Lord Lyons

Richard Bickerton Pemell Lyons (1817–1887) was born at Lymington, the son of naval officer and diplomat Edmund Lyons. After early service aboard his father’s ship, he attended Winchester and Christ Church, Oxford. He joined his father’s Athens mission in 1839, later serving at Dresden, Florence, and Rome. He inherited the family peerage in November 1858 and was appointed minister to Washington the following month. ¹

The Trent crisis brought his mission close to a rupture. In November 1861 an American warship removed Confederate envoys James Mason and John Slidell from a British mail steamer. Britain demanded their release and prepared reinforcements while both governments sought to avoid war. Lyons received Seward’s formal explanation on 26 December: the American secretary defended much of the captain’s conduct but acknowledged the failure to submit the seizure to judicial review and agreed to free the prisoners. Acting under instructions from London, Lyons accepted the explanation. ²

On 7 April 1862 Lyons and Seward signed a treaty to suppress the African slave trade. It authorized specially instructed warships to search suspected merchant vessels within specified areas near Africa and Cuba, and provided for mixed courts at Sierra Leone, the Cape of Good Hope, and New York. The agreement required the liberation of people found aboard condemned vessels and compensation for unlawful detention of ships. It established reciprocal procedures and limits for an activity that had long produced disputes over the right of search. ³

The Civil War mission also required sustained work on blockades, Confederate recognition, and the Alabama dispute. Ill health forced Lyons to leave Washington late in 1864; his departing note recommended Joseph Hume Burnley as chargé. After his resignation was accepted in 1865, he became ambassador at Constantinople and then, in 1867, Paris. ^{1, 4}

His French ambassadorship lasted twenty years. During the Franco-Prussian War he helped arrange an unsuccessful meeting between Bismarck and Jules Favre through embassy secretary Edward Malet. He followed the French government’s delegation to Tours and Bordeaux during the siege of Paris, returning after the war. In 1873 he negotiated renewal of the commercial treaty. Lyons retired in November 1887 and died in London on 5 December, following a stroke. ¹