PALMERSTON AS FOREIGN SECRETARY TILL HIS DISMISSAL, IN 1851.
LORD PALMERSTON achieved his triumph in 1850, and encountered his disgrace, if it is to be so considered, in 1851. There was but the one year and a few months before his foes were too many for him. In describing this second battle, I shall endeavour to tell the story as though the blow had come from Lord John Russell, the head of the Cabinet, with such aid and counsel as may have been given to him by others of his own class. Of the action of the Court, as told to us in detail by Sir Theodore Martin, I have spoken in the first chapter, and it will be more convenient if I go on with Lord Palmerston’s career without much further allusion to it. He himself believed that he had been the victim of a foreign conspiracy, aided by those Englishmen who agreed that its purpose was good. In September, 1850, he thus wrote to his brother,—after the affair of Don Pacifico; “I have beaten and put down and silenced, at least for a time, one of the most widespread and malignant and active confederacies that ever conspired against one man without crushing him; but I was in the right, and I was able to fight my battle.” “The death of Louis Philippe delivers me from my most artful and inveterate enemy, whose position gave him in many ways the power to injure{130} me.” The readers of to-day will dislike the use of the word conspiracy, and will think that the powers brought to bear against the Foreign Secretary were no more than those of fair political opposition. And it will probably be thought that Lord Palmerston was becoming too powerful in foreign affairs,—or was wont to express himself too loudly,—as has since come to be the case with another great arranger of European strategy in another country. It was so. It is not within the compass of a man’s nature to stretch his voice afar and yet to control the power of his own hand. Looking back, we can understand that Palmerston should have fallen; but we all feel that had he not risen to higher place because of his fall, England would have lost much by his falling.
In the autumn of 1850 General Haynau came to London, and, among other sights, visited Barclay & Perkins’ brewery. According to English ideas he had shown himself to be a brute during the Hungarian war; and very brutally was he treated by the draymen. His name should not be mentioned here but that all England was in a momentary ferment because of what had been done. It was generally thought that he had been maltreated, and that, as he had not ill-used Englishmen or English women, we should have contented ourselves with simply ignoring him when he trusted himself to our hospitality. Palmerston’s judgment as to what had been done was lenient. “The draymen were wrong in the particular course they adopted. Instead of striking him, which, however, by Koller’s account, they did not do much, they ought to have tossed him in a blanket, rolled him in the kennel, and then sent him home in a cab, paying his fare to the hotel.”
In his sixty-seventh year (January, 1851) he wrote to{131} his brother from Broadlands. Speaking of the Christmas just past, he says; “I took a fling, and went out several days hunting and shooting in the fine of the early day, coming home, of course, for work earlier than if I had been only a sportsman.” Let gentlemen of sixty-seven who habitually go out hunting and shooting,—for I am aware that there are Englishmen of the age who do so,—bethink themselves of the manner in which they pass the remainder of the day after they have come home. Are they tired, and do they sleep, or sit over their tea? Do they congratulate themselves that at sixty-seven they have been still able to perform so well many of the feats of their youth? I think I may say that they, none of them, betake themselves to the hard thoughtful work of their lives; and that, if such work still falls to their lot, it has to be done before they go out hunting or shooting.
He, however, takes his share in all matters of interest. He knows what is doing as to fortifications, and takes a strong interest in the subject. He writes to the Chancellor of the Exchequer; “Could you but take a sum, however small, to make a beginning, for similar defences at Plymouth?” He is very eager as to some system of volunteering. “Every other country that deserves to be called a power has this kind of reserved force.” Then comes the great Exhibition of 1851,—the first of those marvellous palaces of industry which have since been studded thick over the world’s surface. He is writing to Lord Normanby, and is speaking of the multitude. “The Queen, her husband, her eldest son and daughter, gave themselves in full confidence to this multitude, with no other guard than one of honour and the accustomed supply of stick-handed constables.” And the Papacy has to be put down. “Our Papal Aggression Bill will{132} be carried in spite of the opposition of the Irish members who are driven on by the influence of the priests over the Irish electors.” As to this bill, however, I do not know that we are now inclined to take much pride to ourselves. Then Mr. Gladstone’s Neapolitan letters were written, and so moved Naples, through England, that the Neapolitan prisons were at last opened. On this subject he tells an excellent story. “Walewski told Milnes the other day, as a proof of the goodness of heart of the King of Naples, that at his, Walewski’s request, the King had at one time promised to set free three hundred prisoners against whom no charge or no proof had been established. ‘How grateful,’ said Milnes, ‘these men must have been! Did they not come and thank you for their release?’ ‘Why,’ said Walewski, ‘you see, after the King had made the promise, the Chief of Police came to him, and said that if the men were set free he could not answer for the King’s life. And so, you see, the men were not set free.’”
