The motive of Lord John’s demand that Palmerston should be Minister for Foreign Affairs is clear; he did not trust Lord Granville where Italy was concerned.  He thought extremely well of his qualifications as Foreign Minister—­he had previously appointed him his own Foreign Secretary—­but Lord Granville had objected shortly before to Lord Clarendon’s dispatch to Naples, in which Ferdinand II’s misrule had been condemned in terms such as might have preceded intervention.  This dispatch had had Lord John’s ardent sympathy, while Lord Granville had disapproved of it on the grounds that in diplomacy threatening language should not be addressed to a small State which prudence would have moderated in dealing with a powerful one, and that the whole tenor of the dispatch was calculated to draw on a European war.

It was these views upon Italian questions—­namely, that peace was all-important and that little kingdoms, however corrupt and despotic, should not be browbeaten, which made Lord Granville so acceptable to the Court.  Throughout the next two years he was the principal agent through whom the Queen and the Prince Consort attempted to mitigate the pro-Italian policy of Lord John and Palmerston.  The Cabinet itself was divided on the subject; the “two old gentlemen,” as Sidney Herbert called them, were for stretching England’s “neutrality” to mean support of every kind short of (and even at the risk of) committing us to intervention; while the rest of the Cabinet, with the important exception of Gladstone, were more or less in favour of abstaining from any demonstration on one side or the other.  When Palmerston came into power the matters stood thus:  Austria, after losing the battle of Solferino, was securely entrenched within her four strong fortresses of Verona, Mantua, Peschiera, and Legnago, but her Emperor was already disheartened and disgusted by the fighting.

Napoleon, too, on his side was anxious for peace—­most anxious, in fact, to extricate himself as soon as possible from the dangerous complications in which his alliance was likely to land him.  On the eve of Solferino he had heard that Prussia, ready for war, was concentrating at Coblenz and Cologne, and he knew well there was no army in France capable of much resistance.  He began, too, to realize that success pressed home might lead to the formation on the south-east border of France of a new—­and perhaps formidable—­Italian power; a possibility he had not considered when he planned with Cavour at Plombieres their secret alliance against Austria.  The war was now becoming unpopular with far-sighted Frenchmen precisely because its success plainly tended towards this issue; and, in addition, the formation of such a kingdom, by implying the confiscation of the Papal territories, was most distasteful to his Catholic subjects, with whom Napoleon already stood badly and wished to stand better.  After a brief armistice, he proposed terms of peace to Austria, which were signed at Villafranca on July 9th.  They ran as follows: