by Gillian Gill
While competing actively on the hunting field and in the bedroom, Palmerston was emphatically not the average aristocratic ministerial drone. He had strength and vitality as well as intelligence, and he more than earned his salary at the War Office. He mastered the minutiae of bud gets, was tough on his staff, learned the ways of bureaucracy, and became comfortable making speeches in the House. Powerful English men welcomed Palmerston into their gun rooms and their councils. Powerful women opened their salons and their boudoirs to him because he was amusing and discreet. When finally the political gods brought the Whigs back to office, Palmerston had turned Whig without changing any of his political ideas, and he was the obvious choice for foreign secretary. In the first years of Victoria’s reign, he played the part of wise old uncle to perfection, and the Queen was enchanted by the nonchalant ease with which her foreign secretary handled foreign rulers, including her uncle Leopold.
But then the Queen decided to marry, and Palmerston’s luck turned. Aging roués with more debt than income were precisely the kind of men Prince Albert made it clear at the outset he intended to banish from his wife’s society. Palmerston’s chances of surviving the new Albertian regime hit bottom around the time of the royal engagement in October 1839. Late one night, screams echoed through the notoriously disorienting corridors of Windsor Castle. They came from the room currently occupied by Mrs. Brand (later Lady Dacre), one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Expecting, apparently, to renew acquaintance with an old flame, Lord Palmerston had blundered into Mrs. Brand’s room. Even when apprised of his mistake, he persisted in his amorous pursuit. Mrs. Brand resisted, managed to summon help in time, and Lord Palmerston wandered back to his own room.
An attempted rape hardly redounded to the credit of England’s foreign secretary, especially since it occurred just before Lord Palmerston’s long-awaited marriage to the widowed Lady Emily Cowper in December 1839. The new Lady Palmerston cannot have been pleased by her husband’s exploit, but she apparently took it in stride. Emily was a woman of the world, the daughter of one of the eighteenth century’s great aristocratic courtesans. Back in 1810, when Emily was young and close to the prince regent in more ways than one, Lord Palmerston’s attempt to renew some old Windsor liaison would have made no stir, and the virtuous Mrs. Brands of the world knew better than to take a position at court. Now, of course, things were different, and morality was the watchword at Windsor. Lady Palmerston would need to take her husband firmly in hand and explain to him that if he wanted a future in politics, he had to keep his legendary libido in check.
When the newly married Prince Albert got word of the Brand affair, he was furious. It confirmed all his views on the immorality of the English ruling class, and he declared himself shocked that the sanctity of his own marriage had been defiled. Albert then pragmatically filed away the report of the incident as possible ammunition against Palmerston in the future, and in the meantime kept up a semblance of courtesy with the popular and powerful foreign secretary. The house of Coburg owed Palmerston a debt, since he had been instrumental in securing the throne of the new kingdom of Belgium for Uncle Leopold. Palmerston was also amusing and well informed, and in the long, tedious palace evenings in the year after his marriage, the prince enjoyed discussing European affairs with the foreign secretary. Albert was gratified when his line of argument seemed to win, failing to realize that Palmerston had lived at court for far too long to fall out with Her Majesty’s husband over the port. But when Palmerston was swept out of office in late 1841 with the rest of the Melbourne government, the prince breathed a sigh of relief. That pigheaded old man and his disreputable wife would now wander in the political desert and could safely be barred from court.
But the Palmerstons were experienced fighters and were far from ready to surrender the field. Whereas Emily’s elder brother Lord Melbourne faded into invalidism and irrelevancy once he left office in 1841, Palmerston remained a powerful and active force in opposition. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert as bride and groom had found it unseemly that people in their fifties like Lady Cowper and Lord Palmerston should marry, especially since their wedding tended to confirm the old gossip about their long-term liaison. What they in their youthful arrogance failed to understand was that the Cowper-Palmerston marriage was an inspired political alliance as well as a stab at personal happiness. Harry and Emily were supremely well matched. As the husband of a beautiful, charming, intelligent, rich woman whose friends were the best people in society, Palmerston at last had the money, the social setting, and the personal security he needed to get to the very top of British politics. Lady Palmerston made her husband happy, as he did her, and she was a political power in her own right. In the last and most successful decades of Palmerston’s life, she was his best adviser and most trusted amanuensis. Theirs was one of the great marriages of the century.
