DURHAM, JOHN GEORGE LAMBTON, 1ST EARL or (1792-1840), English statesman, son of William Henry Lambton of Lambton Castle, Durham, was born in London on April 12, 1792. His mother was Anne Barbara Villiers, daughter of the 4th earl of Jersey. Lambton succeeded to large estates when he was five years old. In 1805 he went to Eton, and in 1809 obtained a commission in the loth Hussars. In 1812, while still a minor, he made a runaway match with Henrietta, natural daughter of Lord Cholmondeley, whom he married at Gretna Green ; she died in 1815. In 1813 he was elected to the House of Commons as mem ber for the county of Durham in the Whig interests.
In 1816 he married Louisa Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Lord Grey, and as early as 1818 he was taken into the political confi dence of his father-in-law and other Whig leaders. But Lambton belonged to the avowedly Radical wing of the party, with whose aims Grey had little sympathy ; and when he gave notice of a resolution in 1819 in favour of shortening the duration of parlia ments, and of a wide extension of the franchise, he found himself discountenanced. He warmly espoused the cause of Queen Caro line. In April he made his first great speech in the House of Com mons on parliamentary reform, when he proposed a scheme for the extension of the suffrage to all holders of property, the divi sion of the country into electoral districts and the disfranchise ment of rotten boroughs. He was now one of the recognized leaders of the advanced Liberals, forming a connecting link be tween the aristocratic Whig leaders and the Liberals of the great towns. His opposition to any compromise on the question of Cath olic emancipation led (1825) to his first conflict with Brougham, with whom he had been on terms of close friendship. While sup porting the candidature of his brother-in-law, Lord Howick, for Northumberland in the elections of 1826, Lambton fought a duel with T. W. Beaumont, the Tory candidate, but without bloodshed on either side. Lambton supported the ministry of Canning, and after Canning's death that of Lord Goderich, on whose advice he was raised to the peerage in 1828 with the title of Baron Dur ham. Lord Durham was on terms of friendship with Prince Leo pold of Saxe-Coburg, who, after he became king of the Belgians as Leopold I., continued to correspond with Durham as a trusted confidant; the same confidential relations also existed between Durham and Leopold's sister, the duchess of Kent, and her daughter, afterwards Queen Victoria.
In November 1830 Durham entered the Grey cabinet as lord privy seal. To ardent reformers in the country the presence in the cabinet of "Radical Jack" was a pledge that thorough-going reform would not be shirked by the Whigs, now in office for the first time for 20 years. Lord Grey gave him the task of prepar ing a scheme to serve as the basis of the proposed legislation. He was chairman of the famous committee of four, which met at his house in Cleveland Row and drew up the scheme submitted by the government to parliament. It was Durham who selected Lord John Russell, not then in the cabinet, to introduce the bill in the House of Commons. When the deadlock between the two Houses occurred over the second Reform Bill (1832), he pressed on the prime minister the necessity for a .creation of peers to overcome the resistance of the House of Lords.
After the passing of the Reform Act, Durham was sent on a difficult diplomatic mission to Russia. On his return he resigned office in March 1833, ostensibly for reasons of health, but in reality owing to his disagreement with the government's Irish pol icy as conducted by Lord Stanley; in the same month he was created earl of Durham and Viscount Lambton. His advanced opinions gradually alienated the more moderate of his late col leagues, such as Melbourne and Palmerston, and even Lord Grey often found his son-in-law intractable and self-assertive; but the growing hostility of Brougham was mainly due to Durham's un doubted popularity in the country, where he was regarded by many, including J. S. Mill, as Grey's probable successor in the leadership of the Liberal party. At the great banquet given to Lord Grey at Edinburgh in Sept. 1834 Brougham made a veno mous attack on Durham, repeated shortly afterwards at Salis bury, and anonymously in the Edinburgh Review. But the strength of Durham's position in the country was shown when a concourse of more than a hundred thousand persons assembled to hear him speak at Glasgow Green in October. Durham however found no place in the Melbourne administration, partly because of his difficult temper, and partly on account of his radicalism.
