One cannot help suspecting Lord Salisbury's sense of humour as being responsible for the stipulation, that, if the Russians abandoned to the Turks their conquests from them in Asia Minor, the occupation of Cyprus should come to an end and the Anglo-Turkish Convention become null and void. On the following day (May 30), the so-called Anglo-Russian agreement was signed, and the enterprising Mr. Marvin, who had been temporarily employed at the Foreign Office on the cheap, handed it over to the Globe newspaper, thus creating a political sensation of the first order.
The agreement with Russia being now completed, and an invitation to the Congress in suitable terms having been accepted, Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury decided to go to Berlin themselves, instead of sending Lord Lyons.
Lord Salisbury to Lord Lyons.
June 5, 1878.
I feel that I owe you many apologies for my rudeness in not writing to you on Saturday night to announce to you the decision of the Cabinet—and to thank you for the very kind and cordial way you had placed yourself at our disposition in the spring to perform what was a very ugly duty. The Cabinet was rushed to the decision which it took, partly by the consideration to which you advert, that the threads of the last two months' negociations were more completely in our hands than by any process of communication they could be in yours—but also by the fact that we have dangerous questions looming at Paris—and we cannot afford to have you absent from your post.
My excuse for my negligence is the prosaic one that I had not a moment of time. The agonies of a man who has to finish a difficult negociation, and at the same time to entertain four royalties in a country house can be better imagined than described.
The Convention at Constantinople has been signed with expression of lively gratitude on the Sultan's part. I am sorry that your impressions of the mood in which the French are likely to receive the news when published, are still so gloomy. However, we must hope for the best. We have assembled a powerful fleet at Portsmouth and we shall have six or seven first-rate ironclads to do what may be necessary in the Mediterranean, besides smaller ships. And our relations with Bismarck are particularly good. So I hope our friends at Paris will confine themselves to epigram.
If we can, we shall keep the matter secret till we get at Congress to the part of the Treaty of San Stefano (Art. XIX) which concerns the Asiatic annexations. I do not know whether d'Harcourt has any inkling, but ever since his return from Paris his manner has changed.
Lord Lyons hailed the decision of Lords Beaconsfield and Salisbury as a 'deliverance from a nightmare which had weighed upon him since March,' and found a sympathizer in Lord Odo Russell, who had never expected much good from the Congress if the Three Emperors' League was revived, and who doubted whether the British public would be contented with an amended San Stefano Treaty. The probable action of Waddington, who was to be the French representative at Berlin, is foreshadowed in the following letter.