• Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, 1784

   

He is best remembered for his direction of British foreign policy through a period when Britain was at the height of its power, serving terms as both Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister. Some of his aggressive actions, now sometimes termed liberal interventionist, were greatly controversial at the time, and remain so today. Indeed, historian A.J.P. Taylor has summarized his career by emphasizing the paradoxes:

For twenty years junior minister in a Tory government, he became the most successful of Whig Foreign Secretaries; though always a Conservative, he ended his life by presiding over the transition from Whiggism to Liberalism. He was the exponent of British strength, yet was driven from office for truckling to a foreign despot; he preached the Balance of Power, yet helped to inaugurate the policy of isolation and of British withdrawal from Europe. Irresponsible and flippant, he became the first hero of the serious middle class electorate. He reached high office solely through an irregular family connection; he retained it through skillful use of the press -- the only Prime Minister to become an accomplished leader - writer.

He was the most recent British Prime Minister to die in office.

Henry John Temple was born in his family's Westminster house to the Irish branch of the Temple family on 20 October 1784. Henry was to become the 3rd Viscount Palmerston. His family derived their title from the Peerage of Ireland. His father was Henry Temple, 2nd Viscount Palmerston (1739 – 1802), and his mother Mary (1752 – 1805), daughter of Benjamin Mee, a London merchant. From 1792 to 1794, the young future Lord Palmerston accompanied his family on a Continental tour of France, Switzerland, Italy, Hanover and the Netherlands. Whilst in Italy Palmerston acquired an Italian tutor, Signor Gaetano, who taught him to speak and write fluent Italian.

He was educated at Harrow School (1795 – 1800). 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. Palmerston was often engaged in school fights and fellow Old Harrovians remembered Palmerston as someone who stood up to bullies twice his size. Palmerston's father took him to the House of Commons in 1799, where young Palmerston shook hands with the Prime Minister, William Pitt.

Palmerston was then at the University of Edinburgh (1800 – 1803), where he learned political economy from Dugald Stewart, a friend of the Scottish philosophers Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith. Palmerston later described his time at Edinburgh as producing "whatever useful knowledge and habits of mind I possess". Lord Minto wrote to Palmerston's parents that young Palmerston was well mannered and charming. Stewart wrote to a friend, saying of Palmerston: "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".

Palmerston succeeded his father to the title of Viscount Palmerston on 17 April 1802, before he had turned 18. Palmerston went to St John's College, Cambridge (1803 – 1806). 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 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 Commander of the Romsey Volunteers.

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, he was given the post of Junior Lord of the Admiralty in the ministry of the Duke of Portland. Palmerston stood again for the Cambridge seat in May but he 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 Palmerston spoke in support of confidentiality in the working of diplomacy and the bombardment of Copenhagen and the capture and destruction of the Danish navy by the Royal Navy in the Battle of Copenhagen. At the time of the attack on 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. Preempting this, the British offered Denmark the choice of temporarily handing over her navy until the war's end or the destruction of the navy. The Danes refused to comply and so Copenhagen was bombarded. Palmerston justified the attack by 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 honorable 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, Palmerston described the late Whig MP Edmund Burke as possessing "the palm of political prophecy".

Lord Palmerston's speech was so successful that 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 from the mid nineteenth century. Lord Palmerston preferred the office of Secretary at War, charged exclusively with the financial business of the army. Without a seat in the cabinet, he remained in the latter post for 20 years.

On 10 March 1812 Palmerston spoke in favor in the Commons of limiting foreign soldiers in the British Army to 16,000, and that of that number the majority were employed abroad. Palmerston was also in favor of a standing army in peacetime. On 8 March 1816 Palmerston delivered a speech in the Commons in favor of appropriations for the large standing army that had been maintained since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. He stated that the large standing army was needed "for protection of the constitution." Beside, Palmerston noted, a large proportion of the officers of the standing army were "men of property and connections." In answer to Radical criticisms of defense spending, Palmerston maintained in a speech in the Commons on 16 May 1820 that the financial burden on the country was due to Britain being "Engaged in an arduous struggle, single - handed and unaided, not only against all the powers of Europe but with the confederated forces of the civilized world, our object was not merely military glory — not the temptation of territorial acquisition — not even what might be considered a more justifiable object, the assertion of violated rights and the vindication of national honor, but we were contending for our very existence as an independent nation... He lamented as deeply as the hon. gentleman the burthens of the country, but it should be recollected that they were the price which we had agreed to pay for our freedom and independence".

After the suicide of Castlereagh in 1822, the Cabinet of Lord Liverpool's Tory administration 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 Lord Palmerston was not in the Cabinet, he cordially supported the measures of Canning and his friends. On 26 February 1828 Palmerston delivered a speech in favor 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 the campaign to pass the Reform Bill to extend the voting franchise to more men in Britain. One of his biographers has stated that: "Like many Pittites, now labelled tories, he was a good whig at heart". Catholic Emancipation finally passed Parliament in 1829 when Palmerston was in the opposition. The Great Reform Act passed Parliament in 1832.

On 1 April 1818 a retired officer on half pay, Lieutenant Davies, who had a grievance about his application from the War Office for a pension and was also mad, shot Palmerston as he walked up the stairs of the War Office. However the bullet only grazed his back and the wound was slight. After Palmerston learned that Davies was mad, he paid for his legal defense at the trial (Davies was sent to Bedlam).

Upon the death of Lord Liverpool, 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 Lord Palmerston, who accepted it, but this appointment was frustrated by some intrigue between the King 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 Lord 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 Lord Palmerston. In the spring of 1828, after more than twenty years continuously in office, Lord Palmerston found himself in opposition.

