When the deed was done, the resignation of Sir Robert Peel was its only possible conclusion. Lord Stanley had already left the Ministry on the Corn Law question, and on the next important division which took place the Government was defeated by a union of the Whigs and Tories in the House of Commons. Sir Robert Peel retired, never again to return to office. Lord Palmerston sang the late Minister’s pæan in the House of Commons, and then once more returned to the Foreign Office under the leadership of Lord John Russell.
CHAPTER VII.
PALMERSTON FOREIGN SECRETARY, JULY, 1846, TO DECEMBER, 1850.
WE now come to Lord Palmerston’s third period at the Foreign Office, which lasted from July, 1846, to December, 1851, but which we shall find it better to divide into three chapters than to comprise it in one, because it includes the romantic affair of Don Pacifico, which, by the attempts made and the success achieved, will deserve a chapter to itself. The coup d’état and his dismissal will demand a third. We will therefore take Lord Palmerston’s life at the Foreign Office down to the year 1850, when the great Don Pacifico debate took place. There were in the meantime various circumstances, all at the moment of intense national interest, with which he was either specially concerned as Foreign Secretary, or much concerned as a leading Cabinet Minister. The chief among these were the Spanish marriages, Lord Minto’s mission to Italy, the French Revolution and escape to England of Louis Philippe, the first war between Austria and Sardinia, the French occupation of Rome, and the wars in Hungary. With the minor operations of his official life it is impossible for us here to deal.
When he got back to office, there had arisen a question as to the expulsion of the Jesuits from certain Swiss cantons; but I do not know that the English reader will care much now about the Jesuits in Switzerland. Nor are we specially anxious as to the civil war which was then carried on in Portugal. But the knot in European politics known as the Spanish marriages had then an importance, and has since achieved results, which make it necessary that we should not altogether pass it over in any record, however short, of Lord Palmerston’s life. But for those Spanish marriages Louis Philippe’s heirs might still have sat upon the throne of France, and the name of king would not be altogether disgraced in the realm over which Henry IV. had ruled. No prophecy shall be ventured upon here as to the future of the French nation; but it is, I think, notorious to the world at large that the last blow given to the Bourbon family, in the opinion of Frenchmen, came from the Spanish marriages.
I cannot but here remark that, strong, abiding, and consistent as was Lord Palmerston’s conduct in reference to these transactions, and assuredly as the disgrace would have been prevented could it have been staved off by our English Minister, he does not seem to speak of the foul political arrangements which were contemplated and carried out, with that disgust which they must have engendered in the mind of every honest and high-minded gentleman. But here we must remember that Lord Palmerston, as English Foreign Secretary, accustomed as he was to speak his mind freely, could not speak out quite plainly; and that of all that he did say we probably do not possess the whole. But the consequence is that up to this date men speak of the Spanish marriages as having been tolerable in politics though bad in morals, and as projects which should consign the inventors to no perdition, because they dealt, not with private, but with public matters. To us it has seemed that the evil intended, and in a great degree consummated, was of such a nature as to deserve all the stigma which a private iniquity could bear. The Spanish marriages are withdrawn from the comparatively easy regions of national conscience by the intensity of private desire for aggrandisement, by the private nature of the precautions taken, and by the private evil accomplished.
Now, I must tell the story with as little matter of annoyance as may be possible. It has already been told in Lord Palmerston’s life, and so often before and since, that there can be no other reason for silence but the abomination of the tale to be told. It is, however, impossible to produce aright a memoir of Lord Palmerston’s life without telling it. When kings and their councillors do amiss it is by no means the least of the evil done that their doings must be made public and explained.
It had become to be important to us and other nations that the thrones of France and Spain should be kept distinct, so that no French prince might come to sit upon the throne of Spain. As there were now two Spanish princesses,—Isabella, who was the Queen, and her sister, who at the moment was her heir,—Louis Philippe was required to engage, and did distinctly bind himself, that no son of his should marry Isabella, and also that no son of his should marry the sister till the Queen should have become a mother. Having bound himself by this undertaking the King’s first endeavour was, to use an English phrase, to drive a coach and horses through it. He determined that a son of his, or at any rate a grandchild, should sit upon the throne of Spain, and presuming, as we must surmise, that he found his opportunity in the comparative weakness of Lord Aberdeen, he set to work to make such arrangements as might be practicable. Palmerston had declared in 1836, when Isabella was about five years old, that it would be so. “The fact is that he,”—Louis Philippe,—“is as ambitious as Louis XIV., and wants to put one of his sons on the throne of Spain as husband to the young Queen.” But since then the young lady had grown to what in Spain is a marriageable age, and the young Prince who was to become the link between the thrones was twenty-two.
The King of the French did not see his way to break the engagement by running counter to its first clause. He could not marry his son to the young Queen. He might marry his son to the Queen’s sister, as soon as that sister had a child. But that clause he did manage to break; and on the day on which the Queen was married, the Duke de Montpensier was married to the Princess. This was wrong, and false, and mischievous,—likely to lead to quarrels and wars, and unlikely to lead to increased power and dominion for any king or prince. But it was a trick within the compass of certain kings and certain ministers, and was not unroyal in all its bearings. Louis Philippe, however, was not contented with this. He went farther, and selected the Prince who was to marry the Queen. There was a Prince, unfortunate, as the minds of men go, but hitherto not disgraced,—a poor man who could never become the father of children. He it was whom Louis Philippe selected, with the assistance and guidance of Guizot, in the absolute ignorance, I do not hesitate to say, of Lord Aberdeen.
Such were the Spanish marriages. The fruits of them, as might have been guessed, were disastrous. The Queen, at any rate, had children, on whose royal birth no slur was openly thrown. The Duke de Montpensier lives as an unknown nobleman in a foreign land, to whose name there clings something of the flavour of his father’s deeds. M. Guizot, who was the great Minister of the day, a man of high intellect, of thoughtful habits, of religious feeling, and a Protestant, tarnished his name for ever. And Louis Philippe ran from France as an exile, taking refuge in England under the name of Mr. Smith. And here he died! The marriages were perpetrated! But with what results to all who were concerned in them! It may be doubted whether any meaner crime was ever committed in the name of policy, or one of which the end was more befitting, or better deserved.
The effect which this produced in Europe took eighteen months to show itself. The marriages were solemnized in the autumn of 1846, and Louis Philippe came to England and took up his abode at Claremont in the spring of 1848. All his fine machinations had been blown like soap-bubbles into air! The result of the marriages upon English feeling, and upon Lord Palmerston, who was the one Englishman more concerned than others, was that of distinct alienation. It afforded matter but for few speeches in the House of Commons, and not much for private correspondence, as it was done in secret, and the wickedness of the arrangements could only creep out by slow degrees. Men at the time used to whisper to each other that it was so, and men who received the whisper declined to believe the story in all its foul enormity. Now it has become a matter of history, and there is no ordinary reader who does not know of what nature were the Spanish marriages. But Guizot is said at the time to have become so lost to all decent feeling, so warped and stung by the constant interference which he had received from Lord Palmerston, as to have boasted that the political arrangement made was the one great thing which France had herself achieved, unaided, since 1830!