Palmerston and the Times: Foreign Policy, the Press and Public Opinion in Mid-Victorian Britain 9780755621156, 9781780760742

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The idea for this book originated as part of my research for a doctoral thesis at University College Cork, and my principal thanks are to my supervisor Dr Mervyn O’Driscoll. For permission to refer to manuscripts and for assistance during the course of this work, my thanks are due to a number of organizations and individuals: the Trustees of the Broadlands Archives; Lord Clarendon; the Boole Library, University College Cork; the British Library; the National Archives, London; and the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Chris Woolgar of the Hartley Library, University of Southampton and Nick Mays of News International deserve special mention; this book could not have happened without their kindness and help over many years. I am also grateful to the editors and publishers of Media History, in whose pages much of the material for Chapter 3 was first published as ‘Origins of Animosity: Lord Palmerston and The Times, 1830–41’ in November 2010. Finally, the enthusiasm of Jo Godfrey at I.B.Tauris for this book made the task of writing it significantly easier. Many thanks.

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INTRODUCTION

Throughout the middle years of nineteenth-century Britain, Lord Palmerston was the politician who stood out above all his peers, if not always favourably. He seemed the most dynamic of ministers and, depending on the spectator, the most inspiring or infuriating. Recalled mainly in the milieu of foreign affairs, Palmerston has come down in popular memory as the brash and belligerent defender of British rights around the globe, not averse, if the mood took, to bouts of ‘gunboat diplomacy’ and to letting the Royal Navy prove the point of his policy. He was ‘John Bull personified’.1 Of especial importance in Palmerston’s lengthy career were the 35 years, from 1830 to his death in 1865, during which he was near-permanently ensconced at one or other of the highest offices in the land, receiving on three occasions the seals of the Foreign Office before serving twice as Prime Minister, before, indeed, dying as Prime Minister. He set the tone for almost four decades of British foreign policy, and the mid-nineteenth century has regularly been labelled the Palmerston era. There was, however, a great deal more to Palmerston’s political abilities than the prevalent image of bluster and bullying suggests. He could not have achieved his near-unrivalled parliamentary innings without some aptitude for guile and subtlety, especially as his policies were rarely without many – often powerful – enemies. The immense popularity he enjoyed through the country as a whole was one of the main reasons for Palmerston’s political longevity. He was ‘the people’s darling’, their larger-than-life minister, insouciant when it suited but also resolute and forthright. Much of the credit for fostering this favourable picture in the public mind lies in Palmerston’s skilled

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manipulation of the newspapers. His steady accumulation of press contacts and development of a coterie of friendly papers – the ‘Palmerston press’ – was made all the more crucial by the long-standing enmity of the behemoth of the contemporary press, the ‘liar’, as he would have it, of Printing House Square – The Times. The Times cast an immense shadow over the nineteenth-century newspaper world. ‘Unequalled in the breadth and depth of its reporting, the gravity of its tone, the grandeur of its pretensions and its sheer physical bulk’, the paper’s circulation and influence dwarfed all competitors.2 This was a period during which newspapers played an ever-increasing role in public and political life, their growing importance giving rise to the notion of the press as the fabled ‘fourth estate’.3 The sheen has been stripped off this self-promulgated and self-congratulatory image of the press.4 Nevertheless, the impressive aura surrounding The Times of this era has survived relatively intact.5 The Times, however, despite its much-vaunted independence under the great editors Thomas Barnes and John Delane, was far from an unfettered bastion of the truth. On questions of foreign policy, its editorial pages were certainly a receptive home to a number of vehemently anti-Palmerston voices, their incessant attacks matched for vitriol in the ripostes of the Palmerston press. Fundamental to the success of both Palmerston and The Times was the value they ascribed to the then increasingly important, if still somewhat nebulous, concept of public opinion. In their battles over foreign policy each claimed its imprimatur. The analogy that public opinion, like poverty, ‘has always been with us’ is no doubt correct.6 That has not stopped it proving an incredibly difficult concept to pin down, with attempts to define the expression ‘public opinion’ vexing historians, philosophers, sociologists and political scientists alike. It was ‘a Proteus, a being that appears simultaneously in a thousand guises, both visible and as a phantom, impotent and surprisingly efficacious, which presents itself in innumerable transformations and is forever slipping through our fingers just as we believe we have a firm grip on it’, as the eminent early twentieth-century German historian Hermann Oncken wrote.7 Recent appraisals have been similarly resigned.8 Yet, while nothing ‘is more difficult to define as a precise concept or to

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delineate as a practical force’, for Paul Langford ‘no element in politics was ultimately more important.’9 ‘Public opinion is mainly what contemporaries perceived it to be,’ concluded D.G. Boyce, a historian who has grappled with the subject in a number of works.10 Contemporaries, however, Hannah Barker has pointed out, could be ‘vague and divided’ about what public opinion meant. In the late eighteenth century, for example, the philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke believed that only 400,000 of Britain’s eight million inhabitants, those affluent, informed and invariably propertied adults who had the time to discuss and debate matters, represented the British ‘public’. The Radical John Jebb, on the other hand, thought all adult males constituted the ‘public’.11 The early nineteenth century saw the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton continue to view public opinion as an exclusively masculine realm.12 The thrust, however, as the long reign of Queen Victoria approached, was to associate public opinion with middle-class opinion. Henry Brougham, a leading Whig politician of the time, was in no doubt that when he spoke of public opinion, it was in relation to ‘the middle classes, the wealth and intelligence of the country, the glory of the British name’.13 ‘Opinion now is supreme, and opinion speaks in print.’ So wrote the future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in his 1844 novel Coningsby.14 The newspapers were not shy about claiming to represent public opinion or to be the medium through which the people communicated with government. The problems in too simplistic a connection between the press and public opinion are inherent – it was in the newspapers’ own interests to proclaim such a close and symbiotic relationship. Nevertheless, newspapers were acknowledged as ‘one of the main channels through which public opinion could be expressed’ in nineteenth-century Britain.15 It was a relationship that fired the imagination of contemporaries, giving rise to innumerable articles in journals like Blackwoods and the Westminster Review that questioned whether public opinion was manufactured or expressed by the press.16 Studies of Victorian public opinion, therefore, have, par necessitatum, often been consanguineous with studies of the Victorian press. Politicians certainly saw the two as interlinked. Some, like Robert Peel in this letter from 1820, decried ‘that great compound of folly,

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weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy and newspaper paragraphs which is called public opinion’.17 Others, such as Richard Cobden, saw a higher power at work, the press and public opinion combining beneficently to civilize the world (a view shared by many journalists).18 Still more recognized the potential use of the press in mobilizing public opinion to further their own political ends. Palmerston, who took to the men of the press with great deftness and determination, was among the most successful of this latter grouping. Indeed, his relationship with the press and public opinion has become an indelible part of his story, easing and facilitating his path to the Premiership.19 Similarly, the venomous print war waged against Palmerston, and the myriad personal and political facets to the longstanding rivalry, are important elements in the history of The Times, the titan of Printing House Square.

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1 THE POLITICIAN

Born in London in late October 1784, there was little in the relatively minor aristocratic background of Henry John Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston, to indicate the great impact he would have on world affairs. He was an Irish peer, which in the highly stratified world of the aristocracy ranked below both English and Scottish peers. Although Palmerston did not visit the country until his mid-twenties, the family connection with Ireland was strong, dating back to the late sixteenth century when William Temple travelled over as secretary to Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex, who had been dispatched by Queen Elizabeth I to put down the rebellion now known as the Nine Years War (1594–1603). William Temple was appointed provost of Trinity College Dublin in 1609, Palmerston’s ancestors holding thereafter a variety of sinecured posts, including the Master of the Rolls in Ireland and Chief Remembrancer of the Court of Exchequer in Ireland. They acquired large tracts of land over the course of two centuries, particularly in Sligo on the west coast of the country. It was Palmerston’s great-grandfather, Henry Temple, who became the first viscount, created an Irish peer in 1723 in recognition of the family’s long discharge of public duties in Ireland, the very name of Palmerston taken from a small village in County Dublin where the family held lands. An Irish peerage did not entail residence in Ireland, and so it was to Hampshire in the south of England that Palmerston’s great-grandfather turned when building Broadlands, the grand familial home of the Temples.

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Palmerston’s father, Henry Temple, the second viscount, was an enthusiastic patron of the arts who numbered among his friends the historian Edward Gibbon, the actor David Garrick and the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. A member of the House of Commons for nearly 40 years – Irish peers were not entitled to sit in the House of Lords – he served at both the Admiralty and Treasury and was on good terms with Charles James Fox and Lord North among other leading politicians. Politics, however, were of secondary interest to this voluble and adventurous soul who adored travel and the arts instead. This desire to travel caused trouble when, despite pleas to the contrary, he took the family on the Grand Tour in the summer of 1792, escaping the ‘Reign of Terror’ in Paris by a mere matter of days. The bulk of this European tour was spent in Italy, the young Palmerston visiting an array of Classical and Renaissance sites. Groomed at first for a career in diplomacy, Palmerston was fluent from an early age in French and Italian. His younger brother William would follow this path, serving out a long career at various embassies and legations. Three more siblings, Frances, Mary (who died a child) and Elizabeth completed the family set. The Palmerstons returned to England in late 1794, the eldest son beginning his formal education at Harrow the following year. Palmerston remained at Harrow until 1800, before spending three years apiece at the University of Edinburgh and St John’s College, Cambridge. He was a keen sportsman at all three institutions, and popular with fellow students. But he was also a diligent worker, a trait that endured throughout his long political career despite what later seemed to be an often flippant demeanour. If anything, Palmerston could be too serious and reserved as a youth, leading one friend of the family to bemoan the ‘want of spirits belonging to his age’.1 Palmerston was in Edinburgh, then the ‘capital of the mind’, for the most formative years of his youth, deemed by his father ‘that critical and important period when a young man’s mind is most open to receive such impressions as may operate powerfully on his character and his happiness during the remainder of his life’.2 He studied a wide range of subjects, including mathematics, chemistry, history, political economy, Greek and Latin. Most importantly, he came under the

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influence of Dugald Stewart, the noted Professor of Moral Philosophy, at whose home he also roomed. As foreseen by his father, Palmerston took from Edinburgh a number of lifelong lessons, including a strident belief in the benefits of free trade gleaned from the study of Adam Smith’s seminal text The Wealth of Nations. Of more subtle consequence, perhaps, were Stewart’s progressive ideas on the role and importance of public opinion in modern society. The ‘stability and influence of established authority’, Stewart argued, depended on the ‘coincidence between its measures and the tide of public opinion’, with crises in government and society derived largely from a ‘bigoted attachment to antiquated forms, and to principles borrowed from less enlightened ages’. The path to a more enlightened society, Stewart advised, lay in the ‘gradual and prudent accommodation of established institutions to the varying opinions, manners, and circumstances of mankind’.3 From an early age, therefore, Palmerston was primed to pay heed to the growing power of public opinion, and to view it as a fundamental facet of government, not just something to be pandered to in order to win votes. ‘There is in nature no power but mind, all else is passive and inert,’ Palmerston would go on to declare to the House of Commons in the late 1820s. ‘[In] human affairs this power is opinion; in political affairs it is public opinion; and he who can grasp this power, with it will subdue the fleshy arm of physical strength, and compel it to work out his purpose.’ Those statesmen, he continued in a panegyric tone that carried echoes of his mentor Stewart, who knew how to avail themselves ‘of the passions, and the interests, and the opinions of mankind’ were able ‘to give an ascendancy, and to exercise a sway over human affairs’ that was ‘far out of all proportion greater than belong to the power and resources of the state over which they preside’, while those who sought to ‘check improvement, to cherish abuses, to crush opinions, and to prohibit the human race from thinking, whatever may be the apparent power which they wield’ would ‘find their weapon snap short in their hand, when most they need its protection’.4 Palmerston, however, did not always view public opinion in such benign terms, stating in the midst of a political crisis in 1809 that ‘if a victim is to be sacrificed to appease the fury of the many headed monster [public

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opinion], I know no one whose loss would perhaps be less felt than poor Cas[tlereagh], since whatever his talents for business may be . . . he is dreadfully unpopular & is somewhat of a millstone about the necks of his friends.’5 Political realities, not just lofty ideals, had to be factored in to any thinking on public opinion. The death of the second viscount in 1802 led to Palmerston’s inheritance of the title at just 17 years of age. Recovering himself from the heavy blow of his adored father’s death, Palmerston returned regularly to Broadlands to visit his grieving mother, herself slowly dying of cancer. In late 1804 he wrote to Laurence Sulivan, a friend from Cambridge, how she ‘has been going on very well since you left us. Her spirits are generally very good, and she has had better nights, and been more free from pain than ever when in London.’ She had a garden chair that allowed her to be pushed around the grounds, Palmerston believing the country air to be ‘of much benefit to her’.6 It was with great grief but only mild surprise that Palmerston learned of her passing in January 1805, leaving him bereft of both parents at the age of 20 and burdened with the responsibility for three siblings, a large country estate, more lands in Ireland and significant debts accrued through his father’s voracious art collecting and expensive refurbishments of Broadlands.

To Parliament Palmerston’s father had been a Whig until the 1790s when, in the midst of the war with revolutionary France, he switched allegiance to the Tories of William Pitt the Younger. Upon his death the Earl of Malmesbury, likewise a Whig turned Tory, was appointed Palmerston’s guardian. Malmesbury had enjoyed a distinguished diplomatic career, including spells at the courts of Frederick the Great and Catherine II. By the time Palmerston came under his wing, Malmesbury was retired and almost deaf. Nevertheless, he remained a confidante to many of the political elite and of great value to Palmerston as he sought a path to parliament. They aimed high, with Palmerston running as the Tory candidate in the Cambridge by-election called in response to Pitt’s death in January 1806. This first campaign had not really

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been planned, and though Malmesbury and others canvassed on his behalf, Palmerston came last in the field of the three candidates. He was beaten but determined to try again, his correspondence from this point on growing ever denser with political content – the goings-on in Westminster and the continuing war with Napoleon Bonaparte – the neophyte forming his opinions in preparation for another run at parliament. The collapse of the Whig-led ‘Ministry of All the Talents’ led to a general election in the summer of 1807. The Tories returned to power under the leadership of the Duke of Portland. Palmerston, however, was defeated at Cambridge again, admitting to his close friend Sulivan how ‘very much mortified & disappointed’ he was ‘at being a second time foiled in my attack upon the University’.7 But there was a back-up plan. Malmesbury paid £4,000 for Palmerston to take the seat for the atrociously rotten borough of Newport on the Isle of Wight, where indeed one of the terms of his victory was that he never set foot in his supposed constituency. Such was the fetid state of Britain’s electoral system when the young Palmerston entered parliament for the first time. The London Palmerston arrived in was the world’s first ‘million city’, and home to a cornucopia of attractions and distractions. Palmerston, still in his twenties, lived rather a double life at first, working in an unheralded manner at two relatively minor political offices, socializing somewhat more raucously at dinner parties and clubs. Malmesbury’s influence with Portland had seen him appointed to a junior position in the Admiralty in 1807, Palmerston writing soon after to Sulivan how he had been so busy with work that he had ‘scarcely seen a soul except in the way of business’.8 This was rather disingenuous, for Palmerston was thoroughly enjoying the delights of the capital. He shook off whatever shackles had given rise to an earlier reputation for diffidence, and when promoted to the position of Secretary at War in 1809, it was commented acerbically by one lady that at least ‘it may divert his Lordship from flirting’.9 As Secretary at War, Palmerston was responsible for the financial and general administration of the army, duties that included presenting the army estimates to parliament each year. In office he

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was guilty of some of the iniquities of the age, bringing in Sulivan as his private secretary and ensuring that George Shee, another friend from Cambridge, was made Agent-General of the Militia. More positively, while he increased the workload of his staff, Palmerston did not shy away from long hours himself. Quickly confident in his post, Palmerston was also unafraid to disagree with the Duke of York, King George III’s second son and Commander-in-Chief of the army, their regular disputes having to be smoothed over by a succession of Prime Ministers, from Portland to Spencer Perceval and Lord Liverpool. Palmerston’s political stature was increased when he finally took the prestigious seat for Cambridge during another by-election in 1811. He demonstrated some adept handling of the media during the course of this campaign, something far from common among his political – especially Tory – peers, writing to Sulivan, who later that year married Palmerston’s youngest sister Elizabeth (Libby), of the need to send ‘a paragraph to the Courier’ saying ‘we understand that the greatest exertions are making by Mr [John] Smith & Ld P. and the contest is expected to be a very hard one’ and won ‘by only a few votes’. The Courier, Palmerston complained, had ‘been spreading about the idea that I am secure’, and a piece along the lines envisaged appeared the next day.10 Palmerston, however, was confident of victory. He had put in the work, returning to Cambridge for various social events through the years, all the time cultivating the university’s voters. Back in London, Palmerston’s evening scene revolved around the opera, theatre and lavish balls that characterized the Regency era. He was a member of the exclusive Almack’s club, regarded by many as ‘the seventh heaven of the fashionable world’.11 In 1811 he described to his sister Libby how ‘London is uncommonly gay, so I go every night to the play, I belong to a private box which gives me the run of Covent Garden & the Lyceum all week about which is very pleasant.’12 As Palmerston was an attractive young man as well as sociable and amusing, rumours of affairs abounded and were often true. Foremost among Palmerston’s liaisons was Lady Emily Cowper, wife of Earl Cowper. Palmerston was a friend of Emily’s brother William Lamb, later Lord Melbourne, and is acknowledged as the father of three of the five children she bore while married to Cowper: Emily in 1810, William in

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1811 and Frances Elizabeth in 1820. Very proper in his working day, Palmerston could be scandalously improper at night. Parliamentary recesses often found Palmerston staying at the grand country homes of friends and colleagues. ‘Country-house visiting, in fact, was a way of life,’ observed the social historian Venetia Murray, with these trips just as important as the London clubs to Palmerston’s social milieu.13 Here the aristocracy reposed at leisure, playing charades, billiards and tennis, producing amateur theatricals, shooting pheasants and partridges and hunting with hounds. They partook of politicking and surreptitious seduction. Palmerston had game down at Broadlands, too, and an interest in horses and the races at nearby Romsey. On one occasion, he wrote to his sister Libby how he had sold two horses quite well: ‘Harlequin who was likely to be blind & lame for 100 guineas, & Firefly who was not quite sound for 87. This was a good riddance of bad rubbish.’14 The defeat of Napoleon opened up another welcome social outlet, the aristocracy in their liveried swarms taking once more to the Grand Tour. Visiting Paris in 1815, Palmerston took in the theatre and the Louvre, and with a keen eye noted the physical and mental deNapoleonizing of the French capital. At plays, the restored Bourbon monarchy were cheered by royalists in the crowd, while on the streets the ‘basso relievos upon the arches and public buildings in which anything is contained that relates to Bonaparte, have been chiselled off, and the number of plain entablatures is daily increasing’.15 Palmerston travelled abroad again in 1816, in pursuit on this occasion of Lady Cowper rather than any further culture. In 1818, he went to France and Belgium in the company of George Shee, stopping at Waterloo along the way. The British army were in the midst of finally leaving France, but instead of assuming a superior and mean-spirited air towards the erstwhile foe, Palmerston considered the departure ‘highly gratifying’, as nothing ‘can be more galling and humiliating than the presence of a conquering army within the territory of the worsted nation’.16 Prior to this latter trip, Palmerston had been shot at on the stairs of the War Office. Palmerston’s assailant, David Davies, a former lieutenant in the army, had escaped from a mental institution. The bullet grazed Palmerston’s hip and Davies was easily captured. Palmerston

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actually felt some pity for his would-be assassin, who was sent to Bedlam, and contributed to a fund for his defence. But Palmerston was not always so compassionate. In August 1819 when the yeomanry of Manchester, on the orders of agitated local officials, charged into a peaceful mass meeting at St Peter’s Field, killing 11 and injuring hundreds of the 60,000-strong crowd, his sympathies were firmly with the authorities. The ‘Peterloo massacre’, an attack on innocent men, women and children at a time of heightened post-war economic distress and political tension, caused a national uproar, but Palmerston was resolute in his allegiance to the Tory cause, supporting the repressive and hated ‘Six Acts’ later that year.

To the Foreign Office By the time Palmerston was shot at on the stairs of the War Office, he was in his mid-thirties and had been Secretary at War for nine years. He was not progressing politically and it might even have seemed that he was following in his father’s footsteps, frequenting the continent and London’s finest fashionable parties without ever reaching real political heights. It is instructive that a recent major biography of Lord Castlereagh, one of the leading politicians of the era, mentions Palmerston mainly in the context of dances at Almack’s.17 However, unlike his father, Palmerston was frustrated with his apparent lot, and he became noticeably sullen in his work and at his clubs. Over the course of the next few years he was offered numerous paths out of the War Office, but they all seemed either steps sideways or, worse, devious manoeuvres to get him out of London by offloading him on Jamaica, Ireland or India in order to install a more malleable figure at his War Office berth. The headstrong Palmerston was still getting caught up in confrontations with the Duke of York, quarrels which did nothing for his hopes of promotion. In 1823 Liverpool was said to be ‘in a fever & in despair’ over the trouble Palmerston was causing him and ‘the difficulty of dealing with Princes of the Blood’.18 At the same time as this professional stagnation, Palmerston’s private affairs were becoming unhappily awkward. Lady Cowper, though she had recently borne him another daughter, Frances Elizabeth, was

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sharing her affections with a number of younger up-and-coming politicians such as the Earl of Clanwilliam as well as the Italian Count Giuliano. Palmerston had other lovers of his own, too, but even these affairs brought their troubles. Emma Murray had borne him a son in 1816, Henry John Temple Murray, and so he set her up at 122 Piccadilly. This further lease (on top of his own for 9 Stanhope Street) and the allowances he set aside for both mother and child exacerbated his near-perpetual financial difficulties. Palmerston was living beyond his means in London while pouring money into improving his estates in Ireland. From the mid-1820s Palmerston began to distance himself from the more intractable Tories and align with those in the party closer to George Canning, the Foreign Secretary. This shift was born of genuine political differences but also frustration with his prospects under the Liverpool cabal, the members of which he castigated as ‘old women’, ‘spoonies’, ‘ignoramuses’ and ‘old stumped-up Tories’.19 Chief among the reasons for the growing political cleavage between the rival Tory groupings was the question of Catholic emancipation. Palmerston, like Canning, was of a more liberal persuasion on the Catholic question than the Tory majority. His unambiguous stance made many enemies, and during the general election of 1826 Palmerston complained of ‘an underhand Protestant cabal’ from within his own party undermining his bid in Cambridge. He was, he said, ‘being driven to the Opposition for support’.20 Palmerston was returned for Cambridge, but the experience was an ominous sign for his future amid the Tory ranks. The change in alignment looked to have paid dividends in 1827, when Liverpool suffered a stroke and Canning became Prime Minister in a coalition government that included a number of Whigs, among them Palmerston’s old friend William Lamb, Lady Cowper’s brother. Canning offered Palmerston the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, only to quickly retract the offer on account of King George IV’s objections. And so, although he at last took a seat at Cabinet, Palmerston remained merely Secretary at War. Canning died a few months later and was replaced by Lord Goderich. Palmerston was again on the cusp of being made the Chancellor, only for the King to intervene for a second time. Palmerston was well aware of the role of George IV in his

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undoing, writing sarcastically after a meeting soon afterwards how he was ‘overpowered with a sense of His Majesty’s condescending kindness’ and concluding, ‘we parted very good friends’.21 In January 1828 the Goderich government fell to be replaced by a new Tory administration headed by the Duke of Wellington. The four so-called Canningites – Palmerston, William Huskisson, Charles Grant and Lord Dudley – joined the new ministry, Palmerston staying on at the War Office. But this situation lasted for only a few months; by now there were simply too many strong differences between the factions, and in the summer Palmerston, Huskisson, Grant and Dudley split properly from the Tories. Palmerston, after more than 18 years, was Secretary at War no more. However, he had already begun to turn his attentions to another and more illustrious government posting – the Foreign Office. Palmerston’s maiden speech in parliament had concerned foreign affairs, namely a defence of Canning’s bold seizure of the Danish fleet out of Copenhagen in August 1807. Since then he had not really been associated with that aspect of government. Nevertheless, when the Wellington government was being formed, Palmerston’s friend and confidante George Shee sketched a Cabinet that included Palmerston as Foreign Secretary.22 Once out of government Palmerston took to foreign affairs with tremendous vigour, using his newfound political freedom to impress himself onto the public mind with a series of noteworthy speeches that he quickly printed and circulated. These were years when the British public were highly attentive to foreign matters, most notably the Greek War of Independence. Palmerston made it his business to attack the alignment of Wellington and his Foreign Secretary Lord Aberdeen with the Holy Alliance, the autocratic powers of Russia, Prussia and Austria. It was not only at home that Palmerston worked to pave his way to the Foreign Office. In 1829 and 1830 he made a number of wellpublicized visits to France, meeting with politicians of all parties and coming away with the prescient belief that King Charles X’s position was untenable. ‘Charles 10th is regularly checkmated’, he informed his long-time amour Lady Cowper, ‘& the only Question is, when he will bring his Mind to give up the game.’23 Palmerston wrote, too, of more

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frivolous affairs, cruelly joking of one mutual acquaintance that ‘there is a Man who advertizes that he makes Chins & Noses to order, who might perhaps be useful to L[ad]y Harriet [Cavendish], & give her a better Nose, in exchange for her Redundency of Chin’.24 This period in political limbo and new emphasis on foreign affairs presaged the next and greatest stage in Palmerston’s life and career, years when his name became known throughout Europe and the world, loved and loathed in near-equal proportion. In November 1830 he achieved high office at last, becoming Foreign Secretary in a government led by Lord Grey, the Whigs and Canningites affecting a wedding of their abundant talents. Born a Whig and brought up among and educated by Whigs, the move across parties would not have been too great a wrench for Palmerston. Already, when the Whig members had left the Goderich government in 1828, he had written to his brother: ‘I very sincerely regret their loss, as I like them much better than the Tories, and agree with them much more.’25 Palmerston had also demonstrated the necessary degree of liberalism to receive the call from Grey, through his stance on Catholic emancipation and strictures of the foreign policy of Wellington and Aberdeen. Still, he was decidedly marked out as different, and never considered as one of the Whig elite, the families whose ties stretched back to the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688.

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2 THE PAPER

John Walter, the founder of The Times, was born in the late 1730s to a country in thrall to its press. ‘All Englishmen are great newsmongers,’ wrote the visiting French author Cesar Saussure. ‘Workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms in order to read the latest news. I have often seen shoe blacks and other persons of that class club together to purchase a farthing paper.’1 They talked of scandals and gossip, but they discussed politics too as the press became the acknowledged tribune of the people. These newspapers, however, were far from unfettered bastions of the truth, as evidenced by the tens of thousands of pounds governments like those of Sir Robert Walpole pumped into nurturing a ‘whole family of ministerial writers’.2 Nevertheless, the power of the newspapers was such that one irate Member of Parliament (MP) complained in the Commons in 1738 how ‘the people of Great Britain are governed by a power that never was heard of as a supreme authority in any age or country before . . . it is the government of the press’.3 Walter was the son of a London coal merchant, and as a young man he followed his father into the business. He did well financially, becoming head of Walter, Bradley and Sage and chairman of the coal market. Later, after the coal business became less profitable, he joined Lloyds as an insurance underwriter. This second career failed completely and brought him close to bankruptcy. Surviving on a mixture of resilience, ingenuity and favours from friends, Walter

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turned his attention to printing and in 1782 patented a new logographic printing system that used whole words instead of single letters. Two years later he cobbled together enough money to purchase the Printing House Square premises in Blackfriars, and reopened it as the Logographic Press.4 Formerly the King’s Printing House and part-built on a site that was once a monastery, this was a red-brickfronted building ‘blackened by the smoke of the railway engines that cross[ed] Blackfriars Bridge’.5 Walter printed all manner of material from his new premises: books, pamphlets, the ‘Lloyd’s List’ of daily shipping news and items for the Customs Office. To further promote his logographic printing system he set up a newspaper, the Daily Universal Register, in 1785. Three years later a change of name saw The Times hit the streets of London. The Times of this early period (when it was just one of 13 morning, one evening, seven tri-weekly and two bi-weekly papers in London alone6) was not a particularly important member of the newspaper fraternity. Like numerous others, it received regular payments for supportive writings from the Tory government of William Pitt. By the end of the eighteenth century the printing side of Walter’s business had all but failed. The Times, meanwhile, was barely profitable and in danger of drifting out of existence. The newspaper was saved by the emergence of Walter’s second son, John Walter junior. The younger Walter focused almost exclusively on reviving and advancing The Times, great changes following quickly upon his elevation to the proprietor’s chair in 1803. Not yet 30 years old at the time, he brought a sounder business sense to the enterprise than either his father or elder brother William. He also added substance and style to the re-energized venture, hiring a better standard of writer like John Dyer Collier and Barron Field. He then made The Times among the first papers to break the ‘old corruption’ that had long existed between the press and the stage; charging theatre managers full price for advertisements, with the theatre critics of The Times in turn paying for their own seats and writing candid, often vicious, reviews. Such a move, daring at the time, was not lost on a purchasing public who were increasingly educated, politically minded and demanding of a press free of past corruptions.

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Walter treated the government in the same manner as the powerful theatre interests, determined that The Times throw off any lingering shackles of patronage to become an ‘independent spirit’ in the world of the press. This transformation did not derive solely from any moral judgement of Walter’s as to the evils of political interference, with oppositionist or independent papers, from The Craftsman of the 1730s to the North Briton and Monitor of the 1760s, having long out-performed transparent government rags. Articles opposing or criticizing Pitt cost the printing side of the business some lucrative government contracts but did not derail the development of The Times into a more independent, popular and powerful newspaper. Walter also proved a more far-sighted owner than his competitors; demonstrating a willingness to speculate to accumulate that would be a feature of his long tenure at The Times, he purchased two expensive new Koenig steam printing presses in 1814. This new machine revolutionized the hitherto slow and labourintensive printing process. Printing more than 1,000 sheets per hour, it reduced the time needed to print 3,000–4,000 copies – then the paper’s daily circulation – from ten hours to three, allowing The Times to go to press much later than its rivals and carry the most up-to-date news. As sales grew – doubling in little more than five years – the new machine allowed The Times to keep up with the increased demand. Walter paid his reporters quite well, with a job at The Times soon considered ‘one of the “plums” of the journalistic profession’. John Dyer Collier, for example, received £200 p.a., while his son John Payne Collier earned up to 210 guineas p.a. as a young parliamentary reporter. His attitude to the men working the presses was very different, with The Times refusing to employ trade union labour in an industry where ‘combinations’ or ‘unions’ of compositors and printers – skilled trades – had traditionally been strong. In 1810 he even prosecuted a number of striking compositors, 19 of whom were convicted and jailed. Indeed, it was Walter’s wariness of these manual workers – and the oft-repeated threats of pressmen to smash machines they saw (correctly) as a threat to their jobs – that saw him install the Koenig steam printing press in secret overnight on 28–29 November 1814.7

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During the latter years of the Napoleonic Wars, The Times continued to impress itself upon the reading public as a stimulating and untainted paper, particularly in the area of foreign affairs. To circumvent government interference with foreign news – through the Post Office that controlled the entry of continental newspapers into England and issued censored translations of important articles – Walter took to smuggling in copies of the major European papers. This led to his being approached by even Lord Castlereagh, then Foreign Secretary, for the latest information from Europe. The foreign news coverage of The Times, respected by public and rivals alike, was a source of much pride to its proprietor. Indeed, its foreign affairs reportage was often the jewel in the paper’s crown; the exploits in particular of William Howard Russell during the Crimean War are still lauded and recalled. The conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars found The Times, and the English press generally, in a strong position both materially and with regard to reputation. A report drawn up for the French Ambassador in London in 1817 described The Times as ‘unapproachable’; with ‘regard to corruption it is independent’. The writer did not foresee much chance of success elsewhere either, admitting that of the vast array of papers and periodicals on the English market, there ‘are scarcely four which would insert an article in our favour, for payment, of course’.8 Money had lost its monopoly on power, with the ever-increasing profits available from advertising lessening the need for papers to survive by way of government subsidies or bribes. Nevertheless, the information, favours and privileges that could be dispensed by governments and politicians remained compelling lures to many newspapers and journalists. Walter was fortunate insofar as he took control of The Times during a period of growth in literacy and newspaper readership. But it was his skills, determination and bravery that put it in a position to benefit from the increased advertising revenue that accompanied the rise in readership. The proliferation of newspapers around this time meant they could not all be successful. Nevertheless, it has been estimated that the average annual profits for those newspapers that won public favour quintupled from around £2,000 in the 1770s and 1780s

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to between £10,000 and £12,000 by the 1810s. The capital value of papers soared also, with the Morning Post being sold for £25,000 in 1803 where previously a couple of thousand or even a couple of hundred pounds might have sufficed.9 Such was the rude financial health of The Times – valued at £45,000 in 1819 – that the recently married Walter began to step back from his day-to-day involvement in the paper. From Blackfriars he turned his attention to Bear Wood, near Reading, and to the building of a grand country manor. The man who made The Times would become a respectable country gentleman.

Thomas Barnes John Walter junior took The Times from a failing enterprise to a popular and seemingly independent newspaper. The next shift for The Times, from newspaper to titan of the press, began in 1817 with the appointment of Thomas Barnes as editor. Barnes was born in 1785 and educated at Christ’s Hospital in London, where he was a friend and schoolfellow of the writer Leigh Hunt. Barnes, the son of a barrister, went next to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he was an impressive classicist and cricketer before returning to London in 1808 to pursue a legal career. The young Barnes, however, found himself drawn more to literature than the law. An admirer of Dante and Henry Fielding, it was not long before he took up with a number of literary acquaintances in what was a fertile environment for the imagination. Barron Field, another Christ’s Hospital man, was on the staff of The Times and introduced Barnes to Walter in 1809. With this meeting Barnes became an occasional contributor of theatre reviews. He also wrote parliamentary reports, spending long hours cramped in the public gallery of the Commons, struggling to take notes in the stifling conditions. It was around this time that Leigh Hunt and his brother, John, established a newspaper of their own, The Examiner, and a short-lived quarterly journal, The Reflector. Unsurprisingly, Barnes was soon contributing to these publications, as well as The Times, all the while extending his circle of literary friends and earning a reputation for both prodigious knowledge and equally prodigious drinking (of wine particularly), the latter of which contributed to an unhealthily

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growing girth, the leanness of youth long gone and his short body becoming plump. Another friend of Barnes’ at this time was Charles Lamb, co-author with his sister Mary of the still-popular Tales from Shakespeare. An early biographer of Lamb’s has depicted a scene from the mid-1810s where a small group of these high-minded friends, the London literati, were gathered to discuss the competing merits of the great writers of the world. At one point, long after midnight, Barnes and Lamb engaged each other amicably but determinedly: the ‘face of the advocate of Dante, heavy when in repose, grew bright with earnest admiration as he quoted images, sentiments, dialogues, against Lamb, who had taken his own immortal stand on Lear, and urged the supremacy of the child-changed father against all the possible Ugolinos of the world.’10 But it was not all an easy, intoxicating existence. In 1813 the Hunt brothers were imprisoned for nearly two years for libelling the Prince Regent. Barnes was to the fore of the friends who rallied around to keep The Examiner going. He visited Leigh Hunt in prison frequently, bringing him on one occasion a copy of William Wordsworth’s new poem The Excursion.11 Barnes was an admirer of Wordsworth, preferring his work immeasurably to that of another contemporary, Lord Byron. However, the strenuous efforts Barnes put into safeguarding the existence of The Examiner brought on extreme exhaustion. He would spend much of 1815 laid up with asthma and rheumatism. A happier offshoot of Barnes’ tireless work for The Examiner was the publication of a collection of his parliamentary sketches in book form. These pieces had all been signed anonymously as ‘Criticus’, and Barnes kept the pseudonym for the collection. Anonymity, in fact, was common practice at the time, with its proponents, Barnes included, believing it forced readers to consider the opinions offered on their own merits rather than on the reputation of their authors.12 Barnes did not paint a flattering picture of the Commons at work, portraying a place where about ‘half a dozen speakers, who have acquired a certain fluent mediocrity, are allowed to settle the disputed proposition with little knowledge and less spirit’, while the rest of the members were ‘idle and almost unconcerned hearers, sometimes yawning, sometimes sleeping, and sometimes, to evince perhaps their claims to sit in a speaking

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assembly, shouting in a style to be envied only by a Stentor or a whipper-in’.13 His greatest ire, though, was reserved for the Lords and ‘the acquiescing aristocracy, who slumber in scattered array on the crimson benches of their gaudier chamber’, his radical streak coming through in a denunciation of the Liverpool government and its attempts to move the country from constitutional monarchy to ‘mere monarchy’.14 Of the leading politicians of the day, Barnes was particularly damning of George Canning, whose self-important manner detracted even from the worthy causes he espoused, such as the Catholic emancipation movement Barnes and Hunt both supported.

‘An Event in Every Village’ Sobered perhaps by his long illness and the recent death of his father, from 1816 onwards Barnes eased up on his rather dissolute lifestyle and concentrated on his work at The Times. He impressed the proprietor and by late 1817 had supplanted the too-reactionary John Stoddart as editor. He changed the layout of the paper and made it even more serious than it had been before, focusing almost exclusively on finance, politics and diplomacy where other papers leavened this content with sports, travel writing and other non-news items. The post-war period in Britain was one of conflict, repression and economic distress. The very foundations of British society – the monarchy, parliament, freedom of speech and jury trials – seemed in a precarious position. Yet for all these ills it was perhaps a fortuitous moment for Barnes to assume control of The Times, as newspapers often achieved ‘elite status by supporting a radical opposition at a time when the old order is crumbling’.15 Britain’s middle classes were the (somewhat) radical opposition ready to appropriate the power of the old aristocracy, and The Times was the paper to most vociferously espouse the same causes they supported. The Times under Barnes was not a seriously radical journal in the manner of the Black Dwarf, The Republican or The Deist. Nevertheless, it was not slow to challenge the increasing heavy-handedness of the authorities, as clearly evidenced in its treatment of ‘Peterloo’ when the paper – whose reporter on the scene actually ended up spending a

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night in jail, having been seated on the same platform as the main speaker, Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt – denounced the callous authorities who had allowed ‘the King’s unarmed subjects’ to be ‘sabred by a body of cavalry in the streets of a town of which most were inhabitants, and in the presence of those Magistrates whose sworn duty it is to protect and preserve the life of the meanest Englishman’.16 Other papers were more sensationalist in their coverage of ‘Peterloo’, but it was the judicious, forthright and, most importantly, detailed reports of The Times that carried the greatest weight. Barnes had been the only editor of a national paper to send a reporter up to Manchester for the meeting, and an indication of his success in guiding the interests of The Times were the shares of stock and the pay rise he received from Walter before the year was out. The next major cause célèbre for The Times came with the death of George III in 1820 and the succession of the Prince Regent to the throne as George IV. The new king was a tremendously unloved figure, mocked and ridiculed in satirical prints by artists like George Cruikshank. The extent of the aversion in which the new monarch was held was made clear when Caroline of Brunswick, his estranged wife, refused an offer of £50,000 to renounce her title and instead returned from an extended Italian sojourn to try to take her place by the throne. Queen Caroline was cheered by crowds of thousands on every stage of her journey from Dover to London, and lauded in even the most radical of papers as the abandoned and unjustly accused wife of a profligate king. As George IV could not divorce Caroline without the consent of parliament, Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, instigated the necessary proceedings in the House of Lords. The debate in the Lords took the form of a quasi-trial with testimony and counsel on both sides. During the course of the celebrated ‘trial’ intimations were made of adultery on Caroline’s part while tawdry rumours raced through the country about what the king’s spies had discovered in following her throughout Europe. The public, however, saw through the smears and the scandal to the conniving of a duplicitous king who had long carried on affairs of his own.17 Taken out of context the Queen Caroline trial seems a curious event to cause such popular furore. The trial, though, and the media circus

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around it were a much-needed vent through which all hues of opposition could attack the rampantly repressive Liverpool government. For this reason the radical journalist William Cobbett was able to write reasonably of the trial that it ‘took possession of every house or cottage in the Kingdom’.18 The Times prevaricated at first, only taking up the Queen’s cause when the extent of public favour became clear. Barnes reported on the trial himself and through several connections with her counsel came into the receipt of vital documents that allowed him to furnish The Times with valued ‘scoops’, doubling the paper’s daily circulation to almost 15,000 in the process. Not even Cobbett, a wholehearted despiser of The Times, could deny the paper its due, acknowledging that its arrival ‘was looked upon as an event in every village, the Mails hardly travelled fast enough; and he who had the latest intelligence in his pocket was considered the happiest of mortals’.19 The inconclusive trial ended rather tamely with the withdrawal of the divorce bill by Liverpool. Caroline died shortly afterwards, having been kept away from George IV’s coronation at Westminster Abbey despite futile and embarrassing attempts to enter. This unfulfilling conclusion did not hinder the ascent of The Times, and as the climate of genuinely radical politics dipped in the 1820s, the paper kept in line with, and articulated the urges of, the ever more powerful, newlymoneyed middle and upper-middle classes. Barnes did not lurch toward the middle classes lecherously; his background and predilections ensured it was the only course he would take. He was a long-time proponent of political and franchise reform, his editorship ‘merely an institutional extension of the policies he was already following’.20 Barnes pursued a moderate, progressive policy, as distanced from radicals like Cobbett and Hunt as from the government of the ‘Six Acts’ notoriety. It was a course that appealed to and mirrored the tendencies of the broadening spectrum of people who, while opposed to revolution and political violence, still sought determinedly important measures of reform. His great success lay in granting them – to use a phrase of the famous French sociologist and wartime newspaper editor Raymond Aron – ‘not so much instruction or information as justification, that is to say a more eloquent statement of their prejudices than they can manage themselves’.21

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Having ingratiated itself with the middle classes, and indeed integrated itself into the lives of many, The Times now wholly prospered. Increased readership brought greater advertising revenue and consequently greater profits. The Times kept its readers loyal by way of innovations like free supplements (uneconomical for less successful papers) that complemented its offering purchasers the best by way of reliable news-gathering, literary ability and simple bulk – reducing its font size, adding columns and leading the trend to eight-page papers. A further factor in the success of The Times was the unusual lack of direct competition, for although there were plenty of newspapers on the market too many found themselves at the extremes of political feeling, either too Tory or too radical. Of real alternatives to The Times for the growing liberal audience, the Morning Chronicle was perhaps the best positioned. The Chronicle, however, lost its way after the death of its great editor, James Perry, in 1821, and so The Times roared on unimpeded. Still, the ability and acumen of the proprietor and editor cannot be disregarded as fundamental factors in the emergence of The Times as a truly dominant force in British society and politics. As the 1820s drew to a close, the empire of The Times only promised to expand further, with politicians from all parties expressing exasperation at the scale of secrets being leaked to Barnes. In some cases the line between whom was using whom in transactions between the informant and the paper was blurred, but the impression on the general reader was of a publication at the heart of events. On the big political question of the late 1820s, Catholic emancipation, The Times was wholly in tune with the reforming spirit. The campaign to repeal the Penal Laws that denied Catholics their civil rights was led in Ireland by the inspiring figure of Daniel O’Connell, but had support in Britain, too. Barnes, while sceptical of O’Connell, had long advocated concessions to the Catholics, a judgement reinforced by a trip to Ireland in the summer of 1828. Barnes was accompanied on this trip by Dinah Mary Mondet, his married partner, seven years his junior, with whom he had lived since 1821, the relationship eliciting any number of snide remarks from friends and enemies. Upon their return from Ireland, the editor wrote to a friend how ‘Mrs Barnes [as

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he referred to her] has, like myself, contracted a strong interest for the “green isle” and its inhabitants’.22 The emancipation issue came to a head in the spring of 1828 when O’Connell won a by-election in County Clare in the south-west of Ireland, even though Catholics were not allowed to sit in parliament. The Tory Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, while no enthusiast for emancipation, saw clear-headedly the need to grant civil rights and defuse a situation that in Ireland verged, he felt, on anarchy and war. The Times, in exchange for early notice of its progress, supported Wellington as he guided a Catholic emancipation bill through the Commons and Lords during the first months of 1829, both the Duke and the paper being accused of ‘popery’ by the more intransigent Tories. The Times kept up this support even after the bill was made law, receiving for its trouble considerable favour from the Foreign Office. With O’Connell appeased, The Times and its constituency of readers turned their attention to the bigger prize of parliamentary reform. The middle strata of society, the professional and commercial classes, had supplanted the ‘old order’ of the landed aristocracy as the major power base of Britain but remained sorely underrepresented in parliament. The Times championed change and it was this strident campaign for parliamentary reform that bequeathed the paper the impressive moniker of ‘The Thunderer’. Barnes, for his part, had long been alert to the ills of the system, decrying in his Parliamentary Portraits the ‘silent vote bought in silence’, and complaining of how the Commons ‘only assumes the character of being popular; and, while it pretends to regulate its decisions by deliberate wisdom, in fact listens only to the voice of power’.23

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3 OR IGINS OF ANIMOSIT Y

The 1830s began tumultuously across Britain and Europe. In France, the ‘July Revolution’ propelled Louis-Philippe of the Orléans dynasty onto the throne, the deposed Charles X finding sanctuary in Lulworth Castle in Dorset in England. This fresh French revolt did not carry the same vast consequences as 1789 but there were, nonetheless, serious uprisings in Poland and Belgium in its aftermath. Russian forces viciously quashed the rebellion in poor, partitioned Poland, sending a wave of political exiles to Paris and London. The revolt in Belgium, united with Holland since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, proved more durable and eventually led to independence. In Britain an alarmed Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, warned government colleagues of how the ‘success of the Mobs’ in Paris and Brussels had led to a renewed spirit of unrest in large cities like Manchester, where a colliers’ strike forced the closure of cotton mills.1 In the rural districts of the south-east of the realm, the latest in a succession of crop failures precipitated months of disturbances – including machine-breaking and arson – amongst impoverished farm labourers. This riotous behaviour was the work of the mysterious ‘Captain Swing’, the name that signed the threatening letters sent to farmers about to have their threshing machines smashed up. The obese, unloved George IV also died during the summer of 1830, to be succeeded by his brother, the Duke of Clarence, who ruled as William IV.

