Lord Palmerston. Anthony Trollope
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it to her. She says the Duke has disgraced himself, that it is impossible for him to stay in Paris, and that it must end in the murder of all the English. When first she talked to me about it, I felt like a person who is holding his countenance for a wager while somebody tickles his nose; and when, in spite of all my endeavours, a smirking smile crept into my face, she said, in the most serious manner, ‘No, indeed, this is no laughing matter; I can assure you it is very serious indeed! The Netherland pictures are gone. The Austrians are beginning to take the Italian school belonging to them; and then the Pope takes his property. The statues will go after the pictures, and the horses are to be taken down to-day or to-morrow!’”
In 1818 Palmerston was shot at as he was entering his office, by a madman, one Lieutenant Davis; and I remember well to have had the spot pointed out some ten years afterwards, and to have heard the story that it was chiefly by his own quickness of movement that his life was saved. We have been told since that he supplied the money necessary for the defence of the culprit. He afterwards visited Waterloo, and criticizes the dirt of the Russian troops whom he saw reviewed there. He finds fault also with the reasons given for the building of a fortress at Namur, thinking that this displayed an absence of proper military spirit “I am afraid,” he says, “that our allies the Belgians want much of that spirit never to submit or yield, which is necessary to enable them successfully to defend their territory.” Here we do not quite agree with his criticism, and can only express our hope, as we pass on, that the Belgians may continue to do their work as well for the next fifty years as they have done for the last. Then we come across a remark as to an old friend of ours, which the light of subsequent years has proved to be altogether wrong. Speaking of the army estimates, he says: “He”—Joseph Hume—“is going down hill very fast; indeed, so dull and blunder-headed a fellow, notwithstanding all his perseverance and application, could not long hold his own in the House of Commons.” Joseph Hume, however, did hold his ground, and rose till he was believed in as the great financial reformer of the House of Commons.
The style of Palmerston’s letters is what one would expect from that of his speeches and despatches. It is clear, concise, and very easy to understand, without any approach to artificial graces, or even to the formalities of grammatical correctness. “As to weather, we are fried alive.” He mixes up his racing and his property, his art and his politics, just as any other man would do. “I have been a horrid bad correspondent for some time past.” But he goes at length into his land improvements, and tells his reader, with great zeal, of the good he has been doing down in Co. Sligo: “My harbour is nearly completed;—it will be an excellent one for my purposes; it will be about one and a quarter English acres in extent, and will have fourteen feet water at high spring tides—enough depth to admit vessels of 300 tons, and as much as any harbour on the west coast of Ireland; and it has an excellent anchorage in front of it, where ships may wait the tide to enter. I have no doubt that in a short time it will be much frequented by the coasting trade; and if I can get people—which Nimmo thinks probable—to lay down a railway to it from the end of Loch Erne, a distance of fourteen English miles, it would become the exporting and importing harbour for a large tract of very fertile country lying on the banks of that lake, and would communicate with an inland navigation of nearly forty miles in extent.” The Nimmo named is the engineer of those days who did much good work in the West of Ireland. “I have established an infant linen market at Cliffony, held once a month, and have no doubt of its prospering and increasing. I have just got two schools on foot, but am at war with my priest, who, as usual, forbids the people to send their children.”
The battle for Catholic Emancipation was being carried on, and it became clearer from year to year on which side Lord Palmerston was to be counted, in spite of his colleagues, whom he thus names: “I can forgive old women like the Chancellor, spoonies like Liverpool, ignoramuses like Westmoreland, old stumped-up Tories like Bathurst; but how such a man as Peel, liberal, enlightened, and fresh-minded, should find himself running in such a pack is hardly intelligible. I think he must in his heart regret those early pledges and youthful prejudices which have committed him to opinions so different from the comprehensive and statesmanlike views which he takes of foreign affairs.” But even for Catholic Emancipation he had very little to say in Parliament. It cannot be too often declared—either as against his character as a statesman or on his behalf, as the reader may think it—that he was not in any part of his career a man prone to speech. He was brought up in that school of politicians in which a man uses his power of speech, or used to use it, not as a woman uses her teeth, for ornament, but as a dog does, for attack and defence. To have to make a speech was from the first to the last of his career an evil thing, though the evil became mitigated by practice, till as a personal annoyance it wore away. Nevertheless there was the time lost, and the trouble necessary to be taken, and the hours given up to the listening to other people, which might have been so satisfactorily employed either in reading or writing, or in early years in playing Cupid, or even in shooting pheasants, if his keeper would preserve them for him! As for his taking delight in the speeches of others, it cannot be believed of him. Once—but he was then very young—did he burst out into praise of Canning’s eloquence. “Canning’s speech was one of the most brilliant I ever heard. He carried the House with him throughout.” But at that time he was not yet twenty-four.
When Lord Liverpool died he was forty. And he had lived as a man conspicuous in the world—in office the whole time, holding a rank there next to that of the Cabinet, remarkable for his official carefulness, for his industry, for his resolution to let nothing pass without his notice. Soon after he had joined the War Office, in 1809, he had remarked on the insufficiency of the departmental resources. “Its inadequacy to get through the current business that comes before it is really a disgrace to the country; and the arrear of regimental accounts unsettled is of a magnitude not to be conceived. We are now working at the Treasury, to induce them to agree to a plan, proposed originally by Sir James Pulteney and reconsidered by Granville Leveson, by which, I think, we shall provide for the current business, and the arrear must then be got rid of as well as we can contrive to do it.” But he had clung to his work during the whole period with that tenacity which in official life will get the better of all arrears. And in doing so he had made his character known to all official men. It was not because he was a good speaker, as is now generally the case, that he was chosen by one Minister after another, and that Lord Liverpool had been so anxious to retain him, but because the office work was safe in his hands, and because he had shown that he would make fewer mistakes than another man. He had always the pluck to stand up for himself and his office in a becoming manner, caring nothing for any, whether they were in opposition, or below him in office or above; whether they were in the Cabinet or of royal blood, as was the Duke of York. “Come on then and fight, if it has to be.” This is what he would say, with all good-humour; but had never any special desire to have his official points and aspirations and beliefs made matter of debate in either House of Parliament. Such was his official character, and joined to this was his fame as a man of fashion. He did all things that young men did, and did them well, and at forty he was still a young man. Or if he did not do them well, he did them as a young man of fashion ought to do them. If he was not at first successful with his racing, he carried on the amusement in the grand manner. He did not bet. It was not the fashion for a nobleman in those days to plunge. But he kept his horses with a first-class trainer, and was careful to see that the stable as far as possible was made to pay its expenses. We can imagine that he was much thought of at Almack’s, and was a desired guest at the houses of all the exquisites. There is little, or indeed nothing, said about his tailors or bootmakers in any of his letters that have come to us. But we can imagine that he was very careful in his dress, without descending to the outspoken vanity of dandyism. He lived a life full to overflowing in every direction, and on which the society of beautiful women must have had great effect. But with beautiful women he got into no troubles. There exists at least no record of such trouble. He passed on, a young man of fashion, for a period of twenty years, sipping all the honey from all the flowers, but without any of the usual consequences of such sipping. It was characteristic of him that neither in his early or in his later life was there any love of display. He was a man desirous of all things that were pleasant, but seems to have wished that they should be accorded to him simply as his deserts, and not in obedience to any demand that he had made for them. In 1827, when he was nearly forty-three years old, he was called into the Cabinet. This formed the dividing point in his life,