What indeed?  For, in spite of all his apologies and all his promises, within a few weeks the incorrigible reprobate was at his tricks again.  The Austrian General Haynau, notorious as a rigorous suppressor of rebellion in Hungary and Italy, and in particular as a flogger of women, came to England and took it into his head to pay a visit to Messrs. Barclay and Perkins’s brewery.  The features of “General Hyena,” as he was everywhere called—­his grim thin face, his enormous pepper-and-salt moustaches—­had gained a horrid celebrity; and it so happened that among the clerks at the brewery there was a refugee from Vienna, who had given his fellow-workers a first-hand account of the General’s characteristics.  The Austrian Ambassador, scenting danger, begged his friend not to appear in public, or, if he must do so, to cut off his moustaches first.  But the General would take no advice.  He went to the brewery, was immediately recognised, surrounded by a crowd of angry draymen, pushed about, shouted at, punched in the ribs, and pulled by the moustaches until, bolting down an alley with the mob at his heels brandishing brooms and roaring “Hyena!” he managed to take refuge in a public house, whence he was removed under the protection of several policemen.  The Austrian Government was angry and demanded explanations.  Palmerston, who, of course, was privately delighted by the incident, replied regretting what had occurred, but adding that in his opinion the General had “evinced a want of propriety in coming to England at the present moment;” and he delivered his note to the Ambassador without having previously submitted it to the Queen or to the Prime Minister.  Naturally, when this was discovered, there was a serious storm.  The Prince was especially indignant; the conduct of the draymen he regarded, with disgust and alarm, as “a slight foretaste of what an unregulated mass of illiterate people is capable;” and Palmerston was requested by Lord John to withdraw his note, and to substitute for it another from which all censure of the General had been omitted.  On this the Foreign Secretary threatened resignation, but the Prime Minister was firm.  For a moment the royal hopes rose high, only to be dashed to the ground again by the cruel compliance of the enemy.  Palmerston, suddenly lamblike, agreed to everything; the note was withdrawn and altered, and peace was patched up once more.

It lasted for a year, and then, in October, 1851, the arrival of Kossuth in England brought on another crisis.  Palmerston’s desire to receive the Hungarian patriot at his house in London was vetoed by Lord John; once more there was a sharp struggle; once more Palmerston, after threatening resignation, yielded.  But still the insubordinate man could not keep quiet.  A few weeks later a deputation of Radicals from Finsbury and Islington waited on him at the Foreign Office and presented him with an address, in which the Emperors of Austria and Russia were stigmatised as “odious and detestable assassins”