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he joined the Whigs and formed a coalition as premier in 1852. Forced by Palmerston into the Crimean war, he shouldered some of the blame and resigned in 1855.
It was Aberdeen who persuaded Arthur Gordon, his fourth son, to turn to politics rather than the church after taking his degree in 1851, and he made him his private secretary when he became prime minister. From that vantage point, Gordon had an excellent and intimate apprenticeship in the art of preferment through sponsorship and a network of well-placed connections in public life. He had access to all of the correspondence that lay behind the formation of Aberdeen's coalition ministry, strongly influenced by W. E. Gladstone, and knew the reasons why it fell apart over divergent attitudes to Russia and Turkey. Before that setback, Gordon was elected to a safe Whig-Liberal seat in Yorkshire (1854–1857), largely because of the efforts of his electoral agent, who shook hands and stumped the constituency with him. He lost his seat along with other Peelites who failed to support Palmerston's foreign policy, ending his opportunity to rise to the cabinet. He fell back on the network of political friends and allies operated by his father, which produced a private secretaryship to William Gladstone as lord high commissioner to the Ionian Islands in 1858–1859. The experience introduced him to the rigours of working for a hard taskmaster (whose anti-Greek policy he and his father disagreed with) and to the political complexities of an unpopular protectorate administration, which was transferred to Greece five years later. His secretaryship did nothing to improve Gordon's opinion of Gladstone, but he took care to keep his opinions private and revived the relationship sufficiently to draw on Gladstone's political knowledge and influence later in his career.
Apart from the sometimes-uncertain patronage of Gladstone, Gordon could draw on other useful connections. Arthur's mother, Harriet Gordon, had been the widow of James viscount Hamilton and mother of James Hamilton, second marquis and first duke of Abercorn, twice lord lieutenant of Ireland, and acknowledged by Gordon as half-brother. Politically, he was connected with George Douglas Campbell, eighth duke of Argyll, a prominent Whig and secretary of state for India (1868–1874) and that