the advanced Liberals, forming a connecting link between the aristocratic Whig leaders and the irresponsible and often violent politicians of the great towns. His opposition to those members of his party who in 1825 were prepared for compromise on the question of Catholic emancipation led to his first conflict with Brougham, with whom he had been on terms of close friendship. While supporting the candidature of his brother-in-law, Lord Howick, for Northumberland in the elections of 1826, Lambton fought a duel with T. W. Beaumont, the Tory candidate, but without bloodshed on either side. Unlike his father-in-law, Lambton supported the ministry of Canning, though he had some grounds for personal grievance against the new prime minister, and after Canning’s death that of Lord Goderich. On the advice of the latter Lambton was raised to the peerage in 1828 with the title of Baron Durham. Owing to his Liberal principles Lord Durham was on terms of friendship with the duke of Sussex, and also with Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who sought his advice in the difficult crisis in 1829 when he was offered the throne of Greece, and who, after he became king of the Belgians as Leopold I., continued to correspond with Durham as a trusted confidant; the same confidential relations also existed between Durham and Leopold’s sister, the duchess of Kent, and her daughter, afterwards Queen Victoria.
In November 1830 when Grey became prime minister in succession to the duke of Wellington, Lord Durham entered the cabinet as lord privy seal. Parliamentary reform was in the forefront of the new government’s policy, and with this question no statesman except Lord Grey himself was more closely indentified than Durham. To ardent reformers in the country the presence in the cabinet of “Radical Jack,” the name by which Lambton had been popularly known in the north of England, was a pledge that thorough-going reform would not be shirked by the Whigs, now in office for the first time for twenty years. And it was to his son-in-law that Lord Grey confided the task of preparing a scheme to serve as the basis of the proposed legislation. Full justice has not generally been done to the leading part played by Lord Durham in preparing the great Reform Act. He was the chief author of the proposals which, after being defeated in 1831, became law with little alteration in 1832. He was chairman of the famous committee of four, which met at his house in Cleveland Row and drew up the scheme submitted by the government to parliament. His colleagues, who were appointed rather as his assistants than as his equals, were Lord John Russell, Sir James Graham and Lord Duncannon; and it was Durham who selected Lord John Russell, not then in the cabinet, to introduce the bill in the House of Commons; a selection that was hotly opposed by Brougham, whose later vindictive animosity against Durham is to be traced to his having been passed over in the selection of the committee of four. Durham was present with Grey at an audience of the king which led to the sudden dissolution of parliament in March 1831; and when the deadlock between the two Houses occurred over the second Reform Bill, he was the most eager in pressing on the prime minister the necessity for a creation of peers to overcome the resistance of the house of Lords.
After the passing of the Reform Act, Durham, whose health was bad and who had suffered the loss of two of his children, accepted a special and difficult diplomatic mission to Russia, which he carried out with much tact and ability, though without accomplishing its main purpose. On his return he resigned office in March 1833, ostensibly for reasons of health, but in reality owing to his disagreement with the government’s Irish policy as conducted by Lord Stanley; in the same month he was created earl of Durham and Viscount Lambton. His advanced opinions, in the assertion of which he was too little disposed to consider the convictions of others, gradually alienated the more moderate of his late colleagues, such as Melbourne and Palmerston, and even Lord Grey often found his son-in-law intractable and self-assertive; but the growing hostility of the treacherous Brougham was mainly due to Durham’s undoubted popularity in the country, where he was regarded by many, including J. S. Mill, as Grey’s probable successor in the leadership of the Liberal party. Durham was at this time courted by the youthful Disraeli, who, when Melbourne became prime minister in succession to Grey in 1834, declared that the Whigs could not exist as a party without Lord Durham. Brougham’s animosity became undisguised at the great banquet given to Lord Grey at Edinburgh in September 1834, where he made a venomous attack on Durham, repeated shortly afterwards at Salisbury, and anonymously in the Edinburgh Review. On the other hand the strength of Durham’s position in the country was shown on the occasion of his visit to Glasgow in October to receive the freedom of the city, when a concourse of more than a hundred thousand persons assembled to hear him speak at Glasgow Green, and where he replied to Brougham’s attacks at a great banquet held in his honour. Brougham had over-reached himself; and although Durham was no favourite with William IV., the king’s disgust with the lord chancellor was one of the principal reasons for his summary dismissal of the Whig ministry in 1834. When Melbourne returned to power after Peel’s short administration, Durham’s radicalism and impatient temper excluded him from the cabinet; and again in 1837, on his return from an appointment as ambassador extraordinary in St Petersburg (1835–1837), when there was some idea of his joining the ministry, Lord John Russell wrote: “Everybody, after the experience we have had, must doubt whether there can be peace or harmony in a cabinet of which Lord Durham is a member.”
In July 1837 he resisted the entreaty of Lord Melbourne that he should undertake the government of Canada, where the condition of affairs had become alarming; but a few months later, giving way to the urgent insistence of the prime minister who promised him “the firmest and most unflinching support” of the government, he accepted the post of governor-general and lord high commissioner, with the almost dictatorial powers conferred on him by an act passed in February 1838, by which the constitution of Lower Canada was suspended for two years. Having secured the services of Charles Buller (q.v.) as first secretary, and having with more doubtful wisdom appointed Thomas Turton and Edward Gibbon Wakefield (q.v.) to be his unofficial assistants, Durham arrived at Quebec on the 28th of May 1838. Papineau’s rebellion had been quelled, but the French Canadians were sullen, the attitude of the United States equivocal, and the general situation dangerous, especially in the Lower Province where government was practically in abeyance. Durham at once issued a conciliatory proclamation. His next step was to dismiss the executive council of his predecessor and to appoint a new one consisting of men uncommitted to any existing faction, a step much criticized at home but generally commended on the spot. On the 28th of June, the day of Queen Victoria’s coronation, he issued a proclamation of amnesty, from the benefit of which eight persons only of those who had taken part in the rebellion were excepted; while an accompanying ordinance provided for the transference of these eight excepted persons from Montreal to Bermuda, where they were to be imprisoned without trial. Papineau and fifteen other fugitives were forbidden on pain of death to return to Canada. In a letter of congratulation to the queen, Durham took credit for the clemency of his policy towards the rebels, and it was defended on the same ground by Charles Buller and by public opinion in the colony.
In England, however, as soon as these proceedings became known, Brougham seized the opportunity for venting his malice against both Durham and the ministry. He had already raised objections to the appointment of Turton and Wakefield; he now attacked the ordinance in the House of Lords, challenging the legality of the clause transporting prisoners to Bermuda, where Durham had no jurisdiction. Melbourne and his colleagues, with the honourable exception of Lord John Russell, made little effort to defend the public servant to whom they had promised “the most unflinching support”; and, although both the prime minister and the colonial secretary when first fully informed of the governor-general’s proceedings had hastened to assure him of their “entire approval,” three weeks later, cowed by Brougham’s
