John Russell, 1st Earl Russell

• 1. Introduction

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  John Russell, 1st Earl Russell stood barely five feet five inches tall, and his political opponents never let him forget it. Caricaturists made sport of his slight frame throughout a career that spanned four decades. Yet this small man introduced a bill in March 1831 that changed the shape of British democracy forever, and he did it as a minister who was not even in the Cabinet.

  He was born two months premature on the 18th of August 1792, the third son of the 6th Duke of Bedford, into a family that had anchored the Whig political tradition since the 17th century. From that perch of inherited privilege, Russell spent a lifetime trying to dismantle the system that had produced him. He pushed through the Reform Act 1832, reduced capital offences from thirty-seven to sixteen, introduced civil marriage, championed Catholic emancipation, and fought to extend the vote to industrial cities that had never sent a representative to Parliament.

  He also twice became Prime Minister, and twice found the job beyond his grip. During his first term, a million people died in Ireland and another million fled. During his second, he split his own party and was forced from office by the very reform bill he had staked his reputation on. Charles Dickens dedicated A Tale of Two Cities to him and declared there was no man in England he respected more. Queen Victoria, on his death in 1878, called him impulsive, selfish, vain, and reckless. Both assessments, in their way, were accurate.

  How did a man of such genuine principle leave behind such a mixed record? That question runs through everything that follows.

• 2. The Making of a Reformer

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  At the age of nine, in 1801, Russell was sent away to school. Shortly after his departure, his mother died. It was the first of many early disruptions. Ill health pulled him out of Westminster School in 1804, and tutors took over, among them Edmund Cartwright. By 1806, his father had become Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in the Ministry of All the Talents, and it was in that brief window that the boy met Charles James Fox.

  Fox became Russell's political hero, an inspiration he would carry for the rest of his life. Russell eventually wrote a three-volume biography of Fox, published between 1859 and 1866, and edited four volumes of Fox's correspondence. The attachment was not merely intellectual. Fox embodied a tradition of Whig liberty that Russell absorbed early and never abandoned.

  At the University of Edinburgh, from 1809 to 1812, Russell lodged with Professor John Playfair, who oversaw his studies. He left without a degree. He also held a commission as Captain in the Bedfordshire Militia in 1810 and visited Spain, where his brother was serving as aide-de-camp to Lord Wellington. In December 1814, on a continental tour, he secured a ninety-minute audience with Napoleon at Elba.

  By the time Russell entered the House of Commons in 1813, he was twenty years old, technically underage, and abroad when his father instructed Tavistock's thirty or so electors to return him as their MP. He entered Parliament not out of burning ambition but out of a sense of duty and family tradition. The Whigs had been out of power since 1783, and a ministerial career must have seemed a distant prospect. Within eighteen years he would be steering the most important piece of legislation in British parliamentary history through the Commons.

• 3. Architect of Reform

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  In 1819, six years after entering Parliament, Russell embraced parliamentary reform and placed himself at the head of the Whig party's reformist wing. When the Whigs finally came to power in 1830, he entered Earl Grey's government as Paymaster of the Forces, a relatively junior post. Grey nonetheless chose him as one of a committee of four to draft the Reform Act 1832, alongside Lord Durham, Lord Duncannon, and Sir James Graham.

  Still outside the Cabinet, Russell was the one chosen to introduce the bill to the House in March 1831, and he steered it through a year of difficult progress. The Act was the first major reform of Parliament since the Restoration. It extended the vote to the middle classes and gave representation to Britain's growing industrial towns and cities. Russell drew the line there. He never advocated universal suffrage, and he opposed the secret ballot throughout his career.

  The nickname he earned for his efforts was not flattering. He was called "Finality Jack" after declaring the Act a final measure. The label proved ironic. By the 1850s he was again pressing for electoral reform, and his second premiership would collapse precisely because he pushed too hard for another bill.

  In 1828, before the Reform Act was even drafted, Russell had already secured a significant legal change by introducing a Sacramental Test bill that abolished prohibitions on Catholics and Protestant dissenters holding civil and military offices. The bill won the backing of Tory Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel and passed into law. It was characteristic of Russell's career that a measure he championed as a backbench opposition MP could attract support from across the aisle.