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The accession of William IV necessitated a general election in Britain during which parliamentary reform emerged as a major issue, the increasingly confident middle classes demanding a greater say in the running of the country. The Whigs, under the leadership of the able but ageing Lord Grey, propounded some measure of reform while the Tories, led by the Duke of Wellington, opposed any changes to the electoral system. As an impetuous young MP, Grey had actually presented a motion for parliamentary reform as far back as 1793. Long demoralizing years of opposition had quelled his zeal a great deal in the intervening period; nevertheless, Grey remained a respected politician and eloquent speaker. When the Tories were finally ousted from power in the middle of November, William IV called on Grey to form the first Whig government for more than 20 years.

Thundering for Reform Through the machinations of the Scottish lawyer and politician Henry Brougham, The Times formed an alliance of sorts with the incoming Whig government of Lord Grey. It supported the government’s efforts towards parliamentary reform – the (limited) extension of the franchise and a realignment of seats from ‘rotten boroughs’ in the gift of local aristocrats to new centres of population like Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds – and encouraged its readers to ‘come forward and petition, ay, thunder for reform’.2 Brougham, one of the founders of influential political and literary magazine the Edinburgh Review, was an enigmatic, eccentric character some seven years older than Barnes. But he was also a serious and dynamic reformer who had been an acquaintance of the editor’s from at least the early 1810s, when he had represented Leigh Hunt at an important libel trial.3 The two men had collaborated most notably in 1820 during the infamous ‘trial’ of Queen Caroline. It was a mutually beneficial relationship, with Brougham, the queen’s chief counsel, passing on documents to be printed exclusively in The Times and Barnes, in turn, providing a commanding platform for the shamelessly self-publicizing Brougham. As the Tory hold on power began to weaken during the last years of the 1820s, Barnes and Brougham remained close and conspiring.

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Brougham’s election as the reform candidate for Yorkshire in 1830 was one of the most emblematic of the campaign. Like Palmerston, the flamboyant Brougham was not entirely trusted by the Whig elite. He was, however, too powerful a figure to be ignored and was appointed Lord Chancellor. Palmerston, as one of the four Canningites (seceders from the Tory party) whose support Grey needed to form a government, had also to be accommodated. He was appointed Foreign Secretary. The Times gave warm approval to the new ministry at first, Barnes and Brougham meeting frequently at the editor’s house to concoct leading articles on reform. In one letter from this period, the editor told Brougham he expected ‘to be at home tomorrow from 4 to 5. If any body shall be with me, I will take care that you have a separate room.’4 The 49 Nelson Square abode, a fine three-storey affair with distinctive bow windows set in the middle of a line of handsome residential buildings, was just five minutes’ walk from Printing House Square. Barnes’s growing importance in political circles was clearly illustrated by the parade of ministers and statesmen who passed through its doors; Sir John Cam Hobhouse (later Lord Broughton) and Lord Durham, the Prime Minister’s son-in-law, were just two of the leading Whigs to pay visits to the house for political dialogue or Saturday evening dinner parties where venison, turtle and ‘the richest wines’ were all consumed. Barnes kept in touch with his old artistic, bohemian side by inviting poets and playwrights to these soirées as well.5 Derek Hudson, the editor’s biographer, has described how Barnes and Brougham felt that they were in control of the very ‘destiny of the country’ during the early months of 1831.6 Reform was the all-encompassing topic of the day and the offices of The Times were flooded with petitions pouring in from all parts of the country. Revolution was prophesied in the sheets of radical newspapers and the Duke of Wellington, the hero of Waterloo, was jeered at on the streets and had the windows of his London home broken with stones. The government and The Times, however, were advocates of a moderate rather than a revolutionary reform, the newspaper repelled by the idea of universal suffrage that would bring ‘the dregs’ of the populace into parliament.7 Barnes gave little succour, too, to the struggling

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farm workers, whose desperate plight had pushed them to machinebreaking, The Times callously labelling them ‘an evil upon society’.8 Nor were the Whigs keen to be seen as sympathetic to the rural rioters, executing a number of men and transporting almost 500 to the convict colonies of Australia.9 Relations between the government and The Times began to sour when the passage of legislation for parliamentary reform dragged on much longer than the paper expected; the Whigs hampered both by internal divisions and by the Tory-dominated House of Lords. The editor feared a watering-down of proposals and insisted in print on ‘the Bill, the whole Bill and nothing but the Bill’ – a famous phrase originally coined by John Rintoul of The Spectator. In October 1831 the rejection of an early draft of the reform bill by the Lords precipitated riots in Derby, Nottingham and Bristol. A few weeks later, on Bonfire Night, bishops who had voted against the bill in the Lords were burnt in effigy in place of Guy Fawkes.10 The Whigs were not moving fast enough for either The Times or the country as a whole. The early enthusiasm of the paper began to wane and, while some semblance of an alliance was maintained on account of the reform bill, a frustrated Barnes began to turn upon members of the government. Palmerston’s long Tory past and lukewarm support for reform made him a natural target.

‘Our Zealous Friend’ Palmerston had failed to find favour with The Times in either his Tory or Canningite guises. In 1820, when Secretary at War, The Times complained how his mismanagement of that department made the army ‘a perfect gulf in which the natural resources are swallowed up’.11 More criticisms followed and in 1827 the paper deemed ‘ridiculous’ the idea that the then Prime Minister, George Canning, would make him Chancellor.12 The following year there were clear insinuations of nepotism in articles discussing the promotion of Palmerston’s brotherin-law, Laurence Sulivan, at the War Office.13 Palmerston was treated more favourably, however, when appointed Foreign Secretary. He benefited from the general benevolence with which The Times treated the

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new government at first and was said to have ‘long experience at the head of a difficult department’ and ‘liberal politics with regard to foreign affairs’.14 Having immersed himself in foreign affairs for the previous couple of years, Palmerston was well-primed to grasp the opportunity when finally presented with the seals of the Foreign Office. He was 46 years old and in high office at last, away from minor power struggles over army minutiae and thrust instead into that grand diplomatic arena of Talleyrand and Metternich. He was eager to make his presence felt, both at the Foreign Office buildings in Downing Street – uprooting the lazy, languorous habits of some of the staff and prohibiting them from smoking at their desks – and on the wider European stage. The clerks worked longer days under Palmerston as he met with envoys and drafted innumerable dispatches to representatives abroad. The new Foreign Secretary led by example though, unstinting in his hours and writing how he was ‘ever since my appointment like a man who has plumped into a mill-race, scarcely able by all his kicking and plunging to keep his head above water’.15 Yet Palmerston managed to maintain a hectic social life, actually adding to it with the interminable rounds of dinner parties that were so essential to the conduct of international affairs. It was from this point in his career that Palmerston began to really focus on the press, both as a means of establishing himself in the public mind and as a way to bring public opinion – which like Barnes, Brougham and a majority of contemporaries he saw generally as middle-class opinion – on to the side of his policies. There had been little need to play the press during his long tenure as Secretary at War. Foreign affairs, however, required a greater cognizance of the press than most other departments, as newspapers linked with certain politicians or factions were read avidly in the capitals of Europe and served as unofficial channels of communication between foreign ministers.16 Palmerston was alert, too, to the gains that could be wrought from a positive press profile in the internecine battles within Cabinet. He proved quickly adept at press management, writing or suggesting articles for a wide variety of newspapers. He also forged links with a number of writers for the Edinburgh Review and had speeches he

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delivered in parliament, on topics from Spanish to German to Chinese affairs, published as pamphlets and translated and distributed across both the country and continent.17 Palmerston was far from the only member of the Whig government to involve himself with the press, but he proved the most consistent, persistent and successful. Palmerston had some limited correspondence with The Times during his first years at the Foreign Office, attempting in 1833 to advise on ‘the tone for The Times to take’ on the civil war then raging in Portugal.18 However, no durable relationship was formed and Palmerston focused instead on newspapers like The Courier, an evening paper he already had some contact with. He later made use of both The Globe and the Morning Chronicle, and as the tone of The Times toward the government became more hostile gave clear preference to these publications in Foreign Office communications. For a period, Palmerston even ensured that more copies of the vastly less popular Globe were sent abroad than The Times.19 By the summer of 1831, with the relationship between the government and The Times starting to fray, Barnes was complaining to his confidant Brougham about articles in The Globe ‘by Lord Palmerston or his secretary [George Shee] about our correspondent’. The editor was not particularly worried, however, and felt that he held the upper hand in the dispute, commenting: ‘Our zealous friend has given us a furious puff which of course I have struck out.’20 Nevertheless, considering the country on the cusp of reform and the place of The Times in the vanguard of that epochal agitation (its circulation swelling toward 30,000 and its fame attracting tourists and powerful visitors to Printing House Square) it is not hard to imagine some ego of Barnes’s on behalf of the newspaper. Parity with, let alone inferiority to, other publications would not suffice. Thus, within a very short time of the Grey government coming to power, Palmerston – one of the politicians most willing to consort with the press – and The Times – the leading journal of the period – found themselves essentially foes. This state of bad feeling was exacerbated by the poor opinion held of Palmerston by political intriguers, such as the famous diarist Charles Greville, who had some influence at The Times. Greville’s

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family connections and sensitive position as Clerk of the Privy Council placed him at the heart of high-political society. He exerted his influence through vicarious means and was throughout the 1830s a prime source of information for Barnes.21 His anonymous communications were signed simply ‘B’ and channelled to Printing House Square through the hands of the socialite and journalist Henry de Ros, a friend of the editor of The Times. Greville was initially content with Palmerston’s performance at the Foreign Office, writing in December 1830 how he was ‘said to have given the greatest satisfaction to the foreign Ministers and to have begun very well’. Such matters of etiquette and diplomatic courtesy were important to Greville, who could be quite the staid civil servant when he chose. His opinion quickly turned sour when Palmerston’s behaviour failed to match up to the expected standards of discerning statesmanship. One of Greville’s criticisms actually shows up a worthy egalitarianism of Palmerston’s – his ‘custom of receiving all his numerous visitors and applicants in the order in which they arrived, be their rank what it may’ was unseemly in the eyes of the snobbish diarist. Regarding Palmerston’s amorous liaisons, among the many irate and frustrated scribbles in Greville’s diaries can be found the following comment: ‘He spends his time making love to Mrs [Laura Maria] Petre, whom he takes to the House of Commons to hear speeches which he does not make, and where he exhibits his conquest.’22 For James Chambers, a recent biographer of Palmerston’s, the 21-year-old Mrs Petre was his ‘last great fling’.23 The damage, however, had been done, Greville providing a constant carping voice to fuel the antipathy of The Times.

A Pyrrhic Alliance Despite the faltering nature of the alliance between the government and The Times, they still managed to combine efforts on reform, especially when faced with Tory opposition in the Lords.24 The eventual passage of the Reform Act in June 1832 removed that mutual interest and the waning alliance ruptured further. Barnes grew disillusioned with the direction of government policy and sensed a shift in the

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public mood against the Whigs. The Whigs, for their part, felt that the paper had been gratuitous and unfair in its remarks on individual members of the government, including Grey, who was accused of nepotism.25 Sir Denis Le Marchant, private secretary to Brougham and a chief intermediary between the Whigs and the press, also highlighted complaints from Barnes about the ‘want of confidence placed in the paper by the Administration’. The editor, according to Le Marchant, threatened to withhold support from the government ‘unless he had our entire confidence and the full share of patronage in advertisements, &c’. The Whig elite were ‘much disgusted’ at the ‘tone’ of the paper. Nevertheless, and as an indication of the intense power of The Times, its hostility was deemed a matter ‘of the highest importance’.26 The Reform Act increased the electorate of the United Kingdom by almost a quarter of a million men (although the vast majority of the population remained disenfranchised and thorny issues like the secret ballot and female suffrage went untouched).27 The Times hailed the triumph of the ‘cause of truth and justice’ and celebrations took place across the country.28 In the elections that followed a few months later Palmerston was returned for the constituency of South Hampshire, his previous seat at Bletchingley in Surrey among more than 80 rotten boroughs to have been eliminated. The reformed parliament was not at first markedly different from its predecessors, and the primacy of the aristocracy was maintained. One new representative was the 56-year-old John Walter of The Times. Commended by the electors of Berkshire for his ‘abilities, character, and well-known principles as a reformer’, he took the third and final seat in the December poll.29 Walter had sold most of his shares in the paper in 1819 (including some to Barnes), focusing instead on the construction of his Bear Wood estate near Reading in Berkshire and the joys of the life of a country gentleman. He retained a large staff, was popular with locals and held regular agricultural fêtes. Nevertheless, Walter’s withdrawal from the paper was not total; he still owned the premises on which The Times was located as well as the printing business – both profitable interests. Elected to parliament as a supporter of the Whigs, the independentminded Walter was never truly subsumed within that fold.30

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As became a self-proclaimed reforming ministry, the Whigs were quick to push through some more important legislation, introducing a Factory Act that regulated the hours and conditions that children worked and abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire. (Palmerston was later to the fore of efforts to suppress the international slave trade, concluding treaties with powers such as France and Mexico that included the right of mutual search.) They foundered though on issues relating to Ireland, the Cabinet divided over how best to respond to increased disturbances in that staunchly Catholic country over the forced payment of tithes (taxes) to the Protestant Church. One section urged suppression, firm measures and emergency powers; the other a more remedial and conciliatory approach.31 In May 1834 four members of the government finally resigned over Irish policy, a dispirited and 70-year-old Grey following shortly thereafter. The Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne, brother of Palmerston’s chief paramour, Emily Cowper, assumed the mantle of Prime Minister for four months. Barnes called the Irish coercion bill a ‘tyrannical bill which will make Ireland the permanent enemy of England’.32 Another issue with which The Times was aggrieved (and against which John Walter spoke strongly in the Commons) was the New Poor Law. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 (as the New Poor Law was officially known) is seen today as one of the foundation blocks of modern social welfare policy.33 It was, however, quite controversial at the time of its enactment, centralizing the administration of a hitherto diffuse and disorganized poor relief system that had been in the hands of local magistrates since Elizabethan times. It introduced workhouses for the poor that separated husband from wife and parent from child, prisonlike workhouses where the eponymous child-hero of Oliver Twist asked gingerly for ‘some more’.34 Opponents of the legislation ranged from Radicals to paternalist (often Tory) MPs. Walter, although elected as a Whig, was very firmly in the paternalist camp. He called the new measures ‘harsh’, ‘cruel’ and ‘totally unaccommodating to the feelings of the poor’, and even published a pamphlet against them to his constituents in Berkshire.35 His efforts were in vain and the legislation passed easily into law.

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The increasingly fraught correspondence between Le Marchant and Barnes soon found the editor denouncing again the repressive ‘Coercion Bill which has made a breach never to be repaired between Ireland and England’ and the harsh ‘Poor [Law] Bill which will sow the seeds of perpetual enmity between the Poor and the Rich in England’. Barnes was genuinely aggrieved by these measures, asking: ‘Why cannot we be secure that your good Bills will pass, as well as your bad ones?’ He insisted that the paper did not ‘turn against the Ministers in any spirit of wanton levity’, and stressed how he had ‘never experienced more painful sensations’ in his life than ‘during the last week when I found myself compelled by a sense of duty to the Paper to attack those whom I have always wished to be able to serve’.36 Nevertheless, Barnes’s displeasure with the government became so great he even attacked his old ally, the increasingly erratic Brougham (who had earlier secured for Barnes’s brother, John, a position at the Bankruptcy Court), in so violent a manner it has been described by an otherwise admiring biographer as ‘not an attractive passage in Barnes’s life’.37 Palmerston was another regular source of displeasure, the paper castigating his choice of diplomatic agents, in particular Lord Howard de Walden, the British Ambassador in Lisbon.38 These complaints, however, do not seem to have been motivated by any genuine opposition to Palmerston’s policies, as The Times actually defended the Foreign Secretary from Tory attack in early 1834.39 Barnes, it seems, was irritated by what he deemed to be some sort of harassment of his paper’s correspondent in Portugal, stating: ‘I have no wish to have any communications with the foreign office – indeed would rather decline it till Shee makes an apology for his abuse of our Lisbon Correspondent.’40 He was also put out by Palmerston’s repeated neglect of The Times with regard to the dissemination of foreign news. As he wrote to Le Marchant: ‘Lord Palmerston ought certainly to communicate any important intelligence: but he does not. Occasionally that very good natured but useless person Sir G. Shee sends a paragraph – but generally long after we have the news from some other quarter.’41 This complaint shows that no matter

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how successful The Times was at obtaining foreign news, connections with government were still extremely helpful. By the spring of 1834 Barnes was agitating openly for Lord Durham – ‘a man of such decided ability and such manly and open bearing’ – to replace Palmerston at the Foreign Office.42 In June that year (a few months prior to the Whig government being dismissed by the king) The Times printed one of its most celebrated lines against Palmerston: ‘What an offensive union is that of a dull understanding and an unfeeling heart: add to this, the self-satisfied airs of a flippant dandy, and you have the most nauseous specimen of humanity – a sort of compound which justifies Swift in the disgusting exhibition of his Yahoos.’43 That Barnes’s was the pen behind these words seems clear from a letter written several years earlier that also referred to the Foreign Secretary’s ‘dull understanding’ and ‘cold heart’.44 Major objections, however, to the principles of Palmerston’s foreign policy were not on view in this article, which dealt instead with his handling of the murder of a British citizen in Spain. Barnes was bitter because he believed Palmerston was not giving his all (all his intelligence, all his opinions, all his decisions) to the by now Pyrrhic alliance between the government and The Times. The origins of the rivalry did not lie, as the official history of The Times has claimed, in ‘the lukewarmness of Palmerston’s Liberalism and his unwillingness to champion small nationalities’.45 Palmerston, in fact, had given a decidedly more liberal slant to British foreign policy than his immediate Tory predecessors, supporting the liberals in the civil wars in Spain and Portugal and allying with France to create a constitutionalist-monarchist counterpoint to the so-called Holy Alliance of Austria, Russia and Prussia. He also presided successfully over the long-running forum that led to the creation of the modern Belgian state. Rather, it seems a latent distrust of the former Tory, combined with a general backlash against the Whig government of Lord Grey, combined to place Palmerston at the fore of the paper’s vituperation. Palmerston’s retaliatory actions – the withholding of Foreign Office inducements and harsh attacks on The Times in rival papers – cemented the enmity and ensured its long-standing nature.

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‘Irish Blarney’ Palmerston’s dealings with the press pre-dated by many years his first entering the Foreign Office and it has been speculated that he contributed to the then Tory-supporting Courier as early as 1806, the year he was first elected to parliament.46 A decade later he certainly authored a number of humorous pieces for that paper.47 By 1817 Palmerston was writing confidently to his brother-in-law how any article sent to The Courier ‘with a note & my comp[limen]ts’ would be inserted immediately.48 Two years later, in 1819, The Courier published a ‘paragraph’ of his defending the Liverpool government in the aftermath of ‘Peterloo’.49 In 1829, meanwhile, Palmerston went to the trouble of writing a letter of complaint from Paris to the lowly, regional Colchester Gazette & Herald.50 The issues involved are not clear in the correspondence but it is the industry demonstrated by Palmerston that is noteworthy. The attention Palmerston gave to the press increased dramatically once he was appointed Foreign Secretary, his schooling at Edinburgh under Professor Dugald Stewart having primed him intellectually to pay heed to the growing power of the press and public opinion. At first Palmerston continued to make use of The Courier, which now supported the Whigs.51 The Courier, like all of London’s evening papers, had experienced its greatest days during the latter years of the Napoleonic Wars, when it had a circulation of over 8,000.52 It was in decline in the 1830s, selling around than 2,000 copies a day, but still important politically. It was in relation to The Courier that Palmerston made the oft-quoted remark, taken by many historians as a fair gauge to his relations with the press, that ‘I could get him [the editor] to insert any article I wished today but I have no means or power of preventing him from inserting any other of quite a different kind tomorrow. I can impel but I cannot control.’53 By 1832 The Globe, another evening paper, had replaced The Courier as the Foreign Secretary’s paper of choice for timely leaks of information and responses to articles printed against him in other journals. The Times was a regular target, leading an infuriated Barnes to protest against ‘the gross personal attacks in the Globe sanctioned by Lord Palmerston and written indeed by Sir George Shee under his

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direction’.54 Palmerston’s ties with another paper, the Morning Chronicle, were even more beneficial than those he enjoyed with The Globe. David Brown has contrasted neatly the manner in which Palmerston treated the two papers; whereas he often dictated to The Globe, his letters to the more successful Chronicle ‘were friendly and contained much useful political intelligence’.55 Information was exchanged on an equal basis with the owner and editors of the Chronicle, news having long since overtaken money as the commodity of most value to papers. The Morning Chronicle, Whig-leaning since its inception in 1769, had enjoyed its greatest success during the early part of the nineteenth century under the ownership and editorship of James Perry.56 Perry’s death, however, in 1821, presaged a swift and severe fall in its fortunes. In 1834, with the supposed alliance with The Times clearly foundering, the Whigs turned their attention again to the Chronicle in the search for a more stable press ally. A syndicate of Whig businessmen, led by John Easthope, purchased the ailing Chronicle in May of that year. The Whigs were encouraged, perhaps, by the success of the Penny Magazine, launched in 1832 under the auspices of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, a society founded by, amongst others, the government ministers Lord Brougham and Lord John Russell.57 The new Chronicle was closely aligned to the Whig government, and according to Greville ‘[Sir John Cam] Hobhouse, [Lord] Normanby, [Charles] Poulett Thomson, Le Marchant, and several others, wrote day after day a succession of good articles which soon renovated the paper and set it on its legs.’58 Other new writers on the quickly improving paper included a young parliamentary reporter named Charles Dickens who remembered its Scottish editor John Black in later years as ‘my first hearty out-and-out appreciator’.59 The revitalized Chronicle was soon rivalling The Times in a manner not seen since the 1810s. The editor of the Chronicle was far closer to Brougham than Palmerston but this did not hinder the Foreign Secretary. Through Joseph Parkes, a Birmingham solicitor and important Whig advisor, he was introduced to the chief proprietor Easthope, an MP and successful businessman who earned the nickname ‘Blast-hope’ from employees at the Chronicle.60 It was not long before Easthope was consulting with Palmerston as to the selection of correspondents for

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Paris and Brussels.61 Palmerston had close contact, too, with Michael Joseph Quin, the Irish-born foreign editor of the paper who had come to prominence in the 1820s as a translator and travel writer. In the summer of 1834, Quin, adorned with letters of introduction from the Foreign Secretary, set off for Europe to arrange ‘an extensive system of foreign correspondence’. Palmerston also instructed the embassies in Europe to assist the Chronicle as much as possible and help it compete with The Times in the transmission of foreign news. In return, Quin’s articles on foreign affairs often amounted to little more than what Parkes described as ‘Irish blarney’ about Palmerston and ‘ill-judged & vulgar abuse’ of The Times.62 The resurgent Chronicle seemed a genuine threat to The Times for a period in the mid-to-late 1830s, its circulation increasing dramatically under the new regime before falling off again. Unsurprisingly, the two newspapers were quickly engaged in a war of words.63 Barnes complained to Le Marchant how through ‘their well-known organs the Chronicle and the Globe they [the Whigs] began the attack upon us in the most unqualified personal abuse’. The accusations against The Times, Barnes remonstrated, were ‘as infamous . . . as if I had been accused of picking pockets’.64 That The Times had for years already acted as though the alliance with the Whigs was a nonentity, attacking various persons and policies, did not diminish Barnes’s somewhat self-righteous pontificating. When The Times absconded from the supposed alliance to proclaim unhappily upon some aspect of the Whig ministry it was considered evidence of independence. The Times could be independent of the government but the government, to Barnes’s mind, could not be independent of The Times.

‘The Most Powerful Man in the Country’ The events surrounding the Tory return to power in November 1834, under the leadership of Sir Robert Peel, have been termed ‘the climax of Barnes’s career’.65 The editor’s newfound willingness to favour the Tory cause – after a lifetime of opposition – has been ascribed to ‘a mature consideration of the best interests of the

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country’.66 Peel was also seen as the face of a new, more liberal Toryism. The high level of personal rancour involved in the fallingout with the Whigs, however, was surely another significant factor in the conversion. John Walter, too, was on the verge of switching his parliamentary allegiance to the Tories, and he would play an important role in the formulation of Peel’s ‘Tamworth Manifesto’ – the new Prime Minister’s address to the country outlining the progressive principles of his administration.67 Barnes and the paper were thus following closely the political trajectory of the erstwhile owner. This can be seen simply as evidence that the editor and Walter were well matched in mind. However, it also raises some question marks over Walter’s oft-repeated claims to have had no influence at The Times once elected an MP. Greville, although susceptible to exaggerating his own importance in matters when writing (and rewriting) his diaries, played a crucial role in the establishment of the new alliance between the Tories and The Times. His first act was to surreptitiously approach the Duke of Wellington, who was overseeing the government in the time it took Peel to return from a family holiday in Italy. The perpetual political insider asked if the duke had seen The Times recently, suggesting that ‘there appeared in it a considerable disposition to support the new Government’ and that ‘it would be very advisable to obtain that support if it could be done’. Wellington replied that ‘he was aware that he had formerly too much neglected the press, but he did not think The Times could be influenced. I urged him to avail himself of any opportunity to try, and he seemed very well disposed to do so.’ Greville (who did not actually meet Barnes face-to-face until 1838) then turned his attention to Lord Lyndhurst, the Lord Chancellor-designate, who ‘desired nothing so much’ as the support of The Times. ‘I told him I had some acquaintance with Barnes, the editor of the paper, and would find out what he was disposed to do, and would let him know, which he entreated I would.’68 The Tories, without a majority in the House of Commons, were alert to the value of a powerful press ally. Greville, whose brother Algernon was the duke’s private secretary, was a major conduit to the negotiations, walking freely in and out of the Home Office

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where Wellington was ensconced. Other channels of communication between the government and Barnes included Sir James Scarlett, the Attorney General in previous Tory administrations and a legal adviser to The Times. Henry de Ros, a close friend of both Greville and Barnes, was another vital go-between. The Tories quickly agreed to Barnes’s demand that there would be no roll-back on important reforms made by the Whigs and Greville was soon noting contentedly how ‘Barnes is to dine with Lyndhurst, and a gastronomic ratification will wind up the treaty between these high contending parties’. It was about this time that Lyndhurst declared somewhat spuriously of Barnes that he was ‘the most powerful man in the country’.69 The stature of journalists and journalism had improved markedly in the 50 years since the foundation of The Times. The owners of the largest-selling papers, both in London and the regions, had become wealthy individuals and some of the best-known writers were now deemed ‘clubbable’ men, Barnes for one being elected to the Athenaeum in 1830. Nevertheless, social prejudices remained, Le Marchant confiding to his diary one night after dining at Nelson Square: ‘Our hostess was vulgarity personified. Writing as these men do with spirit and taste, feeling as they do and more than they ought, their ascendancy in society, still they cannot associate with gentlemen without shewing signs of conscious inferiority. When Barnes lays down his pen he becomes a child.’70 The newspapers, however, could not be ignored by even the most reluctant of politicians. The Duke of Wellington, therefore, in the words of a political opponent, ‘paid his court to “King Press” before he kissed [the] hands of King William’.71 At one point during the negotiations with Wellington, Barnes outlined the terms on which The Times would support the incoming government. Unsurprisingly, these included ‘no mutilation of the Reform Bill’. More interesting, and demonstrating that Barnes’s aversion to Palmerston did not arise from the latter’s policies, was the requirement that the Tories make ‘no change in our foreign policy’.72 Nevertheless, not even the powerful backing of The Times could mask the fact that the Tories were a minority government. Peel’s ministry resigned in early April 1835, to be replaced by the Whigs still under

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the leadership of Lord Melbourne. Palmerston returned to the Foreign Office.

The Palmerston Press In 1830, Palmerston had been one of the few ministers with recent experience of running a government department. That did not mean he had full control over foreign policy, with the Whig elders Lords Grey, Lansdowne and Holland all believing they had a certain role to play in its formulation. Palmerston had more freedom of action under his good friend (and soon to be brother-in-law) Melbourne. There would be no more decision-making by consensus; Palmerston would rule his office alone. His press contacts, too, grew to match his increased authority. The London papers remained vitally important and Palmerston continued to pass early intelligence of diplomatic events on to the Morning Chronicle.73 He also maintained some influence as to the choice of writers on foreign topics and became friendly with Andrew Doyle, the new foreign editor of the paper, furnishing him with information to attack and embarrass The Times.74 He also furnished the Chronicle’s correspondents abroad with letters of introduction to British ambassadors and embassy staff.75 The Globe remained another vital organ of Palmerstonian policy and propaganda. In general, Palmerston would author long notes on foreign questions to be inserted verbatim, or almost so.76 The Globe was also used to rebut and respond to articles in other papers, including the Morning Herald and, of course, The Times.77 Alternatively, the Foreign Secretary could write to the editor of The Globe enclosing an article from that day’s issue with passages underlined and a note stating, for instance, ‘that though the most of this article about the [ship] Caroline is well written, the Parts underlined are calculated to do mischief’.78 Suggestions on how to undo such mischief were duly proffered. Of the capital’s other dailies, the normally Tory-supporting Standard also fell into Palmerston’s orbit for a period.79 The Standard, indeed, was ‘in disgrace with the conservative leaders . . . for its support of Palmerston’s conduct of foreign policy’.80

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Palmerston kept an equally watchful eye on newspaper developments in provincial southern England, close to his large Broadlands estate in Hampshire. He was approached about the possibility of establishing a local paper for Tiverton in Devon (his constituency from 1835) that the correspondent – an F. Price – would edit. Palmerston, Price hoped, would ‘support and patronize the undertaking in its infancy’.81 Palmerston did not commit any money to Price’s venture but may have given as much as £1,000 to a former Morning Chronicle reporter, John Wheeler, to help set up the Hampshire Independent in 1835.82 He also provided the small papers of his region with some political information, meeting a request for intelligence from the proprietor of Southampton’s Atlas with a note stating: ‘Lord Palmerston will with pleasure accede to the wishes of Mr. Whiting as expressed in his letter of the 2nd & will be glad to communicate with him whenever he wishes.’83 Small favours, too, as well as information, were dispensed to local newspapermen and helped ensure a positive press profile in the area.84 As Foreign Secretary, Palmerston had to pay a great deal of attention to the European, and especially French, newspapers – ‘Lend this to Mr Black of Chronicle and suggest it would be useful to publish an Extract of Part beginning at “l’angleterre a . . . obstacle serieux.”’85 The tentacles of the Palmerston press grew longer still and through Sir George Shee, his former Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office newly appointed to a diplomatic position in Germany, Palmerston gained some influence over German papers. The Augsburg Gazette, for example, was ‘desirous to open their columns to the advocacy of British policy’ and ‘willing to insert papers, written in favour of Great Britain, in every political question in which . . . Her Majesty’s Government may be interested, including those in which Austria and Greece may be involved’.86 Thus, should he choose so, Palmerston had a voice at the very centre of the continent. Palmerston also made sure to be on good terms with a number of the English foreign correspondents on the continent. From Istanbul, for example, in 1835, Sandison of the Morning Post informed the recently returned Foreign Secretary of ‘some of the news and speculations afloat there’.87 In France, Palmerston could rely on the

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assistance of Joseph Gibbons Merle, formerly of The Courier but now Paris correspondent for The Globe and editor of Galignani’s Messenger. Merle was a useful antidote to articles against France in the Chronicle, which could occasionally (depending on the state of Anglo-French relations) be too forceful, one piece from the Messenger reading: ‘We may take this opportunity of saying, once for all, that Lord Palmerston has no more to do with such [Morning Chronicle] articles as those alluded to than the editor of the Constitutionnel himself.’88 In his covering letter to Palmerston, Merle stated: ‘This is not the first time that I have endeavoured to remove the impression that the articles of the Morning Chronicle upon France are under your Lordships influence.’89 A number of coalescing factors ensured journalists and editors were pleased, eager even, to support Palmerston and his policies. While newspapers like The Times had shown the great profits that could be won from a perceived political independence, it could still be good for business to be linked to a powerful and popular minister, Le Marchant noting in 1834 how Palmerston’s obvious patronage of The Globe gave ‘it a circulation on the continent beyond that of any other Journal’.90 Less materialistic factors were also involved in Palmerston’s popularity with the press. He treated journalists frankly and generously, altering the timing of his speeches to suit their deadlines and supplying them with notes in advance of meetings, common practice now but innovative at the time. According to the historian Jeremy Black: ‘When he stood for Tiverton in 1837, Palmerston made arrangements for the press to come from London, be well sited during his speech, lodged for the night, and for their return to London.’91 That such an effort was unusual can be surmised from the miserly conditions afforded to journalists in the House of Commons – the very heart of the political system and workplace of so many reporters – where they were consigned to the ill-lit back bench of the public gallery, packed tightly together and barely able to hear what was taking place on the floor of the chamber far below.92 There were other ways, too, in which Palmerston went out of his way to accommodate journalists. In 1841, while no doubt busy with Foreign Office duties, he agreed to meet Gibbons Merle who was on

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a brief visit to London.93 In 1836 he received the following pleading letter from Scanlan of The Observer: I entreat your pardon In taking the liberty of thus trespassing on you; but as I am prevented by Severe illness from leaving my Chambers today and must nevertheless write some articles in The Observer I throw myself at your Lordships kindness[.] The slightest hint from you my Lord, upon any Foreign Subject will enable me to fulfil my task.94 The assistance required was quickly given.95 Palmerston’s fair treatment of the men of the press was not, of course, dispensed altruistically. He received vast swathes of favourable newspaper coverage in return, building up through the years a reputation and popularity that would prove significant factors in his eventual assumption of the premiership in 1855. He manipulated and used individual journalists and papers but it was at least done with good grace and some humour. Evidence of the high opinion of Palmerston held by journalists came in 1837, when H. Watts presented the Foreign Secretary with a copy of the Prospectus of the Newspaper Press Benevolent Association, asking if he would consent to being listed as a Vice-President. Palmerston replied: ‘with pleasure’.96

‘The Lord Fanny of Diplomacy’ The relationship between The Times and the second Melbourne ministry was fraught from its inception, the paper receiving practically no government advertisements – an important source of revenue for any newspaper – after the Whig return to office.97 Of even greater detriment to The Times was the administration’s proposal to cut the 4p stamp duty on newspapers. Ostensibly, the proposed reduction was to eradicate the radical, unstamped press that had been conspicuous since the beginning of the decade.98 But the Whigs had more selfish motives, too, guiding their actions; as early as 1831 a reduction in duties had been proffered as a means of remedying the dangerous dominance of The Times, with the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Althorp

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(who would later write about an ‘open war’ with The Times) arguing that the abolition of ‘all the stamps on the newspaper . . . would at once take away one of the greatest sources of the profit of The Times’.99 The Stamp Act came into force during the summer of 1836 but was misjudged and poorly handled, the government wary of the impact it would have on supportive newspapers like the Chronicle. To work against The Times the measure needed to be weighted against all newspapers of a larger size. It was not, and so instead of hurting The Times the lowering of the duties from 4p to 1p merely kept the regular papers too expensive for the majority of the population while allowing The Times to reduce its own cover price from 7p to 5p. This lowering of price increased the circulation of The Times, which had taken a brief hit with the switch of allegiance to Peel. By the end of 1836, and with profits buoyant, Barnes received another pay rise and moved to a new house in a more fashionable area of London, 25 Soho Square. The boost in circulation facilitated by the stamp duty reduction did not end for 20 years until the eventual abolishment of all stamp and paper duties by legislation in 1855 and 1861, when a new ‘popular’ or ‘penny’ press emerged to at last quell the dominance of The Times. In keeping with this spirit of animosity, Barnes hired Benjamin Disraeli, the novelist and future Tory Prime Minister, to write – under the pseudonym ‘Runnymede’ – a series of articles against prominent members of the Whig administration. The editor complained lightly of the personal nature of some of the slurs in these pieces but still printed the celebrated line about the notoriously short-of-stature Lord John Russell: ‘When he learns that you [Russell] are the leader of the English House of Commons, our traveller may begin to comprehend how the Egyptians worshipped – an insect.’100 Palmerston, meanwhile, was derided as ‘the Lord Fanny of diplomacy’, ‘cajoling France with an airy compliment and menacing Russia with a perfumed cane’.101 By 1838 The Times was publishing the anti-Palmerston articles of David Urquhart, a former diplomat dismissed (for a supposed breach of official secrecy) from his post in Istanbul by the Foreign Secretary. For the diplomatic historian Charles Webster, The Times during this period was ‘always glad of a chance to discredit’ Palmerston.102 The mercurial Urquhart was an expert on Greek and Turkish affairs; having fought

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in the Greek War of Independence he then ‘went native’ while stationed in Istanbul, adopting Turkish dress and living outside the main embassy quarter.103 A skilled but paranoid writer, the Turcophile Urquhart became obsessed with the idea that Palmerston was a secret Russian agent, undermining Turkish power to Russia’s advantage. Karl Marx, another prominent critic of the Foreign Secretary’s, circulated this ridiculous charge again in his 1850s polemic The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston. The Eastern Question – the potential demise of the Turkish Empire – was an important issue in European politics in the late 1830s and early 1840s, and one that led to a dangerous breakdown in relations between Britain and France. Palmerston – despite Urquhart’s claims to the contrary – believed in the need for a stable Turkish Empire to act as a bulwark against Russian aggression. The Turkish Empire, however, was under threat from the ambitious Mehemet Ali, the Viceroy of the Turkish province of Egypt who had also, since 1833, virtually ruled most of Syria. Ali wished to gain total control of Egypt and Syria and forge an independent state to be ruled by his family. The French government of Adolphe Thiers, viewing Ali as a potential client, were amenable to his claims. Palmerston responded audaciously, organizing in the summer of 1840 a high-profile convention and treaty with the autocratic powers of Austria, Prussia and even Russia to deal with the situation, an action that briefly gave rise to the threat of war with excluded France.104 Palmerston next ordered the British Mediterranean fleet to sail to the Near East where they blockaded Alexandria in Egypt and retook major ports in Syria, an early example of the sort of ‘gunboat diplomacy’ with which he became synonymous. This blunt show of strength – described by the naval historian Andrew Lambert as ‘an outstanding example of naval power projection’105 – compelled Mehemet Ali to abandon Syria and his own designs for aggrandizement. Palmerston’s success in preserving the territorial integrity of the Turkish Empire was small recompense for Cabinet colleagues who were appalled at his acting in concert with the absolutist powers instead of neighbouring constitutionalist-monarchist France. He had even ignored the advice of the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, to

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seek some accommodation with France.106 Palmerston’s ability to act so defiantly and independently arose, to a large degree, from his vast public support, a support he retained even while acting in a manner that was contrary to the impulses of a largely Russophobic public. Despite repeated strictures in The Times, he had become the most popular minister in an increasingly weak and fragile government and this gave him substantial latitude. This popularity had been built up stealthily through the preceding decade and was based on his personality, his policies and an often-positive press profile. It was in fact Melbourne’s opinion – as he told young Queen Victoria in 1840, then just three years into her long reign – that if Palmerston ‘had not had as devoted an assistant as the Morning Chronicle, he would hardly have been able to maintain his course or carry through his measures’ respecting Turkey.107 The Times, like many of his government colleagues, was dismayed at Palmerston’s alliance with Russia at the expense of the French, ‘the real allies of England’.108 It criticized the Foreign Secretary for dragging the country into ‘an absurd dispute with our nearest neighbour’ and portrayed in a menacing light the secretive negotiations the ‘cloaked and shrouded Viscount’ had carried on with the absolutist powers.109 Palmerston was labelled an ‘evil genius’ whose support for the supine Turkish Empire had helped to establish a ‘protectorate’ for ‘the advancement of Russian power at the expense of England’s character as a nation’.110 The writer of some of these articles, Henry Reeve, a new recruit to The Times, was a subordinate of Greville’s at the Privy Council. An ardent Francophile who had translated Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America into English, Reeve was also close to Francois Guizot, the acclaimed historian and French Ambassador in London. Reeve was a foreign affairs specialist who had worked previously on the journal the British and Foreign Review. He was also rampantly anti-Palmerstonian in his outlook. In May 1840 he was introduced to Barnes by his mentor Greville and was soon writing the paper’s leading articles on foreign affairs. Barnes was blinded at first by Reeve’s literary brilliance and ferociously anti-Palmerston stance. The editor, however, later regretted in conversation with Greville – who was also

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acting as a link between Guizot and Barnes111 – allowing Reeve to use ‘much stronger language . . . than his own judgement and opinion altogether sanctioned’.112 Palmerston invoked supporters like The Globe in his battle with The Times during the Near Eastern crisis. An article attacking the Sultan, the British government and Lord Ponsonby – the British ambassador in Istanbul – inspired the following riposte: ‘For the writer in the Times proves himself ignorant of facts, ignorant of causes, ignorant of results, ignorant of the motives which have impelled [Ibrahim] Pasha [Ali’s son], ignorant of the interests of his own country, or if not ignorant of these things, grossly and intentionally misrepresenting them.’ ‘Such abuse as that of the Times,’ Palmerston opined, was in fact ‘high tribute to the merits . . . of Lord Ponsonby.’113 John Easthope and the Morning Chronicle were likewise unerring allies of Palmerston’s, labelling The Times ‘the most unprincipled’ and ‘the most blackguard journal in Europe’.114 A note of Easthope’s from October 1840 announced his editor’s intention of calling by Palmerston’s London residence to ‘observe the right line’. The next morning, according to Greville, there appeared in that paper an article that had ‘every appearance of being written by Palmerston himself . . . most violent, declamatory, and insulting to France’.115 Other correspondence shows Easthope outlining to the Foreign Secretary a forthcoming article on Mehemet Ali and Palmerston responding with a note suggesting the Chronicle refrain from referring to Ali as a ‘Prince’ but rather as ‘The Government of the Turkish Province of Egypt’.116 It is no surprise, therefore, that Palmerston was soon noting about the paper’s editor how ‘Black has been writing with great ability’.117 In the aftermath of his successful handling of the Near Eastern crisis, a discontented Reeve was forced to admit ‘Lord Palmerston’s star is in the ascendant . . . [he] has now bowled everybody out’.118 Greville, for his part, conceded that the Foreign Secretary had ‘conducted himself well under the circumstances without any air of triumph or boasting either over his colleagues or his opponents or the French. He has deserved his success by the moderation with which he has taken it.’119 Even Barnes was converted to a degree, his biographer arguing that the editor would have welcomed Palmerston’s remaining at the Foreign

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Office in a Tory government.120 Thiers, the (now former) French Prime Minister, suddenly became in the eyes of Barnes ‘an unprincipled scoundrel’ for having ‘raised the storm which had nearly threatened the peace of Europe’. In light of the Foreign Secretary’s diplomatic triumph, the editor stated simply to Reeve: ‘I don’t see that any thing remains for us to do more than to justify Palmerston.’121 Barnes’s death just a few months later put an end to any hopes of rapprochement. He was 55 years old and had been ill for some time. Barnes was remembered fondly in his friend Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, albeit with one slightly barbed reference to what Hunt perceived to be the pro-Tory ‘politics of his later life’. Other papers and journals, including The Age, The Standard and the Gentleman’s Magazine, were more wholly effusive in their praise for the great editor, a man who never sought public acclaim and always put his paper first.122 In keeping with his long-held belief that anonymous journalism was the only kind to read seriously, Barnes’s obituary in The Times ran to just 20 words. His legacy, however, was immeasurable.

