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History > Great Britain, 1815–1914 > Early and mid-Victorian Britain > The political situation > Palmerston
Photograph:Lord Palmerston, c. 1860
Lord Palmerston, c. 1860
BBC Hulton Picture Library

Lord Palmerston, who became prime minister for the first time in 1855, stood out as the dominant political personality of mid-Victorian Britain precisely because he was opposed to dramatic change and because he knew through long experience how to maneuver politics within the half-reformed constitution. In a period when it was difficult to collect parliamentary majorities, he often forced decisions, as in the general election of 1857, on the simple question “Are you for or against me?” He also was skillful in using the growing power of the press to reinforce his influence. At a time of party confusion, when the queen might well have played a key part in politics, Palmerston found the answer to royal opposition in popular prestige, carefully stage-managed. His chief preoccupation was with foreign affairs, and his approach was, on several occasions, diametrically opposed to that of the court.

There was no contradiction between his views on domestic and foreign policy. He preferred the British system of constitutional government, resting on secure social foundations, to Continental absolutism, but, like Canning, his predecessor as foreign secretary, Palmerston was anxious above all else to advance the interests of Britain as he saw them. The supremacy of British sea power, British economic ascendancy, and political divisions inside each of the main countries of Europe before and after the Revolutions of 1848 gave him his opportunity.

His interventions were not confined to Europe. In 1840–41 he had forced the Chinese ports open to foreign trade, and, by the Treaty of Nanjing (1842), he had acquired Hong Kong for Britain. In 1857 he went to war in China again and, when defeated in Parliament, appealed triumphantly to the country. He also intervened in Russia. The Crimean War (1853–56) was designed to curb what were interpreted as Russian designs on the Ottoman Empire and a Russian threat to British power in the eastern Mediterranean. The outcome greatly favoured the British and their main allies, the French and the Ottoman Empire. Although Palmerston's government was defeated in 1858, he was back again as prime minister, for the last time, a year later.

Photograph:The prime ministers of the Victorian era: (top left to right) Lord Melbourne, Sir Robert Peel, Lord …
The prime ministers of the Victorian era: (top left to right) Lord Melbourne, Sir Robert Peel, Lord …
The Print Collector/Heritage-Images

During Palmerston's remarkable ministry of 1859–65, which included Peel's successor as prime minister, Lord John Russell, as foreign secretary and the Peelite Gladstone as chancellor of the Exchequer, it was impossible for Britain to dominate the international scene as effectively as in previous periods of Palmerstonian power. With efficient military power at his disposal, the Prussian prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, proved more than a match for Palmerston. The union of modern Italy, which Palmerston supported, the American Civil War, in which his sympathies were with the Confederacy, and the rise of Bismarck's Germany, which he did not understand, were developments that reshaped the world in which he had been able to achieve so much by forceful opportunism. When Palmerston died, in October 1865, it was clear that in foreign relations as well as in home politics there would have to be what Gladstone described as “a new commencement.”

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