Following his move to opposition, Lord Palmerston appears to have focused closely on foreign policy. He had already urged Wellington into active interference in the Greek War of Independence, and he had made several visits to Paris, where he foresaw with great accuracy the impending overthrow of the Bourbons. On 1 June 1829 he made his first great speech on foreign affairs.

Palmerston was a great orator. His language was relatively unstudied and his delivery somewhat embarrassed, but he generally found words to say the right thing at the right time and to address the House of Commons in the language best adapted to the capacity and the temper of his audience. An attempt was made by the Duke of Wellington in September 1830 to induce Lord Palmerston to re-enter the cabinet, but he refused to do so without Lord Lansdowne and Lord Grey, two notable Whigs. This can be said to be the point in 1830, when his party allegiance changed.
Palmerston entered the office with great energy and continued to exert his influence there for twenty years, which he held it from 1830 – 1834, 1835 – 1841, and 1846 - 1851. Basically, Palmerston was responsible for the whole of English foreign policy from the time of the French and Belgian Revolutions of 1830 until December 1851. His abrasive style earned him the nickname "Lord Pumice Stone", and his manner of dealing with foreign governments who crossed him was the original "gunboat diplomacy".

The revolutions of 1830 gave a jolt to the settled European system that had been created in 1814 - 15. The United Kingdom of the Netherlands was rent in half by the Belgian Revolution, the Kingdom of Portugal was the scene of civil war, and the Spanish were about to place an infant princess on the throne. Poland was in arms against the Russian Empire, while the northern powers (Russia, Prussia, and Austria) formed a closer alliance that seemed to threaten the peace and liberties of Europe. Polish exiles called on Britain to intervene against Russia during the November Uprising of 1830.

Palmerston's overall policy was to safeguard British interests, maintain peace, keep the balance of power, and retain the status quo in Europe. He had no grievance against Russia and while he privately sympathized with the Polish cause, in his role as foreign minister he rejected Polish demands. With serious trouble simultaneously taking place in Belgium and Italy, and lesser issues in Greece and Portugal, he sought to deescalate European tensions rather than aggravate them. He therefore focused chiefly on achieving a peaceful settlement of the crisis in Belgium.

William I of the Netherlands appealed to the great powers that had placed him on the throne after the Napoleonic Wars to maintain his rights; a conference assembled accordingly in London. The British solution involved the independence of Belgium, which Lord Palmerston believed would greatly contribute to the security of Britain, but any solution was not straightforward. On the one hand, the northern powers were anxious to defend William I; on the other, many Belgian revolutionaries, like Charles de Brouckère and Charles Rogier, supported the reunion of the Belgian provinces to France. The British policy was a close alliance with France, but one subject to the balance of power on the Continent, and in particular the preservation of Belgium. If the northern powers supported William I by force, they would encounter the resistance of France and the UK united in arms. If France sought to annex Belgium, she would forfeit the British alliance and find herself opposed by the whole of Europe. In the end the British policy prevailed. Although the continent had been close to war, peace was maintained on London's terms and Prince Leopold of Saxe - Coburg, the widower of a British princess, was placed upon the throne of Belgium.

In 1833 and 1834 the youthful Queens Maria II of Portugal and Isabella II of Spain were the representatives and the hope of the constitutional parties of their countries. Their positions were under some pressure from their absolutist kinsmen, Dom Miguel of Portugal and Don Carlos of Spain, who were the closest males in the lines of succession. Lord Palmerston conceived and executed the plan of a quadruple alliance of the constitutional states of the West to serve as a counterpoise to the northern alliance. A treaty for the pacification of the Peninsula was signed in London on 22 April 1834 and, although the struggle was somewhat prolonged in Spain, it accomplished its objective.

France had been a reluctant party to the treaty, and never executed her role in it with much zeal. Louis Philippe was accused of secretly favoring the Carlists - the supporters of Don Carlos - and he rejected direct interference in Spain. It is probable that the hesitation of the French court on this question was one of the causes of the enduring personal hostility Lord Palmerston showed towards the French King thereafter, though that sentiment may well have arisen earlier. Although Lord Palmerston wrote in June 1834 that Paris was "the pivot of my foreign policy", the differences between the two countries grew into a constant but sterile rivalry that brought benefit to neither.

Lord Palmerston was greatly interested by the diplomatic questions of Eastern Europe. During the Greek War of Independence he had energetically supported the Greek cause and backed the Treaty of Constantinople that gave Greece its independence. However, from 1830 the defense of the Ottoman Empire became one of the cardinal objects of his policy. He believed in the regeneration of Turkey. "All that we hear", he wrote to Bulwer (Lord Dalling), "about the decay of the Turkish Empire, and its being a dead body or a sapless trunk, and so forth, is pure unadulterated nonsense." His two great aims were to prevent Russia establishing itself on the Bosporus and to prevent France doing likewise on the Nile. He regarded the maintenance of the authority of the Sublime Porte as the chief barrier against both these developments.

Lord Palmerston had long maintained a suspicious and hostile attitude towards Russia, whose autocratic government offended his liberal principles and whose ever growing size challenged the strength of the British Empire. He was angered by the 1833 Treaty of Hünkâr Iskelesi, a mutual assistance pact between Russia and the Ottomans, but was annoyed and hostile towards David Urquhart, the creator of the Vixen affair, running the Russian blockade of Circassia in the mid 1830s.