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4 A NEW EDITOR

In the summer of 1841, John Thadeus Delane, a young writer on The Times, rushed home through the streets of south-west London. He reached the fashionable enclave of St James’s Square where he shared an apartment with a friend, John Blackwood, heir to a well-known publishing empire. The square, a large Restoration-era development just off the Pall Mall, had been home through the years to innumerable lords and ladies, viscounts and earls. More recently, it had become synonymous with bachelor lodgings and expensive shops. Delane, a stocky and well-built figure, bounded up the stairs to his rooms, thrust open the doors and declared: ‘By Jove, John, what do you think has happened? I am editor of The Times.’1 Delane, the 23-year-old son of the newspaper’s treasurer, William Delane, had only joined The Times a year earlier, having completed his law studies at Magdalen College in Oxford. His appointment as editor was a surprise and another example of John Walter’s willingness to take risks with the paper. Nevertheless, Delane was far from an unknown quantity to the chief proprietor, with the two families, the Delanes and Walters, close neighbours near Reading in Berkshire. The new editor had actually canvassed for Walter during parliamentary elections in the 1830s, before contributing some articles to the paper as an undergraduate. When first on staff, he worked – like Barnes before him – as a parliamentary reporter. His responsibilities increased significantly as the great editor’s health

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declined, the canny proprietor both testing him and grooming him to take over. Delane, the epitome of youthful self-confidence, was undaunted by the rapid elevation. He had grown up, after all, amidst newspapermen and newspaper talk. Competent, astute and hard-working, he was quick to justify Walter’s faith in shifting editorial control of The Times down a generation, gliding easily into those social and political circles where that most precious of newspaper commodities – information – was to be found. He did not, however, enjoy at first the same autonomy as his illustrious predecessor, the 65-year-old Walter taking a more active interest in the running paper than at any period since the late 1810s. The Times supported the new Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, at the beginning of his second administration, praising his eloquence and ‘intellectual power’.2 It even backed (with certain caveats) his reintroduction of an income tax for the first time since the Napoleonic Wars, a naturally contentious decision that brought a ‘torrent’ of disapproving letters to Printing House Square.3 Walter was less pleased when it became clear that Peel would continue the Poor Law policies of the Whigs. This decision set The Times on a collision course with the new Tory government. The newspaper’s belligerent stance had personal as well as political complexions, with Walter blaming Peel in part for his removal from parliament after a disputed by-election in Nottingham in late 1842.4 This was despite the fact that Walter had been assisted by the Tory party manager F.R. Bonham at an earlier election.5 Walter’s close watch over the domestic policy of the newspaper was matched by a near total indifference to foreign affairs. This aspect of The Times was left entirely in the hands of Delane and Henry Reeve; the latter, just a few years older than Delane, assumed the mantle of chief leader-writer on foreign affairs. Reeve’s credentials for the post were impeccable; schooled in Geneva, he was impressively multilingual and had an array of political and literary contacts across Europe. The provincial doctor’s son relished his position of power at the leading newspaper of the era and thought nothing of following up a long day’s work at the Privy Council with a night of exhausting composition. Not even the death after childbirth of his young wife, Hope,

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in November 1842 could distract from the task, the grieving Reeve responding promptly to his editor’s requests for several articles.6 Charles Greville, Reeve’s mentor at the Privy Council, had feared at first Barnes’s death would put an end to his own subtle influence at The Times. The inveterate newspaper intriguer need not have worried, Reeve noting quickly how the ‘friendly relations which had for some time subsisted between Mr. Greville and Mr. Barnes’ were ‘strengthened and consolidated under the administration of his successor’.7 Greville’s impeccable aristocratic connections opened many doors in London society for the new editor, as they had earlier for Reeve. His recompense for these services was the self-satisfied thrill of maintaining a voice at the heart of that ‘mighty piece of machinery’, as he called The Times.8 The first article Greville sent to Delane was a fierce attack on the outgoing government of Lord Melbourne. A cover letter, signed anonymously but later endorsed by Delane as ‘From Mr. Greville’, read: Sir, Mr Reeve will have prepared you for the possibility of hearing from me, and I now send you the outline of an article, which you may work up as you please. The facts are worth noting, and the monstrous cases alluded to ought to be exposed. If at any time you wish to communicate with me, just put in The Times that the address of ‘B.’ is wanted. I use the same signature which I used to my friend Mr Barnes, whose loss I so sincerely regret. I am, sir, Your obedient servant, B. The article described ‘a momentous spectacle of jobbing’, and lambasted Lord Palmerston in particular for creating ‘several new appointments all of which he filled up, and one of them with the Son of the Mayor of Tiverton!!’9 Delane used some of the material for an article a

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few days later that condemned the Whigs for ‘scattering offices and salaries among their followers without the slightest regard for decency’, highlighting Palmerston as one of the worst offenders.10 The accusations in The Times were well founded, Palmerston spending the last weeks of the Melbourne ministry ‘wiping off old scores’ and securing posts such as paid attachéships for several young protégés. He also secured a baronetcy for John Easthope (now Sir John Easthope) of the Morning Chronicle, after convincing Melbourne that a friendly newspaper would be of even greater necessity when the party was in opposition.11 Palmerston, indeed, would prove as adroit in his use of the Chronicle while in opposition as he had in office. Palmerston’s successor at the Foreign Office, the 57-year-old Scottish peer Lord Aberdeen, was practically the only member of the new Tory government to win the long-term favour of The Times. Dismissed too easily by his biographer Muriel Chamberlain as a relative innocent in the realm of press management, Aberdeen was quick to forge a relationship with Delane, having previously enjoyed some links with Barnes.12 The new Foreign Secretary was in many regards the antithesis of Palmerston, and his connection with Delane reinforced the already strong anti-Palmerston bias of Greville and Reeve. These two complementary relationships – Greville and Reeve, Delane and Aberdeen – would dominate the musings of The Times on foreign affairs for more than a decade. George Hamilton Gordon, fourth Earl of Aberdeen, had been a contemporary of Palmerston’s at Harrow and Cambridge. The two future Prime Ministers had then entered parliament in the same year – 1806 – before serving together as Tories for more than two decades. This long connection, however, never developed into friendship. Both men lost their parents quite young but in all other respects were polar opposites: Palmerston amiable, outgoing and with a roving eye, Aberdeen the insular ascetic and forlorn widower; one a fan of boxing and horseracing, the other a keen classicist who would become president of the Society of Antiquarians and a trustee of the British Museum. Their political styles were as divergent as their personalities: Palmerston brusque, antagonistic and domineering, Aberdeen the conciliatory consensus-builder. Physically, too,

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there were differences, Aberdeen slightly lame and beginning to feel his advancing years while Palmerston remained miraculously robust. Aberdeen, a cousin of the poet Lord Byron, had his political compass set during the last years of the Napoleonic Wars. Dispatched to Vienna as a special ambassador by the then Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, he proved quickly adept in the world of diplomacy and became close to the Austrian Chancellor, Prince Klemens von Metternich, the postwar bête noire of British liberals. This friendship, which lasted decades, would go on to colour the coverage of European affairs in The Times. Of even greater importance were the visits Aberdeen made to battlefields across the continent. Scarred by the grotesque scenes of dead bodies and mutilated limbs he witnessed at first hand, he would never be as quick as Palmerston to resort to gunboat diplomacy or make threats to other countries. It was, indeed, a sad irony that in later years Aberdeen would feel compelled as Prime Minister to lead Britain into the devastating and inglorious Crimean War. Delane and Aberdeen, the eager young journalist and the austere Scottish peer, were surprising allies at first glance. The connection they established, however, was important to both parties. The new editor, while far from intimidated by his exalted position, would still have felt some pressure to prove his worth; a close alliance with the Foreign Office could produce the scoops necessary to create and cement a reputation. He had also been counselled by Barnes, before his death, to support Aberdeen.13 Aberdeen, for his part, was fully aware of the importance of the backing of the largest-selling newspaper in Britain, especially when so many of his government colleagues had alienated themselves from Walter. Peel, too, was alive to the benefits of the Foreign Secretary’s relationship with the editor, persuading him to use his influence with Delane to have some articles published in The Times against a proposed Franco-Belgian customs treaty.14 Peel’s input was not always so constructive: in 1845 he attempted to exact revenge on The Times for its attacks on the Home Secretary Sir James Graham by suggesting to Aberdeen ‘the discontinuance of all communications from the Foreign Office’ to the newspaper.15 Aberdeen resisted these calls and, despite the falling-out

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between Walter and Peel, cultivated a productive working relationship with the young editor that, through the years, shaded even into friendship.

Entente Cordiale Peel’s focus on urgent domestic concerns like a deep recession and soaring budget deficit did not allow for foreign distractions. His instructions to his old friend Aberdeen, therefore, were to bring calm to the restive state of foreign affairs. It was a request that proved far from simple to meet, a trail of Palmerstonian destruction lying in wait for the new Foreign Secretary. The French, of course, were sullen and wounded after their humiliation in the Near East. In the Far East, meanwhile, a dispute between British merchants (enthusiastically supported by Palmerston) and Chinese authorities had culminated in the first so-called Opium War. Another war, in Afghanistan, was an ongoing military disaster. Britain was also embroiled in a serious border dispute with the United States of America that had some senior politicians – with memories of the War of 1812 not forgotten – fearing open conflict. The border between the United States and British North America (now Canada) had been a long-standing source of tension. By the late 1830s, the ‘most hotly contested portion of the boundary’ was that between the American state of Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick, the militias from both regions coming close to armed clashes.16 Aberdeen, acting swiftly, initiated settlement talks. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty, ratified in London in October 1842, resolved the matter along with several other lingering disputes. The Times, normally quite anti-American, approved. The Morning Chronicle, on the other hand, in a series of articles written or inspired by Palmerston, dubbed the treaty the ‘Ashburton Capitulation’. Palmerston also pointed out the new relationship he saw emerging between The Times and ‘the Members of the Government which he [The Times] supports’, attempting thus to blacken its façade of editorial purity and independence.17 Coming from Palmerston, this ploy was hypocritical in the extreme.

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With the American problems smoothed over for the time being, Aberdeen turned his attention to France, the other power so recently affronted by Palmerston. Initially, Francois Guizot, the new Foreign Minister (and in effect the head of government), complained that Aberdeen was ‘trop fidèle à l’héritage de Lord Palmerston’.18 The two men, however, sharing a deep scholarly streak (Guizot had been Professor of Modern History at the Sorbonne) soon struck up a close personal relationship that became the basis of the entente cordiale between their nations. The Times gave warm support to this new spirit of Anglo-French friendship, and not only through Aberdeen’s influence on Delane. Guizot had also cultivated a relationship with Reeve while French Ambassador in London in the late 1830s. A few years later, in 1843, he even arranged an audience with King LouisPhilippe for the visiting journalist, the monarch taking the opportunity to thank Reeve for a recent favourable article in The Times.19 All Europe was cognizant of the power of the titan of Printing House Square. The entente cordiale, despite the best efforts of its originators, never really secured a solid base in either country, the historian Munro Price describing how in ‘launching’ the entente and ‘attempting to apply it in a sincere and generous spirit’ the political leaders of Britain and France ‘were far ahead’ of their respective populations.20 Queen Victoria and King Louis-Philippe exchanged royal visits, the first such meetings in centuries. Nevertheless, hostility and suspicion were too deeply ingrained on both sides of the Channel and by the summer of 1844 the two countries appeared to be on the verge of war after a series of relatively minor diplomatic disputes. In Morocco, French ships bombarded the city of Tangiers, even though the British consul was still on the ground acting as a mediator between the French and Moroccan authorities. Greece, a scene of constant diplomatic intrigue since independence, proved likewise troublesome, the ‘French’ party overthrowing the ruling ‘English’ party in a coup in July 1844. A similar turnaround in political fortunes had occurred in Spain a year earlier. Palmerston railed against this apparent loss of British influence, and accusations that Aberdeen was totally subservient to France became a leitmotif of his period in opposition.21

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Events in far-flung Tahiti – recently annexed by the French – came closest to precipitating war. George Pritchard, a Protestant missionary and former consul, was accused (not without cause) of inciting rebellion on the Pacific island. He was imprisoned by French officers and quickly expelled. As Muriel Chamberlain suggests: ‘The story had everything to rouse the British public: a Protestant missionary persecuted by a Catholic power, a British diplomat insulted by the French, an Englishman torn from his family and imprisoned in a dirty blockhouse by dubious authority.’22 Pritchard arrived back in England in July 1844, the press and public opinion erupting in predictable fury. Cabinet meetings centred on national defence and serious consideration was given to the idea of returning Pritchard to Tahiti in a warship. The incident received a great deal of attention in France, too, and appears as a source of heated conversation in one scene of Gustave Flaubert’s novel Sentimental Education.23 Aberdeen was annoyed by the French actions in Tahiti (part of a wider Anglo-French rivalry in the Pacific) but did not believe them fatal to his cherished entente. He hoped to use The Times to soothe public opinion in Britain. It seemed at first he would be disappointed, a leading article in the paper denouncing the ‘despotic oppression’ of the French ‘towards the natives’, as well as their ill-treatment of foreigners on the island, including two Englishwomen ‘in the family-way’ (pregnant).24 At the same time, Delane was anxious to preserve his own good understanding with Aberdeen. The tone of The Times began to alter, to soften, the editor later admitting to Reeve (on holidays in France where he breakfasted regularly with Guizot) that the paper had made ‘a great deal too much of the “outrages” in the first place’.25 The Chronicle seized upon these contradictions to describe how there were two sides to The Times: ‘one . . . steps forward to maintain the honour and interests of the country against foreign aggression, and another that steps forward . . . to defend Lord Aberdeen against domestic critics’. The result, the rival publication claimed, was ‘a ludicrous, though not unhabitual inconsistency in the language’ of The Times.26 A commitment by France (never met) to pay an indemnity to Pritchard settled the Tahitian affair for the two governments, at least, if not their somewhat dissatisfied populations. Delane was

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‘vexed and annoyed’ at the settlement and believed much more money could have been secured for Pritchard. He was also frustrated by the confused response of the British government to the whole episode – too aggressive at the beginning, too supine at the end – and the manner in which the paper had been forced into ‘drawing in our horns after a fashion I by no means approve’. Nevertheless, having fleetingly abjured, the editor realized the dangers in prolonging any dispute with the Foreign Secretary, and ‘quarrelling irreparably with the only department of the Govt. with which we have been able to keep on terms’.27 The Times, for all its material success, could still not afford to be oblivious to the rewards brought by good government contacts.

Viscount Chronicle On 16 December 1839, Lord Palmerston married at last his long-time lover Lady Cowper, a respectful period of time having elapsed since the death of her first husband, the much-cuckolded Earl Cowper. The bride and groom were 51 and 55 years old respectively. The new Lady Palmerston fell effortlessly into the role of a political hostess during the last years of the Melbourne government, holding weekend receptions at the couple’s new London home at 5 Carlton House Terrace. Nevertheless, surveying the political landscape in the autumn of 1841 and in particular the immense popularity of her husband as he left office, she could not help but suggest it might be a ‘good moment for him to retire’.28 The Palmerstons visited the family estates in County Sligo on the west coast of Ireland once free from office, meeting tenants and perusing the new harbour that had been built there. They later travelled the continent by train – a revolutionary new mode of transport – dining with kings and government ministers all the way. There was also more time for horseracing, hunting and shooting, as well as the remodelling of the gardens at Broadlands. Retirement from politics, however, was not an option that was ever seriously entertained. Palmerston spoke regularly in parliament and was widely acknowledged as the most visible face of the Whig opposition. His

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multitude of newspaper contacts helped maintain this high public profile. Palmerston went to great lengths to keep the press on his side. During the general election of 1841, for example, he had made sure the London reporters covering his campaign in Tiverton had a room of their own in the Town Hall, as well as a special cart on which they could sit and watch him speak. Palmerston also arranged with the journalists to speak for exactly 20 minutes, and end in time for them to catch the last train back to London, so that they could print their reports in the morning papers next day.29 Paid as many poor journalists were by the line or the word, any assistance that helped get their job done promptly and to the pleasure of their various editors would have been well-remembered. Foreign affairs remained a key concern, Palmerston goading the Tories that they were feeding off ‘the broken meats left in the larder’, and that their only successes in this arena were the results of his own earlier endeavours.30 He voiced this opinion most strongly with regard to the Treaty of Nanjing, which brought an end to the somewhat stop-start, three-year-long Opium War. This treaty, entered into by the Chinese just as the numerically inferior but much better equipped British forces were on the brink of storming the ancient imperial capital of Nanjing, secured substantial commercial privileges for Britain, including the acquisition of the island of Hong Kong. It also opened up four more ports – Shanghai, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Xiamen – to an international trade that hitherto had only been allowed at Canton. The treaty did bear a strong resemblance to an earlier Palmerstonian proposal, a fact the ex-Foreign Secretary would not let pass. A letter to Andrew Doyle (Easthope’s son-in-law and editor of the Morning Chronicle from 1843–8) on an article in The Times ‘about the assumed merit of the present Govt. in having opened for British Commerce Four additional Ports in China [sic]’ stated: you will see that the Treaty Lately concluded is, as far its Provisions are known, as nearly as possible the Same in Substance as that Which we instructed our negotiators to obtain, or rather

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to impose; and that we pointed out the Four additional Ports as Long ago as nov[embe]r 1840 [sic].31 The mention of ‘British Commerce’ is important. Palmerston was an ardent free-trader who genuinely believed it was the business of government ‘to open and to secure the roads for the merchant’.32 He also wanted to make it clear to Britain’s powerful middle class that he was on their side. Palmerston was quick, too, to strike a blow against Aberdeen over Tahiti. Writing to Doyle (with a characteristically loose approach to capitals and punctuation) on the chance that the Chronicle should ‘be making any further observations upon the Extraordinary outrage committed by the French naval officers upon our Consul at Tahiti’, Palmerston stressed: Foreign Powers look upon the apathy Indifference and universal Concessions of the present Govt as Proofs only of physical weakness and political Timidity; and they are encouraged therefore to pursue their own Schemes of aggrandizment without caring how they may injure the Interests of England, being perfectly convinced that the British Govt will Either Say nothing about it, or if they Should complain will be pacified by a few fine Phrases, and Empty Professions of Friendship & Esteem [sic].33 Here Palmerston was repeating his claim that British power and prestige would be safer in his hands. The next day’s Chronicle had Pritchard imprisoned ‘like a convicted felon’.34 Palmerston’s antipathy to the ‘Ashburton Capitulation’ has already been mentioned. His attempts to stir up public feeling on the issue, however, fell flat. The treaty was generally well received and neither parliament nor populace could be roused to denounce it. Unlike the later, evocative Pritchard incident, British public opinion was not riled by a distant boundary dispute and geographical and topographical technicalities. The Webster-Ashburton episode had, however, demonstrated afresh Palmerston’s near-wilful independence from his Whig colleagues, who, exhibiting the condescension still prevalent towards

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journalism in some upper-class circles, disapproved of Palmerston’s coarse methods and words and referred to him disparagingly as ‘Viscount Chronicle’. Palmerston was rebuked by the party leadership and asked to quieten his tone. He did so in the end, but in response to public indifference not party orders. Palmerston’s efforts with the press paid dividends on the whole, and he received letters of support for his Chinese and Tahitian stances. One anonymous correspondent, although ‘strongly opposed in political feeling to the late [Whig] Government’, was ‘compelled by a sense of justice to allow to your Lordship the whole merit of arranging the Plan and seizing the occasion for the late Chinese War and thus laying the foundation of its brilliant Results’. ‘This Conviction’, the writer added, was ‘gradually creeping on the Public Mind and will, ultimately, be acknowledged by all’.35 A Tiverton correspondent, meanwhile, insisted it was ‘the opinion of all who are acquainted with your Lordship’s character that Tahiti at this moment would never have been under the Protectorate of France had we had the good fortune of having your Lordship as the Foreign Secretary at the time when this took place’.36 Such sentiments were music to Palmerston’s ears, according precisely with the image he strove to portray.

The Corn Laws The connection between Aberdeen and Delane, both personal and professional, survived the brief lapse during the Tahitian furore unscathed. It was a high-powered but quite evenly balanced alliance. The Foreign Secretary provided The Times with the outlines for many articles on foreign policy, previewed other articles and also advised as to when the newspaper should desist from certain lines of argument.37 The Times, for its part, adhered fairly obediently to the general thrust of Aberdeen’s suggestions but did not shy away from disagreeing strongly with some particulars.38 The relationship prospered because the two men were generally of the same mind with regard to foreign affairs. This coalescing of views was helped by the sheer amount of time they spent in each other’s company, the last months of 1845 in particular witnessing a glut of invitations for Delane to call by the Foreign Office

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or Aberdeen’s private residence at Argyll House for dinner and talks.39 It was around this time that the Foreign Secretary made perhaps his greatest contribution to the young editor’s career, when he revealed Peel’s sensational, epochal decision to repeal the Corn Laws. The Corn Laws – whose putative repeal caused such a stir across Britain – were in essence a set of prohibitive duties that had been placed on imported corn since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. A perennial source of debate, they returned to the top of the political agenda during the mid-1840s against a backdrop of economic distress across Britain and incipient famine in Ireland. Opponents of the duties, including the middle-class pressure group the Anti-Corn Law League and the recently established Economist magazine, blamed them for keeping the price of bread artificially high to the exclusive benefit of large (often Tory) landowners. Supporters, known as Protectionists, argued that the Corn Laws protected British farmers from having their produce undercut by cheap foreign imports. The Protectionists joined forces with some tenant-farmers to present themselves as defenders of traditional rural society. The question of repeal, therefore, became a proxy for any number of overlapping debates: Protectionism versus free trade, the aristocracy versus the people, rural versus urban. Protectionism was assumed to be a central tenet of the governing Tory party policy. Privately, however, the Prime Minister had grave doubts about the value of the Corn Laws.40 Indications of Peel’s weakening resolve began to seep out into the public arena and the debate grew ever more strident. Powerful voices including the writers Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens came out in support of repeal. Dickens wove the free trade ideas of the Anti-Corn Law League into The Chimes, his tale of a starving farm labourer Will Fern and a tyrannical landlord Sir Joseph Bowley.41 (The Chimes was Dickens’s second Christmas book, but did not match the success of its predecessor A Christmas Carol.) The Protectionists hit back with a propaganda machine of their own, backed by magazines like Blackwood’s and Fraser’s, and both sides held mass rallies and mobilized forces across the country. Against this fevered background, The Times of 4 December stunned its readers with the announcement of Peel’s final conversion to repeal: ‘The decision of the Cabinet is no longer a secret. Parliament, it is

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confidently reported, is to be summoned for the first week in January; and the Royal Speech will, it is added, recommend an immediate consideration of the Corn Laws, preparatory to their total repeal.’ John Bright, MP for Durham and one of the leading opponents of the Corn Laws, was so excited he wrote that ‘the reading of the article has almost made me ill – what a glorious prospect is now before us’.42 Less glorious was the reaction within Tory ranks. The party split irreparably between Protectionists and Peelites. Families, too, turned on each other, the Protectionist Duke of Newcastle refusing to speak to his Peelite son, Lord Lincoln, for five years – they were only reconciled on the duke’s deathbed. The scoop of the Corn Laws added to the prestige of The Times and reinforced its sense of omniscience. It is now accepted that Delane received his information from Aberdeen, though other rumours filled the ether at the time, including one story that the editor had purchased the information for £500 from the London socialite Caroline Norton, granddaughter of the Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who had learned it from her lover, the young Secretary at War Sidney Herbert.43 The triumphant Delane (who, confident of his source, had held his nerve when the Tories initially disputed the veracity of the article) received a salary increase at the end of the year, just as Aberdeen and the Tories prepared to leave office, the party torn apart by Peel’s decisive move.

‘The Torments of Office’ On the night of Friday 5 December 1845, and with his Cabinet split on the question of repeal, the Prime Minister made the journey to Buckingham Palace to resign. The Whig opposition, however, under Lord John Russell, proved unable to form a new government. Peel was forced to return and see the controversial measure through. Russell’s difficulties revolved around the displeasure with which senior Whigs viewed the reappointment of Palmerston as Foreign Secretary. Lord Grey, the Francophile son of the former Prime Minister, was particularly prominent in arguing that Palmerston’s return would wreck the good relations established with France. These internal disputes

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increased Palmerston’s popularity among the majority of Whigs, who blamed Grey for allowing Peel to return to office. They also won him the support of previously unfriendly sources, including the liberal weekly The Examiner, edited by Albany Fonblanque, which said it would be sorry to see British government appointments regulated by foreign jealousies. Palmerston, The Examiner concluded, ‘notwithstanding [their] occasional differences’, was ‘without a rival in the qualifications for the Foreign Department’.44 Palmerston, for his part, was intent on returning to the Foreign Office. He had earlier in the year sketched a plan for a ministry to be headed by Russell (leader of the Whigs since 1842 when Lord Melbourne was incapacitated by a stroke), allocating himself the position of Foreign Secretary.45 The Times was unsurprisingly cool on the idea of Palmerston’s return. Reeve, in Paris again, meeting freely with Guizot and keeping Aberdeen abreast of the state of feeling in the French capital’s political salons, praised the younger Grey highly, declaring ‘for my own part nothing would have induced me to sit in a Cabinet with that evil genius presiding over its foreign relations’.46 Paris, it appears, was as apprehensive as Printing House Square at the prospect of Palmerston’s return, Louis-Philippe labelling him ‘l’ennemi de la maison’.47 To counter these fears Palmerston enlisted the services of Easthope, a regular business traveller to France. Easthope had earlier informed him of the joy with which rumours that Lord Clarendon would be at the Foreign Office were met in the Parisian salons.48 Palmerston had actually worked well with French ministers in the 1830s and was not as instinctively anti-French as many believed.49 He asked Easthope to assure his French friends that ‘the new Govt if it does come in will be Just as anxious of maintaining the friendly Relations with France, as the last Govt. can have been’ and to remind them ‘the Whigs are their old Friends & the Tories their new ones’.50 Despite the difficulties surrounding Palmerston, it was clear the Whigs would soon return to office, with Palmerston at his favoured station. In preparation for his imminent return to office, Palmerston, accompanied by his wife, travelled to Paris for Easter 1846 on a sort of goodwill mission. He dined with the king and the leaders of all the political parties, including Guizot and Thiers. Palmerston felt the

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trip went well and expressed his gratitude to Easthope: ‘I cannot forget how much we owe the Character of that Reception, to the Pains Which you had previously taken during your own visits to Paris to prepare the way for us.’51 A disgruntled Aberdeen wrote to Guizot: Whatever may have been the effect in Paris of Lord Palmerston’s visit . . . it has been of the greatest service to him in this country. It has proved to the great merchants and capitalists of the city, who were very apprehensive of the effect likely to be produced by his accession to power, that he is not only tolerated, but cherished by the government and people who were supposed to be most hostile to him.52 Nevertheless, although apprehensive for the future of his cherished entente, Aberdeen seemed genuinely happy at the prospect of being free from ‘the torments of office’.53 The desire for a quiet life did not come to pass, and if anything his communications with Delane increased once out of office, all on account of a Palmerstonian policy which neither man could abide.

‘The Man Who Worked The Times’ From the apartment he shared with John Blackwood in St James’s Square, Delane moved first to 4 Chatham Place and then 22 New Bridge Street, both in Blackfriars near Printing House Square. His real home though was The Times, where he worked prodigiously and surrounded himself with talented friends from his days in Oxford. George W. Dasent, a scholar of note on Scandinavian literature, was among the most important of these new recruits, joining the paper as assistant editor in 1845, having worked previously as secretary to the British envoy in Stockholm. At the beginning of the twentieth century his son Arthur would produce a valuable two-volume biography of the editor. The Times, indeed, began to take the form of a Delane, rather than a Walter, family enterprise when Dasent married Delane’s younger sister, Fanny Louisa, in April 1846 (Delane’s father, of course, was still the paper’s treasurer). Delane himself married Fanny Bacon

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in 1842, the widow of a former assistant editor of The Times. The marriage was troubled as Fanny became mentally ill, and had eventually to be confined. It was, however, yet another indication of how the editor’s life revolved solely around The Times. Not yet 30 years old as the Whigs prepared to re-enter office, Delane could reflect contentedly on his first few years in charge of The Times. He had strengthened the many pillars on which the supremacy of the paper was formed: the consistent excellence of its writing; the accuracy and promptness of its news, including foreign news upon which it continued to place a high premium, as evidenced by the costs incurred in the development of ever-faster overland routes for its India mails and then in the early use of the electric telegraph; the breadth of information published, eight-page issues accompanied by free fourpage supplements increasingly frequent between 1840 and 1850; and even the simple quality of the paper used in production.54 Such clear superiority meant The Times did not lose readers even when it was out of step with public opinion on foreign affairs, as was often the case during Aberdeen’s tenure with its focus on the entente cordiale. Delane shaped the paper, too, for it was under his stewardship that the leading article reached full maturity, having previously fluctuated in placement and length. Delane agonized over the composition of these leading articles (or editorials), working closely with his leader-writers to ensure the right mixture of clarity and style. Nor was he afraid to take chances, as evidenced by a series of articles in the autumn of 1845 unmasking the financial irresponsibility, and even fraud, underlying the then-current ‘railway mania’. These articles lost the paper substantial advertising revenue at first, as the seemingly endless supply of new railway developers published their lengthy prospectuses in rival publications.55 The cautious stand of The Times proved prescient, however, as the railway bubble, like every other bubble, eventually burst. The new editor also earned the respect of the longer-term workers at The Times, men who could have been allowed some hard feelings at his rapid elevation. He was dedicated and disciplined, pushing his body to its limits for the sake of the newspaper with 16-hour days not unusual. He did not drink to any real extent or smoke at all. A regular guest at social functions across London, Delane was nonetheless certain

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to return to Printing House Square for 11 o’clock to work throughout the night on The Times, overseeing the layout of the paper, setting its tone, reading scores of letters sent in by the public and polishing up editorials with a well-judged ‘spark or a sting’.56 Using a quill pen dipped in an inkstand formed from the hoof of a favourite horse, he wrote terse notes to staff and copious letters to foreign and special correspondents.57 Even his holidays, to Europe usually, during parliamentary recesses involved work and networking, meeting foreign correspondents and continental statesmen. Confident without being brash, Delane was quickly comfortable in that luxurious section of London society, the high-political establishment, where those nuggets of vital intelligence that kept his newspaper on top could be surreptitiously procured over talk in a corridor or corner. Journalists on the whole were still a far from favoured profession, but ‘the man who worked The Times’ – as the editor referred to himself – was an obvious exception, and welcomed at the grand homes of the aristocracy where he spent weekends hunting and shooting. Delane was a vigorous young man who enjoyed such outdoor pursuits. These visits, however, were hardly recreational, as Delane, like any worthwhile editor, was always making contacts and gathering information. It was to his great credit (as it was earlier to Barnes’s) that confidences given seemed always to be kept, and in consequence more and more would be passed on. Delane enjoyed mixing in this world a great deal more than his predecessor, and, not unnaturally, began to acquire some of the tone and manner of those whose company he kept. This did not mean he had his head turned by the hospitality and blandishments of the elite. Rather, it reflected an essential difference in the two editors’ upbringings: Delane’s slightly gentrified and in contrast to Barnes’s youth and young manhood spent discussing great literature and politics with other sharp minds against the volatile backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. The Times prospered under Delane, its circulation regularly surpassing 30,000 and profits rising spectacularly. But if materially successful, it also lost some of the lustre of its recent past. Delane did not really add to the moral stature of the paper during his first years; he did not crusade as Barnes had on Catholic emancipation and parliamentary

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reform. The articles showing up the frauds of the railway share-pushers were in the main the work of Thomas Alsager, the City editor of The Times for over two decades. And though The Times had done well out of its Corn Laws exclusive, it had only been a late convert to the campaign for their repeal. Indeed, the Welsh-language weekly Yr Amserau (The Times), founded in 1843, was so named because it felt The Times of London served as a warning of the way in which talent and reforming zeal could be perverted.58 Delane, an admirable editor in so many respects, was to the fore of this development, moving The Times along a course from a vigorous, reforming paper to a far safer establishment organ.

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‘I little thought, once upon a time, that I should ever live to praise Peel,’ wrote Charles Dickens in early July 1846.1 Living in Switzerland for a brief period and about to embark on the serialization of Dombey and Son, he had just found out that the much-reviled Corn Laws, against which he had campaigned vigorously, had finally been repealed. The mass of the Tory party had turned against their supposed leader, Sir Robert Peel, but a coalition of Whigs, Radicals and Peelites (Tory supporters of Peel) carried the measure through. Peel resigned as Prime Minister soon after, clearing the way for Lord John Russell to (this time successfully) form a new Whig government, albeit one that did not enjoy a majority in the House of Commons. Lord Palmerston, distrusted by many Cabinet colleagues but not the country, returned to the Foreign Office. The new Prime Minister was an impressive reforming politician who had served previously as Colonial Secretary, Home Secretary and Leader of the Commons. He was also of pure Whig stock and clear intelligence. His physical appearance, however, was of unfortunately minor stature, with some form of ‘short’ usually attaching itself to his name as a preamble. Queen Victoria, for instance, always referred to him as ‘Little Johnny’. Mindful of each other’s status and power, another alliance of sorts was forged between the Whigs and The Times. George William Frederick Villiers, fourth Earl of Clarendon, was central to the connection. Clarendon did not communicate directly with John Delane until

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1847, but as a lifelong friend of Charles Greville’s had been introduced to Henry Reeve much earlier. Clarendon, President of the Board of Trade in the new government, leaked details about the likely makeup of the government to Reeve throughout late June and early July.2 His real interests though lay in foreign affairs, and he had served previously as the Ambassador to Spain. His connection to Reeve made Clarendon another vital cog in the formulation of The Times’ foreign policy reportage. Clarendon disagreed regularly with Palmerston’s foreign policy, particularly in relation to France. Nevertheless, he was not as rabidly anti-Palmerston as the other main influences on The Times. Clarendon was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in the summer of 1847, and it has been suggested that Russell’s reasoning was twofold: the government would win the support of The Times for its Irish policy and Cabinet secrets would be better kept.3 Sir Charles Wood, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was another important link between the government and The Times. Wood was the brother-in-law of the younger Lord Grey and self-appointed sentinel over Palmerston, ‘making signs’ whenever foreign affairs were discussed and keeping careful note of what had been decided by Cabinet.4 He met Delane regularly to discuss the government’s fiscal policies and had The Times’ backing at first.5 Delane also enlisted Wood’s support when his old tutor, a Mr Jacobson, sought (successfully) the Regius Professorship of Divinity at Oxford.6 On a later occasion, Wood promised to mention to Russell the name of Delane’s brother-in-law George Dasent when he was (unsuccessfully) interested in the vacant Professorship of Modern History at Oxford.7 The Prime Minister’s communications with Delane usually went through Clarendon or Sir Denis Le Marchant, the new Under-Secretary at the Home Office repeating duties he had first undertaken for Lord Brougham. Le Marchant still looked upon this aspect of his work with some disdain, which is instructive of how lowly a profession journalism was still deemed in some circles, even when the paper involved was the mighty organ of The Times. Nevertheless, he fulfilled his duties with diligence, providing Delane with information on, among other topics, the then animated issue of flogging in the army.8 Le Marchant wrote also on foreign affairs, as Delane and Palmerston were incommunicado.9

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Greville summed up the situation in a letter to Clarendon: ‘The Times was all for the F. O. & agt. most others in the last [government] – it is all agt. the F. O. and for most others in this [government].’10 The vast quantity of information passing directly from the Cabinet to Printing House Square bought the government the support of The Times, which, for the first year at least, performed its duties as a quasi-ministerial paper well. So much so, in fact, that when pressed by Le Marchant to explain an anti-government article in August 1847, Delane said it was ‘written with no unkind motive’, but to prove that ‘they [The Times] were not unqualified supporters of the Government’. The editor undertook that ‘an article should appear on Monday which ought to remove all false impressions’, quite a statement for a paper that loudly proclaimed its untrammelled independence.11 The Times, it is clear, was not above political interference; but then no paper could be, so closely were the two worlds intertwined.

The Spanish Marriages Foreign affairs had slipped down the political agenda during Peel’s term of office, despite occasional flashpoints like Tahiti. A new series of diplomatic entanglements with France, however, combined with Palmerston’s energetic return to the arena, brought them back to the fore of public debate. The entente cordiale, so cherished by Queen Victoria, Lord Aberdeen and Francophile Whigs, was about to be severely tested. The first of these diplomatic incidents – the ‘Spanish marriages’ – arose out of the machinations of Francois Guizot, still in power in France, to have the 15-year-old Queen Isabella of Spain and her even younger sister, the 14-year-old Infanta Luisa, marry, respectively, the Spanish Duke of Cadiz and the French Duke of Montpensier, youngest son of King Louis-Philippe. In this era of arranged dynastic marriages and child brides, the marriage of the Infanta was deemed as important as that of Queen Isabella, especially as there were rumours surrounding Cadiz’s ability to sire an heir. In the event, Isabella had several children and the Spanish throne was never in danger of falling to a French prince. The sense at the time, however, was that Guizot had outmanoeuvred the British Foreign Secretary, gaining the ascendancy

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in Spain for France. It was the beginning of a rivalry that would dominate Palmerston’s first years back at the Foreign Office. In arranging for the marriages to occur simultaneously, Guizot reneged on an earlier deal with Aberdeen, which stipulated that the Infanta would not marry Montpensier until Queen Isabella had first married a Spanish cousin – such as Cadiz – and produced heirs, thus ensuring the Spanish throne stayed out of French grasp. Guizot justified his actions by reference to a dispatch sent by Palmerston to Henry Bulwer, the British Ambassador to Spain, barely two weeks after his return to the Foreign Office. The apparently routine dispatch mentioned Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, a first cousin of Victoria’s husband Prince Albert, as one of the possible suitors for Queen Isabella. Palmerston did not know that Aberdeen and Guizot had informally agreed to exclude Leopold – whom the French considered too closely associated with Britain – from the list of suitors for the Spanish queen. There is also the possibility, suggested by the historian Kenneth Bourne, that Palmerston knew Leopold’s candidature would be antithetical to Guizot and wrote the offending dispatch with a deliberate view ‘to provoking the French into some action which would release Britain from the agreements made by Aberdeen’. According to Bourne, Palmerston hoped to frighten the French into accepting Cadiz’s younger, more liberal brother the Duke of Seville for Queen Isabella.12 If so, the ploy backfired; the perceived advocacy of Leopold was seized upon by Guizot as an opportunity ‘to revenge himself on Palmerston for his previous slights of France’.13 News that the ‘Spanish marriages’ would occur simultaneously caused a sensation in Britain. There was a sense that the country had been lied to by the French and that Spanish independence was in jeopardy; even Queen Victoria – previously so well-disposed to King Louis-Philippe – declared the situation ‘infamous’.14 Palmerston was quick to press home this sense of injustice, using nautical terminology to describe how ‘French Influence would soon prevail among the venal & weak minded Set of Men [in Spain] Who Surrounds a Court, and, are placed at the Head of Departments France will thus get Possession of the Captain’s Cabin and of the Management of the Tiller Wheel.’15 His reliable ally the Morning Chronicle embarked on a prolonged and

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uninhibited war of words with Guizot’s Journal des Debats.16 Greville, too, thought the double marriage an ‘odious and offensive’ measure brought about by ‘shabby and underhanded’ means.17 While no friend of the Foreign Secretary’s, this was an occasion where the insult offered to Britain superseded personal animosity. The celebrated diarist’s private convictions found expression in The Times, and by the middle of September Le Constitutional declared itself unable to reprint articles from The Times owing to their ‘brutal and insulting tone’ to France.18 Greville once wrote with regard to The Times: ‘it always amuses me to think what a machine this paper is, and how and by whom the strings of it are pulled’.19 With regard to foreign policy Greville was himself one of the chief puppet masters, never more so than during the autumn of 1846. Delane and Reeve were both holidaying on the continent – the latter receiving from Guizot a note wishing him ‘Bon voyage sur le Danube’20 – and so it was Greville’s correspondence with the assistant editor Dasent that set the tone of the paper’s coverage of the ‘Spanish marriages’, one strongly worded article describing the ‘deep conviction’ of The Times that the double marriage was of ‘a most offensive and dangerous character’.21 The paper was also receiving at this time pro-Palmerston reports from Andrew O’Reilly, its Paris correspondent, with whom Bulwer in Madrid had struck up a correspondence, commenting in one letter on the ‘powerful engine’ the journalist had at his disposal.22 The occasion of the ‘Spanish marriages’ – half an hour apart – on 10 October 1846 saw The Times congratulate the Spanish people on the marriage of Queen Isabella to a native prince who ‘introduces no foreign influence to injure or insult the people of his country’. Montpensier’s arrival, on the other hand, was said to be greeted by ‘the purchased acclamations of noisy crowds well trained and carefully posted on his road’.23 The paper was positively Palmerstonian a few days later when it suggested that the ‘entente cordiale to which the French . . . Government adhered with so much constancy so long as it was necessary to its views of aggrandizement or safety, seems . . . no longer une verité’.24 This sentence, with its suggestion that Guizot adhered to the entente only because it enabled French aggrandizement, could have been uttered by Palmerston himself in parliament or in

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one of his media organs in 1843 or 1844. Guizot was taken aback by the extent of the anger directed towards France, writing in dismay to Reeve how six years of convincing the British of his sincerity could all disappear ‘like a puff of wind’.25 But in Printing House Square, too, change was in the air.

The ‘Heat of Controversy’ Delane returned from his holiday at the end of October to London and a new, assuredly unpalatable, sense of association between Palmerston and The Times. It was in fact to Palmerston that Queen Victoria turned when she finally began to counsel a less hostile tone in The Times.26 Delane did not ‘approve the marriage of the Infanta or the intrigues by which it has been brought about’ and had been supportive of Greville’s tone.27 Nevertheless, his first instinct when back in office was to resume contact with Aberdeen, who had been annoyed at the French action but did not believe it to be ‘an adequate cause of national quarrel’.28 It would, Delane suggested, be ‘easy to profit’ from ‘any suggestions with which your Lordship might garner me as to the future comments upon the many points which may be expected to arise’.29 The reunion, however, was not straightforward. Aberdeen accused The Times of deserting him for Palmerston, and establishing ‘a very intimate connection’ with the new government at the expense of ‘older friends and adherents’.30 Delane blamed ‘haste writing’ and the ‘heat of controversy’ for the earlier errors in writings and insisted, with some tugging at the truth, that he had no ‘direct communication’ with the Whigs and knew ‘as little of them as when they were last in power’.31 Aberdeen accepted Delane’s protestations of innocence, insisting he was ‘by no means hostile to the Government’, but ‘could not write to you freely, without the conviction of you being in a state of perfect indipendence [sic]’32 – or, more correctly, independent of influences contrary to his own. Aberdeen was wilfully blind to the want of independence at The Times inherent in his own communications with Delane. As a willing accomplice in these dealings, Delane scuppered the moral claims of the much promulgated and self-lauded ‘fourth

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estate’. He may have been independent of ‘government’ but he was not independent of political influence; the verdict of public opinion of foreign matters was regularly of secondary importance to the verdict of Aberdeen. Occasionally, Delane’s reading of ‘independence’ seems limited to its use in convincing one source that he ceded to them and no other. Aberdeen advised Delane to pursue a mellower tone: ‘It seems to me that it is impossible you should be employed more usefully for the country, and . . . the whole civilized world, than in endeavouring to soften the feelings of irritation, and to avert the probability of any hostile result from the late events in Spain.’33 The Times complied and throughout November gave precedence in its pages to strong disapproval of Palmerston’s conduct over the now mild rebukes of Guizot and, like Aberdeen, sought rapprochement between the powers.34 The change in tone solicited from Palmerston, in a letter to Easthope, the riposte that ‘of course every Frenchman will be for France, as Every Englishman ought to be (though Some there are who are not so) for England’.35 The dispute between Britain and France over the ‘Spanish marriages’ had unforeseen consequences right at the heart of continental Europe, where the historic Kingdom of Poland had been partitioned since the Congress of Vienna between Austria, Russia and Prussia. A revolt by Polish nobles in Austrian-controlled Galicia had been viciously quashed in early 1846, with some 1,200 men, women and children killed or mutilated and more than 400 manor houses burned or plundered.36 Subsequently, Austrian troops marched into the neighbouring Republic of Cracow – the last vestige of independent Polish territory. The Austrian Chancellor, Prince Metternich, called a conference of the three partitioning powers in November 1846, at which Russia and Prussia agreed that Cracow should be incorporated into the Austrian Empire. This opportunist action was inextricably linked to the inconclusive ending of the ‘Spanish marriages’ affair, the three Eastern courts taking advantage of the rupture in AngloFrench relations to consummate a design originally mooted in the early 1830s.37 The Times denounced Austria’s ‘trampling on the last remnant of Polish nationalism’ as the ‘most flagrant, direct, and unwarrantable

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violation of the Treaty of Vienna’.38 At the same time, however, Delane, Reeve, Aberdeen, Greville and Guizot all saw in the crisis an opportunity for rapprochement between Britain and France. The editor wrote to Aberdeen: I trust that the unanimity of opinion the Governments of France and England expressed on this subject may be the means of producing a better international understanding – I shall do all I can to promote so desirable an object and trust in doing so to deserve your Lordship’s approbation.39 Delane’s hopes for a ‘better international understanding’ – that is Anglo-French cooperation – were dashed by the intransigence of Palmerston. The Foreign Secretary had been alarmed by the Austrian action, but his anger at France meant that he ignored Guizot’s envisaged joint protest, sending instead the tamest of formal rebukes. Demonstrating afresh that well-established independence from (or insubordination to) his Cabinet colleagues, this stance went directly against the advice of the Prime Minister who was anxious to launch ‘a joint representation’ with France about ‘the changes which have taken place in Poland’.40 Guizot’s problem was that the annexation of Cracow caused a great deal more fury among the public in France than Britain, Paris being the centre of the émigré population. Nevertheless, there was a significant level of sympathy for the plight of Poland in Britain, and juxtaposing his insignificant formal letter, Palmerston delivered at the Lord Mayor’s banquet in December a stern denouncement of the violation of Cracow. He also spoke gushingly of the devotion to the Polish cause of Lord Dudley Stuart, the MP and head of the Literary Association of the Friends of Poland. As reward for this speech a deputation from the Polish Historical Society presented Palmerston with an inscribed medal bearing the head of Adam Czartoryski, one of the leading émigrés, ‘in recognition of his sympathy for the Poles’.41 Where Cracow was concerned, Palmerston had placated the respectable supporters of Poland without contributing meaningfully to its survival.

