Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston - Legacy

Legacy

Palmerston has traditionally been viewed as "a Conservative at home and a Liberal abroad". He believed that the British constitution as secured by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was the best which human hands had made, with a constitutional monarchy subject to the laws of the land but retaining some political power. He supported the rule of law and opposed further democratisation after the Reform Act 1832. This liberal system of a mixed constitution in-between the two extremes of absolute monarchy and republican democracy he wished to see on the Continent to replace the absolute monarchies. More recently some historians have seen his domestic policies as Prime Minister as not merely liberal but genuinely progressive by the standards of his era.

However it is in foreign affairs that Palmerston is chiefly remembered. Palmerston's principal aim in foreign policy was to advance the national interests of England. Palmerston is famous for his patriotism. Lord John Russell said that "his heart always beat for the honour of England". Palmerston believed it was in Britain's interests that liberal governments be established on the Continent. He also practised brinkmanship and bluff in that he was prepared to threaten war to achieve Britain's interests.

When in 1886 Lord Rosebery became Foreign Secretary in Gladstone's government, John Bright asked him if he had read about Palmerston's policies as Foreign Secretary. Rosebery replied that he had. "Then", said Bright, "you know what to avoid. Do the exact opposite of what he did. His administration at the Foreign Office was one long crime." The Marquis of Lorne said of Palmerston in 1892: "He loved his country and his country loved him. He lived for her honour, and she will cherish his memory."

In 1889 Gladstone recounted a story to Lord Rendel of when "a Frenchman, thinking to be highly complimentary, said to Palmerston: 'If I were not a Frenchman, I should wish to be an Englishman'; to which Pam coolly replied: 'If I were not an Englishman, I should wish to be an Englishman.'" When Winston Churchill campaigned for rearmament in the 1930s, he was compared to Palmerston in warning the nation to look to its defences. The policy of appeasement led General Jan Smuts to write in 1936 that "we are afraid of our shadows. I sometimes long for a ruffian like Palmerston or any man who would be more than a string of platitudes and apologies."

He was also an avowed abolitionist whose attempts to abolish the slave trade was one of the most consistent elements of his foreign policy. His opposition to the slave trade created tensions with Southern American and the United States over his insistence that the British navy had the right to search the vessels of any country if they suspected the vessels were being used in the slave trade.

Historian A.J.P. Taylor has summarized his career by emphasizing the paradoxes:

For twenty years junior minister in a Tory government, he became the most successful of Whig Foreign Secretaries; though always a Conservative, he ended his life by presiding over the transition from Whiggism to Liberalism. He was the exponent of British strength, yet was driven from office for truckling to a foreign despot; he preached the Balance of Power, yet helped to inaugurate the policy of isolation and of British withdrawal from Europe. Irresponsible and flippant, he became the first hero of the serious middle-class electorate. He reached high office solely through an irregular family connection; he retained it through skilful use of the press--the only Prime Minister to become an accomplished leader-writer.

Palmerston is also remembered for his light-hearted approach to government. He is once said to have claimed of a particularly intractable problem relating to Schleswig-Holstein, that only three people had ever understood the problem: one was Prince Albert, who was dead; the second was a German professor, who had gone insane; and the third was himself, who had forgotten it.

The Life of Lord Palmerston up to 1847 was written by Lord Dalling (Sir H. Lytton Bulwer), volumes I and II (1870), volume III edited and partly written by Evelyn Ashley (1874), after the author's death. Ashley completed the biography in two more volumes (1876). The whole work was reissued in a revised and slightly abridged form by Ashley in 2 volumes in 1879, with the title The Life and Correspondence of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston; the letters are judiciously curtailed, but unfortunately without indicating where the excisions occur; the appendices of the original work are omitted, but much fresh matter is added, and this edition is undoubtedly the standard biography. An early "biographer" of Palmerston was Karl Marx in 1853.