Richard Bickerton Pemell Lyons, 1st Earl Lyons GCB, GCMG, PC (26 April 1817 – 5 December 1887) was a British diplomat, who was the favourite diplomat of Queen Victoria, during the four great crises of the second half of the 19th century: Italian unification, the American Civil War, the Eastern Question, and the replacement of France by Germany as the dominant Continental power following the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.

Lyons endorsed the British Conservative Party faction of the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, and was distrusted by Gladstonian Liberals as a 'Tory-leaning diplomat'.

[7] Richard Bickerton Lyons was tutored at Elizabeth College, Guernsey, by Sir John Colborne, in Classics, English, French, arithmetic, and theology, where he received a Latin Prize in 1828.

He and all of his siblings accompanied their father and their mother to Valletta, Malta, in 1828, where they were homeschooled in the works of Enlightenment philosophy, including those of William Robertson, and in history and in classical civilisation, and in French and in Modern Greek.

[9] Richard Bickerton returned to England to attend Winchester College, and subsequently Christ Church, Oxford, from which he graduated BA (in 1838) and MA (in 1843).

[11] Richard Lyons entered the diplomatic service in 1839, when Lord Palmerston appointed him as an unpaid attaché at his father's legation in Athens.

[9] Lyons implemented the practices of diplomatic conduct for which he would become famous: he entertained his subordinates with informal hospitality, and consulted them on matters of business, and dined with them several times per week, and provided for their welfare.

Lyons achieved this restoration of favourable relations with the Vatican by refusing to condemn actions, however disagreeable to him, that Britain had no ability to prevent.

He agreed with Palmerston's remark that ‘dining is the soul of diplomacy’, and offered five courses of Moet and Chandon champagne to United States Senators.

[11] Lyons contended that British embassies, and consulates, and legations ought to impress Britain's grandeur by their furnishings and of their banquets, to which he often invited junior members of the diplomatic community[9] to create the structure of ‘a boys school of which he were the headmaster’.

[11] Lord Lyons resolved during 1859 the San Juan Island crisis (the "Pig War") by advanced informal disclosure of the ultimatum that he had been instructed to deliver to the US that enabled an agreement to occur before the animosity between Britain and the US created violence.

A few weeks after the Prince's tour, and subsequent to the election of Abraham Lincoln to the U.S. Presidency, the animosity between the USA's slave states and free states created the Secession Crisis, in which, as he wrote in a letter to Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell, Lyons initially considered it 'impossible that the South can be mad enough to dissolve the Union'.

[9] Lyons's most famous diplomatic success, whilst Ambassador to the United States, was the resolution of the Trent Affair, during the autumn of 1861, in which two politicians from the South, (James Mason and John Slidell) who had been sent to Europe to attempt to secure formal recognition for the Confederacy, were abducted from the neutral British mail steamer, Trent which was intercepted by a vessel from the Northern States.

[9] Lyons's persuasion of the Ottoman Court of the Sublime Porte to decline concessions to France that would have provided for French control of the Suez Canal[9] improved Britain's credibility, from which Bismarck had detracted during the crisis of Schleswig-Holstein.

Lyons persuaded the French Minister to resolve the dispute over the Danubian Principalities in a manner that was conducive to British interests.

Lyons served in this position for a continuous twenty years, which made him one of its longest serving occupants, in which his political neutrality enabled him to develop amicable relationships with Liberal ministers to whose political sympathies he was averse:[9] Jenkins contends that ‘the presence of such a reliable and conciliatory man in the most sensitive and important post in Europe gave both Liberal and Conservative British Governments an essential guarantee that their instructions would always be carried out according to the terms determined in London’.

Lyons therein advocated policies that he thought would prevent a conflict between France and Germany and that would consequently perpetuate British dominance of Europe.

Lyons had devoted the first two weeks of his retirement to the study of Catholicism, to which he had expressed his desire to convert, and he had received permission from the Prime Minister to attend Catholic Mass.

[2] Lord Lyons's 1887 obituary in The Morning Post describes him as ‘the idea of a pattern and ideal diplomatist’ who ‘knew the contents of every modern dispatch’ ‘by heart’.

Lyons attained the height of his influence during the premierships of his political ally the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, who offered him the position of Foreign Secretary in 1886.

Lyons is a minor character in the alternate history novel Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove, and in the Southern Victory Series novel The Great War: American Front by Turtledove, in which he is sent to Washington, D.C., after the Battle of Camp Hill, to advise Abraham Lincoln that the United Kingdom and the Second French Empire were to recognise and defend the Confederate States of America, after the Union was decisively defeated in battle.