Despite his popular reputation he was hesitant in 1831 about aiding the Sultan of Turkey, who was under threat from Muhammad Ali, the pasha of Egypt. Later, after Russian successes, in 1833 and 1835 he made proposals to afford material aid, which were overruled by the cabinet. Lord Palmerston held that "if we can procure for it ten years of peace under the joint protection of the five Powers, and if those years are profitably employed in reorganizing the internal system of the empire, there is no reason whatever why it should not become again a respectable Power" and challenged the [metaphor] that an old country, such as Turkey should be in such disrepair as would be warranted by the comparison: "Half the wrong conclusions at which mankind arrive are reached by the abuse of metaphors, and by mistaking general resemblance or imaginary similarity for real identity." However, when the power of Ali appeared to threaten the existence of the Ottoman dynasty, particularly given the death of the Sultan on 1 July 1839, he succeeded in bringing the great powers together to sign a collective note on 27 July pledging them to maintain the independence and integrity of the Turkish Empire in order to preserve the security and peace of Europe. However, by 1840 Ali had occupied Syria and won the Battle of Nezib against the Turkish forces. Lord Ponsonby, the British ambassador at Constantinople, vehemently urged the British government to intervene. Having closer ties to the pasha than most, France refused to be a party to coercive measures against Ali despite having signed the note in the previous year.

Lord Palmerston, irritated at France's Egyptian policy, signed the London Convention of 15 July 1840 in London with Austria, Russia and Prussia - without the knowledge of the French government. This measure was taken with great hesitation, and strong opposition on the part of several members of the UK cabinet. Lord Palmerston forced the measure through in part by declaring in a letter to the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, that he would resign from the ministry if his policy were not adopted.

The London Convention granted Muhammad Ali hereditary rule in Egypt in return for withdrawal from Syria and Lebanon, but was rejected by the pasha. The European powers intervened with force, and the bombardment of Beirut, the fall of Acre, and the total collapse of the power of Ali followed in rapid succession. Lord Palmerston's policy was triumphant, and the author of it had won a reputation as one of the most powerful statesmen of the age.

At the same time as she was acting with Russia in the Levant, the British government engaged in the affairs of Afghanistan in order to stem her advance into Central Asia, and fought the First Opium War with China which ended in the conquest of Chusan, later to be exchanged for the island of Hong Kong.

In all these actions Lord Palmerston brought to bear a great deal of patriotic vigor and energy. This made him very popular among the ordinary people of Britain, but his passion, propensity to act through personal animosity, and imperious language made him seem dangerous and destabilizing in the eyes of the Queen and his more conservative colleagues in government.

In 1839, following the death of her husband, he married his mistress of many years, Emily, Lady Cowper (née Lamb), a noted Whig hostess and sister of Lord Melbourne. They had no legitimate children, although at least one of Lord Cowper's putative children, Lady Emily Cowper, later Countess of Shaftesbury, was widely believed to have been Palmerston's.

Within a few months Melbourne's administration came to an end (1841) and Lord Palmerston remained for five years out of office. The crisis was past, but the change which took place by the substitution of François Guizot for Adolphe Thiers in France, and of Lord Aberdeen for Lord Palmerston in the UK, was a fortunate event for the peace of the world. Lord Palmerston had adopted the opinion that peace with France was not to be relied on, and indeed that war between the two countries was sooner or later inevitable. Aberdeen and Guizot inaugurated a different policy; by mutual confidence and friendly offices, they entirely succeeded in restoring the most cordial understanding between the two governments, and the irritation which Lord Palmerston had inflamed gradually subsided. During the administration of Sir Robert Peel, Lord Palmerston led a retired life, but he attacked with characteristic bitterness the Webster - Ashburton Treaty with the United States. The Webster - Ashburton Treaty of 1842, resolved the several Canadian boundary disputes between the Great Britain and the United States, particularly over the exact border between New Brunswick and the State of Maine of the United States and the exact boundary between Canada and the State of Minnesota from Lake Superior and the Lake of the Woods. Much as he criticized the Treaty, the Webster - Ashburton Treaty did, however, successfully close some other questions with which Palmerston had long been concerned.

Lord Palmerston's reputation as an interventionist and his unpopularity with the Queen and other Whig grandees was such that when Lord John Russell attempted in December 1845 to form a ministry, the combination failed because Lord Grey refused to join a government in which Lord Palmerston should resume the direction of foreign affairs. A few months later, however, this difficulty was surmounted; the Whigs returned to power, and Lord Palmerston to the Foreign Office (July 1846) with a strong assurance that Russell should exercise a strict control over his proceedings. A few days sufficed to show how vain was this expectation.

The French government regarded the appointment of Lord Palmerston as a certain sign of renewed hostilities. They availed themselves of a dispatch in which he had put forward the name of a Coburg prince as a candidate for the hand of the young queen of Spain as a justification for a departure from the engagements entered into between Guizot and Lord Aberdeen. However little the conduct of the French government in this transaction of the Spanish marriages can be vindicated, it is certain that it originated in the belief that in Lord Palmerston France had a restless and subtle enemy. The efforts of the British minister to defeat the French marriages of the Spanish princesses, by an appeal to the Treaty of Utrecht and the other powers of Europe, were wholly unsuccessful; France won the game, though with no small loss of honorable reputation.

Brown rejects the traditional interpretation to the effect that Lord Aberdeen had forged an entente cordiale with France in the early 1840s whereupon the belligerent Lord Palmerston after 1846 destroyed that friendly relationship. Brown argues that as foreign secretary from 1846 to 1851 and subsequently as prime minister, Palmerston sought to maintain the balance of power in Europe, sometimes even aligning with France to do so.

