Palmerston’s joke about the Schleswig-Holstein question

Abstract

According to a well-known quotation, the Danish/German territorial and dynastic dispute known as the Schleswig-Holstein question (which came to a head in the mid-nineteenth century and was a key pretext for the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, on the way to German unification under Prussia’s leadership) was almost impossible to understand. The usual source for this is the biography by G. L. Strachey:1 ‘Only three people’, said Palmerston, ‘have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business—the Prince Consort, who is dead—a German professor, who has gone mad – and I, who have forgotten all about it’. It has been given as an example of an insoluble problem in speeches and articles on numerous unrelated topics. Lytton Strachey’s own trenchant assertion was that the Schleswig-Holstein question was ‘the most complex in the whole diplomatic history of Europe’.2 However, Palmerston’s jaunty opinion raises several problems. First, his confession of memory loss reads as if the comment were made after a lapse of many years—but the Prince Consort died in 1861, and Palmerston outlasted him by less than four years, dying in 1865 when he was still Prime Minister and the Schleswig-Holstein question was still red-hot. As late as August 1864, he was still making speeches about it. Secondly, Lytton Strachey gave only a recent source for the Palmerston quotation, citing C. Grant Robertson’s biography,3 which mentions ‘a German professor who was in a lunatic asylum’ but does not give a specific source. Thirdly, other versions of the quotation have appeared in literature, and historians do not give reasons for their choice.