The Deathbed of Lord Palmerston

NOTES

• The Gladstone Diaries, 14 vols (H.C.G. Matthew, ed.) (Oxford, 1968–94), vi, p. 391; Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals (Christopher Hibbert, ed.) (London, 1984), pp. 190–1; Dean Stanley's Recollections, f. 2, quoted in John Wolffe, Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion, and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford, 2000), p. 155.
   Google Scholar
• Wolffe, Great Deaths, pp. 155–6; Morning Post, 28 Oct. 1865.
   Google Scholar
• University of Southampton Special Collections: Broadlands papers, BR63, diary of Evelyn Ashley, 18 Oct. 1865.
   Google Scholar
• Hatfield House, Herts, Diary of Emily, Lady Palmerston, 18 Oct. 1865.
   Google Scholar
• For Protheroe Smith's account, see Broadlands papers, BR22(ii)/22/1: ‘Notes of Conversation with Lord Palmerston and an account of his last moments by Protheroe Smith M.D. Oct 15 & 18. 1865’. (The ‘conversation’ minus the ‘account’ is available in published form in Mabell, Countess of Airlie, Lady Palmerston and Her Times, 2 vols (London, 1922), ii, pp. 175–7.) For Shaftesbury's account, see Broadlands papers, SHA/PD/8, diary of the 7th earl of Shaftesbury, 20 Oct. 1865. (The bulk of this entry is reproduced in Edwin Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G., 3 vols (London, 1886), iii, pp. 185–7.)
   Google Scholar
• For the presence of a valued servant at the deathbed of a later family member, see Georgina Cowper-Temple, Lady Mount Temple, Memorials of William Francis Cowper-Temple, Baron Mount Temple (privately printed, 1890), p. 95. For servants at deathbeds in general, see Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford, 1996), p. 27.
   Google Scholar
• ‘The Last Illness of the Late Premier’, The Lancet, 4 Nov. 1865, p. 521. (For confirmation of Protheroe Smith's authorship of this article, see Smith to editor of The Lancet, 21 Oct. 1865 (copy) in BR22(ii)/22/1.)
   Google Scholar
• ‘Last Illness of the Late Premier’, supplemented by Protheroe Smith, ‘Notes of Conversation’. The list of family members present is taken from Shaftesbury's diary, 20 Oct. 1865. The deduction that Lady Palmerston was not present for the last hours is made from evidence in Mount Temple, Memorials, p. 70, that it was Lady Jocelyn who broke the news to her.
   Google Scholar
• ‘Notes of Conversation’.
   Google Scholar
• Shaftesbury, diary, 20 Oct. 1865, and see generally Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, pp. 78–9.
   Google Scholar
• The Lancet, 12 Oct. 1889, p. 770. See also Protheroe Smith, Scriptural Authority for the Mitigation of the Pains of Labour, by chloroform and other anaesthetic agents (London, 1848).
   Google Scholar
• Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, ch. 1.
   Google Scholar
• Shaftesbury, diary, 20 Oct. 1865.
   Google Scholar
• Protheroe Smith, ‘Notes of Conversation’.
   Google Scholar
• ‘Notes of Conversation’.
   Google Scholar
• Shaftesbury, diary, 20 Oct. 1865.
   Google Scholar
• Protheroe Smith, ‘Notes of Conversation’.
   Google Scholar
• Shaftesbury, diary, 20 Oct. 1865.
   Google Scholar
• Protheroe Smith, ‘Notes of Conversation’.
   Google Scholar
• Cf. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, pp. 34–6.
   Google Scholar
• Protheroe Smith, ‘Notes of Conversation’. Cf. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, ch. 4, esp. pp. 77, 85–6.
   Google Scholar
• BR22(ii)/22/1: ‘Necropsy of the Body of Viscount Palmerston aet. 81, at Brocket Hall Oct. 19. 1865’. It should be noted that this was not a public document in spite of the eminence of the deceased. Indeed, the family seems to have hesitated in permitting publication of any detail of Palmerston's medical history, though the (Protheroe Smith-drafted) account finally published in The Lancet (see note 7 above) did permit the inclusion of clinical detail to a degree refused by the royal family on the death of the Prince Consort in 1861, and refused by the family of ex-prime minister Sir Robert Peel in 1850: Lancet, 11 Jan. 1862, p. 47; 6 July 1850, p. 19. The contrast between all these reports and the open publication of details of the autopsy carried out on William IV in 1837, Lancet, 1 July 1837, is marked. It is no doubt to be explained in part by the greater sense of professional solidarity achieved by the medical profession by mid-Victorian times – The Lancet in 1837 had published as part of a campaign to expose a possible professional ‘cover-up’ – and also by greater squeamishness about revealing details of ‘the pain-wracked body’, a squeamishness which by 1868 was to lead to the end of public executions in England, for example: V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 589–611. See also Karen Halttunen, ‘Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture’, American Historical Review, 100 (1995), pp. 303–34.
