Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston

Biography

Henry John Temple was born in Westminster in 1784 into the Anglo-Irish branch of the Temple family. He was educated at Harrow, at the University of Edinburgh, where he studied political economy under Dugald Stewart, and at St John's College, Cambridge. He succeeded his father as Viscount Palmerston in 1802; as an Irish peerage it did not give him a seat in the Lords, and in 1807 he entered the Commons as a Tory.

He was Secretary at War, in charge of army finances, from 1809 to 1828. Moving to the Whigs, he served three terms as Foreign Secretary between 1830 and 1851. He shaped the London Conference that secured an independent Belgium, organised the 1840 London Convention against Muhammad Ali of Egypt, backed the Opium War with China, and in 1850 blockaded Piraeus over the claims of Don Pacifico, defending his whole foreign policy in a celebrated Commons speech.

After serving as Home Secretary under Lord Aberdeen, he became prime minister in 1855 when Aberdeen's coalition fell over the conduct of the Crimean War, and held office from 1855 to 1858 and again from 1859, when he joined the meeting at which the Liberal Party was formed. His second government handled the Trent Affair with the United States. Distrusted by Queen Victoria but popular with the press and public, he died in office in October 1865, the last British prime minister to do so.