She was not right, however, in her estimate of the dangers which threatened the Ministry; they came from the Foreign Office and the Court, not from the Commons.
Kossuth, the leader of the Hungarian Revolution, had been received in England with great enthusiasm. He made a series of fiery speeches against the Austrian and Russian Governments, urging that in cases in which foreign Powers interfered with the internal politics of a country, as they had done in the case of the Revolution in Hungary, outside nations should combine to prevent it. This was thoroughly in harmony with Palmerston's foreign policy. He wished to receive Kossuth at his house, which would have been tantamount to admitting to a hostile attitude towards Austria and Russia, who were nominally our friends. Lord John dissuaded him from doing this; but he did receive deputations at the Foreign Office, who spoke of the Emperors of Austria and Russia as "odious and detestable assassins." The Queen was extremely angry.
Windsor Castle, November 13, 1851
The Queen talked long with me about Lord Palmerston and about Kossuth.
After accusing Lord Palmerston of every kind of fault and folly, public and private, she said several times, "I have the very worst opinion of him." I secretly agreed with her in much that she said of him, but openly defended him when I thought her unjust. I told her of his steadiness in friendship and constant kindness in word and deed to those he had known in early life, however separated from him by time and station. She did not believe it, and said she knew him to be quite wanting in feeling. This turned out to mean that his political enmities outlasted the good fortune of his enemies. She said if he took the part of the revolutionists in some countries he ought in all, and that while he pretended great compassion for the oppressed Hungarians and Italians, he would not care if the Schleswig-Holsteiners were all drowned. I said this was too common a failing with us all, etc. I allowed that I wished his faults were not laid on John's shoulders, and John's merits given to him, as has often been the case--and that it was a pity he sometimes used unnecessarily provoking language, but I would not grant that England was despised and hated by all other European countries.
The Kossuth incident was soon followed by a graver one. On December 1, 1851, Louis Napoleon carried out his coup d'état. The Ministry determined to maintain a strict neutrality in the matter, and a short dispatch was sent to Lord Normanby instructing him "to make no change in his relations to the French Government." When this dispatch was shown to the French Minister, he replied, a little nettled no doubt by the suggestion that England considered herself to be stretching a point in recognising the Emperor, that he had already heard from their Ambassador in London that Lord Palmerston fully approved of the change. In a later dispatch to Lord Normanby, which had not been shown either to the Queen or to the Prime Minister, Palmerston repeated his own opinion. Now this was precisely the kind of conduct for which he had been reproved: in consequence he was asked to resign. When it came to explanations before Parliament, Palmerston, to the surprise of everybody, made a meek, halting defence of his independent conduct. But he bided his time, and when the Government brought in a Militia Bill, intended to quiet the invasion scare which the appearance of another Napoleon on the throne of France had started, he proposed an amendment which they could not accept, and carried it against them. Lord John Russell resigned and Lord Derby undertook to form a Government.
Lady John wrote afterwards the following recollections of this crisis:
The breach between John and Lord Palmerston was a calamity to the country, to the Whig party, and to themselves. And although it had for some months been a threatening danger on the horizon, I cannot but feel that there was accident in its actual occurrence. Had we been in London, or at Pembroke Lodge, and not at Woburn Abbey at the time, they would have met and talked over the subjects of their difference. Words spoken might have been equally strong, but would have been less cutting than words written, and conciliatory expressions on John's part would have led the way to promises on Lord Palmerston's to avoid committing his colleagues in future, as he had done in the case of the coup d'état, and also to avoid any needless risk of irritating the Queen by neglect in sending dispatches to the Palace. It was characteristic of my husband to bear patiently for a long while with difficulties, opposition, perplexities, doubts raised by those with whom he acted, listening to them with candour and good temper, and only meeting their arguments with his own; but, at last, if he failed to convince them, to take a sudden resolution--either yielding to them entirely or breaking with them altogether--from which nothing could shake him, but which, on looking back in after years, did not always seem to him the best course. My father, who knew him well, once said to me, half in joke and half in earnest: "Your husband is never so determined as when he is in the wrong." It was a relief to him to have done with hesitation and be resolved on any step which this very anxiety to have done with hesitation led him to believe a right one at the moment. This habit of mind showed itself in private as in public matters, and his children and I were often startled by abrupt decisions on home affairs announced very often by letter.
In the case of the dismissal of Lord Palmerston, there was but Lord Palmerston himself who found fault. The rest of the Cabinet were unanimous in approbation. But there was not one of them whose opinions on foreign policy were, in John's mind, worth weighing against those of Lord Palmerston. He and John were always in cordial agreement on the great lines of foreign policy, so far as I remember, except on Lord Palmerston's unlucky and unworthy sanction of the coup d'état.
They two kept up the character of England as the sturdy guardian of her own rights against other nations and the champion of freedom and independence abroad. They did so both before and after the breach of 1851, which was happily closed in the following year, when they were once more colleagues in office. On matters of home policy Lord Palmerston remained the Tory he had been in his earlier days, and this was the cause of many a trial to John. Indeed, it was a misfortune to him throughout his public career that his colleagues almost to a man hung back when he would have gone forward; and many a time he came home dispirited from a Cabinet at which he had been alone--or with only the support of my father, who always stood stoutly by him while he remained Cabinet Minister--in the wish to bring before Parliament measures worthy of the Whig banner of Civil and Religious Liberty, Progress and Reform. Nothing could exceed John's patience under the criticisms of his colleagues, who were, most of them, also his friends, some of them very dear friends--nothing could exceed his readiness to admit and listen to difference of opinion from them; but it was trying to find the difference always in one direction, and that a direction hardly consistent with the character of a Whig Ministry.