The Times Great Victorian Lives

How shall I describe the scene which already New York presents? There is, as I have already said, no city upon earth permeated by nerves of such exquisite sensibility, vibrating at the slightest access of popular fever, carrying spasmodic sensation through a dense mass of human beings, which in any other capital I have ever seen would take hours to learn and understand what is here known, felt, and appreciated in a few passionate seconds. In a hundred instances during the last four years your correspondents have portrayed the fever fits of New York – mass meetings in this Square or that, processions longer than that which welcomed the Prince of Wales, convulsions which shook Wall-street and Broadway like an all pervading ague – but I doubt whether a scene like that of this morning has yet been witnessed. The chronic excitement of this war influences this strange population as cumulative poisons are said to act upon their victims. Instead of a dispersion of electricity through the medium of these popular thunderbursts, the excitement of the mass seems to accumulate and be hoarded; until, upon the occasion of each recurrent explosion, the reserve of delirious passion is greater and greater in volume. There have often before been paroxysms of sanguine intoxication in this city, or of depression, if not of despair, but never before has the thunderbolt fallen from a smiling sky, never has the proud and swelling note of victory been converted in the twinkling of an eye into the wail of a nation. Abraham Lincoln had grown to be regarded, in a higher degree than any soldier or sailor, as the impersonation of the war power of the Union. Creeping into Washington in disguise and with timid irresolution to be inaugurated as chief magistrate upon the 4th of March, 1861, he lived so to conciliate and, within four brief years, to win popular affection that his second inauguration upon the 4th of March, 1865, was the ovation of an almost unanimous people. The estimates of his character and of the calibre of his intellect since he was suddenly tossed to the surface of a great nation have been numerous and contradictory; but the opinion seems to be daily gaining ground that impartial history will assign to him one of the highest places among the statesmen who have hitherto presided over the North in the supreme agony of the nation. There can be quoted against Mr. Lincoln no such extravagant vaunts or unseemly denunciations of others, no such rash predictions or disingenuous colourings, as crowd the despatches of Mr. Seward; on the other hand, there are thousands of Mr. Lincoln’s anecdotes and quaint conceits, none of which fail to indicate shrewdness, while many reveal a singular depth of insight into the circumstances under which they were spoken. It was mentioned to me by one of the Southern Peace Commissioners that at the recent conference in Hampton Roads he was deeply impressed by the ascendancy of Mr. Lincoln throughout the interview over Mr. Seward. The flags at half-mast, the festoons of crape hung out by each store in succession, and already creeping along the whole length of Broadway upon either side of the street, the eager closing of shutters and suspension of business in Wall-street, the feverish bewilderment of thousands, who can as yet but half realize the truth, the agitated swaying to and fro of hurrying multitudes in the streets, the frenzied accents of grief and rage, the tolling bells, the deep boom of the minute guns, are fitting expressions of the public grief, for they indicate not only the lamentation that a just, temperate, calm, and well-intentioned statesman has died in the track of duty by the most appalling of deaths, but that in one of the most awful of crises which ever overtook a nation his successor should be Andrew Johnson.

Dreadful as is the fashion of his death, if ever man was felix opportunitate mortis that man may be pronounced to be Abraham Lincoln. The difficulties which he has surmounted during his first term of office, stupendous as they have been, are feathers, trifles, air bubbles when compared with those which await his successor during the four coming years. But there can hardly be two opinions that in the interest of the South no event could be more prejudicial, or more deeply to be deprecated, than the foul assassination of last night. There breathes nowhere in the Northern States a partisan so blinded by sectional passion or so exasperated against Secessia as to imagine that the execrable crime of which Washington was last night the scene could be regarded by Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and the men who share their confidence, otherwise than with unmeasured detestation and poignant regret. This is not the place nor the moment for attempting to expatiate upon the character of Mr. Davis. But having long occupied a position which afforded peculiar facilities for understanding him, I cannot forbear briefly saying that, be his faults what they may, the time is not far distant when history will mete out to Mr. Davis that justice which is at present denied to him not only, as is natural, by Northerners, but also by many of his own ignorant and ungrateful countrymen. Meantime the natural vindictiveness, consequent upon the fearful crime of last night, will be employed to intensify Northern bitterness against Mr. Davis. There is already a disposition to draw a line of demarcation between him and General Lee, which none would resent more than the latter. The advocates of harshness will be fearfully augmented by the crime of last night, against which Mr. Davis, whose leniency throughout this war has amounted to a weakness, and who under terrible provocation has never permitted one act of retaliation, would revolt with un-utterable horror. The denunciations of General Grant for his liberal-terms to the Confederates who surrendered to him will be fiercer than ever, especially those which proceed from General Butler, and which are embittered with obvious personal malignity against the General. It has always seemed to me that the surrender of General Lee and the opportunity for generosity so admirably seized by General Grant bridged over the gulf which divides the two sections to a degree which none could have hoped two months ago. But the bullet of a dastardly assassin has in one instant neutralized the effect of the great stride towards conciliation so happily taken by General Grant.

