I hold with respect to alliances, that England is a Power sufficiently strong, sufficiently powerful, to steer her own course, and not to tie herself as an unnecessary appendage to the policy of any other Government. I hold that the real policy of England – apart from questions which involve her own particular interests, political or commercial – 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 wherever she thinks that wrong has been done. Sir, in pursuing that course, and in pursuing the more limited direction of our own particular interests, my conviction is, that as long as England keeps herself in the right – as long as she wishes to permit no injustice – as long as she wishes to countenance no wrong – as long as she labours at legislative interests of her own – and as long as she sympathises with right and justice, she will never find herself altogether alone. She is sure to find some other State, of sufficient power, influence, and weight, to support and aid her in the course she may think fit to pursue.
Therefore I say that it is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow. When we find other countries marching in the same course, and pursuing the same objects as ourselves, we consider them as our friends, and we think for the moment that we are on the most cordial footing; when we find other countries that take a different view, and thwart us in the object we pursue, it is our duty to make allowance for the different manner in which they may follow out the same objects. It is our duty not to pass too harsh a judgment upon others, because they do not exactly see things in the same light as we see; and it is our duty not lightly to engage this country in the frightful responsibilities of war, because from time to time we may find this or that Power disinclined to concur with us in matters where their opinion and ours may fairly differ. That has been, as far as my faculties have allowed me to act upon it, the guiding principle of my conduct. And if I might be allowed to express in one sentence the principle which I think ought to guide an English Minister, I would adopt the expression of Canning, and say that with every British Minister the interests of England ought to be the shibboleth of policy [author’s italics].
In this powerful defence of his political conduct over a span of some twenty years, Palmerston made a clear and perennial case for the sage exercise of foreign policy. Suffused with examples of what he had done, it emphasises the need to maintain a high degree of popular support and underscores the importance of commerce and the requirement for the maintenance of military strength. Palmerston also made it apparent, however, that he was no mere warmonger, nor would he ever enter into a war he thought he would lose or not easily win. Supporting liberal causes was secondary to the national interest and how other countries managed their internal affairs could only ever be of peripheral concern. Palmerston’s words continue to act as an excellent basis for a contemporary foreign policy, rooted as they are in a moral and realistic vision of the supremacy of the national interest. It is certainly the case that Canning’s ‘shibboleth of policy’ resonates to this day and it is against such a policy background that Palmerston’s most famous foreign foray was undertaken.
This was the so-called Don Pacifico affair, which first erupted into the public view in 1847. Its eponymous subject was a Jewish merchant and ex-Portuguese consul-general to Greece. He lived at Athens but was in fact a British subject as a result of his place of birth at Gibraltar. He was also a man of some means and a leader of the Jewish community at Athens. In April 1847, Don Pacifico’s residence in the Greek capital was attacked during an upsurge in anti-Semitic unrest. In addition, police officers and the sons of Greek officials were part of the attacking mob, thus lending a political tinge to this ugly affair. The British government proceeded to lodge a claim for damages against the Greek authorities. Greece protested that the claim was wildly excessive, as indeed it was, and assumed that the British authorities were in part using the attack against Don Pacifico as a pretext to gain some revenge against Hellenic officials suspected of misappropriating funds previously sent to the country from the United Kingdom.
Eighteen months passed without an agreement and now Don Pacifico appealed to the British government to assist in settling his claim. Palmerston himself was a philhellene. Britain had played a critical role in the establishment of Greek Independence in 1828–9, Britain remained a formal guarantor of Greek sovereignty and Britain held the Ionian Islands off the west coast of Greece. A current of benign British influence, in other words, ran very deep in Greece but, notwithstanding each of these facts, Palmerston resolved that in this case intervention was a necessity. In January 1850, a British fleet of fifteen ships sailed into the Bay of Salamis. The Greek navy was impounded and a blockade imposed on Athens, at a stroke both hobbling the Greek military and stifling the small Greek economy.
Palmerston’s political enemies saw an opportunity so they went on the attack, condemning what they regarded as the Foreign Secretary’s heavy-handedness and over-reaction. The result was another motion of censure in Parliament. In the Lords, a chamber that then as now was not answerable to public opinion, Lord Stanley for the Conservatives deplored Palmerston’s actions that were ‘directed against the commerce and people of Greece and calculated to endanger the continuance of our friendly relations with other Powers’. The motion passed.
In the Commons, however, the debate proceeded rather differently. Here, the attacks on Palmerston were founded on principles of high-minded international diplomacy. The Liberal politician Richard Cobden argued that Palmerston’s display of power in Greece in fact was an indication of weakness. Cobden said he preferred a system of international arbitration to the blunt instrument of gunboat diplomacy. Moreover, he did not believe that Palmerston’s intervention was primarily designed to advance liberal constitutions. It was a relatively nuanced argument. It is certainly the case that Stanley’s attack in the Lords had been rather more full-throated and for this reason more successful.
