3, 4. That he had evacuated Syria; and that the Turkish authority was established there and in Candia.
5. That the Sultan had accepted the submission, and pardoned Mehemet Ali, his children, and adherents.
6. That the Sultan had announced his intention of reinstating Mehemet Ali with hereditary succession.
The conditions settled on the 15th of October and 14th November[[107]], being thus fulfilled, the assembled Ministers determined that the Consuls of the Four Powers should now return to Alexandria.
On the 11th of March, Chekib Effendi, the Ottoman Minister, communicated to Lord Palmerston[[108]] that the Porte had restored Mehemet Ali, and forwarded him the firmans I have already mentioned, and requested his Lordship to communicate them to the other Ambassadors in London, and he desired an answer to the official communication; whereupon Lord Palmerston again assembled the Foreign Ministers on the 13th of March[[109]], and they drew up a Collective Note, expressing their lively satisfaction at the event, and communicating to the Ottoman Minister that they had heard from Alexandria, under date of the 24th of February, that Mehemet Ali had admitted, without reserve, that the treaties and laws of the empire should apply to Egypt in the same way as to the other provinces of the empire. That he had acceded to the regulation of the monetary system, the service and uniform of the troops, and the building of the ships. That he had replaced under the orders of the Sultan, the land and sea forces, and, in fact, that at the present moment he had put himself in the situation of a subject, and that it appertains to the Sultan alone to settle the internal administration, and take into consideration the wishes which Mehemet Ali has submitted to the Sultan. The Ministers finish the Note by stating, “The Undersigned are fully assured that these explanations, conceived in a sincere spirit of conciliation, would be received by the Sultan in the same manner in which he has constantly received the advice already given by his Allies,—advice disinterested and sincere, which His Highness has justly appreciated, when he accomplished, by an act of clemency, a work of pacification which his Allies had frankly aided him in effecting.”
Lord Palmerston wrote at the same time to Lord Ponsonby[[110]], transmitting the Note of the Plenipotentiaries, and remarking that doubts might arise out of the wording of the first Article of the Hatti-Sheriff, which specifies the conditions to be imposed upon Mehemet Ali. “The wording of that Article might lead to the supposition, that the Sultan intended to reserve to himself to choose upon each vacancy in the pachalic of Egypt, any one of the descendants of Mehemet Ali, without regard to any fixed rule whatever; and that thus the principle of hereditary tenure would be rendered illusory.
“Her Majesty’s Government conceive, that this was by no means the intention of the Porte, and that what was meant to be established by the condition above-mentioned is, that while, on the one hand, the Sultan grants to the descendants of Mehemet Ali in the direct male line hereditary succession in the pachalic of Egypt, the Sultan reserves his own sovereign rights intact, by declaring, that those descendants shall not succeed as a matter of course and of inherent right, as would be the case with the rulers of an independent state, but shall each in turn receive his appointment from the Sultan, and by a separate act of the Sultan’s sovereign power.
“If this is a correct view of the meaning of the Article in question, there can be no difficulty on the part of the Porte in giving such an explanation thereof as will remove all misunderstandings; and the Porte might say, that is the intention of the Sultan that this right of selection shall in all cases he exercised in favour of the next male heir to the deceased Pacha, unless, by infancy or by physical incapacity, such male heir should be incapable of taking charge of the administration of the province, in which case the person next in relationship to the deceased Pacha would be appointed in his stead. The Sultan might, at the same time, make it to be clearly understood, that it is his intention that Ibrahim shall succeed to Mehemet.”
Lord Palmerston was also of opinion that it would not be difficult to settle the affair of the tribute, and that the Allies had purposely abstained from entering into the question; and that relative to the appointment of the officers, could be easily arranged.
On the 16th of March the Allied Ministers in another conference[[111]] conceiving the Eastern Question settled, engaged the French Government to rejoin the European family, and they initialed a Convention recognising the right of the Porte to shut the passage of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus against ships of war of all nations. The Protocol was as follows:—