Peel’s Conservative Party was to become one of those great institutions. Its vision has always been to live on in the image of its founder, albeit to be mindful of the lesson learned by his final political act. Just as the French Revolution haunted the minds of generations of Britons, so too do today’s Conservatives see the wisdom in not dividing against themselves and destroying the very party that had done so much in the service of the nation.
Norman Gash remarked: ‘though the myth of Conservatism has been more often Disraelian, its practice has been almost uniformly Peelite. With that Peel would have been content; he preferred facts to phrases.’ His grandson, George Peel, wrote the 1895 entry for Sir Robert in that quintessentially Victorian enterprise the Dictionary of National Biography. Here was the perspective which endures to the present day:
In an age of revolutions, Peel may alone be said to have had the foresight and the strength to form a conservative party, resting not on force or on corruption, but on administrative capacity, and the more stable portion of the public will.
There were other ways to conserve, resting on the power of the state or the maintenance of near feudal conditions or the ascendancy of untrammelled wealth, all of which were rejected by the political party founded by Peel.
Then there is Peel the man who was sensitive in ways a political party can never be. His manner became stiffer and more defensive with age. Disraeli observed that Peel’s smile ‘was like the silver plate on a coffin’, and Walter Bagehot said, ‘no man has come so near our definition of a constitutional statesman – the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of a second-rate man’. These are merely the words of an epigram-machine spitting out words at full pelt. Say rather that Peel personified a moral tone that in itself raised the condition of Victorian Britain. Long before there was a ‘family monarchy’, there was a ‘family politician’. In the end, it is only possible to recognise the majestic extent of Peel’s achievement by realising what it avoided. For without the party and its philosophy he bequeathed to the nation, there is little reason to suppose we would have coped with change any better than other countries did. A negative achievement when seen in full, perhaps, but a vital one, and one for which we should still be thankful.
Palmerston: ‘The Shibboleth of Policy’
Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston (20 October 1784–18 October 1865) was one of the great statesmen of the early Victorian period. A scion of an Irish Establishment family raised to the peerage, Palmerston was born into a world of material prosperity and political power. In the course of his long career, he fulfilled a surely manifest destiny by holding three of the great offices of state: Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary and finally Prime Minister. Palmerston, however, was very far from being simply one amid a multitude of grey political figures. On the contrary, his was a life of unusual verve. He was a Tory who became a Whig and eventually a leading player in the foundation of the British Liberal Party. He enjoyed a complicated and notorious private life, a fact which led to tensions with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert; he was a gentleman whose decisions were refracted at all times through a definite and distinct prism of political morality. It is this last quality, this inner or private philosophy brought to bear on his public politics, that this chapter explores.
On 20 October 1784, in the family house in Park Street in the heart of London, an heir was born to Henry Temple, the second Viscount Palmerston and his wife Mary. The Palmerston title was of the Irish Peerage of relatively new creation, the first Viscount Palmerston being ennobled in 1723. The Temples, however, had long been politically connected and wealthy. The family held vast Irish estates surrounding a country seat at Mount Temple in Co. Sligo, while both the infant’s great-grandfather (the first Viscount) and his father (the second) had been Westminster parliamentarians, and from 1736 the Temples also owned the spectacular Palladian mansion at Broadlands in Hampshire, with grounds landscaped by Launcelot ‘Capability’ Brown.
Now, an heir had been born to secure the family line. The child was named Henry, after his father, and with power, money, influence and a title lying in wait it must have seemed a safe bet that fortune would smile on this infant. Indeed, she would smile, and warmly. Henry Temple, third Viscount Palmerston, would establish a public career second to none in nineteenth-century Britain, serving at the pinnacle of government in the course of a career that spanned a remarkable six decades.
Palmerston was thirty-four when Queen Victoria was born and fifty-two when she acceded to the throne so it could be argued that he should not be classified as a fully fledged Victorian at all. The briefest of glances at his life and career, however, reveals that such an assessment would be a mistake. The years of his greatest power and influence occurred during the reign of Victoria and he left an indelible mark on the Victorian era. His private behaviour and standards of morality were not always what we call Victorian. They were those of the rather racier Regency period and he was regarded with considerable disdain by more morally upright Victorians, including the Queen and Prince Albert. Today, such facts merely serve to add an undeniable zest to Palmerston’s history.
Rather more pertinently, he was a fascinatingly complex politician and a figure who understood the emerging forces of democracy surprisingly well. As he remarked, ‘Those statesmen who know how to avail themselves of the passions, and the interests, and the opinions of mankind, are able to gain an ascendancy, and to exercise a sway over human affairs, far out of all proportion greater than belong to the power and resources of the state over which they preside.’ In this sense, Palmerston can be regarded as a populist, a politician who understood the power of a truly popular following. Yet it seems as if there were always a strongly moral purpose to Palmerston’s populism, in that he used his power and authority to pursue policies that he regarded as intellectually and morally sound. He was not a man who would cry ‘I am your leader, I will follow you.’ Rather, he was a politician who realised fully that engaging the popular will with a laudable aim made achieving the aim easier.
Perhaps Palmerston best summed up his own doctrine in a letter written in 1833 to Sir Frederick Lamb, the British Ambassador in Vienna and Palmerston’s brother-in-law to be: ‘The Province of a wise government is to keep pace with the improved notions of the people; not to insist upon knowing better than those they govern.’ These are the words of a man who not only understood how to keep a finger on the pulse of his people but also felt he knew best what improvements could be made to the society within which he lived and wielded power.
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Palmerston’s early life was important, unusually so, in setting the course of his future career and establishing the texture of his own moral and political philosophy. One specific and startling episode stands out. In 1792, the youthful Palmerston, then aged seven, and his parents left Britain for Europe at the beginning of a long continental tour just as events in France were building to a shocking climax. Arriving into the ferment of a revolutionary Paris in early August, the family was received in audience at the Tuileries by the King and Queen, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who remained on the throne if no longer in power. This visit took place mere days before the rising tide of revolution in the city caused the Royal Family to flee the palace. Palmerston and his family personally encountered something of this disorder as they left Paris on 7 August in a pair of carriages. The revolutionaries permitted the first carriage, carrying the parents and the young Palmerston, to pass unimpeded through the barricades thrown up around the city but the second, carrying the younger children and most of the luggage, was stopped and searched. There is no evidence to suppose that the family was ever in any danger – the mob was presumably more attracted by the luggage – but it is fair to assume that such an episode would not be forgotten by Palmerston in later life, indicating as it did what might happen to a society if its ruling class failed or refused to adapt to changing times. This journey into the wider world left its mark in other ways. The family spent two years in Europe, thus enablin
g Palmerston to learn both Italian and French to a reasonable standard, equipping him usefully for his later life as a politician and diplomat.
The next step in Palmerston’s education was rather more conventional. In 1795, he entered Harrow, where he was a contemporary of George Hamilton-Gordon, who as Lord Aberdeen would later in life prove to be an enduring political rival. Palmerston was noted at school both for his physical courage in standing up to boys much older and larger than he and for his academic qualities. In this period of his life, he also visited the Palace of Westminster for the first time, where his father introduced him to William Pitt, then in his first spell as Prime Minister.
Palmerston’s academic prowess stood him in good stead for the next and, as it proved, critical phase of his education. In 1800, at the age of sixteen, he entered Edinburgh University to study political economy, at a time when the Scottish capital was at the heart of a prevailing intellectual power house which was to leave a lasting trace upon the British nation now known as the Scottish Enlightenment, a movement which asserted the primacy of rationalism and empiricism across a field of disciplines from philosophy and politics to medicine and engineering. A host of great thinkers participated in the discourse of the period. Greatest of all, perhaps, were the philosophers Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson and David Hume but also well known in his day was the philosopher and mathematician Dugald Stewart (1753–1828). It was Stewart who would leave a formative impression on Palmerston’s political philosophy.
Stewart was unquestionably a brilliant man. He had received his chair as professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh at the early age of twenty-two and went on to establish a reputation as a charismatic teacher, significantly as a populariser. The texts of his university lectures in politics came to be distributed widely, spreading the import of his teachings near and far. Palmerston himself was able to observe the actions of this educational populist at close quarters, for he lodged in the Stewart household for the duration of his time in Edinburgh. That he admired Stewart himself is very evident. He wrote to his father shortly after he moved to the city, noting that ‘I like Mr and Mrs Stewart amazingly, it is impossible for anyone to be kinder than they both are.’ The Stewart household, moreover, welcomed a wide range of visitors. This discourse added to the academic curriculum a zest of stimulating conversation. This education, both formal and informal, had a profound effect on Palmerston, whose notes nearly thirty years later were laced liberally with many of Stewart’s preoccupations, from free trade and commerce to questions of liberty and the Constitution.
Stewart proved to be a powerful influence in more systematic ways too. Palmerston imbibed the older man’s influential views on what became known as Scottish ‘Common Sense Realism’, the theory that the philosophy of one’s existence was founded upon and bound up with sound and observable phenomena. That is, upon the stuff and experiences of everyday life. As we shall see, this thread in Stewart’s thinking manifests in the practicality and pragmatism that governed Palmerston’s later political career. Nor was Palmerston’s admiration of the sagacious Stewart by any means a one-way street: ‘In point of temper and conduct,’ Stewart would remark of his young friend, ‘he is everything his friends could wish. Indeed, I cannot say that I have ever seen a more faultless character at his time of life, or one possessed of more amiable dispositions.’
In 1803, Palmerston left Edinburgh for Cambridge, where he completed his education at St John’s College. His life had, in the meantime, changed significantly. His father, the second Viscount, had died in the previous year and his son had succeeded to the title at the age of seventeen. His juvenile years were behind him and his life as a politician and a statesman was about to begin.
These youthful years and the experiences they held in England, in Scotland, in France and Italy are relevant because they were instrumental in forming the man that Palmerston would become. Thus they were instrumental in the process of forming the history of nineteenth-century Britain in which he played such a prominent role. His eyewitness experiences in revolutionary Paris made him wary of the power of the mob but they also underscored for him the sense that political change will always manifest, that it was not only possible but inevitable. The challenge for the politician was to harness and direct that will for change and to channel it correctly, and towards the goal of the greatest possible human and social good. His Scottish education, in other words, had provided Palmerston with a clear set of political principles, a moral yardstick by which his public career might be measured and a vision to be implemented in a changing world.
