Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria/Chapter 12

by Millicent Garrett Fawcett

Chapter XII.

Palmerston.

With none of her Ministers has the Queen ever been in sharper conflict than with Lord Palmerston. From his third Foreign Secretaryship in 1846 till his dismissal in 1852, the history of their relations was one long struggle.

Palmerston considered himself the political inheritor of Canning's foreign policy, and that he was bound, as the representative of England to foreign Governments, to be the upholder of political liberty and the foe of tyranny and oppression all over Europe. In this he carried with him the whole-hearted sympathy of the mass of English public opinion. It was not with his opinions and views, but with his way of giving effect to them, that the Queen quarrelled. But the English people were not in a position at the time the conflict was going on to make the distinction. They knew that the Queen and Lord Palmerston was the friend of Hungary, and Poland, and Italy; and in proportion as they gave their sympathy to these countries and to Lord Palmerston, they were hostile to the Court. Now, as their personal loyalty to the Queen was very strong, they sought to find a reason for the Queen's opposition to Lord Palmerston, and they found it, or thought they found it, in the person of the Prince. The Queen's husband was supposed to be a power behind the throne thwarting the will of her constitutional advisers in the interests of foreign despots. The popular view was that the Prince ruled the Queen, and that Stockmar ruled the Prince, and therefore that the policy of the court was not English, but German. That this was a complete misunderstanding, the publication of the "Prince Consort's Life," besides many other political memoirs and memoranda, has abundantly shown. But it was a very natural mistake, and from it arose, not altogether, it is to be feared, without the connivance of Lord Palmerston, a degree of hostility against the Prince which reached an extraordinary height during the early part of the Crimean War.

The question between the Queen and Lord Palmerston is no longer obscured by side issues; at no time was it based upon a divergence of political views. What the Queen, and the majority of Lord Palmerston's colleagues in the Government, no less than the Queen, objected to, was his way of sending despatches, calculated seriously to embroil England with foreign Governments, either entirely without their knowledge and concurrence, going through the form of submitting despatches to them for their criticism and approval, and then actually sending off something entirely different. The despatches submitted by the Foreign Secretary to the Cabinet and to the Queen, and materially altered by them, would be sometimes recast by Palmerston in accordance with his original draft, and thus the Ministers and Sovereign were made to appear to have consented to that of which they had disapproved. At other times he would send important despatches to the Queen for her approval, allowing her quite an inadequate time to digest their contents, almost forcing the suspicion that he wished her to give her assent without knowing what they contained. When this practice was complained of by the Prime Minister, Palmerston excused himself by saying that the practice of sending off early copies of despatches for the Queen's perusal had been discontinued, owing to pressure of work in the office; "but if it shall require an additional clerk or two, you must be liberal," he wrote to Lord John Russell, "and allow me that assistance." This plea of economy came rather strangely from a Foreign Secretary who in 1841 had appointed five new paid attachés without the smallest necessity, and who in one year had spent £11,000 in coach-hire to convey messages to overtake the mails with his letters. The fact is that Lord Palmerston was the sworn foe of despotism everywhere, except in the Foreign Office, when he was Foreign Secretary. In the Foreign Office he reigned supreme and absolute, and would suffer no control either from his colleagues or his Sovereign. With all this, it was impossible not to like him. He had a jollity, a bonhomie, a complete absence of rancor against those who had wrestled with him and thrown him, an easy elasticity, a buoyant faith in himself and in England, which won the hearts of his countrymen. He made mistakes and went through humiliations that would have crushed or imbittered any other man, without losing a jot of his buoyancy and self-confidence. He pursued his own line of policy with incomparable nerve and tenacity. If he triumphed, he crowed; if he was defeated, no one would guess it from his demeanor; he would be cutting his jokes the next day as "game" as ever. No nature could have afforded a greater contrast to that of the Prince Consort; and while one from sheer force and vigor, and the other by position and character, were prominent among the leading politicians of their day, they were certain to be in sharp and almost perpetual conflict. He thought the Prince's hope of German unity a mere dream, impossible of fulfilment, and an alliance between England and Germany, therefore, entirely useless to ourselves. This brought them into political conflict just as their characters brought them into personal conflict. Two or three instances will suffice to illustrate what Palmerston was at the Foreign Office. In 1849, the Neapolitans being in insurrections against the infamous misgovernment under which they suffered, Lord Palmerston supplied them with war material out of the stores of the English Government without the knowledge or consent of his colleagues. Now it may be right or wrong to sympathize with insurgents; but for a Government of another country to supply them with arms is an act of war, of which no single Minister has the right to undertake the responsibility. On this occasion Palmerston was compelled to make a formal official apology to the King of Naples. A question asked in the House of Commons was the first intimation the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, had of what his colleague had done.