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A New Proprietor The publication in January 1847 of some diplomatic correspondence relating to the ‘Spanish marriages’ provided The Times with another opportunity to criticize Palmerston. ‘If we were called upon . . . to pass a judgement on the style and merit of the English despatches in this collection,’ the editorial read, ‘we should complain that they were large without being vigorous, hasty without being energetic, coarse and inelegant without being strong.’42 A second editorial the following day concluded: Whatever, then, may be thought of the tortuous policy of the French King in these affairs, and of the mode in which he has been served by his own Ministers, he has profited as much, first and last, by the errors of our Foreign Secretary as by the dexterity of his own. Greville was in France at the time and perturbed by the ‘rejoicing’ these articles brought Parisians.43 He questioned Reeve as to whether it was ‘wise and patriotik [sic] to attack Palmerston’. The Spanish question remained one of national prestige, and although Greville agreed ‘entre nous’ that Palmerston’s policy had been flawed, he still insisted The Times ought to join ‘in vindicating an English cause’. There would, after all, be ‘plenty of safe opportunities of criticising all or any part of Palmerston’s conduct’ in the future.44 The Spanish affair, however, was fading into the background at The Times, the paper experiencing a period of unprecedented upheaval during the first half of 1847. Delane’s position as editor seemed under threat, for just as his father’s connection to the Walter family had facilitated his entry to the paper, it now threatened to be his downfall. John Walter and William Delane were embroiled in a serious financial dispute and the editor felt his dismissal to be near at hand. His call to the bar in May certainly suggests he was on the lookout for a new profession.45 Walter’s poor health was a complicating factor in the dispute, the two men only reaching a settlement a week before the proprietor’s death from throat cancer in late July. He died in Printing

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House Square, having spent his last months’ living in an apartment on the premises that had always been so much more than a mere place of work to him. Walter’s eldest son and heir, John Walter III, was a reserved and religious young man. Actually born in Printing House Square in October 1818, he took his responsibility to The Times very seriously; it was an institution he was taking over – a ‘part of the order of the universe’ – not just a newspaper. Like his father, he would also enter parliament, elected for the constituency of Nottingham on the very day Walter senior died. He would serve as an MP more or less continuously until 1885. The practical-minded new proprietor was far more interested in the printing and management sides of the business, leaving editorial control for the most part in the hands of Delane. Nevertheless, although the younger Walter never wielded his authority as overtly as his father, contemporaries were agreed that while Delane’s hand ‘was more constantly on the helm’, Walter’s was the ‘deciding voice’ when ‘the course of the ship had to be determined’.46 Delane’s preoccupation with his own position at The Times led to some difficulties with Aberdeen. Reeve had become friendly with Baron Bunsen, the charismatic Prussian Ambassador to Britain, his writing losing its incessant French bias as he began to speculate on a new diplomatic order where an Anglo-Prussian alliance stood opposite a Franco-Austrian one.47 Aberdeen disapproved of this new departure in Reeve’s writings, expressing in March his disappointment at articles on a proposed Prussian constitution: ‘I should have thought that good will and support might have been extended to the Prussian Constitution without putting an end altogether to the French alliance.’48 Delane confided that he had had ‘much hesitation in publishing’ the article ‘as I feared it would bear the construction you have put on it’. He assured Aberdeen it would not be difficult to remedy the trouble ‘today or tomorrow in accordance with your Lordship’s instructions’.49 However, throughout that month and into April relations between the two continued to falter, Aberdeen unhappy at articles in The Times, Delane – too distracted to reign in Reeve – promising remedial writings.50

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Palmerston and the Chronicle The bond between Palmerston and the Morning Chronicle was strengthened by the Russell government’s forging an alliance with The Times. Palmerston paid his dues to the Chronicle, sending in the first days of July a number of notes on the ministerial appointments being considered, including a clarification that there ‘is no Truth Whatsoever in the Report that I am going to the House of Lords’.51 For its part, the Chronicle portrayed Palmerston’s return to the Foreign Office in the tranquil light he wished it viewed.52 It was also a willing receptacle for his correspondence on the Spanish marriages, the Foreign Secretary admitting in one of his letters to Doyle on the French plotting: ‘Some of these are harsh Words but they will do good in the present State of Things.’53 Roger Bullen, in his study of the collapse of the entente cordiale, has highlighted the important role played by papers like the Chronicle and the Journal des Debats, allowing politicians like Palmerston and Guizot to ‘say things . . . the conventions of diplomacy would never have allowed . . . in dispatches or speeches’.54 The Chronicle continued to support Palmerston on the important foreign issues of 1847, most notably the civil wars in Portugal and Switzerland. In Portugal, the increasingly repressive behaviour of Queen Maria II had culminated in the dissolution of the parliament and annulment of the constitution. In response, the liberal Septembrist party established a rival government (or junta) in the coastal city of Oporto. Palmerston had long been deeply involved in Portuguese affairs, having helped Maria to her throne as part of the Quadruple Alliance in 1834. That alliance had been set up as a constitutionalist-monarchist counterpoint to the absolutist powers of Austria, Russia and Prussia, and the Foreign Secretary was unimpressed with Maria’s turn to autocratic rule. In a move that infuriated Queen Victoria – who was a cousin by marriage to Maria – he treated the insurgents as equals to the Portuguese Queen, sending diplomatic representatives to Oporto. Nevertheless, the fear of France or Spain – the other members of the Quadruple Alliance – acting unilaterally compelled him to work in concert with Guizot when Maria sought assistance. A joint mediation was

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undertaken, followed, once it had been rejected by the leaders at Oporto, by a joint military intervention in the early summer of 1847 that crushed the junta. The Globe and the Chronicle were the only papers to support the military intervention. Nevertheless, Palmerston was saved from too severe strictures by his long insistence on mediation prior to the military action and that Maria restore the constitution. Even The Times, which deprecated ‘the cruel necessity of proceeding to measures of violence against a city like Oporto’, was forced to concede ‘these evils are justly attributable to the Junta alone’. Palmerston was also helped by his association with the earlier pro-Septembrist articles in the Chronicle, articles Prince Albert believed gave the impression that Britain supported the junta.55 Indeed, one of the most lasting consequences of the Portuguese affair was the bad feeling, never healed, that it created between Palmerston and Victoria. Although Palmerston had grudgingly collaborated with Guizot over Portugal, he was determined not to do so again when confronted with trouble in Switzerland. Here, the 1840s had seen the liberal party gain power in an increasing number of the 22 cantons that formed the Swiss state. In response, seven conservative Catholic cantons formed a defensive alliance, called the Sonderbund. By the summer of 1847 the liberals had won power in the majority of 12 cantons needed to enact the reform of the Federal Pact of 1815. The Sonderbund refused to recognize the new authority and preparations for civil war began in earnest. With the animosity over the Spanish marriages still casting a shadow, Palmerston obstructed a series of proposals from Guizot to deal with the incipient conflict. The prospect of a democratic and centralized Switzerland was quite unpalatable to Guizot. Nevertheless, he declined Metternich’s plans for France and Austria to invade, the French liberal majority supporting their Swiss counterparts. As with Cracow, Guizot required British participation in any moves on Switzerland, but Palmerston stalled on and rebuffed all his plans, including a five-power conference in London. Palmerston did, however, send a letter of support to the Swiss liberal leader, Colonel Ochsenbein, and for this the liberal papers in Switzerland fêted him. The Times, like Aberdeen, advocated

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the conservative claims of the Sonderbund. In an attempt to stave off the criticism that it was arguing for authoritarianism, the paper tried to blur the distinction between Swiss liberals and radicals, indicating that ‘some contemporaries of this country’ had been led by ignorance ‘to confound the pretensions of Swiss radicals with the cause of Liberalism’, and presenting these ‘Radicals’ as being ‘in imitation of the Russian police’.56 The articles also managed some derogatory references to the Foreign Secretary and his diplomacy. Palmerston was condemned for not cooperating with Guizot earlier and, the paper warned, would be left ‘regarded as the patron of a party of incendiaries and demagogues’.57 The Chronicle argued the liberal cause. On the central question of reform of the Federal Pact: ‘Nothing is more clear than that the system established in 1815 is altogether unsuited to the present state of Switzerland. The Compact was framed for a condition of things that no longer exists.’58 The Chronicle noted caustically how The Times represented Switzerland as ‘a Goshen of ultra-radicalism, a focus of political pestilence, a nest of communism, socialism, and infidelity, a nursery of theoretical and practical ruffianism’. More worrying, however, and demonstrating the never-to-be-underestimated strength of The Times, was the Chronicle’s rueful admission that these misrepresentations ‘should go down with the people of England as they do’ – that is, successfully.59 Palmerston was perturbed at the prospect of French or Austrian intervention, but still held up diplomatic proceedings from July to November, arguing with Guizot about conditions preliminary to any conference and over the wording of a declaration to the Swiss liberals. He was greatly relieved by news of the swift victory of the militarily superior liberals in November, which rendered the staging of any conferences unnecessary. In the aftermath, Palmerston, although he had given little concrete assistance, earned the undeserved gratitude of the Swiss liberals; his burgeoning reputation as a champion of liberalism was enhanced. Three years later, Palmerston was still countering continental claims that he had hastened the military operations and suspicions regarding his relations with Ochsenbein.60

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‘Champion of European Liberalism’ A general election in the autumn of 1847 strengthened the Whig benches in parliament – but only slightly. Russell was still dependent on the tacit support of Peel and his followers to govern. According to The Times, foreign affairs ‘played no part in the combats and victories’ of the election.61 However, one early Chartist historian believed it was precisely because international events loomed so large that Chartists and other left-wing candidates appeared on the hustings to challenge the government on its international record.62 The Chartists were an opposition movement built around the six points of the ‘People’s Charter’ of 1838, including universal male suffrage and the secret ballot. George Julian Harney, their leading spokesman on foreign affairs, was dispatched to Tiverton to face down Palmerston, even though the still-restrictive franchise meant he did not stand a chance of success. Harney arrived three days early and spoke to good effect at a number of meetings. ‘Tonight we sleep upon our arms; to-morrow we march to battle and victory,’ he told a crowd on the last night before polling day.63 Harney appeared on the hustings in Tiverton intent on attacking not simply Palmerston’s policies but also, perhaps just as importantly, the reputation he was beginning to acquire as a defender of liberalism. Harney vilified the Tory governments of which Palmerston had been a member, and then launched into a damning country-by-country criticism of his foreign policy. The recent loss of Cracow was, of course, lamented, with Palmerston accused, quite accurately, of sending ‘waste paper’ to the despots of the Eastern courts. When Harney sat down after more than two hours, there were great cheers. Palmerston countered with a long speech of his own that, while often playing fast and loose with the truth, pleased the crowd with its humour and easy manner. On the Opium War, for example, he held: He [Harney] says that we tried to compel the Chinese to smoke opium. Why, that charge is much the same as if a man were to be accused of compelling the people of England to drink beer, or spirits, or wine, or anything else of which they are exceedingly fond. (A laugh) . . . The very men who were employed by

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the Emperor, ostensibly to prevent the introduction of opium, were the great smugglers of the drug – not to say that they largely consumed it themselves. (Laughter). Palmerston then feigned amazement at Harney’s charge that he supported despotism and tyranny against the liberties of the people of foreign countries. After all, was he not ‘accused all over Europe of being the great instigator of revolution (laughter) the friend and champion of all popular insurrections, the enemy of all constituted authorities?’ Finally, Palmerston was convinced: that in the humble share which I have had in the administration of the foreign affairs of this country I have contributed to the spread of constitutional liberty among foreign nations, and that there are many millions of mankind who are now happier, better, and more prosperous and contented than they would otherwise have been, in consequence of the course which the Government of which I have been the organ, has pursued.64 Like his opponent, Palmerston stepped down from the hustings to loud support. Harney won a show-of-hands poll. But when put to ballot (only a fraction of those present were permitted to vote), Palmerston secured the victory. Palmerston’s strong oratorical showing in Tiverton seemed to confirm the assessment of a recent article in Fraser’s Magazine, which suggested that, after many years ‘as a speaker ranked with the steadypaced humdrums’, he had now shown himself a ‘master of the art’.65 The Foreign Secretary had always been skilled at the cut-and-thrust of parliamentary debate, able to put down an opponent with a welljudged barb; his public speaking, however, whether in the Commons or on the hustings, had often been derided as inept. Change came with the growing realization that his political power rested on the support of public opinion. Needing to go over the heads of the political establishment to connect with the people, Palmerston made a conscious effort to improve his speaking, in much the same way as he worked so diligently on forging links with journalists and papers. It helped that

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he was naturally gregarious, a trait he worked into his speeches. Years of campaigning had, after all, taught Richard Cobden that ‘people do not attend public meetings to be taught, but to be excited, flattered and pleased’.66 Palmerston’s speech reached a much wider audience than the voters of Tiverton. It was published as a pamphlet and distributed widely. It was also praised widely in the papers, the Tiverton election being one of the few to attract a large number of journalists. The reason was simple: Palmerston had invited them, keenly aware of the ‘remarkable ability’, as Aled Jones has put it, of newspapers to ‘to manufacture or to elaborate political images’.67 It was at Tiverton that Palmerston first took to vividly casting himself as the champion of European liberalism, an image popular with the whole of the broad audience he was addressing. It was an image he would come to rely on during the tumultuous years that followed.

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6 R EVOLUTIONS

It was around one o’clock in the afternoon of 1 March 1848 when Lord Palmerston stood up in the House of Commons to begin a five-hour defence of his record as Foreign Secretary. He was responding to the introduction a week earlier of a motion demanding his impeachment for treason. These extraordinary proceedings had been brought forward by Thomas Anstey, a minor politician representing a constituency in Cork in the south of Ireland. The real guiding hand behind the action was David Urquhart, the fanatical Russophobe and recently elected MP who had been dismissed by Palmerston from his diplomatic posting in Istanbul more than a decade previously. The entire episode had a somewhat surreal, desperate feel, with The Times one of the few serious commentators to give it even the slightest credence.1 The thrust of Anstey’s attack was that Palmerston had been guilty of – among other related charges – supporting Russian aggression towards Poland, abetting Russian designs on the dismemberment of Turkey, conniving at the build-up of the Russian fleet in the Baltic and betraying Greece to Russian advantage – that he was, in essence, a Russian agent. With the experience of his Tiverton duel behind him, Palmerston ably defended his conduct in office and handling of various affairs and treaties. It was also in this speech that enunciated the famous political maxim: ‘We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual.’2 The ludicrous impeachment proceedings were a distraction for Palmerston at a moment of great

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crisis in Europe. Nevertheless, the speech, which was widely reported in the papers and again published as a pamphlet, offered an opportunity for the Foreign Secretary to connect and communicate with the British public, outlining his vision of Britain’s place in the world. Such opportunities were particularly important in the spring and summer of 1848, as Palmerston had just lost his most important newspaper ally, the Morning Chronicle. Having challenged The Times quite strongly for a few years in the mid-1830s, the Morning Chronicle lost pace again as the decade ended. The paper remained profitable, however, until a new rival, the Daily News, appeared on the scene. Founded by the novelist Charles Dickens in early 1846, the Daily News stole some of the Chronicle’s best writers as well as many of its readers. Dickens, who had actually worked as a reporter for the Chronicle in the 1830s, enjoyed discomfiting John Easthope, with whom he had clashed on several occasions. The Chronicle began to lose money and became a financial burden for the proprietor. Easthope, who had also lost his seat in the 1847 general election, eventually sold the paper to a consortium of Peelites in February 1848, under whose inept guidance it continued to decline.3 The loss of the Chronicle was a significant blow. Practicality overcame sentiment and the Foreign Secretary got Andrew Doyle to arrange a meeting with John Delane. (Incidentally, having lost his job at the Chronicle, Palmerston found Doyle a position as a Poor Law inspector.) Charles Greville, that perpetual insider, met Delane within hours of the meeting and relayed events to Lord Clarendon in Ireland. Palmerston ‘offered all sorts of information’ before suggesting to Delane ‘that it would be better if he would put the gentleman who conducted his foreign business into . . . communication with him’. Delane, who would not give up Henry Reeve so easily, ‘very civilly declined’, saying ‘that he himself had for some years past turned his especial attention to these subjects & was personally and exclusively responsible for all the articles upon them’. The editor then got to the heart of the matter, stating that ‘he did not think such a connexion as had existed between Ld P & the M. Chron would be either advantageous to him or to the paper’. He professed ‘to have no hostility to P and reminded him that on many occasions they had supported his policy’.

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Palmerston then ‘shook hands with him & so they parted – not I think on the whole on a bad footing’.4 Greville actually urged some accommodation with the Foreign Secretary, telling Clarendon, ‘I really would rather reform Palm than punish him.’5 But there was to be no rapprochement between Palmerston and Printing House Square. A not insignificant factor – aside from the long-standing differences over foreign policy – may have been Delane’s belief that the Whig government was about to fall, its proposal to increase income tax causing middle-class uproar. Greville’s opinion on the increasingly sustained attacks was that The Times had ‘sniffed’ that the government ‘cannot go on, and wants, according to its custom, to give them a shove’.6 The strength of the government, he wrote to Clarendon, was ‘not sufficient for their objects, and it seems as if all the scattered elements would converge in opposition to this budget, or to the most important parts of it. You see The Times, which supports Wood, will go dead agt the income tax.’7 In the event, the income tax proposal was withdrawn and the Whig government limped on, saved by the split in the Tory ranks.

‘Glory to the French People’ Sir Robert Peel not only helped keep the Whigs in office by voting in support of their measures, he was also consulted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Wood, at the height of the banking crisis of late 1847.8 This financial crisis was but one minor manifestation of the turmoil engulfing Europe throughout the 1840s, a series of failed harvests plaguing the middle years of the decade and leading to a dangerous increase in the cost of basic foodstuffs such as cereals and bread. A potato blight, meanwhile, was stalking Ireland. The suffering caused by these agricultural failures was compounded by wider changes in society. Europe itself was in transition: a turbulent convulsion brought on by industrialization, overpopulation and a great shift from country to city living. Food shortages and unemployment became the dominant motifs of a period that would be known as the ‘Hungry Forties’. In France, economic distress was coupled with anger at the corruption of the government of King Louis-Philippe and Francois Guizot – the

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diplomatic jousts with Palmerston not enough to distract the French people from their sufferings. A reform rally scheduled for 22 February 1848 was cancelled at the last minute, but Parisians took to the streets regardless, and were soon joined in cries of ‘Down with the ministry’ by disgruntled members of the National Guard. Gustave Flaubert wove the sights and sounds of revolutionary Paris into his great novel Sentimental Education. ‘Men endowed with a kind of frenetic eloquence’ harangued ‘the populace at street corners’, whilst others ‘were in the churches ringing the tocsin as loudly as ever they could.’ The demonstrations went on for more than two days, and as lead was cast for bullets and cartridges were rolled, the trees on the boulevards together with benches, urinals and railings were put into service as defences. ‘Paris,’ wrote Flaubert, ‘was covered with barricades.’9 Louis-Philippe dismissed Guizot, but on the streets behind the barricades, power passed from the reformers to the radicals. On the night of 23 February a small knot of protestors, red flag in hand, clashed with a contingent of troops on the Rue de Capucines. Shots were fired and a score of protestors left dead. A funeral procession formed, more barricades were raised, and riot turned ineluctably to revolution. On 24 February Louis-Philippe abdicated, and a provisional government was established, consisting in the main of well-known reformers such as Alphonse de Lamartine, but also including more radical figures like Louis Blanc and Alexandre Ledru-Rollin as well as the symbolic ordinary worker, Albert. That night, the Second Republic was proclaimed from a balcony of the Hotel de Ville. ‘Glory to the French people!’ exulted the Limerick Reporter, a nationalist newspaper in the south of Ireland. ‘They are worthy of liberty. Their noble deeds kindle holy emotion and sympathy in every breast not dead to the pulsations of freedom.’10 There was a similar reaction from would-be rebels all over Europe. Palmerston was wary of the Second Republic and its ability to ignite war across the Continent. Nevertheless, he reacted quite calmly to the revolution, recognizing the new government immediately and encouraging the other Great Powers not to interfere. Lamartine and his moderate colleagues, Palmerston reasoned in a letter to a British diplomat in Berlin, were ‘the only security at present against anarchy, conflagration, and

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massacre’.11 His equanimity proved well-founded, as despite some early belligerent words, the provisional government provided little real assistance to revolutionists from other countries. On a more personal level, and showing the affair still rankled deeply, the Foreign Secretary delighted at ‘the sweep made of the Plotters of the Spanish Marriage’.12 Alongside the official diplomatic correspondence, Palmerston was also receiving letters from his old newspaper ally Easthope, who was in Paris on business at the time of the revolution.13 Palmerston appreciated the continued correspondence: ‘Many Thanks, go on Sending; In Times like these Every Sample of Information and Every Mans opinion are of great value.’14 The Times received news of the French Revolution before the government, announcing it to the county in a special edition on Sunday 27 February. The paper was initially positive in its reports, praising the revolutionists for not resorting to plunder and pillage: ‘There is a romantic, and what is better a genuine, sense of honour in the hearts of the people, that will this time, as hitherto, distinguish them.’15 However, The Times soon became convinced that Lamartine was abandoning the country’s middle classes and succumbing to the demands of the Parisian street mobs: ‘Fall down all ye mortals! Crouch to the earth all living things! Worship M. Ledru Rollin, his awful colleagues and tremendous commissioners.’16 Aberdeen, whose admiration for Guizot remained steadfast, approved of the harsher tone: ‘The letters from Paris which you had the goodness to send me cannot fail to produce a considerable effect and will tend to open the eyes of the Publick to the real state of affairs, which has hitherto been most marvellously misrepresented by the Correspondents of the Press.’17 Although the tone of The Times was overly dramatic, the euphoria surrounding the proclamation of the Second Republic did not last long in France, the revolution failing to cure the ills of mass unemployment. Within months simmering tensions between the moderate and radical republicans – who had combined so auspiciously, if somewhat accidentally, in February – erupted after the closure of the National Workshops into the carnage of the ‘June days’, a weekend of bloody fighting on the streets of Paris, with the heaviest artillery in the army ranged against the bodies and barricades of the mainly

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working-class insurgents. Terrible atrocities were committed on both sides, and by the end of the fighting at least 1,500 workers and almost 900 government troops and militia lay dead.18 For the workers of Paris, the National Workshops – which had provided employment in public works for the poor – had been a potent symbol of their victory in February. The ‘June days’, it was immediately clear, were equally symbolic, marking the beginning of the end of the ‘Springtime of Peoples’ and the death of its romantic ideals. The Times characterized the fighting as ‘the outbreak of intense and irreconcilable fear and hostility between the two great classes of society, the bourgeoisie and the people’. On one side lay the interests of law, order and property, on the other an ‘utter dissolution of social order and a desperate resistance to every species of authority – a hurly-burly of wild desires, impudent frauds, frantic delusions, sanguinary passions, imperial and insatiable wants’.19 Britain’s masses were seen in a similarly unsavoury light, as the following letter of John Walter’s to Delane amply demonstrates: ‘I have been lurking here very quietly in my den since I have been here, having pretty much the same sort of apprehension of the Nottinghamites that I have of the Parisians, so that I never turn out without expecting to encounter a mob on every corner.’20 This pro-authority stance would characterize the paper’s writing during the tumultuous ‘year of revolutions’.

‘Times of Storm and Unrest’ An intoxicating wave of rebellion swept through Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Violent protests left Vienna, the heart of the Austrian Empire, under the control of a citizens’ militia and a students’ ‘Academic Legion’. Riots convulsed the streets of Austriancontrolled Milan and Venice. Elsewhere in Italy – or rather the collection of kingdoms, duchies and statelets that made up Italy – King Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia was forced to grant a constitution and even declare war against Austria to placate his citizens. Further north, constitutions were also being won by liberals in many states of the German Confederation, including Baden, Nassau, Wurttemberg

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and Bavaria. ‘Times of storm and unrest,’ observed a character in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.21 The forces of conservatism did not give up power without a struggle – often one with terrible consequences. The Austrian general, Joseph Radetzky, after five days of horrific street fighting ordered one last destructive bombardment of the city of Milan before retreating north to the so-called Quadrilateral of fortresses at Verona, Peschiera, Mantua and Legnano that barred the way into Austria itself. The battle for Berlin on 18 March, meanwhile, was among the most ferocious of the year, with troops attacking barricades with cannons, ‘frightful hand-to-hand fighting’ and houses ‘overcrowded with dead and wounded’. The streets ‘swam with blood’, according to one eyewitness report, before King Frederick William IV of Prussia finally relented and acceded to his citizens’ demands for a constitution.22 Britain was relatively unaffected by the revolutions coursing through Europe, a summer rebellion in famine-struck Ireland lasting just a matter of days before being easily quashed. Earlier, an almost 150,000-strong Chartist demonstration at Kennington Common on 10 April had dispersed rather tamely when informed by authorities that a planned march to parliament to deliver a ‘monster petition’ would not be allowed. The immense gathering on the common did not spiral into conflagration, and London did not fall to the radicals in the manner of other capitals. Nevertheless, there was a great swell of interest in the events on the Continent, not least because of the waves of political dissidents – conservative and radical alike – who made their way to Britain during the tumultuous years of the late 1840s. The sight of benighted Europeans fighting for rights that Britons had taken for granted for centuries, such as constitutions, a free press and jury trials, gave rise to a definite sense of superiority. But there was also a genuine increase in enthusiasm for the liberal and nationalist causes, with middle-class groups organizing in support of the Italians and working-class groups for Poland. Foreign affairs could no longer be regarded ‘as the exclusive and peculiar province of statesmen and diplomatists’, as the Peoples’ International League had previously complained.23

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Palmerston’s main aims during this period of unprecedented disorder were the prevention of any large-scale European war and the maintenance of the ‘balance of power’ that had prevailed since the Treaty of Vienna. How far he actually influenced events is open to question. The Foreign Secretary did mediate between Prussia and Denmark in their conflict over the disputed duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, but for the most part his diplomacy seems to have had little impact on the ground, and the fact that the revolutions did not spill over into a European war (remaining instead a series of localized conflicts) was not, as James Chambers has argued, ‘because the long shadow of Palmerston lay between so many of the potential belligerents’.24 Palmerston saw this himself, explaining to a sceptical Queen Victoria how his policy was ‘one rather of observation than of action’.25 Nevertheless, the sense created was of a minister at the heart of events. This was an utterly favourable impression for Palmerston to generate, as most Britons, Leslie Mitchell contends, did not doubt ‘it was their right and duty to take the Europeans in hand’.26 The revolutions in Europe were far too violent and radical for Palmerston, but recognizing where the sympathies of the British public lay, he tailored his public pronouncements accordingly. For instance, when rumours of Austrian atrocities in Italy, including the flogging of women and children, reached Britain, Palmerston was loud and indignant in his protests, receiving kudos for his humanity. His innate sense of how to manipulate a story to his advantage was also evident when, writing at the end of 1848 to the British Minister in Milan of a recent attack on him in an Austrian-controlled newspaper, Palmerston stated: ‘All I should wish is that that attack should be circulated and read from one end of Italy, and from one end of Europe to another.’27 Palmerston did not mourn the fall of staunch conservatives like the Austrian Chancellor, Prince Metternich, who having escaped Vienna in March fled to London, joining the cabal of foreign and domestic opponents, Guizot and Louis-Philippe among their number, who could now conspire easily together against the Foreign Secretary. The preservation of the Austrian Empire, however, was of paramount importance

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to the balance of power in Europe, and although Palmerston could envisage the establishment of a new buffer state in northern Italy, with the Austrian territories of Lombardy and Venetia joining an enlarged Piedmont, this was only because he believed it would strengthen Austria as a bulwark against Russian aggression. The Foreign Secretary, therefore, gave absolutely no support to revolutionaries within Austria’s dominions north of the Alps, remaining conspicuously tight-lipped when more than 20 rebel leaders, including a British subject named Robert Becher, were summarily executed in Vienna in October.28 Nor did he give any succour to neighbouring German liberals. Yet so strong was the image of Palmerston as a radical firebrand, that it was German conservatives who concocted the rhyme ‘Hat der Teufel einen sohn, so ist er sicher Palmerston’ (‘If the devil has a son/his name is surely Palmerston’).29 In essence, Palmerston was a proponent of the status quo, but he was able to disguise this stance through parliamentary speeches and newspaper articles. His success in creating a sense of vigour around his policy is evident in a letter he received from ‘A Constituent’: The people of England think, rightly or wrongly, that a secret conspiracy is hatching to destroy liberty throughout Europe, under pretence of putting down Anarchy . . . all the oppressions and massacres of the higher Powers will be called legitimate means of maintaining order. They believe you to be an obstacle in the way of the Conspirators. They think a cue has been given to the Public Press to feel the way to your forced resignation. Brave them all my Lord, for your Country’s sake if not for your own – for your fall would be confirmation of their suspicions, and the signal for civil war.30 The anonymous author went on to congratulate Palmerston on ‘the uniform activity and talent you have displayed on all occasions’, asserting that the ‘English People’ recognized him as ‘the Protector of constitutional Freedom on the Continent’.31 The opposition of European tyrants was a popular business, even if for Palmerston it was more manufactured than real.

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‘The Editor’s Room’ ‘I don’t care a straw what any other paper thinks or says,’ wrote Clarendon to Reeve on 18 June 1848. ‘They are all regarded on the Continent as representing persons or cliques, but the Times is considered to be the exponent of what English opinion is or will be, & as it is thought that whatever public opinion determines with us the government ultimately does, an extraordinary and universal importance attaches to the views of the Times.’32 Clarendon was correct as to the importance attached to The Times by foreign leaders. It was not, however, the ‘exponent of what English opinion is or will be’, at least not in the realm of foreign affairs. Here the paper’s writing was heavily influenced throughout the year of revolutions by the sheer amount of time Reeve and Aberdeen spent in the company of the deposed rulers, like Metternich and Guizot, for whom Palmerston was the enemy. The Globe, still under the influence of Palmerston, drew attention to Aberdeen’s ties to these fallen leaders. ‘Imagine my loyalty being doubted,’ Aberdeen protested to his long-time correspondent Princess Lieven, ‘because I have seen the King and M. Guizot!’33 Reeve stated clearly that any revolution had ‘the effect of throwing my sympathies into the opposite scale’, and for the remainder of the year the most reactionary writing in The Times would emanate from his pen.34 Delane, too, came down on the side of authority in 1848, continuing to seek counsel from Aberdeen.35 The editor did stray from the Aberdeen line on occasion. For example, Delane was initially favourable to the Lombardy in its struggle against Austria: ‘We undoubtedly feel that sympathy which our correspondent has powerfully expressed for a people combating in the cause of national independence, protesting against the authority of a foreign nation, and defending in arms the soil of their country.’36 A few months later, however, coached by Aberdeen and others as to the importance to Britain of a strong Austria, the soil the Lombardians had previously been fighting bravely for became ‘an unquestionable right’ of Austria’s, ‘territory which England had contributed to annex to the Empire’.37 Delane here went against his own earlier convictions, congruent with Palmerston’s, that Lombardy ought to be added to Piedmont-Sardinia.

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Such behaviour gives credence to Keith Sandiford’s observation, in a work on diplomacy and public opinion surrounding the SchleswigHolstein question, that ‘probably the only opinions the press truly reflected were those of the politicians it purported to preach to, but who in fact influenced it more than it influenced them’.38 Delane also joined with Aberdeen in viewing (and portraying) Palmerston as a noisy firebrand. The case against the Foreign Secretary seemed strongest in Spain, a country in whose governance he had taken an intimate (if not always benevolent) interest since the mid-1830s. Palmerston did send a letter to Henry Bulwer, the British Ambassador in Madrid, suggesting that ‘it would then be wise for the Queen of Spain, in the present critical state of affairs, to strengthen the Executive Government by enlarging the basis upon which the administration is founded, and by calling to her councils some of those men who possess the confidence of the Liberal party’.39 The letter, the contents of which were quickly made public, was a heavy-handed continuation of his longstanding efforts to inculcate a British-style liberal-constitutional form of government in Spain. It was seized on by Palmerston’s opponents – around the Cabinet table, at Court and in the pages of the press – as an unalloyed act of meddling. The Times described it as an ‘extraordinary, but not unprecedented, attempt to dictate to the Spanish Government the policy it was to adopt’, characterizing its contents as asking the Queen of Spain ‘to turn out her Government, and call to her councils some members of the Opposition!’ Palmerston’s ‘dictatorial tone’, the paper continued, was discreditable ‘to himself, to the English Ministry, and to the nation’.40 Palmerston’s intervention had little effect on the Spanish authorities who, under the leadership of General Ramon Maria Narvaez – a figure who was said to have replied when asked on his deathbed to forgive his enemies, ‘I don’t have to, because I’ve shot them all’ – viciously put down the March rising. It did, however, result in the expulsion of Bulwer and a freeze in diplomatic relations between the two countries that lasted until 1850. The expulsion of Bulwer, which was seen an insult to Britain, made it difficult for either parliament or press to hold Palmerston to account. Regarding any public censure of the Foreign Secretary, The Times admitted that the Spaniards ‘would have

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construed [it] into a justification of themselves’.41 It did not hold back, however, from voicing its belief that Palmerston’s Spanish policy furthered the impression abroad that Britain’s sympathies lay with the revolutionaries, writing in the aftermath of a further series of quashed riots in May: ‘The Spanish Government has for a second time put down the antagonists and rebels with which the English Minister, of all men, seemed to threaten the peace of the country.’42 By associating Palmerston with opponents of dictatorial figures such as Spain’s General Narvaez, Delane was actually doing the Foreign Secretary a fine service in the eyes of most sectors of the British population, including the working class and radicals. The vilification of Palmerston by despots and autocrats, regurgitated in The Times, only made it easier for him to assume the role of popular hero. The influence of Aberdeen, Metternich and Guizot on the foreign affairs coverage of The Times shows that, in this respect at least, the paper neither followed nor guided the middle-class public opinion it claimed to represent, a public who sympathized more easily with freedomseeking insurgents than dour old autocrats. Yet the myriad facets to the paper’s superiority built up over years – the bulk and quality of the information it dispensed – allowed The Times to proceed magisterially, its circulation topping 35,000 while that of its nearest rival, the recently established Daily News, crept to just over 11,000. Its continued investment in new printing press technology enabled it to meet the growing demand, with the new Applegarth press, which could print 10,000 sheets an hour, put into service late in 1848. The Times also remained an institution of world renown, and an attraction for foreign visitors, such as the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. ‘No power in England is more felt, more feared, or more obeyed,’ wrote Emerson of The Times. ‘What you read in the morning in that journal, you shall hear in the evening in all society. It has ears everywhere, and its information is earliest, completest, and surest.’ Visiting London in March 1848, Emerson stopped into Printing House Square, ‘which was entered through a pretty garden-yard’. He was introduced to Mowbray Morris, the manager of The Times since 1847, and shown around the premises. He remembered ‘the reporters’ room, in which they redact their hasty stenographs, but the editor’s room, and who is

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in it, I did not see, though I shared the curiosity of mankind respecting it.’ There was a touch of awe to much of Emerson’s depiction of The Times in his book English Traits. Towards the close, however, he strikes a harsher tone, explaining how the paper gave ‘the argument, not of the majority, but of the commanding class’, and expressing a wish that it would use its great power for more beneficent purposes.43

King Bomba The infectious thrill of the spring of 1848 gave way in the summer to fears among ordinary citizens that radicals were attempting to push the revolutions too far to the left. Conservative forces began to regain the initiative, most clearly on the battlefields of northern Italy where Austrian troops under the command of Radetzky smashed their way through the Piedmontese line at Custozza in late July. An armistice was signed within weeks and Charles Albert withdrew his forces from Lombardy. Vienna, too, was restored to order, as was Prague amidst fears of a ‘communist uprising’.44 General Eugene Cavaignac, commander of the troops who put down the ‘June days’ rising, was installed as a quasi-dictator in France. Then in December the conservative figure of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the great Napoleon, was elected president of the Second Republic, his victory ascribed more to a peasant revolt against the whole political class than a sentimental vote for a famous name.45 Nevertheless, there remained a few places where the rebels continued to hold sway, among them Sicily. Although less celebrated than France, Sicily was in fact the scene of the first revolution of 1848. It was part of the ‘Kingdom of Two Sicilies’ – the island of Sicily and the southern part of the Italian peninsula – and ruled by King Ferdinand II in Naples. The rising of citizens in Palermo in January 1848 led to similar demonstrations on the Neapolitan mainland. Ferdinand appeased his subjects in Naples by releasing political prisoners and granting a constitution. It was a short-lived taste of freedom, brought to an end by ‘cannon, musketball and bayonet’ at the beginning of summer. Sicily proved more resilient, a revolutionary government demanding autonomy and the restoration of their 1812 constitution. In April, the parliament at

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Palermo went even further, decreeing the deposition of the hated monarchy. Sicily, Mike Rapport writes, was for a few months ‘truly an independent state’.46 It was not until the spring of 1849 that Ferdinand finally reasserted his authority, bombing the island into submission and earning in the process the moniker ‘King Bomba’. There had been close relations between Britain and Sicily during the latter years of the Napoleonic Wars, and Palmerston was sympathetic to the desire for constitutional government. However, the Foreign Secretary would not countenance a complete separation of the two territories as it was too drastic an alteration to the territorial status quo. ‘I hope you will have been able to settle matters between the Sicilians & the Govt of Naples without a separation of the Crowns,’ he wrote to a representative in Italy.47 Yet the impression to gain credence at the time was that Palmerston had ‘supported by all means in his power’ the Sicilian insurrection.48 This idea was reinforced when, on 6 January 1849, The Times revealed the Foreign Secretary’s supposed involvement in the arming of Sicilian insurgents. The story centred on events in November 1848, when a Sicilian deputation had approached Tom Hood, an arms manufacturer in London, seeking supplies. Hood had just sold a large quantity of arms to the War Office, and he asked if they had any surplus they could release back to him. The War Office consulted with the Foreign Office, receiving permission from Palmerston to return some arms to Hood. These were then sold to the Sicilians. The details of the transaction were passed on from Hood to Delane in conversation at the beginning of 1849, while the two were out riding together with the Old Surrey hunt, Delane enjoying the pastime he had loved best since childhood in the style of company it increasingly appeared he most enjoyed. The revelation that ‘an English Minister would be found to abet an insurrection as fierce as that of Paris, and a civil war more violent than that of Ireland’ caused outrage and consternation.49 For conservatives throughout Europe it was proof that Palmerston actively encouraged revolution. Aberdeen delighted in the articles, writing ‘it seems to me that your Italian policy, and all your recent treatment of Italian affairs, are quite perfect’.50 Cabinet colleagues were dismayed, with a number even pressing for his dismissal. Interestingly, the diaries of Sir John

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Cam Hobhouse, the President of the Board of Control for India, show that ministers would quote material from The Times when challenging the Foreign Secretary during this period.51 Hobhouse himself was soon introduced to Delane by Sir Denis Le Marchant; he thought the editor a ‘sharp & intelligent’ young man.52 Perhaps most seriously for Palmerston, the ‘Sicilian arms’ affair led the Queen – whose sympathies throughout 1848 were firmly on the side of her fellow monarchs – to finally lose all patience with her Foreign Secretary. She wrote to Russell that ‘after this disclosure it will be no longer to the advantage of the public service to leave the direction of the Foreign Affairs in these critical times in Lord Palmerston’s hands’.53 The solution she proposed was that Palmerston should swap positions with Clarendon and move to Ireland. Russell, though, would not consent to the measure, despite his own irritation with the Foreign Secretary’s action. He knew that Palmerston’s personal support in the country meant that such a move was tantamount to finishing off his fragile government. Palmerston tried to deflect attention from his difficulties, using The Globe to accuse The Times of a lack of patriotism, espousing foreign causes and going against ‘England, its own Country and its own Countrymen’. He also wrote how The Times was ‘very angry with the present govt. for being engaged in so many mediations’ and that it looked back ‘with affectionate Regret to the days . . . of Excellent aberdeen . . . when no body ever thought of asking the English Govt. to mediate in anything’. For Palmerston, the fact that ‘the British Govt. is in so many cases invited or accepted as a mediator proves the present Govt. of England is held in general Respect by other Countries’.54 Britain, the Foreign Secretary made explicit, was performing the role her citizens demanded, a vigorous role. That these interjections were often ineffectual was, of course, not publicized to the same extent. Nevertheless, although initially unapologetic, Palmerston wrote the contrite dispatch demanded of him by Cabinet and Court.55 So strong were The Times’ articles against the Foreign Secretary around this time that Charles Wood interceded with Delane to ask him to stop. His intervention was more for the sake of the government

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than his colleague’s. Wood, too, at the end of January assumed the curious mantle of intermediary between Palmerston and Delane. Possibly indicating his worries at the damage The Times articles were causing – he rarely forgot that on the continent it was perceived as the official organ of the British government – Palmerston informed Wood that he had ‘no objection’ to giving Foreign Office documents to Delane.’56 The minor attempt at reconciliation was as short-lived and unproductive as previous efforts, and in the coming months The Times continued to denounce Palmerston and his policies, most notably over spiralling events in Hungary.

