He was in office altogether forty-nine years and some odd months;—all but fifty years! No other Englishman has, I believe, ever served so long. How should an Englishman serve so long, seeing that a young man has to show some fitness before he is taken into office, and that then, as parties are divided in England, he has to remain out during that portion of his life in which his opponents are in? But this man did so. He lived in all eighty-one years. Of these, twenty-two were those of his boyhood and education; he enjoyed nine of enforced rest, though during those nine he was, with the exception of a month or two, an active member of Parliament; the remaining fifty saw him always in Parliament, always in office, always at the oar. They offered to make him Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, as they had also offered to make him Governor-General of India. But he laughed at the proposal. Not to be in the centre of everything,—at St. Stephen’s, in Downing Street, in London where the Mayor and the Fishmongers held their banquets, ready for Greenwich dinners, ready for all attacks, for all explanations, for all discussions—was to him not to live. But he did live always, till at eighty-one he was taken to his rest, being at the moment Prime Minister of England.
And yet he was by no means a man of genius, possessed of not more than ordinary gifts of talent, with no startling oratory, and, above all, with no specially strong liberal opinions. He had all that could be done for him, both for good and evil, by a thoroughly English education of the first class. He could fight and would fight as long as he could stand; but as conqueror he could be thoroughly generous. He could work, requiring no rest, but only some change of employment. He shot, he hunted, he raced, he danced. But he seems to have cared for the niceties of erudition neither in classics nor in philosophy. He was a man who from the first was determined to do the best he could with himself; and he did it with a healthy energy, never despairing, never expecting too much, never being in a hurry, but always ready to seize the good thing when it came. Through his active life he was fortunate in all things. He avoided those scrapes to which such men are subject,—men who come early into their fortunes and their titles, who profess to live, if not lives of pleasure, lives to which pleasure lends all her attractions. He shot, he hunted, he raced, and he danced; but he did not drink; he did not gamble. The world has heard of no trouble into which he got about women. He became so popular with the world generally that the world was afraid to be censorious or to inquire into him with prying eyes. The world called him “Cupid” when he was young, and the world said nothing of him more severe than that. He had, too, the great gift of uninterrupted physical health, without which no statesman can now do great things in England. Even a Pitt, were a Pitt to come now, would hardly succeed under the weight of responsibility and labour which he would have to bear.
Lord Palmerston began life as a Tory, and only drifted gradually into those Whig tendencies which held him to the end of his life, rather than were held by him. Of the Honourable Henry John Temple, the eldest son of the Viscount Palmerston of that day, the earliest news we have is that he was measured for his first pair of breeches on the 4th of March, 1789, and that later in life complaints were made that Harry Temple was too sedate and wanted animal spirits;[E] and we know that he passed through Harrow School with fair credit and much popularity as a young nobleman. From thence he was sent to Edinburgh to listen to the teaching of Professor Dugald Stewart. The Professor thus writes about him to his old Harrow master in April, 1801. He was then sixteen. “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 his time of life, or one possessed of a more amiable disposition.” It is somewhat exaggerated praise, and would hardly have been believed by Baron Stockmar when, fifty years later on, he had to judge of the Foreign Minister. From Edinburgh he went to St John’s, Cambridge. His father had previously died; and here, though we only know it from himself, he was so “commended for the general regularity of his conduct” that he was advised to stand for the University. In January, 1806, Mr. Pitt died, and the University had to elect a new member. Palmerston was twenty-one years old, and was put forward as representing the Tory Government party; but he was beaten by Lord Henry Petty and Lord Althorp, afterwards Lord Lansdowne and Lord Spencer, with both of whom he for many years sat in the same Cabinet. He then stood for Horsham in November, 1806, and was returned; but he was unseated on petition. He stood again for the University, in May, 1807, and was again unsuccessful. He came in afterwards for a rotten borough, Newtown, in the Isle of Wight. “One condition required” by the patron “was that he would never, even for the election, set a foot in the place.”
