Richard Lyons, 1st Viscount Lyons

Family and early life

Richard Bickerton Pemell was born in Lymington, Hampshire, on 26 April 1817. His father was Edmund Lyons, 1st Baron Lyons and his mother was Augusta Louisa, née Rogers. His siblings were: Anne Theresa Bickerton Lyons (1815 – 1894), Baroness von Würtzburg; Captain Edmund Moubray Lyons (1819 – 1855); and Augusta Mary Minna Catherine Lyons (1821 – 1886), Duchess of Norfolk and grandmother of Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian.

His cousins included Sir Algernon Lyons, Admiral of the Fleet and Richard Lyons Pearson, Assistance Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

Richard Bickerton was tutored at Elizabeth College, Guernsey by Sir John Colborne, in classics, English, French, arithmetic, writing, and theology, where he received a Latin Prize in 1828. He and all three of his siblings accompanied their father and mother to Valletta, Malta, in 1828, where they were homeschooled in the works of Enlightenment philosophy, including those of William Robertson, astrology, history, and the classics, in addition to French and Modern Greek, in both of which he developed fluency. After an initial tour of the Aegean, his father returned to Valletta to refit his ship, HMS Blonde, before sailing again for the Aegean on 30 January 1829: on this second journey, he took his two sons. The two sons were tutored on the boat, explored Greece on excursions into the mainland, and were introduced to prominent members of society. Richard Bickerton returned to England to attend Winchester College, he went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated BA in 1838 and MA in 1843. He later received an honorary DCL from Oxford. By the time he began his diplomatic career, he possessed, like his father, a mastery of several languages.

Athens

Richard Lyons entered the diplomatic service in 1839, when Lord Palmerston appointed him as an unpaid attaché at his father's legation in Athens. In this position, Lyons advocated and sought to implemented, under the authority of his father and his father’s direct successor, Thomas Wyse, policies conducive to the establishment of a stable constitutional monarchy that would not impede an Ottoman Empire which served as a bulwark against Russian expansion in the British-dominated Mediterranean.

In Athens, Lyons developed the framework of diplomatic conduct for which he would become famous. He realised that a diplomat was able to win the loyalty of his subordinates with informal hospitality and courtesy, and by consulting them on matters of business. In Athens, Lyons cultivated a family atmosphere: he dined with his juniors several times per week, provided for their welfare, and sought to ease their workloads. He received their loyalty in return.

It was also in Athens that Lyons decided that British embassies should impress the power of the British Empire, and that opulent dinners with foreign diplomats created amicable relationships.

Before he left Athens, Lyons made a decisive contribution to the resolution of the Don Pacifico Affair: this was acknowledged by those privy to the negotiations, but, unfortunately for Lyons, unrecognised in London.

In 1844 he was made a paid attaché and transferred to Dresden, Saxony. He then served as Ambassador to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.

Papal States

Lyons next appointed, by Lord John Russell, as an unofficial representative of Britain to the Papal States, as which he was expected to pursue the reform of the unpopular Papal government. Lyons’s analyses of the issues, his clarity in his dispatches, and the integrity of his counsel made him admired at the Foreign Office. Russell was impressed with Lyons’s achievement of regaining the favour and of the Papal authorities for Protestant Britain, which had enabled Lyons to dissuade the Vatican from the pursuit of the establishment of a Catholic hierarchy in Scotland, which might have caused Anti-Catholic sedition in Britain. Lyons achieved this restoration of favourable relations with the Vatican by refusing to condemn actions, however disagreeable to him, that Britain had no ability to prevent. Lord Russell was so impressed with Lyons that, when Russell succeeded to the Foreign Office in 1859, he urged his nephew, Odo, who had succeeded Lyons in Rome, to imitate the policies and conduct of Lyons.

Between 1856 and 1858, Lyons was Secretary of the British Legation at Florence. He was the British Minister at Florence between February 1858 and December 1858.

British Ambassador to the United States

Lyons’s first major appointment came in December 1858 when he succeeded Lord Napier as British envoy to the United States in Washington.

One month previously, Lyons had succeeded to his father’s titles: he arrived in the United States, two years before the outbreak of the American Civil War, as 2nd Baronet and 2nd Baron Lyons, of Christchuch, Hampshire. He would later receive the higher noble titles of Viscount (1881) and Earl (1887).

