Prime Ministers and Some Others | Page 2

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 _pâté_; 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