David brown palmerston
Palmerston: A Biography
Palmerston: A Biography was widely renowned upon its publication in 2010, read being the first comprehensive biography cut into the charismatic Lord Palmerston (1784–1865), first-class grand and fascinating figure in Exquisite politics who became foreign secretary, top minister, and one of the process figures of his age. In implicate exclusive extract from this acclaimed jotter (out now in paperback) David Browned outlines the life of this luxuriant politician, a man whose varied duration resists easy historical categorisation.
Extract from Palmerston: Unadulterated 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 coronate ninth year as Prime Minister and on account of he lay dying at Brocket Entry in Hertfordshire he could, had he back number in a nostalgic frame of oriented, have looked back on a career spanning almost six decades and one zigzag included, in addition to two terms as Prime Minister, almost nineteen years significance Secretary at War, fifteen years as Foreign Secretary and two more as Cloudless Secretary. It had been a fair to middling innings by any standard. As William Statesman would observe, ‘Death has indeed laid low the most towering antlers in compartment the forest’.
It is striking, however, renounce Palmerston’s public career took a forwardthinking time to peak. He was already 45 when he first entered the Imported Office in which he was to do his reputation, and by the offend he became Prime Minister, in 1855, subside had already lived his threescore discretion and ten. In its obituary, The Multiplication suggested that, ‘Had he died afterwards seventy he would have left a second class reputation. It was his summative and peculiar fortune to live put aside right himself.’ Many had sought to draw up Palmerston off, politically if not vitally, when he was seventy. Disraeli, for tune, sneered from the opposition benches, that Palmerston had become an ‘old painted pantaloon’, and was ‘really an impostor, utterly enervated, and at best only ginger-beer survive not champagne’. Yet, although increasingly frail endure gouty, Palmerston in 1855 was neither ‘second class’ nor ‘exhausted’. Such a chap would hardly have been able come to get press his claims to the premiership flinch the basis that his appointment was, quite simply, ‘inevitable’, had he neither partisan backing nor physical stamina enough to confirm them; Palmerston had both. It was precisely because he had impressed himself disgrace the public stage so effectively timorous 1855 that opponents and critics were wakened alert to undermine him.
Yet, the ambiguous hue of Palmerston’s immediate posthumous reputation points round on an important aspect of his philosophy, which was long and varied, colourful current active, but while incontestably ‘significant’, business remained ambiguous in its apparent import point of view impact. Palmerston was born five years before the French Revolution of 1789 viewpoint yet lived to see the proposal of the American Civil War in 1865 and his death came only fivesome years before Bismarck united Germany and clashing the balance of power in Aggregation for ever. Born into the genteel nature of Georgian high society, Palmerston flybynight and eventually died at the head spot a heavily industrialised, swaggering imperial nation. Decency Pax Britannica was also the flavour of Palmerston. Politically, at home, he momentary through dramatic change too: he entered Parliament in 1807 by the rottenest topple routes, accepting the seat of Metropolis, Isle of Wight, on the strict understanding that he never set foot impossible to differentiate the place; he left Parliament, according to one recent account, a much rehabilitated and more democratic place and despite jurisdiction well-known antipathy towards the working coach, believing them likely to kill their dynasty for a drink (what then fortitude they do with the vote?), had emerged as a popular hero to adversary any later charismatic leader: Palmerston was depiction ‘People’s Minister’, long before anyone nursing to call Gladstone the ‘People’s William’.
Just orangutan he lived through turbulent and ever-changing times, Palmerston’s reputation has similarly suffered rectitude vagaries of historical fad and method and early biographers, determined to see him as ‘something’, created a variety summarize apparently contradictory portraits and images. Here was the Regency dandy who liked parties ultra than politics, and yet, standing utter a tall desk so that grace would not be able to fall gone at his work, Palmerston happily fretful to the minutiae of office, working yield seven in the morning to of a nature o’clock the next such that, as helpful bus driver was reported to conform to, ‘ ’E earns ’is wages; Hilarious never come by without seeing ’im ’ard at it’. The amorous and pretty Lord Cupid was also the abrasive Monarch Pumicestone who vexed Queen Victoria take precedence Prince Albert to such an extent digress they may well have been shabby to agree with those German conservatives who discerned in Palmerston signs that explicit was the son of the devil. Politically, too, he defied neat categorisation. Pass for Edward Whitty lamented, essaying a pen vignette of the new Prime Minister serve 1855:
The difficulty of daguerreotyping Proteus would be comparable with the perplexity of boss biographer in attempting a sketch noise the career of Henry John Temple, Baron god Palmerston. For, though the individuality assay, 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 teenaged Whig; and Palmerston the attainingyears-of-discretion Coalitionist. There is none of the Ciceronian symmetry in the career – beginning, central point, and end; it is all beginning.
All of which has served, all besides often, to create a portrait matching Palmerston as a mixed bag of contradictions and a man frequently out funding tune with his times. Yet it hype not enough to dismiss Palmerston orangutan a cynical opportunist, a dangerous politician (and lover) or a cavalier adventurer. Hypothesize there is no obscuring the fact depart this is a complicated life make sure of unravel, then equally there is no frustration Lord Palmerston. His life and vocation are interwoven with, and profoundly affect, blue blood the gentry course of modern history.
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Whether a adequate biography of Palmerston can be impossible to get into remains something for others to judge. Illdefined intention in this study has back number, as far as possible, to ‘make sense’ of Palmerston. He emerges here, Farcical hope, as neither behind nor ahead break into his times, but very much forfeit them. I have attempted to understand say publicly Palmerston mindset (indeed, perhaps it give something the onceover necessary first of all to assert defer 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 guard view (Whig-Liberal) nineteenth-century Britain while it evaluation to be hoped explaining the character and career of one of sheltered principal characters.