The British Government considered Lyons to be the best choice for the position of Ambassador to the United States. However, US President James Buchanan, ignorant of Lyons’s precocious ability, was unhappy with the appointment as a consequence of Lord Lyons’s young age and his few years as a diplomat: Buchanan stated that he wanted a “man whose character was known in this country." It is likely that Buchanan was anxious because both of Lyons’s predecessors at Washington, (Napier and Crampton), had been recalled because of scandals. Lyons considered President Buchanan to be thoroughly inept and described him as ‘too weak to wring his hands’.

Diplomatic style

Lord Lyons contended that the British ‘were the chosen people of history’ and his political sympathies were monarchical. However, he was unprejudiced towards Americans and French, towards whom he behaved with unfailing equanimity, to an unprecedented degree. In America, he was ‘witty and erudite’, ‘tactful and discreet to the point of parody, and possessed ‘a subtle intelligence and a steely resolve’.

Geoffrey Madan records Lyons as the author of two somewhat surprising aphorisms:

Lord Lyons detested displays of emotion: according to Lord Newton, ‘he [Lyons] had never been in debt, never gambled, never quarrelled, never as far as was known, ever been in love’ and he detested outdoor life, exercise, and sport. Lord Lyons became famous for his luxurious dinner parties, both when Ambassador to the United States and when Ambassador to Paris. Lyons’s dinner parties ‘nothing could exceed’ in ‘dignity and faultless taste’. He loved gastronomy, agreed with Palmerston’s remark that ‘dining is the soul of diplomacy’, and offered at least five courses of Moet and Chandon champagne at his diplomatic dinners because he found that it made United States senators more pliant.

Jenkins states that Lyons sought to create, amongst each ambassadorial community within which he served, the structure of ‘a boys school of which he were the headmaster’. Lyons contended that British legations and embassies should impress the notion of Britain’s grandeur by splendour of furnishings and banquets, but his banquets were not exclusive, he often invited junior members of the diplomatic community.

Early American actions

Lord Lyons resolved the San Juan Island crisis in 1859 (the "Pig War") by ignoring his orders and showing to the United States, in secret and informally, the ultimatum that he had been instructed to deliver to them: this enabled the United States to realize the position of Britain and thereby enabled an agreement to be reached before the animosity engendered violence.

Lyons regularly attended Willard’s Hotel, a centre of political gossip, to covertly discern the opinions of American notables.

Lyons planned and organized the successful tour, in 1860, of British North America and the United States by the Prince of Wales, of whom he was a close personal friend until his death. Lyons chose a route that included the centres of Republican Party sentiment in New York, Massachusetts, and Ohio, and included meetings with the politicians Sumner and Chase. For this tour, Lord Lyons received the praise of both the United States, including that of President Buchanan, and that of Great Britain, including that of  Queen Victoria. As a consequence of these two successes, Lyons was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George (GCMG).

American Civil War

A few weeks after the Prince's tour, in November 1860, the election of Abraham Lincoln as President initiated the Secession Crisis. Lyons considered Lincoln to be a social nobody and an unrefined westerner, and considered Lincoln’s Secretary, Seward, to be an anti-British exhibitionist.

Lyons wrote to Lord John Russell, the Foreign Secretary, "It seems impossible that the South can be mad enough to dissolve the Union."  However, as the conflict intensified, Lyons revised his opinion. He foresaw an increasingly bloody conflict in which the Union would prevail, but after which the Union would disintegrate as a consequence of internal animosities. Lyons considered Lincoln’s policy of reunion to be inept, and preferred a policy of peaceful separation.

Lyons advocated British non-intervention and instructed his staff to be neutral with dealings with both North and South: he had a network of covert spies reporting on the activities of each side. Lyons feared that American politicians would attempt to distract public attention from domestic problems by increasing their attacks on foreign powers, such as Britain, and was extremely suspicious of William H. Seward, Secretary of State to Abraham Lincoln. Lyons rigorously pursued negotiations intended to preclude the occurrence of a conflict between Britain and either the North or the South: he advocated the continual rejection of French invitations for Britain to join in joint-intervention with France.

Lord Lyons successfully resolved numerous issues, such as the defence of Canada, which he believed would be the first foreign target for an offensive by the Northern States: missions behind the US border were performed by Royal Engineers in Canada.

