[23] See Times, January 18th, 1895.
[24] Greville anticipated that the troubles of the time would affect him to the extent of the loss of half his income. He did not whine, but said, though he should not like it, he hoped and believed he could accommodate himself to the necessary change in his habits without repining outwardly or inwardly.
CHAPTER XII.
PALMERSTON.
With none of her Ministers has the Queen ever been in sharper conflict than with Lord Palmerston. From his third Foreign Secretaryship in 1846 till his dismissal in 1852, the history of their relations was one long struggle.
Palmerston considered himself the political inheritor of Canning’s foreign policy, and that he was bound, as the representative of England to foreign Governments, to be the upholder of political liberty and the foe of tyranny and oppression all over Europe. In this he carried with him the whole-hearted sympathy of the mass of English public opinion. It was not with his opinions and views, but with his way of giving effect to them, that the Queen quarrelled. But the English people were not in a position at the time the conflict was going on to make the distinction. They knew that the Queen and Lord Palmerston were pulling different ways, and that Lord Palmerston was the friend of Hungary, and Poland, and Italy; and in proportion as they gave their sympathy to these countries and to Lord Palmerston, they were hostile to the Court. Now, as their personal loyalty to the Queen was very strong, they sought to find a reason for the Queen’s opposition to Lord Palmerston, and they found it, or thought they found it, in the person of the Prince. The Queen’s husband was supposed to be a power behind the throne thwarting the will of her constitutional advisers in the interests of foreign despots. The popular view was that the Prince ruled the Queen, and that Stockmar ruled the Prince, and therefore that the policy of the court was not English, but German. That this was a complete misunderstanding, the publication of the “Prince Consort’s Life,” besides many other political memoirs and memoranda, has abundantly shown. But it was a very natural mistake, and from it arose, not altogether, it is to be feared, without the connivance of Lord Palmerston, a degree of hostility against the Prince which reached an extraordinary height during the early part of the Crimean War.
The question between the Queen and Lord Palmerston is no longer obscured by side issues; at no time was it based upon a divergence of political views. What the Queen, and the majority of Lord Palmerston’s colleagues in the Government, no less than the Queen, objected to, was his way of sending despatches, calculated seriously to embroil England with foreign Governments, either entirely without their knowledge and concurrence, going through the form of submitting despatches to them for their criticism and approval, and then actually sending off something entirely different. The despatches submitted by the Foreign Secretary to the Cabinet and to the Queen, and materially altered by them, would be sometimes recast by Palmerston in accordance with his original draft, and thus the Ministers and Sovereign were made to appear to have consented to that of which they had disapproved. At other times he would send important despatches to the Queen for her approval, allowing her quite an inadequate time to digest their contents, almost forcing the suspicion that he wished her to give her assent without knowing what they contained. When this practice was complained of by the Prime Minister, Palmerston excused himself by saying that the practice of sending off early copies of despatches for the Queen’s perusal had been discontinued, owing to pressure of work in the office; “but if it shall require an additional clerk or two, you must be liberal,” he wrote to Lord John Russell, “and allow me that assistance.” This plea of economy came rather strangely from a Foreign Secretary who in 1841 had appointed five new paid attachés without the smallest necessity, and who in one year had spent £11,000 in coach-hire to convey messages to overtake the mails with his letters. The fact is that Lord Palmerston was the sworn foe of despotism everywhere, except in the Foreign Office, when he was Foreign Secretary. In the Foreign Office he reigned supreme and absolute, and would suffer no control either from his colleagues or his Sovereign. With all this, it was impossible not to like him. He had a jollity, a bonhomie, a complete absence of rancor against those who had wrestled with him and thrown him, an easy elasticity, a buoyant faith in himself and in England, which won the hearts of his countrymen. He made mistakes and went through humiliations that would have crushed or imbittered any other man, without losing a jot of his buoyancy and self-confidence. He pursued his own line of policy with incomparable nerve and tenacity. If he triumphed, he crowed; if he was defeated, no one would guess it from his demeanor; he would be cutting his jokes the next day as “game” as ever. No nature could have afforded a greater contrast to that of the Prince Consort; and while one from sheer force and vigor, and the other by position and character, were prominent among the leading politicians of their day, they were certain to be in sharp and almost perpetual conflict. He thought the Prince’s hope of German unity a mere dream, impossible of fulfilment, and an alliance between England and Germany, therefore, entirely useless to ourselves. This brought them into political conflict just as their characters brought them into personal conflict. Two or three instances will suffice to illustrate what Palmerston was at the Foreign Office. In 1819, the Neapolitans being in insurrections against the infamous misgovernment under which they suffered, Lord Palmerston supplied them with war material out of the stores of the English Government without the knowledge or consent of his colleagues. Now it may be right or wrong to sympathize with insurgents; but for a Government of another country to supply them with arms is an act of war, of which no single Minister has the right to undertake the responsibility. On this occasion Palmerston was compelled to make a formal official apology to the King of Naples. A question asked in the House of Commons was the first intimation the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, had of what his colleague had done.
