Chapter 6

PALMERSTON OUT OF OFFICE, AUGUST, 1841, TO JULY, 1846.

IN the summer of 1845 Lord Melbourne went out of office, never to come back again, and Lord Palmerston, of course, went with him, having still before him twenty-four years of active official life. Lord Melbourne was only six years his senior, but he died at Brocket Hall in 1848. Lord Melbourne and Lord Palmerston had remained together since 1827, when Lord Melbourne, as William Lamb, was Secretary for Ireland. They had been united in a peculiar manner, each trusting the other, and believing in each other, not simply as Cabinet Ministers, but as friends whose ideas in politics were the same. Though Whig statesmen, they were at heart Conservatives. They afterwards became brothers-in-law. Lord Melbourne�s name occurs again in Lord Palmerston�s letters, but it is only in reference to the late Prime Minister�s illness. Lord Palmerston was too intent on public life to allow him a moment in which to hark back upon what was past I think it is the case that a statesman generally dies out of the memory of his contemporaries very quickly. Some savour of Palmerston and Peel does remain; but almost none of Melbourne and Aberdeen. Soon there will be but little of Disraeli.

The Whigs had been in office long enough for the country, which always desires a change after a period of four or five, or perhaps seven or eight years. Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston were undoubtedly popular in the House of Commons, of which Lord John was probably a more capable leader than any who have lived during the last half century, unless it be Lord Palmerston himself. But the Ministry had become weak, and, as Lord Palmerston said, �the Tories were anxious to turn them out.� He did not add, as he might have done, that the Whigs were as anxious to turn out the Tories whenever the Tories were in. C�la va sans dire, we may say of both; nor would the Liberals and Conservatives of to-day be worthy of their name unless as much could be predicated of them. On this occasion a direct vote of want of confidence was brought, and the House was so equally divided that there was a majority of one against the Government. Then they dissolved Parliament, and in the new House the Tories had a majority of seventy-two. Upon this the Whigs, of course, retired.

On going out of office Palmerston seems to have been specially perturbed, because he was unable to sign, as one of the plenipotentiaries, the new Slave Trade commission. This was postponed till it was necessary that the signature should be given by Lord Aberdeen, who was his successor, and he attributes the delay to wilful spite on the part of Guizot, with whom, as will have been seen, he had been constantly at loggerheads. �It is very shabby of Guizot to endeavour to shirk this, in order to sign with Aberdeen a treaty which I have been hammering at this four years.� That he should have felt this may be natural; but the mention of the grievance as a thing to be complained of even to such a friend as Sir Henry Bulwer, was hardly worth his while. From the summer of 1841 to the summer of 1846 Lord Palmerston remained for five years in Opposition, and during that period we must pass over his career somewhat quickly, because he was not a man who seems to have taken upon himself the hot and eager work of turning out Administrations, unless when, as was subsequently the case, he had to stand up in the ring, and have one lusty round with his old friend, John Russell. When personally attacked, he would hit back with all his strength, but he never seems to have felt rancour afterwards, and on the occasion to which allusion has been made, he returned almost at once into amicable relations with his old friend.

He did, however, as soon as he was out of power, attack Lord Stanley, who, since he had come into office, had spoken more than once on Foreign affairs, although that department was not peculiarly his own. And at this period of his life Lord Palmerston seems to have gone back to that system of making premeditated speeches, which is the common lot of all leading politicians; though it was one which he had altogether refused to adopt during the years that he had been at the Foreign Office. Nor had he complied with it while at the War Office. Now he did make his attacks, not with venom indeed, but with some sharpness. �I must say that the noble Lord�s charge shows a great want of information on his part, as to the state of our foreign relations. It may be that the noble Lord and his colleagues have been too busily occupied in their own departments to have leisure to ransack the archives of the Foreign Office to know what passed in our time; but then, really, they who are so wholly uninformed ought not to make such positive assertions. But the noble Lord�s attack upon me and my colleagues is an instance, not only of great want of information, but also of the grossest ingratitude. So far from having left embarrassments to our successors, we have bequeathed to them facilities. Why, what have they been doing since they came into office? They have been living upon our leavings. They have been subsisting upon the broken victuals which they found upon our table. They are like a band of men who have made a forcible entrance into a dwelling, and who sit down and carouse upon the provision they found in the larder.� The accusation is one which has always been made, and always will be made, by progressive against stationary politicians. We all know the story of the Tory finding the Whig bathing and running away with his clothes. Of course the Conservative wishes to prevent the Liberal from being successful, and finds that he can best do so by carrying out the measures which the Liberal has proposed. Is there any man in England who has thought that Catholic Emancipation, Free Trade in corn, or Reform of Parliament has been dear to the normal Tory mind?