Palmerston’s reply to the motion of censure was an extraordinary five hours in length and constitutes the second of the two great speeches that define his career. He quoted Cicero when he said, ‘As the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity when he could say Civis Romanus sum; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England, will protect him against injustice and wrong.’ These were stirring words and easily comprehensible to the public. The Commons motion of censure failed, Palmerston carried the day and the events in Parliament, far from harming him, had raised him to new heights of popularity.
Here again was Palmerston’s distinctive ability to harness and deploy the power of populism. The British public could after all readily understand that Palmerston was protecting an essential British national interest. His actions did not stem in the main from a personal affront at the treatment meted out to Don Pacifico, although it is significant that the riots at Athens were anti-Semitic at the root and Palmerston was not an anti-Semite. Principally, however, this was a commercial matter and a commercial calculation. British trade around the world depended upon the traders themselves being protected. In many states, there were complex internal as well as external tariffs and the risk of discrimination against international businessmen was high. The United Kingdom could not succeed commercially unless it defended the interests of business and this, quite simply, was what Palmerston was doing. Sending a fleet of ships to blockade a foreign capital not only showed the Greek government that Britain meant business, it also telegraphed the same unmistakable message to other powers, to a watching world and to the public at home.
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In 1851, Palmerston resigned as Foreign Secretary. Queen Victoria had complained
that he had not, as was required of all ministers, submitted his measures for Royal approval. Palmerston accepted the Queen’s criticism and apologised. Soon afterwards, a second complaint was made. Prince Albert alleged that Palmerston had been disrespectful to the Sovereign by sending out letters in the Queen’s name without giving her time to read them. On this occasion, Palmerston vigorously rejected the complaint but the damage was done. Two Royal complaints could not be weathered and he resigned. This episode will be covered more fully in the chapter on Prince Albert.
Indeed, tension between the Royal Family and Palmerston was by no means a new development and here we note a degree of spice added to Palmerston’s activities. In plain terms, his private life was unorthodox. He held in some circles the nickname of ‘Lord Cupid’ and in his own diaries he recorded liaisons with overlapping mistresses. After his marriage to Emily Lamb, a long-term mistress, his ardour did not dim. He continued to see other women and this behaviour has coloured opinions of him during his lifetime, and afterwards. Such habits also informed the dislike felt for him by Queen Victoria and her prudish husband and help to explain the complaints she directed against him.
Indeed, as early as 1838, with the young Queen barely on the throne, the two had fallen out as a result of Palmerston’s nocturnal prowling. During a stay at Windsor, he had crept along a corridor in search of the bedroom of Miss Brand (later Lady Dacre), lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Woken and startled, Brand screamed and woke the household, at which point Palmerston beat a hasty retreat. According to Albert, the Queen complained that she could not agree ‘to take a man as the Chief Adviser … who as her Secretary of State … had committed a brutal attack on one of her ladies’. Palmerston’s misdemeanours and his shamelessness reminded the Queen unpleasantly of her disreputable Hanoverian forebears. It is only fair to add that Victoria disliked Palmerston’s support for revolutionary regimes abroad just as much as and perhaps more than she disliked his morals.
Such habits did his career no great harm. By 1852, Palmerston was back in the Whig coalition government of his old adversary at Harrow, Lord Aberdeen, as Home Secretary. The coalition was difficult and not harmonious and there was considerable puzzlement at Palmerston’s appointment to a domestic role, when his expertise was so evidently in foreign affairs. In the pithiest encapsulation of the situation, David Roberts notes acidly, ‘The proud Foreign Secretary who had snubbed the crowned heads of Europe now haggled with Vestrymen about their sewers.’ Acidic but far from being the case. Vestrymen were the local councillors of the day and it was indeed necessary to haggle with them in order to ensure improvement in living and social conditions.
Haggle was what Palmerston did, with a will and with a good deal of success. Public health was to form a major component of Palmerston’s paternalist work at the Home Office. He was instrumental in pressing a list of reforms the consequences of which would be long-lasting indeed. A Factories Act outlawed work by juvenile labour in the hours of darkness while a Truck Act obliged employers to pay their workers in cash instead of, as had sometimes been the case, in goods the employers themselves had manufactured, thus freeing employees at a stroke from a state which resembled medieval serfdom or vassalage.
A Smoke Abatement Act addressed the pressing problem of air pollution in the cities and a Vaccination Act rolled out a programme of children’s healthcare for the first time. Penal conditions were made less stringent, maximum prison sentences were reduced and the policy of transportation of criminals to Tasmania, often for petty and trivial offences, was ended. Palmerston also began the process of upgrading London’s decaying sewage system, with the result that the filthy condition of the Thames began to improve. He was obliged to deal with and sometimes be defeated by vested interests. From time to time he was also stymied by an excess of liberal ideology which quarrelled with any attempt to regulate public health. In 1854, for example, a correspondent to The Times declared, ‘We prefer to take our chance with Cholera than be bullied into health. There is nothing a man hates so much as being cleansed against his will or having his floor swept, his hall whitewashed, his dung heap cleared away and his thatch forced to give way to slate.’
