Lord John Russell(1792–1878)

John Russell was born at Hertford Street in Mayfair on the eighteenth of August 1792, third son of John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford, and Georgiana Byng, of the great Bedford Whig house. He was raised at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire and at the family town-house, was sent to Westminster School at twelve, transferred to a private tutor at fifteen on the grounds of poor health (he was small, frail and chronically prone to respiratory infection through his whole life), and took the place at the University of Edinburgh from 1809 to 1812 under the moderate-Whig professoriate of Dugald Stewart and John Playfair (the Scottish Universities did not require religious tests for matriculation, unlike Oxford and Cambridge of the period, which Russell as a religious moderate would not subscribe to).

He travelled in Spain and Portugal in 1810 to 1812 during the Peninsular War, witnessed the British fleet's bombardment of Cadiz and the Wellington army's withdrawal from Burgos, returned to England in 1812 to take the family-controlled Commons seat at Tavistock in Devon at twenty in his father's gift, and held a Commons seat continuously for the next forty-nine years to his elevation to the peerage in 1861. He spoke in the Commons across the long years of the Liverpool ministry on Catholic Emancipation, the Test and Corporation Acts, the abolition of slavery and parliamentary reform, and through the 1820s consolidated the position as the leading younger reform-Whig voice in the Commons.

His central single legislative achievement came in 1832. As Paymaster of the Forces in the Grey Whig ministry from November 1830, he was given the parliamentary management of the Reform Bill. He drafted the original Bill with Lord John Durham and Sir James Graham in January 1831, introduced it in the Commons on the first of March 1831 in the great speech that named (against his own wishes) the borough-disenfranchisement schedule with the famous fifty-six pocket boroughs to be totally abolished and the sixty-three more to lose one member each, and across the next fifteen months piloted it through three rounds of parliamentary defeats, a general election (April-May 1831), Lords' rejection (October 1831), and the constitutional crisis of May 1832 in which William IV agreed under Grey's pressure to create sufficient new Whig peers to force the Bill through the Lords. The Reform Act passed on the seventh of June 1832 and is by general agreement the foundational legislation of the modern British parliamentary state.

He served across the next thirteen years as Home Secretary (1835 to 1839, the period in which he carried the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 reforming the borough councils), as Colonial Secretary (1839 to 1841, the period of the Durham Report on Canadian self-government), and as Leader of the House of Commons. He took the Premiership on the resignation of Sir Robert Peel on the thirtieth of June 1846 in his fifty-fourth year, served as Prime Minister for the next five and a half years to February 1852 across the Irish Famine crisis (his ministry's handling of which became the central controversy of his career), the Repeal of the Navigation Acts in 1849, the establishment of the Department of Practical Art at the South Kensington Museum, and the Don Pacifico debate. He served as Foreign Secretary in the Aberdeen and Palmerston coalitions of 1852 to 1855 and 1859 to 1861, was elevated to the peerage as 1st Earl Russell of Kingston Russell in July 1861, and on Palmerston's death in October 1865 took the Premiership for the second time, the only person to be summoned twice to the Premiership at intervals of thirteen years.

His second ministry of 1865 to 1866 fell on the parliamentary defeat of his Second Reform Bill of 1866 (the Bill that Disraeli would carry the next year as the Reform Act of 1867). He retired from active politics in 1866 in his seventy-fourth year and lived out his last twelve years at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park, the small grace-and-favour Park house Queen Victoria had granted him in 1847 (and where his grandson the philosopher Bertrand Russell was raised after his parents' deaths). He died at Pembroke Lodge on the twenty-eighth of May 1878 in his eighty-sixth year and was buried in the family vault at Chenies in Buckinghamshire. The Russell name in modern English constitutional history carries the weight of the Reform Act of 1832 and the two Premierships.