In this post, Frederick Hyde introduces his new article, ‘Lord Palmerston and Tiverton: Politics, Celebrity and Memory in Victorian Britain’, published this week in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.
The article considers the relationship of the Whig statesman, Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston, with the Devonshire borough of Tiverton, which he represented in parliament for thirty years.
Drawing on recent historical work on celebrity and memory, Frederick highlights the reciprocal relationship between constituency and MP, in which the popular appeal Palmerston cultivated via interactions with his constituency in turn served as a source of fierce local pride.
After Palmerston’s death, the politics of celebrity became intertwined with the politics of memory. Control of the political space now occupied by Palmerston’s legacy emerged as a prerequisite for electoral success for those who followed him.
The article is now available Open Access from Transactions.
Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston, is no stranger to historians. His career, as Whig Foreign Secretary and Liberal Prime Minister, was one of the most brilliant features of the Victorian age.
Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, by Francis Cruikshank, oil on canvas, circa 1855-1859, National Portrait Gallery, public domain CC, BY-NC-ND 3,0
For as long as I have been interested in Victorian Britain, I’ve been fascinated by Palmerston. The truth is that when I was an undergraduate, most Victorian politicians seemed pretty gloomy. However important the repeal of the Corn Laws might have been, it is hard for an eighteen-year-old to be captivated by radicals like John Bright, who was such an intense Quaker that he refused to read Shakespeare because it made him uncomfortable.
But to plunder Shakespeare, Palmerston – like bright metal on a sullen ground – is immediately arresting. ‘Pam’, the rollicking Foreign Office beau sabreur, who delighted the British public with diplomatic triumphs and victory in the Crimean War, towers above his peers.
It is a phase that all Palmerston scholars go through, and most grow out of.
Beneath the frock-coated gunboat there lay a Whig of the Enlightenment school and a sincere liberal reformer,
The interesting part comes when you realise how little the caricature had in common with the man. Beneath the frock-coated gunboat – as historians like my own supervisor, David Brown – have argued, there lay a Whig of the Enlightenment school and a sincere liberal reformer, with a tenacity of purpose that, as the diarist Charles Greville put it, bordered on insanity.
Palmerston opened the civil service to competitive entry, liberalised divorce law reform, and rarely left the office before 1am. He even missed an assassin’s bullet through his habit of running up the stairs to work.
He was also the first major politician to use the mass media to cultivate a popular following. In the age of aristocratic politics, Palmerston lacked the family connections that were needed for success in Westminster. His solution was to use the newspaper press to invent a popular image of himself, which eventually propelled him into Downing Street.
It was inevitable, then, that Palmerston would find a place in my PhD. I work on Victorian election contests. Ever since the ‘linguistic turn’ of the 1990s, Victorian elections – hitherto the private hunting grounds of statisticians – have been used as windows into wider cultural and social issues.
The language of elections can be used to examine how local and national identity was articulated by candidates, voters and non-voters in relation to the issues of the day.
Politics took place in public, and speeches were printed verbatim in newspapers, including the raucous acts of voters and non-voters alike. (I once came across a Conservative rally in Sunderland that was stormed by Quaker pacifists who threw dead rabbits and chestnuts at the speakers). The result is a Pandora’s box for historians of Victorian culture; the language of elections can be used to examine how local and national identity was articulated by candidates, voters and non-voters in relation to the issues of the day.
Palmerston’s constituency, the Devonshire borough of Tiverton, was an obvious case study. It is the relationship between Palmerston and Tiverton that is the subject of my new article – ‘Lord Palmerston and Tiverton: Politics, Celebrity and Memory in Victorian Britain’ – for Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.
Tiverton was an important part of Palmerston’s repertoire. He grasped the importance of addressing the whole nation, not just his constituents, in elections and perfected a means of doing so.
What I seek to do in this article is to illuminate new ways of reading Palmerston, by relating Victorian politics to two emerging historiographical subfields: celebrity and memory.
What I identified in my research, however, was that just as Palmerston used Tiverton, so Tiverton used Palmerston. His celebrity status became a pillar of the borough’s identity.
After his death, Palmerston’s memory became a bitterly contested political space, and elections mutated into arguments over who had the better claim to his legacy. His favourite hotel was renamed the Palmerston Hotel and used as Conservative headquarters, to the outrage of the Tiverton Liberals, who plastered the borough with manifestoes from Palmerston’s ghost: ‘It disturbs me mightily to find that the Hotel which bears my name, and which once was the headquarters of Liberal principles, has now fallen into the hands of the enemy’.
Letter from the late Palmerston from ‘Mount Pleasant, Elysian Fields’, to his Tiverton constituents. The Exeter Express and Echo, 22 October 1872, p. 2
What I seek to do in this article is to illuminate new ways of reading Palmerston, by relating Victorian politics to two emerging historiographical subfields: celebrity and memory.
In recent years, ‘celebrity studies’ has blossomed as its practitioners have overturned assumptions that celebrity culture is a product of the twentieth century. As we now better appreciate, the political use of the past was more contested and constructed than previously assumed.
What I hope to show is that memory was not just about statues and plaques; it had a linguistic accompaniment too. And what truly stands out is that Palmerston was remembered, contested, and eventually transformed into a kind of imagined character, but not for anything he had done for Tiverton, but simply for having been a celebrity.
About the author
Frederick Hyde is a PhD Student and Presidential Scholar at the University of Southampton.
He specialises in Victorian British history, with particular emphasis on the relationship between foreign policy and national identity in the mid-nineteenth century. He studied History at Durham and has a Master’s from the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.
Frederick sits on the Council of the Society for Army Historical Research and has worked as a part-time history lecturer at the University of Bournemouth.
His new article in Transactions is now available Open Access.
Submitting an article to Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
Transactions is the flagship academic journal of the Royal Historical Society, published by Cambridge University Press. Today’s journal publishes a wide range of research articles and commentaries on historical approaches, practice and debate. In addition to traditional 10-12,000 word research articles, Transactions also welcomes shorter, innovative commentary articles. In 2023, we introduced ‘The Common Room’—a section of the journal dedicated to commentaries and think pieces by academic historians and historical practitioners.
The journal welcomes submissions dealing with any geographical area from the early middle ages to the very recent past. The journal’s co-editors and editorial boards are interested in articles that cover entirely new ground, thematically or methodologically, as well as those engaging critically on established themes in existing literatures.
From 2024, all articles accepted for publication in Transactions are published open access, without a charge for any author or reader. This ensures content published in Transactions can be shared, circulated and read by the widest possible readership. We very much hope this initiative will encourage a growing range of submissions from authors, worldwide, including those who practice history outside higher education, in related sectors or as independent researchers.
HEADER IMAGE: Punch, or the London Charivari, 28 March 1857
