Constituency : Tavistock 1813-7, 1818-20 Huntingdonshire 1820-6, Bandon 1826-30, Tavistock 1830-1, Devonshire 1831-2, Devonshire South 1832-5, Stroud 1835-41, City of London 1841-61
Now we come to our first Prime Minister. Lord John is a perplexing case. To those with a casual interest in Victorian history he ( along with Derby ) is one of those shadowy figures who filled in the gaps between the real titans of the era Peel, Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli who remain household names. Anyone who really studies the era will realise that Lord John was a colossus who was at the centre of politics for nearly half a century.
Lord John was a younger son of the Duke of Bedford's heir; the "Lord" was a courtesy title. He was born prematurely and remained small and somewhat frail all his life. The Russells were the ultimate Whigs , conscious of their history of resistance to royal encroachment stemming from James II. He went to Edinburgh University. He was given the family borough of Tavistock at 21. He travelled in Europe and met Napoleon in 1814.
In 1821 Lord John managed to push through the disenfranchisement of the notorious rotten borough of Grampound beginning his long association with the cause of parliamentary reform. In 1822 his speech declaring that "The votes of the House of Commons no longer imply the general assent of the realm" galvanised the Reform movement but cost him his seat in 1826. He returned for the Irish seat of Bandon and in 1828 successfully moved the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts.
In 1830 Lord John joined Grey's government as Paymaster of the Forces and sat on a committee to draw up a reform bill. It was Lord John's diligence and energy that produced the scheme accepted by the Cabinet in 1831 and he was entrusted the task of introducing it. When the Commons tried to amend it Grey went to the country. The Reformers won a large majority and Lord John was promoted to the Cabinet. In the course of the struggle to get the Bill through the Lords , Lord John managed to upset William IV by describing them as the "whisper of a faction ... against the voice of a nation".
The passage of the First Reform Act was a considerable personal triumph for Lord John. For the next decade he regarded it as foolproof and earned the nickname "Finality Jack" for his complacent assumption that no further extension of the franchise would ever be necessary. He now turned his attention to Ireland where he advocated the abolition of church tithes; this led to a Cabinet split with Stanley and three others resigning and eventually going over to the Tories. In 1834 the Whig government was dismissed because William IV refused to accept Lord John as Leader of the Commons.
As a result of the Tory advance in the 1835 election, Lord John was given leave to organise the Lichfield House meeting to discuss co-operation with the Radicals and Irish MPs, the first tentative steps towards forming the Liberal party. This new alliance succeeded in bringing down Peel over his Irish tithes bill. John became Home Secretary in Melbourne's new administration. He had a good relationship with the premier. He ameliorated the sentence of the Tolpuddle martyrs and steered the Municipal Corporation Act into being. He also had some success in Ireland. The Lords frustrated his attempts to abolish the tithes but Lord John retaliated by refusing the use of troops or police to enforce collection. He also took steps to discourage membership of the Orange lodges. In 1839 he switched to Secretary of State for the Colonies where his main task was the 1840 Union bill with Canada.
In 1841 Peel finally got his majority and formed a stable government. Lord John and Melbourne disagreed on how aggressively to oppose him and gradually the former prevailed. In 1844 he pushed Peel into a more liberal policy in Ireland and supported him over the Maynooth grant. In 1845 he voted for full repeal of the corn laws, worried that Peel would outflank him, in defiance of his shadow cabinet colleagues. The Irish potato famine justified his tactics. Peel resigned after failing to get his Cabinet to agree on repeal. the Queen recognised Lord John's ascendancy by sending for him rather than Melbourne but John's first attempt to form a government failed over disagreements between Palmerston and Earl Grey.
Lord John supported Peel's repeal of the Corn Laws then voted with the protectionists on the Irish coercion bill. Thus did he in a rather tawdry fashion become Prime Minister for the first time. Lord John was fully aware of the Whigs' minority status and immediately invited three Peelites to join his government but they declined. It had therefore to be a purely Whig government largely of people who'd served under Melbourne. It is not generally regarded as a successful government. It struggled to deal with the Irish famine; the sort of relief that was needed conflicted with the interests of the Irish landowners in the Cabinet and Lord John's own commitment to laissez-faire economics. He further antagonised the Irish with his infamous "Durham letter" and subsequent Ecclesisatical Titles Act an hysterical over-reaction to the Pope's organisation of a Catholic hierarchy in Britain. The government did have the Ten Hours Act and a decent Education Act to its credit.
Lord John was proud and unswerving in his conviction that a Russell should be at the centre of things. At the same time he was a shy man who preferred a quiet life at home to political entertaining, something that put him at a profound disadvantage when jostling for power with Palmerston. He was self-absorbed and liable to lapses in manners particularly when dealing with the queen.. He was intellectually gifted and quick to appreciate the nub of a problem but this made him insensitive to others' opinions. He spoke and wrote plainly, his letters and dispatches notable for their brevity but prone to misunderstanding. He was disorganised and often mislaid documents or failed to keep appointments.
