Lord Palmerston

by Anthony Trollope

Going on to the special case of Don Pacifico, he then explains the circumstances. “What happened in this case? In the middle of the town of Athens, in a house which I must be allowed to say is not a wretched hovel, as some people have described it,—but it does not matter what it is, for whether a man’s home be a palace or a cabin, the owner has a right to be there safe from injury,—well, in a house which is not a wretched hovel, but which, in the early days of King Otho, was, I am told, the residence of the Count Armansperg, the chief of the Regency,—a house as good as the generality of those which existed in Athens before the sovereign ascended the throne,—M. Pacifico, living in that house, within forty yards of the great street, within a few minutes walk of a guard-house where soldiers were stationed, was attacked by a mob. Fearing injury when the mob began to assemble, he sent an intimation to the British Minister, who immediately informed the authorities. Application was made to the Greek Government for protection. No protection was afforded. The mob, in which were soldiers and gens-d’armes, who even, if officers were not with them, ought, from a sense of duty, to have interfered and to have prevented plunder,—that mob, headed by the sons of the Minister of War, not children of eight or ten years old, but older,—that mob for nearly two hours employed themselves in gutting the house of an unoffending man, carrying away or destroying every single thing the house contained, and left it a perfect wreck.”

Then he passes on to the general foreign policy of his administration, and answers the charges which had been made against him at great length by Sir James Graham. We cannot follow him here, as to do so we should be driven to go back over the whole work of his life. But the clearness with which it is all done is of such a nature that no one can now obtain a more lucid statement of the English view of European politics during the period; and he then concludes his view of the manner in which Great Britain could wish that her foreign affairs should be governed, and in which he thinks that they have been governed by him. “I do not complain of the conduct of those who have made these matters the means of attack upon Her Majesty’s Ministers. The Government of a great country like this is undoubtedly an object of fair and legitimate ambition to men of all shades of opinion. It is a noble thing to be allowed to guide the policy, and to influence the destinies of such a country; and, if ever it was an object of honourable ambition, more than ever must it be so at the moment at which I am speaking. For while we have seen, as stated by the right honourable baronet the member for Ripon, the political earthquake rocking Europe from side to side,—while we have seen thrones shaken, shattered, levelled,—institutions overthrown and destroyed,—while in almost every country of Europe the conflict of civil war has deluged the land with blood, from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, this country has presented a spectacle honourable to the people of England, and worthy of the admiration of mankind.”

The speech was liked by the whole House, foes as well as friends. It was thus that all Englishmen felt that they would wish that an English Minister of State should defend himself and the Government to which he belonged. “It has made us all proud of him,” said poor Sir Robert Peel, who, after that day, never lived to express such pride again. Then came the division; and, in a House of five hundred and seventy-four members, Lord Palmerston was acquitted by a majority of forty-six. On the next day,—or, in truth, on that day, for the division was not taken till nearly four o’clock,—he sent a word of joy over to Lord Normanby. “Our triumph has been complete in the debate, as well as in the division; and, all things considered, I scarcely ever remember a debate which, as a display of intellect, oratory, and high and dignified feeling, was more honourable to the House of Commons.”

There never had been a pitched battle fought on that arena in which the thing to be fought for was better understood, in which the combatants were marshalled in fairer order, in which the strategy was of a higher nature, or the courage displayed more brilliant. Should the Whigs, plus Palmerston, be kept in office, or should they be expelled from office because of Palmerston’s ungovernable arrogance? The House of Commons and the Whigs determined to keep Palmerston in his place. The victory was very great, and the glory almost unbounded. The House of Lords was set at naught, and a majority of forty-six in the House of Commons was taken as showing the will of the entire nation.

But it was not to last for long. Lord Palmerston knew, or asserted that he knew, where lay the real force which he had to encounter; and though he sounded his trumpet loudly on the occasion, and in the moment of his triumph forgot that his enemies still existed, he lived to remember their power. He thus wrote to his brother William; “The attack on our foreign policy has been rightly understood by everybody as the shot fired by a foreign conspiracy, aided and abetted by domestic intrigue.” He goes on in the same letter to tell how he was invited to dinner by two hundred and fifty members of the Reform Club, and how the banquet might have been extended to a thousand had it not been thought well to limit the demonstration. It was after this victory that the famous portrait of Lord Palmerston was painted, and presented to Lady Palmerston, by a hundred and twenty members of the House of Commons. This period,—the end, that is, of the session of 1850,—was the culminating point in the fortunes of our great Foreign Minister. He lived, indeed, to be twice Premier, and to have superintended the counsels by which Nicholas was beaten to his death in the Crimean War; but I do not think that he was ever as great as on the night on which he defended himself for having protected Don Pacifico. Such is the story of Don Pacifico. How the battle was renewed under other auspices in the next year, and how Lord Palmerston was then dismissed by the same Lord John Russell who now had defended him, must be told in the next chapter.

