By now Peel was enormously rich. His father, the first Sir Robert, had employed 15,000 people in his mills, and Peel inherited from him 9000 acres in Warwickshire and Staffordshire and an income of £40,000 a year. He also inherited something of the mill-owners’ attitudes, opposing the Ten-Hour Bill for fear that reducing hours would damage the industry’s competitiveness. But he was second only to Shaftesbury in his sympathy for the distress of the poor. If he had not fallen over the Corn Laws, he would surely have moved with his characteristic vigour to reinforce the measures he had already undertaken to relieve the Irish famine. He would certainly not have closed the food depots as Sir Charles Trevelyan did.
All his life there remained something provincial about him, not least his slight Staffordshire accent. One snobbish observer noticed that ‘Peel can always be sure of an H when it comes at the beginning of a word, but he is by no means sure when it comes in the middle’. O’Connell was not the only one to think him a trifle overdressed, if not on the Disraeli scale: his watch and chain were a little too large. Greville records: ‘I was never so struck as yesterday by the vulgarity of Peel. In all his ways, his dress, his manner, he looks more like dapper shopkeeper than a Prime Minister. He eats voraciously and cuts creams and jellies with his knife.’ Yet Carlyle, who was hard to please, found him congenial: ‘clear, strong blue eyes which kindle on occasion, voice extremely good, low tones, something of cooing in it, rustic, affectionate, honest, mildly persuasive . . . Reserved seemingly by nature, obtrudes nothing of diplomatic reserve. On the contrary, a vein of mild fun in him, real sensibility to the ludicrous, which feature I liked best of all.’
Carlyle, like almost everyone outside the ranks of Peel’s immediate political opponents, sensed a kind of greatness in him. That greatness is hard to pin down only if we think of politics as a department of rhetoric, which was never Peel’s forte. G. M. Young’s sculptural analogy gives the clue: ‘Like an able artificer, Peel always thought with his hands’. Anyone could pick off the shelf the idea of a professional police corps; it was what Peel made of it – the unarmed, modest, civilian force – that became immortal. Its founding principles are still enshrined in the code of instructions which every recruit has to learn by heart. There was a rare creative vigour in the way he turned bare slogans, whether financial or penal, into workable, living, enduring systems. In this he was truly original, perhaps the most original minister in modern British history. Douglas Hurd expounds Peel’s achievements with lucidity, eloquence and not a little charm. Yet he never seems quite sure of how remarkable those achievements were.
Often underrated too is the strong-willed continence which runs steadily through all Peel’s foreign policy, from the settlement of the furious boundary disputes with the United States to his last speech (in which he rebuked Palmerston’s belligerence over the Don Pacifico Affair), the night before his horse threw him in Hyde Park, inflicting mortal injuries. It is easy to select damning quotations from Peel’s letters and speeches for use today, for instance on the Afghan War: ‘I fear the possibility of a terrible retribution for the most absurd and insane project that was ever undertaken in the wantonness of power.’ Peel was an early opponent of imperial overstretch, exhorting successive viceroys not to annex the Punjab. But even he and his peacenik foreign secretary Lord Aberdeen were unable to check the remorseless expansion at the furthest reaches of what Peel called ‘the overgrown empire’, for as Hurd remarks, in these years the Empire was acquired not so much in absence of mind as in absence of communications.
What strikes one in foreign as in domestic policy was the relentless modernity of Peel’s mind, his insistence on being guided by the latest facts. ‘There is nothing like a fact’ was his favourite maxim. It is in Peel’s mind and in Peel’s time that the dominant mode of British politics turns from the deductive towards the empirical. He more than any statesman of that period, perhaps of any period, clambered from one platform of understanding, to borrow Michael Oakeshott’s phrase, to the next, without regret or recrimination on his side, for he was a forgiving man and made up almost all his quarrels. The Ultras repeatedly said that few tears would be shed for his passing. They were struck dumb by the outpouring of public grief that actually occurred, unequalled at the death of any prime minister except Pitt and Churchill, and perhaps not even by them. He had led the country through no great wars, he had stood consistently for no great principle, except the duty to elevate the condition of those who had no vote, but that was enough.
