Richard Bickerton Pemell Lyons, 1st Earl Lyons, (26 April 1817 – 5 December 1887) was the leading British diplomat during the four great crises of the second half of the 19th century: Italian unification, the American Civil War, the Eastern Question, and the replacement of France by Germany as the dominant Continental power following the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.

Lyons resolved the Trent Affair during the American Civil War; and contributed to the Special Relationship and to the Entente Cordiale; and predicted, 32 years before World War I, the occurrence of an imperial war between France and Germany that was to destroy Britain's international dominance.

Lyons was offered the office of British Foreign Secretary on three occasions, by three different Prime Ministers (Gladstone, Disraeli, and Salisbury), and was encouraged to accept that office by Queen Victoria, but he declined every offer. Lyons endorsed the British Conservative Party faction of the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, and was distrusted by Gladstonian Liberals as a 'Tory-leaning diplomat'.

Lyons's most recent biographer Jenkins (2014) considers Lyons to be the exemplar of the ‘Foreign Office mind’ who created a canon of practical norms of diplomacy, including the necessity for nominal neutrality in domestic party politics and for private correspondence with Cabinet ministers. Lyons founded the 'Lyons School' of British diplomacy: which consisted of Sir Edwin Egerton; Sir Maurice de Bunsen; Sir Michael Herbert; Sir Edward Baldwin Malet; Sir Frank Lascelles; Sir Gerard Lowther; Sir Edmund Monson, 1st Baronet; and Sir Nicholas O'Conor.

Family and early life Lyons was born in Boldre, Lymington, Hampshire, on 26 April 1817. His father was the diplomat and admiral Edmund Lyons, 1st Baron Lyons and his mother was Augusta Louisa Rogers. His siblings were: Anne Theresa Bickerton Lyons (1815 – 1894), who became Baroness von Würtzburg; and Captain Edmund Moubray Lyons (1819 – 1855); and Augusta Mary Minna Catherine Lyons (1821 – 1886), who became Duchess of Norfolk and the grandmother of Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian.

His uncles included Vice-Admiral John Lyons (1787–1872), who fought on at the Battle of Trafalgar and who served as British Ambassador in Egypt; and Lieutenant-General Humphrey Lyons (1802–1873), of the Indian Army. His first cousins included Sir Algernon Lyons, Admiral of the Fleet, and Aide-de-Camp to Queen Victoria, and Richard Lyons Pearson of the Grenadier Guards.

Lyons, who was a descendant of a Norman family, was an ardent Francophile who throughout his career 'desired Anglo-French cooperation', and had 'a perceptive assessment of the French collective psyche', and was 'ever ready to exculpate French behaviour'.

Education

Lyons was tutored at Elizabeth College, Guernsey, by Sir John Colborne, in classics, English, French, arithmetic, and theology, where he received a Latin Prize in 1828. Lyons liked rhyming verse (including that of Lord Byron and Alexander Pope, both of which he could recite from memory), Latin verse, and melodic music. He knew the poet Samuel Rogers, whom he thought discourteous, and who criticised him for not taking sugar in his tea.

He and all of his siblings accompanied their father and their mother to Valletta, Malta, in 1828, where they were homeschooled in the works of Enlightenment philosophy, including those of William Robertson, and in history and in classical civilisation, and in French and in Modern Greek. After their first tour of the Aegean, Lyons's father returned to Valletta to refit his ship, HMS Blonde, before, on 30 January 1829, sailing again for the Aegean with his two sons: who were tutored on the boat, and explored Greece on excursions into the mainland, and were introduced to prominent members of European society.

Lyons returned to England to attend Winchester College, and subsequently Christ Church, Oxford, from which he received a BA in 1838 and an MA in 1843. He received an honorary DCL from Oxford University in 1865. During the 1880s he studied the works of John Henry Newman.

Early diplomatic career Attaché to Athens Richard Lyons entered the diplomatic service in 1839, when Lord Palmerston appointed him as an unpaid attaché at his father's legation in Athens. In this position, Lyons advocated and sought to implemented, under the authority of his father and his father's direct successor Thomas Wyse, policies conducive to the establishment of constitutional monarchy that would not impede an Ottoman Empire which served as a bulwark against Russian expansion in the British-dominated Mediterranean. Lyons implemented the practices of diplomatic conduct for which he would become famous: he entertained his subordinates with informal hospitality, and consulted them on matters of business, and dined with them several times per week, and provided for their welfare. Lyons believed that British embassies, and opulent dinners with foreign diplomats, should be used to impress the power of the British Empire.

Attaché to Saxony and then Minister to Tuscany

In 1844, Lyons was made a paid attaché and transferred to Dresden, Saxony. He then served as Minister to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.