The Austrian Organ The Hungarian revolution of 15 March 1848 was a bloodless affair, the political leaders of the largest province in the vast and sprawling Austrian Empire wresting a significant degree of autonomy from the stunned and stumbling government in Vienna. Austria returned its attention to Hungary at the end of the year, having reasserted its control over the majority of its other dominions. In January 1849 imperial forces under the command of General Alfred Windischgratz re-entered Budapest. Lajos Kossuth was the de facto head of the Hungarian government and most celebrated name of the Hungarian struggle. With the assistance of skilled military commanders, including the Polishborn General Josef Bem, he retook Budapest in April, forcing the numerically superior Austrian army into retreat. Kossuth declared Hungarian independence and was elected Governor-President. At Austria’s request, Russia intervened in the struggle, sending soldiers across the border in late June. This was the death-knell for the resistance, the long and bloody war ending with Hungarian surrender in August. Palmerston gave little support to the Hungarian cause because of the threat it posed to the Great Power system. The integrity of the Austrian Empire, he told Kossuth’s envoy Ferenc Pulzky, was essential to European security. This indifference was not newsworthy in 1848, when the British public cared little for, or knew little about, the Magyar cause; one early writer suggested that enthusiasm

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for Hungarian independence in London at this time was as likely as enthusiasm for Welsh independence in Budapest.57 However, Pulzky’s successful propaganda campaign the following year created an atmosphere of interest in, and sympathy for, the Hungarian plight amongst Britons of all classes. The Hungarian revolt was soon seen as the most worthy struggle against despotism since Poland in 1830, petitions pouring into the Foreign Office condemning the Austrians. There was a sense that the Hungarians were fighting for constitutional rights that had been theirs since the twelfth century and an aura of romance attached to leaders like Kossuth, who buried the Hungarian throne near the border as he fled to Turkey after the surrender. Pulszky’s contacts with the press saw pro-Hungarian articles printed in a wide range of newspapers and journals including the Daily News, The Spectator, The Examiner, the Morning Advertiser and Palmerston’s Globe.58 One paper to resolutely abstain from any interaction with Pulszky, however, was The Times, which from the first portrayed the Hungarian struggle in a deeply unfavourable light. The Russian intervention was regretted, but the paper remained more concerned with blaming Palmerston for ‘the coldness of England’ towards Austria that it claimed caused the intervention.59 The self-styled organ of public opinion belittled public sympathy for the Hungarian cause, likening it to the conduct of ‘the passenger in the streets who sees a plucky little fellow showing fight to a big one . . . and amuses himself by taking the part of the little one’.60 ‘Industrial centres without a grain of romance in them, fashionable watering-places and remote hamlets in the Highlands, were at one in their enthusiasm for the revolution and their destruction of the perjured Habsburgs,’ wrote Charles Sproxton, the promising young English historian killed in the trenches of the First World War, in an attempt to show the broad spectrum of support for the Hungarian cause.61 It was clearly not just radicals and workers who applauded the Hungarians but the City too, a prime sector of The Times’ readership, with Lord Beaumont presenting to the House of Lords a petition from the City of London supporting the immediate recognition of the existence of Hungary for reasons of justice, policy, commerce and humanity.62 Despite this, Palmerston continued to grant no succour

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to Hungarian hopes, dashing even their wishes for some sort of diplomatic recognition. Palmerston worked his papers to hide his inaction under invective. ‘It might not be amiss’, he told The Globe, ‘to remark that the austrian government by persisting in enforcing its . . . Foreign yoke upon the Italians . . . has placed itself in the degrading [position] of inviting the Russians & the Cathars to defend vienna from the austrian Population and to coerce the Hungarians to submit to the overthrow of their long Established Constitutional Rights.’63 The working-class Sun claimed that Palmerston had openly espoused the Hungarian cause and was prevented from carrying out his own liberal views only by the ‘irresponsible camarilla’ at Cabinet.64 The Times, which could not play a double game, attempted instead to tarnish the Hungarian movement in the eyes of its private property-loving readers, claiming it was tainted by the subversive doctrines of ‘red republicanism’ and led by men who had ‘allowed the barriers of law and property to be overturned’.65 Neither The Times nor Aberdeen could fathom the truth of Palmerston’s stance on the Hungarian conflict. For both, he simply had to be inspiring, conspiring and encouraging the Hungarian fighters. Like the middle- and working-class audience Palmerston convinced of his empathy with the Hungarians, they saw only the façade and not the empty substance of his pronouncements. For its own unambiguous posture, the Daily News labelled The Times the ‘organ of Austrian diplomacy’.66 From the platform of parliament, too, and not just the press, Palmerston wove a spell around his countrymen in the summer of 1849. The scene was set by Aberdeen rising in the Lords to declaim: ‘By our attempted interference in the disputes of other nations, under the guise of reform, we had assisted in the revolutionary movements of various parties, which had subjected us not only to the aversion of other Governments, but to the suspicion of their people.’67 Palmerston’s response came in the Commons a day later, 21 July. The core of the oration gave little hope to the Hungarians, still fighting at the time. ‘Austria,’ he said, ‘stands in the centre of Europe, a barrier against encroachment on the one side, and against invasion on the other. The political independence and liberties of Europe are bound up . . . with

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the maintenance and integrity of Austria as a great European power.’68 However, it is to the style of Palmerston’s speech that one must turn to understand how it made him, in the words of an early biographer, ‘the idol of the Radicals in England and the most popular and powerful minister in Europe’.69 He made a winning appeal to the national selfesteem of his countrymen through his reiterated insistence on Britain’s right to express an opinion on any subject of European concern. Not only was it ‘not fitting that a country occupying such a proud position as England – that a country having such a various and extensive interests, should lock herself up in a simple regard to her own internal affairs’, it was her duty ‘especially when our opinion is asked . . . to state our opinions, founded on the experience of this country – an experience that might have been . . . an example to less fortunate countries’.70 A spate of public meetings followed Palmerston’s speech, and Aberdeen wrote sarcastically to Princess Lieven of a Mr Williams, a linen draper, who wished ‘we had a whole ministry of Lord Palmerston’s! Do not you think that this would be rather too much of a good thing.’71 That public opinion remained fervently pro-Magyar and pro-Palmerston is evident from two memorials found in Palmerston’s papers. The first – a ‘Statement of the Memorials and Addresses Sent to Viscount Palmerston, from various Places about Hungary’ – contained 15 signatories dated between 1 and 21 August and a sixteenth, undated. The signatories came from all areas of England and declared itself to be ‘on the behalf of’ both ‘the working classes’ and the ‘Mayor, Alderman & Burgesses’. The ‘General Object’ column contained amongst its pleas: ‘To recognise the de facto Govt. of Hungary’ or ‘[t]o adopt such measures as may be deemed fit for supporting the cause of Hungary’.72 All of which the signatories appeared to believe Palmerston had done. The signatories of the second memorial desired to express to Palmerston ‘the profound interest which they, in common with the greater part of the inhabitants of Great Britain, have felt, and still feel, in the great struggle which has been made by the Hungarian nation’. The ‘Undersigned’ hailed ‘the calm, dignified, and determined energy of a nation of Freemen’ and heard ‘with great satisfaction the declaration of your Lordship’s own views upon this subject, as made in Parliament, and the intimation then given that your Lordship

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looked to the expression of the public feeling of this great country’.73 Palmerston did indeed look to the public feeling of Britain, middleclass and – increasingly – working-class alike, but to mould his utterances to its favour, not take his cue from it. That he had successfully ingrained the idea that he was a friend to struggling nations in the public mind is evident from the following newspaper report sent to him from Ireland: ‘The Aberdeen clique may ply the Chronicle and Times in London,’ the article read, but there was not ‘an honest man in the community who does not feel that, if Sicily, Lombardy, and Hungary, are not at this moment happy, prosperous, and free, it is not for any lack of timely counsel or of friendly offices, on the part of Lord Palmerston.’ On the continuing enmity of The Times, the piece continued: ‘Against the chivalrous and indomitable champion of all that the friends of freedom hold most dear, an unslumbering war of slander and abuse is steadily pursued.’74

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7 THE R ISE AND FALL OF PALMER STON

‘The inveterate foe of reform movements and the intrepid champion of lost causes, most of which deserved to be lost, it combined political conservatism with social snobbery.’ Such was the damning assessment of the Morning Post delivered by the newspaper historian Stephen Koss.1 Founded in 1772 and staunchly Tory for much of its existence, the Post was reduced by the 1840s to little more than a society journal. Struggling for funds, Charles Eastland de Michele, its Protectionist owner and editor, approached a number of Tory grandees for investment. When they could not be convinced to commit funds, the Post fell into the ownership of T.B. Crompton, the Lancashire paper manufacturer who supplied the newspaper. Peter Borthwick, a 45-year-old former Tory MP with connections to the paper, was installed as the new editor in late 1849. Palmerston’s attention was caught by the change of ownership at the Post, the names of Borthwick and his wife Margaret appearing in the Foreign Secretary’s diary from as early as May – months before the paper finally changed hands.2 Palmerston – who it was speculated also played some part in securing for Michele the position of British Consul at St Petersburg3 – was keen to forge a relationship similar to the one he had enjoyed with the Morning Chronicle. Hoping to revive the political importance of the Post, Borthwick was equally keen to cultivate Palmerston as a source, and it was not long before

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commentators were proclaiming that on questions of foreign policy ‘the Post is Borthwick and Borthwick is Palmertson’.4 The Foreign Secretary’s connection with the paper actually developed into a close friendship with the whole family, including Borthwick’s son, Algernon, the young Paris correspondent of the Post. Palmerston – the free trade-supporting Whig – and Borthwick – the Protectionist Tory – were from opposite sides of the political divide. Nevertheless, the editor had shown support for Palmerston’s foreign policy as far back as 1840, when he wrote a letter stating that although he opposed the majority of the Melbourne government’s policies, he approved wholly of Palmerston’s.5 Lord Aberdeen noticed the new tenor in the paper, writing to John Delane about ‘the attacks of The Globe and the Post’ that he believed ‘all proceed from the same source’.6 The Post was just as quick to take on The Times, and not only because of the latter’s antagonism to Palmerston. It was a professional rivalry, with both Borthwicks considering it one of the main duties of the Post to police what they perceived to be the incessant misstatements and indeed lies of The Times.7 On one occasion Algernon joked to his mother: ‘Why is the M.P. like a chronometer? (please send this to Punch) Cos it regulates the Times.’8 The paper’s fortunes improved under the new management, and in the summer of 1850 Borthwick received a positive letter from Crompton, who thought ‘we may be able to show ere long that the Post can support itself’.9 By December of that year Borthwick was writing to Algernon: ‘Mr. Crompton says he never until now was convinced of the certainty of success . . . He says that the last two months are better than any two months since he knew the Post.’10

‘The Pacifico Affair’ This new press connection arrived at an opportune moment for Palmerston, who throughout the first half of 1850 was under tremendous political pressure over the so-called ‘Pacifico Affair’. This episode originated in the looting of the Athens home of one David ‘Don’ Pacifico during an anti-Semitic riot in the Greek capital in 1847. Pacifico’s family were also abused and molested during the incident.

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His efforts to obtain financial recompense from the Greek authorities failed, partly because the son of a Greek minister had been to the fore of the rioting. Pacifico, a Portuguese Jew who was born in Gibraltar and therefore a British citizen, next sought redress through the British embassy, the matter eventually coming to the attention of Palmerston. The Pacifico case added to a growing number of grievances British subjects had with the Greek government.11As early as March 1847 Palmerston had warned the Greeks against continued refusal to settle the outstanding claims. In November 1849, with the Pacifico case to the fore, he ordered Admiral Sir William Parker to sail to Athens and place the Mediterranean fleet at the disposal of Sir Thomas Wyse, the British Minister to Greece. On 16 January 1850 Wyse delivered an ultimatum to the Greek Foreign Minister demanding reparation for all existing British claims within 24 hours. The demands were not met and the British fleet established a blockade of the principal Greek ports. Greek shipping was seized to the value of the compensation demanded. This unilateral British action met with almost universal disapproval, Russia, France, Prussia, Austria, Bavaria, Sweden and Norway signing a joint letter of protest.12 Palmerston was surprised at the extent of the uproar and later drew up a document listing over 30 instances where the Great Powers had taken military action against other states in support of their citizens.13 Nevertheless, a French offer to mediate was accepted at the behest of the Cabinet and the blockade lifted. When the news of the Greek blockade reached Britain in late January, the papers were split in their reaction: some favourable, others bitterly opposed. Unsurprisingly, The Times was at the vanguard of the latter camp. Aberdeen and Delane connived to rebut ‘the official statement in the Morning Post’.14 The blockade was labelled ‘his Peloponnesian war’.15 The claimants whose legal actions precipitated Palmerston’s move met with similar disparagement. Pacifico, in particular, was characterized as a professional claimant who leeched off governments.16 Judging from Chambers’ recent account, The Times may have had a valid point. He certainly exaggerated the value of his ruined house and possessions.17

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In London, Henry Reeve dined with the French Ambassador, Droyn de Lhuys, who ‘complained in strong terms of Palmerston’s conduct’.18 De Lhuys, who could hardly have wished for a more sympathetic listener, later sent Reeve official French papers on the incident.19 Reeve was also able, thanks to Francois Guizot, to present to the readers of The Times a summary of a note written for Palmerston by the Russian Foreign Minister, Count Nesselrode.20 Such instances demonstrate how, even if what The Times wrote was not always in sync with public opinion, the scope of its contacts and its consistent publishing of ‘scoops’ ensured it remained the essential paper to buy. In April the French-sponsored mediation in London brought about a compromise agreement. However, before that news reached Athens, Wyse, who had been involved in separate negotiations, acted on old instructions and reinforced the blockade with the result that the Greeks yielded to the original British demands. France declared itself slighted and recalled de Lhuys. London’s political class expressed outrage, with Palmerston accused of simply bullying a smaller, weaker nation. Whig colleagues were again worried and uncomfortable, as it seems was the Foreign Secretary himself. Aberdeen delighted in writing to Princess Lieven that Palmerston ‘has admitted he has got us into a scrape’.21 Queen Victoria pressed Lord John Russell once again for the dismissal of Palmerston. Russell sided with her this time, writing to Palmerston that ‘the interests of the Crown & the Country required that a change should take place in the Foreign Department’.22 It was decided that Palmerston would be shifted to the Colonial Office at the end of the parliamentary session.23 Russell, however, had not factored the response of British public opinion into his thinking. Palmerston invoked the Morning Post in his public support. From Paris, Algernon Borthwick explained that the reasons behind de Lhuys’ recall lay in domestic French politicking: ‘The clique at present in power thought to gain two objects – one, to oust Palmerston from office; the other, to pass as unobserved as possible their Electoral Law.’24 A number of other papers followed suit in defending the Foreign Secretary, with The Albion of 18 March stating: ‘England, it seems, did not consult the Czar before she proceeded to enforce her own just claims upon the dishonest Government of Greece. And did

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the Emperor of Russia consult us before he made his blood-stained march into Hungary?’25 On 25 May a newspaper from Leicester compared ‘the bold and becoming attitude assumed by our Foreign Secretary throughout the whole of this complication’ with ‘the Earl of Aberdeen’s laissez faire policy, which . . . consisted partly in sleeping over his duties, and then getting up to bow to the potentates of the continent’.26 Words of support came from the people, too. From Portsmouth, a ‘Commercial Traveller’ wrote: ‘I think . . . you should know the feeling of the people generally of this country toward you at such a time as this & in particular when the leading paper of the day is so misrepresenting every thing connected with the Foreign Policy of the Country.’ ‘The Times paper,’ the writer continued, ‘perhaps in the pay of the despots does not represent the opinion of the people of this Country on foreign questions.’27

‘Civus Romanus Sum’ The offensive against Palmerston came to a head on 17 June when Lord Stanley, the Protectionist leader, brought forward in the House of Lords the long-awaited motion of censure, arguing in the course of his speech that the use of the British navy against so ‘weak and feeble’ a country as Greece was injurious to British prestige, that Palmerston’s action had ‘rashly and unnecessarily’ disturbed the ‘harmony which ought to prevail’ between the Great Powers and that many of the claims underlying the whole affair were ‘either doubtful in point of justice, or exaggerated in point of amount’.28 Prior to the debate, Stanley had conferred with his erstwhile Tory colleague Aberdeen, who was receiving confidential information from French sources to use against Palmerston. Even party colleagues noted warily the effects these communications had on Aberdeen, Sir Robert Peel observing to Sir James Graham how the letters from Paris were ‘reckless as to any other consequences, provided only they can get rid of Palmerston’.29 The motion of censure passed by 37 votes, and Aberdeen next consulted with Delane.30 The Times called for the resignation of the government, writing of the vote of censure that it declared ‘to the world that the Foreign Office of England is

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not England’, a damaging phrase the paper had used throughout Palmerston’s years in power.31 Palmerston viewed the entire, exaggerated affair as a foreign conspiracy, led by an Orleanist clique aided and abetted by Aberdeen and The Times. The Morning Post supported this interpretation, arguing that Britain had not yet learned to become the slave of any foreign state, ‘nor will she be taught such lessons either by Lord Aberdeen or the Times’.32 Palmerston’s success at shaping the terms of public debate was further evidenced by the fact that other papers wrote to a similar effect, with the Manchester Guardian, for example, complaining about the ‘collusion of French diplomatic agents and correspondents of The Times’.33 Nevertheless, the Post faced difficulties, as a Protectionist journal, in reconciling support of Palmerston with continued backing of the Protectionist leader, Stanley. The solution decided upon was to present Stanley as the ‘victim’ of the deceitful schemes of Aberdeen and his fellow Peelites.34 Borthwick was not the only Protectionist to arrive at this conclusion, with even Stanley’s son noting in his journal, ‘Lord Aberdeen was greatly suspected, D[israeli] said (and I had heard the same from others) of making us catspaws in this business: intending to overthrow Lord Palmerston and then supplant him with the Whigs.’35 Charles Wood was one of a number of ministers who favoured resignation after the Lords censure, and he kept Delane informed of the changing predilections of Cabinet members.36 In the end, however, Russell decided to make a stand in the House of Commons, arranging for the tabling of a motion of confidence in the government’s foreign policy. The debate began on Monday 24 June, although Palmerston himself did not speak until nearly ten o’clock the following evening. It would be the longest speech of his parliamentary career, one he prepared for meticulously, marshalling together facts and figures from thousands of Foreign Office documents. He began with a perusal of the state of politics in Greece, where the ‘whole system of government’ was ‘full of every kind of abuse’. He then discussed the merits of the various claimants, including one George Finlay, who he said had been ‘driven from pillar to post’ and ‘put off with every sort of shuffling and evasive excuse, and deprived of compensation for his land’.

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Of Pacifico’s claim, which had been ‘the subject of much unworthy debate’, the Foreign Secretary insisted that the ‘rights of a man depend on the merits of the particular case; and it is an abuse of argument to say, that you are not to give redress to a man, because in some former transaction he may have done something which is questionable. Punish him if you will – punish him if he is guilty, but don’t pursue him as a Pariah through life.’37 There were well-rehearsed encomiums of his foreign policy across Europe – from Belgium to Portugal to Hungary and beyond – and rebukes to enemies, including The Times and its correspondent in Athens. The crowning glory, however, of this most memorable of Palmerstonian speeches, came with the conclusion. Evoking parallels with ancient Rome, Palmerston made a patriotic point of principle out his actions in Greece: I therefore fearlessly challenge the verdict which this House, as representing a political, a commercial, a constitutional country, is to give on the question now brought before it; whether the principles on which the foreign policy of Her Majesty’s Government has been conducted, and the sense of duty which has led us to think ourselves bound to afford protection to our fellow subjects abroad, are proper and fitting guides for those who are charged with the Government of England; and whether, as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say, ‘Civus Romanus sum’; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England, will protect him against injustice and wrong.38 The speech – which was quickly published and distributed as a pamphlet – was an unparalleled triumph, earning the Foreign Secretary great cheers from the enthralled gallery in the Commons and – despite the late hour – the large crowds gathered on the streets outside to greet him. The debate continued for two more days, during which time the offices of MPs across the country were inundated with letters from

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constituents supporting the Foreign Secretary.39 Peel’s speech in the debate would be his last, as he died a few days later following a fall from a horse. Finally, on 27 June, the motion of confidence was passed by 310 votes to 264. Prince Albert wrote to his brother of ‘the unhappy combinations of circumstances that granted our immoral one for foreign affairs such a triumph in the Commons’.40 The Post, on the other hand, gushed forth a plethora of superlatives on Palmerston’s ‘transcendent ability as an orator, his courage and patriotism as a Minister, and his exalted character as a man’.41 A seemingly awestruck C. Shirley Brooks, an author and journalist who was in the Commons the night of Palmerston’s speech, asked for an ‘autograph’ dated ‘25 June 1850’.42 Another author, Abraham Jones Le Cras, praised Palmerston’s ‘noble, generous and patriotic course’ in foreign affairs.43 The Times acknowledged Palmerston’s ‘most able and most interesting defence’, but remained reluctant to praise.44 Palmerston was invited to a large celebratory dinner at the Reform Club, which has been described by Jasper Ridley as ‘a thoroughly patriotic, Radical and middle-class affair’. But to limit the appeal of Palmerston’s ‘Civus Romanus sum’ address to the middle classes is to do it a great disservice, and Ridley goes on to assert how he was backed ‘by the great mass of the working class who talked about Palmerston in the inns’.45 The editor of the working-class Sun confirmed Palmerston carried with him ‘the hearty sympathies of the people’.46 Writing in the year of Palmerston’s death, one early biographer recalled vividly how the man in the street was shown in 1850 that Palmerston ‘would move the whole of the British Empire in order that this Brown or Jones – Civus Romanus – might not be defrauded of his Worcester sauce amid the ice of Siberia, or of his pale ale in the Mountains of the Moon’.47 The reaction of the country put an end to any possible change at the Foreign Office, the Prime Minister informing Palmerston how he ‘had a long conversation with the Queen . . . the result is that things are to remain as they are’.48 Palmerston stayed on at his preferred post, living up to his ‘Civus Romanus sum’ incarnation. Roderick Braithwaite, for instance, has detailed the Foreign Secretary’s immense, if ultimately unsuccessful, efforts throughout the early 1850s to obtain recompense

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for two Britons, Joseph Braithwaite and George Martin, whose property French and Belgian troops had destroyed in 1849 on the west coast of Africa.49 In January 1851, meanwhile, Russell informed Palmerston of the Queen’s wish that an application for redress for some British subjects in Portugal should be dropped. ‘This was not done,’ an unreconstructed Palmerston wrote in the margin.50

‘A Treaty of Peace and Amity’ Palmerston’s stranglehold over British public opinion was so complete after the ‘Pacifico affair’ that even The Times extended an offer of goodwill to the Foreign Secretary. The paper’s official history admits that it became conscious ‘of having by its late campaign outrun the feeling of the country’.51 What Greville described as the ‘olive-branch’ leader ran thus: ‘We are quite ready to begin a new score without more reference to past miscarriages and offences than is absolutely necessary to account for the position in which we find ourselves.’52 Palmerston, ever the pragmatist, responded graciously, ensuring that both Delane and Reeve were invited to Lady Palmerston’s salons, which were among the most popular in London. This long-used method of ingratiating himself with members of the press appears to have worked rather easily on Reeve, who noted in his journal: ‘After the Greek fight, Fleming [a friend of Lady Palmerston’s] made the peace between the Palmerstons and me. I was introduced to Lady P. at Lady Shelburne’s concert on July 24th, and went to Lady P.’s party on August 3rd for the first time.’53 ‘It all ended,’ Russell wrote to Lord Clarendon in later years, ‘in Reeve going to Palmerston to announce that the hostility of The Times was over, and to ask that Mrs. Reeve might be invited to Lady Palmerston’s parties’.54 This, apparently, was Palmerston’s own account to the Prime Minister, and if true represents a tame end to so long and bitter a rivalry. For all his literary talents, Reeve had always seemed susceptible to the blandishments of society’s upper echelons. Greville certainly never forgot Reeve’s ‘humble position, his obscurity, his apparent nothingness’, joking rather cruelly to Clarendon on one occasion that ‘R would be tomber son haut [crestfallen]’ if he knew what was being

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written about him by those whose company he so valued.55 This was not an exceptional trait amongst the journalistic fraternity, with the newspaper historian Denis Griffiths describing how it was once said of Stanley Giffard, an editor of The Standard in the 1830s, that ‘no man [was] more seducible by the least show of courtesy from persons of high rank’.56 Delane, too, was wise to Reeve’s vanity. A few years later, after Reeve had left The Times rather acrimoniously, the editor wrote to George Dasent: ‘He just wanted to job the paper for his own purposes, to prove to his patrons that he was supreme and to receive their pay in flattery and dinners while he was taking ours in hard cash.’57 Delane refused the invitations from Lady Palmerston at this juncture, judging, quite understandably, that ‘it would be too ridiculous’ in light of all that had passed between her husband and his paper.58 His links with Aberdeen remained far more important. It was a connection, indeed, that others looked to take advantage of. ‘I have been applied to,’ wrote Aberdeen to Delane in the summer of 1851, ‘by Sir J. Graham on behalf Mr. Ross, who desires to fill the office of superintendent of your Reporting Corps. Mr. Ross has persuaded Sir James that an application from me might assist him in attaining his object.’59 Ross presumed correctly and was employed and remained on staff for many years. In this respect, what Greville termed ‘a treaty of peace and amity’ between Palmerston and The Times, was, as the History of The Times notes, more akin to an armistice.60 Nevertheless, it was an armistice that held for the best part of 12 months. There were disagreements during this period, for instance over Palmerston’s handling of the visit of the Austrian General Haynau, but they lacked the hard personal edge of earlier clashes. General Ludwig Haynau was an infamously ruthless Austrian commander who had ordered the execution of countless Hungarian rebels in 1849; he had earlier been nicknamed the ‘Hyena of Brescia’ after his brutal suppression of an insurrection there, which had seen the flogging of civilians, including women. On a visit to London in September 1850, the 64-year-old general went to the famous brewery of Barclay and Company. Haynau was recognized by some workers and

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the news of his presence spread quickly. Upon his exit, according to police reports, ‘about 100 of the men & some of the Clerks began hissing then some Horse Dung & . . . Straw were thrown from the loft’.61 Only the intervention of the police saved the general from a heavy beating. The Times, which failed to repeat any episodes from Haynau’s inglorious past, complained bitterly that the conduct of the draymen had ‘outraged every principle of common justice and fair dealing’ and ‘grievously blemished the character of undiscriminating hospitality maintained by this country at no ordinary cost of forbearance’.62 Palmerston, on the other hand, applauded the Barclay’s workers, writing to the Queen how Haynau’s ‘coming here so soon’ after the atrocities in Italy and Hungary ‘was liable to be looked upon as a bravado’ and, as he put it, ‘a challenge to an expression of public opinion’.63 Lady Palmerston was equally pleased that Haynau ‘should carry back with him to Austria some slight tokens of what the People of England think of such Proceedings as his’.64 Queen Victoria was unimpressed with Palmerston’s nonchalant reaction, and wanted an apology to be sent to the Austrian government for the outrage committed upon ‘one of the Emperor’s distinguished Generals’.65 The Foreign Secretary complied, but not without including some candid observations upon the propriety of the visit. To the Queen’s dismay and anger, the dispatch was sent off before being shown to her. This was a regular practice of Palmerston’s, one of which she had frequently complained to Russell. The Queen argued against Palmerston’s inclusion in a dispatch written in a public capacity of his private opinions on ‘the want of propriety evinced by General Haynau in coming to England’, and demanded an unqualified apology be sent.66 Palmerston informed Russell that such a dispatch would have to be written by another Foreign Secretary and that he would sooner resign than comply. However, as in the midst of the ‘Sicilian arms’ affair, Palmerston backed down at the last moment, and followed through the Queen’s orders. If the knowledge of this last-minute retreat was kept out of the public arena, Palmerston’s refusal to prosecute the draymen responsible (as the Austrian authorities expected) was certainly not. Songs ridiculing Haynau and lauding the draymen became very popular among London workers.67 So,

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it can be presumed, did Palmerston, who was getting ever bolder in bidding for working-class favour. Palmerston’s more respectable supporters were less impressed with the draymen, and he had to cajole the editor of The Globe into denouncing Haynau.68 Borthwick, meanwhile, believed the attack was a ‘ruffianly outrage perpetrated on the baron’.69 Such differences of opinion did not impede the development of a personal relationship that was closer than any Palmerston had previously enjoyed with newspapermen, the letters of both Borthwick and his wife Margaret full of references to the Palmerstons’ dinner parties and soirees.70 Palmerston was also full of praise for the political astuteness and literary ability of Borthwick’s son, Algernon.71 Added to the mix was Algernon’s closeness to members of the British Embassy in Paris, acquaintances quite possibly fostered by Palmerston at their inception.72 A disgruntled Aberdeen relayed to Princess Lieven yet another facet to the combination between the Foreign Secretary and the paper: ‘A still stronger mark of disrespect has been shewn [by Palmerston] by making [Eustace Clare Grenville-Murray] the Correspondent of the Morning Post at Vienna, and the author of libellous articles against Austria, an Attaché of the English Mission there!’73 ‘The Post is showing better by £80 to £90 a week this year . . . than the corresponding week of last year,’ wrote Margaret Borthwick to Algernon in the autumn of 1851.74 The paper was making progress, but of the steady rather than the spectacular variety. Certainly, it was nowhere near fulfilling Peter Borthwick’s dream of rivalling The Times, which with its more numerous and varied links to the political scene remained some distance ahead in circulation and importance. Connections with the government continued to be exploited by Printing House Square, with Charles Wood giving Delane ‘a [Government] balance sheet to January’.75 Its international reach was also unrivalled, as evidenced by a letter Palmerston received from Henry Wikoff, an American journalist, in the late summer of 1850. Wikoff offered his services to Palmerston in the task of enlightening the American public and press, mentioning the dangerous degree to which many Americans drew their conclusions on British affairs from The Times alone.76

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Kossuth Fever The arrival of the Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth in Britain in October 1851 – en route from Turkey to America – re-ignited the rivalry between Palmerston and The Times. The Post backed Palmerston in welcoming the arrival of the Hungarian hero. Its support, however, rested on the Hungarian revolution having been aristocratic and conservative in character, and Kossuth himself being ‘no child, or champion of Socialism or Anarchy’.77 This diminished when a speech of Kossuth’s in Marseilles applauding democracy reached London.78 Still, upon his arrival, the Post gave substantial coverage to Kossuth’s numerous public addresses, applauding him for distancing himself from anti-monarchical proclamations made in his presence.79 It was the Post, too, that announced his intention to visit Palmerston to thank the Foreign Secretary for his support for Hungary. The ‘outpouring of popular sentiment’ provoked by Kossuth’s arrival ‘surpassed all expectations’, with almost half-a-million people gathering on the streets of Birmingham to see him. His popularity in Manchester irritated the Queen, whose reception in that city a few weeks earlier paled by comparison. An address at Copenhagen Fields in London, meanwhile, saw up to 200,000 workers turn up to cheer the Hungarian. Kossuth was an idol not only for Britain’s workers and radicals, but for the middle classes too. Like Palmerston, he proved adept at portraying himself as all things to all men, with one contemporary newspaper noting how he ‘talked constitutionalism with mayors and aldermen, free trade to Cobden and the middle classes, and genuine democracy to the multitudes assembled on Copenhagen Fields’.80 With Delane on holiday in Europe for October and part of November, control of the paper reverted again to the hands of Dasent, and control of foreign affairs primarily to Reeve. The Times deprecated the enthusiasm shown for Kossuth – whom it called a socialist – especially amongst the lower orders of society. Palmerston’s support for the Hungarian was also castigated, despite Reeve’s supposed turn in Palmerston’s favour. In return, supporters of Kossuth burned copies of The Times in both London and Birmingham.81 From Venice, Delane

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approved of the stance of The Times in spite of the ‘row against us’.82 The paper was supported by Clarendon, who informed Reeve how he had ‘a long conversation’ with a Count Nugent who ‘was delighted that no respectable persons had figured in the Kossuth ovations, and very grateful for the service which the Times has rendered to the cause of order abroad and common-sense at home’.83 The Times, on foreign affairs, spoke for the British Establishment. Cabinet colleagues asked Russell to persuade Palmerston – who had already tried to bring Kossuth to Broadlands – not to receive the Hungarian revolutionary at the Foreign Office. Russell first broached the subject with Palmerston on 22 October, though only to profess his disappointment that Palmerston felt ‘bound to see Kossuth’.84 Two days later he raised the Queen’s fears that such a reception would expose her to ‘French Slights & affronts from other sovereigns’, suggesting to the Foreign Secretary that ‘the personal reception of the chief enemy of the Emperor of Austria [was] improper & unnecessary’.85 The substance of Palmerston’s reply was: It is not as chief enemy of Emperor of Austria that Kossuth has hitherto been looked upon, nor is it in that capacity that he is about to be received by the British Nation. He has been regarded as a man who among others has stood up for the rights of his Country.86 An exasperated Russell then called a Cabinet meeting to discuss the matter, at which it was decided that Palmerston would not entertain Kossuth. A couple of weeks later, however, in an act of (for his opponents) supreme defiance to the check imposed upon him, Palmerston received a deputation from two of the largest radical areas of London, Finsbury and Islington. The deputation of working men presented Palmerston with a memorial thanking him for saving the Hungarians and, even more incongruously, the Poles from what they termed the tyrants, despots and odious assassins, the Emperors of Austria and Russia. Palmerston replied politely that he could not endorse their language with respect to the two Emperors. Nonetheless, he thanked

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the deputation for the honour they had done him by making the presentation. He also repeated some of what he had said in parliament in 1849 about how the moral influence of the British Crown abroad was very great, and that the most important element in that influence was the confidence and support of the British people.87 Palmerston was well-practised in massaging Englishmen’s egos where their status in the world was concerned. Although supposedly a private meeting, one journalist was present and the contents of the memorial, including the references to the two Emperors, were published in the newspapers. Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Greville and many other critics of Palmerston’s immediately perceived Palmerston’s reception of that delegation as an offence even worse than meeting Kossuth. The Queen’s feelings had again ‘been deeply wounded by the official conduct of her Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs’.88 Russell, however, understood that with the so-called ‘Kossuth fever’ still so strong, it was impossible to dismiss Palmerston on any issue connected with the Magyar’s visit. Palmerston, for his part, explained that he had ‘Said Nothing Which I have not before Said in the House of Commons, & Elsewhere’, flippantly adding that he was not as used to receiving delegations as the Prime Minister himself.89 In The Times, now fully back in its anti-Palmerstonian mould, the Foreign Secretary was accused of having extracted, with his usual dexterity, ‘a little political capital from the Kossuth agitation . . . he seems to congratulate himself on holding a share in the mock prizes and honours lavished on the Hungarian demagogue’. The article questioned whether ‘it was worth while, for the sake of a miserable cheer from some paltry club in Marylebone or Islington, to increase the aversion with which the policy imputed to this country is unhappily regarded by a large proportion of the statesmen of the continent’.90 The following day the Post accused The Times of magnifying ‘a very trifling circumstance’ into an event of importance. The Post then repeated its mantra that the ‘public opinion of Englishmen on foreign questions is not likely to be in unison with the foreign opinions of the Times’.91 Tellingly, however, the contents of Palmerston’s speech to the deputation were not reported as wholly in the Post or Globe as they were in The

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Times. In this evasive action Greville saw a realization by Palmerston of the potential damage such apparent avowal of radical ideals could have on his middle-class advocates.92 Unlike the Pacifico debate, Palmerston was being forced to project different stories in order to appease his differing sections of support.

Coup d’État On Christmas Eve 1851, The Times at last had the pleasure of breaking the news of Palmerston’s dismissal from government to the country. The cause: his apparent support for Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in France. The paper wrote rather magnanimously of the fallen minister, holding back from reviving the charges it had previously brought against him, and calling to mind instead ‘the indefatigable activity he has often shown in the public service, the vast capacity for work, the courage in presence of dangers’. It has been suggested this tact derived from a belief that at 67 years old, Palmerston would never again hold office, an understandable and shared conclusion. France had been in turmoil throughout 1851, the death of LouisPhilippe leading to rumours of an Orléanist plot to restore the monarchy. Left-wing politicians, or the démoc-socs, were also making an impact in rural départments, and looked set for large gains in the next parliamentary elections. The National Assembly was divided; the country ungovernable. Feeling under threat from both sides of the political divide – radicals and royalists alike – President Louis Napoleon determined to stage a coup d’état to secure power. In the early hours of 2 December, police arrested opposition leaders, and troops occupied the National Assembly. Paris succumbed quietly. Opposition in the provinces was put down violently. According to James F. McMillan, few doubted the coup was a prelude to empire. This came to pass a year later, when Louis Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III.93 Concerned about the possibility of ‘disastrous civil strife’ should the French radicals gain power, Palmerston had actually resolved, when speculating upon the possibility of a coup, that it might be

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‘better for the interests of France and, through them, for the interests of Europe, that the power of the President should prevail, inasmuch as the continuance of his authority might afford a prospect of the maintenance of social order in France’.94 On the day news of the coup reached London, he therefore signalled his approval of Louis Napoleon’s conduct to Count Walewski, the French Ambassador. It was a private, unofficial conversation; the kind diplomats and ministers partook of every day. Nevertheless, when the gist of this conversation leaked out, Queen Victoria seized upon Palmerston’s apparent approval of the coup without the authority of the Cabinet or his sovereign as another opportunity to press for his dismissal from office. Russell, tired of ‘this most harassing warfare’ between the Court and the Foreign Office, agreed. Unlike the Kossuth affair, he did not see how Palmerston could invoke popular support when standing accused of approving the establishment of a dictatorship by military power. But Palmerston still had his supporters, with Peter Borthwick, whose paper supported the coup, organizing a series of ‘confidence meetings’ to ‘express public gratitude for your administration of foreign affairs and public admiration for your Character’. The idea, he said, came from the volumes of letters to the Post, ‘from all classes’, suggesting such a course.95 Russell, indeed, must have been surprised at the degree of working-class support Palmerston received. The members of the Working Men’s Institution of Leamington Priors in Warwickshire wrote to take ‘the liberty of congratulating you on your withdrawal [a gratifying take] from the Russell Cabinet Coinciding as we do with you generally on your Foreign Policy. And most particularly on your conduct in 1843 when opposing the Ashburton Capitulation.’96 (Britain’s workers had longer memories of foreign affairs than they were given credit for.) Nor did Palmerston’s support for the coup damage his reputation in Europe as a sure supporter of liberalism, one diplomat (and former Post journalist) Eustace Clare Grenville-Murray writing to Borthwick: ‘Lord Palmerston’s retirement [again the positive spin] is received with the most profound regret by the Liberal party in Austria who look upon it as the utter annihilation of their hopes.’97

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Palmerston himself was furious at the dismissal, especially as the rest of the government – as a matter of political expediency – went on to endorse the coup. ‘The real ground’, he informed his brother, sounding slightly paranoid, ‘was a weak truckling to the hostile intrigues of the Orléans family, Austria, Russia, Saxony and Bavaria, and in some degree also of the present Prussian Government.’98 Palmerston’s conspiracy theory – as during the Pacifico debate – gained widespread support, the Chartist Reynolds Weekly denouncing the dismissal as ‘an unworthy concession to the Court at Vienna’.99 The author of the pamphlet ‘Palmerston: What has he Done?’ claimed the ex-minister had been dismissed because he estranged himself from those foreign powers ‘whose good opinion it is the ambition of The Times to cherish’.100 Palmerston had his revenge on Russell just a few weeks later, helping the opposition bring down the Whigs on a vote on a Militia Bill. A Tory government under Lord Derby came into power, albeit not for long.

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8 R APPROCHEMENT

There was some surprise in the British newspapers of December 1852, when it was announced that Lord Palmerston would serve as Home Secretary in a government to be headed by his old rival Lord Aberdeen.1 The strange alliance was occasioned by the fall of the minority Tory government of Lord Derby, the aftermath of which had seen Queen Victoria turn first to Lord Lansdowne and then Aberdeen to form a new ministry. Lansdowne, the aging Whig peer, was not interested in being the head of any government; he was, however, prepared to support a new ‘liberal’ administration, the kind that had been hinted at for a number of months. His imprimatur cleared the way for Aberdeen to form a coalition of Whigs and Peelites, a coalition that in just over five years’ time would provide the basis of the new Liberal party. The British public were unused to – even suspicious of – coalition governments. The Times admitted they were usually seen as the ‘gratuitous combinations of parties for the purpose of overthrowing a third’. Intent on smoothing the path to the premiership for one of its most important allies, the paper attempted to redress this negative view, arguing against ‘blind deference’ to party and in favour of ‘diversity’ within government. ‘Nothing great or powerful,’ it declared, ‘exists in the world which is not the result of conflicting forces skilfully balanced and combined.’ Somewhat more pertinently, it also reflected upon the political upheavals of recent years that meant no one party had been able to govern effectively, as the sword of Damocles ‘hung perpetually

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over their heads’. The new coalition – or ‘united Administration’ as The Times delicately phrased it – would have a strong mandate in parliament and great support ‘out of doors’.2 The incoming Prime Minister – who actually met with the editor just hours after his audience with the Queen – repaid The Times with a series of notes outlining his plans with regard to the formation of the ministry.3 John Delane’s influence was so strong he even persuaded Aberdeen to give Sir William Molesworth – a friend of Reeve’s and a co-founder of the Reform Club – a seat in the Cabinet, as First Commissioner of Works and Public Places, a position that placed him in charge of public buildings and spaces. Molesworth, the 43-yearold MP for Southwark in London and former owner and editor of the Westminster Review, had only been offered the War Office without a seat in Cabinet prior to the editor’s intervention.4 The coming together of the Whigs and Peelites – while not unexpected – was not without its difficulties. There were a number of big political figures to be accommodated and egos to be massaged. Lord John Russell, in particular, was slow to come around to the idea of serving under Aberdeen – or anyone else for that matter. (At one point during the negotiations Aberdeen asked Delane to refrain from alluding ‘tomorrow to the positions of Ld. J.R. or Lord P.’.5) Russell had to be cajoled by his brother, the Duke of Bedford, and another Whig elder statesman, Lord Minto, who was also his father-in-law. Finally, intimations from Aberdeen that he would step aside and let Russell assume leadership of the government at some (unspecified) time in the future convinced him to serve as Foreign Secretary. The coming together of Palmerston and Aberdeen was no less trying. Palmerston had procrastinated openly about joining the Derby ministry in February 1852, ultimately declining on account of its Protectionist stance. The efforts to involve him had been genuine, with Benjamin Disraeli, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, writing to Derby: ‘It is everything for your Government that P. should be a member of it. His prestige in the House is very great; in the country considerable.’6 Palmerston then forged a somewhat independent path for the next ten months, sitting apart from the Whigs in the House of Commons and voting tactically. There were further overtures

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from Disraeli, but Palmerston knew the minority Tory administration could not last long. He began to prepare for what might follow, writing to his brother about a possible Lansdowne government in which he ‘should have the Home Office and Johnny the Foreign’. Palmerston was displaying here a keen sense of the political landscape: he would be important to any future government or combination of parties, but Russell, still the leader of the Whigs, was even more so. It is also clear that the possibility of a return to high office would see him overlook any lingering issues about working with the man who had just pushed him from power. Palmerston watched political developments in early December keenly, fully aware that he was in a position of strength. He would have preferred to see Lansdowne assume the premiership but was prepared to meet Aberdeen. The first meeting between the erstwhile rivals was extremely cordial on the surface, though neither man was insensible to its incongruous nature. Palmerston joked about their schooldays in Harrow and both men scrupulously avoided any mention of past political disagreements. Aberdeen offered the Admiralty and a seat in Cabinet but Palmerston declined. Aberdeen returned with another offer: any ministry except the Foreign Office. Palmerston was still minded to say no, but relented when pressed by Lansdowne, who was to sit in Cabinet without portfolio and with whom he had always enjoyed a good relationship. Palmerston was not totally comfortable with his decision. The premiership was his ambition, but, as he wrote to his brother-in-law Laurence Sulivan, ‘that is not a thing a man can accomplish by willing it’.7 A place back at the heart of government would suffice for the present. The Times had not slackened in its attacks on Palmerston while he was out of office, resuscitating complaints about, for example, his ‘mapping out his Kingdom of Northern Italy on an imaginary chart of Europe’.8 Realizing, however, that he had to be accommodated if the new Aberdeen government was to survive, it welcomed his appointment as Home Secretary. By the summer of 1853 the newspaper was tentatively positive in its coverage of Palmerston, applauding ‘the revolution which transferred such indefatigable energies to the peaceful fields of the Home-office’.9 These indefatigable energies, even in his

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late sixties, were always an aspect of Palmerston that friend and foe could agree on. It would be a few years yet before age and illness eventually began to take a real toll on him.

