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Cheryl Bolen
The second Viscount Palmerston (1739-1802),
whose son served as Prime Minister in the 1850s and 1860s, exemplified the late
Georgian aristocracy. He served for many years in the House of Commons and was
at the center of society. He traveled extensively abroad, always with an eye to
adopting Continental architecture and artifacts into his own beloved
Broadlands, his country home in Hampshire.
What makes him stand apart from other
effulgent aristocrats of his day, though, is the rich legacy of letters
(1,400), travel journals and appointment books (100 books) he left behind —
some million words in all, a sixth of which is presented in Connell’s work.
It was through a most circuitous path that
these papers saw publication. Since the Prime Minister Lord Palmerston had no
legitimate issue, Broadlands fell to the second son of Palmerston’s wife, the
widow of Lord Cowper, whom Palmerston did not marry until she was fifty. That
son, William Cowper (said to have been sired by Palmerston), left no issue, so
Broadlands passed to the second son of his niece, Evelyn Ashley. The estate
eventually passed to Ashley’s granddaughter, who became the Countess
Mountbatten.
The Countess Mountbatten found the papers
at Broadlands in the mid 1900's while renovating the mansion and asked Brian Connell
to edit them. His labors resulted in Portrait of a Golden Age: Intimate Papers of
the Second Viscount Palmerston, Courtier under George III, published in
1958.
Critic Virginia Kirkus said their discovery “rates with the Boswell papers and the Walpole letters, and that recaptures a personality and period as vividly as does Cecil’s Melbourne.”
From Palmerston’s engagement diaries, it is
possible to know with whom he had dinner every night of his adult life. His
range of friendships included an astonishing roster of the great names of his
era from Voltaire to Lady Hamilton to Prinny. His works are rich with records
of prices he paid for items as well as serving as a glossary of medicinals of
the era. Palmerston himself prefaced his diaries, “As these books may be
considered as the anals of a man’s life, and may be of use even after his
decease, they ought by all means to be preserved.”
Few of the entries are intensely personal,
but the following one chronicles the death of his first wife, who died in
childbed two years after their marriage:
Lady Palmerston was taken ill
with a feverish complaint. Two days afterwards she was brought to bed of a dead
child. She was tolerably well for some days, but a fever came on suddenly which
made a most rapid progress and on the fatal 1st of June terminated
the existence of a being by far the most perfect I have ever known; of one who
possessing worth, talents, temper and understanding superior to most persons of
either sex, never during my whole connection with her spoke a word or did an
act I could wished to alter.
These diaries shed so much light on the
practices of the day. For example, weddings were no big deal. Families often
did not attend. The well-placed Lord Palmerston wrote the following to his
mother prior to his first marriage:
I should have wrote to you a
little sooner but could not have given you any certain notice of the time of my
being married, but have the pleasure to tell you that before you read this, you
will in all probability have a most amiable daughter-in-law, as I believe I
shall be married tomorrow.
We should all give thanks to Countess
Mountbatten and to Brian Connell for giving us such a work.
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