John Russell, 1st Earl Russell
John Russell, 1st Earl Russell,, known by his courtesy title Lord John Russell before 1861, was a British Whig and Liberal statesman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1846 to 1852 and again from 1865 to 1866.
Photograph by John Jabez Edwin Mayall, 1861
A pro-reform cartoon of 1831 depicting Russell as the man with the cure for the country's ills. Tory MPs for rotten and pocket boroughs are shown as patients requiring "The Russell Purge".
Russell served on the Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition, which took place in 1851 while he was Prime Minister. In this group portrait of the Commissioners, by Henry Wyndham Phillips, Russell is depicted standing behind Prince Albert (fifth from right).
Detail of Russell's portrait by Francis Grant, 1853
Whigs (British political party)
The Whigs were a political party in the Parliaments of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Between the 1680s and the 1850s, the Whigs contested power with their rivals, the Tories. The Whigs merged into the Liberal Party with the Peelites and Radicals in the 1850s. Many Whigs left the Liberal Party in 1886 to form the Liberal Unionist Party, which merged into the Conservative Party in 1912.
Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, painted more than once during his chancellorship in 1672 by John Greenhill
Equestrian portrait of William III by Jan Wyck, commemorating the landing at Brixham, Torbay, 5 November 1688
A c. 1705 portrait of John Somers, 1st Baron Somers by Godfrey Kneller.
In A Block for the Wigs (1783), caricaturist James Gillray caricatured Charles James Fox's return to power in a coalition with Frederick North, Lord North (George III is the blockhead in the centre)