The Eastern Question In December 1852, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia refused to greet the newly crowned Emperor Napoleon III of France as ‘mon frère’ – unlike the sovereigns of Britain, Austria and Prussia – preferring instead the less intimate ‘mon ami’. Napoleon brushed off the subtle insult, even though some of his advisors wanted him to use it to force a break with Russia.10 Nevertheless, it helped to generate further bad feeling between the countries at the very moment that they were embroiled in a dispute that would eventually erupt into the Crimean War. The origins of the Crimean War lay in two heated religious controversies of the early 1850s: over the right to hold the keys to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and over the right to repair the roof of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem – the two holiest places in Christendom nestled in the heart of the Muslim Turkish Empire. France and Russia, representing the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, both claimed primacy. The French leader seized upon the dispute both as a means to curry favour with Catholic opinion at home and also to project an image of French power abroad. He bullied the Turkish powers until in November 1852 – just weeks before he declared himself Emperor – they relented, ceding control of the Holy Places to the Catholics. This was a grave affront to the extremely religious Tsar. He reacted strongly, mobilizing tens of thousands of troops and dusting down plans for the dismemberment of the Turkish Empire, the socalled ‘sick man of Europe’. In February 1853 Nicholas dispatched a new envoy to Istanbul. His orders were not only to restore Orthodox control of the Holy Places but also to conclude a new treaty that recognized the Tsar’s right of protection over the millions of Orthodox Christians living within the Turkish Empire – an act that would compromise the very sovereignty of the Sultan. The Tsar’s choice of envoy, the historian Orlando Figes makes clear, was deliberately provocative: Prince Alexander Menshikov,

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‘a military man with a fearful reputation’.11 After a couple of months of often tense negotiations, during which time the French and British fleets approached the area, the bullying Menshikov delivered an ultimatum to the Turkish authorities. The Turkish government, fired up with anti-Russian sentiment and believing France and Britain would come to their aid, rejected the ultimatum, leading the Tsar to send troops across the River Pruth into the Turkish provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia (present-day Romania). The Turks prepared for war, gathering together troops during the summer months. Finally, on 4 October 1853, the Turkish Empire declared war on Russia. The fighting began in earnest at the end of the month, Turkish troops crossing the Danube into Wallachia and driving the Russians back towards the Moldavian border. Palmerston, although an industrious and reforming Home Secretary, maintained a keen interest in foreign policy and the burgeoning Eastern crisis. He was part of the Cabinet’s inner circle on foreign affairs, and throughout the spring and summer of 1853 urged strong action – such as sending British warships into the Bosporus – to convince the Tsar that Britain was serious about protecting the territorial integrity of the Turkish Empire. The majority of the Cabinet, however, led by Aberdeen and the new Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon (Russell having switched to the position of Leader of the House of Commons so that he could concentrate on pushing through some measures of electoral reform), struck a more cautious note. They did not really believe Russia would go to war; felt the Tsar was simply posturing to secure some concessions on the Holy Places. It was Palmerston who was proved correct, the Tsar taking the irresolute British stance as a sign they would not join with France in any fight for Turkey. The public, both foreign and domestic, certainly continued to associate Palmerston with foreign affairs, a deputation from the Paris Polish Committee presenting him in the summer of 1853 with another (undeserved) medal for his efforts for Poland.12 It was this continued association with foreign matters that enabled Palmerston to cloak his shock resignation from government in December 1853 – on account of Russell’s new electoral reform proposals – in the garb of foreign affairs, word of his resignation hitting the papers on the same day that news

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arrived from the east of the destruction by a Russian naval squadron of the Turkish fleet anchored at the Black Sea port of Sinope. The Morning Post (edited since the death of Peter Borthwick in December 1852 by his son Algernon) pushed this interpretation, while The Times attempted to establish reform as the primary cause.13 Writing of his short-lived resignation to Laurence Sulivan, Palmerston stated somewhat falsely: ‘The newspapers have left me nothing to tell you except that The Times is a deliberate liar which you knew before.’14 The so-called ‘massacre’ at Sinope – in which almost 3,000 Turkish sailors lost their lives – caused a sensation in the British press, a longlatent Russophobia finding expression in garish newspaper reports of Turkish sailors burnt to death or left to drown at sea. (It did not matter that it was a legitimate act of war.) A full-scale Russian invasion of Turkey looked imminent and public opinion grew increasingly warlike, with public meetings in defence of Turkey held in London, Manchester, Rochdale, Sheffield, Newcastle and many other towns. The Cabinet, too, began to swing behind Palmerston’s more forceful policy. Queen Victoria put Clarendon’s change of tone down to a ‘fear of the newspapers’. And it was to the newspapers, too, that the Turkish government turned, directing considerable sums to its London embassy to organize and pay for articles calling on the British government to intervene against Russia.15 Against this backdrop, Palmerston did not have to work very hard for a belligerent British public to believe it was the vacillations of the government on the Eastern question that had compelled him to walk out. His robust image was insinuated in the collective psyche. Earlier that year he had received a letter from a journalist that compared him favourably with Aberdeen – calling the latter ‘that venerable despotworshipper’ whereas Palmerston stood so often between the despots of Europe and ‘their intended prey’. Of the Eastern question in particular, the correspondent described how the ‘boa constrictor [Russia] which has been so long biding its time for enfolding and swallowing’ Turkey was now ready for its ‘final and fatal spring’. ‘The belief in the Clubs,’ he continued, was that Aberdeen ‘would have connived at the ambition of the Cossack with a smile and a bow and the doctrine of non-intervention, but for the influence of Lord Palmerston’.16 In the

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event, Palmerston soon rejoined the government when the ostensible ‘misunderstanding’ was cleared up and reform measures shelved. The influence of the so-called ‘war party’ in Cabinet increased and in late December a joint Anglo-French fleet was sent to the Black Sea to protect Turkish shipping, the dispute over the Holy Places morphing into a war between ‘civilized’ Europe and ‘barbarous’ Russia.

The Times at War Britain declared war on Russia on 27 March 1854; France followed suit a day later. In truth, both countries had been on a war footing since the end of February, when a joint ultimatum was sent to the Russians to withdraw from Moldavia and Wallachia. The previous months had seen a hesitant Aberdeen continue to search for a negotiated peace, despite the urgings of an increasingly bellicose public. The Prime Minister had eventually been forced to abandon these hopes, complaining to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of being ‘dragged’ into war by Palmerston.17 The Tsar, meanwhile, first learned the contents of the Anglo-French ultimatum – which he did not even deign to answer – through The Times, the titan of Printing House Square securing yet another great scoop. The paper was censured for this breach of official secrecy in the House of Lords, the Tory leader Derby questioning how it was possible ‘that any honourable man, editing a public paper of such circulation as The Times, can reconcile to his conscience the act of having made public that which he must have known was intended to be a public secret’. Aberdeen, who was present in the upper chamber during this speech, annoyed Delane by his refusal to speak out in support of the impugned paper.18 Their warm relationship had started to fray. While the Crimean War witnessed the nadir of Aberdeen’s political career, The Times achieved a stature few papers have ever experienced. It became ‘not only the chief recorder of the events of that war’ but one of the main protagonists, helping to bring down a government and revolutionizing the way in which the domestic audience experienced war.19 The paper was originally tied to a policy of peace, both ‘by [Delane’s] nature and through Aberdeen’s influence’.20 ‘I think we

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have seen the worst of the warlike feeling,’ the editor wrote in October 1853, suggesting to Aberdeen that in ‘bringing about that good end’ some credit was due to The Times.21 Nevertheless, The Times broke ranks from its old ally in December, when, following the lead of public opinion, it condemned the Russian attack on Sinope. It thereafter bellicosely advocated war. The break in relations between Aberdeen and Delane was only mended in the autumn of 1857, when Delane, in Scotland anyway, visited the former Prime Minister at his Haddo House residence in the Highlands. The Crimea was a strange hybrid of a war, with one recent chronicler describing it as both the ‘first truly modern war’ – with war correspondents, modern rifles, steamships, railways, telegraphs etc. – and also the last to be fought by the ‘old codes of chivalry’, including truces in the fighting to clear the dead and wounded from the battlefields.22 William Howard Russell of The Times was by far the most important of these new war correspondents, the decision to send him ‘an immense leap in the history of journalism’.23 For the first time a civilian reporter would bring the truth of war back to readers’ homes, promptly and candidly, whereas in past conflicts British newspapers had employed junior officers to send home letters from the front. Russell’s appointment was last-minute, but it was a decision that would prove one of Delane’s greatest. Born in Dublin in the early 1820s, Russell had worked for The Times on a freelance basis for a number of years before setting off with British troops in February 1854. They stopped first at Malta and then Gallipoli in Turkey. From the beginning, Russell noticed deficiencies in the way the army was run. The management is infamous, and the contrast offered by our proceedings to the conduct of the French most painful. Could you believe it – the sick have not a bed to lie upon? They are landed and thrown into a rickety house without a chair or a table in it. The French with their ambulances, excellent commissariat staff and boulangerie etc, in every respect are immeasurably our superiors. While these things go on, Sir George Brown [Commander of the Light Division] only seems anxious about

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the men being clean-shaved, their necks well stiffened and waist belts tight. He insists on officers and men being in full rig; no loose coats, jackets etc. ‘Am I to tell these things, or hold my tongue?’ he asked his editor.24 Russell’s dispatches worked their way back to the east and he was harassed by some men who took exception to his apparently unpatriotic words. This did not stop him from carrying on with the troops to the Crimea in September. Here he described the action vividly, bringing readers closer to the heart of battle than ever before. His most famous lines concerned the Battle of Balaclava in late October: The silence is oppressive; between the cannon bursts one can hear the champing of bits and the clink of sabres in the valley below. The Russians on their left drew breath for a moment, and then in one grand line dashed at the Highlanders. The ground flies beneath their horse’s feet; gathering speed at every stride, they dash on towards that thin red streak topped with a line of steel.25 The ‘thin red streak’ was later amended by the author to the more poetic ‘thin red line’. Russell’s biggest impact, however, came from more prosaic articles written during the harsh winter months of 1854–5. Based in the British camp at Balaclava, Russell wrote movingly about the suffering of ordinary soldiers forced to endure a Russian winter without basic food and provisions, such as warm clothing or fuel or blankets. Cholera and other diseases decimated the ranks, killing far more men than any enemy fire. These articles, supported by strong editorials in The Times, ignited great controversy at home, questioning the military authorities and shattering the illusion that Britain had the greatest army in the world. The Queen raged against ‘the infamous attacks against the army’ while her husband Prince Albert derided ‘the pen and ink of one miserable scribbler’.26 The British public, however, were fascinated by Russell’s letters from

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the front, the circulation of The Times rising to an unprecedented 50,000. The Crimean War is so called because the major fighting took place on the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea, with the aim of capturing the major Russian naval base and fortress of Sebastopol. It is something of a misnomer; the conflict was much broader, ranging from the Baltic to the Balkans to the Caucasus and even the Pacific. The Times fed the unprecedented demand for news with correspondents in almost all the theatres of the war. Thomas Chenery, a future editor of the paper, was perhaps the next most influential correspondent after Russell. Based in Istanbul, he travelled across the Bosporus to the British army’s base hospital at Scutari and was appalled at what he found. There was ‘not sufficient surgeons . . . no dressers or nurses . . . not even linen to make bandages for the wounded.’ The Times supported Chenery’s article with an editorial appeal for private charity. Donations poured into Printing House Square and the paper soon found itself administering a fund to assist the suffering soldiers. Another article highlighted the superior medical arrangements of the French and the impressive work of their Sisters of Charity. Florence Nightingale, a nurse whose family were friendly with the Palmerstons in Hampshire, was inspired to recruit a team of nurses to take to the war. She actually sailed to Scutari in late October with a John MacDonald of The Times, who was in charge of dispensing its fund, the ‘two most dynamic forces which emerged from the Crimean War’ irrevocably entwined in the public mind.27 Delane travelled to the Crimea himself in September 1854, and the mark made on him by the war was indelible. He was shocked by the ineptness of the military command and saw ‘in every regiment . . . sad traces of cholera and fever in the pale faces, lank forms, and tottering steps of the men’. Even the Turks, who Delane admitted the British were ‘accustomed either to pity or despise . . . as soldiers’, were ‘infinitely better supplied and better appointed’.28 He returned to London determined to tackle the mismanagement of the war by both the Aberdeen government and the aristocratic military elite. He supported Russell’s writings even in the face of accusations of treason, ensuring they remained headline news. The ‘noblest army England

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ever sent from these shores,’ one editorial thundered, ‘has been sacrificed to the grossest mismanagement. Incompetence, lethargy, aristocratic hauteur, official indifference, favour, routine, perverseness, and stupidity reign, revel, and riot in the camp before Sebastopol.’ Delane then went further even than his star reporter, calling for the recall of Lord Raglan, the Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in the Crimea – or the ‘invisible commander’ as the paper described him.29 ‘Of robust appearance and a somewhat florid complexion,’ Delane resembled in his middle years ‘a typical country squire.’30 So wrote his nephew and biographer A.I. Dasent. In 1858 he would purchase a large property at Ascot Heath, and even his obituary in The Times described how, as ‘was universal with British statesmen and politicians, his one idea of dignified happiness was that of a country gentleman’.31 More recent commentators have criticized the editor for acquiring the tone and habits of the dukes and lords at whose great homes he spent weekends, taking it as evidence that his sympathies and those of The Times lay wholly with the ruling class.32 However, the passionate articles in The Times during the Crimean War show Delane’s moral compass had not been compromised by intimate acquaintance with the rulers of the country, with the paper even being accused in some quarters of waging war on the country’s aristocracy.33 And so, while Thomas Barnes cemented his name in the annals of journalistic history through agitation for parliamentary reform, for Delane it was the campaign to reform a fossilized, aristocratic-controlled military whose egregious blundering undermined the sacrifices made by the common soldier during the Crimean War that was the making of his long-lived reputation.

‘The Palmerstonian Ranks’ ‘We wipe our hands of the war under the existing management,’ declared The Times of 25 January 1855. Aberdeen resigned a few days later, after a motion to set up a select committee ‘to inquire into the condition of our army before Sebastopol, and into the conduct of those departments of the government whose duty it has been to minister to the wants of that army’ – in essence a vote of no confidence in the

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government – was carried by the overwhelming margin of 305 votes to 148. ‘More than any other single thing’, writes Russell’s biographer, it was the war correspondent’s letters to The Times ‘that had brought this about’.34 The British public ran the gamut of emotions during the Crimean War, ‘confidence, frustration, hysterical enthusiasm and even more hysterical rage and despair’.35 Nevertheless, they still wanted to win the war, still yearned for a strong war leader. Palmerston seemed the obvious choice. Queen Victoria, however, was reluctant to look to the man whose manner and policies had so infuriated her for much of the previous decade. She turned, therefore, to Lord Derby and Lord John Russell, neither of whom proved able to form a government. Finally, on 4 February 1855, Palmerston was invited by the Queen to lead the country. The Peelites, who initially consented to serve under Palmerston, stood aside a few weeks later. Palmerston’s first government, therefore, was almost wholly Whig, with Delane and Reeve’s friend Molesworth the one Radical inclusion, again as First Commissioner of Works and Public Places. The Times was cautiously welcoming to the new Prime Minister. It had, in fact, been inching towards Palmerston since the start of the Crimean War, arguing in 1854 for his appointment to the newlycreated position of Secretary of State for War, a post that ended up going to the Peelite Duke of Newcastle. The Times had not been alone in this conviction, with Molesworth writing to Aberdeen how ‘among the public there is a unanimous feeling that Palmerston ought to be the war minister’, adding that his own opinion ‘in this matter agrees with that of the public’.36 The new tone in The Times was noticed around the halls of Westminster. Some, not unreasonably, questioned its strength, with the young Tory peer Lord Stanley certain The Times was ‘Palmerstonian only in deference to the feeling of the moment’.37 Palmerston himself was just as cautious, informing the Queen that the paper was only backing him because it always liked to be on the winning side.38 The true moment of rapprochement between Palmerston and The Times came several months later, with the appointment in August 1855 of Robert Lowe, MP for Kidderminster, as Vice-President of

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the Board of Trade. For Lord John Russell, Palmerston’s appointments around this time were all designed to win the favour of The Times.39 The Prime Minister’s popularity had begun to suffer on account of the lack of a military breakthrough in the Crimea, and the politically ambitious Lowe was a good friend of Delane’s and regular leader-writer for The Times. ‘Upon receiving news of his appointment,’ writes Angus Hawkins, ‘Lowe wrote an editorial for the next morning’s edition that began the paper’s more favourable comment on the government.’40 This piece of 14 August, which would not have been inserted without Delane’s approval, declared Palmerston to be the ‘exponent of the popular will’ – the highest compliment the paper could give. It was the consummating moment of a conciliation that had been prefigured by the earlier Palmerstonian promotion of Molesworth to Colonial Secretary. Within a few weeks of the article Delane and Palmerston were meeting each other at Molesworth’s home. It was a fraternization that Lord Brougham, that old friend-turned-enemy of Barnes, likened to ‘devil-worship’ in a letter to Aberdeen.41 The passing of the Stamp Act on 1 July 1855 was another significant factor in the coming together of Palmerston and The Times, an uncertain future for the paper facilitating the convergence of the erstwhile rivals. This legislation – abolishing the so-called ‘taxes on knowledge’ that had kept the price of newspapers artificially high – seismically altered the newspaper landscape of mid-Victorian Britain, bringing a whole ‘new segment of British society’ into the reach of the daily newspaper.42 A new ‘popular’ or ‘penny’ press quickly emerged, with its leading light the Daily Telegraph soon surpassing The Times as the best-selling paper in the country. The high costs involved in running a paper as large as The Times, with correspondents not only across Britain but throughout the world, meant it could do no more than reduce its cover price from 5p first to 4p, and then in 1861 to 3p. Its circulation increased to 60,000, where it would stay for more than 20 years. This paled in comparison to the Daily Telegraph, whose sales by 1862 equalled those of all the other London morning papers combined – an honour that not long before had been held by The Times.43

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Another possible factor in the union was an important change in personnel right at the heart of Printing House Square. Reeve left the paper to become editor of the influential Edinburgh Review, a position he retained for 40 years. The Press, Benjamin Disraeli’s weekly organ, was soon commenting on how ‘Pam has . . . humbled his old enemy into being his trumpeter’.44 Dasent, on the other hand, suggested that ‘Palmerston was the first to admit how much he owed, during the last and most creditable decade of his long public career, to the advice and support of his former critic.’45 The truth was that neither protagonist outdid the other in their eventual coming together. It was a logical, mutually beneficial step. The Times and Palmerston ought to have been allies for years, so full of approbation for Palmerston were those middle-class readers The Times claimed as its constituency. There had been occasions in the past when such a union seemed possible, but it took the exigencies of the summer of 1855 – a Prime Minister’s popularity in steep decline and a whole newspaper world in the midst of revolution – for The Times, as the press historian Stephen Koss has phrased it, to finally take ‘its natural place in the Palmerstonian ranks’.46 One of Palmerston’s first actions as Prime Minister had been to proceed with the parliamentary inquiry into the war that had brought down Aberdeen. He did not actually believe it would achieve much, but felt compelled by the strength of public opinion to follow it through. The new Prime Minister also oversaw some definite improvements in conditions for the soldiers on the front line, for example in the supply of munitions and transport and sanitary equipment. Nevertheless, the failure to take Sebastopol, despite continued massive bombardment, damaged his standing, and there were even demonstrations against his government in the summer of 1855.47 The eventual fall of Sebastopol in September lifted the mood of the country. It was a victory that presaged the end of the war, the first note to Delane in Palmerston’s indelibly scrawled handwriting, liberally sprinkled with the use of capitals (except often where they were actually required), concerning peace proposals being advanced by Austria: ‘Russia has accepted some & has either declined or wished to modify others[.] austria has however adhered to her Terms and has given Russia till the 18th to reconsider her answer and it is to send by

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Telegraph to vienna a yes or a no.’48 The flow of privileged information, once begun, did not abate. The very next day Palmerston related how ‘we have a Telegraphic Message this morning from Vienna dated yesterday Saying that yesterday Count Buol received a message . . . from Count Esterhayzy at Petersburg Saying that “the Russian Government accepts the Austrian propositions as a Basis for negotiations for Peace”.’49 And so it went on for the denouement of the Crimean conflict and well beyond.

‘Handsome and Powerful Support’ The signing of the Treaty of Paris in March 1856 did not mean foreign affairs slipped down the political agenda. In May four British diplomats were expelled from America for their involvement in the illegal recruitment of soldiers for the Crimea, giving rise to a brief war scare.50 Then in October, Sir John Bowring, the British Governor of Hong Kong, ordered a squadron of the Royal Navy to bombard the city of Canton, still the prime trading link between the West and the Chinese empire. It was a rash, over-the-top reaction to the boarding by Chinese coastguards of a British-registered vessel, the Arrow, which had until a short time previously been used as a pirate ship. The crew were arrested and the British flag, apparently, ‘insulted’. In the early stages of the dispute the Chinese authorities – in the person of Commissioner Yeh Ming-Chen – had shown some willingness to compromise, releasing the majority of the crew except for three well-known pirates. But this was not sufficient atonement for the (unverifiable) insult to the British flag and nation. The naval bombardment, which included the razing of Yeh’s palace, hardened attitudes. Yeh retaliated with a virtual declaration of war, offering a bounty for British heads that resulted in a number of murders and the burning of British factories.51 Britain and China were at war again, a conflict that would drag on in a stopstart fashion for four years. The first reports of trouble at Canton were brought to the British public by The Times in late December 1856. There was support for Bowring and derogatory references to the Chinese as an ‘ignorant race’. The paper portrayed the issue in a largely commercial light, arguing

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that Britain required ‘liberty and security for our commerce’, a view it shared with the free trade disciple Palmerston.52 Demonstrating its continued primacy in the coverage of foreign affairs, The Times then went to the great expense of dispatching a special correspondent, George Wingrove Cooke, to cover the war with China. He stayed for nearly two years, his reports earning great praise even from rival publications. The Times was still the only paper in Britain with the resources to undertake such an operation, the maintenance of an excellent foreign-news service not just a source of professional pride but also a justification – to the mind of its manager Mowbray Morris – for its continued high price.53 Back in London – where Palmerston was thanking Delane for ‘the handsome and powerful support which you have given to the Government’54 – the focus was on the clear illegality of Bowring’s action, with Derby denouncing the Arrow incident in the Lords as the ‘most despicable cause of war that has ever occurred’. In early March the government lost a vote of confidence in the Commons. Palmerston responded by calling a general election, suspecting perhaps, as Saul David has written, ‘that his gunboat diplomacy would have more favour with the electorate than it had with MPs’.55 He was right, the government returning to power with an increased majority. ‘We felt that our fellow-countrymen in a distant part of the globe had been exposed to every sort of insult, outrage, and atrocity,’ Palmerston had told an enthralled audience in London in the midst of the election campaign. It was a speech – echoing his earlier ‘Civus Romanus sum’ rhetoric – that proved quickly popular, one prospective MP distributing it among his electors alongside a poster that stated simply: ‘Vote for Puller, Who will give Lord Palmerston a hearty support, because he approves his measures.’56 Palmerston had stayed in contact with Delane during the course of the three-week election campaign, writing with regard to the selection of a new envoy to China ‘that we have this Day settled with Lord Elgin that he shall undertake this Duty’.57 Elgin’s instructions were to secure complete observance of existing treaties, access to Beijing for a British envoy, and the opening of more ports to trade. Elgin was actually unenthusiastic about fighting the Chinese, believing the Arrow affair to be

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‘a scandal to us’. Nevertheless, he combined forces with the French (who were demanding reparations for the beheading of a French Catholic missionary a year earlier) to attack Canton in late 1857. Watching on, Elgin remarked, ‘I am sad. I feel I am earning for myself a place in the litany, immediately after Plague, pestilence and famine.’ The AngloFrench forces moved further north, to within 30 miles of the imperial capital of Beijing. The signing of the Treaty of Tianjin in the summer of 1858 seemed to conclude the war. The Chinese Emperor prevaricated, however, when it came to ratifying the treaty. Further fighting took place, one of the many casualties being Thomas Bowlby, Cooke’s successor as correspondent for The Times, who was slowly tortured to death after being caught in a Chinese ambush with a group of British officials and troops. The war was not conclusively decided until after French and British forces reached the outskirts of Beijing in October 1860.58 The Indian Mutiny was the next affair to grab the public’s attention, the misconception that the cartridges for the new muzzleloading Enfield rifle, which had to be bitten into by the soldiers, were greased with the fat from cows (sacred to Hindus) or pigs (unclean to Muslims) serving as the spark to unleash decades of simmering resentment. Centred at first on the Bengal Army in the north, the mutiny escalated quickly into the largest civil and military rebellion in the history of the British Empire. It was a rebellion marked by grotesque massacres at Meerut, Delhi and Cawnpore, not just of British soldiers but of Europeans more generally, of both sexes and all ages; the British reprisals, when they came, were just as horrific. News of the Indian Mutiny reached London in late June 1857. The newspapers, including The Times, focused unsurprisingly on the violence of the mutineers. Palmerston has been criticized for not responding promptly enough, but he eventually poured tens of thousands of extra troops into India. He also kept Delane – whose brother Captain George Delane was a member of the Governor-General Lord Canning’s bodyguard – abreast of developments, advising the editor of the appointment of Sir Colin Campbell in place of the deceased General George Anson as Commander-in-Chief of the British army in India.59 The following month found the Prime Minister writing: ‘I should be

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glad that no mention should be made of our suspicions that Russia has had a Hand in these Indian Disorders.’60 In September, Delhi, which had fallen to mutineers in May, was finally retaken. The sense that Britain had regained control of the situation was strengthened when the besieged city of Lucknow was relieved in March 1858, witnessed at first-hand by William Howard Russell of The Times who was shocked by the brutality of the British soldiers and their Sikh allies.61 A month earlier, Palmerston had actually revolutionized the governance of India, abolishing the East India Company – which had ruled the sub-continent for more than a century – and placing India under the direct control of London. ‘It was a triumph,’ writes Chambers, but one that was astonishingly short-lived, Palmerston’s government falling on a completely unrelated affair just a day later.62 The first reading of the Conspiracy to Murder Bill that would see the crime of planning a murder changed from a misdemeanour to a felony passed through the Commons by the comfortable margin of 200 votes. It was a response to the attempted assassination of Napoleon III in Paris in January 1858 by a group of Italian nationalists led by Count Felice Orsini. The bombs used in the attack, it turned out, had been made in London by other members of Orsini’s group. The French protested – politely – and Palmerston acknowledged the legitimacy of their concerns. However, in an opportunistic alliance, and latching on to notices in French papers that gave the bill the look of a pandering response to the French Emperor, the Tories, Peelites and Radicals brought down the government by 19 votes on the second reading of the bill. A Tory government under Lord Derby assumed power, with Benjamin Disraeli – one of the prime movers behind what Chambers has termed the ‘ambush’ of Palmerston63 – again Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Times praised Palmerston for ‘having conducted the national affairs with extraordinary ability and success’.64 Nevertheless, the response of the country to the fall of the septuagenarian premier was surprisingly muted, especially in light of his impressive victory at the polls just 11 months earlier. Gladstone and Disraeli were clearly the coming men in British politics, but Palmerston was not quite ready to give up his hold on power. Indeed, he would be on the campaign trail

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again a year and a half later. Delane continued to dine with Palmerston during this period out of office. Palmerston was especially keen to calm the anti-French sentiment of the paper, suggesting the ‘constant attacks irritate and create Resentment, and it Seems undesirable to excite those Feelings in the mind of the man [Napoleon III] upon Whom will the Relations between England & France in Some measure depend’.65 Times had certainly changed when Palmerston was pragmatically arguing against Delane in support of France.

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‘Whoever writes for us fights for Italy.’1 So wrote Mowbray Morris, the manager of The Times, when the long-prophesied war between France and Austria in northern Italy finally came to pass in the spring of 1859. Napoleon III, with an eye on gaining control of the territories of Savoy and Nice, had combined with Victor Emmanuel, the King of Piedmont-Sardinia, to drive the Austrians out of Italy. British military intervention – on either side – was not an option ever seriously entertained. Nevertheless, the pro-Italian stance of The Times (tempered with distrust of the Bonaparte connection) mirrored the mood of the British public; quite a change from a decade earlier when, under the influence of Lord Aberdeen, it had consistently upheld Austrian claims. Lord Palmerston was more consistent in tone, deploring once again Austria’s ‘abominable system of misgovernment in Italy’ to a receptive audience in Tiverton.2 Although surprisingly short-lived and inconclusive, the war in Italy had serious repercussions in London. The ‘Italian question’ was ‘one of the greatest and most contested ideological divides’ in nineteenth-century British politics, and one of the few issues on which all strands of opposition to the pro-Austrian Tory government could agree.3 Coming at precisely the same time as months of slow reconciliation talks between Palmerston and Lord John Russell came to a head – each promising to serve under the other – the war

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in Italy facilitated the fusion of Whigs, Peelites and Radicals into a new force in British politics: the Liberal party. A famous meeting in Willis’s Rooms in London on 6 June – where Palmerston, Russell and even the Radical John Bright stood together on the same platform – is traditionally regarded as marking the birth of this new political grouping. A vote of no confidence was quickly carried in parliament and Lord Derby resigned. Queen Victoria prevaricated – and then sent for Palmerston. The former Tory became the first Liberal Prime Minister. For Jonathan Parry, one of the leading authorities on the Liberal party, Palmerston ‘established his credentials with the mass of the provincial Liberal party’ from the late 1840s ‘by his advocacy of interventionism abroad on “liberal” grounds’.4 Palmerston’s baseless propaganda of the ‘year of revolutions’, therefore, had a direct impact on this latest (and last) political incarnation. The 74-year-old Prime Minister quickly set about finding positions for the diverse elements of the Liberal party within the new Cabinet. He was just as quickly informing John Delane how ‘our arrangements are going on well, and will be completed very soon, but are not as yet far enough adorned to be made public; as soon as they are I will let you know.’ Palmerston went on to congratulate the editor on the ‘capital article you had today about Italy and the war’.5 It is no surprise he was pleased, Delane promising ‘to reproduce from time to time’ Palmerston’s arguments on the issue.6 The following year events in Italy again dominated European affairs, with the famous revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi and his red-shirted followers joining an uprising in Sicily that eventually led to the unification of Italy. Palmerston was generally supportive of Garibaldi’s campaign – although not to the same extent as a wildly enthusiastic public– and in March 1861 Britain became the first Great Power to grant the Kingdom of Italy diplomatic recognition. The Times had given an inordinate amount of positive press coverage to Garibaldi’s campaign, and its correspondent Ferdinand Eber, a former Hungarian revolutionary, instead of just covering the story, actually joined Garibaldi, becoming the commander of his own column of troops.7

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‘A Hearty Welcome’ William Gladstone was one of the pallbearers when a 76-year-old Aberdeen was buried in December 1860, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer mourning the loss of both a close friend and political mentor. Like Aberdeen, Gladstone had a tendency to appear aloof and cold. But the younger man transformed himself in the mid-1860s into ‘the People’s William’. Such a transformation was beyond the ability (or even interest) of Aberdeen, who never really engaged the public’s sympathies despite his long years at the forefront of British politics. Consequently, the obituary in The Times, while generally warm, was far from a panegyric to Delane’s first and greatest political ally. Reputedly one of the few pieces actually written by Delane after he became editor, it paid tribute to Aberdeen’s ‘tolerant nature’, ‘vast experience’ and ‘perfect integrity’. Nevertheless, it could not deny that ‘it was in private that he appeared to the most advantage’, an austere manner off-putting to those he did not know well. A great deal of the obituary concerned foreign policy, in particular the different styles of Palmerston and Aberdeen. The former was ‘bold and impulsive’ and with great faith ‘in the aspirations of the European peoples’; the latter more ‘soberminded and farsighted’, regarding ‘freedom suddenly attained as a licence ending in tyranny and misrule’.8 The paper did not come down strongly on either side of the debate, despite having spent years articulating Aberdeen’s views. Delane was in no hurry to re-open old wounds with Palmerston. ‘I don’t believe half the Cabinet know it as I write,’ wrote Delane to George Dasent in April 1864.9 He had just received a long letter from Palmerston outlining the details of a Cabinet reshuffle, the connection between Printing House Square and the Prime Minister going from strength to strength. Palmerston, for his part, had the pleasure of reading in The Times articles that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. An ‘English Statesman’, it declared, had to be ‘emphatically one of us; one of all of us; with feelings and interests, and even occupations, which make him at home with all of us’. Palmerston was the only man to fit this brief, equally at home in the House of Commons as he was at agricultural meetings, ploughing matches, racecourses or labourers’

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cottages.10 The Times gave life, too, to the still-lingering impression of Palmerston as the ‘champion of European liberalism’ – an image it had derided in the past – with one article describing how ‘the dreamy Aldermen have seen Britannia with her trident raised more proudly than ever, and with an almost bursting cornucopia liberating oppressed nations in Europe and taking vengeance on barbarians in Asia’.11 There were occasional differences, such as when The Times supported the building of the Suez Canal, work on which started in late 1859.12 Palmerston opposed this French-sponsored scheme, as he believed it would be a great advantage to France in any war with Britain ‘to have such a short cut to the Indian Seas, while we should be obliged to send ships round the Cape’. He therefore got the Morning Post to run sensationalist articles on the terrible conditions imposed on the workers.13 A few years later, after Palmerston suggested that Delane refrain from mentioning the then much-noted seclusion of the Queen, Prince Albert having died in late 1861, he received the sharp retort: ‘I need not assure you that one does not take up such subjects . . . [just] to fill a column.’14 Even when Palmerston was ill and unable to use his hands, a few months before his death, he got Lady Palmerston to write to Delane expressing his disappointment about a ‘very unfriendly’ and ‘unjust’ article on Gladstone in that day’s edition.15 But these disagreements were rare and did not hinder the development of close relations, Delane’s papers full of invitations to parties, large and small, at 94 Piccadilly Street (the Palmerstons’ new London residence), Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire (inherited by Lady Palmerston in 1853) and, of course, Broadlands.16 For one Delane biographer, the relationship between the editor and Palmerston was far more intimate than that previously enjoyed with Aberdeen.17 Delane was assured at Broadlands of ‘a hearty welcome’ and ‘some Pheasants though fewer than last year’.18 The editor also continued to correspond with Lady Palmerston after her husband’s death.19 An episode from the summer of 1861, when Delane injured his eye, underscores the warm feeling between the two. Palmerston let it be known to the editor that a civil service position at the War Office would soon be vacant; should he desire it, the job was his. It would be all daylight work, ‘and it was suggested it might save my eyes’. Delane

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recovered and there was no need to follow up on the offer. There is no guarantee the editor would have taken the position even had the eye trouble proved more serious. As he explained to the proprietor John Walter: ‘My whole life is bound up with the paper – I must either work for it or not at all.’20 The intimate connection between Palmerston and The Times became a matter of parliamentary debate in 1860. An MP, Edward Horsman, stung by an attack in the paper, accused the editor of being controlled by the Prime Minister. Unlike Aberdeen in 1854, Palmerston rose to delicately defend the propriety of The Times, explaining that he only wished he could influence The Times in the manner Horsman suggested. He did not pretend he did not know Delane, but stated simply, ‘If there are influences which have fortunately led Mr. Delane to me, they are none other than the influences of society.’ ‘My right honourable friend,’ Palmerston continued, ‘has observed that the contributors to the press are the favourites and the ornaments of the social circles into which they enter. In that opinion he is, it seems to me, perfectly correct. The gentlemen to whom he refers are, generally speaking, persons of great attainments and information. It is, then, but natural that their society should be agreeable.’ Palmerston’s acquaintance with Delane, he said, was ‘exactly of that character. I have had the pleasure of meeting him frequently in society, and he has done me the honour to mix in society under my roof.’21 Although the speech was supportive, the use of the word ‘ornaments’ demonstrated the condescending view some politicians and aristocrats – even Palmerston – still held of the press. Delane may have been accepted into the Reform Club and the Athenaeum, and William Howard Russell in great demand as a dinner guest, but the perception of the profession as a whole left a lot to be desired. Indeed, it was this dichotomy between the low status of journalists and the increasing importance of journalism that Mark Hampton has shown helped turn journalists’ minds to the idea of professionalization. It would be a slow process, the Institute of Journalists not founded until the 1880s. Algernon Borthwick was among its early leaders.22

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An ‘Unsung Pioneer’ Like Delane, Algernon Borthwick assumed editorial control of a national newspaper in his early twenties. He enjoyed a long and distinguished career, although criticized by some for being too close to Napoleon III, whom he first got to know around the time of the coup d’état, when he was the young Paris correspondent of the Post. Borthwick went on to purchase the Post in 1876 and later entered politics, standing successfully as the Tory candidate for South Kensington in 1885. Ten years later, he became the first newspaper proprietor to be given a peerage, created Baron Glenesk by Lord Salisbury. Borthwick was a regular dinner guest of the Palmerstons in London and Broadlands, and it is clear that Palmerston did not throw over his old newspaper ally when the connection with The Times proved durable. Borthwick communicated frequently with the Prime Minister, securing early intelligence of government policies. In return, the Post’s support for Palmerston during his two terms as Prime Minister was near steadfast, even – ‘most disastrously’, according to one historian of the paper23 – during the Schleswig-Holstein crisis of the mid-1860s. Palmerston also forged links with the Daily Telegraph, the most successful of the new ‘penny press’. Thornton Leigh Hunt, a contributing editor at the paper, was another regular attendant of Lady Palmerston’s salons.24 The paper eulogised the Prime Minister’s ‘common-man’ veneer: ‘At Romsey, turning the first sod of a new Railway, Lord Palmerston is no less at home than he was at the House of Commons, when he called Mr. Ponsonby an old women.’25 Up to his death Palmerston was sending speeches of his into the Telegraph for insertion.26 Palmerston might not have been the Telegraph’s favourite politician – Hunt was closer to Gladstone – but it was an important ally for the Prime Minister, as it has been argued that from the late 1850s much of the increasingly important provincial press turned from The Times to follow the Telegraph’s lead on London politics.27 This connection with the Telegraph also gave Palmerston access to a broader section of society than that reached by The Times or the Post, the working-class audience he had been looking to more and more for support since the late 1840s.

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In later years, Palmerston also turned increasingly to the platform as a means of courting popularity, demonstrating once again that willingness to adapt that was such a feature of his long political career. Gladstone may be the nineteenth-century politician most associated with such public speaking, but Palmerston, H.C.G. Matthew suggests, was the ‘unsung pioneer’.28 A number of these meetings were of a purely middle-class tenor, with, for instance, the 3,000 tickets ‘well distributed over the more respectable classes of the community’ when Palmerston was given the Freedom of Glasgow in 1853.29 Many others, however, were aimed at working-class audiences, with Joseph Meisel describing how in Manchester in 1856 ‘he spoke at the Free Trade Hall to an audience of 4,000 members and friends of the Mechanics’ Institution’. At Glasgow, meanwhile, where ‘he spoke at a soiree for the working classes at the City Hall’ in 1863, it was claimed that of ‘the 2,000 ticket-holders in attendance . . . 19 out of 20 actually belonged to the “industrious classes”’.30 Palmerston was extremely well-received at the vast majority of such trips, mobbed by supporters at the railway stations when he arrived and cheered along the streets. According to David Steele’s revisionist work on Palmerston’s last years, these tours and speeches outside parliament implied ‘a direct relationship between premier and people’. Steele goes on to argue that Palmerston ‘singled out the upper working-class and treated them as if they already possessed the franchise’.31 Nevertheless, Palmerston remained reluctant to actually grant the working class the vote, a position he shared with Delane.32 This led to some difficulties, the Prime Minister being greeted with co-ordinated silence by parts of the crowd on his visit to Bradford in 1864.33 Palmerston was on surer ground, or so it seemed, on foreign affairs. Indeed the Liberal MP Sir John Trelawny believed they were what kept his ministry in power: the ‘Govt. is mainly sustained by their foreign policy’, he wrote, ‘& the great apprehensions most men now have of the effect of change at this moment. America, France, Italy, Poland, Hungary – danger everywhere. Who is to open the ball in this dance of death?’34

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The ‘Disunited States’ ‘Our American friends seem as bent upon a row as two factions at an Irish fair,’ wrote Palmerston to Delane in January 1861.35 It was a tactless description of the deteriorating situation in the United States – or ‘Disunited States’ as the Prime Minister was wont to call them. South Carolina had just seceded from the Union, closely followed by ten more slave-owning states. Three months later, the first shots of the American Civil War were fired, Confederate guns attacking the Union-held Fort Sumter in Charleston. Four years of horrifically bloody conflict would follow, culminating in the deaths of more than 620,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians. British observers were astounded that a prosperous industrialized nation could so tear itself apart, and unsure of where their sympathies lay. Hostility to an apparently expansionist and bellicose North was ‘widespread’, writes Michael de Nie, but ‘this rarely translated into genuine sympathy for the South, primarily because of a deeply felt antipathy for slavery’.36 That Britain should remain neutral, however, was one point on which almost all observers agreed. Palmerston had endured a long and difficult relationship with the United States, dating back to the War of 1812. More recently, there had been several tense territorial and diplomatic disputes, including a controversy during the Crimean War when four British diplomats were expelled from the United States for their parts in a recruitment scandal. The Prime Minister was consequently wary of American leaders and suspicious of Northern plans to invade Canada. Serious commercial considerations were also at play, with 85 per cent of the raw cotton arriving in Lancashire – then the world’s largest manufacturer of cotton fabrics – coming from the South and almost five million people in Britain dependent upon this industry and its subsidiary trades.37 ‘Palmerston’s instinct,’ according to his biographer David Brown, ‘was to back the South since his fear of democracy outweighed his distaste for slavery and both considerations were secondary to a cold assessment of material interest which suggested that the South would break away and Britain needed to maintain good relations with those states.’ Although the Prime Minister did not back the South openly or go so

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far as to recognize the Confederacy as an independent state, he did recognize the Confederates as belligerents (rather than mere rebels), giving their cause a legitimacy that was resented in Washington.38 The Times did not have to be as careful as Palmerston in its prejudices. Delane, Morris and Walter all favoured the Southern states, a position made easier by the initial refusal of the North to make emancipation the main aim of the war and by the virulently antiBritish tone of some Northern newspapers, including the best-selling New York Herald. Early victories on the battlefield reinforced the belief in Printing House Square that the Confederacy would prevail. The Battle of Bull Run in particular, near Washington in late July 1861, was an embarrassment for the North whose beaten troops retreated in unseemly panic. William Howard Russell, on the scene for The Times, described how soldiers ‘clamoured and shouted like madmen as they ran’, and how the road back to Washington ‘for miles presented such a sight as can only be witnessed in the track of the runaways of an utterly demoralized army’. His editor’s response to this portrayal of Northern fright was thoroughly positive: ‘I can’t describe to you the delight with which I . . . read your vivid account of the repulse at Bull’s Run and the terrible debacle which ensued.’39 Russell, who in contrast to his employers actually sympathized with the North, had arrived in America in March, a few weeks before the war. As the most famous war journalist in the world he was quickly acquainted with the leading figures in Washington, including the Secretary of State William H. Seward, at whose home he smoked cigars and played whist. He dined at the White House and was introduced to President Abraham Lincoln. ‘Mr. Russell,’ the president said, ‘I am very glad to make your acquaintance, and to see you in this country. The London Times is one of the greatest powers in the world – in fact, I don’t know anything which has more power – except perhaps the Mississippi.’40 Lincoln would not remain so well-disposed to the paper; nor would Russell remain so welcome in Washington, his unflattering (albeit essentially accurate) account of the retreat at Bull Run making him powerful enemies. He was vilified in the Northern press, threatened on the streets and refused permission to accompany Northern troops. These difficulties, combined nevertheless with a

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continued pro-Northern stance the writer knew to be at variance with his paper, placed Russell in an untenable position. In the spring of 1862 he left both America and The Times. His replacements – both selected by Morris, a white West Indian native who sympathized with slavery – were strongly pro-South. The closest Britain came to intervening in the war was during the winter of 1861–2. A British mail ship, the Trent, sailing from Cuba, was forcibly stopped at sea by a Northern warship, the San Jacinto. James Mason and John Slidell, two prominent Southern representatives travelling to Britain to make the case for formal recognition, were discovered and taken to prison in Boston. ‘Outrage on the British flag – the Southern Commissioners Forcibly Removed From a British Mail Steamer,’ proclaimed The Times, on this occasion wholly in tune with an incensed public opinion.41 Delane was delighted, writing how the ‘whole Army, Navy, and Volunteers are of one mind and all mad for service in America’ and that ‘if we are foiled by a surrender of the prisoners, there will be a universal feeling of disappointment. We expect, however, that they will show fight – and hope for it, for we trust that we will give them such a dusting this time.’42 Palmerston, too, was quite aggressive at first, threatening ‘to read a lesson to the United States which will not soon be forgotten’ and dispatching thousands of extra soldiers to Canada.43 But if public indignation was one thing, genuine appetite for war was quite another. Palmerston realized this, and in the official correspondence he came up, alongside Lord John (now Earl) Russell and Prince Albert, with a form of wording that enabled the Lincoln administration to release the men without losing too much face. This they did, to the Prime Minister’s surprise, on 1 January 1862. The spring of 1862 saw the North capture New Orleans – news The Times carried in black mourning borders44 – in the first of a series of important successes. Two years later, John Wodehouse (later first Earl of Kimberley), a future Foreign Secretary, would record in his diary having met ‘“Delane” of The Times’ at a party, the editor ‘big with the “melancholy” news of a fresh Confederate defeat’.45 Victory at Gettysburg in July 1863 had placed the North clearly in the ascendency, forcing Palmerston to rethink his government’s attitude to the

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war. Fortunately, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which in essence turned a conflict about states’ rights into one about slavery, allowed the Prime Minister to cast his changing position as a moral move. This could easily be viewed as a ‘cynical’ move, admits Brown.46 Nevertheless, Palmerston has been praised in recent works for his judicious handling of British policy during the Civil War, keeping in check the competing pro-North and pro-South tendencies of a divided Cabinet and avoiding an unnecessary conflict with America, even in the face of insults from Secretary of State Seward.47 He would be less successful dealing with events much closer to home.

A ‘Fictitious Reputation’ ‘Prince Roman’, a short story from 1908, is the only piece of fiction Joseph Conrad set in his native Poland, that nation ‘not so much alive as suffering . . . railed in by a million bayonets and triple-sealed with the seals of three great empires’.48 The story takes place during the abortive Polish uprising of 1830, in which his grandfather had fought. Conrad’s father, meanwhile, the political dissident Apollo Korzeniowski, was exiled to Russia just months before the imposition of conscription by Tsar Alexander II sparked off yet another insurrection in January 1863. Palmerston was unperturbed by news of this latest Polish rebellion, seeing no British interests at stake and believing it would be quickly crushed by the Russian forces. But the rebellion proved longer-lasting than expected, and Polish nationalism was still a popular cause in Britain, especially among the working class. The British public, moreover, had an exaggerated sense of British power in the world, the natural result of so many years of Palmerstonian propaganda. By the end of February Palmerston was writing to his Foreign Secretary Earl Russell how ‘public opinion in this country . . . is getting strong upon this subject, and we shall not stand well if we do not do something’.49 He responded in grand fashion the very next evening during a debate in the Commons. As Sir John Trelawny observed from the Liberal backbenches, ‘Poland & its affairs occupied us for several hours. Rarely has more unanimity been witnessed in Parliament.’