LORD PALMERSTON: THE UNSTOPPABLE PAM
Under bare Ben Bulben’s head was W. B. Yeats’s chosen resting place. It was not Thomas Carlyle’s. Passing through that bleak mountain landscape beyond Sligo during the years of the Famine, he exclaimed: ‘Lord Palmerston’s country – a dingy, desolate looking country. Would we were well out of it!’ That was the last thing Palmerston could afford to wish for himself. He drew most of his income from his estates in Dublin and Sligo – £6100 out of a total of £7700. For those bleak moors were densely populated, wherever faintly habitable, by the descendants of the native Irish whom Cromwell had despatched ‘to Hell or Connaught’. Two centuries later, they were still paying stiff rents to their absentee landlord on miserable plots too small to scratch a living from. It was said that no member of Palmerston’s family had actually visited the estates until young Harry went there in September 1808 at the age of twenty-three. He was seized with a burning zest to improve the wretched lot of his tenants. He had a stone harbour built at Mullaghmore to encourage trade, planned ‘a little manufacturing village’, set up schools and fussed about their curriculum, planted bent grass to stabilize the sandy soil and Bordeaux pines too, which he recommended to O’Connell the Liberator for his seaside estate down the coast in Co. Kerry.
Above all, he was determined not to follow his more grasping neighbours in ‘squaring’ the land by amalgamating the holdings into viable units and evicting the surplus tenants. As late as 1837 – on the death of William IV when many leases fell in – Palmerston was still telling his agent that ‘I have never yet acted on so cruel a system and shall certainly not begin now . . . If any can be persuaded to emigrate voluntarily, well and good; but not a single creature shall be expelled against its will.’ Yet Palmerston’s racehorses and his mistresses and his rotten boroughs had to be paid for. By 1846, when the potato crop failed again (the acreage under potatoes in Co. Sligo had fallen from 50,000 to 3500), his estates were largely squared, and over the next year alone 2000 of his tenants had embarked for the New World, many of them, according to the emigration officers, ‘in the most abject state of poverty and destitution, with barely sufficient rags upon their person to cover their nakedness’. Palmerston’s agents claimed that the rations for the voyage had been adequate – and at least better than those issued by Lord Lansdowne’s agents. Lord Palmerston had personally intervened to send puncheons of best Jamaica rum for the emigrants and, when the clergy complained, ordered that coffee and biscuits be sent instead.
When he visited Sligo ten years later, he found a green and prosperous land, with fat cattle grazing on lush grass and his tenants, probably fatter too and certainly far fewer in number, building their own houses and paying their rents on time. Rents from his Sligo properties had increased from £4467 in 1824 to £7370 in 1857. He had no legitimate children to leave these now smiling acres to, having married Emily Cowper only after she had been widowed, when they were both in their fifties. She had been his mistress, off and on, for thirty years. The stepchildren who became successively his heirs, William Temple and then Minnie Ashley, may well have been his own children. Through Minnie, the Irish estates and the far better-known Broadlands, in Hampshire, descended to Edwina Mountbatten (née Ashley). So when Lord Mountbatten set out with his family from Mullaghmore harbour for a fishing expedition on that pleasant August morning in 1979, he was reeling in the ghosts of the past as well as the lobster pots. In his fine life of Mountbatten, Philip Ziegler says, ‘what had induced the IRA to decide that 197
9 was a suitable year in which to kill a distinguished old man and his family may never be known.’ But I don’t think it’s very hard to guess.
