INTRODUCTION

George Villiers, the fourth Earl of Clarendon, was British foreign secretary from 1853 to 1858, 1865 to 1866 and 1868 to 1870, dying in office. Although critical events regarding Japan – the opening of the country and the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration – occurred while he was foreign secretary, there are not a huge number of references to Japan in his papers, the turbulence in Europe seeming far more pressing to him. Nevertheless, he played an important part in the ‘opening’ of Japan to British trade and the establishment of a productive diplomatic relationship with the country.

PERSONAL BACKGROUND

A member of the Liberal party, Clarendon was a highly competent administrator and a charming man – Gladstone considered him the pleasantest colleague that he had. Although he was liked by Prince Albert, Queen Victoria came to feel antipathy towards him after Albert's death, thinking him ‘impertinent’ for his hostile comments about Germany and Germans (and she may have got wind of his jokes about her relationship with her servant, John Brown). Clarendon's biographer Herbert Maxwell described him as ‘the most finished gentleman’, with the ‘air of refinement which Vandyke was wont to give to his portraits’. He added, ‘even in age … his eye had lost none of its brightness nor his figure any of its unstudied elegance. His manners … had a charm which unbent the most rugged antagonist’. Bismarck thought that he might have prevented the Franco-Prussian War had he not died in 1870. He was intensely sociable, spending his days gossiping and intriguing, and his nights working on Foreign Office papers. He was a chain-smoker, an unknown thing in England at the time, having picked up the habit when he was minister in Spain in his thirties. He was ambitious, in an age when it was necessary to conceal political ambition, although he never made any real push to get to the very top. He was also a ladies man. The best-known story about him in this regard is when the Countess de Montijo was asked whether her daughter Eugénie, who became Empress of France, was in fact his child, she replied after a pause, ‘Les dates ne correspondent pas’.