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 interests of the country without jeopardising the utmost efficiency of its troops and defences. In the same way he maintained the ‘right of entrée to the closet,’ or personal access to the sovereign, which his predecessor had surrendered in favour of the commander-in-chief. Besides asserting the rights of his office, Palmerston had a laborious task in removing the many abuses which had crept into the administration of his department. In the House of Commons he spoke only on matters concerning his office, and maintained absolute silence upon Liverpool's repressive measures. Some of his official reforms excited the animosity of interested persons, and a mad lieutenant, Davis, attempted to assassinate him on the steps of the war office on 8 April 1818. Fortunately the ball inflicted only a slight wound in the hip, and Palmerston, with characteristic magnanimity, paid counsel to conduct the prisoner's defence.

During nearly the whole of his tenure of the war office he sat as a burgess for Cambridge University, for which he was first returned in March 1811, and was re-elected in 1812, 1818, 1820, and 1826, the last time after a keen contest with Goulburn. He was once more returned for Cambridge in December 1830, but was rejected in the following year on account of his resolute support of parliamentary reform. He complained that members of his own government used their influence against him, and recorded that this was the beginning of his breach with the tories. His next seat was Bletchingley, Surrey (18 July 1831), and when this disappeared in the Reform Act he was returned for South Hampshire (15 Dec. 1832). Rejected by the South Hampshire electors in 1834, he remained without a seat till 1 June 1835, when he found a quiet and steadfast constituency in Tiverton, of which he continued to be member up to his death, thirty years later.

With the accession of Canning to power in 1827, Palmerston received promises of promotion. Although as foreign secretary Canning had found his colleague remarkably silent, and complained that he could not drag ‘that three-decker Palmerston into action’ except when his own war department was the subject of discussion, the new prime minister did not hesitate to place him in the cabinet, and even to offer him the office of chancellor of the exchequer, as Perceval had done nearly twenty years before. The king, however, disliked Palmerston, and Canning had to revoke his promise. Palmerston took the change of plan with his usual good temper; but when, some time afterwards, Canning offered him (at the king's suggestion, he explained) the governorship of Jamaica, Palmerston ‘laughed so heartily’ in his face that Canning ‘looked quite put out, and I was obliged to grow serious again’ (autobiographical fragment in Life of Palmerston, ed. 1879, i. 105–8). Palmerston's jolly ‘Ha, ha!’ was a thing to be remembered. Presently Canning offered him the governor-generalship of India, as Lord Liverpool had done before, but it was declined on the score of climate and health. After the prime minister's sudden death (8 Aug. 1827) and the brief administration of ‘Goody Goderich,’ which expired six months later [see ], Canning's supporters, including Palmerston, resolved ‘as a party’ to continue in the Duke of Wellington's government. The differences, however, between the ‘friends of Mr. Canning’ and the older school of tories—the ‘pig-tails,’ as Palmerston called them—were too deep-rooted to permit an enduring alliance, and in four months (May 1828), on the pretext of the East Retford bill, the Canningites left the government, as they had entered it, ‘as a party.’

Canning's influence moulded Palmerston's political convictions, especially on foreign policy. Canning's principles governed Palmerston's conduct of continental relations throughout his life. The inheritance of a portion of Canning's mantle explains the isolation and independence of Palmerston's position during nearly the whole of his career. He never belonged strictly to any party or faction. Tories thought him too whiggish, and whigs suspected him of toryism, and he certainly combined some of the principles of both parties. The rupture between the Canningites and the tories threw the former into the arms of the whigs, and after 1828 Palmerston always acted with them, sometimes in combination with the Peelites or liberal-conservatives. But though he acted with whigs, and liked them and agreed with them much more than with the tories (as he wrote to his brother, Sir William Temple, 18 Jan. 1828), he never was a true whig, much less a true liberal. He pledged himself to no party, but judged every question on its merits.

During the two years of opposition in the House of Commons, Palmerston's attention was closely fixed upon the continental complications, especially in Portugal and Greece. On 1 June 1829 he made his first great speech on foreign affairs, his first public declaration of foreign policy, and his first decided oratorical success. He denounced the government's countenance of Dom Miguel, lamented that England had not shared with France