74 Facts About Lord Palmerston

1. Lord Palmerston ended transportation to Tasmania for prisoners by passing the Penal Servitude Act 1853, which reduced the maximum sentences for most offences.

2. Lord Palmerston is remembered for his light-hearted approach to government.

3. Lord Palmerston ordered the Viceroy of Ireland, Lord Wodehouse, to take drastic measures, including a possible suspension of trial-by-jury and a monitoring of Americans travelling to Ireland.

4. Lord Palmerston refused to pay damages or to refer the dispute to arbitration.

5. Lord Palmerston received a law officer's report he had commissioned on 29 July 1862 which advised him to detain the CSS Alabama because it was being built for the South in the port of Birkenhead and it was therefore a breach of Britain's neutrality.

6. Lord Palmerston was convinced that the reinforcements he had sent to Canada had persuaded the North to acquiesce.

7. Lord Palmerston ordered that reinforcements be sent to Canada because he was convinced that the North would make peace with the South and then invade Canada.

8. Lord Palmerston decided to recognise the Confederacy as a belligerent and to receive their unofficial representatives.

9. Lord Palmerston rejected an offer from Disraeli to become Conservative leader, but he attended the meeting of 6 June 1859 in Willis's Rooms at St James Street where the Liberal Party was formed.

10. Lord Palmerston was confident that Sevastopol could be captured and so put Britain in a stronger negotiating position.

11. Lord Palmerston argued for immediate decisive action; the Royal Navy should be sent to the Dardanelles to assist the Turkish navy and that Britain should inform Russia of her intention to go to war with her if she invaded the principalities.

12. Lord Palmerston was totally opposed to any extension of the franchise and during 1864 came into conflict with William Gladstone, his Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was a strong supporter of reform.

13. Lord Palmerston entered Lady Dacre's bedroom while staying as Victoria's guest at Windsor Castle.

14. Lord Palmerston believed the main objective of the government's foreign policy should be to increase Britain's power in the world.

15. Lord Palmerston held this post for twenty years serving five Prime Ministers, Lord Liverpool, George Canning, Lord Goderich and the Duke of Wellington.

16. Lord Palmerston was a philhellene; but by the time he became foreign secretary the only question was whether Greece should be a viable size, wholly independent of Turkey and under the surveillance of Britain, France, and Russia.

17. Lord Palmerston believed that something like the British system of responsible government would be good for all European states and that it would become the norm.

18. Lord Palmerston vigorously opposed what he viewed as the two major threats to the British system: absolutism and republicanism.

19. Lord Palmerston was not a liberal in the Gladstonian sense of the word.

20. Lord Palmerston failed to carry through a plan to intervene in behalf of Denmark, and Denmark was soundly beaten by Austria and Prussia in a war in 1864.

21. Lord Palmerston began his parliamentary career as a Tory representative for a pocket borough in 1807.

22. Lord Palmerston was a famous as we would say here, shagger.

23. Lord Palmerston looks to be the leading contender for the character we Victorians are going to most love to hate this season.

24. Lord Palmerston lived for her honour, and she will cherish his memory.

25. Lord Palmerston practised brinkmanship and bluff in that he was prepared to threaten war to achieve Britain's interests.

26. Lord Palmerston believed it was in Britain's interests that liberal governments be established on the Continent.

27. Lord Palmerston supported the rule of law and opposed further democratisation after the Reform Act 1832.

28. Lord Palmerston believed that the British constitution as secured by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was the best which human hands had made, with a constitutional monarchy subject to the laws of the land but retaining some political power.

29. Lord Palmerston has traditionally been viewed as "a Conservative at home and a Liberal abroad".

30. Lord Palmerston was succeeded by his stepson William Cowper-Temple, whose inheritance included a 10,000-acre estate in the north of County Sligo in the west of Ireland, on which his stepfather had commissioned the building of the incomplete Classiebawn Castle.

31. Lord Palmerston was so much more in earnest than he appeared.

32. Lord Palmerston was the fourth person not of royalty to be granted a state funeral.

33. Lord Palmerston enjoyed robust health in old age, living at Romsey in his home Foxhills, built in about 1840.

34. Lord Palmerston began thinking of a new friendship with France as "a sort of preliminary defensive alliance" against America and looked forward to Prussia becoming more powerful as this would balance against the growing threat from Russia.

35. Lord Palmerston advised that more armaments be sent to Canada and more troops be sent to Ireland.

36. Lord Palmerston believed that the Fenian agitation was caused by America.

37. Lord Palmerston won another general election in July 1865, increasing his majority.

38. Lord Palmerston replied that the fleet could not do much to assist the Danes in Copenhagen and that nothing should be done to persuade Napoleon to cross the Rhine.