Palmerston rejected such ideologically dogmatic excesses, dismissing, for example, the idea that cholera was an act of God that could be halted by penitential fasting. Instead he pressed publicly the idea that civic works in the poorest areas were the best way to stop the diseases which led to death. His work as Home Secretary, in other words, connected with his Edinburgh philosophic apprenticeship and enabled him to bring his intelligence and learning to bear for the good of the people. It is also worth noting that twenty years later, Disraeli would be working in much the same area, asserting the political morality of such public works and seeking to define such works as explicitly the terrain of the Conservative Party. It was not only in the foreign arena that Palmerston excelled, in other words. Our collective social history tells a different tale.
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In February 1855, Palmerston at last attained the greatest office of all, with his appointment as Prime Minister. With one brief interruption he would hold the office until his death, at the age of eighty, in October 1865. His premiership is remembered for many signal achievements, from a conclusion to the Crimean War that largely favoured the British side to forging from a tentative and sometimes chaotic Whig identity a contemporary British Liberal Party. He saw his most important goal as Prime Minister as continuing to improve the lot of the people. As he remarked, nothing was ‘attended with more permanent and general benefit [above] the spread of education and the diffusion of information among the lower classes’.
He believed, as he had learned from Dugald Stewart, that the spread of knowledge would safeguard society and that consequently it needed to flourish in all parts of the nation. Education, clean water, cheap food and personal liberty: taken together, these were Palmerston’s recipes for the preservation and enhancement of the nation and for the prevention of revolution. Was this a populist creed? Yes indeed, this was emphatically populist, though it was mingled with good sense and a correct morality and it was a message, moreover, that the great mass of the people could follow and approve.
He valued popular support but he was not a democrat in the sense of the term as we know it. He wanted to avoid revolution and not to destabilise the Constitution. He wanted change, not as an end in itself but because change was an antidote to revolution. As early as 1828, he had made this philosophy explicit when he argued for a limited extension of the franchise. ‘I am anxious,’ he said, ‘to express my desire that the franchise should be extended to a great town, not because I am a friend of reform in principle, but because I am its decided enemy. I think that extending the franchise to large towns, on such occasions as the one in question, is the only mode by which the House can avoid the adoption, at some time or another, of a general [author’s italics] plan of reform. It is my opinion that the disturbances, which on many occasions, have agitated the great commercial districts, would have been prevented, if such places had possessed a legitimate organ for the expression of their opinions.’ When these modest reforms were frustrated he returned to his point in 1831, remarking in the House of Commons on the eve of the Reform Bill: ‘If instead of this, the government had turned reformers on ever so moderate a scale; if the government had admitted the principle of amendment, and pledged themselves to act upon it whenever opportunities might occur, the House would not now have been discussing a plan of general reform proposed by my noble friend.’
His argument was a compelling one. He, like Peel and many others of their contemporaries, accepted that reform was indeed necessary. They felt that unrepresented large towns would be quieter with some level of representation. When citizens were accorded no representation at all, they naturally tended to back ever greater changes. At the very end of his life, however, the limits of Palmerston’s support for change would be laid bare when he opposed William Gladstone’s call for universal suffrage. When Gladstone remarked th
at every man had a moral right to vote, Palmerston countered with the statement, ‘The fact is that a vote is not a right but a trust. All the nation cannot by possibility be brought together to vote and therefore a selected few are appointed by Law to perform this function for the rest and the publicity attached to the performance of their trust is a security that it will be responsibly performed.’
Nor did he want to see the aristocracy taken out of political life. He was, after all, a nobleman himself. He believed that the landed interest was essential to stability but their duty was to improve and enhance both their land and the lot of their tenants. As a landlord in Ireland, he made a considerable effort to improve the land he owned. In one speech on the government of Ireland, he noted that with slightly less than half the population of Great Britain, Ireland only generated an annual income of one seventh of that of its larger neighbour, seven million pounds compared to fifty million pounds. He attributed this to a lack of capital which came about because of poor government and on his own estates he tried to do better. As early as 1808, when he was only twenty-four years old, he wrote to his sister to tell her that the land was wholly unimproved but could be drained to enhance its arable yield threefold. He also wanted to do for his tenants what he tried to achieve for the nation decades later.
He looked to improve the condition of the people, by investing in education and better roads. Again, he wanted this partly out of natural self-interest, for a more prosperous estate would benefit him and increase his income, but he also had a sense of noblesse oblige and of philanthropy. This did not mean that he wanted his own privileged position overthrown. On the contrary, he was determined to preserve it but saw that the best way to hold off revolution was by means of a steady improvement in living standards. In both his political and private sphere he followed a similar approach. Adam Smith famously remarked that while the baker does not bake our daily bread out of charity, nonetheless he feeds us. Palmerston clearly saw Smith’s essential point.
The Victorians Page 7