The revolutions of 1848 spread like a conflagration through Europe, and shook every throne on the Continent except those of Russia, Spain and Belgium. Lord Palmerston sympathized, or was supposed to sympathize, openly with the revolutionary party abroad. In particular, he was a strong advocate of national self - determination, and stood firmly on the side of constitutional liberties on the Continent.

He was bitterly opposed to the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 in his family's homeland of Ireland, despite his support for such rebellions elsewhere in Europe. Nor did he use his great influence at Cabinet to secure aid for the starving people of Ireland during the Great Famine there in the second half of the 1840s. County Sligo, where Lord Palmerston had a country estate, was one of the worst affected parts of Ireland during this famine.

No state was regarded by him with more aversion than Austria. Yet, his opposition to Austria was chiefly based upon her occupation of northeastern Italy and her Italian policy. Lord Palmerston maintained that the existence of Austria as a great power north of the Alps was an essential element in the system of Europe. Antipathies and sympathies had a large share in the political views of Lord Palmerston, and his sympathies had ever been passionately awakened by the cause of Italian independence. He supported the Sicilians against the King of Naples, and even allowed arms to be sent them from the arsenal at Woolwich. Although he had endeavored to restrain the King of Sardinia from his rash attack on the superior forces of Austria, he obtained for him a reduction of the penalty of defeat. Austria, weakened by the revolution, sent an envoy to London to request the mediation of the UK, based on a large cession of Italian territory. Lord Palmerston rejected the terms he might have obtained for Piedmont. After a couple of years this wave of revolution was replaced by a wave of reaction.

In Hungary the civil war, which had thundered at the gates of Vienna, was brought to a close by Russian intervention. Prince Schwarzenberg assumed the government of the empire with dictatorial power. In spite of what Lord Palmerston termed his judicious bottle - holding, the movement he had encouraged and applauded, but to which he could give no material aid, was everywhere subdued. The British government, or at least Lord Palmerston as its representative, was regarded with suspicion and resentment by every power in Europe, except the French republic. Even that was shortly afterwards to be alienated by Lord Palmerston's attack on Greece. When Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian democrat and leader of its constitutionalists, landed in the UK, Lord Palmerston proposed to receive him at Broadlands, a design which was only prevented by a peremptory vote of the cabinet.

This state of things was regarded with the utmost annoyance by the British court and by most of the British ministers. On many occasions, Lord Palmerston had taken important steps without their knowledge, which they disapproved. Over the Foreign Office he asserted and exercised an arbitrary dominion, which the feeble efforts of the premier could not control. The Queen and the Prince Consort did not conceal their indignation at the fact that they were held responsible for Lord Palmerston's actions by the other Courts of Europe.

When Benjamin Disraeli and others took several nights in the House of Commons to impeach Lord Palmerston's foreign policy, the foreign minister responded to a five hour speech by Anstey with a five hour speech of his own, the first of two great speeches in which he laid out a comprehensive defense of his foreign policy and of liberal interventionism more generally. Reviewing his whole parliamentary career — reminding him, he joked, of a drowning man's visions of his past life — he said:

I hold that the real policy of England... is to be the champion of justice and right, pursuing that course with moderation and prudence, not becoming the Quixote of the world, but giving the weight of her moral sanction and support wherever she thinks that justice is, and whenever she thinks that wrong has been done.

It is generally supposed that Russell and the Queen both hoped that the other would take the initiative and dismiss Lord Palmerston; the Queen was dissuaded by Prince Albert, who took the limits of constitutional power very seriously, and Russell by Lord Palmerston's prestige with the people and his competence in an otherwise remarkably inept Cabinet.

In 1847 the home of Don Pacifico, a Gibraltaran merchant living in Athens, Greece, was attacked by an anti - Semitic mob. The mob included the sons of a Greek government minister and, during the attack, Greek police did not intervene and stood by and watched the attack. Because Don Pacifico was a British citizen, the British government expressed concern. In January 1850 Palmerston took advantage of Don Pacifico's claims on the Greek government and blockaded the port of Piraeus in the kingdom of Greece. As Greece was under the joint protection of three powers, Russia and France protested against its coercion by the British fleet.

After a memorable debate (17 June), Lord Palmerston's policy was condemned by a vote of the House of Lords. The House of Commons was moved by Roebuck to reverse the sentence, which it did 29 June by a majority of 46, after having heard from Lord Palmerston on 25 June. This was the most eloquent and powerful speech he ever delivered, wherein he sought to vindicate not only his claims on the Greek government for Don Pacifico, but his entire administration of foreign affairs.

It was in this speech, which lasted five hours, Lord Palmerston made the well known declaration that a British subject ought everywhere to be protected by the strong arm of the British government against injustice and wrong; comparing the reach of the British Empire to that of the Roman Empire, in which a Roman citizen could walk the earth unmolested by any foreign power. This was the famous Civis Romanus sum ("I am a citizen of Rome") speech. After this speech Palmerston's popularity had never been greater.

Yet, notwithstanding this parliamentary triumph, there were not a few of his own colleagues and supporters who condemned the spirit in which the foreign relations of the Crown were carried on. In that same year, the Queen addressed a minute to the Prime Minister in which she recorded her dissatisfaction at the manner in which Lord Palmerston evaded the obligation to submit his measures for the royal sanction as failing in sincerity to the Crown. This minute was communicated to Lord Palmerston, who accepted its criticisms.

