On the 14th of November 1843 he was appointed ambassador at the court of the young Spanish queen Isabella II. Upon his arrival at Madrid signal evidence was afforded of the estimation in which he was then held as a diplomatist. He was chosen arbitrator between Spain and Morocco, then confronting each other in deadly hostility, and, as the result of his mediation, a treaty of peace was signed between the two powers in 1844. In 1846 a much more formidable difficulty arose,—one which, after threatening war between France and England, led at last to a diplomatic rupture between the British and Spanish governments. The dynastic intrigues of Louis Philippe were the immediate cause of this estrangement, and those intrigues found their climax in what has ever since been known in European annals as the Spanish Marriages. The storm sown in the Spanish marriages was reaped in the whirlwind of the February revolution. And the explosion which took place at Paris was answered a month afterwards at Madrid by a similar outbreak. Marshal Narvaez thereupon assumed the dictatorship, and wreaked upon the insurgents a series of reprisals of the most pitiless character. These excessive severities of the marshal-dictator the British ambassador did his utmost to mitigate. When at last, however, Narvaez carried his rigour to the length of summarily suppressing the constitutional guarantees, Bulwer sent in a formal protest in the name of England against an act so entirely ruthless and unjustifiable. This courageous proceeding at once drew down upon the British envoy a counter-stroke as ill-judged as it was unprecedented. Narvaez, with matchless effrontery, denounced the ambassador from England as an accomplice in the conspiracies of the Progressistas; and despite his position as an envoy, and in insolent defiance of the Palmerstonian boast, Civis Britannicus, Bulwer, on the 12th of June, was summarily required to quit Madrid within twenty-four hours. Two days afterwards M. Isturitz, the Spanish ambassador at the court of St James’s, took his departure from London. Diplomatic relations were not restored between the two countries until years had elapsed, nor even then until after a formal apology, dictated by Lord Palmerston, had been signed by the prime minister of Queen Isabella. Before his return the ambassador was gazetted a K.C.B., being promoted to the grand cross some three years afterwards. In addition to this mark of honour he received the formal approbation of the ministry, and with it the thanks of both Houses of Parliament.
Before the year of his return from the peninsula had run out Sir Henry Bulwer was married to the Hon. Georgiana Charlotte Mary Wellesley, youngest daughter of the 1st Baron Cowley, and niece to the duke of Wellington. Early in the following year, on the 27th of April 1849, he was nominated ambassador at Washington. There he acquired immense popularity. His principal success was the compact known as the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty (q.v.), ratified in May 1850, pledging the contracting governments to respect the neutrality of the meditated ship canal through Central America, bringing the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific into direct communication. After having been accredited as ambassador to the United States for three years, Sir Henry Bulwer, early in 1852, was despatched as minister plenipotentiary at the court of the grand duke of Tuscany at Florence. Shortly after his retirement from that post in the January of 1855, he was entrusted with various diplomatic missions, in one of which he was empowered as commissioner under the 23rd article of the treaty of Paris, 1856, to investigate the state of things in the Danubian principalities, with a view to their definite reorganization. Finally he was installed, from May 1858 to August 1865, as the immediate successor, after the close of the Crimean war, of the “Great Elchi,” Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe, as ambassador extraordinary to the Ottoman Porte at Constantinople.
In the winter of 1865 Bulwer returned home from the Bosporus, and retired with a pension. He was elected member for Tamworth on the 17th of November 1868, and retained his seat until gazetted as a peer of the realm on the 21st of March 1871, under the title of Baron Dalling and Bulwer of Wood Dalling in the county of Norfolk. Upon the eve of his return to his old haunts as a debater and a politician he had asserted his claim to literary distinction by giving to the world in two volumes his four masterly sketches of typical men, entitled Historical Characters. This work, dedicated to his brother Edward, in testimony of the writer’s fraternal affection and friendship, portrayed in luminous outline Talleyrand the Politic Man, Cobbett the Contentious Man, Canning the Brilliant Man, and Mackintosh the Man of Promise. Two other kindred sketches, those of Sir Robert Peel and Viscount Melbourne, having been selected from among their author’s papers, were afterwards published posthumously. Another work of ampler outline and larger pretension was begun and partially issued from the press during Lord Dalling’s lifetime, but not completed. This was the Life of Viscount Palmerston, the first two volumes of which were published in 1870. A third volume appeared four years afterwards. Even then it left the story of the English statesman broken off so abruptly that the work remained at the last the merest fragment. It was completed by Evelyn Ashley.
