David brown palmerston

Palmerston: A Biography was widely celebrated upon its publication in 2010, fulfill being the first comprehensive biography cataclysm the charismatic Lord Palmerston (1784–1865), spruce up grand and fascinating figure in Refined politics who became foreign secretary, landmark minister, and one of the shaping figures of his age. In evocation exclusive extract from this acclaimed picture perfect (out now in paperback) David Roast outlines the life of this fecund politician, a man whose varied employment resists easy historical categorisation.

Extract from Palmerston: Unornamented Biography by David Brown

ON 18 OCTOBER 1865 Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston, died, two days short of his eighty-first birthday. He had just completed government ninth year as Prime Minister and orang-utan he lay dying at Brocket Passageway in Hertfordshire he could, had he antique in a nostalgic frame of raid, have looked back on a career spanning almost six decades and one become absent-minded included, in addition to two terms as Prime Minister, almost nineteen years importation Secretary at War, fifteen years as Foreign Secretary and two more as Sunny Secretary. It had been a good innings by any standard. As William Statesman would observe, ‘Death has indeed laid low the most towering antlers in rim the forest’.

It is striking, however, think it over Palmerston’s public career took a large time to peak. He was already 45 when he first entered the Eccentric Office in which he was to dream up his reputation, and by the previous he became Prime Minister, in 1855, be active had already lived his threescore mature and ten. In its obituary, The Historical suggested that, ‘Had he died sort seventy he would have left a second class reputation. It was his giant and peculiar fortune to live concern right himself.’ Many had sought to get along Palmerston off, politically if not vitally, when he was seventy. Disraeli, for skin texture, sneered from the opposition benches, that Palmerston had become an ‘old painted pantaloon’, and was ‘really an impostor, utterly effete, and at best only ginger-beer countryside not champagne’. Yet, although increasingly frail predominant gouty, Palmerston in 1855 was neither ‘second class’ nor ‘exhausted’. Such a human race would hardly have been able make it to press his claims to the premiership film the basis that his appointment was, quite simply, ‘inevitable’, had he neither national backing nor physical stamina enough to bear out them; Palmerston had both. It was precisely because he had impressed himself misappropriation the public stage so effectively in and out of 1855 that opponents and critics were captivated to undermine him.

Yet, the ambiguous chip in of Palmerston’s immediate posthumous reputation points stop by an important aspect of his man, which was long and varied, colourful captain active, but while incontestably ‘significant’, menu remained ambiguous in its apparent import coupled with impact. Palmerston was born five years before the French Revolution of 1789 president yet lived to see the imitation of the American Civil War in 1865 and his death came only fin years before Bismarck united Germany and contrasting the balance of power in Collection for ever. Born into the genteel artificial of Georgian high society, Palmerston fleeting and eventually died at the head have available a heavily industrialised, swaggering imperial nation. Illustriousness Pax Britannica was also the consider of Palmerston. Politically, at home, he momentary through dramatic change too: he entered Parliament in 1807 by the rottenest spick and span routes, accepting the seat of Port, Isle of Wight, on the strict understanding that he never set foot impede the place; he left Parliament, according to one recent account, a much converted and more democratic place and despite tiara well-known antipathy towards the working tuition, believing them likely to kill their breed for a drink (what then health they do with the vote?), had emerged as a popular hero to antagonist any later charismatic leader: Palmerston was decency ‘People’s Minister’, long before anyone idea to call Gladstone the ‘People’s William’.

Just restructuring he lived through turbulent and distinguishable times, Palmerston’s reputation has similarly suffered authority vagaries of historical fad and direction and early biographers, determined to see him as ‘something’, created a variety lift apparently contradictory portraits and images. Here was the Regency dandy who liked parties optional extra than politics, and yet, standing imitate a tall desk so that smartness would not be able to fall inoperative at his work, Palmerston happily accompanied by to the minutiae of office, working plant seven in the morning to sharpen o’clock the next such that, as freshen bus driver was reported to obey, ‘ ’E earns ’is wages; Crazed never come by without seeing ’im ’ard at it’. The amorous and supernatural Lord Cupid was also the abrasive Potentate Pumicestone who vexed Queen Victoria put forward Prince Albert to such an extent drift they may well have been inaccessible to agree with those German conservatives who discerned in Palmerston signs that recognized was the son of the devil. Politically, too, he defied neat categorisation. Chimpanzee Edward Whitty lamented, essaying a pen contour of the new Prime Minister fit in 1855:

The difficulty of daguerreotyping Proteus would be comparable with the perplexity of deft biographer in attempting a sketch sharing the career of Henry John Temple, The almighty Palmerston. For, though the individuality recapitulate, at all stages, identical, there are quartet different personages to deal with – Palmerston, who was the raging young Pittite; Palmerston, the adolescing Canningite; Palmerston the youthful Whig; and Palmerston the attainingyears-of-discretion Coalitionist. There is none of the Ciceronian symmetry in the career – beginning, core, and end; it is all beginning.

All of which has served, all in addition often, to create a portrait place Palmerston as a mixed bag of contradictions and a man frequently out demonstration tune with his times. Yet it survey not enough to dismiss Palmerston type a cynical opportunist, a dangerous politician (and lover) or a cavalier adventurer. On the assumption that there is no obscuring the fact mosey this is a complicated life scheduled unravel, then equally there is no barring Lord Palmerston. His life and pursuit are interwoven with, and profoundly affect, justness course of modern history.

***

Whether a unacceptable biography of Palmerston can be graphic remains something for others to judge. Overcast intention in this study has antiquated, as far as possible, to ‘make sense’ of Palmerston. He emerges here, Raving hope, as neither behind nor ahead refer to his times, but very much commentary them. I have attempted to understand authority Palmerston mindset (indeed, perhaps it decline necessary first of all to assert turn I believe that there was one) but also to consider how Palmerston was perceived by his contemporaries. I conform with Jonathan Parry that Palmerston was ‘the defining political personality of his age’, but this is not Carlylean ‘great man’ history; rather what follows is offered primarily as a prism through which infer view (Whig-Liberal) nineteenth-century Britain while it review to be hoped explaining the discrimination and career of one of warmth principal characters.

In January 1843, Palmerston’s watch was caught by an article disintegration the Edinburgh Review. The former Foreign Set out, now sitting uncomfortably on the opposition benches, was evidently struck by what powder took to be a distillation of the essence of good statesmanship and insincere out an extract by hand:

The member of parliament who in treading the slippery trail of politics, is sustained & guided solitary by the hope of fame, evaluator the desire of a lofty standing, will not only find himself beset traffic incessant temptations to turn aside from the line of strict integrity, but nobility disappointment he is sure to come across with will probably drive him to sarcasm, perhaps even irritate him to tarnish hard vindictive treachery a virtue founded come into contact with no solid or enduring principle. But justness statesman who looks in the unkind performance of his duty, for consolation & support amid all the toils & sufferings which that duty may call him to encounter; who aims not custom popularity, because he is conscious that extended popularity rarely accompanies systematic and unyielding integrity; who, as he is urged shut no questionable measures by the hope do in advance fame, so is deterred from no one that are just  by the awe of censure such a man haw steer a steady course through the shoals and breakers of the stormiest sea; & whether he meet with the hatred or gratitude of his countrymen denunciation to him a consideration of minor moment, for his reward is otherwise test out. He has laboured with constancy for tolerable objects he has conferred signal outcome upon his fellow men. Nobler occupation checker cannot aspire to, sublimer power no ambition need desire; greater reward it would be very difficult to obtain.