Confident that, sooner or later, the political dice would roll again, Palmerston had fun during his years in the political wilderness from 1841 to 1846. With Emily’s money he could at last afford to sit back and relax, indulge his passion for hunting, launch some much-needed improvements to his Irish estates, entertain his friends at Broadlands, and grow into the new role of stepfather and grandfather to the enchanting Cowper clan. With ample spare time, he could think long term, read eclectically travel through his beloved France, keep up his vast correspondence at home and abroad, write for the newspapers, speak out in the Commons, and consolidate his position in the party. When the protectionist wing of the Tory Party colluded with the radicals to bring down the Peel government, and the Whigs under Lord John Russell were returned to office, Lord Palmerston went back to the foreign office. He quickly came under sniper fire from the newly confident and assertive Prince Albert.
IF THE PRINCE and the foreign secretary differed fundamentally in their personal values, they clashed in cabinet and memorandum over political ideology and diplomatic strategy. The foreign policy that Lord Palmerston developed during his terms as foreign secretary (1830–1834, 1835–1841, and 1846–1851) was sly but neither complex nor mysterious. What mattered to England was all that mattered to Palmerston, since he had no doubt that England was the greatest nation in the world and deserved to be. His job as foreign secretary was to promote the interests of the country and protect individual British citizens abroad. If this meant an alliance with France against Russia today, and with Russia against France tomorrow, so be it.
Palmerston was loyal to the Crown and personally devoted to Queen Victoria, but he had little use for foreign monarchs. Whether tyrants or weaklings, he saw them as corrupt and inadequate, and he did not care if they hated him. Palmerston was keen to spread English values and institutions to the world, and, as long as there was no risk of harming England’s interests, he was ready to tweak the tails of foreign autocrats. He sent money and guns in secret to the Risorgimento (the Italian liberation movement), offered encouragement to democratic elements in Spain and Portugal, welcomed the exiled Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth to his house, and condoned the attack launched by outraged British brewery workers on a notoriously brutal Austrian general. England under Palmerston became the chosen place of refuge for revolutionaries and political extremists from all over Europe, including an obscure German political theorist named Karl Marx.
If Palmerston had a bête noire, it was Russia. In his very first foreign policy speech in the Commons in 1828, Palmerston fulminated about the threat Russia posed to Britain’s safety and British values. He evolved the theory that Russia and Great Britain were engaged in a “Great Game” for control of the Balkans, the Levant, and the trade routes to India. He was personally repelled by Tsar Nicholas II. He considered him a tyrant who for personal gain kept his nation in the dark ages and prevented it from enjoying the rights and opportunities of a free society. As foreign secretary in the 1830s, Palmerston adopted a fiercely anti-Russian policy and wrote or commissioned articles in the popular press that inflamed British opinion against Russia. The tsar, who took an even more
personal view of foreign affairs than Queen Victoria, knew that he had an implacable enemy in Lord Palmerston.
The one movement for national unification and democratic reform in Europe that Palmerston seemed to have no time for was in Germany. The neglect was more apparent than real and obeyed both the first and second rules of Palmerstonian diplomacy: defend British interests, spread English values. Certainly his lordship agreed that the German people, like any other, had the right to choose its own political future, that the fragmentation of Germany was a barrier to economic progress, and that Austrian hegemony was inimical to German prosperity. But Palmerston feared that a new, unified Germany at the heart of Europe would alter the balance of power and threaten English interests as a free Hungary or a republican Spain could not. The Kingdom of Prussia was aiming to be the kernel around which the new Germany would form, and Prussia was openly hostile to Britain and its constitutional form of government. Prussia was a repressive, militaristic society ruled by a medievally minded king and a tiny, ultraconservative camarilla. The Prussians saw Russia as their governmental ideal and chief ally. Palmerston did not like the Prussians.
