Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/34

 and Lord John Russell had failed to construct an administration, although Palmerston magnanimously consented to serve again under ‘Johnny,’ he was himself sent for by the queen, and, after some delay, succeeded (6 Feb. 1855) in forming a government of whigs and Peelites; the latter, however (Gladstone, Graham, and Sidney Herbert), retired within three weeks, on Palmerston's reluctant consent to the appointment of Roebuck's committee of inquiry into the management of the war. Their places were filled by Sir G. C. Lewis, Sir C. Wood, and Lord John Russell, and the cabinet thus gained in strength and unity—especially as Russell was fortunately absent at the Vienna conference.

The situation when Palmerston at last became prime minister of England, at the age of seventy, was full of danger and perplexity. The siege of Sevastopol seemed no nearer a conclusion; the alliance of the four powers was shaken; the emperor of the French had lost heart, and was falling more and more under the influence of financiers; the sultan of Turkey was squandering borrowed money on luxuries and showing himself unworthy of support; parties in England were broken up and disorganised, and the House of Commons was in a captious mood. At first Palmerston's old energy and address seem to have deserted him, but it was not long before his tact and temper began to reassert their power. He infused a new energy into the military departments, where his long experience as secretary at war served him in good stead. He united the secretaryships for and at war in one post, which he gave to Lord Panmure; he formed a special transport branch at the admiralty; sent out Sir John McNeill [q. v.] to reconstitute the commissariat at Balaclava, and despatched a strong sanitary commission with peremptory powers to overhaul the hospitals and camp. He remonstrated personally with Louis Napoleon upon his desire for peace at any price; and urged him (28 May 1855) ‘not to allow diplomacy to rob us of the great and important advantages which we are on the point of gaining.’ In a querulous House of Commons his splendid generalship carried him triumphantly through the session. The Manchester party he treated with contemptuous banter, and refused to ‘count for anything’—the country was plainly against them; but he vigorously repulsed the attacks of the conservatives, and administered a severe rebuke (30 July) to Mr. Gladstone and the other Peelites who had in office gone willingly into the war, and then turned round and denounced it. The new energy communicated to the army was rewarded by the fall of the south side of Sevastopol in September, and then once more Austria tried her hand at negotiations for peace. Palmerston firmly refused to consent to Buol's proposal to let the Black Sea question be the subject of a separate arrangement between Russia and Turkey—‘I had better beforehand take the Chiltern Hundreds,’ he said—but greatly as he and Clarendon would have preferred a third year's campaign, to complete the punishment of Russia, he found himself forced, by the action of the emperor of the French and the pressure of Austria, to agree to the treaty of Paris, 30 March 1856. The guarantee by the powers of the integrity and independence of the Turkish empire, the abnegation by them of any right to interfere between the sultan and his subjects, and the neutralisation of the Black Sea, with the cession of Bessarabia to Roumania and the destruction of the forts of Sevastopol, appeared to him a fairly satisfactory ending to the struggle. The Declaration of Paris, abolishing privateering and recognising neutral goods and bottoms, followed. The Garter was the expression of his sovereign's well-deserved approbation (12 July 1856).

Shortly after France had joined in guaranteeing the integrity of the Ottoman empire, she proposed to England, with splendid inconsistency, to partition the Turkish possessions in North Africa—England to have Egypt. While pointing out the moral impossibility of the scheme, Palmerston stated to Lord Clarendon his conviction that the only importance of Egypt to England consisted in keeping open the road to India. He opposed the project of the Suez Canal tooth and nail; the reasons he gave have for the most part been proved fallacious, but the real ground of his opposition was the fear that France might seize it in time of war and reduce Egypt to vassalage. He had little faith in the constancy of French friendship; ‘in our alliance with France,’ he wrote (to Clarendon, 29 Sept. 1857), ‘we are riding a runaway horse, and must always be on our guard.’ He predicted the risk of a Franco-Russian alliance; the necessity of a strong Germany headed by Prussia; and the advance of Russia to Bokhara, which led to the Persian seizure of Herat and the brief Persian war of the winter of 1856–7.

On 3 March 1857 the government was defeated by a majority of fourteen by a combination of conservatives, Peelites, liberals, and Irish, on Cobden's motion for a select committee to investigate the affair of the lorcha Arrow and the justification alleged