One of the special objects of Palmerston's abhorrence was Austria; and it was a state of mind with which there was much sympathy in England. Neither in Italy nor in Hungary could the English people regard the Austrian Government otherwise than as a cruel and perfidious tyranny. This national feeling had burst out in England on the occasion of the visit to London in 1850 of the Austrian General Haynau. In Italy and Hungary the name of this man was associated with acts of barbarous cruelty in putting down the national movement. He was especially charged, and the charge was universally believed in England, with the responsibility of having ordered the flogging of women among the Hungarian insurgents. When in London he made a visit to Barclay's brewery. The draymen and other employés got wind who their foreign visitor was; they gathered together in the yard of the brewery, and rushed upon him with a torrent of abusive epithets; the general cry was, "Down with the Austrian butcher;" they dropped a truss of straw upon him, pelted him with small missiles, and tore his coat, and knocked his hat over his eyes. He and his friends fought their way out of the brewery, only to find an equally warm reception outside from the people in the streets; he was again pelted, struck, and dragged along the road by his mustache. He finally got shelter in the upper part of a public-house, and the police contrived his escape by the river. The general feeling in the country was "serve him right;" but the Queen was seriously annoyed, and dwelt, not without justice, on the cowardice of an attack by a whole mob upon a single unarmed man. At the desire of the Queen, Palmerston expressed in person to the Austrian chargé d'affaires the regret of the Government at the incident; but at the same time advised that no prosecution should be instituted by Haynau, as this would involve a minute recapitulation of the barbarities of which he was accused. Palmerston's private opinion on the affair was expressed in a letter to Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, in which he says: "The draymen were wrong in the particular course they adopted. Instead of striking him, … 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." It may be easily imagined that he did not cordially respond to an order to send a formal written apology to the Austrian Government, and there was a prolonged duel between Lord Palmerston on the one side, and the Prime Minister and the Queen on the other, upon the wording of it. As originally drafted by Palmerston, it contained a paragraph implying that it would have shown better taste on the part of General Haynau to take his autumn holiday nearer home. This was corrected in the draft by the Prime Minister, and the correction was indorsed by Her Majesty; the amended despatch was then returned to the Foreign Secretary, who, in the mean time, had sent off to the Austrian Government the despatch as originally drawn by himself. Then began a regular pitched battle. Palmerston said he would rather resign than withdraw the despatch and substitute the one approved by the Queen and Prime Minister. Sir Theodore Martin says that Palmerston ultimately gave way. Greville says he never did. Mr. Evelyn Ashley says nothing. It is certain that the Haynau incident was for years considered enough to account for the hostility of Austria to England. It was for this that Austria alone of all the great Powers refrained from sending a representative to the Duke of Wellington's funeral; and some people thought it was this that prevented her joining her forces to those of England and France in the Crimean War. But Palmerston was not long in giving Austria other items to add to her account against England.

When Kossuth was in England in 1851, he having been the leader of the unsuccessful Hungarian insurrection against Austria, he was received with tremendous enthusiasm all over England. The Austrians were furious, and their anger was intensified by the report that Lord Palmerston was going to receive him at the Foreign Office. Many politicians thought that this would be regarded by Austria as equivalent to a declaration of war. The Cabinet remonstrated, and Palmerston, to their relief and surprise, yielded. A day or two after this, Greville saw Lord John Russell and Palmerston at Windsor, "mighty merry and cordial, laughing and talking together. Those breezes leave nothing behind, particularly with Palmerston, who never loses his temper, and treats everything with levity and gayety." But Palmerston docile was more dangerous than Palmerston pugnacious. The next week he was receiving addresses at the Foreign Office from Finsbury and Islington, thanking him for the protection he had given to Kossuth, and for the sympathy he had shown to the Hungarian cause. In his reply he gave warm expression to his sympathy with Hungary, and spoke of the position of the British Government as that of the "judicious bottle-holder" during the conflict between Hungary and her foe. The phrase has been often remembered after the occasion on which it was used has been forgotten. The people applied it to Palmerston himself, and liked him all the more for it. But the proceeding was strongly and formally censured in the Cabinet and by the Queen. Her Majesty's anger was not appeased by those who told her that although the Emperor of Austria might be angry, the action of the Foreign Secretary was not unpopular with the English people. Her Majesty replied:—

"It is no question with the Queen whether she pleases the Emperor of Austria or not, but whether she gives him a just ground of complaint or not. And if she does so, she can never believe that this will add to her popularity with her own people."^[1]

Lord John communicated the Queen's views to Lord Palmerston, and he was especially cautioned as to the future upon "the necessity of a guarded conduct." Lord John writing to the Queen was sanguine enough to hope that this remonstrance would "have its effect upon Lord Palmerston." The ink of his letter was hardly dry when like a clap of thunder came the news of the coup d'état in Paris; Louis Napoleon, then President of the Republic, had had his political opponents seized in the night and thrown into prison, nearly 500 persons were shipped off to Cayenne without any form of trial, thousands were shot down in the streets, and the Prince President became first by military and then by popular election Napoleon III. and Emperor of the French.

