The episode is of interest in that it helps to encapsulate Palmerston’s general philosophy. He was able to combine a sense of moral indignation, which was true and deeply felt, with a practical calculation of what might also be gained from the situation. Portugal’s ability to trade and profit in the Atlantic might be circumscribed and Portugal itself, ally though she was, brought usefully to heel by Britain’s action in defence of abolitionism. More importantly, the hobbling and dismantling of the trade in slaves encouraged and promoted the principles of free trade and fair competition on the seas, an area in which Britain was supreme. Palmerston’s rhetoric and actions against the Portuguese in these years were not without risk. His position of Foreign Secretary was not unassailable and the country’s allies were not to be lightly offended but they were part of a larger picture so a risk worth taking. In his attitudes to the United States, at this time still a prominent player in the Atlantic slave trade, Palmerston was equally robust. In 1838, he remarked that ‘having declared the slave trade to be piracy both they [the British government] and the majority of the people of the United States would take all adequate measures to rescue their national flag from the stain of such a degradation’. Even though he believed that ‘the United States is, of all countries, that with which it ought to be our object to maintain, not merely peace, but the most intimate connection’ he was still keen to exercise ‘what the Americans are pleased to call an officious interference; and [trusted] that no slave will enter a British port, whether in a colony or the mother country … without being immediately set free. An American slave-owner ought to feel, that if his slave-ship enters a British port, it is to him, as far as his slave-property is concerned, as if she had foundered at sea; excepting only that he will have the consolation to think that his ship and his crew are safe, and that his slaves, instead of having perished by a miserable death, have entered, as it were, upon a new life of freedom and civilisation’. It is highly unlikely that any slave owner would have had so noble a thought.
Palmerston’s words and his approach antagonised the Americans. Yet, in spite of his desire for the closest associations with the United States, he was not afraid to irritate when he considered it necessary. British naval squadrons continued to board and check slaving ships bound for the southern United States and such actions led to periods of diplomatic tension. For the British, there was little to be lost from so doing and much to be gained. The US was a rising global force but it was not yet a military or economic rival to the United Kingdom. It did no harm to remind the Americans of the fact of British control of the seas. In addition, for the United States as for Portugal, free trade was to be encouraged and the distortions introduced by the slave trade discouraged where possible. Tensions with the Americans on this issue would end only with the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865.
These debates on Catholic Emancipation and on the slave trade underscore Palmerston’s strong belief in the principle of liberty, both of the person and of individual conscience, and they prefigure the character of the rest of his political career. They emphasise this politician’s belief, moral and political, in the essential validity and virtues of free trade and the moral wrongness of protectionism. In the chapter on Peel, the impact of these issues upon British politics has been assessed. Palmerston, as a relatively junior politician in the years that these debates were taking place, did not have a decisive role in events but he again took the opportunity to make his opinions, in this case his opposition to the protectionism of the Corn Laws and their ilk, very plain indeed. In 1832 he remarked bracingly, ‘I contend that these duties, which are absurdly called protecting duties, are, in fact, nothing but disturbing duties; that they divert capital from its most profitable employment; that they check the accumulation of wealth; that they narrow, circumscribe, and destroy the full employment of labour; and that it is for the benefit of the nation to cast away those fetters by which we are still encumbered.’ He went on to argue all that high duties ultimately achieved was an increase in the profit for smugglers and ‘a premium to the contraband trade’.
The following year in a speech in the House of Commons, Palmerston made his views even more explicit. He claimed that as a landowner and thus as an agriculturalist himself he did not believe that the protectionist system was as beneficial to ‘the welfare of the landed interest as they suppose it to be’. He denied that it was dangerous to be dependent upon foreign countries for the supply of food. His powerful argument was that ‘A great portion of the population of a manufacturing country must depend upon foreign countries for the means of subsistence; for if the foreign market be cut off, the manufacturers will be deprived of the commodities or money which they receive in exchange for the produce of their labour.’ In the same year, he said that ‘Any restriction on commerce is as injurious to the country imposing it as it is to the country against which it is imposed.’ Customs duties, he added, ought only to be there to raise a modest amount of revenue.
It is critical to remember that these were tense, strained arguments and they were part of a battle for the soul of the nation. Would Britain fully embrace the principle of free trade or would the nation cleave to the notion of protectionism, raising barriers to a flow of trade within a rapidly expanding global market? Palmerston’s own views were, once more, moulded in part by his three years steeped in the debates and discourse of the Scottish Enlightenment, where Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) had taken aim at the so-called ‘mercantilism’ that had dominated patterns of trade in the eighteenth century. Smith had deplored the notion that any government should excessively govern or direct economic activity within its jurisdiction. Such efforts were wholly unnecessary, Smith argued, and he went on to make the case for a model of free trade that would permit a free flow of exports and imports at competitive prices. ‘It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family,’ Smith wrote, ‘never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy.’ For Palmerston, this was mere common sense, made more valuable by its Scottish Enlightenment imprimatur. It is better to focus on the efficient use of capital and to be aware of the risk to employment spawned by protective tariffs and duties.