Lord Palmerston made his attack on Lord Stanley in the speech above quoted. Lord Stanley treasured up the grievance; and in years to come, when Palmerston was back at the Foreign Office, in 1850, had his revenge, by the studied accusation he made in the House of Lords in regard to Don Pacifico. But Don Pacifico and the circumstances of his eventful career were still in the womb of time.

He at once begins life as an idle man; and tells his brother of a series of visitings, which he has made. Then he goes on to his racing. His famous mare Ilione has come out, and he has won a stake of �1,700 with her at Newmarket;—against which, however, he acknowledges that John Day, the trainer, will send him a long bill. �Then came Holmes� accounts, which have necessarily fallen greatly into arrear.� Holmes was his steward. He writes a word of criticism about the present Government; �The country will understand what they are, and find out the difference between them and us. We shall have a little comparative repose, and shall be able to attend somewhat to our own affairs.�

He is still eager about the slave trade, and very busy also in abusing Guizot �The French Government have got themselves into a nice hobble about the Slave Trade Treaty. They cannot ratify without disgusting their deputies. They cannot refuse to ratify without bringing dishonour upon the Crown of France.� �All this comes from Guizot�s pitiful spite towards me for our success in the Syrian affair.� He is said to have declared of himself that during his many years at the Foreign Office, no subject was more constantly in his thoughts than the slave trade. And now, during the period of his leisure, he dinned the matter into the ears of the House of Commons. We, who are old, can remember how urgent he was, in season and out of season, respecting the African cruisers; and how, in disregard of all criticism, he �hammered away,� as he called it, so that the world should know that the slave trade had one enemy who would never yield. He never did yield; and though his service in the cause of free labour was not so palpable as that of Wilberforce and Buxton, who brought about the total abolition of slavery in the British Colonies, he did fully as much by forcing other nations into treaties, and then watching closely to see that those treaties were maintained.

In 1842, Lord Ashburton was sent to the United States with the object of establishing by treaty a boundary between them and British America; and while he was there he had also entrusted to him the duty of making some arrangement in reference to the Right of Search. We wanted to look for Africans intended for the slave market. No doubt we could not do so on board vessels belonging to nations which had not entered into treaty with us to that effect. But we claimed the right to see whether a vessel was in truth what she called herself. But the Americans would admit no Right of Search; and Palmerston roused himself into wrath on the occasion. �Ashburton�s treaty,� he writes, �is very discreditable to the negotiators who concluded it, and to the Government who sanctioned it.� �Our Foreign Affairs are getting into the most miserable state, and the country is fast falling from the position in which we had placed it. This Ashburton Treaty is a most disgraceful surrender to American bullying, for I cannot ever give Ashburton and the Government the credit of having been out-witted.� He has already stated that �Lord Ashburton has, if possible, greater interest in America than in England.� This probably was altogether incorrect. But the statement made at such a time shows the animus of the man, and the strong feeling with which he viewed anything which seemed to have a flavour of surrendering British interests.