One of the special objects of Palmerston’s abhorrence was Austria; and it was a state of mind with which there was much sympathy in England. Neither in Italy nor in Hungary could the English people regard the Austrian Government otherwise than as a cruel and perfidious tyranny. This national feeling had burst out in England on the occasion of the visit to London in 1850 of the Austrian General Haynau. In Italy and Hungary the name of this man was associated with acts of barbarous cruelty in putting down the national movement. He was especially charged, and the charge was universally believed in England, with the responsibility of having ordered the flogging of women among the Hungarian insurgents. When in London he made a visit to Barclay’s brewery. The draymen and other employés got wind who their foreign visitor was; they gathered together in the yard of the brewery, and rushed upon him with a torrent of abusive epithets; the general cry was, “Down with the Austrian butcher;” they dropped a truss of straw upon him, pelted him with small missiles, and tore his coat, and knocked his hat over his eyes. He and his friends fought their way out of the brewery, only to find an equally warm reception outside from the people in the streets; he was again pelted, struck, and dragged along the road by his mustache. He finally got shelter in the upper part of a public-house, and the police contrived his escape by the river. The general feeling in the country was “serve him right;” but the Queen was seriously annoyed, and dwelt, not without justice, on the cowardice of an attack by a whole mob upon a single unarmed man. At the desire of the Queen, Palmerston expressed in person to the Austrian chargé d’affaires the regret of the Government at the incident; but at the same time advised that no prosecution should be instituted by Haynau, as this would involve a minute recapitulation of the barbarities of which he was accused. Palmerston’s private opinion on the affair was expressed in a letter to Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, in which he says: “The draymen were wrong in the particular course they adopted. Instead of striking him, ... they ought to have tossed him in a blanket, rolled him in the kennel, and then sent him home in a cab, paying his fare to the hotel.” It may be easily imagined that he did not cordially respond to an order to send a formal written apology to the Austrian Government, and there was a prolonged duel between Lord Palmerston on the one side, and the Prime Minister and the Queen on the other, upon the wording of it. As originally drafted by Palmerston, it contained a paragraph implying that it would have shown better taste on the part of General Haynau to take his autumn holiday nearer home. This was corrected in the draft by the Prime Minister, and the correction was indorsed by Her Majesty; the amended despatch was then returned to the Foreign Secretary, who, in the mean time, had sent off to the Austrian Government the despatch as originally drawn by himself. Then began a regular pitched battle. Palmerston said he would rather resign than withdraw the despatch and substitute the one approved by the Queen and Prime Minister. Sir Theodore Martin says that Palmerston ultimately gave way. Greville says he never did. Mr. Evelyn Ashley says nothing. It is certain that the Haynau incident was for years considered enough to account for the hostility of Austria to England. It was for this that Austria alone of all the great Powers refrained from sending a representative to the Duke of Wellington’s funeral; and some people thought it was this that prevented her joining her forces to those of England and France in the Crimean War. But Palmerston was not long in giving Austria other items to add to her account against England.
When Kossuth was in England in 1851, he having been the leader of the unsuccessful Hungarian insurrection against Austria, he was received with tremendous enthusiasm all over England. The Austrians were furious, and their anger was intensified by the report that Lord Palmerston was going to receive him at the Foreign Office. Many politicians thought that this would be regarded by Austria as equivalent to a declaration of war. The Cabinet remonstrated, and Palmerston, to their relief and surprise, yielded. A day or two after this, Greville saw Lord John Russell and Palmerston at Windsor, “mighty merry and cordial, laughing and talking together. Those breezes leave nothing behind, particularly with Palmerston, who never loses his temper, and treats everything with levity and gayety.” But Palmerston docile was more dangerous than Palmerston pugnacious. The next week he was receiving addresses at the Foreign Office from Finsbury and Islington, thanking him for the protection he had given to Kossuth, and for the sympathy he had shown to the Hungarian cause. In his reply he gave warm expression to his sympathy with Hungary, and spoke of the position of the British Government as that of the “judicious bottle-holder” during the conflict between Hungary and her foe. The phrase has been remembered after the occasion on which it was used has been forgotten. The people applied it to Palmerston himself, and liked him all the more for it. But the proceeding was strongly and formally censured in the Cabinet and by the Queen. Her Majesty’s anger was not appeased by those who told her that although the Emperor of Austria might be angry, the action of the Foreign Secretary was not unpopular with the English people. Her Majesty replied:—
“It is no question with the Queen whether she pleases the Emperor of Austria or not, but whether she gives him a just ground of complaint or not. And if she does so, she can never believe that this will add to her popularity with her own people.”[25]