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‘Some passages’ in the Prime Minister’s speech ‘were among the finest sentences I have ever heard spoken.’ Palmerston, the diarist continued, ‘stigmatized the conscription . . . as “barbarous”, a bitter word to Russians, who are peculiarly sensitive upon the point of being so deemed’.50 ‘An English statesman in the present day lives by following public opinion,’ the contemporary critic Walter Bagehot observed.51 Palmerston, once the arch-manipulator of public opinion, was now proving the truth of that statement. The Prime Minister succumbed to the public pressure and, in close conjunction with Russell, urged upon Russia an immediate amnesty for the insurgents and the speedy re-establishment of the historic Kingdom of Poland. Bellicose articles found their way into the Post, which all Europe knew to be intimately acquainted with Palmerston. But Palmerston could not back up these words with effective action. A war on the continent was beyond the means of the British army. And an alliance with the French – their only potential allies – was unforthcoming, in part because Napoleon III was distracted by an ill-fated imperial adventure in Mexico, in part because of mutual distrust. Nevertheless, the diplomatic wrangling dragged into the summer, with Palmerston still being pressed by working-class deputations to aid the rebels.52 Russia was resolute, however, and would yield nothing in Poland except to force. Palmerston’s bluff was called and by the end of July he was forced to make what Bourne has called ‘a confused defence of his policy’ in the Commons.53 ‘Every one must abhor the Russian oppression in Poland,’ John Wodehouse, a future Foreign Secretary, noted, ‘but if we are not prepared to make war against Russia to compel her to restore Poland to independence, strong remonstrances are out of place, & only make the remonstrants contemptible.’54 The aura of British power, built up so assiduously by Palmerston, was starting to crack. The French Foreign Minister certainly thought so, telling the British Ambassador that ‘the question of Poland had shown that Great Britain could not be relied upon when war was in the distance’.55 ‘You must keep us out of wars as we shall soon lose the fictitious reputation on which all our power is based. We might manage one in India, but in Europe or America we should soon see our

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real weakness exposed.’56 This was Delane’s forthright advice to Sir Charles Wood, the Secretary of State for India, in late 1863. The editor had changed his tune from the winter of 1861, when he had been hoping for war with America. It was, however, a very rational view, one that saw him steer The Times clear of Palmerston’s bellicose words during the Polish rebellion (yet another foreign news story where The Times provided the fullest coverage of the British press). Unfortunately for The Times, Delane did not heed his own words during the Prime Minister’s next great misadventure, when he sided with Denmark in the war with Prussia over the disputed duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. The fictitious nature of Britain’s power was to be exposed again, as it had in Poland, not by war but by the empty threat of war. Palmerston’s main opponent on this occasion was not a Russian Tsar but the new Minister-President of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck, the man who would lead the unification of Germany, emerging in the process as the most powerful politician of late nineteenth-century Europe.

A Power in Decline The death of King Frederick VII of Denmark in November 1863 brought the long-festering Schleswig-Holstein question back to the fore of European politics. The duchies were in an anomalous position, linked historically to the Danish Crown but semi-independent and populated either significantly (in Schleswig’s case) or entirely (in Holstein’s case) by Germans. Under pressure from Danish nationalists, Frederick’s successor, King Christian IX, attempted to incorporate Schleswig entirely into Denmark. This provocative move went against existing treaty obligations, and in response German Confederation troops moved in to occupy Holstein. A few months later, a joint force of Prussian and Austrian troops went even further, crossing the River Eider into Schleswig. They met little resistance and two weeks later were in Denmark proper, where the fighting continued for a number of months. Bismarck was already contemplating the annexation of the two duchies to Prussia, keen in particular on securing control of the important port of Kiel.

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Months of negotiations in late 1863, filled as they were with confusing talk of competing lines of dynastic succession, had failed to engage the British public. However, the invasion of Denmark – and the sudden spectre of Prussian soldiers occupying Copenhagen – saw many previously bewildered spectators turn into belligerent advocates of war. Newspapers were quick to print articles on Prussian atrocities and on the threat of the Austrian navy dispatching a squadron to the Baltic.57 A small state had been set upon by two Great Powers and British inaction was criticized, William Howard Russell, formerly of The Times, noting in his diary how the ‘poor Danes are getting a tremendous beating from the Austrians and Prussians in Schleswig’ and that everyone ‘feels that we are playing a very third-rate fiddle in the face of the world’.58 Lord Clarendon was soon writing in a similar vein to a diplomat how ‘the steam is gradually rising in the country & I hear from MPs that their constituents are beginning to be ashamed of our standing by while that plucky little friend of ours is mauled & robbed by those 2 big bullies’.59 Palmerston was genuinely alarmed by the war and the threat it posed to the ‘balance of power’ and peace in Europe. He was also concerned about protecting the independence and integrity of the Danish monarchy, a key strategic ally of Britain’s. In fact, an earlier statement of his to the Commons, where he suggested that in the event of any ‘violent attempt’ to interfere with Danish independence ‘those who made the attempt would find in the result that it would not be Denmark alone with which they would have to contend’, had seemed to indicate British readiness to support Denmark with force.60 Such words were out of place and poorly judged; the near impossibility of British military intervention was as clear as it had been over Poland, especially as neither of the two other Great Powers, France and Russia, showed much inclination to get involved in the dispute. A majority of the Cabinet were also unwilling to interfere, as was the Queen. Nevertheless, Palmerston determined to maintain a belligerent facade in an effort to save something of the duchies for Denmark, ordering home the Channel fleet and floating the possibility of sending a naval squadron to protect Copenhagen.61

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‘The Prussians are excessively unreasonable,’ Palmerston wrote to Delane, in the midst of the London Conference that finally put a pause to the fighting in April 1864. ‘The only check we can have upon them is the indefinite notion that public opinion here is getting irritated against them.’62 If the Prime Minister could not march armies into Denmark, he would at least line up the mighty potentate of public opinion – his best, his only weapon – against Bismarck. The Prime Minister kept his newspaper allies on the right track, with the Post perhaps the most warlike. ‘It is certain that Borthwick is closeted nearly every day with Lord Pam,’ Wodehouse observed.63 The Times, too, was strongly pro-Denmark, although Palmerston had to intercede on one occasion, leading the editor to explain that his ‘temporary Germanism . . . was the direct consequence of your Lordship’s gout which has shut me out from communication with you’.64 But British public opinion was not the power Palmerston imaged it to be; certainly it was not strong enough to curtail Bismarckian schemes of aggrandizement. The conference collapsed without success, a severe diplomatic humiliation for Britain compounded by the resumption of war and swift victory of Prussia and Austria. Playing a deeper game than anyone realized, Bismarck turned on Austria two years later, securing the prosperous and strategically important duchies to Prussia. Despite announcing Britain’s withdrawal from anything to do with the Schleswig-Holstein question in late June 1864, Palmerston, according to Trelawny, continued to utter ‘renewed threats to the Germans of the conduct to wh. we might be driven in certain events’. ‘This was too much,’ the backbench diarist noted sadly. ‘Everyone saw the mistake. Friends and foes were alike conscious of an increase in ridicule attaching to the Nation, in a case in wh. it appeared before that no more ridicule was hardly possible.’65 The government survived (barely) a motion of censure over its handling of the Schleswig-Holstein crisis. Nevertheless, the power and prestige of both the country and the Prime Minister had been badly damaged. Returning to Trelawny: ‘There is something, which is not quite satisfactory in telling the world that the influence of England is lowered; it may be true, but there is no pressing necessity for propounding such truth.’66

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A complicating factor during Cabinet discussions on SchleswigHolstein had been ‘Old Pam’s’ periodic absences through illness. Having suffered from gout for many years, his health was now in serious decline. Baron Wodehouse, one of the younger members of the House of Lords and later a prominent fixture of Gladstone’s governments, was a regular guest at the Palmerstons’ Saturday evening dinner parties around this period. ‘I thought Lord P. looking more worn and out of spirits than I had ever seen him,’ he noted in March 1864. An election the following summer returned the government with its majority intact. Palmerston’s health, however, refused to improve. He died, just a few days short of his eighty-first birthday, on 18 October 1865.

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CONCLUSION

‘There never was a statesman who more truly represented England than Lord Palmerston,’ read the generous, 13,000-word obituary in The Times.1 The paper went on to celebrate the news that Palmerston would be buried in Westminster Abbey, that ‘august temple’ where the remains of so many ‘Sovereigns, Statesmen, warriors, and philosophers repose in peace and reconciliation’.2 There was, however, one slight sting-in-the-tail in the week-long tributes to Palmerston. ‘Had he died at seventy,’ the paper opined, ‘he would have left a second-class reputation for cleverness, restlessness’ and a ‘dexterity chiefly shown in getting out of scrapes . . . It has been his great and peculiar fortune to live to right himself, and to show the preponderance of the greater powers and the nobler faculties.’3 Right himself in the eyes of The Times perhaps? As according to this synopsis, the only worthy years of Palmerston’s exceedingly long life and career were his final ten, those accompanied by the good favour of The Times. ‘He saw in Public Opinion a force and a meaning which no statesman before him had realized’, The Times had also declared, and ‘all through his political life Lord Palmerston bowed to this deity, recognized its power, and used it as he could’.4 Palmerston did indeed recognize the power and importance of public opinion, as befitted a progeny of the Edinburgh school. He did not bow to it, however, preferring instead to attempt to control it. He was remarkably successful for the most part, with public opinion tempering merely Palmerston’s portrayal of his policy, not his actual policy. Although he turned to the platform more and more in later years, it was primarily through the press that Palmerston sought to manipulate and manage public

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opinion, his newspapers deflecting attention from any inaction or failings, fashioning several popular personas, such as the ‘Champion of European Liberalism’ and the patriotic ‘Minister for England’, and promulgating, in the words of the novelist Anthony Trollope, an early biographer of Palmerston’s, the image of a politician who was in ‘perfect sympathy with those whom he was called upon to govern’.5 Palmerston was capable of thinking more deeply about the role of newspapers in the nineteenth-century world, regularly lecturing foreign governments on the importance of a ‘free press’.6 He was also alert to the ways in which newspapers could elevate and educate readers, stating around the time of the repeal of stamp duty in 1855: ‘I believe there will arise cheap publications for the use of those unable to buy dear ones, which will convey instruction, enlarge their understandings, improve their morals, and at the same time make them good and useful members of society.’7 Thus, what Mark Hampton has posited as the ‘educational ideal’ in nineteenth-century conceptions of the press, was one definite strand to Palmerston’s thinking on the press. Nevertheless, he was always far more interested in the less beneficent uses of newspapers, and how they could be turned to his benefit. Palmerston believed in a free press – just not one entirely free of his own influence. Right up to his death, in fact, he was attempting to exert a level of control, keeping the extent of his ill-health out of the papers.8 Palmerston’s death left Delane bereft of his ‘most valuable source’.9 The impact was felt almost immediately, The Times being scooped by rival papers with uncomfortable frequency in early 1866.10 The editor would go on to forge reasonable relations with both Gladstone and, to a lesser extent, Disraeli, the clear emerging powerhouses in British politics, but these never matched up to the intimacy of his connection with Palmerston. The Times was also slow to evolve in the manner outlined in Jean Chalaby’s influential The Invention of Journalism. Caught up in a somewhat superior sense of itself as the ‘newspaper of record’, it fought, for example, against the trend that saw most newspapers shorten the amount of space given over to long parliamentary reports from the 1860s on, leavening such dense, high-political content with more sporting and sensational news items.11 And so sales of The Times

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stagnated at around the 60,000 mark, while those of the more populist Daily Telegraph raced toward an astonishing 250,000 a day. However, any sense of The Times in serious decline must be tempered by the recognition that it was still read avidly in the corridors of power of not just London, but Paris, Berlin, Washington and beyond. Although famous enough to have been satirized by Trollope in his 1855 novel The Warden – as ‘Tom Towers’, editor of the all-seeing ‘Jupiter’– Delane can still be justifiably described as one of ‘the most impenetrable’ of ‘leading nineteenth-century figures’.12 He was a man subsumed by his paper – but what a paper, with its imposing premises, legion of talented writers and skilled printers, vast network of correspondents and aura that spread across oceans and continents. Its name, indeed, was enough to save a man’s life, as evidenced by the story of an Englishman named Apel who joined the Polish revolution in 1863. Captured by Russian soldiers and on the point of being shot, Apel, who had no connection with the paper, claimed immunity on the grounds that he wrote for The Times. The ruse worked; he was let go.13 Delane has been described as ‘the most important and eloquent defender of the liberty of the press’.14 That was certainly the sense created by a set of famous editorials from early 1852 that portrayed the press as a noble ‘fourth estate’. The Times, however, did not live up its own lofty ideals; it did not ‘speak the whole truth without fear or favour’.15 It may not have been a crude party organ, but it was certainly in thrall to a number of leading politicians. Is such personal allegiance really any better than allegiance to a political party? At the same time, is the sort of independence it claimed to aspire to ever truly achievable when those doing the reporting and those reported upon are so enmeshed in each other’s lives? It may be too harsh to admonish the paper for its failings in this regard, for in truth it set itself an unattainable goal. Readers of The Times valued it for being at the heart of the political world, but a corollary of this achievement was that it could never be truly independent. Delane stayed on in the editor’s chair until 1877, retiring at the age of just 59, ‘worn out and rheumy-eyed through years of relentless nightly toil in putting to bed some 7,000 editions of his beloved

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Times’.16 He had remained throughout a figure of great influence, and the paper was also still highly profitable when he stepped down. Nevertheless, The Times was far from the dominating force of old. A whole new newspaper world – the ‘popular press’ in London and successful provincial titles like the Manchester Guardian – had grown up around it, taken over from it. Delane died two years after leaving the paper, during which time he was cared for at his large home at Ascot Heath by his unmarried sister. It was a dreary and depressing end for a man so used to straddling the apex of the political and newspaper worlds. For the American writer George Smalley, a friend of the editor’s in his last years, Delane ‘probably cared little for life without power’.17 It is an epitaph that would have been equally apt for Palmerston.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. D. Newsome, The Victorian World Picture: Perceptions and Introspections in an Age of Change (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 60. 2. T. Morley, ‘“The Arcana of that Great Machine”: Politicians and The Times in the Late 1840s’, History (February 1988), p. 38. 3. F. Knight Hunt, The Fourth Estate: Contributions Towards a History of Newspapers, and of the Liberty of the Press, vol. 1 (London: David Bogue, 1850), p. 8. 4. D.G. Boyce, ‘The Fourth Estate: The Reappraisal of a Concept’, in D.G. Boyce, J. Curran and P. Wingate (eds), Newspaper History from the 17th Century to the Present Day (London: Constable, 1978), pp. 26–7. 5. R. Hargreaves, The First Freedom: A History of Free Speech (Stroud: Sutton, 2002), pp. 230–7; A. Marr, My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism (London: Macmillan, 2004), pp. 18–19. 6. H. Chisick, ‘Public Opinion and Political Culture in France During the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’, English Historical Review (February 2002), p. 54. 7. E. Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 59. 8. W. Donsbach and M.W. Traugott, ‘Introduction’, in W. Donsbach and M.W. Traugott (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Public Opinion Research (Los Angeles, CA; London: Sage Publications, 2008), p. 1.

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9. P. Langford, The Eighteenth Century, 1688–1815 (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1976), p. 11. 10. D.G. Boyce, ‘Public Opinion and Historians’, History (June 1978), p. 225. 11. H. Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695–1855 (Essex: Pearson, 2000), pp. 22–3. 12. D. Wahrman, ‘“Middle-Class” Domesticity Goes Public: Gender, Class and Politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria’, Journal of British Studies (October 1993), p. 396. 13. G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 97. 14. B. Disraeli, Coningsby; or The New Generation (London: Henry Colburn, 1844), p. 428. 15. Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, p. 23. 16. A. Jones, Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in NineteenthCentury England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 73–97. 17. Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, p. 27. 18. D. Brown, ‘Morally Transforming the World or Spinning a Line? Politicians and the Newspaper Press in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain’, Historical Research (May 2010), p. 235. 19. Although Kingsley Martin’s The Triumph of Lord Palmerston drew attention to Palmerston’s relationship with the press as early as 1924, it was not until Kenneth Bourne’s 1982 biography and, latterly, a series of works by David Brown, that the topic has received a more satisfactory level of attention.

1 The Politician 1. J. Chambers, Palmerston: ‘The People’s Darling’ (London: John Murray, 2005), p. 28. 2. B. Connell (ed.), Portrait of a Golden Age: Intimate Papers of the Second Viscount Palmerston, Courtier Under George III (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 425. 3. D. Brown, Palmerston: A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 32. 4. Ibid., p. 137. 5. K. Bourne, Palmerston: The Early Years, 1784–1841 (London: Allen Lane, 1982), p. 228.

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6. K. Bourne (ed.), The Letters of the Third Viscount Palmerston to Laurence and Elizabeth Sulivan, 1804–1863 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1979), p. 29. 7. Ibid., p. 85. 8. Ibid., p. 99. 9. J. Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London: Constable, 1970), p. 36. 10. Bourne, Palmerston–Sulivan Letters, pp. 120–1. 11. V. Murray, High Society: A Social History of the Regency Period, 1788–1830 (London: Viking, 1998), p. 48. 12. Bourne, Palmerston–Sulivan Letters, p. 125. 13. Murray, High Society, p. 234. 14. Bourne, Palmerston–Sulivan Letters, p. 125. 15. Viscount Palmerston, Selections from Two Tours to Paris in 1815 & 1818 (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1871), p. 16. 16. Ibid., p. 39. 17. J. Bew, Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny (London: Quercus, 2011), p. 366. 18. Bourne, Palmerston–Sulivan Letters, p. 156. 19. Chambers, Palmerston, p. 87. 20. Bourne, Palmerston–Sulivan Letters, p. 180. 21. Ibid., p. 200. 22. University of Southampton, Palmerston Papers [PP], GC/SH/87/(1 encl.), 28 Jan. 1828. 23. Mabell, Countess of Airlie, Lady Palmerston and Her Times, vol. 1 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922), p. 163. 24. Ibid., pp. 168–9. 25. Chambers, Palmerston, p. 120.

2

The Paper

1. P. Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), p. 402. 2. Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, pp. 83–4. 3. Ibid., p. 24. 4. H. Barker, ‘Walter, John (1739?–1812)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 5. S.V. Makower, Some Notes upon the History of The Times, 1785–1904 (Edinburgh: Morrison & Gibb, 1904), p. 6.

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6. J. Black, The English Press: 1621–1861 (Stroud: Sutton, 2001), p. 74. 7. R. Fulton, ‘Walter, John (1776–1847)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; A. Briggs and P. Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Cambridge; Polity, 2002), p. 111. 8. The History of The Times, vol. 1: ‘The Thunderer’ in the Making, 1785–1841 (London: The Times, 1935), pp. 464–5. 9. Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, p. 95. 10. R. Watters, ‘Thomas Barnes and The Times, 1817–1841’, History Today (September 1979), p. 561. 11. N. Roe, Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt (London: Pimlico, 2005), p. 214. 12. M. Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), p. 67. 13. T. Barnes, Parliamentary Portraits; or Sketches of the Public Character of Some of the Most Distinguished Speakers of the House of Commons (London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1815), p. 3. 14. Ibid., p. 12. 15. M. Walker, Powers of the Press: The World’s Great Newspapers (London: Quartet Books, 1982), p. 14. 16. O. Woods and J. Bishop, The Story of The Times (London: Michael Joseph, 1983), pp. 46–7. 17. See F. Fraser, The Unruly Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline (London: Macmillan, 1996) for more on this episode. 18. R. Ingrams, The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett (London: Harper Collins, 2005), p. 180. 19. Ibid. 20. T.H. Ford, ‘Political Coverage in The Times, 1811–41: The Role of Barnes and Brougham’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research (May 1986), p. 100. 21. Irish Times, 3 May 2003. 22. D. Hudson, Thomas Barnes of The Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943), p. 53. 23. Barnes, Parliamentary Portraits, p. 7.

3

Origins of Animosity

1. R. Quinault, ‘The French Revolution of 1830 and Parliamentary Reform’, History (October 1994), p. 384. 2. The Times, 29 Jan. 1831.

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3. Ford, ‘Political Coverage’, pp. 95–6. 4. Times Newspapers Limited Archive, News International, London [TNL Archive], Barnes Papers, BAR/1/17, Barnes to Brougham, n.d. [1831] (copy). 5. Hudson, Barnes of The Times, pp. 45–8. 6. Ibid., p. 57. 7. E.A. Smith, Reform or Revolution?: A Diary of Reform in England, 1830–32 (Stroud: Sutton, 1992), p. 48. 8. The Times, 15 Nov. 1831. 9. E. Hobsbawm and G. Rudé, Captain Swing (London: Phoenix Press, 2001), p. 262. 10. Smith, Reform or Revolution, p. 82. 11. The Times, 5 June 1820. 12. Ibid., 20 Aug. 1827. 13. Ibid., 6 Mar. 1828. 14. Ibid., 22 Nov. 1830. 15. Bourne, Palmerston–Sulivan Letters, p. 248. 16. D. Brown, ‘Compelling but not Controlling?: Palmerston and the Press, 1846–1855’, History (January 2001), p. 45. 17. J. Shattock, Politics and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and The Quarterly (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1989), p. 130. 18. C.K. Webster, ‘Lord Palmerston at Work, 1830–1841’, in A. Coville and H. Temperley (eds), Studies in Anglo-French History during the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), p. 80. 19. C.K. Webster, The Foreign Policy of Lord Palmerston, 1830–1841, vol. 1 (London: G. Bell, 1969), p. 50. 20. TNL Archive, Barnes Papers, BAR/1/13, Barnes to Brougham, 27 June 1831 (copy). 21. The History of The Times, vol. 2: The Tradition Established, 1841–1884, (London: The Times, 1939), p. 216. 22. P.W. Wilson (ed.), The Greville Diary, vol. 2 (London: Heinemann, 1927), pp. 82–3. 23. Chambers, Palmerston, p. 156. 24. A. Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries (London: Williams and Norgate, 1952), pp. 197, 201. 25. The complaint was fair, with E.A. Smith writing of Grey’s relatives: ‘After a long exclusion from power there were many hungry mouths to

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NOTES

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

169

feed, and Grey was driven to distraction by their competing claims.’ E.A. Smith, ‘Grey, Charles, second Earl Grey (1764–1845)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Aspinall, Three Diaries, pp. 117–18. J.A. Phillips and C. Wetherell, ‘The Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Political Modernization of England’, American Historical Review (April 1995), pp. 413–14. The Times, 5 June 1832. Ibid., 25 July, 20 Dec. 1832. History of The Times, vol. 1, pp. 171–86; Fulton, ‘Walter’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. E.A. Smith, Lord Grey: 1764–1845 (Stroud: Sutton, 1996), pp. 288–307. Hudson, Barnes of The Times, p. 68. B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England: 1783–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 588–98. C. Dickens, Oliver Twist (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1839), p. 19. Hansard (House of Commons), 27 June 1834, vol. 24, cols 913–18; J. Walter, A Letter to the Electors of Berkshire (London: James Ridgeway, 1834). TNL Archive, Barnes Papers, BAR/1/115, Barnes to Le Marchant, 3 June 1834 (copy). Hudson, Barnes of The Times, p. 76. The Times, 7 June 1832, 24 Mar. 1834. Ibid., 12 Feb. 1834. TNL Archive, Barnes Papers, BAR/1/139, Barnes to Le Marchant, June 1834 (copy). TNL Archive, Barnes Papers, BAR/1/100, Barnes to Le Marchant, 11 Jan. 1834 (copy). The Times, 31 May 1834. Ibid., 25 June 1834. TNL Archive, Barnes Papers, BAR/1/17, Barnes to Brougham, n.d. [1831] (copy). History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 237. Bourne, Palmerston, p. 232. PP, PRE/B/3/1–2, ‘Anticipation of Debate on Address’, Dec. 1815; PP, PRE/B/8/1–2, ‘Squibs Written for the Courier Newspaper’, 1815, 1816. Bourne, Palmerston–Sulivan Letters, p. 137.

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49. Ibid., p. 147. 50. PP, PRE/A/1, 6 Dec. 1829. 51. The National Archives, London [NA], FO 96 17/14, Miscellaneous Papers, 3 Apr. 1831. 52. A.P. Wadsworth, ‘Newspaper Circulations, 1800–1954’, Transactions of the Manchester Statistical Society (1954–5), p. 7. 53. Brown, ‘Compelling but not Controlling’, p. 41. 54. Bourne, Palmerston, p. 490. 55. Brown, ‘Compelling but not Controlling’, p. 57. 56. I. Asquith, ‘Advertising and the Press in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: James Perry and the Morning Chronicle, 1790– 1821’, Historical Journal (December 1975), pp. 703–24. 57. E.A. Wasson, ‘The Whigs and the Press, 1800–1850’, Parliamentary History (February 2006), pp. 73–6. 58. Wilson, Greville Diary, vol. 2, p. 325. 59. P. Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990), p. 154. 60. PP, PRE/A/2, Parkes to Palmerston, 7 June 1834; Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 154. 61. PP, GC/EA/2, Easthope to Palmerston, 7 June 1834. 62. Bourne, Palmerston, pp. 485–6. 63. See for example the Morning Chronicle, 22 July 1834 and The Times, 25 July 1834. 64. TNL Archive, Barnes Papers, BAR/1/115, Barnes to Le Marchant, 3 June 1834 (copy). 65. Hudson, Barnes of The Times, p. 80. 66. Ibid., p. 88. 67. N. Gash, Peel (London: Longman, 1976), p. 167. 68. H. Reeve (ed.), The Greville Memoirs: A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, vol. 3 (London: Longmans, Green, 1875), pp. 149–52. 69. Ibid., pp. 150–9. 70. Aspinall, Three Diaries, pp. 363–4. 71. A.D. Kriegel (ed.), The Holland House Diaries, 1831–1840 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 277. 72. Reeve, Greville Memoirs, vol. 3, p. 155. 73. PP, GC/DO/17, Palmerston to Doyle, 3 Feb. 1837. 74. PP, PRE/B/12, Palmerston to Howard, 13 Mar. 1840; PP, GC/DO/22/1–2, Palmerston to Doyle, 25 Aug. 1838.

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75. British Library, London [BL], Letters to Lord Howard de Walden, 1835– 1868, Add Ms 45,176, ff 16–17, Palmerston to Walden, 14 Apr. 1836. 76. PP, PRE/B/123/1–3, ‘For the Globe’, 3 Jan. 1841. 77. PP, PRE/B/124/1–2, ‘For the Globe’, 13 Jan. 1841; PP, PRE/B/126, ‘For the Globe’, n.d. [1841]. 78. PP, PRE/B/125, ‘For the Globe’, n.d. [1841]. 79. PP, GC/MI/2, Michele to Palmerston, 27 Apr. 1841. 80. R. Stewart, ‘The Conservative Party and the Courier Newspaper, 1840’, English Historical Review (April 1976), p. 346. 81. PP, PRE/A/5, 5 Apr. 1838. 82. Bourne, Palmerston, p. 480. 83. PP, MPC/1234/(encl.), 2 Jan. 1841. 84. PP, MPC/905, 20 Nov. 1838. 85. PP, PRE/B/15/1–2, 31 Aug. 1840. 86. PP, PRE/A/6, 11 Oct. 1838. 87. PP, GC/PO/224/(encl.), Sandison to Palmerston, 5 Nov. 1835. 88. PP, GC/ME/619(encl.), Merle to Palmerston, 29 Nov. 1839. 89. PP, GC/ME/619, Merle to Palmerston, 29 Nov. 1839. 90. History of The Times, vol. 1, p. 460. 91. Black, The English Press, p. 187. 92. Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 133. 93. PP, GC/ME/622/1, Merle to Palmerston, 26 Apr. 1841. 94. PP, GC/SC/1, Scanlan to Palmerston, 8 Oct. 1836. 95. PP, GC/SC/1/(encl.), Palmerston to Scanlan, 8 Oct. 1836. 96. PP, MPC/639, 13 Nov. 1837. 97. Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, p. 92. 98. For more on the unstamped newspapers of the 1830s see J. H. Wiener, The War of the Unstamped: The Movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax, 1830–1836 (New York, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969) and P. Hollis, The Pauper Press: A Study in Working-Class Radicalism of the 1830s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). 99. Aspinall, Three Diaries, p. 117; History of The Times, vol. 1, p. 300. 100. The Times, 1 Feb. 1836. 101. Ibid., 22 Feb. 1836. 102. C.K. Webster, ‘Urquhart, Ponsonby, and Palmerston’, English Historical Review (July 1947), p. 349. 103. M. Taylor, ‘Urquhart, David (1805–1877)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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104. Palmerston was not worried about a war, writing to Easthope how the ‘official communications of the French govt. have been invariably pacific even while the French newspapers were blowing their Hurricane’. BL, Easthope Papers, Add Ms 86,842, Palmerston to Easthope, 31 Aug. 1840. 105. A. Lambert, ‘Palmerston and Sea-Power’, in D. Brown and M. Taylor (eds), Palmerston Studies II (Southampton: Hartley Institute, 2007), p. 60. 106. L. Mitchell, Lord Melbourne, 1779–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 203. 107. Bourne, Palmerston, p. 617. 108. The Times, 17 June 1840. 109. Ibid., 16 Nov. 1840, 24 June 1840. 110. Ibid., 10 June 1840. 111. Brown, Palmerston, p. 233. 112. Hudson, Barnes of The Times, p. 112. 113. PP, PRE/B/126, ‘For the Globe’, n.d. [Jan. 1841]. 114. Morning Chronicle, 23 Nov. 1839. 115. Bourne, Palmerston, p. 485. 116. PP, PRE/A/9, Easthope to Palmerston, n.d. [1840]. 117. BL, Easthope Papers, Add Ms 86,842, Palmerston to Easthope, 21 Nov. 1840. 118. Hudson, Barnes of The Times, p. 114. 119. Wilson, Greville Diary, vol. 2, p. 113. 120. Hudson, Barnes of The Times, pp. 112–13. 121. TNL Archive, Barnes Papers, BAR/1/154, Barnes to Reeve, 21 Nov. 1840 (copy). 122. Hudson, Barnes of The Times, pp. 120–1.

4 A New Editor 1. A.I. Dasent, John Thadeus Delane, Editor of The Times: His Life and Correspondence, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1908), p. 26. 2. The Times, 2 Sept. 1841. 3. Ibid., 18 Mar. 1842. 4. Ibid., 30 Sept. 1841; History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 6. 5. Bonham was not very complimentary towards Walter, commenting: ‘Abstractedly we might doubtless have had a much better MP, but not a better Candidate for that place, and it is not bad to beat them with a

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NOTES

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

173

person very hateful to the Whig Party. Besides feeling that, if successful, he must owe his Election to the Conservatives, it may correct the devious course of The Times.’ BL, Peel Papers, Add Ms 40,429, ff 199–201, F.R. Bonham to Peel, 15 Apr. 1841. J.K. Laughton (ed.), Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1898), pp. 157–9. Woods and Bishop, Story of The Times, p. 61. Morley, ‘The Arcana of that Great Machine’, p. 47. Dasent, Delane, vol. 1, pp. 30–1; TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/1/38–39, Greville to Delane, undated (2 Sept. 1841). The Times, 4 Sept. 1841. Bourne, Palmerston, p. 635. M. Chamberlain, Lord Aberdeen: A Political Biography (London: Longman, 1983), p. 6. Dasent, Delane, vol. 1, p. 25. Chamberlain, Aberdeen, p. 351. History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 95. D. Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815−1848 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 674. PP, PRE/B/21/1–11, undated (1842). E. Jones Parry (ed.), The Correspondence of Lord Aberdeen and Princess Lieven, 1832–1854, vol. 1 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1938), p. xii. Laughton, Reeve, vol. 1, p. 166. M. Price, The Perilous Crown: France between Revolutions (London: Pan Books, 2008), p. 316. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/2/8, Aberdeen to Delane, 25 Oct. 1845. M. Chamberlain, ‘Pax Britannica’?: British Foreign Policy, 1789–1914 (London: Longman, 1988), p. 89. G. Flaubert, Sentimental Education (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2003), p. 62. The Times, 30 July 1844. Laughton, Reeve, vol. 1, p. 170. Morning Chronicle, 10 July 1844. Laughton, Reeve, vol. 1, p. 170. Lord Sudley (ed.), The Lieven–Palmerston Correspondence, 1828–1856 (London: John Murray, 1943), pp. 212–13.

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174 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

PALMERSTON

AND

THE TIMES

Ridley, Palmerston, pp. 279–80. Chamberlain, Aberdeen, p. 346. PP, GC/DO/48, Palmerston to Doyle, 3 Nov. 1843. M. Lynn, ‘British Policy, Trade, and Informal Empire in the MidNineteenth Century’, in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 105. PP, GC/DO/50/1–2, Palmerston to Doyle, 31 July 1844. Morning Chronicle, 1 Aug. 1844. PP, MPC/1474, Anonymous to Palmerston, 27 Nov. 1842. PP, MPC/1497/1–2, Gervis to Palmerston, 9 July 1846. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/1/74, Aberdeen to Delane, 31 Dec. 1844; Delane Papers, JTD/2/5, Aberdeen to Delane, 16 May 1845; Delane Papers, JTD/2/5, Aberdeen to Delane, 2 July 1845. History of The Times, vol. 2, pp. 99–100. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/2/12, Aberdeen to Delane, Nov. 1845; Delane Papers, JTD/2/14, Aberdeen to Delane, 9 Dec. 1845; Delane Papers, JTD/2/23, Aberdeen to Delane, 21 Jan. 1846. Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People, pp. 551–4. M. Shelden, ‘Dickens, The Chimes and the Anti-Corn Law League’, Victorian Studies (Spring 1982), pp. 329–53. K. Robbins, John Bright (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 60. Woods and Bishop, Story of The Times, pp. 64–5. An earlier note, when the issue was still still debated, ran: ‘It is not in my power to make any communication to you on the subject of your note, because nothing has been decided. Any person therefore, who should pretend to announce the adoption of any resolution, would most assuredly speak without authority.’ TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/2/9, Aberdeen to Delane, 2 Nov. 1845. The note was later marked ‘Corn Laws?’ by an archivist. PP, PRE/C/76/1–2, Examiner, 3 Jan. 1846. PP, GMC/44, 8 Apr. 1845. BL, Aberdeen Papers, Add Ms 43,245, ff 160–1, Aberdeen to Reeve, 30 Dec. 1845; Aberdeen Papers, Add Ms 43,245, 165–6, Reeve to Aberdeen, 6 Jan. 1846; A.H. Johnson (ed.), The Letters of Charles Greville and Henry Reeve, 1836–1865 (London, 1924), p. 131. Wilson, Greville Diary, vol. 2, pp. 247–8.

Fenton_Book.indd Sec10:174

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NOTES

175

48. PP, GC/EA/19, Easthope to Palmerston, 15 Dec. 1845. 49. For more on Palmerston’s complex relationship with France, see D. Brown, ‘Palmerston and Anglo-French Relations, 1846–1865’, Diplomacy and Statecraft (2006), pp. 675–92. 50. PP, GC/EA/41, Palmerston to Easthope, 15 Dec. 1845. 51. PP, GC/EA/45, Palmerston to Easthope, 2 May 1846. 52. Jones Parry, Correspondence of Aberdeen and Lieven, vol. 1, p. 252. 53. Ibid., p. 258. 54. History of The Times, vol. 2, pp. 68–82; Printing The Times Since 1785: Some Account of the Means of Production and Changes of Dress of the Newspaper (London: The Times, 1953), p. 38. 55. History of The Times, vol. 2, pp. 14–18. 56. The Times, 11 Oct. 1917. 57. G. Hamilton, ‘Delane, John Thadeus (1817–1879)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 58. P.H. Jones, ‘Yr Amserau: The First Decade, 1843–52’, in L. Brake, A. Jones and L. Madden (eds), Investigating Victorian Journalism (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 88.

5

Palmerston vs. Guizot

1. K. Tillotson (ed.), The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 576. 2. See for example Bodleian Library, Oxford [Bodl.], MSS Clar. dep., 534– 5, ff 13–14, Clarendon to Reeve, 30 June 1846 and ff 15–16, Clarendon to Reeve, 3 July 1846. 3. J. Prest, Lord John Russell (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 253. 4. Ibid., p. 229. 5. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/2/34, Wood to Delane, 29 Aug. 1846. 6. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/2/92, Delane to Wood, 21 Nov. 1847 7. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/3/48, Wood to Delane, 20 Aug. 1848. 8. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/2/28–9, Le Marchant to Delane, Aug. 1846; Delane Papers, JTD/2/68, Le Marchant to Delane, May 1847; Delane Papers, JTD/2/74, Le Marchant to Delane, July 1847; Delane Papers, JTD/26/1, Le Marchant to Delane, 1847.

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176

PALMERSTON

AND

THE TIMES

9. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/2/81, Le Marchant to Delane, 27 Apr. 1847. 10. Morley, ‘The Arcana of that Great Machine’, p. 42. 11. NA, Russell Papers, 30/22 6E (20–1), Le Marchant to Russell, Aug. 1847. 12. K. Bourne, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England, 1830–1902 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 59. 13. M. Chamberlain, British Foreign Policy in the Age of Palmerston (London: Longman, 1980), p. 58. 14. A.C. Benson and Viscount Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence Between the Years 1837 and 1861, vol. 2 (London: Murray, 1907), p. 100. 15. PP, GC/EA/52/1–2, Palmerston to Easthope, 19 Nov. 1846. 16. R. Bullen, Palmerston, Guizot and the Collapse of the Entente Cordiale (London: Athlone Press, 1974), p. 58. 17. D. Southgate, ‘The Most English Minister . . .’: The Policies and Politics of Palmerston (London: Macmillan, 1966), p. 187. 18. The Times, 21 Sept. 1846. 19. Bodl., MSS Clar. dep., c. 521, Greville to Clarendon, 24 Feb. 1848. 20. Laughton, Reeve, vol. 1, p. 178. 21. The Times, 21 Sept. 1846. 22. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/2/41, Bulwer to O’ Reilly, 26 Sept. 1846. Later O’ Reilly would communicate directly with Palmerston, on one occasion seeking employment with the government: PP, GC/OR/2, O’ Reilly to Palmerston, 30 Sept. 1847 and PP, GC/OR/3, O’ Reilly to Palmerston, 6 Mar. 1848. 23. The Times, 12 Oct. 1846. 24. Ibid., 16 Oct. 1846. 25. Laughton, Reeve, vol. 1, p. 182. 26. B. Connell (ed.), Regina v. Palmerston: The Correspondence between Queen Victoria and Her Foreign and Prime Minister, 1837–1865 (London: Evans, 1962), p. 43. 27. BL, Aberdeen Papers, Add Ms 43,246, ff 276–8, Delane to Aberdeen, 24 Oct. 1846. 28. A. Gordon, Lord Aberdeen (London: S. Low, Marston & Co, 1893), p. 195. 29. BL, Aberdeen Papers, Add Ms 43,246, ff 276–8, Delane to Aberdeen, 24 Oct. 1846.

Fenton_Book.indd Sec10:176

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NOTES

177

30. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/2/44, Aberdeen to Delane, 30 Oct. 1846. 31. BL, Aberdeen Papers, Add Ms 43,246, ff 276–8, Delane to Aberdeen, 24 Oct. 1846. 32. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/2/44, Aberdeen to Delane, 30 Oct. 1846. 33. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/27/60, Aberdeen to Delane, 30 Oct. 1846. 34. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/2/48, Aberdeen to Delane, 22 Nov. 1846; The Times, 16 Nov. 1846. 35. PP, GC/EA/54, Palmerston to Easthope, 27 Nov. 1846. 36. M. Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (London: Little, Brown, 2008), p. 39. 37. P. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), p. 792. 38. The Times, 18 Nov. 1846. 39. BL, Aberdeen Papers, Add Ms 43,246, ff 283–4, Delane to Aberdeen, 25 Nov. 1846. 40. PP, GC/RU/129, Russell to Palmerston, 14 Dec. 1846. 41. A. Gielgud (ed.), Memoirs of Prince Adam Czartoryski, vol. 1 (London: Remington & Co, 1888), pp. 348–9. 42. The Times, 14 Jan. 1847. 43. BL, Correspondence of C.C. Greville and H. Reeve, Add Ms 41,185, ff 30–3, Greville to Reeve, 15 Jan. 1847. 44. BL, Correspondence of C.C. Greville and H. Reeve, Add Ms 41,185, ff 35–6, Greville to Reeve, 17 Jan. 1847. 45. Hamilton, ‘Delane’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 46. D. Porter, ‘Walter, John (1818–1894)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; G.W. Smalley, Studies of Men (London: Macmillan, 1895), pp. 333–53. 47. History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 104. 48. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/2/57, Aberdeen to Delane, 8 Mar. 1847. 49. BL, Aberdeen Papers, Add Ms 43,246, ff 310–11, Delane to Aberdeen, 9 Mar. 1847. 50. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/2/60, Aberdeen to Delane, 30 Mar. 1847; BL, Aberdeen Papers, Add Ms 43,246, ff 314–15, Delane to Aberdeen, 1 Apr. 1847.

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178

PALMERSTON

AND

THE TIMES

51. PP, GC/EA/49, Palmerston to Easthope, 1 July 1846; PP, GC/EA/50 Palmerston to Easthope, 2 July 1846. 52. Morning Chronicle, 28 Aug. 1846. 53. PP, GC/DO/75/1–2, Palmerston to Doyle, 17 Sept. 1846. 54. Bullen, Palmerston, Guizot, p. 58. 55. Connell, Regina v. Palmerston, pp. 52–3. 56. The Times, 2, 23 Oct. 1847. 57. Ibid., 27 Oct. 1847. 58. Morning Chronicle, 6 Aug. 1847. 59. Ibid., 27 Oct. 1847. 60. PP, MM/SW/4/1–6, 8 June 1850. 61. The Times, 14 Aug. 1847. 62. G.D.H. Cole, Chartist Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1941), p. 285. 63. F.J. Snell, Palmerston’s Borough: Electioneering Anecdotes, Squibs, Jokes and Speeches (Tiverton: H. Marshall & Son, 1894), p. 84. 64. The Times, 2 Aug. 1847. 65. J.S. Meisel, ‘Palmerston as Public Speaker’, in D. Brown and M. Taylor (eds), Palmerston Studies I (Southampton: Hartley Institute, 2007), p. 47. 66. O.F. Christie, The Transition from Aristocracy, 1832–1867 (London: Seeley, Service, 1927), p. 85. 67. A. Jones, ‘The Image Makers: Journalists in Victorian Popular Politics’, Trivium (1989), p. 27.

6 Revolutions 1. The Times, 9 Feb. 1848. 2. Hansard (House of Commons), 1 Mar. 1848, vol. 97, col. 122. 3. D.F. Bostick, ‘Sir John Easthope and the Morning Chronicle, 1834–1848’, Victorian Periodicals Review (Summer 1979), p. 57. 4. Bodl., MSS Clar. dep., c.521, Greville to Clarendon, 24 Feb. 1848. 5. Ibid. 6. Wilson, Greville Diary, vol. 2, p. 328. 7. Bodl., MSS Clar. dep., c.521, Greville to Clarendon, 19 Feb. 1848. 8. R.A Gaunt, Sir Robert Peel: The Life and Legacy (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), p. 57. 9. Flaubert, Sentimental Education, pp. 303–4. 10. Limerick Reporter, 29 Feb. 1848. 11. Bourne, Foreign Policy of Victorian England, p. 291

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NOTES 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

179

P. Guedalla, Palmerston (London: Ernest Benn, 1926), p. 283. PP, GC/EA/24/(encl. 1), Easthope to Palmerston, Mar. 1848. PP, GC/EA/57, Palmerston to Easthope, 4 Mar. 1848. Dasent, Delane, vol. 1, p. 73. The Times, 18 Mar. 1848. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/3/23, Aberdeen to Delane, 8 Mar. 1848. Rapport, 1848, p. 208. T. Morley, ‘The Times and the Revolutionary Crisis of 1848’, (PhD thesis, Thames Polytechnic, 1985), p. 140. Ibid., p. 126. T. Mann, Buddenbrooks (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 153. Rapport, 1848, p. 76. Address of the Peoples’ International League (London: Palmer & Clayton, 1847), p. 3. Chambers, Palmerston, p. 310. Benson and Esher, Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. 2, p. 171. L. Mitchell, ‘Britain’s Reaction to the Revolutions’, in R.J.W. Evans and H. Pogge von Strandman (eds), The Revolutions in Europe, 1848–1849: From Reform to Reaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 90. E. Ashley, The Life and Correspondence of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, 1846–65, vol. 1 (London: Bentley, 1876), p. 112. Ridley, Palmerston, p. 349. Ibid., p. 333. PP, MPC/1523, ‘A Constituent’ to Palmerston, June 1848. Ibid. Morley, ‘The Arcana of that Great Machine’, p. 39. E. Jones Parry (ed.), The Correspondence of Lord Aberdeen and Princess Lieven, vol. 2, (London: Royal Historical Society, 1939), p. 297. History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 105. BL, Aberdeen Papers, Add Ms 43,247, ff 6–8, Delane to Aberdeen, 23 Aug. 1848; Aberdeen Papers, Add Ms 43,247, ff 9–12, Delane to Aberdeen, 6 Sept. 1848. The Times, 25 Apr. 1848. History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 107; The Times, 5 Sept. 1848. K.A.P. Sandiford, Great Britain and the Schleswig-Holstein Question, 1848–1864: A Study in Diplomacy, Politics and Public Opinion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), p. 16.