And so the foreign secretary acted vague whenever the topic of German unification came up in cabinet, as it did not infrequently, given the Crown’s pronounced pro-German sympathies. In general, Palmerston was hostile to autocratic Austria, but he tacitly supported its efforts to keep Germany a weak and divided Austrian satellite. In view of the consistently violent aggression of the German Empire between 1860 and 1918, Palmerston’s prescience is remarkable. Palmerston could be stubborn and impulsive. Given that he often was dealing with China and Greece on the same day, he made mistakes. But on certain key issues, like Germany, he saw things clearly, as the prince did not.
Lord Palmerston’s liberal interventionism and contempt for diplomatic niceties made him a hated man in the courts of Europe but raised his profile at home. Reports that the tsar of Russia went into apoplexy at the mere mention of Lord Palmerston’s name; that Palmerston had no use for the French, as they were always up to something sneaky; that he routinely kept foreign ambassadors kicking their heels in his waiting room—all this did Palmerston no harm in English political circles. A tall, heavily built, balding sexagenarian who could still stand for hours at his lectern-desk, reading dispatches late into the night after a long day out with the guns in the pouring rain, Palmerston, like Winston Churchill in the mid-twentieth century, seemed the incarnation of John Bull, the English equivalent to Uncle Sam.
Prince Albert, and Queen Victoria under her husband’s tutelage, hated Lord Palmerston. They referred to him derisively in their private German correspondence as “Pilgerstein.” The Queen and the prince cared deeply when their royal foreign brothers and sisters wrote to complain about the British foreign secretary. With her plain speaking and her devotion to country Victoria in many ways resembled Palmerston, but she reflexively identified British national interest with her own as queen. She sympathized with the problems of other sovereigns and liked to give them the benefit of the doubt, especially perhaps when they were manifestly out of their depth. When Palmerston badgered the queens of Spain and Portugal, Victoria flared up.
Prince Albert had a more complicated response to what he regarded as the foreign secretary’s lack of principle and sins of protocol. If Sir Robert Peel came close to making an English statesman out of Prince Albert, Lord Palmerston brought out the “true German, Coburger, and Gothaner” in him. On the one hand, the prince assumed a lofty and philosophic view. High principle and clearly enunciated goals were, Albert believed, essential in diplomacy. Hence he condemned Palmerston’s foreign policy as unclear, wavering, and immoral. But fundamentally Prince Albert’s response to the foreign secretary was visceral, just as it had been with Baroness Lehzen. Palmerston was distasteful to the prince, and he also blocked the prince’s path. He was ipso facto an obstinate and disrespectful servant to the Crown and deserved to be dismissed. Such servants did not last a week in Berlin or even Lisbon.
Albert was convinced that the survival of the Saxe-Coburg dynasty in Britain depended on other kings and queens abroad retaining their thrones. That most of those monarchs—like Victoria herself—were of German origin was to the point, since Prince Albert was as ardent a Germanophile as Palmerston was an Anglophile. Albert had been fed from infancy on the Coburg legend and on the glorious history of the German Holy Roman Empire. Thus when Lord Palmerston seemed to favor the republican factions in Portugal, Albert ignored the manifold tribulations of the oppressed Portuguese people and leaped to the defense of his first cousin King Ferdinand. When Austria brutally crushed the forces of the king of Sardinia, setting back the cause of Italian unification by decades, Prince Albert was jubilant and sent a letter of personal congratulation to the Austrian emperor. While giving lip service to constitutional restraints and political reform, he found reasons to explain why the Austrian emperor reneged on all his promises of internal democratic reform once he had the army at his back again. That the Mensdorffs, Albert’s favorite uncle and cousins, were high officials in the Austrian army and diplomatic service reinforced Prince Albert’s pro-Austria tendencies and facilitated his seductively intimate communication with the Austrian imperial family.
