'Civis Romanus sum' speech in the Don Pacifico affair (1850)
Defended blockading Greece over a British subject's claim, as Foreign Secretary
Prime Ministers · 19th century
Viscount Palmerston
1784–1865 · British (Anglo-Irish peer)
Whig; Liberal
In office: 1855–1858; 1859–1865
Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, whose Irish peerage allowed him to sit in the Commons, served as Secretary at War for nearly twenty years and as a combative Foreign Secretary, famous for gunboat diplomacy and his "Civis Romanus sum" speech in the Don Pacifico affair. He became Prime Minister at 70 in 1855, won the Crimean War, and after a brief fall over the Orsini affair returned in 1859 at the head of what became the Liberal Party. "Pam" died in office in 1865.
How to spot them
- ▸'Civis Romanus sum': the Don Pacifico affair, 1850
- ▸Gunboat diplomacy; 'Lord Pumicestone'; 'Pam'
- ▸Oldest person to become PM for the first time (aged 70, 1855); died in office 1865
- ▸The Schleswig-Holstein question quip
- ▸Palmerston Forts ('Palmerston's Follies')
In office
Brought the Crimean War to a close (1855–1856)
Treaty of Paris, 1856
Second Opium (Arrow) War and the 1857 general election victory (1856–1857)
Defeated in the Commons over China, he won the ensuing election
Fall over the Conspiracy to Murder Bill after the Orsini plot (1858)
Bomb attack on Napoleon III planned in England
Coastal forts against a feared French invasion (1860s)
Known as Palmerston Forts or 'Palmerston's Follies'
Treaty of London guaranteeing Belgian neutrality (1839)
The 'scrap of paper' of 1914; negotiated as Foreign Secretary
Quick-fire facts
- •Secretary at War from 1809 to 1828
- •The 1859 meeting at Willis's Rooms is taken as the founding of the Liberal Party
- •Quipped that only three people understood the Schleswig-Holstein question: one dead, one mad, and himself, who had forgotten it
- •Last Prime Minister to die in office, in 1865, just before his 81st birthday
- •His house was Broadlands in Hampshire
- •Survived an assassination attempt at the War Office in 1818
- •Palmerston North in New Zealand is named after him
Drill it — 7 cards
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Sources
- GOV.UK History of Government — Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
- Oxford University Press — Oxford Dictionary of National Biography