In 1844, O�Connell was tried for conspiracy, and convicted by a Protestant jury, and was put into prison. He appealed to the House of Lords; and there, it will not perhaps be too much to say, that the matter was tried on its political, rather than on its legal bearings. There were five lords, and the three who reversed the decision of the Court below were Liberals. Palmerston continually alludes to the subject in the letters to his brother. He speaks of the trial without any violence, and almost without the expression of an opinion. When the House of Lords had decided, he wrote as follows;—�The ending of the O�Connell trial has surprised us all; but the man most surprised is Chief Justice Tindal, who, having given the opinion of the majority of the judges in the House of Lords, thought the matter settled, and set off the same night for his summer excursion. Upon arriving at Frankfort, the day before yesterday, he met Bellenden Kerr, one of our Commissioners for digesting the criminal law, who immediately made an experiment on his legal digestion by telling him of the decision of the House of Lords. Tindal could hardly believe it possible. I agree with the Times that it would only be fair by O�Connell to allow him to stay in prison a few days longer, to consider what he is to do next.� But O�Connell and the trial soon died away, and in the Session of 1846 the Maynooth grant was the subject which chiefly filled the minds of politicians. Mr. Gladstone resigned upon it, because he would not, while in office, support Sir Robert Peel�s measure. Sir Robert endeavoured to strengthen his Cabinet by various changes, as to which Lord Palmerston makes the following suggestions as to his own office;—�If he would but shift Aberdeen to any other less important office, and put to the Foreign Office some man of more spirit, energy, and sagacity, it would be a great gain for the country; but that seems now hopeless!�

Then there came the step in English politics which Sir Robert Peel took in this Session, and by taking which he has obtained a place among the half-dozen greatest statesmen whom England has produced. He determined to repeal the Corn Laws altogether. �The Minister was honestly convinced,� says Morley, in his �Life of Cobden,� �but the party was not.� How far the intention of his purpose came from the immediate necessity of his position,—how far, that is, we owed the repeal of the Corn Laws at that moment to the scarcity of food in Ireland,—or how far it was due to the actual conversion of the statesman�s mind to the truth of Adam Smith�s teaching, is, to my thinking, doubtful. There were yet five years before his death, and during those five years the conversion was completed. But the audacity with which he acted on the spur of the moment, resolving that a people must be fed even though he might have to abandon all his old political alliances, betokened a great man; and a great man he will remain as long as English history is read and understood. The political position at the moment, and that of Lord Palmerston as a person concerned, is so well described by Mr. Ashley that I will venture to quote his own words:—�The immediate cause of events, however, which came so suddenly on the political world, was a scarcity of the Irish potato crop. The population of Ireland had to be provided for; and, after two or three meetings with his Cabinet, and propositions made by him and rejected by Lord Stanley, the Prime Minister declared that he saw no satisfactory course to adopt short of the total abolition of the Corn Laws, which it had been hitherto only proposed to modify; and the Administration broke up, Lord John Russell being entrusted with the construction of a new Ministry. This task, after a short effort to fulfil it, he resigned, giving as his principal reason for not forming a Government the refusal of Lord Grey to join it.� This Lord Grey was the son of him who had refused to come back to the Government after Lord Althorp had become a peer. �If, as it was generally said, Lord Grey�s refusal was because the Foreign Office was to be placed in the hands of Lord Palmerston, this would prove that all his former colleagues were not his friends, but that he still remained more powerful than his opponents. At all events, Sir Robert, exalted by the thought that he had a high duty to perform, once more sacrificed his past life to what he believed the future of his country, or perhaps (to speak more correctly) to the exigencies of the hour; and it was this disinterested conversion of an old and experienced statesman that gave the Manchester doctrines the unquestioned authority they have exercised from that time.�

When the deed was done, the resignation of Sir Robert Peel was its only possible conclusion. Lord Stanley had already left the Ministry on the Corn Law question, and on the next important division which took place the Government was defeated by a union of the Whigs and Tories in the House of Commons. Sir Robert Peel retired, never again to return to office. Lord Palmerston sang the late Minister�s p�an in the House of Commons, and then once more returned to the Foreign Office under the leadership of Lord John Russell.