Prince Albert claimed to have political principles, but, in fact, he veiled monarchical self-interest and Coburg dynastic ambition in lofty rhetoric. In principle, Albert was the champion of the small, independent kingdom, especially if the ruler of that kingdom was his distant cousin Otto in Greece. But Albert’s overriding international mission was the reunification of Germany under Prussia, so he did not come to the defense of little Denmark when Prussia made moves to swallow up the Danish duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. And when the Germans met in an ill-fated parliament to debate how best to unify the country, the dynastic Albert was horrified at the suggestion that smaller states like Coburg and Gotha might lose their independence in a new Germany. That would mean that he himself would lose his revenues and privileges as Prince of Coburg and that his son Alfred would lose the succession to his brother Ernest’s throne. Albert was ready to fight with old Stockmar as well as with his wife’s brother Charles Leiningen, who had surprisingly changed into a radical democrat, to maintain the independent sovereignty of tiny Coburg.
IF THE FIGHT FOR foreign policy supremacy between the foreign office and the Crown was rooted in ideology, it was waged mainly on procedural grounds. Her Majesty complained over and again to Lord Palmerston about his failure to observe the established protocol in his diplomatic correspondence. The following note is typical. “Osborne, 20th August 1848. The Queen has received an autograph letter from the Archduke John (in answer to the private letter she had written to him through Lord Cowley) which had been cut open at the Foreign Office. The Queen wishes Lord Palmerston to take care that this does not happen again. The opening of official letters even, addressed to the Queen, which she has of late observed, is really not becoming, and ought to be discontinued, as it used never to be the case formerly.”
When Lord Palmerston failed to comply with Her Majesty’s requests, the Queen and the prince took the prime minister, Lord John Russell, to task for his failure to assert his own statutory right to direct foreign affairs and keep his foreign secretary in line. Lord John was intelligent, principled, and ambitious, but he was also a ditherer who deferred to his wife at home and to his foreign secretary in cabinet. The prime minister was well aware that Palmerston had strong support in parliament and was the most popular politician in England. Russell had important measures that he wanted to get through parliament, notably a new Reform Bill to widen the franchise. Without Palmerston, the Russell ministry was doomed, and so for several years Lord John bobbed and weaved in a vain attempt to keep his Queen and his colleagues happy.
Dissatisfied by the prime minister’s evasions, the royal couple summoned Lord John for grueling personal interviews as if he were an errant schoolboy. The Queen and the prince pointed out, quite accurately, that Lord
Palmerston was conducting key aspects of foreign policy without consulting the Crown, and they repeatedly asked for his dismissal. The Crown’s displeasure with Lord Palmerston and efforts to get rid of him are well captured by the long memorandum signed “Victoria R” of September 19, 1848, that records the Queen’s conversation with her prime minister at Balmoral. It begins: “I said to Lord John Russell, that I must mention to him a subject, which is a serious one … namely about Lord Palmerston; that I really felt I could hardly go on with him, that I had no confidence in him, and that it made me seriously anxious and uneasy for the welfare of the country and for the peace of Europe in general.”
In an all-out attempt to get Palmerston dismissed, in July 1850 the prince dug up the old issue of Palmerston’s attempted rape of Mrs. Brand ten years earlier. According to the memorandum Prince Albert composed after his private meeting with Russell: “How could the Queen consent to take a man as her chief advisor and confidential counsellor in all matters of state, religion, Society, Court, etc. who as her Secretary of State and while a guest under her roof at Windsor Castle had committed a brutal attack upon one of her Ladies? had at night by stealth introduced himself into her apartment, barricaded afterwards the door and would have consummated his fiendish scheme by violence had not the miraculous efforts of his victim and assistance attracted by her screams saved her?” Russell, taken aback, agreed that this was all very bad, and that he had heard other similar stories.
