Image TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage Tile
Image size: 6656x9216 Scale: 35% - PanoJS3
Page overview thumbnail

Article text

PERTH NAMES.
Palmerston of Palmerston-street.
BY CYGNET.
PALMERSTON of Palmerston-street
was that Lord Palmerston who was
twice Prime Minister of England under
Queen Victoria. He was a fop and a
dandy, boasted of the fact that he held
no fixed political principles except
such as were suitable for the moment,
became notorious as the most trouble-
some and meddlesome and dangerous
Foreign Secretary that England ever
knew, and had the further unenviable
distinction of being dismissed from the
Cabinet by Queen Victoria for rude-
ness to her royal person. But he had
a royal revenge three years later
when, in the middle of the
muddle of the Crimean War, this
same Queen Victoria found herself
compelled to ask him to become her
new Prime Minister to restore con-
fidence in the government of the land.
Henry John Temple, third Viscount
Palmerston, was an Irish peer and
thus eligible to sit in the House of
Commons of which he was a member
for the incredible period of 58 years,
for 47 years of which he was a Min-
Lord Palmerston. Help
Lord Palmerston.
ister of the Crown! For 20 years (from
1809 to 1828) he was Secretary at War
(not Secretary for War); for 15 years
Foreign Secretary; for three years
Home Secretary; and for nine years
Prime Minister. Yet all the time no
one trusted him, George the Fourth
hated him, Queen Victoria detested
him. He was a conservative at heart
but despised the tories, whom he de-
rided as the "pig-tails," and he pre-
tended to be a liberal, although he
opposed every appeal for reform ex-
cept in his own department, where he
set himself against corruption so
sternly that he was shot in the hip
on the steps of the War Office by one
of those affected. On his recovery he
paid a barrister to defend his assailant!
As a boy at Harrow, Palmerston's
face and figure were so perfect
that he was nicknamed "Cupid." As
a young man he was a fop and dandy
and man of fashion, and will go down
into history not as a statesman, but
as the man who danced the waltz into
fashion in England. It had proved a
"flop" in fashionable London when,
suddenly, society was intrigued by the
Where Palmerston popularised the waltz : Dancing at Almack's in 1822. .(From a drawing by CruickshankJ. Help
Where Palmerston popularised the waltz : Dancing at
Almack's in 1822.
(From a drawing by Cruickshank)
report that Lord Palmerston had
circled a lady an interminable number
of times in a waltz at Almack's, the
club of fashion a century ago, and the
waltz was safe from that moment.
But Palmerston was no empty-
headed fool of a fop. He was clever
and cultured, a wit of outstanding
merit, and a polished debater with a
gift for stinging repartee. He was busy
and industrious, and recognised the
strength of silence in parliament where
for 20 years he only spoke on matters
affecting his own department. When
Canning became Prime Minister he
complained that he could not drag
"that- three-decker Palmerston into
action" in the parliamentary arena;
but all the same he wanted to make
him his Chancellor of the Exchequer.
George the Fourth, however, objected,
and Palmerston was left out of the
Ministry.
Palmerston deserves to be remem-
bered on our map if only for the rea-
son that his great moment came on
our Foundation Day, June 1, 1829, when
he delivered a masterly and most pro-
found exposition of the foreign situa-
tion, which led him into office as For-
eign Secretary for the next 15 years.
But the story of those 15 years makes
strange reading. He quarrelled with
every Power in Europe, he supported
every insurrection and revolt, whether
in Italy or Hungary or elsewhere, only
to abandon the insurrectionists in the
end and let them flounder in the mud
they had created; he brought England
and France to the brink of war on
several occasions; he was responsible
for wars in Turkey, Egypt, China,
Afghanistan. He drove Queen Vic-
toria to distraction by ignoring her
in his correspondence with foreign gov-
ernments, and he defied his colleagues
and the Prime Minister by acting on
his own impulse without reference to
them. Yet these very people whom he
ignored and insulted kept him in power,
or when they cast him out of office,
almost immediately begged him to re-
turn to power. And the common people
whose pleas and demands for reforms
and betterment he pushed aside so un-
ceremoniously never failed to succumb
to his jaunty air and devil-may-care
attitude and made him into a popular
hero.
NOTHING reveals the remarkable
personality of Palmerston more
than a review of his past by "The
Times," which in a biting survey
charged him with being responsible for
the Copenhagen Expedition in 1808
when the Danish Fleet was stolen by
the Royal Navy in buccaneer style; for
the Walcheren Disaster, when tens of
thousands of English soldiers perished
from disease in a few days; for the
American War of 1812, the cause of
which no one knows or will ever know;
with sending Napoleon to his barbarous
prison house at St. Helena, and forc-
ing the Bourbons on France; with
abandoning Hungary in its struggle for
independence; with urging on Russia
against Poland; with threatening Swit-
zerland's independence. Coming right
home, "The Times" taunted him with
stifling every effort at popular reform,
with the responsibility for the massacre
of Peterloo, and bitterly upbraided him
for opposing on every occasion the
abolition of flogging in the army. It
made an appalling list -- but it did not
prevent Palmerston becoming Prime
Minister, not once but twice in the next
dozen years!
$