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180 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

PALMERSTON

AND

THE TIMES

Ridley, Palmerston, p. 341. The Times, 27 Apr. 1848. Ibid., 7 June 1848. Ibid., 16 May 1848. R.W. Emerson, English Traits, Representative Men & Other Essays (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1910), pp. 129–35. Rapport, 1848, p. 232. R. Tombs, France 1814–1914 (London: Longman, 1996), p. 386. Rapport, 1848, pp. 258–9. PP, GC/MI/592/1–2, Palmerston to Minto, 28 Mar. 1848. J. Geffken, The British Empire (London: Sampson, Low, 1889), p. 206. The Times, 6 Jan. 1849. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/3/78, Aberdeen to Delane, 20 Jan. 1849. BL, Broughton Diary, Add Ms 43,753, f 116, 10 Mar. 1849. BL, Broughton Diary, Add Ms 43,753, f 116, 4 Mar. 1849. Benson and Esher, Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. 2, p. 212. PP, PRE/B/140/1–2, ‘For the Globe’, 12 Jan. 1849. PP, GC/RU/249/1–2, Russell to Palmerston, 25 Jan. 1849. Brown, ‘Compelling but not Controlling’, p. 50. C. Sproxton, Palmerston and the Hungarian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919), p. 49. Ibid., pp. 50–2. The Times, 20 Apr. 1849. Ibid., 8 Sept. 1849. Sproxton, Palmerston and the Hungarian Revolution, pp. 94–5. Hansard (House of Lords), 26 July 1849, vol. 107, col. 962. PP, PRE/B/143/1–3, ‘For the Globe’, 10 June 1849. Johnson, Greville–Reeve Letters, p. 190. The Times, 5, 31 May 1849. History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 107. Hansard (House of Lords), 20 July 1849, vol. 107, col. 691. Hansard (House of Commons), 21 July 1849, vol. 107, col. 809. W. Pemberton, Lord Palmerston (London: Batchworth Press, 1954), p. 161. Hansard (House of Commons), 21 July 1849, vol. 107, cols 813–14. Jones Parry, Correspondence of Lord Aberdeen and Princess Lieven, vol. 2, p. 312.

Fenton_Book.indd Sec10:180

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NOTES

181

72. PP, MM/HU/1, 1849. 73. PP, MM/HU/2, 3 Sept. 1849. 74. PP, PRE/C/83, 27 Aug. 1849.

7

The Rise and Fall of Palmerston

1. S. Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, vol. 1 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981), p. 42. 2. PP, D/11, 23 May, 1 June, 4 June, 21 June, 2 Aug. etc. 1849. 3. The following letter from Lord John Russell to Palmerston seems to give this speculation some credence. ‘There is no doubt a great advantage in having some morning paper, which would cancel misrepresentations . . . I think it would be fair to say that if the Morning Post becomes gradually more favourable to the Ministry, you should give a Consulship to the present Editor when vacant. I understand from you that he is a person quite fit for employment, from education and manners.’ PP, GC/ RU/279/1–2, Russell to Palmerston, 4 Aug. 1849. 4. Koss, Rise and Fall of the Political Press, vol. 1, p. 81. 5. PP, GC/BO/3/1–2, P. Borthwick to Palmerston, 27 Aug. 1840. 6. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/3/91, Aberdeen to Delane, 1 Sept. 1849. 7. R. Lucas, Lord Glenesk and the Morning Post (London: A. Rivers, 1910), p. 76. 8. Ibid., p. 70. 9. Ibid., p. 54. 10. Ibid., p. 63. 11. A Memorandum showing the Dates of the Claims on Greece for Redress, and the Opinions of the Queen’s Advocate thereupon listed six main complaints. PP, MM/GR/30/1–2, 6 June 1850. 12. D. Whitten Jr., ‘The Don Pacifico Affair’, The Historian (February 1986), p. 259. 13. PP, MM/GR/31, Statement of Instances in which, from 1700 downwards, the British or any other European Government has enforced Redress for Wrongs of Subjects in Foreign Countries, 17 June 1850. 14. BL, Aberdeen Papers, Add Ms 43,247, ff 120–3, Aberdeen to Delane, 16 Feb. 1850. 15. The Times, 22 Feb. 1850.

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182 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

PALMERSTON

AND

THE TIMES

Ibid. Chambers, Palmerston, p. 313. Wilson, Greville Diary, vol. 2, p. 353. History of The Times, vol. 2, pp. 241–2. Laughton, Reeve, vol. 1, p. 221. Jones Parry, Correspondence of Lord Aberdeen and Princess Lieven, vol. 2, p. 380. PP, GC/RU/343/1–2, Russell to Palmerston, 22 May 1850. It was Palmerston’s manner and not his policies that convinced Russell the time was right for change, the Prime Minister noting his intention to ‘continue the same line of policy, without giving the same offence’. Benson and Esher, Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. 2, pp. 243–4. Lucas, Lord Glenesk, pp. 51–2. PP, PRE/C/84, Albion, 18 Mar. 1850. PP, PRE/C/87, 25 May 1850. PP, MPC/1538, ‘A Commercial Traveller’, 22 May 1850. Hansard (House of Lords), 17 June 1850, vol. 111, col. 1295. Chamberlain, Aberdeen, p. 409. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/3/121, Aberdeen to Delane, 18 June 1850. The Times, 19 June 1850. Morning Post, 21 June 1850. R.M. Keeling, Palmerston and the Pacifico Debate (PhD thesis, University of Missouri, 1968), p. 71. Morning Post, 20 June 1850. J. Vincent (ed.), Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party: Journals and Memoirs of Edward Henry, Lord Stanley 1849–1869 (Sussex: Harvester, 1978), pp. 19–20. History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 242. Hansard (House of Commons), 25 June 1850, vol. 112, cols 386, 392, 394. Hansard (House of Commons), 25 June 1850, vol. 112, col. 444. Ridley, Palmerston, p. 388. H.C.F. Bell, Lord Palmerston, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, 1936), p. 29. Morning Post, 28 June 1850. PP, MPC/1540, C. Shirley Brooks to Palmerston, 30 June 1850.

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NOTES 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

183

PP, MM/GR/54, Abraham Jones Le Cras to Palmerston, 8 July 1850. The Times, 27 June 1850. Ridley, Palmerston, pp. 388–9. PP, MM/GR/38, Editor of Sun to Col. Freeston, 30 May 1850 (copy). W. Walford, Memoir of the Rt. Hon. Viscount Palmerston (London, 1865), p. 34. PP, GC/RU/358, Russell to Palmerston, 9 Aug. 1850. R. Braithwaite, Palmerston and Africa: The Rio Nunez Affair – Competition, Diplomacy and Justice (London: British Academic Press, 1996). PP, GC/RU/390, Russell to Palmerston, 7 Jan. 1851. History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 243. The Times, 1 July 1850. Laughton, Reeve, vol. 1, p. 230. Sir H. Maxwell, The Life and Letters of George William Frederick, fourth Earl of Clarendon, vol. 2 (London: E. Arnold, 1913), p. 314. Morley, ‘The Arcana of that Great Machine’, p. 49. D. Griffiths, ‘The Early Management of the Standard’, in Brake et al, Investigating Victorian Journalism, p. 121. Dasent, Delane, vol. 1, p. 221. History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 247. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/4/15, Aberdeen to Delane, 7 May 1851. History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 247. NA, HO 3340, Police Report, 5 Sept. 1850. The Times, 7 Sept. 1850. Benson and Esher, Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. 2, p. 268. T. Lever (ed.), The Letters of Lady Palmerston (London: John Murray, 1957), p. 311. Ridley, Palmerston, p. 395. Benson and Esher, Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. 2, p. 270. H. Cunningham, ‘The Language of Patriotism, 1750–1914’, History Workshop Journal (Autumn 1981), p. 30. PP, PRE/B/146, ‘For the Globe’, 8 Sept. 1850. Morning Post, 6 Sept. 1850. Lucas, Lord Glenesk, pp. 69, 72–3. Ibid., pp. 55, 66, 72. Ibid., pp. 52–3.

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184

PALMERSTON

AND

THE TIMES

73. Jones Parry, Correspondence of Lord Aberdeen and Princess Lieven, vol. 2, p. 588. 74. Ibid., p. 80. 75. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/4/5, Wood to Delane, Feb. 1851; Delane Papers, JTD/4/16, Wood to Delane, 9 Feb. 1851. 76. PP, GC/ED/20/(encl.), Wikoff to Palmerston, 16 Sept. 1850. 77. Morning Post, 3 Oct. 1851. 78. Ibid., 9 Oct. 1851. 79. Ibid., 4, 5 Nov. 1851. 80. G. Claeys, ‘Mazzini, Kossuth and British Radicalism, 1848–1854’, Journal of British Studies (July 1989), pp. 245–8. 81. Ibid., p. 247. 82. Dasent, Delane, vol. 1, p. 115. 83. Laughton, Reeve, vol. 1, p. 240. 84. PP, GC/RU/429, Russell to Palmerston, 22 Oct. 1851. 85. PP, GC/RU/430, Russell to Palmerston, 24 Oct. 1851. 86. PP, GC/RU/430/(encl. 2), Russell to Palmerston, 24 Oct. 1851. 87. Morning Post, 19 Nov. 1851. 88. PP, GC/RU/440/1–2/(encl.), Russell to Palmerston, 25 Nov. 1851. 89. PP, GC/RU/1090/1–2, Palmerston to Russell, 28 Nov. 1851. 90. The Times, 20 Nov. 1851. 91. Morning Post, 21 Nov. 1851. 92. History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 249. 93. J.F. McMillan, Napoleon III (London: Longman, 1991), pp. 49–51. 94. Chambers, Palmerston, p. 333. 95. PP, GMC/47/1–4, P. Borthwick to Palmerston, 27 Dec. 1851. 96. PP, GMC/92, 1 Jan. 1852. 97. PP, GMC/108/1–2, Eustace C.G. Murray to Borthwick, 31 Dec. 1851. 98. Southgate, The Most English Minister, p. 292. 99. Ibid., p. 297. 100. Palmerston: What has he Done? Contained within ‘One of the People’ [W. Coningham], Lord Palmerston and Prince Albert (London, 1854), p. 19.

8

Rapprochement

1. See for example the Daily News, 28 Dec. 1852. 2. The Times, 20, 22, 24 Dec. 1852.

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NOTES

185

3. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/4/99, Aberdeen to Delane, 22 Dec. 1852; Delane Papers, JTD/4/102, Aberdeen to Delane, 26 Dec. 1852. 4. M.G. Fawcett, Life of the Right Hon. Sir William Molesworth, (London: MacMillan, 1901), pp. 307–8. 5. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/4/99, Aberdeen to Delane, 22 Dec. 1852. 6. D. Brown, Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy, 1846–55 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 137. 7. Chambers, Palmerston, p. 351. 8. The Times, 13 July 1852. 9. Ibid., 26 July 1853. 10. O. Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade (London: Allen Lane, 2010), pp. 102–3. 11. Ibid., p. 107. 12. PP, MPC/1555/(encl.), Deputation to Palmerston, 30 July 1853. 13. The Times, 16 Dec. 1853. 14. Bourne, Palmerston–Sulivan Letters, p. 307. 15. Figes, Crimea, pp. 130, 141–7. 16. PP, PRE/C/95, Correspondent of Lancheshire Times to Palmerston, 7 June 1853. 17. Figes, Crimea, p. 160. 18. History of The Times, vol. 2, pp. 116–17, 159. 19. Ibid., p. 166. 20. Ibid., p. 114. 21. BL, Aberdeen Papers, Add Ms 43,251, ff 205–6, Delane to Aberdeen, 16 Oct. 1853. 22. Figes, Crimea, p. xix. 23. P. Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Vietnam (London: Deutsch, 1975), p. 4. 24. Ibid., p. 7. 25. Woods and Bishop, Story of The Times, p. 75. 26. A. Hankinson, Man of Wars: William Howard Russell of The Times (London: Heinemann, 1982), p. 83. 27. Knightley, The First Casualty, pp. 13–14; Woods and Bishop, Story of The Times, p. 81. 28. Dasent, Delane, vol. 1, pp. 179–95.

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29. The Times, 23 Dec. 1854. 30. A.I. Dasent, John Thadeus Delane, Editor of The Times: His Life and Correspondence, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1908), p. 4. 31. The Times, 25 Nov. 1879. 32. A. Grant, The American Civil War and the British Press (North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 2000), pp. 121–2. 33. E. Cook, Delane of The Times (London: Constable, 1915), pp. 83–4. 34. Hankinson, Man of Wars, p. 84. 35. O. Anderson, A Liberal State at War (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 26. 36. BL, Aberdeen Papers, Add Ms 43,200, ff 40–1, Molesworth to Aberdeen, 3 June 1854. 37. Brown, Palmerston, p. 381. 38. Chambers, Palmerston, p. 378. 39. History of The Times, vol. 2, pp. 257–8. 40. A. Hawkins, Party, Parliament and the Art of Politics, 1855–59 (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 289. 41. History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 264. 42. Hampton, Visions of the Press, p. 63. 43. J.K. Chalaby, The Invention of Journalism (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 40. 44. History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 265. 45. Dasent, Delane, vol. 1, p. 206. 46. Koss, Rise and Fall of the Political Press, vol. 1, p. 82. 47. Brown, Palmerston, p. 389. 48. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/7/11, Palmerston to Delane, 16 Jan. 1856. 49. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/7/15, Palmerston to Delane, 17 Jan. 1856. 50. L. Fenton, ‘Charles Rowcroft, Irish-Americans, and the “Recruitment Affair”, 1855–1856’, Historical Journal (December 2010). 51. S. David, Victoria’s Wars: The Rise of Empire (London: Penguin, 2007), pp. 286–7. 52. Brown, Palmerston, pp. 400–1. 53. History of The Times, vol. 2, pp. 271, 292. 54. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/8/7, Palmerston to Delane, 4 Feb. 1857. 55. David, Victoria’s Wars, pp. 287–8. 56. PP, SP/B/5, Speech of Lord Palmerston, 20 Mar. 1857.

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NOTES

187

57. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/8/10, Palmerston to Delane, 13 Mar. 1857. 58. H. Gelber, The Dragon and the Foreign Devils: China and the World, 1100 BC to the Present (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), pp. 198–203; History of The Times, vol. 2, pp. 292–3. 59. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/8/30, Palmerston to Delane, 11 July 1857. 60. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/8/63, Palmerston to Delane, 31 Aug. 1857. 61. Hankinson, Man of Wars, p. 127. 62. Chambers, Palmerston, p. 438. 63. Ibid., p. 441. 64. The Times, 23 Feb. 1858. 65. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/9/80, Palmerston to Delane, 5 Dec. 1858.

9

The Last Years

1. History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 288. 2. Chambers, Palmerston, p. 453. 3. R. Aldous, The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli (London: Hutchinson, 2006), p. 118. 4. J. Parry, Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party, 1867– 1875 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 25. 5. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/9/112, Palmerston to Delane, 14 June 1859. 6. PP, GC/DE/47, Delane to Palmerston, 14 July 1859. 7. J. Ridley, Garibaldi (London: Constable, 1974), p. 448. 8. The Times, 15 Dec. 1860. 9. Dasent, Delane, vol. 2, p. 101. 10. The Times, 23 Dec. 1859. 11. Ibid., 12 Nov. 1860. 12. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/9/144, Palmerston to Delane, 16 Dec. 1859. 13. Chambers, Palmerston, pp. 411, 472. 14. PP, GC/DE/52/1–2, Delane to Palmerston, 27 Dec. 1864.

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15. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/14/12, Lady Palmerston to Delane, 5 May 1865. 16. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/9/121, Palmerston to Delane, 24 Aug. 1859; Delane Papers, JTD/10/36, Palmerston to Delane, 22 Oct. 1860; Delane Papers, JTD/10/99, Lady Palmerston to Delane, 1861; Delane Papers, JTD/11/10, Palmerston to Delane, 25 Jan. 1862; Delane Papers, JTD/12/10, Palmerston to Delane, 24 Jan. 1863. 17. Cook, Delane of The Times, p. 101. 18. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/10/77, Palmerston to Delane, 11 Jan. 1861. 19. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/17/4, Lady Palmerston to Delane, 1868. 20. Dasent, Delane, vol. 2, pp. 26–7. 21. Ibid., pp. 5–6. 22. M. Hampton, ‘Journalists and the “Professional Ideal” in Britain: The Institute of Journalists, 1884–1907’, Historical Research (June 1999), pp. 183–201. 23. W. Hindle, The Morning Post, 1772–1937: Portrait of a Newspaper (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1937), p. 200. 24. Chambers, Palmerston, p. 377. 25. PP, PRE/C/106/1–2, Daily Telegraph, 1859. 26. PP, SP/B/7/(encl.), Palmerston to editor Daily Telegraph, 6 July 1865. 27. H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 136. 28. H.C.G. Matthew, ‘Rhetoric and Politics in Great Britain, 1860–1950’, in P.J. Waller (ed.), Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain: Essays Presented to A.F. Thompson (New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 40. 29. PP, SP/B/3/1–4, ‘Proceedings on Giving One the Freedom of Glasgow’, Sept. 1853. 30. J.S. Meisel, Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 234. 31. E.D. Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 7. 32. For more on Palmerston and reform see K. Zimmerman, ‘Liberal Speech, Palmerstonian Delay, and the Passage of the Second Reform Act’, English Historical Review (November 2003), pp. 1176–1207 and

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NOTES

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

189

R. Saunders, ‘The Politics of Reform and the Making of the Second Reform Act, 1848–1867’, Historical Journal (September 2007), pp. 571–91. G.R. Searle, Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid-Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 137. T.A. Jenkins (ed.), The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1858– 1865 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1990), p. 188. Dasent, Delane, vol. 2, p. 23. M. De Nie, ‘The London Press and the American Civil War’, in J.H. Wiener and M. Hampton (eds), Anglo-American Media Interactions, 1850–2000 (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 129. D.A. Campbell, English Public Opinion and the American Civil War (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2003), pp. 49–50. Brown, Palmerston, pp. 451–2. Hankinson, Man of Wars, pp. 168–70. A. Foreman, A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided (London: Allen Lane, 2010), pp. 72–7. D.K. Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 397. History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 373. Chambers, Palmerston, p. 487. Knightley, The First Casualty, p. 37. A. Hawkins and J. Powell (eds), The Journal of John Wodehouse, first Earl of Kimberley, for 1862–1902 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1997), p. 63. Brown, Palmerston, p. 455. D.A. Campbell, ‘Palmerston and the American Civil War’, in Brown and Taylor, Palmerston Studies II, pp. 162–3. J. Conrad, Selected Short Stories (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), p. 206. W.E. Mosse, ‘England and the Polish Insurrection of 1863’, English Historical Review (January 1956), pp. 31–2. Jenkins, Trelawny, pp. 276–7. Koss, Rise and Fall of the Political Press, vol. 1, p. 138. The Times, 19 May 1863. Bourne, Foreign Policy of Victorian England, p. 106. Hawkins and Powell, Kimberley, p. 88.

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55. J. Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 214. 56. E.D. Steele, ‘Palmerston’s Foreign Policy and Foreign Secretaries 1855–1865’ in K. Wilson (ed.), British Foreign Secretaries and Foreign Policy from Crimean War to First World War (London: Croom Helm, 1987), p. 61. 57. Sandiford, Schleswig-Holstein, p. 103. 58. Hankinson, Man of Wars, p. 193. 59. D. Krein, The Last Palmerston Government: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics and the Genesis of ‘Splendid Isolation’ (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1978), pp. 144–5. 60. Brown, Palmerston, p. 456. 61. Sandiford, Schleswig-Holstein, p. 103. 62. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/13/45, Palmerston to Delane, 9 May 1864. 63. Hawkins and Powell, Kimberley, p. 129. 64. TNL Archive, Delane Papers, JTD/13/44, Delane to Palmerston, 9 May 1864. 65. Jenkins, Trelawny, p. 292. 66. Ibid., p. 296.

Conclusion 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

The Times, 19 Oct. 1865. Ibid., 25 Oct. 1865. Ibid., 21 Oct. 1865. Ibid., 19 Oct. 1865. A. Trollope, Lord Palmerston (London: William Isbister, 1882), p. 200. Brown, Palmerston, p. 188. Hampton, Visions of the Press, p. 64. Brown, Palmerston, p. 476. History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 393. Ibid., pp. 397–400. Chalaby, Invention of Journalism, p. 86. M. Crawford, The Anglo-American Crisis of the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Times and America, 1850–1862 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987), p. 20.

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NOTES 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

191

History of The Times, vol. 2, p. 291. Hargreaves, The First Freedom, p. 231. The Times, 7 Feb. 1852. Hargreaves, The First Freedom, p. 237. G.W. Smalley, London Letters, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1890), p. 61.

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Knight Hunt, F., The Fourth Estate: Contributions Towards a History of Newspapers, and of the Liberty of the Press, 2 vols. (London: David Bogue, 1850) Knightley, P., The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Vietnam (London: Deutsch, 1975) Koss, S., The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, 2 vols. (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981–4) Krein, D.F., The Last Palmerston Government: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics and the Genesis of ‘Splendid Isolation’ (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1978) Lambert, A., ‘Palmerston and Sea-Power’, in D. Brown and M. Taylor (eds), Palmerston Studies II (Southampton: Hartley Institute, 2007) Langford, P., The Eighteenth Century, 1688–1815 (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1976) Lee, A.J., The Origins of the Popular Press 1855–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1976) Lucas, R., Lord Glenesk and the Morning Post (London: A. Rivers, 1910) Lynn, M., ‘British Policy, Trade, and Informal Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Mabell, Countess of Airlie, Lady Palmerston and Her Times, 2 vols. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922) Makower, S.V., Some Notes upon the History of The Times, 1785–1904 (Edinburgh: Morrison & Gibb, 1904) Mann, T., Buddenbrooks (London: Vintage, 1999) Marr, A., My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism (London: Macmillan, 2004) Martin, K., The Triumph of Lord Palmerston: A Study of Public Opinion in England before the Crimean War (London: Hutchinson, 1963) Marx, K., Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth-Century and The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston, L. Hutchinson (ed.), (London, 1969) Matthew, H.C.G., Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) Matthew, H.C.G., ‘Rhetoric and Politics in Great Britain, 1860–1950’, in P.J. Waller (ed.), Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain: Essays Presented to A.F. Thompson (New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 1987) McMillan, J.F., Napoleon III (London: Longman, 1991) Meisel, J.S., Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001)

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BIBLIOGR APHY

201

Meisel, J.S., ‘Palmerston as Public Speaker’, in D. Brown and M. Taylor (eds), Palmerston Studies I (Southampton: Hartley Institute, 2007) Mitchell, L., Lord Melbourne, 1779–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) Mitchell, L., ‘Britain’s Reaction to the Revolutions’, in R.J.W. Evans and H. Pogge Von Strandmann (eds), The Revolutions in Europe 1848–1849: From Reform to Reaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Morley, T., ‘The Times and the Concept of the Fourth Estate: Theory and Practice in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain’, Journal of Newspaper and Periodical History (1985) Morley, T., ‘“The Arcana of that Great Machine”: Politicians and The Times in the Late 1840s’, History (February 1988) Mosse, W.E., ‘England and the Polish Insurrection of 1863’, English Historical Review (January 1956) Murray, V., High Society: A Social History of the Regency Period, 1788–1830 (London: Viking, 1998) Newsome, D., The Victorian World Picture: Perceptions and Introspections in an Age of Change (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997) Noelle-Neumann, E., The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984) Parry, J.P., Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party 1867–1875 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) Pearce, E., Reform! The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act (London: Vintage, 2003) Pemberton, W.B., Lord Palmerston (London, 1954) Phillips, J.A., and C. Wetherell, ‘The Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Political Modernization of England’, American Historical Review (April 1995) Porter, D., ‘Walter, John (1818–1894)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Prest, J., Lord John Russell (London: Macmillan, 1972) Price, M., The Perilous Crown: France between Revolutions (London: Pan Books, 2008) Printing The Times Since 1785: Some Account of the Means of Production and Changes of Dress of the Newspaper (London: The Times, 1953) Quinault, R., ‘The French Revolution of 1830 and Parliamentary Reform’, History (October 1994) Rapport, M., 1848: Year of Revolution (London: Little, Brown, 2008) Ridley, J., Lord Palmerston (London: Constable, 1971)

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202

PALMERSTON

AND

THE TIMES

Ridley, J., Garibaldi (London: Constable, 1974) Robbins, K., John Bright (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) Roe, N., Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt (London: Pimlico, 2005) Royle, T., Crimea: The Great Crimean War 1854–1856 (London: Abacus, 2000) Sandiford, K.A.P., Great Britain and the Schleswig-Holstein Crisis 1848–1864: A Study of Politics, Diplomacy and Public Opinion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975) Saunders, R., ‘The Politics of Reform and the Making of the Second Reform Act, 1848–1867’, Historical Journal (September 2007) Scherer, P., Lord John Russell: A Biography (London: Associated University Presses, 1999) Schroeder, P., The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) Searle, G.R., Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid-Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) Shattock, J., Politicians and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and The Quarterly (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1989) Shelden, M., ‘Dickens, The Chimes and the Anti-Corn Law League’, Victorian Studies (Spring 1982) Smalley, G.W., London Letters, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1890) Smalley, G.W., Studies of Men (London: Macmillan, 1895) Smith, E.A., Reform or Revolution?: A Diary of Reform in England, 1830–32 (Stroud: Sutton, 1992) Smith, E.A., Lord Grey: 1764–1845 (Stroud: Sutton, 1996) Smith, E.A., ‘Grey, Charles, second Earl Grey (1764–1845)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Southgate, D., ‘The Most English Minister . . .’: The Policies and Politics of Palmerston (London: Macmillan, 1966) Sproxton, C., Palmerston and the Hungarian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919) Steele, E.D., ‘Palmerston’s Foreign Policy and Foreign Secretaries 1855–1865’, in K. Wilson (ed.), British Foreign Secretaries and Foreign Policy from Crimean War to First World War (London: Croom Helm, 1987) Steele, E.D., Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) Steinberg, J., Bismarck: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Stewart, R., ‘The Conservative Party and the Courier newspaper, 1840’, English Historical Review (April 1976) Taylor, A., ‘Palmerston and Radicalism, 1847–1865’, Journal of British Studies (April 1994)

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BIBLIOGR APHY

203

Taylor, M., ‘Urquhart, David (1805–1877)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Tombs, R., France 1814–1914 (London: Longman, 1996) Trollope, A., Lord Palmerston (London: William Isbister, 1882) Wadsworth, A.P., ‘Newspaper Circulations, 1800–1954’, Transactions of the Manchester Statistical Society (1954–5) Wahrman, D., ‘“Middle-Class” Domesticity Goes Public: Gender, Class and Politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria’, Journal of British Studies (October 1993) Walker, M., Powers of the Press: The World’s Great Newspapers (London: Quartet Books, 1982) Walford, W., Memoir of the Rt. Hon. Viscount Palmerston (London, 1865) Walker Howe, D., What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009) Wasson, E.A., ‘The Whigs and the Press, 1800–1850’, Parliamentary History (February 2006) Watters, R., ‘Thomas Barnes and The Times 1817–1841’, History Today (September 1979) Webster, C.K., ‘Lord Palmerston at Work, 1830–41’, in A. Coville and H.W.V. Temperley (eds), Studies in Anglo-French History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935) Webster, C.K., ‘Urquhart, Ponsonby and Palmerston’, English Historical Review (July 1947) Webster, C.K., The Foreign Policy of Lord Palmerston, 1830–1841: Britain, the Liberal Movement and the Eastern Question, 2 vols. (London, 1969) Weisser, H., ‘The British Working-Class and the Cracow Uprising of 1846’, The Polish Review (1968) Whitten Jr., D., ‘The Don Pacifico Affair’, The Historian (February 1986) Wiener, J.H., The War of the Unstamped: The Movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax, 1830–1836 (New York, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969) Wilson, A.N., The Victorians (London: Hutchinson, 2002) Woods, J. and O. Bishop, The Story of The Times (London: Michael Joseph, 1983) Young, G.M., Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) Ziegler, P.R., Palmerston (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

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204

PALMERSTON

AND

THE TIMES

Zimmerman, K., ‘Liberal Speech, Palmerstonian Delay, and the Passage of the Second Reform Act’, English Historical Review (November 2003)

Theses Keeling, R.M., ‘Palmerston and the Pacifico Debate’ (PhD thesis, University of Missouri, 1968) Morley, T., ‘The Times and the Revolutionary Crisis of 1848’ (PhD thesis, Thames Polytechnic, 1985)

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INDEX

A Aberdeen, George Hamilton Gordon, Lord coalition government leader 125–6, 127 and Crimean War 129, 131–2, 135–6 and Delane 55, 56–7, 63–4, 65, 76–7 and deposed rulers 96 foreign policy 55–60 and France 58, 91 and Palmerston 67, 111–12, 127 resignation 135–6 and Spanish marriages 74 and Tahiti 59–60 Times obituary 146 and US border dispute 57 Alexander II, Tsar 154 Ali, Mehmet 48, 50 Alsager, Thomas 70 Althorp, Lord 46–7 American Civil War 151–4 Anstey, Thomas 87

Fenton_Index.indd 205

Ashburton Capitulation 57, 62 Atlas 44 Austrian Empire annexation of Cracow 77–8 and Hungary 102–6 and Italy 92–3, 94–5, 96, 99 and Schleswig-Holstein question 156–8 B Barclay and Company brewery 116–18 Barnes, Thomas and Coercion Bill 35, 36 death 51 editor of The Times 20, 22–6 and Palmerston 36–7 and parliamentary reform 28–30 parliamentary reports 20, 21–2, 26 Queen Caroline’s trial 24 and Reeve 49–50 Tory return to power 40–42 and the Whigs 40, 47 Belgium 27, 37

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206

PALMERSTON

Blackwood, John 52 Borthwick, Algernon 108, 118, 130, 148, 149 Borthwick, Margaret 107 Borthwick, Peter 107–8, 118, 123 Bowlby, Thomas 141 Bowring, Sir John 139–40 Bright, John 65 Britain Anglo-French cooperation 58–60, 77–8, 81–3 redress for British subjects 108–9, 112–13, 115 Brougham, Henry (later Lord) 3, 28–9, 39, 137 Bullen, Roger 81 Bulwer, Henry 74, 97 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 3 Bunsen, Baron 80 Burke, Edmund 3 C Cadiz, Duke of 73–5 Canning, George 13 Caroline, Queen 23–4, 28 Castlereagh, Lord 19 Catholic emancipation 13, 25–6 Chamberlain, Muriel 59 Charles X, King of France 14, 27 Chartism 84, 93 Chenery, Thomas 134 China 1856 dispute with Britain 139–41 Opium War 61–2, 63, 84–5 Christian IX, King of Denmark 156 Chronicle see Morning Chronicle Clarendon, George William Frederick Villiers, Lord 71–2, 88–9, 96, 120, 129, 130

Fenton_Index.indd 206

AND

THE TIMES

Cobbett, William 24 Cobden, Richard 4 Colchester Gazette & Herald 38 Collier, John Dyer 17, 18 Collier, John Payne 18 Conrad, Joseph 154 Conspiracy to Murder Bill 142 Cooke, George Wingrove 140 Corn Laws 63–5, 71 Courier, The 10, 32, 38 Cowper, Lady Emily (later Lady Palmerston) 10–11, 60, 115, 149 Crimean War British army conditions 132–3, 138 origins 128–9 peace proposals 138–9 recruitment scandal 139, 151 Sebastopol 138 Sinope massacre 130 Times coverage 131–6 Crompton, T.B. 107, 108 D Daily News 88, 98 Daily Telegraph 137, 149, 162 Daily Universal Register 17 Dasent, George W. 67, 72, 75, 119, 138 de Lhuys, Droyn 110 de Ros, Henry 33, 42 Delane, John Thadeus and Aberdeen 55–7, 63–4, 65, 76–7, 80, 132 background 52 British mail steamer incident 153 and Crimean War 134–5 and foreign policy 53–4

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INDEX and Indian Mutiny 141 legacy 135 and liberty of the press 162 and Palmerston 88–9, 137, 145, 146–8 retirement 162 and Russell government 72–3 and Sicilian arms 100 and Spanish marriages 76 and Tahiti 59–60 Times editor 52–3, 67–70, 79 Denham, Lord 37 Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein question 94, 97, 156–9 Dickens, Charles 39, 64, 71, 88 Disraeli, Benjamin 3, 47, 126–7, 138, 142 Doyle, Andrew 43, 61, 62, 88 Dudley, Lord 14 Durham, Lord 29 E Easthope, Sir John 39–40, 50, 55, 66–7, 88, 91 Edinburgh Review 31–2, 138 Egypt, naval blockade 48 elections see general elections Elgin, Lord 140–41 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 98–9 Examiner, The 20, 21, 66 F Ferdinand II, of Sicily 99 Field, Barron 17, 20 Flaubert, Gustave 90 France Anglo-French relations 58–60, 77–8, 81–3 coup d’état 122–4

Fenton_Index.indd 207

207

dispute with Russia over Holy Places 128 French Revolution 89–92 and Italy 144 July Revolution 27 and Near Eastern crisis 48–9, 50 and Palmerston’s return to office 66–7 and Spanish marriages 73–7 and Tahiti 59–60, 62, 63 Frederick, Duke of York 10, 12 G Garibaldi, Giuseppe 145 general elections 9, 34, 61, 84–6, 140 George IV, King 13–14, 23–4, 27 German Confederation 92–3, 156 Gibbons Merle, Joseph 45–6 Gladstone, William 146 Glenesk, Baron see Borthwick, Algernon Globe, The 32, 38–9, 43, 45, 104, 118 Goderich, Lord 13, 14 Greece British blockade 109–111 British grievances 108–9, 112–13 coup 58 Grenville-Murray, Eustace Clare 118, 123 Greville, Charles amnesty with Palmerston 115–16 background 32–3 conduit between Tories and The Times 41 influence under Delane 54 and Palmerston 33, 50, 79, 88, 89 and Spanish marriages 75

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208

PALMERSTON

Grey, 2nd Earl 15, 28, 35 Grey, 3rd Earl 65–6 Guizot, Francois and Aberdeen 58 and Anglo-French cooperation 78 corruption 89–90 and Portugal 81–2 and Reeve 58 and Spanish marriages 73–6 and Switzerland 82–3 H Hampshire Independent 44 Harney, George Julian 84–5 Haynau, General Ludwig 116–18 Hobhouse, Sir John Cam 29, 39, 101 Hood, Tom 100 Horsman, Edward 148 Hungary 102–6, 119–23 Hunt, Leigh 20, 21, 28, 51 Hunt, Thornton Leigh 149 Huskisson, William 14 I Indian Mutiny 141–2 Ireland Catholic emancipation 13, 25–6 Nine Years War 5 Times displeasure over 36 Whig divisions over 35 Isabella, Queen of Spain 73–5, 97 Italy and Austria 92–3, 94–5, 96, 99 Franco-Austrian war 144 unification 145 J Jebbs, John 3

Fenton_Index.indd 208

AND

THE TIMES

K Korzeniowski, Apollo 154 Kossuth, Lajos 102, 103, 119–20 L Lamartine, Alphonse de 90, 91 Lamb, Charles 21 Lamb, William see Melbourne, William Lamb, Lord Lansdowne, Lord 125 Le Marchant, Sir Denis 34, 36, 39, 40, 42, 45, 72–3 Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, Prince 74 liberalism 37, 84–6, 145, 147 Lincoln, Abraham 152 Louis Philippe, King of France 27, 58, 89–90 Lowe, Robert 136–7 Luisa, Infanta of Spain 73–5 M MacDonald, John 134 Malmesbury, Earl of 8–9 Maria II, Queen of Portugal 81 Marx, Karl 48 Melbourne, William Lamb, Lord 10, 48–9, 66 Menshikov, Prince Alexander 128–9 Metternich, Klemens von (Prince) 56, 77, 94 Michele, Charles Eastland de 107 Molesworth, Sir William 126, 136 Mondet, Dinah Mary 25–6 Montpensier, Duke of 73–5 Morning Chronicle decline 88 and Near Eastern crisis 50 and Palmerston 32, 39–40, 43, 45, 55, 81–2, 83

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INDEX and Spanish marriages 74–5 and Switzerland 83 and Tahiti 62 and The Times 59 Morning Post capital value 20 Greek blockade 109, 110, 112 and Kossuth 119 and Palmerston 107–8, 149 and Suez Canal 147 and The Times 108 Morocco 58 Murray, Emma 13 N Napoleon III, Emperor (Louis Napoleon) 99, 122–3, 128, 142, 144, 149 Narvaez, General Ramon Maria 97, 98 Newspaper Press Benevolent Society 46 newspapers educational role 161 parliamentary reporting 20, 21–2, 45 and public opinion 2–4, 7–8, 31–2, 38, 160–61 stamp duty 46–7, 137 status of journalists 42, 148 Nicholas I, Tsar of Russia 128 Nightingale, Florence 134 North Briton 18 Norton, Caroline 65 O Observer, The 46 Ochsenbein, Colonel 82, 83 O’Connell, Daniel 25–6

Fenton_Index.indd 209

209

Opium War 61–2, 63, 84–5 O’Reilly, Andrew 75 Orsini, Count Felice 142 P Pacifico affair 108–111 Pacifico, David 108–9, 113 Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Personal and the Borthwicks 108, 118 childhood travels 6 education 6–7 and Emma Murray 13 illness and death 159, 161 inherits title 8 Irish connections 5 and Lady Cowper 10–11, 12–13, 60 Lady Palmerston’s salons 115, 149 marriage 60 and Mrs Petre 33 social pursuits 9, 10, 11, 60 Policies American Civil War 151–2, 153–4 Anglo-Chinese war 140–41 Austrian Empire 94–5, 102, 104–5 Britain’s foreign responsibilities 105–6 Crimean War 129–31, 136, 137, 138–9 and European conflicts 94–5 fictitious nature of British power 155–8 French coup d’état 123–5 and French Revolution 90–91

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210

PALMERSTON

General Haynau 117–18 Greek blockade 109–111 Hungarian revolt 102–6 Indian Mutiny 141–2 liberalism 37, 84–6, 147 Opium War 84–5 Poland 78 Polish uprising 155–6 Portugal 81–2 and Schleswig-Holstein question 157–9 Spain 97–8 Spanish marriages 73–6 Turkish Empire 48–51 Political career attempted assassination 11–12 attempts to remove from Foreign Office 110–114 by-elections 8–9, 10 Civus Romanus Sum 112–14 continental press 44–5 debating skills 85–6, 150 declines to join Derby ministry 126–7 dismissal from office 122–4 enters Parliament 8–9 Foreign Secretary 29, 31 Home Secretary 125, 127 Hungarians and Poles delegation 120–22 impeachment proceedings 87–8 Liberal party foundation 145 MP for Cambridge 10 MP for South Hampshire 34 in Opposition 61–3, 65–7 Palmerston press 43–6 Prime Minister 136–7, 138–9, 145

Fenton_Index.indd 210

AND

THE TIMES

and public opinion 7–8, 31–2, 38, 160–61 resignation and Crimean War 129–30 Russian agent accusation 48, 87–8 split from Tories 14 Tory candidate 8–9 War Office 9–10, 13, 14, 30 Whig background 15 and the Whigs 62–3, 65–6 And The Times anti-Palmerston articles 47–8, 79, 101–2, 106 close relationship 145, 146–8 and France 143 Home Secretary 127–8 hostilities resume 121–2 Near Eastern crisis 49–50 nepotism charges 30, 34, 54–5 no rapprochement 88–9 obituary 160 olive branch 115–16 origins of rivalry 30, 32–3, 36–7 Palmerston’s importance as source 161 rapprochement 136–9 Spanish policy criticism 97–8 Palmerston, Henry Temple, 1st Viscount (great-grandfather) 5 Palmerston, Henry Temple, 2nd Viscount (father) 6, 8 Palmerston, Lady (formerly Lady Emily Cowper) 10–11, 60, 115, 149 Parkes, Joseph 39 parliamentary reform 26, 28–30, 33, 34, 150

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INDEX parliamentary reporting 20, 21–2, 45, 161 Peel, Sir Robert and civil unrest 27 and Corn Laws 64–5 death 114 Prime Minister 40–41, 53 and public opinion 3–4 resignation 71 and The Times 56–7 Perry, James 25, 39 Peterloo massacre 12, 23 Petre, Laura Maria 33 Pitt, William 17, 18 Poland 27, 77–8, 154–6 Ponsonby, Lord 50 Poor Law policies 35–6, 53 Portugal, civil war 81–2 Pritchard, George 59–60, 62 Prussia 80, 93, 156–8 public opinion 2–4, 7–8, 31–2, 38, 160–61 Pulzky, Ferenc 102–3 Q Quin, Michael Joseph 40 R Radetzky, Joseph 93, 99 Raglan, Lord 135 railway shares 68, 70 Reeve, Henry amnesty with Palmerston 115–16 anti-Palmerston 49–50, 66 and Clarendon 72 and deposed rulers 96 foreign policy leader-writer 53–4 and France 58 and Kossuth 119–20

Fenton_Index.indd 211

211

leaves The Times 138 and Prussia 80 Reform Act (1832) 33, 34 Russell, Lord John (later Earl) 65, 71, 101, 126, 129, 153, 154 Russell, William Howard 19, 132–3, 142, 152–3, 157 Russia and Crimean War 128–31 Polish uprisings 27, 154–6 S Scarlett, Sir James 42 Schleswig-Holstein question 94, 97, 156–9 Seward, William H. 152 Shee, Sir George 10, 11, 14, 38–9, 44 Sicily 99–102 slavery 35 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 39 Spain 73–7, 97–8 Stamp Acts 46–7, 137 Standard, The 43 Stanley, Lord 111, 112 Steele, David 150 Stewart, Dugald 7, 38 Stuart, Dudley, Lord 78 Suez Canal 147 Sulivan, Laurence 8, 10 Switzerland, civil war 82–3 T Tahiti 59–60, 62, 63 Temple, Elizabeth (Libby; Palmerston’s sister) 6, 10 Temple, William (Palmerston’s brother) 6

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212

PALMERSTON

theatre reviews 17 Times, The Management circulation 18, 24, 47, 69, 98, 137, 162 foundation of 17 independence vs political contacts 19, 162 influence 2, 98–9 international reach 118 leading articles introduced 68 post-Palmerston 161–3 profits 19–20 salaries 18 success under Barnes 22–6 success under Delane 67–70 success under John Walter junior 17–20 supplements 25, 68 technological advances 18, 98 theatre reviews introduced 17 threatened by Morning Chronicle 39–40 and trades unions 18 and Palmerston see Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount, and The Times Policy coverage 1856 dispute with China 139–40, 141 American Civil War 152–3 Austrian Empire 96 Caroline of Brunswick’s trial 23–4, 28 Catholic emancipation 25–6 on coalition government 125–6 Corn Laws 64–5 Crimean War 131–6

Fenton_Index.indd 212

AND

THE TIMES

early support for Whigs 28–9 French Revolution 91–2 Greek blockade 109–110, 111 Hungarian uprising 103, 104 Indian Mutiny 141, 142 Ireland 36 Italy 144, 145 Kossuth 119–20 Lord Aberdeen 76–7, 146 nepotism charges 30, 34, 54–5 parliamentary reform 28–30 Peterloo massacre 23 Polish uprising 156 Poor Law policies 35–6, 53 Portugal 82 railway shares 68, 70 Schleswig-Holstein question 158 Sicilian arms affair 100–101 Spanish marriages 75 supports Russell government 71–3 and Switzerland 82–3 Tahiti 59–60 Tory return to power 40–42 US border dispute 57 Whig policy 33–4, 35–6, 40, 46–7 see also Delane, John Thadeus; Reeve, Henry Treaty of Nanjing 61 Trelawny, Sir John 154–5 Turkish Empire 48–51 see also Crimean War U United States American Civil War 151–4 army recruitment scandal 139, 151

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INDEX border dispute 57, 62 British mail steamer incident 153 Urquhart, David 47–8, 87 V Victoria, Queen and Crimean War 133 and fellow monarchs 58, 74, 81, 101 and France 58, 123 and General Haynau 117 and Palmerston 82, 101, 110, 121, 123, 136, 145 W Walter, John 16–17 Walter II, John death 79–80 and Delane 52, 79 MP and country gentleman 34, 41

Fenton_Index.indd 213

213

and the Poor Law 35 and The Times 17–20, 34, 41, 53 Walter III, John 80 Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842) 57, 62 Wellington, Duke of 14, 26, 28, 29, 41–2 Wheeler, John 44 Wikoff, Henry 118 William IV, King of England 27–8 William IV, King of Prussia 93 Wodehouse, John (later Earl of Kimberley) 153, 155, 159 Wood, Sir Charles 72, 101–2, 112 Wyse, Sir Thomas 109, 110 Y Yeh Ming-Chen 139 Yr Amserau (The Times) 70

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Fenton_Index.indd 214

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