Lord Lyons to Lord Granville.
Paris, April 4, 1882.
You will have seen by the despatches I sent you by post yesterday that Freycinet has at last put the dots on his i's, and distinctly proposed that Tewfik shall be deposed and Halim put in his place. I cannot say I take to the idea. As you said to Tissot, there might be some good in it if Halim had great moral and intellectual qualities. But I don't see that we have any reason to suppose he has such qualities. Nor indeed, if he had, do I see how his mere appointment would at once set things straight in Egypt. The removal of Ismail was a great blow to the prestige of the Khediviate, and it would require a genius to re-establish its authority, if another deposition takes place in so short a time. I do not understand how Freycinet reconciles his present idea with his objection to Turkish interference. If the Khedive is in daily fear of being deposed by the Sultan, there will be abject submission to Yildiz Kiosk and a constant flow of backsheesh to the Porte.
Halim no doubt promises the French that he will be their man, and if he becomes so, they may go great lengths to support him; but how will this suit us? And how long will it be before it leads to something very like armed intervention of the French in support of him?
Then it seems to me that to depose Tewfik would be something very like treachery, after the dual declaration made to him in January.
It seems to me that the things to aim at should be: to keep Tewfik; to give him some strength against military dictation, and to preserve the Anglo-French Control, which means a reasonable financial administration, and gives us at any rate some means of knowing what the Egyptians (perhaps I ought to add) what the French are about.
The immoral proposal to depose Tewfik met with no encouragement from Her Majesty's Government, as was only to be expected, and the only conclusion to be drawn from the equivocal language of M. de Freycinet was that he felt armed intervention to be inevitable, but wanted the proposal to come from England. He tried to persuade Lord Lyons to propose a plan of his own which should be put forward privately, but this met with no approval at all. '"Private and between ourselves conversations," between Ambassadors and Foreign Ministers generally cause mischief.'
As the situation in Egypt continued to get worse, the British Government was forced to take some action, and accordingly suggested that three generals, French, English, and Turkish, should be sent to Egypt 'to restore discipline to the Egyptian army.' As it was not proposed that these generals should employ anything but moral force, it is difficult to see how they could have succeeded, but Lord Granville appears to have considered that it would obviate armed interference, and the French Government having no plan of their own were presumably ready to accept almost anything, but caused considerable embarrassment by asking for a pledge that Turkish intervention by force of arms, in any circumstances, would not be tolerated. What Freycinet wanted, in fact, was to be able to declare to the Chamber that England and France were agreed not to allow armed Ottoman intervention.
Lord Lyons to Lord Granville.
Paris, May 5, 1882.
Freycinet asked me just now to let him speak to me 'privately and academically' about intervention in Egypt. He said his great objection to Turkish intervention was that as matters now stand, it would take place for a vague and indefinite object: that thus it would be impossible to fix the exact time at which that object would be accomplished, and that thus the Turks would have pretexts for prolonging it indefinitely, for mixing themselves up in the administration, for laying their hands on the Treasury, and what not.
If the intervention was simply for installing a new Khedive, his objections would be less. This would be a single definite sovereign act of the Sultan. It might be accomplished in a week or ten days, and the Ottoman troops would have no pretext for staying, or for interfering in the administration. He should not object to a Turkish, French, and English fleet going to Egypt to support some single definite act of this kind, nor even, speaking solely for himself personally, to Turkish troops being landed.
After some questioning from me, he said that, for a single definite object, he personally might even prefer a Turkish intervention, but that for any such vague purpose as supporting Tewfik and restoring order, he thought Turkish intervention absolutely inadmissible. If anything of that kind was to be attempted, Anglo-French seemed to him the least open to objection. Italian seemed to him to be worse than Turkish.
His idea was that we should set on foot some Government that could stand by itself. Under Tewfik no such Government would in his opinion be ever possible. He had no predilection for any particular individual as Khedive: all he wanted was to have some reasonably efficient man at the head of the Government.
He begged me to consider all this as strictly confidential, personal, private, and academic; and he said that except in a conversation of this character, he could not even have mentioned the possibility of France consenting under any conceivable circumstances to Turkish intervention; for he was by no means sure that it would ever be agreed to by his colleagues or borne by public opinion.