Palmerston: A Biography [Hardcover]

David Brown has had access to the Palmerston papers and has clearly done a magnificent job in mastering the archives, as the cover so correctly states. However, therein lies the weakness of this book for references to the archives and the extensive reproduction of them have subsumed the narrative and resulted in extended passages of only passing interest when a short analytical reference to the material would have sufficed. For example, verbatim reproduction of a number of different newspaper reports in order to demonstrate a prevailing newspaper opinion is tedious for the reader when that public opinion might be simply stated and referenced. Brown has clearly set out to write an academic book and frequently concerns himself with the views of other Palmerston biographers; views which will be of little concern to the general reader.
The author has a tendency to refer to political events in Europe which appear to be of significance but which are not explained to the reader, for example, the competing claims to the Portuguese and Spanish thrones. This may be acceptable to a university history don but is most confusing and frustrating to the general reader. A similar criticism might be made where characters are introduced to the political debate but they are not provided with any characterisation or background. For example, Cobden and Bright suddenly appear in the narrative without introduction, how are we to know without going off to do our own research, their importance in the anti-Corn Law debate or their campaigning activities for greater suffrage. Great space is given to Palmerston's view on various international crises that occur whilst he was Foreign Secretary or Prime Minister, again largely by lengthy reproduction of documents, but the author never completes the story. We learn of views but not of the action taken and never the outcome, we are left to guess at the success or failure of Palmerston's practical diplomacy. An example is the blockade of the Greek port of Athens in 1850 in support of two British subjects who were arrested. We do not learn of the outcome or fate of those who were arrested; how many readers will be familiar with this piece of history for the author to make assumptions about our knowledge. Somehow the history has been lost in the documentation and is never made plain.
There is little characterisation of the many personalities who are brought into the narrative. Palmerston's wife Emily despite having quite an interesting story having been Palmerston's lover when married to her first husband, is not rounded out or given any form other than her name. Long time associates of Palmerston such as Clarendon, Melbourne, Malmesbury, Grey and Peel etc., are simply names. The author may be forgiven for assuming the reader will be familiar with figures such as Gladstone and Disraeli but some of the other politicians surely require some elucidation.
The reader may well come away after reading this book wondering why Palmerston has such a prestigious reputation and requires such a large book when he appears to have actually achieved very little. He was certainly lucky and very well liked by the public for his larger than life character and outspoken style and he managed to live to a good age which is always helpful, but it is difficult to point to solid political or diplomatic achievement.
I doubt that many general readers will actually finish this book as it has a number of tedious and long winded passages, although it may be of interest to the academic precisely for those extended reproductions of original documents and absence of characterisation.

Few politicians have enjoyed as long and distinguished a career as Henry John Temple, the third Lord Palmerston. First elected to Parliament in 1807, he accepted office as Secretary at War two years later. After an unprecedented nineteen-year stretch in the post, he served three times as Foreign Secretary and three years as Home Secretary before becoming Prime Minister in 1855 at the age of 70. His resignation in 1858 led many people to conclude that his days in office were over, yet Palmerston returned to the premiership the following year, embarking on a second term that would only end with his death in 1865, two days before his 81st birthday.

Palmerston has often attracted the attention of biographers and historians, yet studies of him have faced the problem, as David Brown notes in the introduction to this book, of coming to terms with the enormous amount of material generated over the course of his long and active life. Encompassing over a half-century of British history and touching on an extensive range of issues during that time, the sheer number of documents generated during his political career has threatened to overwhelm efforts to use them. Brown is certainly well-prepared for the effort: a longtime Palmerston scholar and author and editor of several previous studies on "Pam", he brings an expertise possessed by few others.

This expertise shows in Brown's assured command of the details of Palmerston's life. His book is a coherent and insightful study of Palmerston, one that focuses on his public career but without slighting his private life. He sees Palmerston as a remarkably consistent figure ideologically during a period of considerable political flux, arguing that Palmerston held a fealty throughout his career to the ideas taught to him by Dugald Stewart. Though initially a Tory, Brown argues that this was due more to the influence of Palmerston's guardian, Lord Malmesbury, than any devotion to Tory ideas. Palmerston's liberal views eventually brought him to the Whig Party, where by the 1830s he had emerged as a leading figure, particularly in foreign affairs. Though disliked by Queen Victoria and detested by many of his colleagues, his popularity with the voting public - a new factor in British politics at that time - gave him a strength that made him a figure that could not be discounted politically, and one ultimately brought him to the pinnacle of British politics.

Thoroughly researched and carefully argued, Brown's book is an indispensable study of Palmerston. Yet it is a challenging work for readers to digest. Its greatest strength - the extensive knowledge the author brings of Palmerston's foreign policy - is also the book's main narrative weakness, as Brown spends pages recounting the minutiae of British foreign policy. Domestic politics and the particulars of Palmerston's personal life are covered in nowhere near the degree of detail, and they are the better for it. This excess of information on foreign policy diminishes the book's accessibility, but does not in any way temper its indispensability as a study of Palmerston. Brown's biography is the new standard by which future Palmerston biographies will be judged, one that rewards the effort spent wading through its pages with the insight it provides into a towering figure of nineteenth century British politics.

Some reviews on this site complain that the book is hard to follow, so I will address this first. This biography will be tough-going if you have no idea who, say, Spencer Percival was, or Richard Cobden, or how the Crimean War started and what issues it raised in Britain. But basic background on the period - of the kind one would have acquired from reading the Oxford History, for example, or a general work such as Evans's The Forging of the Modern State 1783-1870 - is sufficient for anyone to find this a clear and lively read. If you are a novice to nineteenth-century Britain, moreover, I would ask why you wish to begin with a biography of Palmerston. One just doesn't do Palmerston, who began his career barely after the departure of Pitt and was prime minister well after the Great Exhibition, on the cheap. There are shorter biographies, such as Judd's Palmerston (1975) or Bourne's The Early Years (1982), but they assume the same level of intimacy with contemporary politics and/or are more judgemental in approach, shedding even less light on the period.

Brown has done an admirable job of providing a balanced and yet detailed perspective on this unique British statesman's life and career. The problem with Palmerston is not just that he lived long. He was in one office or another for most of the time between 1806 and 1865, and we was an extremely prolific writer: there is an ocean of documents to deal with. This book is a monumental achievement, weaving as it does between diplomacy and politics, public and private life, local elections and estate management. And the author brings new research to light, such as on his subject's education in Edinburgh and its influence, or on the management of Palmerston's Irish estates, a controversial topic in the context of the 1840s Irish famine. It is written with great fluency, and I like the way it sticks closely to its sources, favouring the use of quotes over paraphrase. This great tome flags just a little bit in Palmerston's second premiership, where stray typos (the word 'not' apparently missing) risk obscuring the point on Italian unification and on the Schleswig-Holstein affair. But these are minor details; Brown provides background, besides, on the European contexts to diplomatic business. Finally, the strength of this biography is that it provides a fresh yet even view of its subject. Palmerston has too often either been portrayed as a Liberal champion (e.g. in Webster's The Foreign Policy of Palmerston (1951)) or as the archetypal gunboat diplomatist, or paradoxically sometimes both at the same time. Brown examines his protagonist's intellectual and ideological outlook, both through private jottings and his public persona. His analysis of Palmerston's often hard-fought (and occasionally lost!) campaigns for local elections is in this sense particularly interesting. And the book achieves consistency between the posturing, the press manipulation, the hard diplomatic bargaining, and Palmerston's avowed political notions. This will remain, for a long time, the reference work on its subject.