This is not strictly an obituary, but it conveys much of the sense of horror and the awareness of the severity and abruptness of America’s loss which was felt on both sides of the Atlantic. Lincoln’s assassination is compared to those of Henry IV of France in May 1610, of the British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval in May 1812, and of Count (not Cardinal) Rossi, the Papal Minister of Justice, in November 1849. On 14 April 1865 Lincoln had been shot in the head while attending a performance of the play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater in Washington. He died the next day. After firing the fatal shot, his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, jumped from Lincoln’s box, on to the stage (breaking his leg in the process). Witnesses differed as to whether he shouted ‘Sic semper tyrannis’ or ‘The South is avenged’. Booth was shot while resisting arrest on 26 April. Lincoln was buried at Springfield, Illinois, on 4 May 1865.

LORD PALMERSTON

Statesman: ‘There was never a statesman who more truly represented England.’

18 OCTOBER 1865

THE FEARS WHICH for months past the state of Lord Palmerston’s health has excited have at length been realized. The great statesman is no more. Many who saw him towards the close of last Parliament, broken and bent by a recent attack of illness, shook their heads and whispered to each other that he could never meet another Parliament. That fear has been quickly and fatally verified. The bulletins we have published will have prepared most persons for the sad news which we have to announce to-day, that Lord Palmerston died yesterday morning, at a quarterto 11.

There never was a statesman who more truly represented England than Lord Palmerston. His name is now added to that splendid but very short list of Ministers, from Walpole to Pitt and from Pitt to Peel, who in times of great difficulty have rendered England prosperous at home and famous abroad, and who, while obtaining place from the Court, have derived their chief power from the country. Pitt, properly speaking, belonged to the last century, and there have been but three men in the present century who attained to the same enviable position. The first was Canning, a great spirit, but greater in what he devised than in what he accomplished; for no sooner had he reached the pinnacle of power, and excited the brightest hopes of the nation, than, sick at heart, he fell before the intrigues of rivals, leaving it to others to avenge his death and to prosecute his policy. After Canning, two statesmen from among his colleagues, the one his rival the other his disciple – Peel and Palmerston – gradually rose to the highest offices in the realm, and won, as only great characters win, the most sweet voices of the multitude. They have this in common – both were trained in the Tory camp, both forsook the traditions of Toryism, both have been decried as the most inconsistent statesmen that ever lived. Yet no two men could be more unlike, and the inconsistency of each was so different, that what in the one was a failing in the other was a virtue. Sir Robert Peel gave up his principles; Lord Palmerston merely relinquished his party. Less sociable than Palmerston, and less capable of forming new alliances, Peel clung to the Tories while rejecting their dogmas, and compelled them again and again to follow a course which they had learnt from his own lips to regard as the road to destruction. Free and frank, of a jovial nature, hail fellow with good men and true of every rank and politicians of every shade, Lord Palmerston was less fettered by party ties, and, so the objects dearest to his heart were attained, cared little whether the men with whom he sat on the Treasury benches were styled Whigs or Tories, Liberal-Conservatives, or Conservative-Liberals. His very consistency in this respect has been denounced as a fault. It has been said that he was constant only in the retention of office; that he was fixed only to the Treasury bench; that his one principle was that of the Vicar of Bray. He was a member of every Government since 1807, with the exception of those years in which Sir Robert Peel, and subsequently Lord Derby, held the reins. He began life as a Pittite; gradually he developed into a Canningite; when the Whigs came into power he renewed his youth; when they had fallen into disrepute he expanded into a Conservative-Liberal; afterwards he stood forward as the Tory chief of a Radical Cabinet; and he closed his wonderful career as the head of a Ministry with the motto of ‘Rest and be thankful.’ In all these changes there may be traced a consistency of purpose which, when the clue to it is perceived, becomes entitled to our highest respect; and this clue is furnished in the fact that, whatever changes come over the domestic or colonial policy of England, her foreign policy is unalterable. That policy is indeed, more or less modified by the circumstances of the time, by the amount of our resources, by the temper of our allies, by the spirit of the nation; but in principle it is always the same. Our domestic reforms are for the most part carried in the face of a formidable Opposition; but our foreign policy is supported by overwhelming majorities, and by a national enthusiasm which nothing can resist. We have never a dispute about the principle; it is a tradition based on the universal sentiment of patriotism, and handed from generation to generation – from Cabinet to Cabinet. The Minister of such a policy may through all changes adhere to the Treasury bench if he can; nothing need remove him from it but his personal relations with its other occupants; and he who, like Lord Palmerston, can preserve his seat there through the vicissitudes of half a century is indeed a great man as well as a great statesman.