There have been many biographies of Palmerston – the most popular being those by Philip Guedalla and Jasper Ridley. Yet they all have a queer English bias and say little or nothing about Palmerston’s experience of Ireland, the country from which he drew his title and most of his wealth, where he first saw poverty and saw the inevitability of Catholic emancipation and became a Liberal. In this new rich, thoughtful, occasionally slow but always rewarding biography, David Brown demonstrates clearly that John Bull’s Other Island was also the other half of Palmerston. And he fills very nicely too that other lacuna in most accounts of Palmerston’s career, his spell at the Home Office in Lord Aberdeen’s coalition from 1852 to 1855. Because both Palmerston’s contemporaries and his biographers were waiting to see which way he would jump on foreign affairs, especially on the Eastern Question, they paid little attention to what he was actually doing at the office. Yet it was here that Palmerston’s domestic liberalism can best be seen in action. He introduced the Factory Act of 1853 which improved working conditions, especially for children, a Smoke Abatement Act and a Truck Act to entitle workers to cash wages rather than vouchers for the employer’s shop. He took vigorous measures to prevent cholera, against the opposition of the water companies and local councils. He even tried unsuccessfully to pass a bill confirming the rights of trade unions. I am not sure why Brown describes this record as ‘unremarkable’.
As always, Palmerston worked ferocious hours, though not as long as he had worked as foreign secretary, where he never left the office before 2 a.m. and was sometimes still there till five in the morning. He used to stand at a tall desk to stop him falling asleep. As Brown points out, ‘Palmerston has long remained an elusive character: moving politically from Tory to Whig to Liberal; from reactionary eighteenth-century throwback to enlightened harbinger of late nineteenth-century democracy; the flamboyant and apparently disreputable society beau who was in fact a near teetotal workaholic.’ By the time he reached the Home Office, he was still a Tory in his resistance to widening the franchise (indeed he briefly resigned over the question) and in his fear of public disorder, but he was very much a progressive Whig in his belief in the education and welfare of the masses. In his teens, Harry had been sent to Edinburgh to live with and study under the philosopher Dugald Stewart. Other biographers have dismissed Stewart as a rather ponderous sermonizer, but it is clear that Palmerston really did inhale Stewart’s belief in ‘an almost divine advance towards improvement’, and an equally rooted conviction that ‘a great part of the political order which we are apt to ascribe to legislative sagacity is the natural result of the selfish pursuits of individuals’. The invisible hand of the market, the natural operations of free trade – these were what delivered the goods. Palmerston never wavered in his hatred of the Corn Laws and his belief in the benefits of free trade to the poorest classes. W. L. Burn, like other earlier historians, claimed that Palmerston lacked ‘the sober, serious, conscious thoughtfulness so characteristic of the age he lived into’; ‘there was at the bottom of him a moral vacuum.’ A. J. P. Taylor declared that ‘very little has been written or ever will be about Palmerston’s place in British political life, for it is an empty one’. He owed his success to public opinion and ‘did not voice any great principle or idea’.
I think these sweeping dismissals derive from a caricature of Palmerston as his opponents liked to portray him, as a Regency roué overstaying his time, in Guedalla’s famous phrase, ‘the last candle of the eighteenth century’; or, in Disraeli’s cutting image, as the old painted pantaloon with his dyed whiskers and false teeth, ‘at best ginger beer and not champagne’, flamboyant and superficial to the last. This is certainly not how he was seen by his contemporaries when he was young. His mentors, the Mintos and the Malmesburys, thought him singularly reserved for a young man, too afraid of committing himself even in ordinary life; there was a coldness and want of effect in his public speeches: ‘he had too little spring for his age’, Lord Minto wrote to his wife. At work, he was feared and ridiculed as a stickler and a pettifogger. In 1809, he became Secretary at War – a sort of ministerial quartermaster-general – and stayed there until 1828 without a glimmer of promotion, poring deep into the night over bread and forage returns, clothing expenses and claims by generals for often nonexistent ADCs. He was less like Young Lochinvar than the bureaucrat Blackhead in A Dance to the Music of Time. His energies in this period were also taken up with finding – and keeping – a seat in the House of Commons. This was in many ways a more laborious, certainly a more expensive business under Old Corruption than it was to be in the reformed House. The going rate for a borough seat could be as much as £5000. Palmerston managed to secure Newport on the Isle of Wight for £4000 on condition that he ‘should never, even for the election, set foot in the place’ – lest he should seduce the electors from their patron. Palmerston kept the deal so faithfully that in later years he could never quite remember the name of his first seat and referred to it as Newtown. Lady Malmesbury approved of this approach. She told Palmerston: ‘At all events it is better to pay any thing, if you are to be in Parlt, than to court & canvass people for 7 years together’ – an arduous business in those constituencies where every elector expected to be personally wooed by the candidate.
