Lord Palmerston poses severe quantitative problems to biographers. His public life covered a huge span. Born in 1784, the year Dr Johnson died, he was nine years younger than Jane Austen and four years Byron’s senior. He died in 1865, the year Kipling, Yeats and Northcliffe were born. To put it another way, when he was a baby Reynolds was painting Mrs Siddons; when he died Manet was showing his ‘Olympia’, and Tolstoy had just published War and Peace.
His long life was crowded with incessant political activity. He was on the Board of Admiralty in 1807, aged 23, even before he had a seat in parliament. He was an MP, with one or two brief interruptions, the rest of his life — a total of 59 years — and for 50 years a minister, including 17 years as Foreign Secretary, three as Home Secretary and ten as Prime Minister, dying in office, like his original mentors, Pitt and Canning.
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