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Lyons had hesitated to accept the Washington post for fear that he might prove to be a disappointment. Though the eldest of four children, he had always suffered in comparison to his younger brother, Edmund. Richard was portly, nonathletic, and incapable of stepping onto a boat without being sick. In contrast, Edmund was charismatic, adventurous, and loved the sea, like their father, the 1st Lord Lyons. The latter had forged a successful double career in the Royal Navy and the Foreign Office, which led to becoming a rear admiral in 1851 and receiving a peerage in 1856.

Richard Lyons had entered the diplomatic service in 1839 after graduating from Oxford with a fourth-class degree and no other prospects. For five years he worked as an unpaid attaché for his father, who was serving as the British minister in Athens. In his sixth year, he was promoted to paid attaché, but there he remained long after his father moved on to more interesting posts. For thirteen years Richard worked quietly and efficiently, hoping that the Foreign Office would take notice of him. Finally, he could no longer bear his life at the conflict-riven legation or put up with the humiliation of being the oldest attaché in the service, and in 1852 he announced his intention to resign. His protest resulted in a rapid transfer to Dresden, though with the same rank.

By 1857, Lyons was serving in the Florence legation, though still only ranked twenty-fourth out of the twenty-six secretaries in the service. This was a significant improvement in his fortunes, yet one that his father thought long overdue. Admiral Lyons’s beloved Edmund had been killed in 1855, in the waning months of the Crimean War, while carrying out his father’s order to attack the batteries of Sebastopol. The admiral’s health declined rapidly after Edmund’s death, but during his last years he continued to exert himself on Richard’s behalf, arguing his merits to former colleagues.14 His efforts were vindicated after Lyons surprised himself and others with his elegant resolution of a dispute between the Neapolitans and the Sardinians before it escalated into an international controversy. Overnight, he became the Foreign Office’s preferred man for difficult situations. Admiral Lyons died in November 1858, a few days after learning of his son’s promotion to the Washington legation.

Lord Lyons would have arrived in Washington much sooner had not the settlement of the will detained him in England until mid-February 1859. There was a further delay caused by the Foreign Office’s parsimonious attitude to travel; Lyons had to cross the Atlantic on an inferior ship that burned through its coal halfway through the voyage. The crossing took a stomach-churning six weeks to complete instead of the usual ten days, sheer torture for a man who was terrified of water.15

Lyons’s doubts about his fitness for his new post were shared by President James Buchanan, who resented the implication that Washington ranked next to Florence in importance—especially since 80 percent of Britain’s cotton supply came from America. The textile industry was one of the most important in Britain, and the cotton trade translated into a business worth $600 million a year, providing employment and financial security in England for more than 5 million men and women. This alone, believed Buchanan, merited a “first-rate man whose character is known to this country.”16 Lord Lyons’s courtesy call to the American legation in London before he sailed had unwittingly confirmed the U.S. administration’s suspicion that the British Foreign Office was sending a nonentity. “Sensible,” “unobtrusive,” and “short” were the legation’s chief impressions of Lyons.17

Buchanan’s misgivings about the quality of his new British minister were mild compared to Lord Lyons’s judgment of his new place of residence. Washington was not a city at all, in his opinion. “It is in fact little more than a large village,” he wrote to Lord Malmesbury, the Conservative foreign secretary, a month after he arrived, “and when