Lyons was prepared to destabilise the Union, and recognise Confederate independence, in order to ensure the security of the cotton supply to Britain, from the Confederacy, after Lincoln’s decision to order a blockade of the southern coast. However, he also worked to develop a personal friendship with Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, to provide for the eventuality, which proceed to arise, in which British favour for the North were in Britain's best interests. Lyons wanted to create what he called a "golden bridge" that would enable the Union to retract the policies that damaged the British cotton trade without humiliating itself.

In the words of Jenkins, "by sidestepping questions of principle, he [Lyons] avoided a collision and reached an understanding with Seward". Lyons maintained such a convincing semblance of genuine honesty that, after the Civil War, the Union praised him for his honesty: Lyons's artifice so deceived Seward that Seward was led, by his perception of Lyons’s apparent honesty, to consider an Anglo-American special relationship to be a possibility. In Britain, Lyons’s deceptive powers led the Foreign Office to consider him to be 'one of Britain's most intelligent and skilful diplomats'.

Lyons believed, in the words of Jenkins, that the Union "had to be disabused of the notion that there was no limit to his nation's [Britain's] forbearance". During the Trent Affair, he advised the British Government to prepare the Military.

The Trent Affair

Lyons’s most famous diplomatic success, whilst Ambassador to the United States, was the resolution of the Trent Affair, during the autumn of 1861, in which two politicians from the South, (James Mason and John Slidell) who had been sent to Europe to attempt to secure formal recognition for the Confederacy, were abducted from the neutral British mail steamer, Trent which was intercepted by a vessel from the Northern States. This stimulated the animosity of the British public and war between Britain and the United States seemed imminent, but, through idiosyncratic ‘tact and firmness’, Lyons compelled the United States government to release the two envoys, and the likely conflict was averted. Lyons achieved this by two actions: first, he deliberately withheld the official statement of the British response for an extended period after the date on which he was ordered to give it, in order to make the Americans distressed by the uncertainty; second, during the later stages of this period, he used the same technique that he had used, successfully, to resolve the San Juan Crisis: he disclosed to the Americans, without British authorization, and in a manner that suggested the disclosure were an accident, a version of the British policy that deliberately overstated the severity of the British keenness to use force, a number of days before issuing the official British response.

For this victory, Queen Victoria stated that she would be pleased for Lyons to ‘represent Her at any court in the world’.

For this victory, Raymond Jones has described Lyons as ‘Britain's greatest mid-century ambassador.’

Lyons resigns from Washington

In December 1864, Lord Lyons left Washington, suffering poor health. Before he left, Lyons had amiable final meetings with Abraham Lincoln and Seward, both of whom wished for his rapid convalescence and his return to the position of British Ambassador at Washington. However, Lyons’s health deteriorated further and, in the spring of 1865, compelled Lyons to resign his position as Ambassador to the United States. Queen Victoria and the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, attempted to persuade Lyons to return to Washington, but he would not. Lyons nominated Sir Frederick Bruce as his successor: the Queen and Palmerston immediately accepted his suggestion, demonstrating their possession of the utmost confidence in Lyons' ability to read the diplomatic situation.

After his resignation, Queen Victoria remarked to Palmerston that she was so pleased by Lyons' service in the United States that she would be happy to have Lyons "represent Her at any Court" in the world. Victoria considered Lyons to have a  ‘sterling reputation for integrity’.

Three Volumes of Lyons’s American Civil War despatches were published in 2005.

Ambassador to Constantinople

Subsequent to his resignation from the position of Ambassador to the United States, Lord Lyons served as Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at Constantinople, for a period of less than two years. He replaced Sir Henry Bulwer, who was embroiled in a humiliating scandal: despite the fact that the Ottoman Government had bought Bulwer an island estate, several thousand pounds had disappeared from the Embassy Accounts. In contradistinction, the new Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon was confident that Lord Lyons was an ‘honest man’ who would easily restore amicable Anglo-Ottoman relations: Lyons did so within two years. In this position, Lyons forecast that the Ottoman Empire would disintegrate, and he advocated a policy of British defence of the Ottoman Empire's territory only until the point at which the implementation of this policy would entail British military involvement, at which, he contended, British support should cease.

Lyons successfully persuaded the Court of the Sublime Porte to decline to make concessions to France that would have provided for French control of the Suez Canal, which was an important route for the British supply of the Indian Empire.

