John George Lambton, 1st earl of Durham, also called (1828–33) Baron Durham, (born April 12, 1792, London—died July 28, 1840, Cowes, Isle of Wight, Eng.), British reformist Whig statesman sometimes known as “Radical Jack,” governor-general and lord high commissioner of Canada, and nominal author of the Report on the Affairs of British North America (1839), which for many years served as a guide to British imperial policy.
In mid-1835, the Whig government of Lord Melbourne decided that a new ambassador was needed in St Petersburg – there having been no British ambassador there since 1832 – and Durham was the obvious choice, especially for a government anxious to remove such a ‘loose cannon’ from British politics. Shelving his ambition to be Foreign Secretary, a post taken by a safer pair of hands in the person of Lord Palmerston, Durham accepted the appointment, although he wrote:
"I am put out of the pale of home politics. In this foreign field I may do some good, as I have considerable influence with the Emperor and may establish a better state of things between the two countries."
Durham was ordered to proceed to St Petersburg via the Black Sea and to take with him in his entourage naval and military observers whose task it was to note and assess Russian naval and military capabilities. His journey took him to another new European kingdom – Greece – recently emerged from another war of independence – from Turkey – and to audiences with another newly-elected – and also German – king, Otho I, formerly Prince Otto of Bavaria. Unlike Leopold of Belgium, Otho was young and inexperienced in statecraft; like Leopold, he was patriotically attached to his new kingdom but was in need of advice. Durham found the king of Greece neither intellectual nor good-looking but he was gracious and avuncular towards the shy young man, who clearly blossomed as a result. When writing to Lord Palmerston after Durham had left Greece, the British minister Sir Edmund Lyons said:
"I sat next to the King at dinner after the long private audience he had given Lord Durham, and it was evident to me that his mind was dwelling with pleasure on the picture Lord Durham had drawn of the advantages to bederived from free institutions in the development and resources of a nation emerging from centuries of slavery and oppression."
King Otho clearly appreciated the advice and support given by Lord Durham for, following their final audience, he conferred upon Durham the Grand Cross of the Order of the Redeemer on 28th August 1835.
After calling on the Sultan in Constantinople, Durham and his party crossed the Black Sea, disembarking at Odessa on 18th September. Following an audience with the Tsar in Kiev late in October, he reached Moscow on 30th October and arrived in St Petersburg on 5th November 1835. In the 1830s, as much as in 1939 – when Winston Churchill referred to Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma", Russia was barely known and still less understood in the West. Her naval and military capacities were regularly over-estimated and her intentions in foreign affairs were often exaggerated or falsified. Durham’s role, both self-defined and ordained by the British government, was to establish what Russia’s intentions were towards Turkey and any other areas, such as India, where her expansion might threaten Western spheres of influence; it was also to create a climate of mutual understanding between St Petersburg and London.
In all aspects of the defined role of his ambassadorship, Durham not only succeeded but also exceeded the best expectations of his masters in London – to the extent that inveterate British Russophobes believed that, in modern parlance, he had been ‘turned’ by the Russians. He wrote regularly to Palmerston, sending detailed reports on the strengths of the Russian fleets and of the deployment of troops, and his assessments of Russian intentions in territorial expansion. His reports were regarded in Whitehall as models of clarity and of good advice at a time when fear of Russian strength and intentions had assumed hysterical proportions: his conclusion was that, for all her vastness, Russia was too weak to be feared. Writing to him on 7th July 1836, Melbourne said:
"I consider you as rendering the greatest service to your country and the world by taking a sober and rational view... and by trying to check the extreme violence of feeling and the unnecessary prejudice and suspicion which prevail in this country."
At the same time as informing and reassuring his British masters, Durham retained the friendship and regard of the Tsar that he had gained in 1832. In 1835 he was able to confide to his diary that: "Personally, I am on the best terms with the Tsar..." One of his earliest – albeit uncritical – biographers, Stuart J. Reid, wrote of the rapport between the Tsar and Durham:
"It was a veritable triumph of personality. The Tsar Nicholas was a shrewd judge of men, and was quick to detect either flattery or dissimulation. Durham’s open nature, his palpable honesty, the moral courage which lurked beneath his conciliatory speech, his broad grasp of first principles, the practical bent of his quick mind, and the imagination which made the sympathy of his warm heart so effective, all appealed to Nicholas. Even Durham’s weaknesses, love of display, moody depression, the touch of hauteur which marked his bearing, and that strain of impatience which he was not able always to suppress, even in the atmosphere of a Court, were points of similitude between them which promoted mutual understanding."
The only point of serious discord between the Tsar and Durham was over the question of Poland, where Russian policies of oppression had provoked violent Russophobia in Britain. Since candid Russian ministers observed that Russia’s policy in Poland was little different to that of Britain in Ireland, and in any case Poland was within Russia’s sphere of influence, neither Durham nor Palmerston felt that it was a cause worth conflict and so it was largely passed over in the interests of maintaining harmony. In contrast, an area in which Durham was able to make beneficial changes was in that of tariffs, which British merchants found restrictive of trade: as a result of his representations at the highest level, these were relaxed and for many years Lord Durham was remembered "as the best friend that English trade had had at St Petersburg."