But he had become the officer of the Government before he was a member of Parliament, having, in anticipation of his lot in life, been appointed one of the junior Lords of the Admiralty. He was nominated to that office by the influence of Lord Malmesbury, who had been one of his guardians. His duties as such were, as he tells us, confined to the signing of his name. The Duke of Portland was the Prime Minister, but Mr. Canning was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and gave the Ministry what power it had. Soon afterwards, still in 1807, application was made to Canning to appoint young Palmerston Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, but the place had already been given away. A quarter of a century was thus left to run by, as Mr. Ashley remarks, before he took his place in that department.
It was Under the Duke of Portland, as a special friend and follower of Canning, that Lord Palmerston took his place as a Government servant, in April, 1807. As such he remained, with six intervals, amounting in all to about nine years, till on 16th October, 1865, he died at Brocket Hall, in Hertfordshire, in the same house in which Lord Melbourne, whose brother-in-law he became, had previously died in 1848. For four or five months of his life,—in the winter of 1834-35,—he was without a seat in Parliament, till in the April of that year he found himself landed in a safe refuge in Tiverton. At the time at which he entered the Admiralty he was not yet twenty-three years old. He possessed a fair patrimony, but was by no means a rich nobleman. He had an Irish property in County Sligo, partly in the town, but chiefly on the sea-coast. To this he paid great attention. I remember having been told on the spot nearly forty years ago that that wonderful “Irishman,” Lord Palmerston, had for the last ten years spent all his income upon the estate. He had just then been over, and the beauty of his presence had probably enhanced the virtue of his operations. The family house was at Broadlands, near Romsey, in Hampshire. Here he went into the country, sometimes for a week or two at a time, whereas other country gentlemen go for months. Nothing astonishes us more than the smallness of the periods allowed to himself by Lord Palmerston for the amusements of life. But he makes his statements in that respect without any feeling either of surprise or self-praise. He does in one place break out into anger against a keeper who spends his nights in the alehouse in order that the poachers may spend theirs in the coverts. “Five guns killing sixteen pheasants in Yew Tree!” Yew Tree we presume to have been a wood, and certainly must have been unsatisfactory even in 1834, when the catastrophe took place. The Foreign Secretary going down to his own preserves with four friends, and for a very short holiday, and finding only three birds apiece among them, cannot but have been exasperating! But Mr. Thresher, the keeper in fault, probably thought that a man so greatly occupied with foreign affairs as his master, could not want many pheasants.
CHAPTER II.
PALMERSTON AS JUNIOR LORD OF THE ADMIRALTY AND SECRETARY OF WAR, APRIL, 1807, TO MAY, 1827.
THE early years of Lord Palmerston, though he was in office, in Parliament, even when he had become a Cabinet Minister, were not those by which he will be known. Pitt died about the age at which Palmerston went to the Foreign Office, having served his country as Prime Minister for nearly twenty years. But during that period of his comparative youth, Lord Palmerston was always at work, gaining slowly that consideration in the eyes of men on which his fame and strength was built up. It was not in him to take Parliament by surprise, and to captivate the ears of all hearers by some precocious speech. Nevertheless he slowly learned the art of speaking with great efficiency, and could at last carry on a debate with energy and success,—as was found by the Don Pacifico speech, to which we shall come in his sixty-sixth year, when he spoke for five consecutive hours. In the way of speech-making, that was the greatest effort of his life; but other orators have reached their zenith before they have become sexagenarians. Through his whole life I think that he had never spoken for the mere sake of the effect which oratory is supposed to have. In the mode of life to which he had fashioned himself, there constantly arose matters which required speeches. When the occasion fell upon him he could express himself. When, as Secretary of War, he had to advocate a Military College, he declared that, “for his part, he wished to see the British soldier with a British character, with British habits, with a British education, and with as little as possible of anything foreign.” The argument was ad captandum, but it was of a nature fitted for its purpose. Such generally were his arguments. And he could tell a story with expressive force, as he did tell the story of Don Pacifico in his own defence. He failed lamentably in defending himself after his dismissal from the Foreign Office,—when the witty statesman said, prematurely, that there “had been a Palmerston.” Defence by words would at that moment have been very difficult,—to have been efficacious and hot to have been disloyal! But he could answer a rowdy at the hustings with rough, easy fun, in a manner that, with such an audience, was found to be successful. He seems to have prepared his speeches carefully when he was young, having among his papers left the notes behind him when he died, but to have abandoned the practice as he became accustomed to the work. It was just what we should have expected. He looked forward as a young man to speaking as a necessity from which there could be no escape; but he never seems to have regarded the art as the source of his power, or the bulwark of his fame.
