Death
On 12 October Palmerston caught a chill and instead of retiring immediately to bed he spent an hour-and-a-half dawdling. He then had a violent fever but his condition stabilised for the next few days. However on the night of 17 October his health worsened, and when his doctor asked him if he believed in regeneration of the world through Jesus Christ, Palmerston replied: "Oh, surely." His last words were, "That's Article 98; now go on to the next." (He was thinking about diplomatic treaties.) An apocryphal version of his last words is: "Die, my dear doctor? That is the last thing I shall do." He died at 10:45 am on Wednesday, 18 October 1865 two days before his eighty-first birthday. Although Palmerston wanted to be buried at Romsey Abbey, the Cabinet insisted that he should have a state funeral and be buried at Westminster Abbey, which he was, on 27 October 1865. He was the fourth person not of royalty to be granted a state funeral (after Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Nelson, and the Duke of Wellington).
Queen Victoria wrote after his death that though she regretted his passing, she had never liked or respected him: "Strange, and solemn to think of that strong, determined man, with so much worldly ambition – gone! He had often worried and distressed us, though as Pr. Minister he had behaved very well." Florence Nightingale reacted differently upon hearing of his death: "He will be a great loss to us. Tho' he made a joke when asked to do the right thing, he always did it. No one else will be able to carry things thro' the Cabinet as he did. I shall lose a powerful protector...He was so much more in earnest than he appeared. He did not do himself justice."
Read more about this topic: Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“I thought of all that worked dark pits
Of war, and died
Digging the rock where Death reputes
Peace lies indeed.”
—Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)
“To die, to sleep—
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“It is certainly safe, in view of the movement to the right of intellectuals and political thinkers, to pronounce the brain death of socialism.”
—Norman Tebbit (b. 1931)