Henry John Temple, 3d Viscount Palmerston

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Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount (1784-1865). Prime minister. A pupil of Dugald Stewart at Edinburgh, he went on to Cambridge University. He was elected in 1807 for a pocket borough in the Isle of Wight and subsequently represented Cambridge University 1811-31, Bletchingley 1831-2, Hampshire South 1832-4, and Tiverton 1835-65.

Palmerston was perhaps the most famous foreign secretary of the 19th cent. He began his long career as a lord of Admiralty 1807-9 and then served in the relatively junior office of secretary at war from 1809 to 1828. In the Commons he largely confined himself to the necessary business of his office. He kept racehorses and was much liked by the ladies. This carefully cultivated image as a man about town however belied the industry which he brought to his office.

Palmerston became a follower of Canning, and resigned with his fellow-Can-ningites from Wellington's administration in 1828 over the question of parliamentary reform. He was not an enthusiastic reformer, however, and when he decided to join Grey's ministry, it was another example of his ability to spot the winning side. He was a somewhat reluctant supporter of Grey's Reform Bill.

Palmerston modelled his foreign policy on Canning's. He was foreign secretary from 1830 to 1841, excepting only the interlude of Peel's ‘hundred days’, and again from 1846 to 1851. His principles were to defend British political, strategic, and economic interests in Europe and overseas, to remain aloof as much as possible from long-term commitments, to mediate in European disputes to preserve peace, and to assert British power when necessary. His first great success was his settlement of the Netherlands crisis of 1830-9, when as chairman of the London conference he secured the independence of Belgium under international guarantee. This prevented the Low Countries from falling under French control. He saw France as Britain's potential enemy and was always concerned to preserve the Vienna settlement of 1815 which placed restrictions on future French expansion. Thus he also tried to prevent the Spanish and Portuguese thrones from falling under French influence. He generally supported ‘liberal’ constitutional movements in Europe, as being more likely to be friendly to Britain than absolutist regimes, but his attitude was wholly pragmatic. He opposed Russia not because of the tsar's absolutism but because of the threat to British interests in southern Europe and Asia. British trade with Turkey increased eightfold between 1830 and 1850. He was less successful in Afghanistan but he followed a policy of extending British control in north-west India.

Palmerston as foreign secretary was outstandingly successful. His popularity as ‘John Bull’ was sealed by his robust defence in 1850 of a Portuguese merchant named Don Pacifico who claimed British citizenship and who appeared to have been victimized by the Greek government. His confidence led him too far in 1851, however, when he sent congratulations to Louis Napoleon on his coup d'état in Paris without first consulting the queen or his colleagues and he was dismissed. He remained in the government as home secretary but became prime minister by popular demand when Aberdeen's ministry collapsed during the Crimean War.

Palmerston's foreign policy gave the Liberal Party a somewhat incongruous electoral appeal but in domestic affairs his attitudes were never particularly ‘liberal’. He strenuously opposed further electoral reform. In Europe, his support for ‘liberal’ movements such as Italian independence, or in the European revolutions of 1848, was always secondary to his concern for national interests which required stability in Europe.

Palmerston was tall and handsome. Nicknamed ‘Cupid’, he did not marry until he was 55, chiefly because of his attachment to Emily Lamb, wife of Lord Cowper, which began in 1813 and lasted until his death. They had at least four children out of wedlock and he also had children by other women. In 1839, two years after Cowper's death, they married and enjoyed another 25 years of ‘unfamiliar married bliss’.

1784 - 1865

British statesman, diplomat, and prime minister whose policies in the Middle East curtailed Ottoman power in the mid-nineteenth century.

Henry John Temple was born at Westminster and died at Brocket Hall, England. At the death of his father in 1802, he became third Viscount Palmer-ston at age seventeen. Palmerston entered politics in 1806 as a member of the House of Commons and served in parliament for an unbroken fifty-nine years.

During his first twenty years in Commons, he did a competent job as secretary of war but held no cabinet rank. His first cabinet appointment was in 1828, during the prime ministership of the Duke of Wellington. In his subsequent distinguished career, Lord Palmerston was foreign secretary from 1830 to 1841 and 1846 to 1852, then prime minister from 1855 to 1858 and 1859 to 1865.

