Lord John Russell (18 August 1792 – 28 May 1878) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 30 June 1846 to 23 February 1852 (succeeding Robert Peel and preceding Edward Smith-Stanley) and from 29 October 1865 to 28 June 1866 (succeeding Lord Palmerston and preceding Smith-Stanley). He was a leading Whig and Liberal Party politician.
Biography[]
John Russell was born in Mayfair, London, Middlesex, England on 18 August 1792 to an old aristocratic family. He attended the University of Edinburgh, and he was elected to the House of Commons as a Whig in 1813, despite being abroad and underage. In 1819, he embraced the cause of parliamentary reform, and he led the reformist wing of the Whigs during the 1820s. In 1834, he became the leader of the Whigs in the Commons, and he led his party into support for reform. As Prime Minister from 1846 to 1852 and from 1865 to 1866, his luck ran out, and his government failed to deal with the famine in Ireland, which killed a quarter of its population. After his 1846-1852 ministry, the Whigs would never compose a government again, and his 1865-1866 ministry was almost the ruin of the Liberal Party also. Russell died in Richmond Park, Surrey in 1878 at the age of 85.
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