Allusion has been made to the pride which Lord Palmerston took in the Quadruple Alliance. The Quadruple Alliance was a compact made between England, France, Spain, and Portugal, for preserving the thrones of Spain and Portugal on behalf of Isabella and Maria, and defending the two Princesses from the machinations of their uncles, Don Carlos and Don Miguel. That the two Princesses were the legitimate heirs to the thrones need not now, specially in England, be more than stated. But the collateral object was to ensure freedom under the rule of the two Queens, instead of despotism, with all its bitterness, under the two Kings. That at least was Lord Palmerston’s object; though, when we come to the story of the Spanish marriages, we shall find that Louis Philippe had a further object of his own. For some account of the kind of misery to be looked for under Don Miguel, to whom Palmerston was specially hostile, I may refer my readers to an article in the _Edinburgh Review_ of September, 1831, on the condition of Portugal.
In looking back at Lord Palmerston’s career, and the entire success of his political life, we have to own that it was due to the teaching, or rather to the genius, of Mr. Canning. He had fallen into Mr. Canning’s hands, and though without that fine intellect which would have enabled him to imitate the lessons which he had so learned, he was quick enough to perceive their merit, and wise enough to follow them, whether he were called Whig or Tory. Canning died, and in carrying out his lessons Palmerston had become a member of Lord Grey’s Cabinet. It was not much to him whether men called him Whig or Tory. But he saw the wisdom of going still on; and whether he were Member for the University which demanded a Tory to represent it, or for his own county, which afterwards in turn again repudiated him, or for the borough of Tiverton, where he could be one or the other, he remained always true to the precepts of the school which he had adopted. “A Tory Government,” he says, writing to his brother, in June, 1833, “is an utter impossibility in the present state of the public feeling; the country would not stand it.” Then he goes on to speak of what he and the Cabinet had just done for the abolition of slavery. “To be sure, we give the West Indians a tolerably good compensation. I really believe that the twenty millions which are to be voted for them are about the whole value of all the estates at the present market price; so that they will receive nearly the value of their estates, and keep their estates into the bargain. I must say it is a splendid instance of generosity and justice, unexampled in the history of the world, to see a nation (for it is the national will, and not merely the resolve of the Government or the Parliament) emancipate seven hundred and fifty thousand slaves, and pay twenty millions sterling to their owners as compensation for the loss they will sustain. People sometimes are greatly generous at the expense of others, but it is not often that men are found to pay so high a price for the luxury of doing a noble action.”