dispute went far nearer to a serious rupture, though the hesitation to detain the vessel at Birkenhead in August 1862 was due not to Palmerston or Russell, but to the law officers of the crown. Whatever the sympathies of England for the South, Palmerston actively stimulated the admiralty in its work of suppressing the slave trade.
In 1862 the Ionian Islands were presented to Greece, on Mr. Gladstone's recommendation, although Palmerston had formerly held the opinion that Corfu ought to be retained as an English military station. Apart from a fruitless attempt in 1863 to intercede again for the Poles, and a refusal to enter a European congress suggested by Louis Napoleon for the purpose of revising the treaties of 1815, and thereby opening, as Palmerston feared, a number of dangerous pretensions, the chief foreign question that occupied him during his concluding years was the Danish war. While condemning the king of Denmark's policy towards the Schleswig-Holstein duchies, he thought the action of Prussia and Austria ungenerous and dishonest; but the conference he managed to assemble for the settlement of the dispute broke up when it appeared that neither party could be induced to yield a point; and, in presence of a lukewarm cabinet and the indifference of France and Russia, Palmerston could do little for the weaker side. Challenged by Disraeli on his Danish policy, the premier, then eighty years of age, defended himself with his old vigour, and then turning to the general, and especially the financial, work of the government, ‘played to the score’ by citing the growing prosperity of the country under his administration, with the result that he secured a majority of eighteen. His last important speech in the house was on Irish affairs, on which, as a liberal and active Irish landholder, he had a right to his opinions. He did not believe that legislative remedies or tenant-right could keep the people from emigrating: ‘nothing can do it except the influence of capital.’
For several years before his death Lord Palmerston had been a martyr to gout, which he did not improve by his assiduous attendance at the House of Commons. There, if he seldom made set speeches (his sight had become too weak to read his notes), his ready interposition, unfailing tact and good humour, practical management, and wide popularity on both sides, smoothed away difficulties, kept up a dignified tone, and expedited the business of the house. He refused to give in to old age, kept up his shooting, rode to Harrow and back in the rain when nearly seventy-seven to lay the foundation-stone of the school library, and on his eightieth birthday was on horseback nearly all day inspecting forts at Anglesey, Gosport, and elsewhere. When parliament, having sat for over six years, was dissolved, 6 July 1865, he went down to his constituency and won a contested election. But he never met the new parliament, for a chill caught when driving brought on complications, and he died at his wife's estate, Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire, 18 Oct., within two days of his eighty-first birthday. His official despatch-box and a half-finished letter showed that he died in harness. He had sat in sixteen parliaments, had been a member of every administration, except Peel's and Derby's, from 1807 to 1865, and had held office for all but half a century. He was buried on 27 Oct. with public honours in Westminster Abbey, where he lies near Pitt. Lady Palmerston was laid beside him on her death on 11 Sept. 1869, at the age of eighty-two.
Among the honours conferred upon him, besides the Garter, may be mentioned the grand cross of the Bath (1832), the lord-wardenship of the Cinque ports (1861), lord-rectorship of Glasgow University (1863), and honorary degrees of D.C.L., Oxford (1862), and of LL.D., Cambridge (1864). His title died with him, and his property descended to Lady Palmerston's second son by her first marriage, William Francis Cowper, who added the name of Temple, and was created Baron Mount Temple of Sligo in 1880; and thence devolved to her grandson, the Right Hon. Evelyn Ashley (1836–1908).
Lord Palmerston, as Mr. Ashley points out (ii. 458–9), was a great man rather by a combination of good qualities, paradoxically contrary, than by any special attribute of genius. ‘He had great pluck, combined with remarkable tact; unfailing good temper, associated with firmness almost amounting to obstinacy. He was a strict disciplinarian, and yet ready above most men to make allowance for the weakness and shortcomings of others. He loved hard work in all its details, and yet took a keen delight in many kinds of sport and amusement. He believed in England as the best and greatest country in the world … but knew and cared more about foreign nations than any other public man. He had little or no vanity, and claimed but a modest value for his own abilities; yet no man had a better opinion of his own judgment or was more full of self-confidence.’ He never doubted for an instant, when he had once made up his mind on a subject, that he was right and those who differed from him were hopelessly
