Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, known as Lord Palmerston, was a British Anglo-Irish politician who served as prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1855 to 1858 and from 1859 to his death in 1865. A member of the Tory, Whig and Liberal parties, Palmerston was also the first Liberal prime minister. An ideologue of "Free-Trade" and a major sponsor of the Opium Wars against the Chinese Empire and the war against Egypt, he dominated British foreign policy from 1830 to 1865 when Britain stood at the height of its imperial power.
In 1802, Temple succeeded to his father's Irish peerage as the 3rd Viscount Palmerston. This Irish peerage did not entitle him to a seat in the House of Lords and Temple became a Tory MP in the House of Commons in 1807. From 1809 to 1828, he was Secretary at War, organising the finances of the army. He was Foreign Secretary from 1830–1834, 1835–1841 and 1846–1851, responding to a series of conflicts in Europe.
In 1852, Palmerston became Home Secretary in the government of the Earl of Aberdeen. As home secretary, Palmerston enacted various social reforms, although he opposed electoral reform. When Aberdeen's coalition fell in 1855 over its handling of the Crimean War, Palmerston was the only man able to sustain a majority in Parliament, and he became prime minister. He had two periods in office, 1855–1858 and 1859–1865, before his death in 1865 at the age of 80 years. Palmerston is considered to have been the "first truly popular" prime minister. He remains the most recent British prime minister to die in office.
Palmerston masterfully controlled public opinion by stimulating British nationalism. He was distrusted by Queen Victoria and most of the political leadership, but he received and sustained the favour of the press and the populace. Historians rank Palmerston as one of the greatest foreign secretaries, due to his handling of great crises, and commitments to the balance of power and British interests. His policies in relation to India, China, Italy, Belgium and Spain had extensive long-lasting beneficial consequences for Britain. However, Palmerston's leadership during the Opium Wars was questioned and denounced by other prominent statesmen. The consequences of the conquest of India have also been reconsidered with time.
Early life: 1784–1806
Henry John Temple was born in his family's Westminster house to the Irish branch of the Temple family on 20 October 1784. His family derived their title from the Peerage of Ireland, although he rarely visited Ireland. His father was Henry Temple, 2nd Viscount Palmerston, an Anglo-Irish peer, and his mother was Mary, a daughter of Benjamin Mee, a London merchant. From 1792 to 1794, he accompanied his family on a long Continental tour. While in Italy, Palmerston acquired an Italian tutor, who taught him to speak and write fluent Italian. The family owned a huge country estate in the north of County Sligo in the northwest of Ireland.He was educated at Harrow School. Admiral Sir Augustus Clifford, 1st Bt., was a fag to Palmerston, Viscount Althorp and Viscount Duncannon and later remembered Palmerston as by far the most merciful of the three. Temple was often engaged in school fights and fellow Old Harrovians remembered Temple as someone who stood up to bullies twice his size. Henry Temple's father took him to the House of Commons in 1799, where the young Palmerston shook hands with the prime minister, William Pitt the Younger.
Temple was then at the University of Edinburgh, where he learnt political economy from Dugald Stewart, a friend of the Scottish philosophers Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith. Temple later described his time at Edinburgh as producing "whatever useful knowledge and habits of mind I possess". Lord Minto wrote to the young Palmerston's parents that Henry Temple was well-mannered and charming. Stewart wrote to a friend, saying of Temple: "In point of temper and conduct he is everything his friends could wish. Indeed, I cannot say that I have ever seen a more faultless character at this time of life, or one possessed of more amiable dispositions."
Henry Temple succeeded his father to the title of Viscount Palmerston on 17 April 1802, before he had turned 18. He also inherited a vast country estate in the north of County Sligo in the west of Ireland. He later built Classiebawn Castle on this estate. Palmerston went to St John's College, Cambridge. As a nobleman, he was entitled to take his MA without examinations, but Palmerston wished to obtain his degree through examinations. This was declined, although he was allowed to take the separate college examinations, where he obtained first-class honours.
After war was declared on France in 1803, Palmerston joined the Volunteers mustered to oppose a French invasion, being one of the three officers in the unit for St John's College. He was also appointed Lieutenant-Colonel Commandant of the Romsey Volunteers. When the Volunteers were subsumed into the Local Militia, he commanded the South-West Hampshire Local Militia from March 1809 to April 1816. Based at Romsey the regiment assembled for two weeks' training each year.