On 2 December 1851 Louis Napoleon — who had been elected President of France in 1848 — carried out a coup d'état by dissolving the National Assembly and arresting the leading Republicans. Palmerston privately congratulated Napoleon on his triumph, noting that Britain's constitution was rooted in history but that France had had five revolutions since 1789, with the French Constitution of 1850 being a "day - before - yesterday tomfoolery which the scatterbrain heads of Marrast and Tocqueville invented for the torment and perplexity of the French nation". However the Cabinet decided that Britain must be neutral and so Palmerston requested his officials to adopt a neutral attitude towards the coup. However Prince Albert came to learn of Palmerston's favorable opinion of the coup and the Queen learned that Palmerston had sent a dispatch without showing it to her first, in which he protested that he had merely expressed his personal opinion. Victoria demanded that the Prime Minister dismiss him, and so Palmerston duly resigned.

After a brief period of Conservative minority government, the Earl of Aberdeen became Prime Minister in a coalition government of Whigs and Peelites (with Russell taking the role of Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons). Being impossible for them to form a government without Lord Palmerston, he was made Home Secretary in December 1852. Many people considered this a curious appointment because Lord Palmerston's expertise was so obviously in foreign affairs. There was a story that after a great wave of strikes swept Northern England, the Queen summoned Palmerston to discuss the situation. When she inquired after the latest news, Palmerston is said to have replied: "There is no definite news, Madam, but it seems certain that the Turks have crossed the Danube".

Palmerston passed the Factory Act 1853 which removed loopholes in previous Factory Acts and outlawed all labor by young persons between 6pm and 6am. He attempted to pass a Bill that confirmed the rights of workers to combine but this was thrown out by the House of Lords. He introduced the Truck Act which stopped employers paying workmen in goods instead of money, or forcing them to purchase goods from shops owned by the employers. In August 1853 Palmerston introduced the Smoke Abatement Act in order to combat the increasing smoke from coal fires, a problem greatly aggravated by the Industrial Revolution. He also oversaw the passage of the Vaccination Act 1853 into law, which was introduced as a private member's bill, and which Palmerston persuaded the government to support. The Act made vaccination of children compulsory for the first time. Palmerston outlawed the burying of the dead in churches. The right to bury the dead in churches was held by wealthy families whose ancestors had purchased the right in the past. Palmerston opposed this practice on public health grounds and ensured that all bodies were buried in the churchyard or public cemetery.

Palmerston reduced the period in which prisoners could be held in solitary confinement from eighteen months to nine months. He also ended transportation to Van Diemen's Land for prisoners by passing the Penal Servitude Act 1853, which also reduced the maximum sentences for most offenses. Palmerston passed the Reformatory Schools Act 1854 which gave the Home Secretary powers to send juvenile prisoners to a reformatory school instead of prison. He was forced to accept an amendment which ensured that the prisoner had to have spent at least three months in jail first. When in October 1854 Palmerston visited Parkhurst jail and conversed with three boy inmates, he was impressed by their behavior and ordered that they be sent to a reformatory school. He found the ventilation in the cells unsatisfactory and ordered that they be improved.

Palmerston strongly opposed Lord John Russell's plans for giving the vote to sections of the urban working classes. When the Cabinet agreed in December 1853 to introduce a bill during the next session of Parliament in the form which Russell wanted, Lord Palmerston resigned. However, Aberdeen told him that no definite decision on reform had been taken and persuaded Lord Palmerston to return to the Cabinet. The electoral Reform Bill did not pass Parliament that year.

Lord Palmerston's exile from his traditional realm of the Foreign Office meant he did not have full control over British policy during the events precipitating the Crimean War. One of his biographers, Jasper Ridley, argues that had he been in control of foreign policy at this time, war in the Crimea would have been avoided. Lord Palmerston argued in Cabinet, after Russian troops concentrated on the Ottoman border in February 1853, that the Royal Navy should join the French fleet in the Dardanelles as a warning to Russia. He was overruled, however.

In May 1853 the Russians threatened to invade the principalities Wallachia and Moldavia unless the Ottoman Sultan surrendered to their demands. Lord Palmerston argued for immediate decisive action; the Royal Navy should be sent to the Dardanelles to assist the Turkish navy and that Britain should inform Russia of her intention to go to war with her if she invaded the principalities. However, Lord Aberdeen objected to all of Lord Palmerston's proposals. After prolonged arguments, a reluctant Lord Aberdeen agreed to send a fleet to the Dardanelles but objected to his other proposals. The Russian Tsar was annoyed by Britain's actions but it was not enough to deter him. When the British fleet arrived at the Dardanelles the weather was rough so the fleet took refuge in the outer waters of the straits. The Russians argued that this was a violation of the Straits Convention of 1841 and therefore invaded the two principalities. Lord Palmerston thought that this was the result of British weakness and thought that if Russia had been told that if they invaded the principalities the British and French fleets would enter the Bosphorus or the Black Sea, she would have been deterred. In Cabinet, Lord Palmerston argued for a vigorous prosecution of the war against Russia by Britain but Lord Aberdeen objected, as he wanted peace. Public opinion was on the side of the Turks and with Aberdeen becoming steadily unpopular, Lord Dudley Stuart in February 1854 noted, "Wherever I go, I have heard but one opinion on the subject, and that one opinion has been pronounced in a single word, or in a single name - Palmerston."