His first speech was in 1808, on the taking of Copenhagen. We have all read our history sufficiently to know that Nelson raised his telescope to his blind eye, or in other words, took upon himself to disobey his superior officer. The Danish expedition was debated, and Nelson, as we know, got great honour for what would have ruined him had he been unsuccessful. The Ministry were attacked as to the expedition to Copenhagen, and on this occasion Lord Palmerston, as a Lord of the Admiralty, made his first speech. “My dear Elizabeth,” he says, writing to his sister, “you will see by this day’s paper that I was tempted by some evil spirit to make a fool of myself for the entertainment of the House last night; however I thought it was a good opportunity of breaking the ice, although one should flounder a little in doing so; as it was impossible to talk any egregious nonsense in so good a cause.” In time, as he came to have more experience, he must have found that in this he was in error. Let the case be ever so good, the oratory may be bad. But he had numbers on his side. There were 253 votes for Government and 108 against it;—and yet Palmerston complained to his sister that the division was not so good as he had expected. He tells us he was half an hour on his legs, and did “not feel so much alarmed as I expected to be.”
He had opened his lips but once in the House of Commons, when, in October 1809, there came a break up of the Cabinet, on the duel between Canning and Castlereagh. Mr. Percival undertook the office of Prime Minister, and offered to Palmerston the place of Chancellor of the Exchequer, from the duties of which he was desirous of saving himself. The fact that he did so will chiefly be of use to us as showing the idea which was then held of Lord Palmerston by his elders, and the idea which he held himself. He writes to Lord Malmesbury for advice, but he himself gives the advice on which he means to act “I have always thought it unfortunate for any one, and particularly a young man, to be put above his proper level, as he only rises to fall the lower. Now, I am quite without knowledge of finance, and never but once spoke in the House.” “A good deal of debating must of course devolve upon the person holding the Chancellorship of the Exchequer. All persons, not born with the talents of Pitt or Fox, must make many bad speeches at first, if they speak a great deal on many subjects, as they cannot be masters of all; and a bad speech, though tolerated in any person not in a responsible situation, would make a Chancellor of the Exchequer exceedingly ridiculous.” And so that matter of the Chancellorship of the Exchequer was decided. He had not possessed the gifts which would have enabled him to be a second Pitt, but he had the gift of knowing that he could not be so. He settled down at last as Secretary at War, and, by his own judgment, decided on taking the office without a seat in the Cabinet. Writing again to Lord Malmesbury, he says: “Percival having very handsomely given me the option of the Cabinet with the War Office (if I go to it), I thought it best on the whole to decline it; and I trust that, although you seemed to be of a different opinion at first, you will not, on the whole, think I was wrong.” He tells us that he entered on his new functions on the 27th of October, 1809. He was then twenty-five years old.
Having thus made his choice against the Cabinet, he did not enter those sacred doors till May, 1827. An apprenticeship of eighteen years was more, probably, than he had anticipated when he made his choice. But it was no doubt well for his future fame and his stability as a Government servant, that it should have been so. During these eighteen years he was thoroughly learning his duty as a Minister of the Crown;—learning, as some will say, how to exaggerate those duties, and to absorb into his own hands more of power and potentiality than had been intended by those who had appointed him. But by himself, though he thought probably but little about it while he was learning it, the lesson had to be learned; and the lesson taught seems to have been this, that he would interfere with the duties of no other office than his own, but with those duties he would put up with no interference. There may have been danger in this; but such was his theory of official life. And it can hardly be denied that as a Minister of State no Englishman has been more successful.