George Hamilton-Gordon was born in on 28 January 1784. He was educated at Harrow and St John’s College, Cambridge. Both of his parents died when he was young, and by 11 he was the heir to both a large fortune and a considerable estate. He, and his siblings, were taken in by his father’s friend Henry Dundas, a powerful politician and associate of William Pitt the Younger. These two men guided Hamilton-Gordon in a political direction.

He became Lord Aberdeen on his grandfather’s death in 1801. In 1802, he took a Grand Tour around Europe, meeting many prominent personalities, including Napoleon.

As a Scottish peer, Aberdeen did not have an automatic right to sit in the House of Lords. The Scottish Lords elected 16 to represent them in the Lords, and Aberdeen was elected on three occasions: 1806, 1807 and 1812. In June 1814, he was created a Viscount, which entitled him to a permanent place in the Lords.

In 1812, Aberdeen had joined the Foreign Service and he was appointed Ambassador to Austria. In 1813, Aberdeen signed the treaty that cemented Austria’s alliance with Britain in the Sixth coalition against Napoleon. He accompanied the allied leaders as they travelled with the armies, chasing Napoleon back to France. In October 1813, he witnessed the horrifying aftermath of the Battle of Leipzig, the biggest battle of the Napoleonic Wars.

He sat in the Lords uneventfully for a decade, before being appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster by Wellington, and then Foreign Secretary. He served as Foreign Secretary in Peel’s second government (1841-46) as well. During these years he would conduct diplomacy to prevent conflict breaking out with France or the emerging United States. In 1846, he helped to settle a crisis over the Oregon territory that a less skilled diplomat might have fumbled.

It was during Peel’s government that he split with the Conservative Party over the abolition of the Corn Laws. He remained loyal to Peel and then sat in the Lords as a ‘Peelite’. He earned a reputation as a decent and conciliatory figure, but he was never a good speaker, something that would haunt him when he came under rhetorical attack during his premiership.

Though there were only about thirty Peelites, in 1852 they joined with the Whigs to establish a government headed by Aberdeen as a generally respected compromise leader. It was a genuinely talented government, containing three past and present Prime Ministers: Lord John Russell, William Gladstone, and Lord Palmerston.

Some reforms to the Civil Service and government administration were carried out during Aberdeen’s premiership. The ministry was strengthened, and left an enduring political legacy, due to Gladstone’s robust performance as Chancellor. In 1853, Gladstone gave a commanding budget speech that influenced financial policy for the rest of the century. It was his reforms that placed the Treasury at the centre of the government’s activities, in a way that continues to impact governments to this day.

Aberdeen’s premiership was largely dominated by foreign affairs related to Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Aberdeen was horrified by the thought of war, but the more belligerent Lord Palmerston, who had public opinion on his side, was determined to confront Russian expansionism. In March 1854, Britian and France finally declared war on Russia. Aberdeen attempted to resign, but Queen Victoria asked him to continue.

The consequent conflict was a difficult one. Allied attention focused on Crimea, a strategic location that contained the main base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, Sevastopol. It had been assumed that the British military was invincible, and it defeated the Russians in most the war’s battles, but as the siege of Sevastopol (1854-55) set in, the army found itself dearly lacking in supplies and equipment. Nearly twenty thousand British soldiers died of disease. Parliament voted for a commission of inquiry and Aberdeen resigned, taking the blame. His premiership had lasted just two years and 42 days.

In his personal life, Aberdeen also travelled to Greece, to excavate historical sites, and he gave many antiquities to the British Museum. As landlord of his estate in Aberdeen, he was proud of never having expelled a tenant for failing to pay rent.

Aberdeen had married Lady Catherine Hamilton in 1805 and they had four children, though only one reached adulthood, before her death in 1812. He remarried to Harriet Douglas in 1815 and had another five children (of whom four reached adulthood), though the marriage was much less happy than his first. She died in 1833 and Aberdeen was a widower for the rest of his life.

Aberdeen died in 1860.