaded himself that the inclusion of Herries should not be made an insuperable objection, he, with the other members of the ‘triumvirate’, Dudley and Grant, nudged Huskisson into accepting the final ministerial arrangement. This he almost settled at a meeting on the 18th, when, however, he raised additional demands for the fair treatment of pro-Catholics over official or electoral patronage and the exclusion of rigid Protestants from the Irish administration, to which the new premier laughingly replied that ‘the first was asking him whether he was an honest man, and the second whether he was a madman’. He later recorded that ‘Dudley, Lamb, Binning [soon to become 9th earl of Haddington], Grant and myself met at Huskisson’s house’, and accepted Wellington’s offer, ‘not as individuals, but as a party representing the principles, and consisting of the friends, of Mr. Canning’. The ministry was settled by the 21st and Palmerston opined that ‘I think it will do, and the government will be strong and liberal, at least if it is not the latter, it will soon cease to be the former’.
Palmerston, ever ready to express his stoutly held opinions in cabinet, stated his reservations about Wellington remaining as commander-in-in-chief at its meeting, 24 Jan. 1828.
He spoke for the grant to Canning’s family, 13 May 1828, much to the delight of the embittered widow of the late premier, and the following day, in response to an attack from Lord Chandos, he declared ‘that as the principles which emanated from him are followed, just in that proportion will those who adopt them conduce to its interest and advantage, and obtain for their government the confidence and approbation of the people’.
Palmerston’s justificatory Commons statement on this affair, 2 June 1828, was satisfactory to both his former colleagues and the Huskissonites, or ‘ejected liberals’, who sat below the treasury bench on the government side. He compiled a list, ‘respectable both in its number and composition’, of ‘gentlemen in Parliament who may be supposed as agreeing pretty much in opinion and likely to find themselves voting the same way’; the three versions of it, each of which placed him second after Huskisson, comprised about 26 MPs and about 11 peers.
all points on which we had almost angry disputes at every cabinet from January to May, and upon which I thought it impossible we ever should agree, and out of which I daily expected a break up of the government to take place; all of these points have now been settled exactly in conformity with our opinions.
Broadlands mss BR23AA/5/4; Bulwer, i. 287-95.
By the following month, when, according to lists he sketched in his journal, he seems to have envisaged serving under Wellington as chancellor or under Lansdowne as colonial secretary, he was speculating that the ministry’s apparent weakness would lead to another reorganization once Parliament was recalled, although he had determined ‘to make the [settlement of the] Catholic question a sine qua non to my return to office’.
He visited Ireland in the wake of what he saw as the epochal Clare election that autumn, conferring with the lord lieutenant, Lord Anglesey, on the desirability of Catholic relief, and in December 1828 he welcomed the revelation that Wellington, whose foreign policy he again found deficient, was, as had long been suspected, preparing the ground for emancipation. His visit to Huskisson’s Sussex estate at Eartham that month, in the company of Goderich and Lord Melbourne (as Lamb had become), gave rise to speculation that what Croker jokingly referred to as the ‘party of the three viscounts’ might be attempting to position itself to exploit the ministerial split that Palmerston imagined would arise if Peel refused to give up his entrenched anti-Catholicism.
Palmerston contented himself with a silent vote for enfranchising Birmingham, 5 May 1829, commenting to Temple the following day that, with the Catholic question becoming forgotten, ‘parties are returning to their ancient demarcations’ and ‘our division last night upon East Retford brought us nearly to the status ante’.
Sir Edward Knatchbull* questioned whether Palmerston could be separated from the Huskissonites, but the Ultra chief Sir Richard Vyvyan* believed that, if handled with care, he might be caught.
by detaching Lord P. from the Huskisson party, which may be done effectually, provided a favourable change takes place, we have dislocated the strength of that party and gained a most valuable auxiliary, a good speaker, a man of business and, if necessary, a competent leader in the House of Commons.
Ibid. Vyvyan to Cumberland, 6, 22 Oct. 1829; Broadlands mss BR23AA/5/6; Palmerston-Sulivan Letters, 232-6; B.T. Bradfield, ‘Sir Richard Vyvyan and Fall of Wellington’s Government’, Univ. of Birmingham Hist. Jnl. xi (1967-8), 148-9.