• 4. The Home Secretary's Record

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  When Melbourne's second government was announced on the 20th of April 1835, Russell took office as Home Secretary. He had just lost his home constituency in Devonshire to strong Tory campaigning, and a new seat had to be found for him at Stroud by persuading Charles Richard Fox to step down. On the 19th of May he was elected again and took his place in time.

  The record Russell built at the Home Office was one of the more consequential in that office's history. He recommended and secured conditional royal pardons for the Tolpuddle Martyrs. In October 1835 he published plans for prison reform and appointed the first official prison inspectors. The 1836 Marriages Act introduced civil marriages in England and Wales and allowed Catholics and Protestant Dissenters to marry in their own churches.

  Between 1837 and 1841, he steered a series of seven Acts through Parliament that reduced the number of offences carrying a death sentence from thirty-seven to sixteen. The Substitution of Punishments of Death Act 1841 reduced the number further still. After these reforms, the death penalty was rarely applied in the United Kingdom for crimes other than murder.

  Some of the cases Russell handled as the last official receiver of pleas for mercy from those condemned to death would be revisited much later. James Pratt and John Smith were among those whose cases, in the 21st century, led to posthumous pardons. Russell also introduced public registration for births, marriages, and deaths, and played a significant role in democratising city government outside London. As Secretary of State for War and the Colonies from 1839 to 1841, he extended his ministerial reach further before the Whigs lost the 1841 general election and he returned to opposition.

• 5. The Irish Famine

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  Russell took office as Prime Minister in 1846 with the Whigs a minority in the House of Commons, sustained in power by Peelite support. The Irish Famine was already under way. During the course of the crisis, an estimated one million people died from malnutrition, disease, and starvation, and well over one million more emigrated from Ireland. The loss amounted to roughly a quarter of Ireland's population.

  Russell's own words from 1846 offer a measure of the catastrophe. He reported to Parliament that in one year more than fifty thousand Irish families had been "turned out of their wretched dwellings without pity and without refuge," and he declared that "we have made it the most degraded and most miserable country in the world...all the world is crying shame upon us."

  His government's initial response was a programme of public works that by the end of 1846 employed some half a million people, but proved impossible to administer. In January 1847 the government abandoned it and turned instead to a combination of workhouse relief under the Irish Poor Laws and outdoor soup kitchen distribution. The Poor Law Extension Act of June 1847 established the principle that Irish property should support Irish poverty, shifting costs onto local landlords. Some of those landlords responded by evicting tenants to reduce their liability.

  Russell himself was sympathetic to the suffering of the Irish poor, and many of his relief proposals were blocked by his cabinet or by Parliament. The historical verdict has been harsh nonetheless. His government's response is now widely regarded as counterproductive, ill-informed, and disastrous. The famine's shadow fell across every subsequent dimension of his first term, including his handling of Irish political opinion, which he continued to misjudge in ways that would eventually bring down his government.

• 6. Palmerston and the Cost of Alliance

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  Lord Palmerston served as Russell's Foreign Secretary during the first premiership, and the relationship was one of the most combustible in Victorian politics. In 1847, Palmerston provoked France by undermining Spanish royal marriage plans. He clashed with Russell over proposals to enlarge the army and navy against an anticipated French threat. In 1850, his gunboat diplomacy over the Don Pacifico affair, in which he demanded compensation from Greece for the burning of the house of David Pacifico, a Gibraltarian British passport holder, brought the two men into open conflict.

  Russell considered the matter "hardly worth the interposition of the British lion," and privately told Palmerston the Queen had been informed that the country's interests required a change at the Foreign Department. Less than a month later, however, the House of Lords passed a censure motion over the affair, and Russell realised he needed Palmerston's popularity to prevent the Commons from following suit. The government survived, and Palmerston emerged at the height of his public standing.