The Queen, true to her principles of non-intervention, at once wrote to the Prime Minister, instructing him to caution Lord Normanby, our ambassador in Paris, to observe strict neutrality, and to remain absolutely passive towards the new Government. Lord Palmerston accordingly sent a despatch to Lord Normanby in that sense. At the same time, however, that he was sending his despatch to Paris, he was seeing Count Walewski, the French ambassador in London, and expressing his entire approbation of the coup d'état and his conviction that the President could not have acted otherwise than he had done! On the 16th December he followed this up by a despatch to Lord Normanby, expressing his conviction that the action of Louis Napoleon was for the benefit of France and also of the rest of Europe. This despatch was sent off without the knowledge or approval of the Queen or the Prime Minister, and in contravention of their express wishes. This was the end. Lord Palmerston was dismissed, not at the instance of the Queen, but with her entire approval. Lord John Russell offered him, as a consolation, the Lord Lieutenantcy of Ireland and a British Peerage, both of which were curtly declined. The general opinion of the political world was that Palmerston's career was over. Disraeli spoke of him in the past tense, as if he were dead. There was tremendous rejoicing over his fall in every stronghold of despotism in Europe, especially in Austria, where the heads of the Government took credit to themselves for his overthrow, and gave balls in honor of the event; a rhyme was current in Austria at the time which expresses the feelings Palmerston had awakened:—

"Hat der Teufel einen Sohn,
So ist er sicher Palmerston."^[2]

In the debate in the House of Commons which followed these events, Lord John made a most successful speech, in which he showed the impossibility of working with a colleague who deliberately defied the express views of the whole Cabinet; he read the memorandum drawn up by the Queen for Lord Palmerston's guidance on the occasion of a former dispute. In this paper Her Majesty had claimed her right to know distinctly what the proposals were to which she was asked to give her sanction, and, secondly, that, having once given her sanction to a despatch, it was not to be arbitrarily altered or modified by the Minister. She also claimed her right to be kept informed of what passed between the Foreign Secretary and the ambassadors before important decisions were taken, and to receive the despatches in good time, so that she could acquaint herself with their contents. Lord John Russell completely carried the House with him. It was felt that the demands of the Queen and the Cabinet had been strictly reasonable, and that it would be impossible to carry on the business of the country on any other basis. Lord Palmerston practically had no defence, and he abandoned any attempt to manufacture one. Of the Queen's memorandum he said not a word. Greville says the effect of Lord John's speech was prodigious, and that Palmerston's reply was weak and ineffective. He had resigned the seals of the Foreign Office before Parliament met, and Lord Granville had been appointed his successor. He bore the whole position with admirable good temper. He received Lord Granville with the greatest cordiality, spent three hours with him putting him in possession of the threads of his diplomacy, spoke of the Court without bitterness, and in strong terms of the Queen's "sagacity," and ended by offering to give any information or assistance that was in his power. He pursued the same line of conduct when in a few weeks Lord John Russell's Government fell and was succeeded by Lord Derby's; Lord Malmesbury becoming Foreign Secretary. Palmerston at once came to see him, and offered to coach him in Foreign Office policy. He gave the new Foreign Secretary a masterly sketch of the status quo in Europe, as well as general hints upon the principles by which English policy should be guided; the pith of these was, "Keep well with France." By this means, though ousted from office, Palmerston remained practically the director of the policy of the Foreign Office.

