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 temporary security by lasting sacrifices,’ and he denounced the habit of making concessions (as in the Ashburton treaty with America) as fatal to a nation's interests, tranquillity, and honour. It was rumoured that he supported these opinions by articles in the ‘Morning Chronicle;’ and, though he denied this when in office, Aberdeen and Greville certainly attributed many of the most vehement ‘leaders’ to him when he was ‘out’ (, Journal, pt. ii. vol. i. p. 327, vol. ii. pp. 105, 109, &c.). In home affairs he was a free-trader, as he understood it, though he advocated a fixed duty on corn; he supported his intimate friend Lord Ashley (afterwards Shaftesbury) in his measures for the regulation of women's and children's labour and the limiting of hours of work in factories, and voted in 1845 for the Maynooth bill.

On 25 June 1846 Peel was defeated on the Irish coercion bill and placed his resignation in the hands of the queen. The new prime minister, Lord John Russell, naturally invited Palmerston to resume the seals of the foreign office, though the appointment was not made without apprehensions of his stalwart policy. For the third time he took up the threads of diplomacy in Downing Street on 3 July 1846. The affairs of Switzerland were then in a serious crisis: the federal diet on 20 July declared the dissentient Sonderbund of the seven Roman catholic cantons to be illegal, and in September decreed the expulsion of the jesuits from the country; civil war ensued. France suggested armed intervention and a revision of the federal constitution by the powers. Palmerston refused to agree to any use of force or to any tinkering of the constitution by outside powers; he was willing to join in mediation on certain conditions, but he wished the Swiss themselves, after the dissolution of the Sonderbund, to modify their constitution in the mode prescribed in their federal pact, as guaranteed by the powers. His chief object in debating each point in detail was to gain time for the diet, and prevent France or Austria finding a pretext for the invasion of Switzerland. In this he succeeded, and, in spite of the sympathy of France and Austria with the seven defeated cantons, the policy advocated by England was carried out, the Sonderbund was abolished, the jesuits expelled, and the federal pact re-established. Palmerston's obstinate delay and prudent advice materially contributed to the preservation of Swiss independence.

Meanwhile Louis-Philippe, who was ambitious of a dynastic union between France and Spain, avenged himself for Palmerston's eastern policy of 1840. He had promised Queen Victoria, on her visit to him at the Château d'Eu in September 1843, to delay the marriage of his son, the Duc de Montpensier, with the younger infanta of Spain until her elder sister, the queen of Spain, was married and had issue. At the same time the pretensions to the young queen's hand of Prince Albert's first cousin, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, and of the French king's eldest son were withdrawn, and it was agreed that a Spanish suitor of the Bourbon line should be chosen—either Francisco de Paula, duke of Cadiz, or his brother Enrique, duke of Seville. On 18 July 1846 Palmerston, having just returned to the foreign office, sent to the Spanish ministers an outspoken despatch condemning their misgovernment, and there fell into the error of mentioning the Duke of Coburg with the two Spanish princes as the suitors from whom the Spanish queen's husband was to be selected. The French ambassador in London protested, and Coburg's name was withdrawn. But Louis-Philippe and his minister Guizot, in defiance of the agreement of the Château d'Eu, made Palmerston's despatch the pretext for independent action. They arranged that the Duke of Cadiz, although Louis-Philippe knew him to be unfit for matrimony, should be at once united in marriage to the Spanish queen, and that that marriage and the marriage of the Duc de Montpensier with the younger infanta should be celebrated on the same day. Both marriages took place on 10 Oct. (Annual Reg. 1847, p. 396;, Politique Extérieure de la France, i. 156; , vii. 600 et seq.; , v. 534; , Chute de Louis-Philippe). The result was that the Orleanist dynasty lost the support of England, its only friend in Europe, and thereby prepared its own fall.

From the autumn of 1846 to the spring of 1847 Palmerston was anxiously engaged in dealing with the Portuguese imbroglio. His sending the fleet in November to coerce the rebellious junta and to re-establish the queen on conditions involving her return from absolutism to her former constitutional system of government, though successfully effected with the concurrence of France and Spain and the final acceptance of Donna Maria, was much criticised; but the motions of censure in both houses of parliament collapsed ludicrously. Palmerston's defence was set forth in the well-considered memorandum of 25 March 1847.

The troubles in Spain and Portugal, Switzerland and Cracow (against whose