Henry John Temple was the third Viscount Palmerston, and was born at Broadlands, near Romsey, on the 20th of October, 1784. Although an Irish Peer, his descent is traced to Saxon earls anterior to the Conquest. In the arms of his family may still be seen the eagle displayed of that Leofric, Earl of Mercia, who is remarkable chiefly for his treatment of his wife, the Lady Godiva. Lord Palmerston, however, bears a nearer resemblance to another and less mythological member of his family, of whom his father was the heir male – Sir William Temple, the friend of William III, the patron of Dean Swift, the author of that triple alliance which bound England, Sweden, and the States-General to prevent France from entering the Netherlands, and, singularly enough, a statesman who, while he remained in public life, was always on the winning side, and had the credit of all the popular acts of the Government after the Restoration. M. Capefigue, in noting this resemblance, has been pleased to observe that the chief point of similarity between the Minister of William III and the Minister of Queen Victoria lies in the utter hatred which both had to everything French, and thinks that on one occasion, as he was dining with Lord Palmerston, he made a terrible home thrust when he recalled the unpleasant fact that Sir William Temple, in bequeathing his property to his grand-daughters, stipulated that they should not marry Frenchmen. It gave M. Capefigue considerable satisfaction that Lord Palmerston could only laugh at the remark; it never entered into his head that the statement is quite unfounded, there being no mention of such a condition in the will of Sir W. Temple. Not from Sir William Temple, however – it was from Sir John Temple, younger brother of the diplomatist, and the same of whom Archbishop Sheldon said, ‘He has the curse of the Gospel, for all men speak well of him,’ that Lord Palmerston was descended. The first viscount of the name was the grandson of Sir John Temple, and was created a peer in 1722. Little more has to be said of him than this, – that his wife was regarded as a perfect model of conjugal affection, her will being quoted with admiration in the Annual Register. The second viscount, the father of our great statesman, was grandson of the first, and, like his grandmother, has been regarded as a pattern of conjugal tenderness. The epitaph which he wrote on the death of his first wife is said to be the most pathetic ever penned; and written at a time when our poetry had reached its lowest ebb, when all was artifice and platitude, phrase and frippery, it must be admitted that the lines have a genuine tenderness which it is almost impossible to find, in other compositions of the period. To his father, indeed, Lord Palmerston owes much of that taste for literature which furnished many a happy illustration to his speeches in Parliament, besides enabling him in his younger days to join with Croker and Peel in assailing the Whigs with literary satire. Of his father’s lively humour the late Lord Palmerston himself gave an amusing illustration in one of those anecdotes with which he, of all men, knew best how to parry the questions of political opponents or the entreaties of troublesome deputations. He said that it was his father’s habit, in placing wine before his guests, to say, ‘Here is claret, gentlemen; here is sherry; but I cannot answer for them, I can only give you the word of my wine merchant for them. Here is port, however, for which I can give my own word, – it is very good – I made it myself.’ If he was a bad judge of wine, he was considered a good judge of pictures. He collected in Broadlands a gallery of paintings which, at the beginning of the century, had a high repute, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, in bequeathing to his friends the works of his own easel unsold at the time of his death, gave to the Earl of Upper Ossory the first choice and to Lord Palmerston the second. He enjoyed the gift of his artistic friend ten years, and, dying in 1802, left by his second wife, who did not long survive him, two sons and two daughters. Of these sons, Henry John Temple, the elder, is the subject of the present sketch; the younger was afterwards known as Sir William Temple, the British Envoy at the Court of Naples.