In 1837 Durham accepted the post of governor-general and lord high commissioner in Canada, with the almost dictatorial powers conferred on him by an act passed in Feb. 1838, by which the con stitution of Lower Canada was suspended for two years. Having secured the services of Charles Buller (q.v.) as first secretary, and having appointed Thomas Turton and Edward Gibbon Wake field (q.v.) to be his unofficial assistants, Durham arrived at Que bec on May 28, 1838. Papineau's rebellion had been quelled, but the French Canadians were sullen, the attitude of the United States equivocal, and the general situation dangerous, especially in the Lower Province where government was practically in abey ance. Durham at once issued a conciliatory proclamation. He dismissed his predecessor's executive council and created a new and unprejudiced one. On June 28, the day of Queen Victoria's coronation, he issued a proclamation of amnesty, from which eight persons only were excepted ; these were to be transferred from Montreal to Bermuda, where they were to be imprisoned without trial. Papineau and 1 5 other fugitives were forbidden on pain of death to return to Canada.
These proceedings were violently attacked in England by Brougham. Of the ministers Lord John Russell alone defended the public servant to whom they had promised "the most un flinching support" ; and the prime minister and the colonial secre tary, who had signified their "entire approval," now disallowed the ordinance, and carried an Act of Indemnity the terms of which were insulting to Durham. The latter immediately resigned; but before returning to England he put himself in the wrong by at tempting a public justification of his actions. He laid his memo rable "Report on the Affairs of British North America," before parliament on Jan. 31, 1839. This report, one of the greatest state papers in the English language, laid down the principles, then unrecognized, which have guided British colonial policy ever since. It was not written or composed by Charles Buller, as Brougham was the first to suggest, and the credit for the states manship it exhibits is Lord Durham's alone, though he warmly acknowledged the assistance he had derived from Buller, Wake field and others in preparing the materials on which it was based. With regard to the future government of British North America, Durham had at first inclined towards a federation of all the col onies on that continent ; but as a more immediately practical pol icy he advised the legislative union of Upper and Lower Canada. He further urged the creation of an executive council responsible to the colonial legislature ; he advised state-aided emigration on the broadest possible scale, and the formation of an intercolonial railway for the development of the whole country. Meantime Durham, who almost alone among the statesmen of his time saw the importance of imperial expansion, interested himself in the emigration schemes of Gibbon Wakefield (q.v.) ; he became chair man of the New Zealand Company, and was thus concerned in the enterprise which forestalled France in asserting sovereignty over the islands of New Zealand in Sept. 1839. He died at Cowes on July 28, 184o, just five days after the royal assent had been given to the bill giving effect to his project for uniting Upper and Lower Canada.
Lord Durham filled a larger place in the eyes of his contempo raries than many statesmen who have been better remembered. He was in his lifetime regarded as a great popular leader; and his accession to supreme political power was for some years consid ered probable by many ; his opinions were, however, too extreme to command the confidence of any considerable party in parlia ment before 184o. That Brougham hated him and Melbourne feared him, is a tribute to his abilities; and in the first Reform Act, of which he was the chief author, and in the famous Report on the principles of colonial policy, he left an indelible mark on English history. His personal defects of character did much to mar the success of a career, which, it must be remembered, ter minated at the age of 48. He was impatient, hot-tempered, hyper sensitive to criticism, vain and prone to take offence at fancied slights; but he was also generous and unvindictive, and while per sonally ambitious his care for the public interest was genuine and untiring.
By his first wife Durham had three daughters; by his second, who was a lady of the bedchamber to Queen Victoria but resigned on her husband's return from Canada, he had two sons and three daughters, the eldest son, Charles William, the "Master Lamb ton" of Sir Thomas Lawrence's celebrated picture, died in 1831; the second, George Frederick d'Arcy (1828-1879), succeeded his father as end earl of Durham. The latter's son, John George Lambton (1855-1928), became 3rd earl in 1879.