Lord Palmerston

Lord Palmerston (1784-1865), Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister of Great Britain (1855-1858, 1859-1865), who had an important influence on European affairs.

Palmerston was born on October 20, 1784, in Westminster, the son of the 2nd Viscount Palmerston, a Lord of the Treasury and Irish peer. Palmerston was educated at Harrow School, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Cambridge. After succeeding to the peerage in 1802, he entered Parliament in 1807 as a member of the Tory party; he remained a member of the House of Commons for 58 years. From 1809 to 1828 he served as Secretary of War in several Tory administrations. Thereafter he had a falling-out with the party, and, beginning in 1830, he was Foreign Secretary in three Whig governments (1830-1834, 1835-1841, and 1846-1851).

The creation of an independent Belgium in 1830 to prevent its annexation by France was one of Palmerston's most successful diplomatic achievements. From 1834 to 1841 he collaborated with the French in supporting Isabella II of Spain and Maria II of Portugal against the rival claimants to the thrones of those countries. Palmerston involved Britain in the Opium Wars with China (1839-1843, 1856-1860). In 1840 he was largely responsible for preventing Muhammad Ali of Egypt from seizing control of the Ottoman Empire. He dissuaded Austria from intervening in the Swiss civil war of 1847, and the following year he mediated a quarrel between Austria and France. He also showed some sympathy for the revolutions of 1848, courting the Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth, protecting liberal refugees, and giving tacit support to Italian risings against Austria. During his last term at the Foreign Office, Palmerston gained a reputation for blustering “gunboat” diplomacy. A much noted example of this was his insistence on using a naval blockade of Greece in 1850 to obtain compensation for a British subject, Don Pacifico, whose house in Athens had been looted and burned. When Palmerston's enemies tried to censure him for this act, he successfully defended himself in the House of Commons, declaring that a British subject, wherever he might be, should feel confident that the “watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong” (see British Foreign Policy Since 1800).

Palmerston was Home Secretary from 1852 to 1855, when, in his seventies, he became Prime Minister at the height of the Crimean War (1853-1856). He brought the war to a successful conclusion, launched a second invasion of China in cooperation with France in 1856, won a general election in 1857 by appealing to nationalist sentiment over the war with China, and suppressed the Indian Mutiny. Palmerston's government was defeated in 1858, but he returned to office in 1859 as Britain's first Liberal Party prime minister. He supported Italian unification but remained neutral during the American Civil War. He died in Hertfordshire on October 18, 1865, while still in office.

Palmerston's contemporaries often said that he was a Conservative at home and a Liberal abroad. His popularity among the British people stemmed from his refusal to be the tool of any party, his cavalier attitude towards foreigners, and his firm belief in the rightful international dominance of Great Britain.