ABSTRACT
At his state funeral, the Dean of Westminster asserted that ViscountPalmerston had ‘an unfailing trust in the greatness of England’. Despite the setbacks of the early 1860s, his European adversaries respected him. A German newspaper forecast that ‘from one generation of Englishmen to another, the saying will be handed down: We are all proud of him’. This opinion was not universally shared. John Bright spoke for the many nonconformists and moralists in the Liberal party when he said in 1886 that Palmerston’s administration at the Foreign Office was ‘one long crime’.1 Palmerston, whose faults did not include self-delusion, would have been gratified at the widespread respect in which he was held while almost certainly acknowledging that his international reputation would have stood higher if he had died in 1860 rather than 1865 (see Chapter 34).