All the contemporary records agree upon the main outward and visible facts; but they are provokingly silent upon Palmerston's real motives. He was neither a hot-headed youth, acting on the impulse of the moment, neither was he "an old man in a hurry;" he was sixty-seven years old, about the prime of life for a statesman, and steeped to the lips in an absorbing interest in England's foreign politics. His whole tradition had been to oppose despotism and support civil and political liberty against despots all over Europe. Why did he go out of his way to establish, so far as he could, a cordial understanding with a despot who was also an upstart, and whose Government was founded on violence, and carried on by crushing every vestige of liberty in France? Some have thought an answer could be found in his hostility to the Orleans family; but this does Palmerston less than justice. It is true he hated Louis Philippe, and rejoiced in his fall, which he attributed to the King's perfidy about the Spanish marriages. When the French King was fugitive in England, Palmerston had tried to prevent his receiving the shelter of Claremont, although the Government really had no business whatever to interfere, as Claremont had been settled for his life on Leopold, King of the Belgians, and if he chose to lend it to his father-in-law, no one else had any business in the matter. Louis Philippe died in 1850, and in 1851, although Palmerston said the Orleans Princes were plotting for a restoration, and if Louis Napoleon had not struck when he did, he would himself have been overthrown, the excuse was not a good one. Some contend that Palmerston was afraid of the red spectre in France, and thought Louis Napoleon the only man capable of laying it. But Palmerston was not afraid of the reds in any other European country. The real explanation of his conduct must be sought elsewhere. At the end of 1851, it required no superhuman power of prophecy, especially to one who surveyed Europe from the watchtower of the London Foreign Office, to foresee that the time was approaching when England would have to face the alternative of either relinquishing her traditional policy of maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, or fight Russia in order to sustain it. Palmerston, it need hardly be said, was all for fighting; but the question was whether England would face Russia alone, or whether Russia would restore the Holy Alliance, and thus lead a combination of European powers against England; or whether, as a third possibility, England could succeed in isolating Russia and in obtaining an ally for herself. It is not extravagant to suppose that it was to make this third possibility a probability that Palmerston hastened to make friends with a man whom he could not have trusted, and whose cruelty and despotism he must have loathed. It was impossible for England to look for any other ally. Russia, Austria, and Prussia were wild against England, regarding her as the great stronghold of constitutional principles, and believing that to her encouragement was due the revolutionary outbreak of 1848. The immunity of England herself from disorder did not open their eyes to see that it was their own misgovernment which had produced revolution. It only rendered them the more furious, as they believed that England had preached insurrection, while other Governments bore its penalties. It was touch-and-go in the first year of Napoleon III.'s reign whether he would try to put himself at the head of a European combination against us, or whether he would become our ally and fight one of the other Powers. He certainly believed that was necessary in order to divert the attention of France from domestic politics, to conciliate the army, and thus on both sides to consolidate his own position. The almost universal feeling in England was that he was going to fight us. The common opinion was that the new Emperor's first thought would be to avenge Waterloo. By 1853, however, Louis Napoleon had decided not to fight us, but to fight with us against Russia. This was due more to Palmerston than to any other Englishman.

Greville reports a conversation early in 1853 between himself and Comte de Flahault (afterwards French ambassador in London), who had just returned from Paris, where he had been in constant communication with the Emperor. Flahault said that the rancor and insolence against England on the part of Austria, Russia, and Prussia, were almost inconceivable; he added that Louis Napoleon had had offered to him in the first year of his reign a position which it had been the object of his uncle's life to attain,—the leadership of a European league against us; that he decided to decline these flattering overtures, and to consolidate his alliance with England. Flahault went on to say that he had supported Louis Napoleon in this determination, and had represented to him that the Northern Powers had long withheld any recognition of his Imperial position; whereas England had at once recognized him, and that if she had not done so, probably the acknowledgment of the other Powers would have been still further delayed. Flahault represented to Greville that, greatly to his surprise, the Emperor had wholly concurred in this view.

It is needless to say that the importance of this conversation is not derived from its truth, but from its representing what Louis Napoleon wished to be believed in England in the spring of 1853. He was strongly desirous for his own purposes of the English alliance, and knew that it was the only one he could hope for at that time in Europe. So far from declining flattering proposals from the Czar, his vanity had just been bitterly wounded by the absolute refusal of the Russian monarch to greet him as "mon frère."

There can be little doubt that Palmerston availed himself of the Emperor's isolated position in Europe, and "captured" him as an ally of England. It was the wish to secure him more surely that made Palmerston endeavor in 1852-3 to promote a marriage between Louis Napoleon and the Queen's niece, the Princess Adelaide of Hohenlohe. There was a definite proposal made to bring this about, the Emperor stating that his wish was to reserrer les liens entre les deux pays. The offer was declined by the Queen on behalf of her niece, on the ground of the latter's youth and inexperience. In 1854, another matrimonial project between the two families was started with the same object, between Princess Mary of Cambridge and Prince Jerome Napoleon. Malmesbury heard of it, and said he hoped it was not true, for the sake of the Princess; but it was strongly pressed by Palmerston on the Queen, and was only put an end to by the Princess's absolute refusal to listen to it.

