Political portrait of an age

BIOGRAPHY: Palmerston: A BiographyBy David Brown Yale University Press, 573pp. £25

LORD PALMERSTON, famous British foreign secretary, and twice prime minister, held an Irish peerage, which of itself did not entitle him to sit in the post-Union House of Lords. He was an MP from 1807 to 1865, and held junior and senior office for practically half a century, serving in first Tory, then Whig/Liberal administrations, but not for long under Wellington, or at all under Peel or Derby. He repeatedly refused elevation to the Lords, even though it would have allowed him time to devote himself entirely to ministerial duties, on the grounds that the Commons was “a place where a man out of office might make himself of consequence”.

The Temple family were influential administrators in 17th-century Ireland. The early-18th-century title came from what is now a western suburb of Dublin, but the rents that helped fund Palmerston’s political career came from around Cliffoney, in north Sligo. He paid only a handful of well-spaced visits to Ireland, not even once a decade. In 1841 he stayed at Lissadell with Sir Robert Gore-Booth. His major estate development project, with help from the Board of Works, was a fishing harbour at Mullaghmore. Coincidentally, his English estate at Broadlands passed eventually to his wife’s great-great-granddaughter Edwina, wife of Lord Mountbatten, making the fatal connection. Palmerston’s record as a landlord was contested. He assisted emigration during the Famine, but there was significant loss of life on the sea voyages.

Palmerston always supported Catholic emancipation, probably because it would have helped Irish recruitment to the army during the Napoleonic Wars. He was for nearly 20 years secretary at war. He later defended the Maynooth grant, and did not believe that government by bayonet was sustainable.

DAVID BROWN’S 500-page scholarly biography is a political portrait of the age, focusing primarily on British foreign policy from 1830 to 1865. As a boy Palmerston, in August 1792, had been taken to Paris, where his parents were presented to Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, shortly before their violent deposition. He was later educated in Edinburgh in the atmosphere of the Scottish Enlightenment, before going to St John’s College, Cambridge. His credo was progressive change and constitutional government, as opposed to reactionary absolutism. His assertive, often jaunty championing of liberal causes abroad, based on a confidence in English political and military superiority, made him popular at home, despite his lukewarm attitude to extension of the franchise. In 1864, he argued, if every sane man had the right to vote, “why does it not also belong to every sane woman who is equally affected by legislation and taxation?” His criticism of France in 1815 – “the public enjoy everything, individuals nothing” – would have echoes in cross-channel attitudes even today.

Assertive without being quixotic, Palmerston’s diplomacy was successful in helping Britain to punch above its weight, preserving the European balance of power in its own interests, without leading to war, except the Crimean War, which started when he was no longer foreign secretary. His cabinet colleagues, the queen and Prince Albert, and partners abroad all found him difficult to control. Post-1830 he supported the newly independent Belgium, broadly backed Italian independence working with the French, and opposed dismemberment of the Ottoman empire from within and without, but lost office over his leaked support for the coup d’etat of Louis-Napoleon in 1851. Like Gladstone and Russell, he misjudged the American Civil War, being more sympathetic to the south and convinced until 1862 that secession would succeed. He was very conscious of the lurking Fenian threat.

He was famous for his gunboat diplomacy in the Don Pacifico affair, in 1850, where he threatened force to protect the rights of a British citizen abroad, in the manner of ancient Rome (" civis Romanus sum"). This principle was later a casus belli in starting the Boer War. He famously stated that Britain had no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies, only eternal and perpetual interests. As junior lord of the admiralty he justified a pre-emptive attack in 1807 on the navy of neutral Denmark by invoking Britain's right of self-preservation, the same principle invoked by Churchill vis-à-vis Ireland in his May 1945 broadcast. Palmerston was criticised in his constituency for threatening force in 1847 to secure repayment of Spanish government bonds held by English investors attracted by higher rates of interest than at home.

Palmerston bought his first seat for £4,000. A condition of purchasing a subsequent one was that he would never visit his constituency, a cheque from time to time to his election agent for worthy local causes sufficing. Yet, in 1845, he wrote, “Elections turn more upon local feeling and local bribery than upon great public questions, except in moments of extraordinary crisis.”

NICKNAMED CUPID in his younger days, he recorded concurrent liaisons with a number of women, one of whom, Lady Emily Cowper, nee Lamb, and sister of Lord Melbourne, he married. Queen Victoria took a dim view of his nocturnal attempt to seduce a lady-in-waiting during a stay at Windsor Castle. In his late 70s, a failed attempt by an Irish journalist to cite him as co-respondent in a divorce case did him no harm with the public, though Gladstone, as in 1890, was nervous of its effect on Nonconformist opinion. Palmerston’s famous last words were, “Die, my dear doctor, that’s the last thing I shall do.”

A professional biographer, Jasper Ridley, wrote a lively study of Palmerston 30 years ago. This biography by David Brown, a history lecturer at Strathclyde University, is drier but weightier.

Martin Mansergh, TD for Tipperary South, is Minister of State for the OPW and a former political adviser and diplomat