In fact, he had no intention of abandoning Huskisson and, for instance, in November he attempted to encourage Melbourne to participate in his planned assaults, especially on foreign policy, in the following session.
Despite wanting to raise foreign affairs at the start of the session, Palmerston contented himself with voting for Knatchbull’s amendment on distress, 4 Feb. 1830.
What Palmerston considered that spring to be the ‘very disjointed state’ of parties, with a weak administration and an indifferent opposition, was heightened by the instability generated during the final illness of George IV, which may have been partly the reason why he received an abortive approach from Grey via Princess Lieven in April 1830.
my mind was quite made up that I, for one, would not accept the very best offer which it was possible for the duke to make us, supposing he was willing to treat us as a party ... without a general or larger reconstruction of his administration.
Broadlands mss PP/GMC/33; Bulwer, i. 381; Bourne, 312-13; J. Milton-Smith, ‘Earl Grey’s Cabinet and Parliamentary Reform’, HJ, xv (1972), 61.
He was nevertheless supposed to want to rejoin singly, possibly replacing Goulburn as chancellor (as Hardinge surmised), although Peel was reported to have said that Palmerston ‘would be too discreditable and unsafe, that he would not come alone and would be paralysed in speaking by fear of attacks from those he quitted’.
Greville, who had heard conflicting reports of his joining either Grey or Wellington, wrote in his journal, 20 Aug. 1830, that ‘it seems odd that Palmerston should abandon his party on the eve of a strong coalition [with the Whigs], which is not unlikely to turn out the present administration’, but on the 29th he met Palmerston and could ‘from the tenor of his language infer that he has no idea of joining government’.
In late September 1830 Wellington contemplated inviting Palmerston to succeed Sir George Murray* as colonial secretary, and, at the suggestion of Mrs. Arbuthnot, who considered him ‘the best of that party and certainly a good speaker’, he decided to use as an intermediary Lord Clive*, who was an old friend of Palmerston and had involved him with his Ludlow constituency affairs.
the friends with whom I was politically acting were Melbourne and Grant; but that, to say the truth, I should be unwilling, and I believed they would be so too, to join the duke unless Lansdowne and Grey were to form part of his government.
Likening Wellington’s offer to ‘asking me whether I was disposed to jump off Westminster bridge’, he determined to stick to his and Huskisson’s former resolution, which still had Melbourne’s support, to hold out for a general rearrangement, a proposal which the prime minister refused to contemplate.
Croker called on me a few days afterwards to try to persuade me to reconsider the matter. After talking some time he said, ‘Well, I will bring the matter to the point. Are you resolved, or are you not, to vote for parliamentary reform?’ I said, ‘I am’. ‘Well, then’, said he, ‘there is no use in talking to you any more on this subject. You and I, I am grieved to see, shall never again sit on the same bench together’.
By that time, having been sounded out by the Whigs, he and some of the former Canningites, or what Lord Althorp* called the ‘Palmerston party’, had agreed to vote for Brougham’s intended motion on reform, provided it was vaguely worded, and he also promised to ask the Ultras to support it.
Palmerston, who (so Croker assured Peel) was, like Grant, easily answered, as they were ‘really nothing but froth’, raised a question about Portugal on the address, 3 Nov., and criticized the government’s legislative programme and its civil list proposals, 12 Nov. 1830.
According to his official biographer William Henry Lytton Earle Bulwer*, a diplomat, in November 1830 Palmerston’s appearance was that
of a man in the full vigour of middle age, very well dressed, very good looking, with the large thick whiskers worn at the time. His air was more that of a man of the drawing room than of the senate; but he had a clear, short, decisive way of speaking on business which struck me at once.
Bulwer, ii. 17.
He was reported by Greville to ‘have begun very well’ in diplomatic circles, although on 22 Dec., a month after his arrival at the foreign office, Palmerston wrote that ‘I have been ever since my appointment like a man who has plumped into a mill-race, scarcely able by all his kicking and plunging to keep his head above water’.
Except in answering numerous questions and making minor interventions, Palmerston was not called on to make many speeches on foreign policy, although when he was, he always ensured that he had fully mastered his subject.
