Palmerston justified the attack by peroration with reference to the ambitions of Napoleon to take control of the Danish fleet: it is defensible on the ground that the enormous power of France enables her to coerce the weaker state to become an enemy of England...

The more liberal wing of the Tory government made some ground, with George Canning becoming Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons, William Huskisson advocating and applying the doctrines of free trade, and Catholic emancipation emerging as an open question.

[35] The Canningites remained influential, and the Duke of Wellington hastened to include Palmerston, Huskisson, Charles Grant, William Lamb, and the Earl of Dudley in the government he subsequently formed.

With serious trouble simultaneously taking place in Belgium and Italy, and lesser issues in Greece and Portugal, he sought to de-escalate European tensions rather than aggravate them, favouring a policy of universal non-interventionism.

He believed in the regeneration of Turkey, as he wrote to Henry Bulwer (Lord Dalling): "All that we hear about the decay of the Turkish Empire, and its being a dead body or a sapless trunk, and so forth, is pure unadulterated nonsense.

[56] 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.

He was angered by the 1833 Treaty of Hünkâr İskelesi, a mutual assistance pact between Russia and the Ottomans, but was annoyed and hostile towards David Urquhart, the creator of the Vixen affair, running the Russian blockade of Circassia in the mid-1830s.

The permanent author of this magazine was Karl Marx, who stated "from the time of Peter the Great until the Crimean War, there was a secret agreement between the London and St. Petersburg offices, and that Palmerston was a corrupt tool of the Tsar's policy"[58] Despite his popular reputation he was hesitant in 1831 about aiding the Sultan Mahmud II, who was under threat from Muhammad Ali, the wali of Egypt.

[64] In September 1838, Palmerston appointed a British consul in Jerusalem, without the conventional consultation of the Board of Trade, and gave instruction to assist with the construction of an Anglican church in the city, under the prompting influences of Lord Shaftesbury, a prominent Christian Zionist.

[67] Palmerston's biographer, Jasper Ridley, outlines the government's position: An entirely opposite British viewpoint was promoted by humanitarians and reformers such as the Chartists and religious nonconformists led by young William Ewart Gladstone.

"[76] Young Queen Victoria found it unseemly that people in their 50s could marry, but the Cowper-Palmerston marriage according to biographer Gillian Gill: Within a few months Melbourne's administration came to an end (1841) and Palmerston remained out of office for five years.

Aberdeen and Guizot inaugurated a different policy: by mutual confidence and friendly offices, they entirely succeeded in restoring the most cordial understanding between the two governments, and the irritation which Palmerston had inflamed gradually subsided.

They availed themselves of a dispatch in which he had put forward the name of a Coburg prince as a candidate for the hand of the young queen of Spain as a justification for a departure from the engagements entered into between Guizot and Lord Aberdeen.

The efforts of the British minister to defeat the French marriages of the Spanish princesses, by an appeal to the Treaty of Utrecht and the other powers of Europe, were wholly unsuccessful; France won the game, though with no small loss of honourable reputation.

[56][80] Historian David Brown rejects the traditional interpretation to the effect that Aberdeen had forged an entente cordiale with France in the early 1840s whereupon the belligerent Palmerston after 1846 destroyed that friendly relationship.

Palmerston asserted that "... any great improvement in the social system of Ireland must be founded upon an extensive change in the present state of agrarian occupation [through] a long continued and systematic ejectment of Small holders and of Squatting Cottiers.

[56] When Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian democrat and leader of its constitutionalists, landed in England in 1851 to wide applause, Palmerston proposed to receive him at Broadlands, a design which was only prevented by a peremptory vote of the cabinet.

The Queen addressed a minute to the Prime Minister in which she recorded her dissatisfaction at the manner in which Palmerston evaded the obligation to submit his measures for the royal sanction as failing in sincerity to the Crown.

Dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war grew amongst the public in Britain and in other countries, aggravated by reports of fiascos and failures, especially the mismanagement of the heroic Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava (25 October 1854).

However, when a committee of inquiry chaired by MP John Roebuck was established to examine the misdirection of the war in Crimea became evident, Palmerston was forced to "practically accept" it and this immediately led to the resignations of Lord Herbert, Gladstone and Clarendon.

the aged charlatan ambition.” However Lady Cowper noted, “I fear he is not popular, except out of doors among the people, who say he is a true Englishman.” Though some doubted his abilities, he was respected among the ruling elite and admired by the middle classes.

Playing the patriotism card, Palmerston said that Cobden demonstrated "an anti-English feeling, an abnegation of all those ties which bind men to their country and to their fellow countrymen, which I should hardly have expected from the lips of any member of this House.

In 1860, following a reconciliation with Napoleon III and strengthening of Anglo-French relation, a joint expedition was launched into China by British and French forces under the commands of General Sir Hope Grant and Count Palikao.

When the Board faced abolition, Palmerston alongside sanitary reformer Arthur Helps sought to preserve its work by transferring medical functions to the Privy Council which initially failed.

Palmerston believed that this was incitement to the working class to begin agitating for reform and told Gladstone: "What every Man and Woman too have a Right to, is to be well governed and under just Laws, and they who propose a change ought to shew that the present organization does not accomplish those objects".

[171] Palmerston, who feared an imminent French invasion, wanted substantial increases in military defences, which clashed with Gladstone's committed to reducing public spending and pursuing free trade principles.

He was very pleased with the Confederate victory at the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, but 15 months later he felt: ...the American War... has manifestly ceased to have any attainable object as far as the Northerns are concerned, except to get rid of some more thousand troublesome Irish and Germans.

"[200] In a speech at his constituency at Tiverton in August, Palmerston told his constituents: I am sure every Englishman who has a heart in his breast and a feeling of justice in his mind, sympathizes with those unfortunate Danes (cheers), and wishes that this country could have been able to draw the sword successfully in their defence (continued cheers); but I am satisfied that those who reflect on the season of the year when that war broke out, on the means which this country could have applied for deciding in one sense that issue, I am satisfied that those who make these reflections will think that we acted wisely in not embarking in that dispute.

Palmerston's biographer William Baring Pemberton argued that his "failure to understand Bismarck lies at the root of his misunderstanding of the Schleswig-Holstein question, and it derived from an old man's inability to adapt himself to a changing world".

Palmerston continued to consider Prussia 'an instrument in the hands of Austria', its army weak and doomed to defeat, and its public to consist of romantically minded students and dreamy professors.