Unofficial Minister to the Papal States Lyons was subsequently appointed, by Lord John Russell, as an unofficial representative of Britain to the Papal States. In this office, Lyons was expected to pursue the reform of the unpopular Papal government. Lyons's analyses of the issues, his clarity in his dispatches, and the integrity of his counsel made him admired at the Foreign Office. Russell was impressed with Lyons's achievement of regaining the favour and of the Papal authorities for Protestant Britain, which had enabled Lyons to dissuade the Vatican from the pursuit of the establishment of a Catholic hierarchy in Scotland, which might have caused Anti-Catholic sedition in Britain. Lyons achieved this restoration of favourable relations with the Vatican by refusing to condemn actions, however disagreeable to him, that Britain had no ability to prevent. Lord Russell was so impressed with Lyons that, when Russell succeeded to the Foreign Office in 1859, he urged his nephew, Odo, who had succeeded Lyons in Rome, to imitate the policies and conduct of Lyons.

Minister to Florence Between 1856 and 1858, Lyons was Secretary of the British Legation at Florence. He was the British Minister at Florence between February 1858 and December 1858.

Minister to the United States

Lyons's first major appointment commenced in December 1858, after he had succeeded to his father's title of 2nd Baron Lyons, when he succeeded Lord Napier as British Envoy to the United States in Washington. He arrived in the United States two years before the outbreak of the American Civil War. The US President James Buchanan, who was ignorant of Lyons's precocious ability, was unhappy with the appointment of Lyons, who had only a few years as a diplomat: Buchanan stated that he wanted a 'man whose character was known in this country'.Amanda Foreman (2010), A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War, New York: Random House, Prologue, p. 9; Brian Jenkins (1974—1980), Britain and the War for the Union, Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, vol. 1, p. 44. Lyons considered President Buchanan to be inept and described him as ‘too weak to wring his hands’.

Lord Lyons contended that the British ‘were the chosen people of history’ but was otherwise unprejudiced to French and to Americans. He was in America ‘witty and erudite’, and ‘tactful and discreet to the point of parody, and with ‘a subtle intelligence and a steely resolve’. Lyons detested displays of emotion: Lord Newton contended that ‘he [Lyons] had never been in debt, never gambled, never quarrelled, never as far as was known, ever been in love’ and that Lyons detested exercise and sport.

Geoffrey Madan records Lyons as the author of two aphorisms:J.A.Gere and John Sparrow (eds.), Geoffrey Madan's Notebooks, Oxford University Press, 1981, at page 34

Americans are either wild or dull. If you're given champagne at lunch, there's a catch somewhere.

Lyons was reputed for his luxurious dinner parties, both when Ambassador to the United States and when Ambassador to Paris. Lyons's dinner parties ‘nothing could exceed’ in ‘dignity and faultless taste’. He agreed with Palmerston's remark that ‘dining is the soul of diplomacy’, and offered five courses of Moet and Chandon champagne to United States Senators. Lyons contended that British embassies, and consulates, and legations ought to impress Britain's grandeur by their furnishings and of their banquets, to which he often invited junior members of the diplomatic community to create the structure of ‘a boys school of which he were the headmaster’. Lyons regularly attended Willard's Hotel to discern the political opinions of American notables.

George Sheffield Lyons's private secretary when he was British Ambassador to the USA was George Sheffield (13 September 1836 - 10 October 1898), who was the fourth son of Sir Robert Sheffield, 4th Baronet, of Normanby Hall, and who was educated at University College, Oxford, Pembroke College, Oxford, and Lincoln's Inn. Sheffield continued to serve as Lyons's private secretary for over 20 years, including when Lyons was British Ambassador to France.

Lyons's early American actions Lord Lyons resolved during 1859 the San Juan Island crisis (the "Pig War") by advanced informal disclosure of the ultimatum that he had been instructed to deliver to the US that enabled an agreement to occur before the animosity between Britain and the US created violence.

Lyons organized the successful tour, in 1860, of British North America and the United States by the Prince of Wales, of whom he was a friend, to include the centres of Republican Party advocacy (including in New York, and in Massachusetts, and in Ohio) and to meetings with the USA's Sumner and Chase. Lord Lyons was consequently commended both by the United States, including by President Buchanan, and by Great Britain, including by Queen Victoria, by whom he was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George (GCMG).

American Civil War A few weeks after the Prince's tour, and subsequent to the election of Abraham Lincoln to the U.S. presidency, the animosity between the USA's slave states and free states created the Secession Crisis, in which, as he wrote in a letter to Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell, Lyons initially considered it 'impossible that the South can be mad enough to dissolve the Union'.Amanda Foreman (2010), A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War, New York: Random House, Ch. 3, "'The Cards are in Our Hands!'" p. 61. Lyons then revised his judgement to predict an increasingly bloody conflict that would be won by the Union, but after which the Union would disintegrate as a consequence of internal animosities.