   Google Scholar
• Shaftesbury, diary, 20 Oct. 1865 (repr. in Hodder, Shaftesbury, iii, p. 186).
   Google Scholar
• For Georgina's account of Fanny breaking the news of death to Lady Palmerston, see Mount Temple, Memorials, p. 70. Cf. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, p. 26, on the role of pain in ‘the evangelical good death’. For Shaftesbury's relief at Lady Palmerston's reaction (‘a holy and subdued sorrow without bitterness and repining … so far as I could see’), see Shaftesbury, diary, 20 Oct. 1865. Lady Palmerston's antipathy to evangelical religion must have been well known in family circles. See, for example, her admonition to her son after he attempted to challenge Lady Holland on theological matters over dinner: BR43/3/6, Lady Palmerston to William Cowper [?Oct. 1845]: ‘It is useless to try and convert people …. I do not like the new fangled Notions of the present day and I cannot bear that Religion instead of being a comfort and a consolation should be made a terror and a torment.. The religious affectations of the present day provoke me.’ Unlike Lady Holland, however, Lady Palmerston had a firm belief in an afterlife, as she also made plain in her letter to William. Her objection was to the evangelical assumption that the Almighty required abject confession of human sinfulness to become qualified for it: ‘I should be miserable if I did not believe that all those I have loved so much in this world and who are now gone before me to Eternity – are enjoying everlasting happiness as a reward for their Virtues & well spent lives. – I believe this, I trust to it entirely, and I am convinced that the goodness and mercy of God is unbounded.’ (I have dated this letter on the provisional assumption that it is the ‘last kind letter’ referred to in BR43/16/1, William Cowper to ‘Dearest Mum’ (draft), 1 Nov. 1845.)
   Google Scholar
• British Library Add MS 45799, f. 160, Florence Nightingale papers, Georgina Cowper to Nightingale [30 Oct. 1865]. See also ff. 149–50, the same to the same, 24 Oct. 1865. For the parable of the good servant, see Luke 19:17. The reference to Palmerston's trust in God's ‘righteous laws' is a response to Nightingale's specific recall of ‘his letter to Edinburgh (about the Cholera) [1853] as the most religious of human words': Add MS 45799, ff. 151–5, Florence Nightingale to Georgina Cowper (draft) [?27 Oct. 1865]. The Edinburgh letter, controversial in its time, appeared to some evangelicals (though not to Lord Shaftesbury) to marginalize the role of providence in human affairs by urging sanitary action against contagious disease in preference to a public fast day: John Wolffe, ‘Lord Palmerston and Religion: A Reappraisal’, English Historical Review, cxx (no. 488) (2005), pp. 916–17.
   Google Scholar
• BR51/1, ‘Accounts of Séances 1861–1877’, 1 Dec. 1866.
   Google Scholar
• Diary of Emily, Lady Palmerston, 18 Oct. 1866 and 18 Oct. 1867. For Lady Palmerston's full explanation of her belief in the availability of an afterlife of reunion to those leading ‘well spent lives', see note 24 above.
   Google Scholar
• Record, 30 Oct. 1865, p. 2; 6 Nov. 1865, p. 3. For Shaftesbury's briefing of the editor of The Record, see Hodder, Shaftesbury, iii, pp. 184–5; and BR33/6, Lady Palmerston to William Cowper, n.d. [most likely late Oct. 1865]. An additional source of irritation to some evangelicals was Dean Stanley's failure to mention Palmerston's religious faith in his valedictory sermon. The Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue lists three published sermons in correction of this oversight: Robert H. Baynes, ‘Man, being in honour, abideth not’: A Sermon on the Death of the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston (London, 1865); W. Conway, The Victory over Death: A Sermon Preached in Westminster Abbey, on Sunday Morning, October 29th, 1865, after the Funeral of the Late Viscount Palmerston (London, 1865); R.W. Dibdin, The Patriot Palmerston: Was He Saved? (London, 1865). For a report of Stanley's sermon, see The Times, 30 Oct. 1865, p. 10.
   Google Scholar
• John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1981), p. 2. Cf. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, ch. 8.