On 28 March 1854 Britain, along with France, declared war on Russia for refusing to withdraw from the principalities. In the winter of 1854 - 55, the British troops besieging Sevastopol suffered from the harsh conditions and military setbacks such as the Charge of the Light Brigade. An angry mood swept the country and in January 1855 Aberdeen's government was forced to set up a Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry into the conduct of the war after losing a Commons vote on the matter. After the vote, the government resigned. Queen Victoria did not want to ask Lord Palmerston to form a government and so asked Lord Derby to accept the premiership. Derby offered Lord Palmerston the office of Secretary of State for War which he accepted under the condition that Clarendon remained as Foreign Secretary. Clarendon refused and so Lord Palmerston refused Derby's offer and Derby subsequently gave up trying to form a government. The Queen sent for Lansdowne but he was too old to accept: so she asked Russell; but none of his former colleagues except Lord Palmerston wanted to serve under him. Having exhausted the possible alternatives, the Queen invited Lord Palmerston to Buckingham Palace on 4 February 1855 to form a government.

In March 1855 the old Tsar, Nicholas I, died and was succeeded by his son, Alexander II, who wished to make peace. However, Lord Palmerston found the peace terms too soft on Russia and so persuaded Napoleon III of France to break off the peace negotiations. Lord Palmerston was confident that Sevastopol could be captured and so put Britain in a stronger negotiating position. In September Sevastopol surrendered when the French captured the Malakov whilst the British were driven back from the Redan after many casualties. On 27 February 1856 an armistice was signed and after a month's negotiations an agreement was signed at the Congress of Paris. Lord Palmerston's demand for a demilitarized Black Sea was secured, although his wish for the Crimea to be returned to the Ottomans was not. The peace treaty was signed on 30 March 1856. In April 1856 Lord Palmerston was awarded the Order of the Garter by Victoria.

In October 1856 the Chinese seized the pirate ship Arrow. It had been registered as a British ship two years previously but was owned by a notorious Chinese pirate. The titular captain was British, and the crew was Chinese. It was intercepted in Chinese territorial waters by Chinese coastguards and the Union Flag was pulled down. The Chinese crew was arrested and the British captain was released. The British Consul at Canton, Harry Parkes, protested against this insult to the flag and demanded an apology. The Chinese Commissioner Ye Mingchen refused and it was discovered that the Arrow's registration as a British vessel expired three weeks before it was seized and therefore had no right to fly the flag or to be exempt from interception under international law. However, in disregard of international conventions, Parkes refused to back down in order to save face and protested that the Chinese did not know it was not a British ship at the time they accosted it. Parkes sent the Royal Navy to bombard Ye's palace and it was duly destroyed, along with a large part of the city and a large loss of life. Ye retaliated by issuing a proclamation calling on the people of Canton to "unite in exterminating these troublesome English villains" and offering a $100 bounty for the head of any Englishman as the British factories outside the city were burned to the ground in reprisal.

When news of this reached the UK Cabinet, many Ministers thought that Parkes' action had been both legally and morally wrong, and the Attorney General had no doubt that Parkes had acted in breach of international law. Lord Palmerston, however, backed Parkes on the principle that subordinates' actions should not be second guessed. The government's policy was subsequently strongly attacked in the Commons on high moral grounds by Richard Cobden and Gladstone during a censure debate. On the fourth night of the debate (3 March 1857), Lord Palmerston attacked Cobden and his speech as being pervaded by "an anti - English feeling, an abnegation of all those ties which bind men to their country and to their fellow countrymen, which I should hardly have expected from the lips of any member of this House. Everything that was English was wrong, and everything that was hostile to England was right." Lord Palmerston went on to claim that if the motion of censure was carried it would signal that the House had voted to "abandon a large community of British subjects at the extreme end of the globe to a set of barbarians - a set of kidnapping, murdering, poisoning barbarians." The censure motion was carried by a majority of sixteen and Lord Palmerston requested to the Queen that Parliament be dissolved for a general election, which it duly was. On the international front, the Sino - British crisis escalated subsequently and culminated in the Second Opium War.

Lord Palmerston's stance was very popular in the country and his party achieved the biggest parliamentary majority since 1835. Cobden and John Bright lost their seats, and Lord Shaftesbury wrote of the election:

[Palmerston]'s popularity is wonderful — strange to say, the whole turns on his name. There seems to be no measure, no principle, no cry, to influence men's minds and determine elections; it is simply, "Were you, or were you not? are you, or are you not, for Palmerston?"'

After the election, Lord Palmerston passed the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 which for the first time made it possible for courts to grant a divorce and removed divorce from the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. The opponents in Parliament, which included Gladstone, were the first in British history to try to kill a bill by talking it out. Nonetheless, Palmerston was determined to get the bill through, which he did.

In June news came to Britain of the Indian Mutiny and the attacks on British people there. Lord Palmerston sent Sir Colin Campbell and reinforcements to India. Lord Palmerston also agreed to transfer the authority of the British East India Company to the Crown. This was enacted in the Government of India Act 1858.

After the Italian republican Felice Orsini tried to assassinate the French emperor with a bomb made in Britain, the French were outraged (Orsini affair). Lord Palmerston introduced a Conspiracy to Murder Bill which made it a felony to plot in Britain to murder someone abroad. At first reading, the Conservatives voted for it but at second reading they voted against it. Lord Palmerston lost by nineteen votes. Therefore, in February 1858 he was forced to resign.

However, the Conservatives lacked a majority and Russell introduced a resolution in March 1859 arguing for widening the franchise, which the Conservatives opposed but which was carried. Parliament was dissolved and a general election ensued, which the Whigs won. Lord Palmerston rejected an offer from Disraeli to become Conservative leader, but he attended the meeting of 6 June 1859 in Willis's Rooms at St James Street where the Liberal Party was formed. The Queen asked Lord Granville to form a government but although Palmerston agreed to serve under him, Russell did not. Therefore, on 12 June the Queen asked Lord Palmerston to become Prime Minister. Russell and Gladstone agreed to serve under him.

