ABSTRACT
The village of Lacock in Wiltshire is nowadays celebrated for the early photographs taken there by William Fox-Talbot. But it made another indirect contribution to the Victorian scene by housing in the eighteenth century one Daniel Chamberlain, maltster, the earliest traceable ancestor of the statesman. The younger brother of Daniel, the maltster, was certainly established in London as a confectioner, since it was to this uncle that Daniel’s son William was apprenticed about 1730. Psychologists say that the earliest years of life are the most decisive in shaping character; biographers have to contend with the fact that these are precisely the years about which least is known. Although Oxford and Cambridge were still barred to dissenters, the door to London was open and at hand. Palmerston died two days before his 81st birthday and was succeeded by Russell, ‘the last Doge of Whiggism’, who was only 73.