Lord John was very sensitive to threats to his own position as leader of the progressive forces in the Commons. His main concern was Peel who let the government continue with a sort of benign contempt , occasionally giving help behind the scenes such as helping counter a financial crisis in 1847. After Peel's death it was Palmerston who occupied his thoughts. While his government faltered on the domestic front, his foreign secretary was attracting radical plaudits for his support of liberal movements abroad. After his extraordinary triumph in the Don Pacifico affair he became a real threat and Lord John who had stoutly defended his minister against royal complaints now connived with the Court to dismiss him, ostensibly for recognising Louis Napoleon's coup in 1851 without consulting Court or colleagues. Palmerston immediately retaliated by mustering enough support to bring the government down on a militia bill, his famous "tit for tat with Johnny Russell".
For the rest of the decade the two men were locked in a rivalry for leadership of the "liberal party" although the majority of its MPs were committed to neither of them. Lord John soon found out how his position had weakened after the 1852 election when a number of previous colleagues including Palmerston made clear they would not serve under him when Derby's government went out. His brother Bedford arranged a meeting at Woburn which led to a coalition government under the Peelite Lord Aberdeen. Lord John accepted office as Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House but soon relinquished the former office.
Lord John was very unhappy with the Coalition from the start and repeatedly complained that the Whigs as the largest party should be better represented. Aberdeen struggled to keep him happy first with a vague promise that he would step aside for him at the first opportunity and then the concession that Lord John could proceed with a new Reform Bill despite the approaching conflict with Russia. At the same time Palmerston was strengthening his own position with liberal reforms at the Home Office and generally being a better behaved colleague. John's reputation hit rock bottom when he resigned as Leader of the House rather than defend his government's handling of the Crimean War against Roebuck's motion for an inquiry, a move that appalled most members. Aberdeen resigned and the queen blamed Lord John.
This left the way clear for Palmerston who refused to serve under Derby or Lord John. Once in place he acted on his Foreign Secretary Clarendon's suggestion to send Lord John as an envoy to the peace conference at Vienna. While there he accepted Palmerston's offer of the Colonial Office after the Peelites' resignation from the government. However Lord John was not a skilled diplomat and after the faux pas of accepting an Austrian proposal without authorisation he had to resign. In 1857 he joined the Tories in colluding with Cobden to bring Palmerston down over China. Unlike Cobden he managed to retain his seat and this allowed him to mount a political comeback. He did not attack Palmerston over the Conspiracy to Murder Bill. He then tried to amend rather than oppose Derby's Reform Bill. Derby went to the country rather than accept the changes and improved the Tories' position.
It was now imperative that Palmerston and Russell came to some understanding; ; other politicians mainly from the Peelites had been working to this end for the past year. At the Willis' Tea Room meeting of 1859 the two men agreed to turn Derby out and leave the queen to choose which of them would be Prime Minister, each agreeing to serve under the other. The queen was appalled at the choice between the "two terrible old men" and asked Lord Granville instead. Palmerston was more adroit in responding to this manoeuvre ensuring that he was asked next.
Lord John , given a free choice, elected to be Foreign Secretary despite his Austrian embarrassment. Palmerston made appropriate concessions to his vanity but by and large kept his own hand on the tiller. Lord John is well remembered in Italy for his famous dispatch welcoming unification and he shared in Palmerston's embarrassment over Schleswig-Holstein. In 1861 he was created Earl Russell and went to the Lords.
In 1865 after a triumphant election Palmerston finally died and Lord John got his chance to be Prime Minister again after 13 years, the longest gap between any two terms in that office to this day. He freshened up the Cabinet with some younger faces .Both he and Gladstone ( now Leader in the Commons ) were well aware that they were working with Palmerston's majority and it would not automatically transfer to them. Nevertheless at 75 Lord John was the archetypal "old man in a hurry" and they proceeded to present a moderate Reform Bill. Unfortunately Lord John had already made his final mistake His accession back to the premiership had been greeted with a coruscating article in The Times written by one of his own MPs, the prickly but able Robert Lowe. He had been a minister under Palmerston but was passed over by Lord John and joined a small faction of malcontents the Adullamites. It was Lowe's brilliantly argued speeches that brought the Bill down and with it Lord John's career.
Although Lord John remained Leader of the Opposition until the general election of 1868 he played little effective part in the ferment over the Second Reform Act and let it be known that he was not interested in seeking office again. As a result the queen sent for Gladstone after the 1868 election. He declined a Cabinet seat without office. He gave Gladstone the odd headache with cranky crticisms but the PM was able to shrug these off as evidence of increasing infirmity. He took care to acknowledge Lord John's antecedents in education and Irish matters and visited him in his last illness.
Lord John had to suffer the deaths of his wife and son before he himself passed away in May 1878 aged 85.
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