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Romance Through the Ages, Ranked from Sweet to Cringey

Khalid Elhassan September 30, 2021 36 min

Victorian courtship, with a chaperone just a few feet away, put a crimp on romance. Pintrest

Lord Palmerston was a randy old goat to the very end. String Fixer

19. Illicit Romance Was The Death of This Aged British Prime Minister

Lord Palmerston, formally the 3rd Viscount Palmerston, born Henry John Templeton (1784 – 1865), dominated British foreign policy from 1830 to 1865 when Britain stood at the height of her power. He served as Secretary at War from 1809 to 1828, as Foreign Secretary from 1830 to 1841 and again from 1846 to 1851, and twice as Prime Minister, from 1855 to 1858, and again from 1859 to 1865. In his private life, he seems to have been a randy old goat who tried to get it on whenever and wherever he could, with eventually fatal consequences.

Lord Palmerston is the only British Prime Minister to have ever died in office, and oh what a death it was. On October 18th, 1865, the eighty-year-old Prime Minister, who enjoyed robust health well past his biblical three score and ten, reportedly was loving up one of his maids on a billiard table. He seems to have overexerted himself, which led to his demise in the midst of his illicit romance, just two days short of his eighty-first birthday.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.