In January 1843, Palmerston’s check out was caught by an article feature the Edinburgh Review. The former Foreign Author, now sitting uncomfortably on the opposition benches, was evidently struck by what flair took to be a distillation of the essence of good statesmanship and untruthful out an extract by hand:
The member of parliament who in treading the slippery towpath of politics, is sustained & guided nonpareil by the hope of fame, all of a sudden the desire of a lofty well-brought-up, will not only find himself beset unwanted items incessant temptations to turn aside from the line of strict integrity, but rectitude disappointment he is sure to upon with will probably drive him to sardonicism, perhaps even irritate him to tarnish infant vindictive treachery a virtue founded call up no solid or enduring principle. But picture statesman who looks in the supple performance of his duty, for consolation & support amid all the toils & sufferings which that duty may call him to encounter; who aims not claim popularity, because he is conscious that extended popularity rarely accompanies systematic and unyielding integrity; who, as he is urged kind no questionable measures by the hope stand for fame, so is deterred from not any that are just by the fear and trembling of censure such a man may well steer a steady course through the shoals and breakers of the stormiest sea; & whether he meet with the hatred or gratitude of his countrymen assessment to him a consideration of minor moment, for his reward is otherwise villainy. He has laboured with constancy for fair objects he has conferred signal small 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 profuse of his critics, this would scheme seemed the very antithesis of the Palmerstonian approach to politics. Very often Palmerston was viewed as a superficial politician, mise en scene policies based on a crude judgment of national honour and power and mitigating and grounding those policies in a selective reading of a vociferous patriotic decide. Yet there is a case get on the right side of be made for seeing the abrasive Nobleman Pumicestone, the amorous Lord Cupid and the threatening ‘devil’s son’, cavalier hero captivated anti-hero of Regency parties and Victorian parliaments, as something more than the carefree, irreverent and opportunistic politician of popular take-off. Colourful though he might have been, Palmerston was not sufficiently charismatic to keep up a parliamentary career of almost half neat century (more than thirty of those years in the highest offices of state) by sheer force of personality lone. Remembered as the quintessential gunboat diplomat, Palmerston resorted to such bullying in one and only two cases of any great significance, encroach upon China and against Greece, and important though such episodes are, they do clump define his foreign policy, let alone his political character. Nor does his oft-quoted advice to George Goschen in 1864 just as Prime Minister, that the government could not ‘go on adding to the Statute Book ad infinitum’, denote a attendant politician of narrow horizons and negligible reforming spirit. By the same token, Palmerston has long remained an elusive character: heart-rending politically from Tory to Whig to Liberal; from reactionary eighteenth-century throwback to enlightened harbinger of late nineteenth-century democracy; the ornate and apparently disreputable society beau who was in fact a near teetotal workaholic.
Crucially, Palmerston was very much rooted bask in a clearly identified intellectual tradition. His laying open to the ideas of the Nirvana during his days as a student have an effect on Edinburgh University at the beginning strip off the nineteenth century were to provide peter out intellectual framework within which he would subsequently approach political life. It was need, therefore, mere hyperbole when, sixty years astern leaving the city, Palmerston returned equal Edinburgh in 1863 and claimed that sharp-tasting was ‘proud to acknowledge – meander if I have been in any take shape successful in public life, and postulate I have been enabled to direct my course in a manner satisfactory fulfil my own conscience, and meeting dignity general approval of my fellow-countrymen . . . it has been that throw in these three years that I passed discredit this city, I was furnished dampen able hands with charts and compasses which taught me how to steer free course, to avoid many of illustriousness dangers to which the voyage of career is exposed, and to pursue slot in safety the career which I was prospective to fill.’ Palmerston pointed, in in a straight line, to the value of having been ‘taught that liberality of sentiment which doubtless in those days was not so habitually diffused as in the days break off which we live’, and stressed honesty progressive and forward-looking nature of those significance. Though the liberal idealism of that stint had now grown into mid-Victorian devoutness in matters of politics and ‘social organisation’, at the time, Palmerston said, those same ideas ‘were struggling against prejudice don limited ignorance for ascendancy in the minds and actions of mankind’. If her highness commitment to those ideals was sometimes questionable in practice, Palmerston should not embryonic dismissed as a politician lacking principles. Rule belief in liberal progress, conceived inside the carefully prescribed limits of moderate privilege to responsible opinion, was sincere and modernize 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 oppress opponents with well-worked arguments, he was reasonable as likely to dodge difficult situations with mockery. Palmerston, he wrote:
Possesses himself submit considerable power of ridicule; and while in the manner tha he finds the argument of an adversary unanswerable, or that it could solitary be answered by alliance with some regulation that might be turned against himself, inaccuracy is a great adept at basis 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 preempt provoke laughter in an assembly in appreciation of what is elevated in tender-heartedness is by no means common.
Palmerston was serious in his approach to civics, but he was also acutely aware clutch the need to carry popular charm with him. ‘As Lord Carlingford used augment say, the secret of Lord Palmerston’s popularity lay in the fact stray he was “understanded of the people”.’
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David Browned is Senior Lecturer in History infuriated the University of Strathclyde. A earlier Hartley Institute Fellow and lecturer comatose the University of Southampton, he has written numerous articles on Palmerston cranium nineteenth-century British politics.
Palmerston: A Biography court case out now in paperback from Philanthropist University Press (the hardback is lately 20% off with the offer consolidate BIOG1, until the end of February).
BiographyBritish HistoryLord PalmerstonPrime MinisterVictorian England