Aberdeen

Aberdeen, GEORGE HAMILTON GORDON, EARL OF, was born at Edinburgh, 28th January 1784. He was educated at Harrow and at St John's College, Cambridge, where he took his M.A. in 1804. Before this, on succeeding to the earldom in 1801, he made a tour through Greece; hence Byron's well-known line: 'The travelled thane, Athenian Aberdeen.' In 1806 he was elected one of the Scotch representative peers, and entered the House of Lords as a Tory. In 1813 he was appointed ambassador to the Austrian court, and conducted the negotiations which led to the alliance of that power with Britain. At this time he formed the close friendship with Prince Metternich which so decidedly influenced his subsequent policy as a statesman. On the conclusion of the war, he was raised to the British peerage as Viscount Gordon. In 1828 he took office in the new Wellington ministry. The general principle which guided his policy, as Foreign Secretary, was that of non-interference in the internal affairs of foreign states, which, joined to his well-known sympathy with such statesmen as Metternich, exposed him—not always justly—to the suspicion of hostility to the cause of popular liberty. His gradual abandonment of high Tory principles was evinced by his support of the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, and of the Catholic Emancipation Act. For eleven years after the fall of the Wellington ministry he remained out of office, with the exception of his brief administration of the Colonial Office in the Tory government of 1834-5. In 1841 he again became Foreign Secretary, his chief services as such being the conclusion of the Chinese war, the Ashburton Treaty, and the Oregon Treaty. M. Guizot was at that time foreign minister in France, and the two statesmen acted in cordial alliance. Lord Aberdeen's Act, in 1843, for removing doubts regarding the admission of ministers to benefices in Scotland, could not heal the Disruption, and was virtually repealed by the Act for the Abolition of Patronage, 1874. Like Peel, he was honestly converted to free-trade principles, and with Peel he resigned in 1846, immediately after the repeal of the Corn Laws. In 1852, on the resignation of Lord Derby, Aberdeen became head of a popular coalition ministry, which lost credit owing to mismanagement in the Crimean War (q.v.). The government was defeated by Mr Roebuck (q.v.), and in February 1855 Aberdeen resigned. He died in London, 13th December 1860. See Life by his son (1893).—His grandson George (1841-70), 'the Sailor Earl,' was drowned at sea, and was succeeded by his brother, the seventh earl, who in 1886 was Lord-lieutenant of Ireland, and in 1893-98 Governor-general of Canada. His countess, daughter of Lord Tweedmouth, takes a keen interest in woman's work and in Irish well-being, and published Through Canada with a Kodak (1894).