In his last premiership Palmerston oversaw the passage of important legislation. The Offenses against the Person Act 1861 codified and reformed the law, and was part of a wider process of consolidating criminal law. The Companies Act 1862 was the basis of modern company law.

Palmerston was considered by some of his contemporaries to be a womanizer; The Times named him Lord Cupid (on account of his youthful looks), and he was cited, at the age of 79, as co-respondent in an 1863 divorce case, although it emerged that the case was nothing more than an attempted blackmail.

Although both Palmerston and William Gladstone treated each other as gentleman, they disagreed fundamentally over Church appointments, foreign affairs, defense and reform. How to handle his Chancellor of the Exchequer was Palmerston's greatest problem during his last premiership. The MP Sir William Gregory was told by a member of the Cabinet that "at the beginning of each session and after each holiday, Mr Gladstone used to come in charged to the muzzle with all sorts of schemes of all sorts of reforms which were absolutely necessary in his opinion to be immediately undertaken. Lord Palmerston used to look fixedly at the paper before him, saying nothing until there was a lull in Gladstone's outpouring. He then rapped the table and said cheerfully: “Now, my Lords and gentlemen, let us go to business”." Palmerston told Lord Shaftesbury: "Gladstone will soon have it all his own way and whenever he gets my place we shall have strange doings". He told another friend that he thought Gladstone would wreck the Liberal Party and end up in a madhouse.

When in May 1864 the MP Edward Baines introduced a Reform Bill in the Commons, Palmerston ordered Gladstone in his reply not to commit himself and the government to any particular scheme. Instead Gladstone said in his speech in the Commons that he did not see why any man should not have the vote unless he was mentally incapacitated, but added that this would not come about unless the working class showed an interest in reform. Palmerston believed that this was incitement to the working class to begin agitating for reform and told Gladstone: "What every Man and Woman too have a Right to, is to be well governed and under just Laws, and they who propose a change ought to shew that the present organization does not accomplish those objects".

French intervention in Italy had created an invasion scare and Lord Palmerston established a Royal Commission on the Defense of the United Kingdom which reported in 1860. It recommended a huge program of fortifications to protect the Royal Navy Dockyards, which Palmerston vigorously supported. Objecting to the enormous expense, Gladstone repeatedly threatened to resign as Chancellor when the proposals were accepted. Palmerston said that he had received so many resignation letters from Gladstone that he feared that they would set fire to the chimney.

Lord Palmerston's sympathies in the American Civil War (1861-5) were with the secessionist Southern Confederacy of pro-slavery states. Although a professed opponent of the slave trade and slavery, he also had a deep life long hostility towards the United States and believed that a dissolution of the Union would weaken the United States (and therefore enhance British power) and that a southern Confederacy "would afford a valuable and extensive market for British manufactures".

At the beginning of the Civil War, Britain had issued a proclamation of neutrality on 13 May 1861. Lord Palmerston decided to recognize the Confederacy as a belligerent and to receive their unofficial representatives (although he decided against recognizing the South as a sovereign state because he thought this would be premature). The United States Secretary of State, William Seward, threatened to treat any country which recognized the Southern separatists as a belligerent, as an enemy of the Union and the North. Lord Palmerston ordered that reinforcements be sent to Canada because he was convinced that the North would make peace with the South and then invade Canada. When news reached him of the Confederate victory at Bull Run in July 1861 he was very pleased, although 15 months later he wrote that "the American [Civil] War... has manifestly ceased to have any attainable object as far as the Northerns are concerned, except to get rid of some more thousand troublesome Irish and Germans. It must be owned, however, that the Anglo - Saxon race on both sides have shown courage and endurance highly honorable to their stock".

The Trent Affair in November 1861 produced a crisis. A U.S. Navy warship stopped the British steamer Trent, and seized two Confederate envoys en route to Europe. British opinion was outraged. Lord Palmerston called the action "a declared and gross insult". He demanded the release of the two diplomats, and ordered 3,000 troops to Canada. In a letter to Queen Victoria on 5 December 1861 he said, "Great Britain is in a better state than at any former time to inflict a severe blow upon and to read a lesson to the United States which will not soon be forgotten." In another letter to his Foreign Secretary the next day, he predicted war between Britain and the Union:

It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that the rabid hatred of England which animates the exiled Irishmen who direct almost all the Northern newspapers, will so excite the masses as to make it impossible for Lincoln and Seward to grant our demands; and we must therefore look forward to war as the probable result.

In fact Irishmen did not control any major newspapers in the North and Washington decided to release the prisoners rather than risk war. Lord Palmerston was convinced that the troops sent to Canada had persuaded the U.S. to acquiesce.

After the Confederate defeat at the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, and the subsequent issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, Palmerston declined Napoleon III of France's proposal for the two powers to try to arbitrate the war. Palmerston rejected all further efforts to gain British recognition for the Confederacy, as he thought the military situation did not warrant it. The U.S. threatened war with any nation that recognized the Confederacy. He realized that Britain depended more on American corn than Confederate cotton, and a war with the U.S. would not be in Britain's interest.