In the Middle East, Palmerston pursued an aggressive policy. When Muhammad Ali, viceroy of Egypt, attempted to seize control of the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, renouncing his fealty to the Ottoman sultan, Palmerston risked war with France (1839 - 1841), which had supported the viceroy and his son, Ibrahim Pasha, as they concentrated Egyptian troops in Syria. In the end, the French failed to assist their client. Britain bombarded Beirut and Acre, landed troops there, and gave a series of graded ultimatums to Muhammad Ali, offering him greater rewards for immediate retreat. The Egyptians, harboring false expectations of French aid, hesitated too long. The London Conference of 1840 and its follow-up in 1841, inspired by Palmerston, ended by depriving Muhammad Ali of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and the Sinai desert, leaving him only the consolatory title Hereditary Viceroy of Egypt. At those conferences, all the great world powers supported Palmerston by declaring that warships, except for small vessels in diplomatic service, were barred from passing the Straits of the Bosporus and Dardanelles while the Ottoman Empire was at peace. Even France, Muhammad Ali's former ally, supported the London Conference of 1841.

In 1850 Palmerston risked losing office when he sent the navy to bombard Piraeus after the Greek government had been desultory in paying damages to a British subject whose property had been destroyed in a riot. He emerged from the crisis enjoying the confidence of the British parliament, stronger and more popular than ever.

Even before Muhammad Ali's retreat from Syria, Palmerston had succeeded in persuading the Ottomans to allow foreign consuls to be stationed in Jerusalem and to allow foreign nationals to reside permanently in the holy city - something not previously tolerated. William Tanner Young, who opened the British consulate in 1838, had full capitulatory rights, including powers of life and death to judge British subjects in Ottoman Jerusalem who were under British law.

When Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh earl of Shaftesbury, married Lady Palmerston's daughter by her first marriage, Palmerston found himself under personal pressure to back his stepson-in-law's evangelical Christianity. This chiefly meant giving strong support to English and German Protestant missions in Palestine. Jews were the largest single group at whom missionary efforts were directed, as it was illegal in Turkey to convert Muslims to Christianity. Thus, by 1847, Britain was prepared to extend consular protection to Russian and other stateless Jews whose visas had expired. For a brief period, Palmerston contemplated creating a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine, under British protection, but under Ottoman suzerainty. Even after abandoning that idea as premature, Palmerston continued to encourage Consul James Finn in Jerusalem to grant blanket protection not only to Jews without valid passports, but also to such native Ottoman subjects as Druze, Samaritans, and Armenians. He saw no contradiction between the acquisition of willing clients and the primary British goal of saving the Ottoman Empire from partition at the hands of the French or Russians. Because France had become the protector of Roman Catholics in the Middle East and Russia had become the protector of Orthodox Christians, Palmerston regarded it as merely an evening of the contest for Britain to become the protector of Palestinians who were not Catholic, Orthodox, or Muslim.

Palmerston was out of office in 1853 when Britain, France, and Russia blundered into the Crimean War. He became prime minister in 1855, in time to participate in the negotiation of the Treaty of Paris (1857), a settlement that ensured the total removal of all fortifications and warships from the Black Sea.

Throughout his career, Palmerston did everything possible to prevent France from sponsoring the construction of a canal at Suez because he feared that it would become still another source of conflict. He did not live to see the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, and he certainly could not have predicted that by 1874 Britain would control the waterway. By July 1860 Palmerston was sufficiently comfortable with Napoléon III that Britain became a party to a treaty, negotiated at Paris, permitting France to send 6,000 troops to Lebanon to end the endemic strife there between the religious sects in that Ottoman province.

Bibliography

Bell, Herbert C. F. Lord Palmerston, 2 vols. Hamden, CT: Shoestring Press, 1966.

Conwell, Brian. Regina v. Palmerston: The Correspondence betweenQueen Victoria and Her Foreign and Prime Minister, 1837 - 1865. London: Evans Brothers, 1962.

Southgate, Donald. "The Most English Minister . . .": The Policies and Politics of Palmerston. New York: St. Martin's Press; London: Macmillan, 1966.

Webster, Charles. The Foreign Policy of Palmerston, 1830 - 1841:Britain, the Liberal Movement, and the Eastern Question, 2 vols. New York: Humanities Press, 1969.

— ARNOLD BLUMBERG
UPDATED BY ERIC HOOGLUND