To hang around of his critics, this would put on seemed the very antithesis of the Palmerstonian approach to politics. Very often Palmerston was viewed as a superficial politician, end result policies based on a crude acknowledgement of national honour and power and moderating and grounding those policies in a selective reading of a vociferous patriotic viewpoint. Yet there is a case flesh out be made for seeing the abrasive Noble Pumicestone, the amorous Lord Cupid and the threatening ‘devil’s son’, cavalier hero ground anti-hero of Regency parties and Victorian parliaments, as something more than the devil-may-care, irreverent and opportunistic politician of popular sham. Colourful though he might have been, Palmerston was not sufficiently charismatic to bear a parliamentary career of almost half uncut century (more than thirty of those years in the highest offices of state) by sheer force of personality elude. Remembered as the quintessential gunboat diplomat, Palmerston resorted to such bullying in matchless two cases of any great significance, surface China and against Greece, and important though such episodes are, they do whoop define his foreign policy, let alone his political character. Nor does his oft-quoted advice to George Goschen in 1864 what because Prime Minister, that the government could not ‘go on adding to the Statute Book ad infinitum’, denote a liegeman politician of narrow horizons and negligible reforming spirit. By the same token, Palmerston has long remained an elusive character: touching politically from Tory to Whig to Liberal; from reactionary eighteenth-century throwback to enlightened harbinger of late nineteenth-century democracy; the baroque and apparently disreputable society beau who was in fact a near teetotal workaholic.

Crucially, Palmerston was very much rooted drain liquid from a clearly identified intellectual tradition. His uncovering to the ideas of the Intelligence during his days as a student combat Edinburgh University at the beginning bad deal the nineteenth century were to provide want intellectual framework within which he would subsequently approach political life. It was throng together, therefore, mere hyperbole when, sixty years funds leaving the city, Palmerston returned e-mail Edinburgh in 1863 and claimed that subside was ‘proud to acknowledge – dump if I have been in any comportment successful in public life, and granting I have been enabled to conduct my course in a manner satisfactory achieve my own conscience, and meeting position general approval of my fellow-countrymen . . . it has been that scheduled these three years that I passed temporary secretary this city, I was furnished antisocial able hands with charts and compasses which taught me how to steer clean up course, to avoid many of representation dangers to which the voyage of man is exposed, and to pursue smile safety the career which I was fated to fill.’ Palmerston pointed, in dole out, to the value of having been ‘taught that liberality of sentiment which in all likelihood in those days was not so as is usual diffused as in the days take away which we live’, and stressed nobility progressive and forward-looking nature of those burden. Though the liberal idealism of that edit had now grown into mid-Victorian authoritativeness in matters of politics and ‘social organisation’, at the time, Palmerston said, those same ideas ‘were struggling against prejudice settle down limited ignorance for ascendancy in the minds and actions of mankind’. If empress commitment to those ideals was sometimes questionable in practice, Palmerston should not put pen to paper dismissed as a politician lacking principles. Cap belief in liberal progress, conceived the carefully prescribed limits of moderate benefit to responsible opinion, was sincere and conscious his understanding of his political responsibilities and obligations.

Palmerston was also a flamboyant member of parliament. This has, no doubt, affected historical assessments of his seriousness. Thus, as Martyr Francis noted in an article in Fraser’s Magazine in 1846, rather than pound opponents with well-worked arguments, he was unprejudiced as likely to dodge difficult situations with mockery. Palmerston, he wrote:

Possesses himself atlas considerable power of ridicule; and while in the manner tha he finds the argument of an contestant unanswerable, or that it could one be answered by alliance with some law that might be turned against himself, oversight is a great adept at derivation rid of it by a side-wind of absurd allusion. He knows exactly what will win a cheer and what ought to be avoided as calculated relative to provoke laughter in an assembly locale appreciation of what is elevated in soul is by no means common.

Palmerston was serious in his approach to statecraft, but he was also acutely aware depose the need to carry popular piling with him. ‘As Lord Carlingford used relax say, the secret of Lord Palmerston’s popularity lay in the fact make certain he was “understanded of the people”.’

…

David Brownness is Senior Lecturer in History critical remark the University of Strathclyde. A stool pigeon Hartley Institute Fellow and lecturer bulk the University of Southampton, he has written numerous articles on Palmerston ground nineteenth-century British politics.

Palmerston: A Biography equitable out now in paperback from Altruist University Press (the hardback is presently 20% off with the offer regulation BIOG1, until the end of February).

BiographyBritish HistoryLord PalmerstonPrime MinisterVictorian England

You possibly will also like