Even when finally settled in Parliament and in high office, ‘Lord Pumicestone’ was deeply unpopular with almost everyone. Greville said that at the Foreign Office he was detested as ‘a bully, a blackguard and a coward’. George IV ‘hated me’, Palmerston claimed, and offered to make him first governor of Jamaica and then governor-general of India to get rid of him. Later, he had to resist several efforts to push him up to the House of Lords, in which as a mere Irish peer he had no seat. He himself admitted that in 1852 he could not go back to the Foreign Office because ‘his general unpopularity in Europe unfits him for that post’. Queen Victoria said ‘I never liked him’ and moaned that ‘if our dear Aberdeen was still at his post, the whole thing would not have happened’ (the tangled affair of the Montpensier marriage).
Between them, either Aberdeen or Palmerston was either foreign secretary or prime minister almost continuously for the whole period between 1828 and 1865, an alternation in power longer and more unbroken than that of any other duo I can think of. They had been contemporaries at Harrow School. One anecdote had it that Palmerston triumphed over Aberdeen in a pillow fight; another that Aberdeen had locked Palmerston in a darkened room without a candle until Palmerston was heard pleading ‘lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord’. No anecdote claimed that they had ever been friends.
In the public mind, and in their own, they stood for dramatically opposite styles in foreign policy: conciliation versus deterrence, appeasement versus bluster. The one thing they had in common was that they were both surprisingly poor speakers, hesitant and often rambling. Disraeli claimed that Palmerston’s ‘false teeth would fall out of his mouth if he did not hesitate and halt so in his talk’. Palmerston described Aberdeen as ‘a good natured, easy tempered, apathetic and yielding man’ and so soft on the French that he behaved like ‘Under Secretary of State to Guizot’. Aberdeen supported Palmerston when he felt he ought to. Yet he could not disguise that he thought him incorrigibly reckless and could not abide the way Pam played to the crowd. When Palmerston urged that, for popular as well as strategic reasons, the British navy should be sent immediately to obstruct Russian forces, Aberdeen replied that in ‘a case of this kind, I dread popular support’.
Palmerston was an indefatigable manipulator of the press. According to Cobden, he had ‘made greater use of that means of creating an artificial public opinion than any minister since the time of Bolingbroke’. He would feed exclusive titbits to favoured editors in return for their support, and get them to insert pro-government articles, though he was well aware that they might publish a completely opposite piece tomorrow:
‘though editors look to government for news, they look to their readers for money and they never can resist flying out upon popular topics’. In September 1846, he not only suggested to Lord John Russell that he send a few ships off the coast of Spain to restrain the French but added that ‘it would do no harm at the Tuileries if any orders about fitting out our line of battle ships could be given in our dockyards, and mentioned in the newspapers, even if no active or real steps were taken to carry them into effect’. Even Alastair Campbell might have hesitated to go that far. It was certainly not the sort of spin that dear Lord Aberdeen would have countenanced.
Yet Brown’s judicious treatment leaves us wondering how much difference in practice there was between their approaches to foreign policy. Aberdeen himself told the House of Commons in December 1852 that ‘the truth is that for the last 30 years the principles of the foreign policy of this country have never varied’ (admittedly he was trying to hold his fragile newborn coalition together at the time). Gladstone, always the peacenik in any cabinet of the period, testified that Palmerston and Aberdeen differed only in the sense that they represented ‘distinct forms of the same principles connected with different habits and temperaments’. It is plausible to claim, I think, that there was an underlying consensus in British foreign policy throughout the Palmerston–Aberdeen years which kept the peace with great success until the Crimean War. The anti-appeasement camp claimed that this war too might have been deterred by an earlier show of force, but as with all such claims this is as unprovable as it is doubtful. Palmerston himself claimed that his overriding aim was ‘not to bring on war, but to prevent war’.
English Voices Page 33
