I
_LORD PALMERSTON_
I remember ten Prime Ministers, and I know an eleventh. Some have
passed beyond earshot of our criticism; but some remain, pale and
ineffectual ghosts of former greatness, yet still touched by that
human infirmity which prefers praise to blame. It will behove me
to walk warily when I reach the present day; but, in dealing with
figures which are already historical, one's judgments may be
comparatively untrammelled.
I trace my paternal ancestry direct to a Russell who entered the
House of Commons at the General Election of 1441, and since 1538
some of us have always sat in one or other of the two Houses of
Parliament; so I may be fairly said to have the Parliamentary tradition
in my blood. But I cannot profess to have taken any intelligent
interest in political persons or doings before I was six years
old; my retrospect, therefore, shall begin with Lord Palmerston,
whom I can recall in his last Administration, 1859-1865.
I must confess that I chiefly remember his outward characteristics--his
large, dyed, carefully brushed whiskers; his broad-shouldered figure,
which always seemed struggling to be upright; his huge and rather
distorted feet--"each foot, to describe it mathematically, was a
four-sided irregular figure"--his strong and comfortable seat on
the old white hack which carried him daily to the House of Commons.
Lord Granville described him to a nicety: "I saw him the other
night looking very well, but old, and wearing a green shade, which
he afterwards concealed. He looked like a retired old croupier
from Baden."
Having frequented the Gallery of the House of Commons, or the more
privileged seats "under the Gallery," from my days of knickerbockers,
I often heard Palmerston speak. I remember his abrupt, jerky, rather
"bow-wow"-like style, full of "hums" and "hahs"; and the sort of
good-tempered but unyielding banter with which he fobbed off an
inconvenient enquiry, or repressed the simple-minded ardour of
a Radical supporter.
Of course, a boy's attention was attracted rather by appearance and
manner than by the substance of a speech; so, for a frank estimate
of Palmerston's policy at the period which I am discussing, I turn
to Bishop Wilberforce (whom he had just refused to make Archbishop
of York).
"That wretched Pam seems to me to get worse and worse. There is
not a particle of veracity or noble feeling that I have ever been
able to trace in him. He manages the House of Commons by debauching
it, making all parties laugh at one another; the Tories at the
Liberals, by his defeating all Liberal measures; the Liberals at
the Tories, by their consciousness of getting everything that is to
be got in Church and State; and all at one another, by substituting
low ribaldry for argument, bad jokes for principle, and an openly
avowed, vainglorious, imbecile vanity as a panoply to guard himself
from the attacks of all thoughtful men."
But what I remember even more clearly than Palmers ton is appearance
or manner--perhaps because it did not end with his death--is the
estimation in which he was held by that "Sacred Circle of the
Great-Grandmotherhood" to which I myself belong.
In the first place, it was always asserted, with emphasis and even
with acrimony, that he was not a Whig. Gladstone, who did not much
like Whiggery, though he often used Whigs, laid it down that "to be
a Whig a man must be a born Whig," and I believe that the doctrine
is absolutely sound. But Palmerston was born and bred a Tory, and
from 1807 to 1830 held office in Tory Administrations. The remaining
thirty-five years of his life he spent, for the most part, in Whig
Administrations, but a Whig he was not. The one thing in the world
which he loved supremely was power, and, as long as this was secured,
he did not trouble himself much about the political complexion of
his associates. "Palmerston does not care how much dirt he eats,
so long as it is gilded dirt;" and, if gilded dirt be the right
description of office procured by flexible politics, Palmerston
ate, in his long career, an extraordinary amount of it.
Then, again, I remember that the Whigs thought Palmerston very
vulgar. The newspapers always spoke of him as an aristocrat, but
the Whigs knew better. He had been, in all senses of the word, a
man of fashion; he had won the nickname of "Cupid," and had figured,
far beyond the term of youth, in a raffish kind of smart society
which the Whigs regarded with a mixture of contempt and horror.
His bearing towards the Queen, who abhorred him--not without good
reason--was considered to be lamentably lacking in that ceremonious
respect for the Crown which the Whigs always maintained even when
they were dethroning Kings. Disraeli likened his manner to that
of "a favourite footman on easy terms with his mistress," and one
who was in official relations with him wrote: "He left on my
recollection the impression of a strong character, with an intellect
with a coarse vein in it, verging sometimes on brutality, and of a
mind little exercised on subjects of thought beyond the immediate
interests of public and private life, little cultivated, and drawing
its stores, not from reading but from experience, and long and
varied intercourse with men and women."
Having come rather late in life to the chief place in politics,
Palmerston kept it to the end. He was an indomitable fighter, and
had extraordinary health. At the opening of the Session of 1865 he
gave the customary Full-Dress Dinner, and Mr. Speaker Denison,[*]
who sat beside him, made this curious memorandum of his performance
at table: "He ate two plates of turtle soup; he was then served very
amply to cod and oyster sauce; he then took a _pâté_; afterwards
he was helped to two very greasy-looking entrées; he then despatched
a plate of roast mutton; there then appeared before him the largest,
and to my mind the hardest, slice of ham that ever figured on the
table of a nobleman, yet it disappeared just in time to answer the
enquiry of the butler, 'Snipe or pheasant, my lord?' He instantly
replied, 'Pheasant,' thus completing his ninth dish of meat at
that meal." A few weeks later the Speaker, in conversation with
Palmerston, expressed a hope that he was taking care of his health,
to which the octogenarian Premier replied: "Oh yes--indeed I am. I
very often take a cab at night, and if you have both windows open
it is almost as good as walking home." "Almost as good!" exclaimed
the valetudinarian Speaker. "A through draught and a north-east
wind! And in a hack cab! What a combination for health!"
[Footnote *: Afterwards Lord Ossington.]
Palmerston fought and won his last election in July, 1865, being
then in his eighty-first year, and he died on the 15th of October
next ensuing. On the 19th the Queen wrote as follows to the statesman
who, as Lord John Russell, had been her Prime Minister twenty years
before, and who, as Earl Russell, had been for the last six years
Foreign Secretary in Palmerston's Administration: "The Queen can
turn to no other than Lord Russell, an old and tried friend of
hers, to undertake the arduous duties of Prime Minister and to carry
on the Government."
It is sometimes said of my good friend Sir George Trevelyan that his
most responsible task in life has been to "live up to the position
of being his uncle's nephew." He has made a much better job of his
task than I have made of mine; and yet I have never been indifferent
to the fact that I was related by so close a tie to the author of
the first Reform Bill, and the chief promoter--as regards this
country--of Italian unity and freedom.