A race against time

Lord Palmerston poses severe quantitative problems to biographers. His public life covered a huge span. Born in 1784, the year Dr Johnson died, he was nine years younger than Jane Austen and four years Byron’s senior. He died in 1865, the year Kipling, Yeats and Northcliffe were born. To put it another way, when he was a baby Reynolds was painting Mrs Siddons; when he died Manet was showing his ‘Olympia’, and Tolstoy had just published War and Peace.

His long life was crowded with incessant political activity. He was on the Board of Admiralty in 1807, aged 23, even before he had a seat in parliament. He was an MP, with one or two brief interruptions, the rest of his life — a total of 59 years — and for 50 years a minister, including 17 years as Foreign Secretary, three as Home Secretary and ten as Prime Minister, dying in office, like his original mentors, Pitt and Canning.

All this is covered in overwhelming detail in his papers, and David Brown is, I think, the first biographer who has tried to master them in full. This heroic attempt has not entirely come off. Brown has little narrative skill, and the structure of his book is fragile and collapses from time to time under the sheer weight of his material. All the same, the book contains much of value, and I emerged from it exhausted and exasperated, but closer to understanding this extraordinary man.

The key to Palmerston was his energy. He had a good mind, superb memory and a lifelong appetite for hard work. His conscientious parents made sure he had an excellent education. Aged seven, they took him on a continental tour, and he was soon fluent in French and Italian. He was industrious at Harrow, and here it is worth noting that, although Harrow has produced fewer prime ministers than Eton, four of them — Peel, Palmerston, Baldwin and Churchill — have been in the top class.