In November, 1851, we come to the cause of his fall,—which cause was in truth Napoleon’s Coup d’Etat. The feeling in England, when the Coup d’Etat was first made known, was very averse to it. There was a belief that Napoleon had been guilty of falsehood and treachery. Mr. Kinglake, in his great work on the invasion of the Crimea, translates the words which Napoleon had used on the 13th of November, 1850—“The noblest object, and the most worthy of an exalted mind, is not to seek when in power how to perpetuate it, but to labour incessantly to fortify, for the benefit of all, those principles of authority and morality which defy the passions of mankind and the instability of laws.” About a year after he had uttered this philanthropic but sententious{133} idea he had filched the Empire. Englishmen did not like that; and though they were gradually won by the fealty of the Emperor to his English alliance so as to endure him, the stain of the falsehood still stuck to him through his twenty years of governing. Such we think has been the English feeling.
Such was not the feeling of Lord Palmerston, who knew more as to the state of Europe than any other Englishman, and was more keenly alive to the immediate needs of both France and England. He writes to Lord Normanby; “There is no other person at present competent to be at the head of affairs in France; and if Louis Napoleon should end by founding a dynasty, I do not see that we need regret it as far as English interests are concerned.” “At all events, I say of Louis Napoleon, laudo manentem.” But it was known that there had been private friendship between the two men while Louis Napoleon was living in England, and also that there had been a strong aversion on the part of Palmerston to the whole family of Bourbons. The Bourbons had during the entire period of his career, both before and after the coming of the Citizen King, ruled after that mysterious and crafty fashion which had produced at last the Spanish marriages. Palmerston no doubt desired something better than craft and mystery. The Bourbons had been expelled by the Revolution; but the Republic, as established with Louis Napoleon as its President, had not acted with much wisdom. To Palmerston’s thinking something more nearly akin to the established rule of a dynasty was necessary for France,—and for England also if it was to remain in alliance with France,—than the wild and uninstructed enthusiasm of the Assembly. He did believe in Louis Napoleon, and continued no doubt to{134} believe to the end of his life, justified, as he thought, by the French Emperor’s early successes, and also by his friendship for England. He had left the world of politics before Napoleon had spun all his thread and run his reel out to the end. To me who write this, even the memory of the Emperor is distasteful. But the fall that was about to come upon Palmerston may have been in part due to his feeling for a man who stood higher in his estimation than in that of his countrymen. Years afterwards, in 1858, he had to retire with his Government, of which he was then the head, for a reason which was partly similar. We shall come to that before long; but it afforded another proof of the general tone of his mind towards Louis Napoleon.
Lord Normanby was our Ambassador in Paris; and from some cause, of which I know nothing, entertained different feelings. It may probably be that he, as an honest man, disliked the dishonesty of the President. There was a variance between him and Palmerston, and that too no doubt had its effect upon the coming circumstances. And it must be remembered that Lord Palmerston was already labouring under a sense of the disapprobation of his superior officers in that he would not submit his despatches in time for such surveillance as it was thought that they should receive. He had then against him at this moment the Prime Minister and his own Ambassador in Paris, who had been a Cabinet Minister, and the Court influence, and he had the feeling that he himself was on too friendly terms with the man who had achieved the Coup d’Etat by not the fairest means that ever were used in politics, and not by the cleanest instruments.
On the other hand, it must be borne in mind that{135} Palmerston knew himself as few men do, and his own sagacity, and his general popularity in the country. His object was so to administer foreign affairs as might best redound to the honour of his country, and he was aware that there was no man in England who could teach him a lesson in that respect. As to his despatches, it was to him quite impracticable to encounter the required delay. There was an order to that effect, and other orders came. He, however, if he remained Foreign Secretary, must do so after his own fashion. But there arose at this moment another source of displeasure against him, which, joined to his disobedience as to the despatches, caused his dismissal.[H] Lord Palmerston had expressed to M. Walewski, who was then the Ambassador from France in London, his approbation of the Coup d’Etat. This assent had been given somewhat in an off-hand manner, so as not to have bound him absolutely to the words which he had used. He alleged that it was so. Count Walewski of course sent home to the new Empe............