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 pæan in the House of
Commons, and then once more returned to the Foreign Office under the
leadership of Lord John Russell.