   Google Scholar
• Kenneth Bourne, Palmerston: The Early Years 1784–1841 (London, 1982), ch. V, esp. pp. 201–3.
   Google Scholar
• Disraeli, Derby, and the Conservative Party: Journals and Memoirs of Edward Henry, Lord Stanley, 1849–1869 (John Vincent, ed.) (Hassocks, 1978), p. 241 (my italics).
   Google Scholar
• E.g. BR50/24, Palmerston to William Cowper, 14 June 1844; Mount Temple, Memorials, p. 71. Note, however, the entry in Lady Palmerston's diary for 5 Sept. 1843, indicating earlier hopes of William inheriting Broadlands as Palmerston's beneficiary.
   Google Scholar
• Hodder, Shaftesbury, iii, p. 189.
   Google Scholar
• The first ‘last words' are cited by David Steele in his article on Palmerston in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols (Oxford, 2004) on the authority of E. Latham, Famous Sayings (London, 1904). It may be a reworking of the words reported by Georgina Cowper for ‘Sunday’ [15 Oct. 1865], Mount Temple, Memorials, p. 70: ‘The improvement continues …. [H]e is quite himself, often drolly so. When Doctor W. was giving him some medicine, he asked, “How shall I give it to you, my Lord; in a glass or in a spoon?” “Or not at all?” said Lord Palmerston.’ The second ‘last words' are cited by Jasper Ridley in his standard biography, Palmerston (London, 1970), p. 583, relying on Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, 2 vols (J.K. Laughton, ed.) (London, 1898), ii, pp. 119–20. (Reeve's source was Dr Thomas Watson, who was indeed present during the final stage of events.) A variant version is set out in an undated but contemporary fragment in the hand of Florence Nightingale (BL Add MS 45799, f. 162): ‘His last conscious words were (on Tuesday even[in]g): “That Belgium Treaty, it must be signed – yes, read me again the sixth clause”.’ For general discussion of the significance of ‘last words' in the evangelical death, see Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, pp. 33–7.
   Google Scholar
• Wolffe, ‘Lord Palmerston and Religion’, pp. 907–36, esp. pp. 907–8, 925, 931, 936. See also Geoffrey B.A.M. Finlayson, The Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, 1801–1885 (London, 1981), pp. 378–85; Nigel Scotland, ‘Good and Proper Men’: Lord Palmerston and the Bench of Bishops (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 21–36.
   Google Scholar
• See, e.g., BR43/25/2, William Cowper to Georgina Cowper, H[ome] O[ffice], Sat. [1855]: ‘He [Palmerston] asked me last night what was meant by saying that Ryle is so very low Church: I explained as well as I c[ou]ld – and when he saw that Ryle is of the same views as the three preachers he has had at Romsey he felt very averse to appointing him.’ (Romsey Abbey was the ‘parish church’ of Broadlands. J.C. Ryle, the evangelical clergyman referred to, eventually became bishop of Liverpool in 1880.)
   Google Scholar
• Bourne, Palmerston, pp. 33–5.
   Google Scholar
• D.L. LeMahieu, The Mind of William Paley (Lincoln, NE, 1976), pp. 82–90.
   Google Scholar
• BR50/24, Palmerston to William Cowper, 2 Sept. 1843 (capitalization as in original).
   Google Scholar
• William Paley, Natural Theology (Charlottesville, VA, repr. of 12th edn, 1809), ch. XXVI, ‘The goodness of the Deity’, esp. pp. 526, 541–2. For appraisal of the persisting nineteenth-century appeal of the work among certain intellectual elites, see LeMahieu, Paley, pp. 168ff.
   Google Scholar
• BR50/24, Palmerston to William Cowper, 11 Aug. 1856. For the significance of Palmerston's distinction between English and German variants of ‘rational’ religion as an indicator of his awareness of some general aspects of current theological debate, see Tod E. Jones, The Broad Church: A Biography of a Movement (Lanham, MD, 2003), pp. 133–4, 153–4.
   Google Scholar
• Mount Temple, Memorials, p. 69. For the ‘plurality of worlds' debate and its literature of the 1850s and 1860s, see David Clifford, ‘Re-imagining Heaven: Victorian Lunar Studies and the Anxiety of Loneliness', in David Clifford, Elisabeth Wadge, Alex Warwick and Martin Willis (eds), Repositioning Victorian Sciences: Shifting Centres in Nineteenth-century Scientific Thinking (London, 2006), pp. 171–81, 244–5.
   Google Scholar