These views are the product of careful thought and economic analysis and they are by no means the rushed judgements of a rash or unscrupulous populist. The easy path has always been to argue for protectionism. The free trade position is less intuitive, less based on emotion but nevertheless more truly grounded in the principle of the common good. Palmerston had taken his studies seriously and although history does not remember him for his financial skills, unlike Peel and Gladstone, nonetheless they were a key part of his political make-up.
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Palmerston clearly relished his role as Secretary at War but in retrospect this was merely a long preamble to the greatest phases of his career. In 1828, as his tenure at the War Office ended, the tectonic plates in British party politics were shifting decisively and their movements would profoundly influence the remainder of Palmerston’s career. He had begun this career as a Tory but the debates concerning free trade and Catholic Emancipation were causing internal Tory tensions. Now Palmerston was able to follow his instincts, while still preserving his career. He moved towards the liberal wing of the Tories and, when these made common cause with the Whigs to form a government in 1830, Palmerston was, as we have seen, appointed Foreign Secretary. This was a critical, a decisive, moment in his political life. In the first place, he was leaving his Tory antecedents behind as he moved purposefully towards Liberal politics. In the second, he was embarking on a period at the Foreign Office that would come to define his career.
Palmerston remained in this position off and on, mainly on, for the next twenty years and it is fair to say that he stands as the most famous Foreign Secretary the United Kingdom has ever had. He was, for one thing, remarkably dominant. He served three Whig or Liberal Prime Ministers (Grey, Melbourne and Russell) and with the latter two he had considerable freedom to follow his chosen path
. This did not mean that there were no disagreements, sometimes quite fierce ones, within the Cabinet but Palmerston tended to have his way.
To his critics, his name is synonymous with interventionism, with vigorous and frequently hostile adventures abroad staged in order to bolster British influence and defend British interests and backed by what is sometimes misleadingly called gunboat diplomacy. Palmerston did believe in the principle of intervention when this was judged to be in the national interest. During his first stint as Foreign Secretary (1830–34), however, he made it clear that intervention in and of itself was not his main objective. Instead, he said, the preservation of peace was to be the ‘first object’ of the government. He emphasised his belief in the ‘general principle of non-intervention in the affairs of other countries’ and naturally he expected other nations to follow the same self-denying ordinances.
As part of this general desire for the preservation of peace, Palmerston was a believer in reform, in foreign as in domestic affairs. Reform brought about managed change and change staved off revolution but, as he surveyed a Europe that appeared utterly resistant to change, this the result of the Congress of Vienna of 1815 that ended the Napoleonic Wars and implemented a new European order, he noted the existence of subterranean political tensions across the Continent. His judgement was that a modicum of careful reform could prevent greater changes, the violent and explosive changes he had witnessed as a child at Paris. He worried that the stultifying oligarchies of Europe, symbolised by Metternich, the arch-conservative Austrian foreign minister and no admirer of Palmerston, did not and would not realise this.
This said, he did not believe that the possibility of future European unrest warranted large-scale British interventions. Instead, Britain must be ready for all eventualities while continuing to exert her influence in the defence of peace. ‘There is no better or more necessary security which this country can have for the continuance of peace,’ he remarked, ‘than to put its navy on a footing with that of any other country.’ He wanted, in other words, his nation to possess military strength and to be able to project it but he did not want to put forth such strength unnecessarily.
His thinking, his sage use of British power and his reluctance in general terms to become involved overtly in foreign adventures were all tested from the very first. In the revolutionary year of 1830, British influence was instrumental in the formation of a new and predominantly Catholic Belgian state, formed of breakaway southern provinces of the Netherlands. Palmerston also sealed an uneasy alliance in this year with France, Portugal and Spain to act as a counter-balance to a northern European alliance of Austria, Russia and Prussia. In the East, he lent British support to bolster the defences of the Ottoman Empire against the predations of Russia.
Tested but not found wanting, in each of these potentially dangerous arenas Palmerston’s policies were executed without the need to send British troops into unpopular conflicts in Europe. Indeed, his first spell as Foreign Secretary underscores the sense that Palmerston’s approach and his power base were underpinned by popular support in the widest possible sense of the word. Public opinion was emphatically not in favour of foreign military adventures, not at this point, with the devastation of the Napoleonic era still within the memories of many Britons. Palmerston’s genius was, first, to be mindful of this crucial fact and, second, to bring together the three classes of society who cared about foreign policy. As David Brown notes in his biography of Palmerston, quoting the Daily News, ‘There is the aristocracy who nervously want to keep their privileges; the commercial and industrious class who only ever care for avoiding shocks or any threat to their existing situation; and third, the people who are unselfish in their views and dislike oppression in foreign lands.’ Brown argues that Palmerston’s skill ensured that the views of the second and third of these groups were heard just as clearly as those of the first, in the process broadening public support for his policies to its widest possible extent.