Lord Dalling died unexpectedly on the 23rd of May 1872 at Naples. He had no issue, and the title became extinct. In his public career he enjoyed a three-fold success—as ambassador, as politician and as man of letters. His popularity in society was at all times remarkable, mainly no doubt from his mastery of all the subtler arts of a skilled conversationalist. The apparent languor with which he related an anecdote, flung off a bon mot, or indulged in a momentary stroke of irony imparted interest to the narrative, wings to the wit and point to the sarcasm in a manner peculiarly his own.
(C. K.)
DALLMEYER, JOHN HENRY (1830-1883), Anglo-German optician, was born on the 6th of September 1830 at Loxten, Westphalia, the son of a landowner. On leaving school at the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to an Osnabrück optician, and in 1851 he came to London, where he obtained work with an optician, W. Hewitt, who shortly afterwards, with his workmen, entered the employment of Andrew Ross, a lens and telescope manufacturer. Dallmeyer’s position in this workshop appears to have been an unpleasant one, and led him to take, for a time, employment as French and German correspondent for a commercial firm. After a year he was, however, re-engaged by Ross as scientific adviser, and was entrusted with the testing and finishing of the highest class of optical apparatus. This appointment led to his marriage with Ross’s second daughter, Hannah, and to the inheritance, at Ross’s death (1859), of a third of his employer’s large fortune and the telescope manufacturing portion of the business. Turning from astronomical work to the making of photographic lenses (see [Photography]), he introduced improvements in both portrait and landscape lenses, in object-glasses for the microscope and in condensers for the optical lantern. In connexion with celestial photography he constructed photo-heliographs for the Wilna observatory in 1863, for the Harvard College observatory in 1864, and, in 1873, several for the British government. Dallmeyer’s instruments achieved a wide success in Europe and America, taking the highest awards at various international exhibitions. The Russian government gave him the order of St Stanislaus, and the French government made him chevalier of the Legion of Honour. He was for many years upon the councils of both the Royal Astronomical and Royal Photographic societies. About 1880 he was advised to give up the personal supervision of his workshops, and to travel for his health, but he died on board ship, off the coast of New Zealand, on the 30th of December 1883.
His second son, Thomas Rudolphus Dallmeyer (1859-1906), who assumed control of the business on the failure of his father’s health, was principally known as the first to introduce telephotographic lenses into ordinary practice (patented 1891), and he was the author of a standard book on the subject (Telephotography, 1899). He served as president of the Royal Photographic Society in 1900-1903.
DALL’ ONGARO, FRANCESCO (1808-1873), Italian writer, born in Friuli, was educated for the priesthood, but abandoned his orders, and taking to political journalism founded the Favilla at Trieste in the Liberal interest. In 1848 he enlisted under Garibaldi, and next year was a member of the assembly which proclaimed the republic in Rome, being given by Mazzini the direction of the Monitor officiale. On the downfall of the republic he fled to Switzerland, then to Belgium and later to France, taking a prominent part in revolutionary journalism; it was not till 1860 that he returned to Italy, where he was appointed professor of dramatic literature at Florence. Subsequently he was transferred to Naples, where he died on the 10th of January 1873. His patriotic poems, Stornelli, composed in early life, had a great popular success; and he produced a number of plays, notably Fornaretto, Bianca Capello, Fasma and Il Tesoro. His collected Fantasie drammatiche e liriche were published in his lifetime.