Palmerston: A Biography (review)

Academic biography was once the standard way for historians of British politics to write for a wider audience. This is no longer so, not just because of doubts about the intellectual legitimacy of biography, but also because academics who aspire to be public historians now have easier and, with general interest in politics declining, more lucrative topics. Recent works on Lord Castlereagh, Lord Derby, and Lord Palmerston suggest, however, a revival of interest in the genre. Palmerston is the most challenging of the three subjects, given the amount of writing already published on him, the extraordinary volume of relevant diplomatic materials, and the patchiness of his personal political archive. David Brown’s approach to this problem is interesting and idiosyncratic. He does not claim any new interpretation or any major archival discoveries. His object is to present a general narrative and a historiographical summary of current studies on Palmerston and liberalism. To a greater extent than any comparable biography, its argument explicitly relies on the work of other scholars. This modesty is creditable, but it is also frustrating.

Probably the book’s clearest thesis is that the intellectual influences on Palmerston should be taken seriously: the teaching of Dugald Stewart at Edinburgh University shaped an identifiably liberal mind. At Edinburgh Palmerston grasped that good government involved paying active attention to an evolving public opinion. Ideas were in flux; governing required a flexible accommodation to popular sentiment at home and to world-historical forces abroad. Naturally, this emphasis owes much to recent historical writing on liberalism, though in fact Kenneth Bourne dwelt extensively on Palmerston’s thoughts on progress in the first volume of his unfinished biography in 1982. Brown’s case is that Palmerston was never a Tory and was always Whiggishly inclined. The suggestion is attractive to this reviewer (though much depends on how one defines the term Tory). At two of the great turning points of his career, in 1830 and 1852, Palmerston was adamant that he would not work with Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, nor Derby, because a purely Tory ministry would be too weak to provide proper government and would involve too many compromises with his own attitudes.

What is not made so clear is the process by which this stance emerged, since it was hardly apparent when he left Edinburgh. Brown sits awkwardly on the fence in handling his political positioning in 1806: “His moderate Pittite inclinations do not preclude judgments that Palmerston would adhere to broadly Whiggish notions in his political maturity” (47). He might have taken further Bourne’s shrewd insight that Palmerston’s early politics were more social than ideological—more about networks than principles. He does not refute the conventional wisdom that Palmerston only awoke to the opportunities offered by an ideological politics once he relinquished office in 1828 after nineteen years of service in (Tory) government. In fact one might argue that for Palmerston, as for W. E. Gladstone, brief spells of opposition were among the most radicalising experiences of his life. Palmerston adored giving orders and was contemptuous of less decisive, imaginative, and flexible figures, so it was irresistible for him to deride his Tory successors in 1828 and again in 1841 for their narrow-mindedness: “When I see such men as Buckingham, Knatchbull, Ripon, Goulburn, Hardinge, appointed to govern the world, I well know that they can do no such thing” (243–44).

It is also good to see Brown upholding the concomitant argument that Palmerston’s foreign policy was not just realpolitik but a flexible and pragmatic combination of power politics with the pursuit of liberal constitutionalism where practicable (and where its entrenchment would assist British power). He makes this case best in discussion of some individual crises, though the concluding “Legacy” chapter weakens it by confusingly half-claiming that Benjamin Disraeli adopted the Palmerstonian mantle on foreign policy. In fact Liberals praised Palmerston much more than Disraeli did in the great foreign policy debates of 1880, and...