Lyons's success was impeded by the injury that Bismarck had inflicted on British credibility during the crisis of Schleswig-Holstein. Lyons responded by cajoling the French Minister into a partnership with himself: this provided for the resolution of the issue of the Danubian Principalities in a manner amenable to British interests. Lyons’s success at Constantinople recovered the Ottoman favour for Britain that had been lost by his predecessors: as a consequence, he was appointed to the most senior position in the diplomatic service, British Minister to France.

Ambassador to Paris

In October 1867, after the resignation of Lord Cowley, Lord Lyons was appointed to the most prestigious position in the British Diplomatic Service: British Ambassador to France, at Paris. The twenty years Lyons spent in Paris were of paramount importance in French history: they included the last years of the Second French Empire, the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune, the establishment of the Third Republic and the beginning of the Boulanger crisis, which threatened to destruct the republican settlement. Lyons served in this position for a continuous period of twenty years, making him one of the longest serving occupants of the position. He was also one of the most successful: Lyons maintained absolute political neutrality, which he considered to be an imperative quality for a diplomat, that enabled him to develop amicable relationships with Liberal ministers to whose political sympathies he was fundamentally averse: according to Jenkins, ‘the presence of such a reliable and conciliatory man in the most sensitive and important post in Europe gave both Liberal and Conservative British Governments an essential guarantee that their instructions would always be carried out according to the terms determined in London’. The fact that Lyons remained absolutely politically neutral demonstrates that his promotion to the highest ambassadorial rank, by the Tories, was a consequence of '[his] professional not political considerations'.

When Lyons arrived in Paris during the last months of 1867, at the height of the Paris Exhibition, the Second French Empire was stable. However, Lyons subsequently reported on the idiocy of Napoleon's war with Prussia, which Lyons predicted, again correctly, would culminate in the destruction of the French Empire. Lyons's correspondence provides valuable contemporaneous commentary on the siege of Paris, on the insurgency of the Paris Commune, on the transfer of political power to Germany, and on the various inept French attempts to establish a stable polity. Lyons advocated the restoration of French military power because he believed that it would restore the balance of power on the Continent. Lyons worked unceasingly to create secure British relations with France, but his actions were met with French aversion to Britain: though Lyons had succeeded to the office as a Francophone, he had lost the favour with which he had considered the French by the time of his resignation.

When travelling through Paris, Queen Victoria often stayed to spend time with Lyons.

Advocacy of an Entente with France and forecast of World War

Lord Lyons did not consider parliamentary democracy to be a viable system for France. He favoured powerful leaders, such as Napoleon III and Léon Gambetta, believing that only such were able to pacify French society, which was necessary for the perpetuation of the French entente with Britain and its adherence to a free-trade policy.

The later years of Lyons’s tenure in France included those in which the Eastern Question determined international policy; those in which France invaded Tunisia and pursued imperial expansion; and those in which the Egyptian Question became an important issue. As the response to all of these issues, Lord Lyons advocated a close association, in international politics, between France and Britain: prophetically, Lyons advocated policies that he thought would prevent a conflict between France and Germany, which he forecast, and that, therefore, would secure the perpetuation of British dominance within Europe. Subsequent to the British Action in Egypt in the summer of 1882, and the formal abolition of the dual rule in Egypt, Lyons became ensconced in a confrontation between Britain and France that lasted until 1904: he worked diligently to ease it, but with little success, although his characteristic quality of gracefulness towards those whose interests were antithetical to the British interest, of which his defence was absolute, prevented the antipathy from evolving into animosity. Unlike many members of the British Government, Lyons contended that Britain should, having established its authority over Egypt, not withdraw from the task into which she had entered herself: he advocated a British reform of Egyptian finances and a British observance of French financial rights in Egypt.

Lyons’s competence in France led the Prime Minister, Salisbury with the support of Queen Victoria, to offer Lyons the position of Foreign Secretary, on the formation of the second Salisbury administration, in 1886: this was the third occasion on which Lyons had been offered the Foreign Office, and for the third time, Lyons declined.

Lyons, who had inherited the titles of 2nd Baronet and 2nd Baron Lyons, after the death of his father, Edmund Lyons, in 1858, also received the higher noble titles of Viscount, in 1881, and Earl, in 1887, though he died before he had been formally invested with the latter.