39. Lord Palmerston rejected all further efforts of the Confederacy to gain British recognition.

40. Lord Palmerston was convinced the presence of troops in Canada persuaded the US to acquiesce.

41. Lord Palmerston called the action "a declared and gross insult", demanded the release of the two diplomats and ordered 3,000 troops to Canada.

42. Lord Palmerston ordered reinforcements sent to the Province of Canada because he was convinced the North would make peace with the South and then invade Canada.

43. Lord Palmerston told another friend that he thought Gladstone would wreck the Liberal Party and end up in a madhouse.

44. Lord Palmerston used to look fixedly at the paper before him, saying nothing until there was a lull in Gladstone's outpouring.

45. Lord Palmerston rejected an offer from Disraeli to become Conservative leader, but he attended the meeting of 6 June 1859 in Willis's Rooms at St James Street, where the Liberal Party was formed.

46. Lord Palmerston agreed to transfer the authority of the British East India Company to the Crown.

47. Lord Palmerston supported Parkes while in Parliament the British policy was strongly attacked on moral grounds by Richard Cobden and William Gladstone.

48. Lord Palmerston took a hard line on the war; he wanted to expand the fighting, especially in the Baltic where St Petersburg could be threatened by superior British naval power.

49. Lord Palmerston argued for immediate decisive action; the Royal Navy should be sent to the Dardanelles to assist the Turkish navy and that Britain should inform Russia of the intention to go to war with her if it invaded the principalities.

50. Lord Palmerston argued in Cabinet, after Russian troops concentrated on the Ottoman border in February 1853, that the Royal Navy should join the French fleet in the Dardanelles as a warning to Russia.

51. Lord Palmerston passed the Reformatory Schools Act 1854 which gave the Home Secretary powers to send juvenile prisoners to a reformatory school instead of prison.

52. Lord Palmerston ended transportation to Van Diemen's Land for prisoners by passing the Penal Servitude Act 1853, which reduced the maximum sentences for most offences.

53. Lord Palmerston introduced the Truck Act which stopped the practice of employers paying workmen in goods instead of money, or forcing them to purchase goods from shops owned by the employers.

54. Lord Palmerston passed the Factory Act 1853 which removed loopholes in previous Factory Acts and outlawed all labour by young persons between 6pm and 6am.

55. Lord Palmerston rejected the terms he might have obtained for Piedmont.

56. Lord Palmerston maintained that the existence of Austria as a great power north of the Alps was an essential element in the system of Europe.

57. Lord Palmerston resided at Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire, his wife's inheritance.

58. Lord Palmerston feuded with The Times, edited by Thomas Barnes, which did not play along with his propaganda ploys.

59. Lord Palmerston forced the measure through in part by declaring in a letter to the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, that he would resign from the ministry if his policy were not adopted.

60. Lord Palmerston had long maintained a suspicious and hostile attitude towards Russia, whose autocratic government offended his liberal principles and whose ever-growing size challenged the strength of the British Empire.

61. Lord Palmerston regarded the maintenance of the authority of the Sublime Porte as the chief barrier against both these developments.

62. Lord Palmerston was greatly interested by the diplomatic questions of Eastern Europe.

63. Lord Palmerston had no grievance against Russia and while he privately sympathized with the Polish cause, in his role as foreign minister he rejected Polish demands.

64. Lord Palmerston had already urged Wellington into active interference in the Greek War of Independence, and he had made several visits to Paris, where he foresaw with great accuracy the impending overthrow of the Bourbons.

65. On 26 February 1828 Lord Palmerston delivered a speech in favour of Catholic Emancipation.

66. On 3 February 1808 Lord Palmerston spoke in support of confidentiality in the working of diplomacy and the bombardment of Copenhagen and the capture and destruction of the Danish navy by the Royal Navy in the Battle of Copenhagen.

67. Lord Palmerston entered Parliament as Tory MP for the pocket borough of Newport on the Isle of Wight in June 1807.

68. In February 1806 Lord Palmerston was defeated in the election for the University of Cambridge constituency.

69. The young 3rd Lord Palmerston inherited a vast country estate in the north of County Sligo in the west of Ireland.

70. Lord Palmerston succeeded his father to the title of Viscount Palmerston on 17 April 1802, before he had turned 18.

71. Lord Palmerston remains, to date, the last Prime Minister to die in office.

72. Lord Palmerston became Home Secretary in Aberdeen's coalition government, in 1852, subsequent to the Peelite advocacy of the appointment of Lord John Russell to the office of Foreign Secretary.

73. Lord Palmerston began his parliamentary career as a Tory, defected to the Whigs in 1830, and became the first Prime Minister of the newly formed Liberal Party in 1859.

74. Lord Palmerston dominated British foreign policy during the period 1830 to 1865, when Britain was at the height of her imperial power.