When the deed was done, the resignation of Sir Robert Peel was its only possible conclusion. Lord Stanley had already left the Ministry on the Corn Law question, and on the next important division which took place the Government was defeated by a union of the Whigs and Tories in the House of Commons. Sir Robert Peel retired, never again to return to office. Lord Palmerston sang the late Minister’s pæan in the House of Commons, and then once more returned to the Foreign Office under the leadership of Lord John Russell.
PALMERSTON FOREIGN SECRETARY, JULY, 1846, TO DECEMBER, 1850.
We now come to Lord Palmerston’s third period at the Foreign Office, which lasted from July, 1846, to December, 1851, but which we shall find it better to divide into three chapters than to comprise it in one, because it includes the romantic affair of Don Pacifico, which, by the attempts made and the success achieved, will deserve a chapter to itself. The _coup d’état_ and his dismissal will demand a third. We will therefore take Lord Palmerston’s life at the Foreign Office down to the year 1850, when the great Don Pacifico debate took place. There were in the meantime various circumstances, all at the moment of intense national interest, with which he was either specially concerned as Foreign Secretary, or much concerned as a leading Cabinet Minister. The chief among these were the Spanish marriages, Lord Minto’s mission to Italy, the French Revolution and escape to England of Louis Philippe, the first war between Austria and Sardinia, the French occupation of Rome, and the wars in Hungary. With the minor operations of his official life it is impossible for us here to deal.
When he got back to office, there had arisen a question as to the expulsion of the Jesuits from certain Swiss cantons; but I do not know that the English reader will care much now about the Jesuits in Switzerland. Nor are we specially anxious as to the civil war which was then carried on in Portugal. But the knot in European politics known as the Spanish marriages had then an importance, and has since achieved results, which make it necessary that we should not altogether pass it over in any record, however short, of Lord Palmerston’s life. But for those Spanish marriages Louis Philippe’s heirs might still have sat upon the throne of France, and the name of king would not be altogether disgraced in the realm over which Henry IV. had ruled. No prophecy shall be ventured upon here as to the future of the French nation; but it is, I think, notorious to the world at large that the last blow given to the Bourbon family, in the opinion of Frenchmen, came from the Spanish marriages.