Lyons agreed to remain Ambassador to France until the close of 1887: this was against his wishes, but according to those of Salisbury. Lyons finally relinquished this post in October 1887, whereupon it was to be declared that he was to be raised from Viscount to Earl. Lyons was succeeded as Ambassador to France by the Earl of Lytton, who had been his Secretary whilst he had served in the post.

Lyons was exhausted by the time of his retirement: he had served as an Ambassador to the world’s most important courts for a continuous period of 50 years. In November, one month after his retirement, he suffered a severe stroke that rendered him paralysed and incapacitated: on 5th December, he died, at Norfolk House, the residence of his nephew, Duke of Norfolk. Lyons was never able to enjoy the retirement which he had intended to begin.

Conversion to Roman Catholicism

In 1886, Lyons’s sister, the Duchess of Norfolk, had died. Lyons had devoted the first two weeks of his retirement to the study of Catholicism, had received permission from the Prime Minister to attend Mass, and had expressed his desire to convert to Catholicism. He had not converted to Catholicism by the time of his stroke/seizure, which paralysed and incapacitated him to the extent that ‘it is extremely doubtful to what extend he retained consciousness’: however, the Bishop of Southwark, Dr. Butt, with whom Lyons had had several conversations about Catholicism in the short period between the beginning of his retirement and his loss of consciousness, ‘felt so convinced of his [Lyons’s]  disposition and intention that he received [Lyons] into the [Catholic] Church and administered to him extreme unction’ whilst Lyons lay unconscious and unable to communicate. Lyons was not conscious for the rite and never regained consciousness: he was, however, in the way aforementioned, converted.

Earldom

Lord Lyons also died before he had formally received the title of Earl: however, because the notice of his possession of this title had appeared in the London Gazette, he is sometimes, nevertheless, termed 1st Earl Lyons, as in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the American Civil War, Round Table UK Profile.

Lyons never married and died without issue or a male sibling: all his titles became extinct on his death. He left the possessions and decorations of his father, Edmund, 1st Baron Lyons, to the Dukes of Norfolk, in the hope that they would be kept at Arundel Castle.

Burial

Lord Lyons’s funeral occurred on 10 December 1887 at the Fitzalan Chapel at Arundel Castle. He is buried under the Chapel, which is the burial ground of the traditionally Catholic Dukes of Norfolk. His sister, the Duchess of Norfolk, her husband, the 14th Duke, and his father, Edmund, 1st Baron Lyons, are buried alongside him.

Numerous members of the British aristocracy attended the funeral at the Fitzalan Chapel. Queen Victoria, the Prince of Wales, Gustave de Rothschild, Alphonse James de Rothschild, and Edmond James de Rothschild sent floral tributes.

Diplomatic legacy: the Lyons School of diplomacy

Lord Lyons’s Obituary in the Morning Post describes him as ‘the idea of a pattern and ideal diplomatist’ who ‘knew the contents of every modern dispatch’ ‘by heart’.

He founded the Lyons School of Diplomacy and trained the diplomats Sir Edward Baldwin Malet and Sir Edmund Monson, 1st Baronet, in addition to many others who proceeded to serve in the most important diplomatic posts for the 30 years after his death.

Jenkins (2014), in the most recent biography of Lyons, considers him to be the exemplar of the British diplomat, of the ‘Foreign Office mind’, who created a canon of practical norms of British imperial diplomacy, including the necessity for neutrality in domestic party politics and the necessity for extensive confidential correspondence with various Cabinet ministers.

Other legacy

Through his nephew, the Duke of Norfolk, Lyons was the great-granduncle of the writer Maisie Ward, and the great-great-granduncle of the translator Rosemary Sheed and the writer Wilfred Sheed.

Lyons appears briefly as a character in the alternative history novel Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove. He also appears in the Southern Victory Series novel The Great War: American Front also by Turtledove, where he was a diplomat who was sent to Washington, D.C. after the Battle of Camp Hill to advise Abraham Lincoln that the United Kingdom and France were set to offer recognition to the Confederate, and that if the U.S. did not do the same, Britain would defend the C.S. by use of its military. This, in addition to the claim of the Lord Lyons character that he envisioned a time where both the U.S. and C.S. would "stand together, [as] a pair of sturdy brothers," is historically untrue. He was also a minor character in the historical novel Freedom by William Safire.