Lord John Russell (1792-1878) came from one of the great families of the Whig aristocracy. Elected to Parliament in 1813, he advocated parliamentary reform tirelessly during the 1820s. Given a junior position in Earl Grey's ministry in 1830, he helped Althorp to promote the Reform Bills in the Commons; after Grey's resignation in 1834, and Althorp's departure to the Lords, he became Leader of the House of Commons in the government of Lord Melbourne. In 1835 he became home Secretary as well, and fiercely struggled for the reform of the Church and State in Ireland. But over the next few years his, and the Whigs' commitment to reform diminished as their popularity shrank, and in 1841 they were defeated at the general election. Five years later, the split in the Tory party over the Corn Laws and Peel's defeat at the polls allowed Russell to form a government of his own, but although it accomplished many individual reforms, it struggled to find an issue around which the party could unite, and a quarrel between Russell and the foreign Secretary, Palmerston, sent the ministry onto the rocks. Russell resigned in 1852, and although he returned to the Leadership of the House in a government headed by Lord Aberdeen after the general election of that year, he was increasingly marginalized. In 1865-66 he briefly held the premiership again after he had accepted a peerage as Earl Russell.