Not much is known regarding the early life of Henry John Temple. He was one of the late flowering plants. Always remarkable for his ability, and generally successful in his undertakings, he rejoiced in a splendid constitution, and had to get rid of a certain excess of animal spirits before his ambition could rise to the level of his powers. There is a long period of some five and forty years – considerably more than the half of a man’s life – which Lord Palmerston passed in comparative inactivity, and which is a puzzle to the biographer whose idea of the man is derived from the later glories of his career. To account for this anomaly, it has by some of his eulogists been asserted that he was never at heart a Tory, that he was out of his element in the Ministry of Liverpool and Castlereagh, and that he never truly lived until he escaped from the thraldom of Tory ideas and joined the friends of liberality and progress. This theory is quite unfounded. Lord Palmerston was at the last what he was at the first. There is no real difference between Palmerston Secretary-at-War, Palmerston Foreign Secretary, Palmerston Home Secretary, and Palmerston Prime Minister. The explanation of his backwardness lies wholly on the surface, and is what we have already indicated. He was never what would be called an ambitious man; and, delighting in society, he found in the pleasures of private life what, together with the cares of his particular office, was sufficient in his hot youth, if not fully to occupy his powers, at all events to employ his time. Whatever he had to do he did well, but it is quite evident in his parliamentary history that he never cared to go out of his way for work. As Secretary-at-War for some 20 years, he hardly ever made a speech except on the subject of the army, and then only when he was compelled to do so. As Foreign Secretary for a period little less, he in like manner confined his attention to the business of his own department. At a time when he was the most popular statesman in England, he was content to serve now under his junior, and now under his rival. On the dissolution of the Aberdeen Cabinet he consented to serve even under Lord Derby if certain of his colleagues could be induced to follow the same course. It was not until every possible combination had been tried, and every possible Premier had given up the task in despair, that, as a last resource, Lord Palmerston was asked to form a Government. He at once accepted the position which he had not sought and filled with dignity to himself and advantage to the country an office which, from his never having grasped at it, persons who measure men, not according to their deserts, but according to their demands, regarded as beyond his power.

In the little that is known concerning the early life of Lord Palmerston there is not much that is remarkable. He received his education at Harrow, at Edinburgh, and at Cambridge. He went to Harrow a little after Lord Aberdeen, and about the same time as Sir Robert Peel and Lord Byron. Thence he proceeded to Edinburgh, to enjoy the benefit of Dugald Stewart’s instruction; and, by the way, it may be noted as something peculiar that he was one of the very few Tories who followed the example of the young Whigs of that generation in sitting at the feet of the great Whig Professor of Moral Philosophy and Political Economy. It certainly does not appear that he entered with any enthusiasm into the studies which absorbed every inmate of Stewart’s family; and one might with some show of reason accept it as a proof of this apathy that his name is not to be found among the members of that Speculative Society which was joined by every man of mark in the University, and which, besides Lord Lansdowne, Henry Brougham, Sydney Smith, Francis Jeffrey, Francis Horner, Walter Scott, and Lord John Russell, included Lord Palmerston’s own brother, Sir William Temple. But he himself stated about two years ago in one of his speeches, ‘I passed three years of my youth in studying at the University of Edinburgh, and I will frankly own, without disparagement to any other seat of learning at which I had the fortune to reside, that I enjoyed greater advantages in the acquirement of useful knowledge and sound principles during the three years’ residence in Edinburgh than I possessed at any other place.’ Certainly, the influence of Stewart’s training was at a later period apparent in the strong determination expressed by Lord Palmerston to maintain those principles of government of which Huskisson was the exponent. So long as Huskisson remained in the Cabinet he felt certain that these doctrines would be honoured; when Huskisson was ejected from the Duke of Wellington’s Ministry on purely personal grounds he too seceded, because he had no guarantee, he said, that these doctrines would have the weight to which they were entitled. We may add that it must have been in Stewart’s classroom that a phrase which he often turned to good account in his speeches, and on one memorable occasion with most brilliant effect, first caught his fancy and left upon it an indelible impression –‘The fortuitous concourse of atoms.’ Having been inoculated at Edinburgh, where he remained three years, with these liberal views and this inkling of philosophy, he turned southward again to the University which Pitt represented in Parliament, and which was at that time the chief school of thought in England. Almost all his political contemporaries who took a leading position, whether in the Whig or in the Tory ranks, were Cambridge men. If Byron, Coleridge, and Wordsworth are to be classed among our greatest poets, it would appear that in other departments than that of politics Cambridge had, at the beginning of the present century, a pre-eminence over the sister University of Oxford. Lord Palmerston, who had in the meantime succeeded to his title through the death of his father, entered at St. John’s College in 1803, and worked in good earnest for academical success at a time when it was not usual for a nobleman to present himself for any but an honorary degree.

