A. J. P. Taylor on John Russell, 1st Earl Russell

“Russell was a tender-hearted man and was made wretched by the thought of all the suffering of the Irish, but he set his face against any measure of relief which would interfere with the workings of natural economic law.”

“His life spanned the change from aristocratic to middle class England, from the England of broad acres to the England of factory chimneys. Russell was the man of the transition, the link between the old order and the new, belonging to the old order by birth, carried over to the new order by his ideas. He was the last great Whig; he became the first Liberal. Russell, more than any other single man created the Victorian compromise; he made the England we know, or knew rather, the England that is vanishing before our eyes.”