Notwithstanding the applause which has been bestowed upon the bill, we must not disguise from ourselves, that there is a vast mass of intelligence, of property, of liberality and even of Whiggism by which its provisions are looked upon, with some uneasiness, as too sweeping and extensive, and to whom considerable modifications would be exceedingly acceptable; and the points to which the most frequent objections are directed are the extent of disfranchisement, the lowness of the £10 qualification and the reduction in the English representation.
On the last point, he correctly predicted (as Gascoyne’s successful wrecking amendment demonstrated later that month) that ‘my confident belief is, that we shall be beat, if we resist it’. Although his pleas were partly motivated by concern for his own standing in Cambridge, where he exclaimed that ‘I have scarcely met six people who approve of our bill!’, a pained Grey refused to alter the principles of it.
Enclosing a cutting from The Times, which argued in favour of the will of the people overriding the resistance of the peers, Palmerston complained to the prime minister in May 1831 that such sentiments ‘inspire me with unpleasant misgivings that we are hurrying on too fast’. Grey, however, refused to rein back and his ‘expressions were so strong that they silenced Palmerston’ at the cabinet meeting, 29 May, when the latter was the only minister present who did not agree ‘that a very probable consequence of attempting to conciliate the House of Lords by concession would be to lose the House of Commons’.
is not popular with the bulk of our House of Commons supporters, and has not, as [Edward Smith] Stanley perhaps has, that promptitude and talent in debate which by gratifying the eagerness of the moment overcomes any prejudice of partisans in their leader.
Granville mss.
He declined to oppose the disfranchisement of Bletchingley, 20 July 1831, and divided silently for the reform bill’s details when present that summer, being, like Grant, as Tom Macaulay* suspected, ‘idle and ... not very hearty’ on the subject.
It may also have been because Palmerston was distracted by foreign affairs, since, having produced papers on Belgium, 27 July, he was assailed by questions about the French retaliatory military action following the invasion by the disaffected Dutch of its former possessions, 3, 6, 8 Aug. 1831.
In the summer Palmerston had imagined that the creation of ‘a few peers’ would have secured the passage of the reform bill through the Lords, but by late August 1831 Holland was disappointed to notice that he and Lansdowne were ‘disinclined to any measure vigorous enough to be effectual’, and by the following month the foreign secretary was canvassing his cabinet colleagues on the lengths they were prepared to go in manipulating public opinion as a means of pressurizing the upper House.
we could not only have improved the measure, but have ensured a majority in the House of Lords for that and all other purposes before Parliament had met. How this is now to be done I hardly see. John Russell is tomorrow three weeks to expound what we call the principles, but what, as we well know from experience, will be all the details, of the bill. From that point all negotiation is over.
Melbourne’s Pprs. 140-2.
In fact, Palmerston renewed his discussions with Wharncliffe and continued to urge modifications to the bill, though he was so worried by some of the suggested changes, including the proposals to omit the division of counties and to substitute scot and lot for the householder franchise, that he commented, in relation to the opponents to the bill, that ‘we have caught at the letter of their arguments without regarding the spirit’, thus serving only to increase their objections. Despite having his own complex ideas for changing schedules B and D, on which he had done some detailed work, he was willing to agree to Grey’s compromise of the bare minimum of significant changes at a heated cabinet meeting, 30 Nov. 1831.
Assisted by a rapprochement with France, Palmerston secured an international treaty on Belgium, 15 Nov. 1831, which he described as ‘a great thing done’, and two days later Littleton noted in his diary that ‘his success, through a thousand difficulties and constantly impending war, and other machinations and lies and evil forebodings of party, is a signal triumph’.
Granville commented to Holland, 23 Jan. 1832, that ‘I think with you that Palmerston’s foreign politics are essentially good and liberal, but he is constantly apprehensive, not of being duped, but of being thought to be duped by Talleyrand and the French government’.
Since February 1832 Palmerston, still resolutely opposed to peerage creations, had been confident that the reform bill would be read a second time in the Lords and that, with Grey being more reasonable, no amendments ‘which we shall not be prepared to agree to’, would be forced on the government.
felt strongly that as we had prevented the making of peers at a time when the king gave Grey the power to do so, if now in consequence of none being made we are defeated, we were to insist upon dissolving the government, we should be accused and with some show of plausibility, of a scheme to defeat the bill and to play false to our colleagues.
As well as considerations of public unrest in necessitating reform, he added:
Had we been beat on a clause of the bill, the metropolitan districts, the rating of the ten pounders, the exclusion of the county freeholders living in represented towns or anything of that kind, I should not have agreed to make peers for that; but this proposal was either nothing but a mere preference of arrangement or it was an opinion against disfranchisement. If it was the former, the making it a pitched battle and a defeat of the government was intended for the purpose of compelling the government to resign; if the latter, it attacked a fundamental principle of the bill. In either case we have no longer any power over our own measures in the Lords and must either strengthen ourselves or retire.
Add. 60463, f. 92; Milton-Smith, 72.
Refusing to apologize for any change in his own opinions in the Commons, 14 May, he justified ministers’ conduct in resigning, the king having chosen this course over the cabinet’s request for peerage creations. He was delighted by the decision made by the Whigs at Brooks’s that night to oppose any reform bill emerging from the putative Wellington government, commenting to Lamb the following day that ‘the debate of last night was the most remarkable expression of public opinion, upon the political conduct of public men, which I ever remember to have witnessed, and that has been the immediate cause of the duke’s failure’.
impossible to disguise from oneself that the events of the last ten days have struck a harder blow at royal and aristocratical power in this country than any thing since the days of Charles I, saving the expulsion of James II, because a ministry and a measure odious to the peers and distasteful to the king have been forced upon both by the House of Commons as backed by the great mass of the nation.
Lady Palmerston Letters, 190; Add. 60463, f. 107.
Thereafter, he grudgingly accepted the bill as the best an essentially conservative reformer could hope for in the way of limiting concessions to democratic demands, and, apart from declining O’Connell’s invitation to back the re-enfranchisement of the Irish 40s. freeholders on 13 June 1832, he made no further speeches on it.
That month Palmerston, who was given the grand cross of the order of the Bath as a personal mark of favour by William IV, was annoyed by what he considered quite improper press attacks, inspired he suspected by Durham and Ellice, on his employing Tories as diplomats; his approval of Durham to lead a special mission to Russia was partly designed to satisfy the violent Whigs in this respect.
By the autumn of 1832 Palmerston, still flatteringly called ‘the Romsey dandy’ and also known as ‘Protocol Palmerston’, had earned the nickname ‘Lord Pumicestone’ for his abrasive foreign policy, which in a later age would became characterized as ‘gunboat diplomacy’ and ‘brinkmanship’.
Palmerston, the most enigmatical of ministers, who is detested by the corps diplomatique, abhorred in his own office, unpopular in the House of Commons, liked by nobody, abused by everybody, still reigns in his little kingdom of the foreign office, and is impervious to any sense of shame from the obloquy that has been cast upon him, and apparently not troubling himself about the affairs of the government generally, which he leaves it to others to defend and uphold as they best may.
Greville Mems. iv. 138.
Nevertheless, he was a colossus of a foreign secretary, who, while sometimes content to work within the confines of the concert of Europe, but also bold enough to nurture the development of constitutional states, was ultimately, like his mentor Canning, governed by considerations of Realpolitik, as encapsulated in his later dictum that ‘we have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow’.
Palmerston, who realized he had no chance of regaining his seat at Cambridge University and turned down offers from several other constituencies, was eventually satisfied that he had sufficient backing in Hampshire South and was returned as a Liberal for his native county after a contest at the general election of 1832.
certainly one of, if not quite the ablest of statesmen I have ever met with in all my official career. He possesses all the aptitude and capacity which most contributes to form such a man in England - extensive and varied information, indefatigable activity, an iron constitution, inexhaustible mental resources and great facility of speech in Parliament. Without being what is called a great debater, his style of eloquence is biting and satirical, his talent lying more in his power of crushing an adversary under the weight of his irony and sarcasm, than of convincing his auditors; and furthermore, he has great social qualities and highly finished manners.
Talleyrand Mems. iii. 281.
In his oratory, which was not very evident in his early years at the foreign office, he was certainly more effective than eloquent.