  The break came on the 2nd of December 1851, when Palmerston recognised Napoleon III's coup without consulting the Queen or the Cabinet. Russell forced him out of the Foreign Office. The revenge was swift. Palmerston turned a militia bill vote into a confidence motion, and a majority for his amendment on the 21st of February 1852 brought down Russell's ministry. Palmerston called it his "tit for tat with Johnny Russell."

  Yet the two men eventually rebuilt their relationship. From 1859 onward, their renewed alliance formed one of the foundations of the united Liberal Party. Their Palmerston cabinet of that year is generally regarded as the first true Liberal cabinet, and the party they helped forge would go on to dominate British politics in the decades that followed.

• 7. The Durham Letter and Catholic England

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  On the 4th of November 1850, Russell sent a letter to the Bishop of Durham, published in The Times the same day, responding to Pope Pius IX's bull Universalis Ecclesiae. The bull had unilaterally reintroduced Catholic bishops to England and Wales for the first time since the Reformation. In his letter, Russell declared that the Pope's actions suggested a "pretension to supremacy" and that "no foreign prince or potentate will be permitted to fasten his fetters upon a nation which has so long and so nobly vindicated its right to freedom of opinion, civil, political, and religious."

  The letter won Russell popular applause in England. In Ireland it was read as an unwarranted insult to the Pope. Irish Repealer MPs withdrew their confidence in him, and his cabinet was angered that he had issued such a statement without consultation. The tension pointed to a recurring pattern: Russell's instinct for a dramatic public gesture that played well in England but damaged his parliamentary position.

  His record on Catholicism was genuinely complex. He had championed Catholic emancipation in the 1820s, had proposed a grant of three hundred and forty thousand pounds annually to the Catholic Church in Ireland, and had pressed for the restoration of formal diplomatic relations between Britain and the Holy See, severed since James II was deposed in 1688. He managed to pass an Act authorising an exchange of ambassadors with Rome, but Parliament amended it to require that the Pope's representative be a layman. The Pope refused that restriction, and the exchange never occurred. Formal UK-Vatican diplomatic relations would not be established until 1914.

  The following year, Russell passed the Ecclesiastical Titles Act 1851, which made it a criminal offence carrying a fine of one hundred pounds for anyone outside the Church of England to assume an episcopal title in the United Kingdom. The Act was largely ignored and further alienated Irish MPs, whose votes he could no longer afford to lose.

• 8. Legacy and the Philosopher's Grandson

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  Following the death of his son Viscount Amberley in 1876 and his daughter-in-law Viscountess Amberley in 1874, Russell and his wife raised their orphaned grandchildren at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park, the home Queen Victoria had granted to the family in 1847. One of those grandchildren was Bertrand Russell, who would become one of the most noted philosophers of the twentieth century. In later life Bertrand recalled his elderly grandfather as "a kindly old man in a wheelchair."

  Earl Russell died at Pembroke Lodge on the 28th of May 1878. The Prime Minister, the Earl of Beaconsfield, offered a public funeral and burial at Westminster Abbey. Countess Russell declined, in accordance with her husband's wish to be buried among his family. He is buried at the Bedford Chapel at St. Michael's Church, Chenies, Buckinghamshire.

  Historians have weighed him unevenly. A. J. P. Taylor credited his persistent battles in Parliament on behalf of the expansion of liberty. E. L. Woodward argued he was too much the abstract theorist, more concerned with removing obstacles to civil liberty than with building a more civilised society. Queen Victoria, recording his death in her journal, called him a man of much talent who was also impulsive, vain, and reckless. Anthony Trollope reportedly took him as the model for the politician Mr. Mildmay, and aspects of his character may have suggested those of Plantagenet Palliser. Trollope's ideal statesman, he wrote, should have an inexhaustible love of country, but should also be "scrupulous, and, as being scrupulous, weak."

  Charles Dickens dedicated A Tale of Two Cities to Lord John Russell "in remembrance of many public services and private kindnesses." In a speech in 1869, Dickens said there was no man in England he respected more in his public capacity, or loved more in his private capacity. The town of Russell in New Zealand's Northland Region was named in his honour during his time as Secretary of State for the Colonies, one small trace of a ministerial career that reached across four decades and left its mark on British life in ways that outlasted the man himself.