Palmerston, HENRY JOHN TEMPLE, VIS-COUNT, was born at the family mansion, Broadlands, near Romsey, Hants, 20th October 1784, and belonged to the Irish branch of the ancient English family of Temple, taking name from Temple in Leicestershire. Sir W. Temple, the diplomatist and patron of Swift, was a member of this family, which removed to Ireland about 1601, and which was ennobled in 1722, when Henry Temple was created a peer of Ireland with the dignities of Baron Temple and Viscount Palmerston. His grandson, Henry, second Viscount (1739-1802), was father of the great minister, and superintended his education at Broadlands, until he sent him to Harrow. Young Temple in 1800 went to the university of Edinburgh, where he attended the lectures of Dugald Stewart and other professors. In 1802 he succeeded his father as third Viscount, and in 1803 he matriculated at St John's College, Cambridge. His eminent abilities were early recognised, for he was scarcely of age when the Tory party in the university selected him (1806) as their candidate to succeed Mr Pitt in the representation. Unsuccessful at Cambridge then and again in 1807, he entered parliament in the latter year for Newport, in the Isle of Wight, his colleague being Arthur Wellesley, then Chief-secretary for Ireland. In 1811 he exchanged Newport for the university of Cambridge, enjoyed the distinction of representing his alma mater for twenty years, and only lost his seat when he became a member of the Grey administration and supported the Reform Bill. For the last two years of the unreformed parliament he sat for the now extinct borough of Bletchingly. At the first election after the Reform Act he was returned for South Hampshire, but lost his seat at the general election of 1835. He immediately afterwards found a seat for the borough of Tiverton.
Having traced his representative, we now turn to his official career. Palmerston entered life as a member of the Tory party, and accepted the office of Junior Lord of the Admiralty and Secretary at War (without a seat in the cabinet) in 1809. This office he held during the successive governments of Mr Perceval, the Earl of Liverpool, Mr Canning, Lord Goderich, and the Duke of Wellington—a period extending from 1809 to 1828. There was ample scope at the War Office for Palmerston's administrative talents and activity. The military system swarmed with abuses, and the labour thrown upon the Secretary at War during the Peninsular campaigns was prodigious. In 1816 an attempt was made to assassinate Palmerston by an insane army-lieutenant, named Davis, who fired a pistol at him as he was entering the Horse Guards; the bullet, however, only inflicted a slight wound. Palmerston early attached himself to the Canning section of the Liverpool administration, and he accepted a seat in the cabinet of Mr Canning. His official connection with the Tory party ceased in 1828, when the 'Great Duke' insisted on accepting Mr Huskisson's resignation, which was followed by Palmerston's retirement. The Duke's government was swept away in the reform flood of 1830; and Earl Grey, who became prime-minister, offered the seals of the Foreign Office to Palmerston. The European horizon was so disturbed at this crisis that a great political authority declared that if an angel from heaven were in the Foreign Office he could not preserve peace for three months. Palmerston falsified the prediction. Louis-Philippe then filled the throne of France; and for the first time on record England and France acted in concert, and without jealousy, under Palmerston's foreign ministry. He took a leading part in securing the independence of Belgium, in establishing the thrones of Queen Isabella of Spain and Queen Maria of Portugal on a constitutional basis, in endeavouring, in alliance with Austria and Turkey, to check Russian influence in the East, and in the war with Mehmet Ali. In 1841 Palmerston went out of office with the Whigs on the question of free trade in corn; but on their return in 1846 he resumed the seals of the Foreign Office. His second foreign administration furnished various subjects of hostile party criticism, among which may be mentioned the civil war in Switzerland, the Spanish marriages (see GUIZOT), the European revolutions in 1848, the rupture of diplomatic relations between Spain and Great Britain, and finally, the affair of Don Pacifico (a Gibraltar Jew living in Athens, who claimed the privileges of a British subject), and the consequent quarrel with Greece. His strenuous self-asserting character, his brusque speech, his frequently hasty interferences in foreign affairs, were little calculated to conciliate opponents at home, and secured him many enemies abroad—the name ‘Firebrand Palmerston’ still clinging to him on the Continent. A vote of censure on the foreign policy of the government was in 1850 carried in the House of Lords on the motion of Lord Stanley (afterwards Earl of Derby). A counter-resolution, approving the foreign policy of the government, was thereupon moved by Mr Roebuck in the Lower House. The debate lasted four nights. In a speech of five hours’ duration—‘that speech,’ said Sir Robert Peel, ‘which made us all so proud of him’—Palmerston entered upon a manly and dignified vindication of his foreign policy; and Mr Roebuck’s motion was carried by a majority of forty-six.
In December 1851 the public were startled at the news that Palmerston was no longer a member of the Russell cabinet. He had expressed to the French ambassador in London his approbation of the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon, without consulting either the premier or the Queen; and, as explanations were refused, Lord John Russell advised his resignation. Palmerston, in the general opinion, was ‘smashed;’ but he soon got his ‘tit for tat;’ for in the following February, soon after the meeting of parliament, he avenged himself by shattering the Russell administration to pieces on a comparatively trifling question—a Militia Bill. He refused an offer from the Earl of Derby to join the government which he was commissioned to form, but accepted the post of Home Secretary in the coalition administration of the Earl of Aberdeen in 1852. The fall of this coalition government in the winter of 1854–55, on Mr Roebuck’s motion for a Sebastopol committee, placed Palmerston in his seventy-first year in the position of prime-minister, to which he was unanimously called by the voice of the nation; in his own phrase he was ‘the inevitable.’ He vigorously prosecuted the Russian war until Sebastopol was taken, and peace was made. His government was defeated in March 1857 on Mr Cobden’s motion condemnatory of the Chinese war. Palmerston appealed to the country, and met the House of Commons with a largely increased majority. But his administration fell in February 1858, over the Conspiracy Bill, intended to protect the French emperor against the machinations of plotting refugees. A short Conservative administration followed; but in June 1859 Palmerston was again called to the post of First Lord of the Treasury, which he continued to fill up to his death, the chief events of this premiership being the American civil war (with its Trent and Alabama incidents), Napoleon’s war with Austria, and the Austro-Prussian war with Denmark. His last great speech was his defence of the policy of his government, delivered in July 1864, in reply to the attack of Mr Disraeli. He died at his country seat, Brockett Hall, 18th October 1865, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Both his titles became extinct with him.
It was his ambition to be considered the minister of a nation rather than the minister of a political party; and his opponents have been constrained to admit that he held office with more general acceptance than any English minister since the time of the great Lord Chatham. As an orator he was usually homely and unpretending, but always sensible and practical. He was a dexterous tactician, of irrepressible spirit, and a ready, witty, and often brilliant debater. He was popular as a minister, because he was thoroughly English in his ends and aims. Even his robust health, off-hand manner, manly and usual jaunty bearing, and physical vigour were elements of his popularity, because they were regarded as a glorification of the English sports, which he was never ashamed to patronise. He desired nothing so ardently as to promote the prosperity, influence, and grandeur of Great Britain, and his national character and national spirit were thoroughly appreciated by his countrymen.
See Life of Palmerston, by Lord Dalling (3 vols. 1870), continued by Evelyn Ashley (2 vols. 1879); and smaller works by Anthony Trollope (1882), Lloyd Sanders (1888), and the Marquis of Lorne (1892).