If Palmerston ever believed in the Emperor's fidelity to the English alliance, he did not do so permanently.^[3] All through the negotiations which finally led up to the Crimean War, Palmerston and his coadjutor at Constantinople, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, urged on his country, not only to war, but to immediate war. Palmerston knew his man. It was Louis Napoleon's present purpose in 1853 and 1854 to fight on our side; England's policy, in Lord Palmerston's view, was to clinch the matter before he had turned against us.

When Palmerston was dismissed in 1851, his defence of himself in the House of Commons at the opening of the Session of 1852 was such a complete failure that people went about saying "Palmerston is smashed." But the epithet was misapplied. The Government of which he had been the life and soul was smashed. In less than three weeks' time the debate on his dismissal, the Government was defeated, and the Russell Administration resigned. Palmerston wrote to his brother: "Dear William,—I have had my tit-for-tat with John Russell, and I turned him out on Friday last." Lord Derby formed a Government which he invited Lord Palmerston to join. The offer was declined, but, as already pointed out, Palmerston continued practically to direct our foreign policy. The Conservative Government was of very short duration. Before the year was out, Mr. Disraeli's Budget was defeated, the Government resigned, and Lord Aberdeen became the head of a Coalition Government formed by a union of the Whigs with the Peelites. In this Government, Lord Palmerston was Home Secretary. Greville mentions that when the Queen went to Scotland in 1853, she desired that Lord Granville should be the Minister-in-Attendance, because she did not wish for the presence of the Home Secretary at Balmoral. But this feeling was not of long duration. Lord Clarendon, the new Foreign Secretary, labored diligently to change it. He told the Queen everything he could likely to make her regard Palmerston in a more favorable light, and showed her notes and memoranda by him calculated to please her. Lord Aberdeen also used his influence in the same direction. The Queen is never implacable, and always ready to recognize good service, and before the autumn was out Palmerston took his turn as Minister-in-Attendance on the Queen at Balmoral. An anecdote is told, illustrate of his continued absorption in foreign politics, although he was no Home Secretary. The Queen was much interested in some strikes and labor troubles that were taking place in the North of England, and asked Palmerston for details about them which, as Home Secretary, he might be expected to know. However, she found him absolutely without information. "One morning, after previous inquiries, she said to him, 'Pray, Lord Palmerston, have you any news?' To which he replied, 'No, Madam, I have heard nothing; but it seems certain that the Turks have crossed the Danube!'" Palmerston was at the Home Office during the outbreak of cholera in 1854. His measures against it were said to have been conceived in the spirit of treating Heaven as if it were a Foreign Power.

Palmerston really directed the foreign policy of England from the Home Office during the year which led up to the Crimean War. When the Government refused to take his view, he resigned, ostensibly because he did not like Lord John Russell's Reform Bill; really because when the Turks refused to accept the Vienna note, the majority of the Cabinet wished to leave them to their fall. Palmerston took an exactly opposite line, and urged the entry of the allied French and English fleets into the Black Sea, which really amounted to an act of war. As soon as he got his own way he rejoined the Government. As some excuse was necessary to the outer world, he had said he was not prepared to sit out debates on the Reform Bill in the House of Commons at "his time of life." Clarendon said that no one had ever before heard him acknowledge that he had a time of life.

The Queen went heartily with Palmerston in his war policy. She was convinced of the justice of the Russian War, and that it could not have been avoided. Her intense interest in its progress will be described in the coming chapter. It is sufficient here to say that her former feeling of hostility to Palmerston was very much softened by seeing the whole-hearted devotion with which he threw himself into the success of the British arms. As is well known, the events of the war made Palmerston Prime Minister. She gave him her entire confidence in that capacity. On the signing of the Treaty of Peace in April, 1856, she bestowed upon him the Order of the Garter, as a special and public token of her appreciation of his zealous and able services to his country.

There was no love lost between Palmerston and Lord John Russell. In 1857-58, there was great uneasiness in the ranks of the Whigs, lest these two should never be able to overcome their mutual hostility. Lady William Russell said of them at this time, "They have shaken hands and embraced, and hate each other more than ever." However, by degrees the stronger nature dominated the weaker, and from 1859 till 1865, when Palmerston died, Lord John may be said to have danced to Palmerston's piping.

1. Letter from the Queen to Lord John Russell, Nov. 21st, 1851.
2. If the Devil has a son,
   Sure his name is Palmerston.
3. See letter from Lord Palmerston to Lord Clarendon, vol. ii. p. 127, Ashley's "Life of Palmerston."