Once his education was completed Palmerston moved into politics and by 1808 he occupied a seat as a Tory in the House of Commons. Initially he represented a rotten borough on the Isle of Wight and later Cambridge University. By 1809 he held the post of Secretary at War, in charge of the administration and financial well-being of the Army. It was an influential position, though one below Cabinet level. It clearly suited Palmerston, who would occupy the post without a break until 1828. His political career was now underway and it provided many opportunities for the effects of Stewart’s moral and political education to be put to the test.
The consequences of this education shine through in some of Palmerston’s long-standing political positions. It was one of his proudest boasts, for example, that he had voted for Catholic Emancipation virtually from the beginning of his parliamentary career. As noted in the previous chapter, anti-Catholic laws had begun to be relaxed in the second half of the eighteenth century but in the early decades of the new century sufficient measures remained on the statute books to fuel rising resentment and restlessness on the part of Catholic citizens and their supporters in both Britain and, particularly, Ireland. As early as 1807, the House of Commons had been decidedly in favour of sweeping away the remnants of anti-Catholic legislation but the outright opposition of the monarch and of powerful elements in the House of Lords ensured that no further measures were taken at this time. Indeed, it is important to note that while support for Emancipation was strong, it was relatively covert. A centuries-old fear and mistrust of Catholicism made most politicians unwilling to agitate too publicly in favour of the measure.
Palmerston, however, was happy to lend consistent support, as a survey of his parliamentary speeches makes clear. The contrast with the cautious and conservative Peel could not be more obvious. During one debate in the Commons as early as 1813, Palmerston noted that the Anglican Establishment would simply not be damaged in any way by Catholic Emancipation and went on to argue that in particular the continuing exclusion of Catholics from Parliament had disagreeable practical results. ‘If it had unfortunately happened that by circumstance of birth and education, a Nelson, a Wellington, a Burke, a Fox or a Pitt had belonged to this class of the community, of what honour and what glory might not the page of British history have been deprived!’ Fifteen years later he declared, ‘I beg most distinctly to declare, that I am a warm and zealous friend to religious liberty – that I am as strenuous a partisan of religious freedom as the noble Lord himself … I concur with him as far as he or any man can wish, that restraints upon the consciences of men can never be advantageous.’
These were common-sense views. This was Palmerston’s Edinburgh education manifesting itself briskly and sensibly and in the face of a certain degree of political danger. Certainly in 1813, some of the voters in his Cambridge University constituency would have listened sourly to their MP’s pro-Emancipation words. As was the case later with Peel at Oxford, the issue was not at all popular in Cambridge where, as Palmerston noted, ‘Protestantism is very rife’. As late as 1826, with the Catholic Relief Bill at last on the horizon and common-sense change on the way, the issue nearly cost Palmerston his Cambridge seat. He was saved by a whisker and by the tactical votes of Whigs.
On other matters, too, Palmerston was willing to ‘see the big picture’ and take a stance that, while not necessarily to his immediate political advantage, nevertheless accorded w
ith his own personal and political philosophy. This applies to his position on slavery, an issue that had begun to be settled in British political discourse in the early decades of the nineteenth century. William Wilberforce’s Slave Trade Act of 1807 had hastened the abolition of slavery in the British Empire but not in other jurisdictions. Palmerston’s own position was a settled one. He opposed all forms of slavery and was happy to do so openly even when such public opposition discomfited and vexed Britain’s allies. Such a situation arose in the late 1830s, just as Victoria had come to the throne.
The ally in question was Portugal, famously Britain’s oldest ally and in general terms a useful counter-balance to French and Spanish power in western Europe and on the high seas. Portugal had agreed by a treaty of 1817 to limit the slave trade but by the 1830s it was clear that slavery had not been to any great extent curtailed, much less prohibited, across the global Portuguese Empire. With this in mind, in 1837 the MP, noted abolitionist and proponent of free trade Thomas Fowell Buxton brought a motion before the House of Commons condemning Portuguese behaviour and Palmerston duly supported the measure, telling members that the British government fully shared ‘those sentiments of indignation … at the extent to which the traffic in slaves still continued under the flag of Portugal’. In discussions especially with the French, Palmerston brought the powers of Europe together in an effort to stop the trade.
Palmerston was no mere Secretary at War at this time. He had become Foreign Secretary so his words as a result carried even more weight. He was not afraid to anger the Portuguese. In the following year, he declared, ‘That the slave trade, as is now carried on under that [Portuguese] flag, is a disgrace to any civilised or Christian state.’ He called for the ability to ‘seize slavers anywhere’ and to be entitled to ‘seize any ship palpably equipped for the traffic’. He was as good as his word. Britain spent heavily on naval squadrons dedicated to hunting and capturing slaving vessels and succeeded in disrupting, though not ending, the Atlantic trade in slaves.
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