Prime Ministers and Some Others: A Book of Reminiscences

I remember ten Prime Ministers, and I know an eleventh. Some have passed beyond earshot of our criticism; but some remain, pale and ineffectual ghosts of former greatness, yet still touched by that human infirmity which prefers praise to blame. It will behove me to walk warily when I reach the present day; but, in dealing with figures which are already historical, one's judgments may be comparatively untrammelled.

I trace my paternal ancestry direct to a Russell who entered the House of Commons at the General Election of 1441, and since 1538 some of us have always sat in one or other of the two Houses of Parliament; so I may be fairly said to have the Parliamentary tradition in my blood. But I cannot profess to have taken any intelligent interest in political persons or doings before I was six years old; my retrospect, therefore, shall begin with Lord Palmerston, whom I can recall in his last Administration, 1859-1865.

I must confess that I chiefly remember his outward characteristics-his large, dyed, carefully brushed whiskers; his broad-shouldered figure, which always seemed struggling to be upright; his huge and rather distorted feet-"each foot, to describe it mathematically, was a four-sided irregular figure"-his strong and comfortable seat on the old white hack which carried him daily to the House of Commons. Lord Granville described him to a nicety: "I saw him the other night looking very well, but old, and wearing a green shade, which he afterwards concealed. He looked like a retired old croupier from Baden."

Having frequented the Gallery of the House of Commons, or the more privileged seats "under the Gallery," from my days of knickerbockers, I often heard Palmerston speak. I remember his abrupt, jerky, rather "bow-wow"-like style, full of "hums" and "hahs"; and the sort of good-tempered but unyielding banter with which he fobbed off an inconvenient enquiry, or repressed the simple-minded ardour of a Radical supporter.

Of course, a boy's attention was attracted rather by appearance and manner than by the substance of a speech; so, for a frank estimate of Palmerston's policy at the period which I am discussing, I turn to Bishop Wilberforce (whom he had just refused to make Archbishop of York).

"That wretched Pam seems to me to get worse and worse. There is not a particle of veracity or noble feeling that I have ever been able to trace in him. He manages the House of Commons by debauching it, making all parties laugh at one another; the Tories at the Liberals, by his defeating all Liberal measures; the Liberals at the Tories, by their consciousness of getting everything that is to be got in Church and State; and all at one another, by substituting low ribaldry for argument, bad jokes for principle, and an openly avowed, vainglorious, imbecile vanity as a panoply to guard himself from the attacks of all thoughtful men."

But what I remember even more clearly than Palmers ton is appearance or manner-perhaps because it did not end with his death-is the estimation in which he was held by that "Sacred Circle of the Great-Grandmotherhood" to which I myself belong.

In the first place, it was always asserted, with emphasis and even with acrimony, that he was not a Whig. Gladstone, who did not much like Whiggery, though he often used Whigs, laid it down that "to be a Whig a man must be a born Whig," and I believe that the doctrine is absolutely sound. But Palmerston was born and bred a Tory, and from 1807 to 1830 held office in Tory Administrations. The remaining thirty-five years of his life he spent, for the most part, in Whig Administrations, but a Whig he was not. The one thing in the world which he loved supremely was power, and, as long as this was secured, he did not trouble himself much about the political complexion of his associates. "Palmerston does not care how much dirt he eats, so long as it is gilded dirt;" and, if gilded dirt be the right description of office procured by flexible politics, Palmerston ate, in his long career, an extraordinary amount of it.

Then, again, I remember that the Whigs thought Palmerston very vulgar. The newspapers always spoke of him as an aristocrat, but the Whigs knew better. He had been, in all senses of the word, a man of fashion; he had won the nickname of "Cupid," and had figured, far beyond the term of youth, in a raffish kind of smart society which the Whigs regarded with a mixture of contempt and horror. His bearing towards the Queen, who abhorred him-not without good reason-was considered to be lamentably lacking in that ceremonious respect for the Crown which the Whigs always maintained even when they were dethroning Kings. Disraeli likened his manner to that of "a favourite footman on easy terms with his mistress," and one who was in official relations with him wrote: "He left on my recollection the impression of a strong character, with an intellect with a coarse vein in it, verging sometimes on brutality, and of a mind little exercised on subjects of thought beyond the immediate interests of public and private life, little cultivated, and drawing its stores, not from reading but from experience, and long and varied intercourse with men and women."

Having come rather late in life to the chief place in politics, Palmerston kept it to the end. He was an indomitable fighter, and had extraordinary health. At the opening of the Session of 1865 he gave the customary Full-Dress Dinner, and Mr. Speaker Denison,[*] who sat beside him, made this curious memorandum of his performance at table: "He ate two plates of turtle soup; he was then served very amply to cod and oyster sauce; he then took a pacirc;té; afterwards he was helped to two very greasy-looking entrées; he then despatched a plate of roast mutton; there then appeared before him the largest, and to my mind the hardest, slice of ham that ever figured on the table of a nobleman, yet it disappeared just in time to answer the enquiry of the butler, 'Snipe or pheasant, my lord?' He instantly replied, 'Pheasant,' thus completing his ninth dish of meat at that meal." A few weeks later the Speaker, in conversation with Palmerston, expressed a hope that he was taking care of his health, to which the octogenarian Premier replied: "Oh yes-indeed I am. I very often take a cab at night, and if you have both windows open it is almost as good as walking home." "Almost as good!" exclaimed the valetudinarian Speaker. "A through draught and a north-east wind! And in a hack cab! What a combination for health!"

[Footnote *: Afterwards Lord Ossington.]

Palmerston fought and won his last election in July, 1865, being then in his eighty-first year, and he died on the 15th of October next ensuing. On the 19th the Queen wrote as follows to the statesman who, as Lord John Russell, had been her Prime Minister twenty years before, and who, as Earl Russell, had been for the last six years Foreign Secretary in Palmerston's Administration: "The Queen can turn to no other than Lord Russell, an old and tried friend of hers, to undertake the arduous duties of Prime Minister and to carry on the Government."

It is sometimes said of my good friend Sir George Trevelyan that his most responsible task in life has been to "live up to the position of being his uncle's nephew." He has made a much better job of his task than I have made of mine; and yet I have never been indifferent to the fact that I was related by so close a tie to the author of the first Reform Bill, and the chief promoter-as regards this country-of Italian unity and freedom.