CHAPTER IX.
PALMERSTON AS FOREIGN SECRETARY TILL HIS DISMISSAL, IN 1851.

LORD PALMERSTON achieved his triumph in 1850, and encountered his disgrace, if it is to be so considered, in 1851. There was but the one year and a few months before his foes were too many for him. In describing this second battle, I shall endeavour to tell the story as though the blow had come from Lord John Russell, the head of the Cabinet, with such aid and counsel as may have been given to him by others of his own class. Of the action of the Court, as told to us in detail by Sir Theodore Martin, I have spoken in the first chapter, and it will be more convenient if I go on with Lord Palmerston’s career without much further allusion to it. He himself believed that he had been the victim of a foreign conspiracy, aided by those Englishmen who agreed that its purpose was good. In September, 1850, he thus wrote to his brother,—after the affair of Don Pacifico; “I have beaten and put down and silenced, at least for a time, one of the most widespread and malignant and active confederacies that ever conspired against one man without crushing him; but I was in the right, and I was able to fight my battle.” “The death of Louis Philippe delivers me from my most artful and inveterate enemy, whose position gave him in many ways the power to injure me.” The readers of to-day will dislike the use of the word conspiracy, and will think that the powers brought to bear against the Foreign Secretary were no more than those of fair political opposition. And it will probably be thought that Lord Palmerston was becoming too powerful in foreign affairs,—or was wont to express himself too loudly,—as has since come to be the case with another great arranger of European strategy in another country. It was so. It is not within the compass of a man’s nature to stretch his voice afar and yet to control the power of his own hand. Looking back, we can understand that Palmerston should have fallen; but we all feel that had he not risen to higher place because of his fall, England would have lost much by his falling.

In the autumn of 1850 General Haynau came to London, and, among other sights, visited Barclay & Perkins’ brewery. According to English ideas he had shown himself to be a brute during the Hungarian war; and very brutally was he treated by the draymen. His name should not be mentioned here but that all England was in a momentary ferment because of what had been done. It was generally thought that he had been maltreated, and that, as he had not ill-used Englishmen or English women, we should have contented ourselves with simply ignoring him when he trusted himself to our hospitality. Palmerston’s judgment as to what had been done was lenient. “The draymen were wrong in the particular course they adopted. Instead of striking him, which, however, by Koller’s account, they did not do much, they ought to have tossed him in a blanket, rolled him in the kennel, and then sent him home in a cab, paying his fare to the hotel.”

In his sixty-seventh year (January, 1851) he wrote to his brother from Broadlands. Speaking of the Christmas just past, he says; “I took a fling, and went out several days hunting and shooting in the fine of the early day, coming home, of course, for work earlier than if I had been only a sportsman.” Let gentlemen of sixty-seven who habitually go out hunting and shooting,—for I am aware that there are Englishmen of the age who do so,—bethink themselves of the manner in which they pass the remainder of the day after they have come home. Are they tired, and do they sleep, or sit over their tea? Do they congratulate themselves that at sixty-seven they have been still able to perform so well many of the feats of their youth? I think I may say that they, none of them, betake themselves to the hard thoughtful work of their lives; and that, if such work still falls to their lot, it has to be done before they go out hunting or shooting.

He, however, takes his share in all matters of interest. He knows what is doing as to fortifications, and takes a strong interest in the subject. He writes to the Chancellor of the Exchequer; “Could you but take a sum, however small, to make a beginning, for similar defences at Plymouth?” He is very eager as to some system of volunteering. “Every other country that deserves to be called a power has this kind of reserved force.” Then comes the great Exhibition of 1851,—the first of those marvellous palaces of industry which have since been studded thick over the world’s surface. He is writing to Lord Normanby, and is speaking of the multitude. “The Queen, her husband, her eldest son and daughter, gave themselves in full confidence to this multitude, with no other guard than one of honour and the accustomed supply of stick-handed constables.” And the Papacy has to be put down. “Our Papal Aggression Bill will be carried in spite of the opposition of the Irish members who are driven on by the influence of the priests over the Irish electors.” As to this bill, however, I do not know that we are now inclined to take much pride to ourselves. Then Mr. Gladstone’s Neapolitan letters were written, and so moved Naples, through England, that the Neapolitan prisons were at last opened. On this subject he tells an excellent story. “Walewski told Milnes the other day, as a proof of the goodness of heart of the King of Naples, that at his, Walewski’s request, the King had at one time promised to set free three hundred prisoners against whom no charge or no proof had been established. ‘How grateful,’ said Milnes, ‘these men must have been! Did they not come and thank you for their release?’ ‘Why,’ said Walewski, ‘you see, after the King had made the promise, the Chief of Police came to him, and said that if the men were set free he could not answer for the King’s life. And so, you see, the men were not set free.’”