The Temples were a family predestined to rule. Within the space of 50 years Macaulay has counted among the sons and grandsons of the Countess Temple alone, and she died in 1752, three First Lords of the Treasury (George Grenville, W. Pitt, and Lord Grenville), three Secretaries of State, two Keepers of the Privy Seal, and four First Lords of the Admiralty. Although Lord Palmerston belonged to a different branch of the Temple family, he too, whose father had been a Lord both of the Admiralty and of the Treasury, looked forward to political life, and, in 1806, immediately on the death of Pitt, offered himself to the University of Cambridge as a candidate to represent it in Parliament. He was opposed, on this occasion, by Lord Henry Petty, who had become Chancellor of the Exchequer in room of the ‘heaven-born Minister’ and who thus came to the election with a weight of Ministerial influence which his rival found it vain to withstand. That rival, however, was not to be discouraged. He presented himself again as a candidate in 1807, when he failed of success by only two votes; and in 1811 he tried his fortune a third time, in this case attaining the object of his ambition so unmistakably that he continued to represent the University until, in 1831, he gave mortal offence to his constituents by joining the Whigs. In the meantime, however, he found his way into Parliament, at first through the pocket borough of Bletchingley, and then through the borough of Newport, in the Isle of Wight. Nor was he long in Parliament before he enjoyed the sweets of office. The notorious Ministry of ‘All the Talents’ soon fell to pieces; and, as if in mockery of that splendid coalition, a Ministry succeeded to power headed by a nobleman whose natural incapacity was aided by a natural indolence, and whose indolence was aggravated not only by sickness, but also, to make assurance doubly sure, by continual opiates, under the influence of which he would fall asleep over his papers. Not able to touch animal food, not caring to open his mouth, often found sleeping at his desk, it would be one of the marvels of government that the Duke of Portland contrived to keep a Cabinet together for more than a couple of years, were we not too well acquainted with the truth of Oxenstiern’s commonplace regarding the wisdom of rulers. It was in this singular Ministry, whose great achievement was the Walcheren disaster, that Lord Palmerston first entered upon office. He entered on the office which his father had long enjoyed, as a Lord of the Admiralty; and when, on the quarrel of Castlereagh and Canning on the subject of the Walcheren expedition, the Duke of Portland resigned, and Perceval was called upon to form a Government, Lord Palmerston became Secretary at War. A number of writers, in recording this fact, have fallen into the mistake of confounding the Secretary at War with the Secretary for War, and thence inferring that Lord Palmerston at the early age of five-and-twenty succeeded Lord Castlereagh as War Minister while we were engaged in the gigantic contest with Napoleon. Castlereagh was Colonial Secretary, as such was Secretary for War, and in that double office was succeeded by Lord Liverpool. Palmerston succeeded Sir James Pulteney as Secretary at War, doubtless a very important post, but one which by no means implied a seat in the Cabinet.