ABSTRACT
Nothing should conduce more caution among analysts of the Victorian period than the dominant part played in its politics by Palmerston. An opportunist beside whom Disraeli appears a model of consistency, his ever-increasing popularity attested
both to his own extraordinary astuteness and to the evident fact that the Victorians were a good deal less ‘Victorian’ than they are supposed to have been. In an age when serious men were guilt-ridden and high-minded he was repeatedly flippant, never high-minded, and if he had a conscience at all, what little he had seems never to have been guilty. He regarded religion as a device for diverting men’s minds from socially dangerous thoughts and accordingly subscribed to it as automatically as he subscribed to aristocratic control of Parliament and the army; and, since he ignored theology, and had no personal faith of his own, he was untroubled by doubt. He lived and acted entirely for the moment. For the greater part of his career he displayed an instinct for pursuing at any given moment whatever was the most advantageous course of action, regardless of whether it contradicted what he had said or done previously or would say and do thereafter. He treated all problems, whether of domestic or of foreign policy, in the manner of a shrewd, usually wellbriefed but unrelentingly hard-headed lawyer determined to get the best possible terms for his client (and himself) regardless of all other considerations. One would no more expect such a man to be consistent than one would accuse of improper conduct a barrister who accepted a brief from a dishonest share-pusher one day and from a share-pusher’s victim the next, or from a peer of the realm in one law term and a radical revolutionary in another. A supporter of constitutional government and of the Habsburg Empire; an opponent of revolution and a verbal partisan of Kossuth (see p. 122); a supporter of slavery and then a persistent abolitionist; a defender of the Six Acts but also of decimal currency and easier divorce; an advocate of the continuance of public executions and an enthusiast for sanitary reform; a supporter of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état and a furious if frustrated opponent of the emperor’s Italian adventure; the prime minister who ‘won’ the Crimean War, he devoted more energy to defending the aristocratic control of the army which had nearly lost it than to revitalizing the war effort; adept at barnstorming electioneering speeches, he opposed an extension of the franchise after 1832 without realizing that, at any time after 1848, a widened electorate would almost
certainly have voted tumultuously in his favour; brusque, jocular and defiantly English, he was an accomplished linguist who was accounted the best French scholar of his time.