Early political career: 1806–1809
In February 1806, Palmerston was defeated in the election for the University of Cambridge constituency. In November he was elected for Horsham but was unseated in January 1807, when the Whig majority in the Commons voted for a petition to unseat him.Due to the patronage of Lord Chichester and Lord Malmesbury, Palmerston was given the post of Junior Lord of the Admiralty in the ministry of the Duke of Portland. He stood again for the Cambridge seat in May, but lost by three votes after he advised his supporters to vote for the other Tory candidate in the two-member constituency so as to ensure a Tory was elected.
Palmerston entered Parliament as Tory MP for the pocket borough of Newport on the Isle of Wight in June 1807.
On 3 February 1808, he spoke in support of confidentiality in the working of diplomacy, and of the bombardment of Copenhagen and the capture and destruction of the Royal Danish Navy by the Royal Navy in the Battle of Copenhagen. Denmark was neutral but Napoleon had recently agreed with the Russians in the Treaty of Tilsit to build a naval alliance against Britain, including using the Danish navy for invading Britain. Pre-empting this, the British offered Denmark the choice of temporarily handing over its navy until the war's end or the destruction of their navy. The Danes refused to comply and so Copenhagen was bombarded. Palmerston justified the attack by peroration with reference to the ambitions of Napoleon to take control of the Danish fleet:
it is defensible on the ground that the enormous power of France enables her to coerce the weaker state to become an enemy of England... It is the law of self-preservation that England appeals for the justification of her proceedings. It is admitted by the honourable gentleman and his supporters, that if Denmark had evidenced any hostility towards this country, then we should have been justified in measures of retaliation... Denmark coerced into hostility stands in the same position as Denmark voluntarily hostile, when the law of self-preservation comes into play...Does anyone believe that Buonaparte will be restrained by any considerations of justice from acting towards Denmark as he has done towards other countries?... England, according to that law of self-preservation which is a fundamental principle of the law of nations, is justified in securing, and therefore enforcing, from Denmark a neutrality which France would by compulsion have converted into an active hostility.
In a letter to a friend on 24 December 1807, he described the late Whig MP Edmund Burke as possessing "the palm of political prophecy". This would become a metaphor for his own career in divining the course of imperial foreign policy.
Secretary at War: 1809–1828
Palmerston's speech was so successful that Spencer Perceval, who formed his government in 1809, asked him to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, then a less important office than it was to become later. But Palmerston preferred the non-cabinet office of Secretary at War, charged exclusively with the financial business of the army. He served in that post for almost 20 years.On 1 April 1818, a retired officer on half-pay, Lieutenant David Davies, who had a grievance about his application from the War Office for a pension and was also mentally ill, shot Palmerston as he walked up the stairs of the War Office. The bullet only grazed his back and the wound was slight. After learning of Davies' illness, Palmerston paid for his legal defence at the trial, and Davies was sent to Bethlem Royal Hospital.
After the suicide of Lord Castlereagh in 1822, Lord Liverpool, who was Prime Minister had to hold together the Tory Cabinet which began to split along political lines. The more liberal wing of the Tory government made some ground, with George Canning becoming Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons, William Huskisson advocating and applying the doctrines of free trade, and Catholic emancipation emerging as an open question. Although Palmerston was not in the Cabinet, he cordially supported the measures of Canning and his friends.
Upon the retirement of Lord Liverpool in April 1827, Canning was called to be prime minister. The more conservative Tories, including Sir Robert Peel, withdrew their support, and an alliance was formed between the liberal members of the late ministry and the Whigs. The post of Chancellor of the Exchequer was offered to Palmerston, who accepted it, but this appointment was frustrated by some intrigue between King George IV and John Charles Herries. Lord Palmerston remained Secretary at War, though he gained a seat in the cabinet for the first time. The Canning administration ended after only four months on the death of the Prime Minister, and was followed by the ministry of Lord Goderich, which barely survived the year.
The Canningites remained influential, and the Duke of Wellington hastened to include Palmerston, Huskisson, Charles Grant, William Lamb, and the Earl of Dudley in the government he subsequently formed. However, a dispute between Wellington and Huskisson over the issue of parliamentary representation for Manchester and Birmingham led to the resignation of Huskisson and his allies, including Palmerston. In the spring of 1828, after more than twenty years continuously in office, Palmerston found himself in opposition.
On 26 February 1828, Palmerston delivered a speech in favour of Catholic emancipation. He felt that it was unseemly to relieve the "imaginary grievances" of the Dissenters from the established church while at the same time "real afflictions pressed upon the Catholics" of Great Britain. Palmerston also supported parliamentary reform. One of his biographers has stated that: "Like many Pittites, now labelled tories, he was a good whig at heart." The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 finally passed Parliament in 1829 when Palmerston was in the opposition. The Great Reform Act passed Parliament in 1832.