Palmerston’s strategies did not rigidly favour non-intervention, for this was simply not the way of the world. Nor did his policies always go according to plan, a fact most clearly demonstrated in the history of Sino-British relations in the course of the 1830s and 1840s, in which his principles of non-intervention clashed with his desire to expand a network of free trade across the globe. China was at this time in a state of relative isolation. There were no Chinese diplomats in Europe and no European representation in China. Trade, however, continued. Demand for Chinese porcelain and silks was high in Europe. This was so to such an extent, indeed, that by the 1830s the Chinese enjoyed a considerable trade surplus with Britain. In addition, economic exchange with China was highly regulated. In order to keep European influence at bay, all goods flowing into China were funnelled through the southern port of Canton. This was the so-called ‘Canton System’; both it and the trade imbalance with China were sources of considerable irritation to the British authorities.
For Palmerston in particular, with his dedication to the principle of free trade, this state of affairs was vexing. In 1834, he despatched his friend the Scottish peer Lord Napier to Canton to negotiate new and more advantageous trading arrangements with the Chinese. Napier’s mission was a notable failure. He lacked the necessary depth of knowledge of the terrain and of Chinese attitudes ever to be in with a chance of success. Frustrated and angry at what he perceived as Chinese intransigence, Napier counselled a military offensive against the Chinese at Canton in order to force change. The result was at this time a military stalemate and Napier retreated to his base at nearby Portuguese Macao, where he died of typhus in October.
Napier was dead but the train of events he and Palmerston had set in motion could not now be halted. Britain was obliged to remedy, if she could, a very public diplomatic and military failure at Canton and now the scene was set for the First Opium War between Britain and China, which erupted in 1839. The British East India Company had taken to transporting Indian-grown opium into China, where it was resold to local users, thus creating a wave of opium addicts. When the Chinese authorities proposed a tax on the sale of opium, Palmerston saw his opportunity and ordered an intervention. The First Opium War proved an unqualified British success, Canton was captured and Chinese opposition was swept away. By the Treaty of Nanking, Chinese ports were opened to British goods and the strategically valuable territory of Hong Kong, close to Macau, was ceded to Britain. A Second Opium War (1856–60) would complete the mission to British satisfaction, though at the cost of inflicting considerable humiliation on the Chinese nation.
Palmerston did not see the war through to victory, for he was replaced as Foreign Secretary in the summer of 1841. Yet, this was undeniably his war, his vision and his success. It violated his general desire for non-intervention but the prize of vast new Asian markets and a balance of trade surplus was clearly worth it. In addition, he understood that the Chinese would regard British caution and hesitation as signs of weakness and therefore that it was in the national interest to act. The events in China did not mark a rupture in Palmerston’s political philosophy but rather a continuation or evolution of it. Where a certain course of action was warranted, it was a sensible move to ensure that this course of action be pursued.
Palmerston was out of office until 1846, returning as Foreign Secretary in that year just in time to observe the wave of revolutions which broke across Europe in 1848. Now the Liberal statesman can be seen in full view, Palmerston openly siding with revolutionary activists in Hungary as they sought to break the connection with Austria. From a pragmatic point of point, his succour of Hungarian nationalism made sense. Palmerston had always disliked Austrian hegemony in central Europe and Austrian weakness would advance British power and influence. However, the sight of a British Foreign Secretary cheering on foreign revolutionaries caused consternation at home and when Palmerston proposed receiving the Hungarian nationalist leader Lajos Kossuth at Broadlands, this alarming suggestion was vetoed by the Cabinet.
Shortly after
wards, Palmerston was faced with a motion of censure in the Commons. This move was spearheaded by the Irish MP Thomas Anstey, who put down a motion in the Commons requiring the ‘production of papers’, a technique still used today in the House to embarrass ministers. Anstey had form. He was a consistent and virulent critic of Palmerston, both in Parliament and outside, taking every possible opportunity to criticise the minister on all aspects of his foreign policies. On this occasion, Palmerston responded with a full defence of his thinking and an explanation of his sensible and pragmatic approach and his speech is so significant that it is worth quoting at some length:
The main charges brought against me are, that I did not involve this country in perpetual quarrels from one end of the globe to the other. There is no country that has been named, from the United States to the empire of China, with respect to which part of [Anstey’s] charge has not been, that we have refrained from taking steps that might have plunged, us into conflict with one or more of these Powers. On these occasions we have been supported by the opinion and approbation of Parliament and the public. We have endeavoured to extend the commercial relations of the country, or to place them where extension was not required, on a firmer basis, and upon a footing of greater security. Surely in that respect we have not judged amiss, nor deserved the censure of the country; on the contrary, I think we have done good service.
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