ABSTRACT
Viscount Palmerston’s death came at the time that his foreign policy was deeply discredited. John Russell was unwilling to state his opinion at once, Palmerston was quick, open, decisive and frank. Palmerston actually encouraged Russell to become a kind of living caricature of himself. Palmerston and Russell were in fact misled by the one political theory in which they really believed. For constitutional monarchy, despite Palmerston’s efforts, had been a decided failure in Portugal, in Spain, in Brazil and in Greece. Sir Ernest Satow, who spoke with unrivalled authority on the East, thought Palmerston’s treatment of China and Japan indefensible. Palmerston invoked the principle of non-intervention to prevent all foreign powers from interfering in Italy. Palmerston’s own belief was that smaller naval powers like Naples and Sicily or Greece were comparatively innocuous because likely to side with England as the bigger naval power in the case of a Franco-British war.