Another difficulty for Lord Palmerston was the raiding ship CSS Alabama, built in Birkenhead in Britain. On 29 July 1862, a law officer's report he had commissioned advised him to detain Alabama, as its construction was a breach of Britain's neutrality. Lord Palmerston ordered Alabama detained on 31 July, but she had already put to sea before the order reached Birkenhead. In her subsequent cruise, Alabama captured or destroyed many Union merchant ships, as did other raiders also fitted out in Britain. (All of the raiders were armed after leaving Britain, though.) The U.S. accused Britain of complicity in the construction of the raiders. This was the basis of the postwar Alabama claims for damages against Britain. Lord Palmerston refused to pay damages or to refer the dispute to arbitration. After Palmerston's death, Gladstone acknowledged the U.S. claim and agreed to arbitration. Britain paid $15,500,000 as damages.

Lord Palmerston won another general election in July 1865, increasing his majority. The leadership of Palmerston was a great electoral asset to the Liberal Party. He then had to deal with the outbreak of Fenian violence in Ireland. Lord Palmerston ordered the Viceroy of Ireland, Lord Wodehouse, to take measures against this, including a possible suspension of trial - by - jury and a monitoring of Americans traveling to Ireland. He believed that the Fenian agitation was caused by America. On 27 September 1865 he wrote to the Secretary for War:

The American assault on Ireland under the name of Fenianism may be now held to have failed, but the snake is only scotched and not killed. It is far from impossible that the American conspirators may try and obtain in our North American provinces compensation for their defeat in Ireland.

He advised that more armaments be sent to Canada and more troops sent to Ireland. During these last few weeks of his life, Lord Palmerston pondered on developments in foreign affairs. He began thinking of a new friendship with France as "a sort of preliminary defensive alliance" against America and looked forward to Prussia becoming more powerful as this would balance against the growing threat from Russia. In a letter to Russell he warned him that Russia "will in due time become a power almost as great as the old Roman Empire... Germany ought to be strong in order to resist Russian aggression."

On 12 October Lord Palmerston caught a chill and instead of retiring immediately to bed he spent an hour - and - a - half dawdling. He then had a violent fever but his condition stabilized for the next few days. However on the night of 17 October his health worsened, and when his doctor asked him if he believed in regeneration of the world through Jesus Christ, Palmerston replied: "Oh, surely". His last words were, "That's Article 98; now go on to the next." (He was thinking about diplomatic treaties.) An apocryphal version of his last words is: "Die, my dear doctor. That is the last thing I shall do". He died at 10:45 am on Wednesday, 18 October 1865 two days before his eighty - first birthday. Although Lord Palmerston wanted to be buried at Romsey Abbey, the Cabinet insisted that he should have a state funeral and be buried at Westminster Abbey, which he was, on 27 October 1865. He was the fourth person not of royalty to be granted a state funeral (after Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Nelson, and the Duke of Wellington).

Queen Victoria wrote after his death that though she regretted his passing, she had never liked or respected him: "Strange, and solemn to think of that strong, determined man, with so much worldly ambition – gone! He had often worried and distressed us, though as Pr. Minister he had behaved very well". Florence Nightingale reacted differently upon hearing of his death: "He will be a great loss to us. Tho' he made a joke when asked to do the right thing, he always did it. No one else will be able to carry things thro' the Cabinet as he did. I shall lose a powerful protector...He was so much more in earnest than he appeared. He did not do himself justice".

When in 1886 Lord Rosebery became Foreign Secretary in Gladstone's government, John Bright asked him if he had read about Palmerston's policies as Foreign Secretary. Rosebery replied that he had. "Then", said Bright, "you know what to avoid. Do the exact opposite of what he did. His administration at the Foreign Office was one long crime". The Marquis of Lorne said of Palmerston in 1892: "He loved his country and his country loved him. He lived for her honor, and she will cherish his memory".

Palmerston is famous for his patriotism. Lord John Russell said that "his heart always beat for the honor of England". In 1889 Gladstone recounted a story to Lord Rendel when "a Frenchman, thinking to be highly complimentary, said to Palmerston: “If I were not a Frenchman, I should wish to be an Englishman”; to which Pam coolly replied: “If I were not an Englishman, I should wish to be an Englishman”". Palmerston's principal aim in foreign policy was to advance the national interests of England. When Winston Churchill campaigned for rearmament in the 1930s, he was compared to Palmerston in warning the nation to look to its defenses. The policy of appeasement led General Jan Smuts to write in 1936 that "we are afraid of our shadows. I sometimes long for a ruffian like Palmerston or any man who would be more than a string of platitudes and apologies".

He was also an avowed abolitionist whose attempts to abolish the slave trade was one of the most consistent elements of his foreign policy. His opposition to the slave trade created tensions with Southern American and the United States over his insistence that the British navy had the right to search the vessels of any country if they suspected the vessels were being used in the slave trade. This public face was at odds with his private treatment of his servile tenants on estates he controlled in Ireland.

Lord Palmerston is remembered for his light - hearted approach to government. He is once said to have claimed of a particularly intractable problem relating to Schleswig - Holstein, that only three people had ever understood the problem: one was Prince Albert, who was dead; the second was a German professor, who had gone insane; and the third was himself, who had forgotten it.

The Life of Lord Palmerston up to 1847 was written by Lord Dalling (Sir H. Lytton Bulwer), volumes I and II (1870), volume III edited and partly written by Evelyn Ashley (1874), after the author's death. Ashley completed the biography in two more volumes (1876). The whole work was reissued in a revised and slightly abridged form by Ashley in 2 volumes in 1879, with the title ‘The Life and Correspondence of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston’; the letters are judiciously curtailed, but unfortunately without indicating where the excisions occur; the appendices of the original work are omitted, but much fresh matter is added, and this edition is undoubtedly the standard biography. An early "biographer" of Palmerston was Karl Marx in 1853.