It is needless to say that the Queen was thoroughly convinced before war was declared that it could not have been avoided, that our cause was just, and that the claim of Russia to protect the Christian subjects of Turkey was a hypocritical cloak to her aggression and ambition, and that her real object was to seize Constantinople and the command of the entrance between the Black Sea and Mediterranean, with an eye ultimately to India and the possessions of England in Asia.
The Queen and Prince were exceedingly indignant with the King of Prussia for withholding his support and sympathy from England. He was a man of weak and excitable disposition, and very much influenced by his brother-in-law, the Czar. The King’s brother, however, then known as the Prince of Prussia (afterwards the Emperor William), and his son, Prince Frederic William (afterwards the husband of the Princess Royal), strongly sympathized with England; and this circumstance naturally strengthened the warm friendship already existing between them and the English Royal Family. How distant at this time must have seemed the realization of Prince Albert’s and Stockmar’s dream of a united Germany, and of a political alliance between England and Germany. The Prince, however, never lost sight of his goal. He wrote to his stepmother at Coburg, who was strongly Russian in her sympathies, “If there were a Germany and a German Sovereign in Berlin, this [the war] could never have happened.”
When once war was declared (March, 1854), the Queen threw her whole heart and soul into the cause. She wished she had sons old enough to go, two with the army, two with the navy. Lord Aberdeen had sanctioned the setting apart of a Day of Humiliation and Prayer for the success of our arms by sea and land. The Queen very strongly and quite properly deprecated the use of the expression a Day of Humiliation. She condemned this as savoring of hypocrisy. She believed her policy to have been directed by unselfishness and honesty, and therefore felt the only appropriate prayer would be one expressive of our deep thankfulness for all the benefits we had enjoyed, and entreating the protection of the Almighty for our forces on sea and land. She equally objected to imprecations against our enemies, and suggested the use of a form already in the Prayer Book, “To be used before a Fight at Sea.”
As the war went on, the Queen and the elder Princesses stimulated the activity of other women throughout England in helping to supply comforts for the wounded, and various articles of warm clothing to be distributed among the troops. The Queen also took a keen maternal interest in the establishment of a fund, afterwards called the Patriotic Fund, to provide for the orphans of those who were killed in the war. She neglected no opportunity of showing her interest in her troops, giving them in person a hearty “Godspeed” on their departure, and a cordial welcome on their return, and decorating with her own hands the surviving heroes of the various engagements. Our soldiers fought with all the old British valor and tenacity, and were successful in every great engagement; but there was a most frightful breakdown in the commissariat and stores departments of the army, and in organization generally. No Wellington or Marlborough was discovered among our generals, and no Nelson or Duncan among our admirals. The only notable personalities revealed to the nation by the Crimean War were those of Florence Nightingale and Dr. W. H. Russell, and the only new piece of military knowledge, the use of women and special correspondents in war time. Miss Nightingale and a band of other ladies, all trained nurses, were sent out at the instance of Mr. Sidney Herbert to Constantinople, and at once proceeded to take charge of the great hospital at Scutari; they arrived just in time to receive the wounded from the battle of Balaklava. Before their arrival all had been chaos and hugger-mugger, which Miss Nightingale’s “voice of velvet and will of steel” soon changed to order, and as much comfort and solace as were possible in such a place. Her gentle tenderness and compassion aroused a passion of chivalrous worship in the roughest soldiers. One of them said afterwards to Mr. Sidney Herbert, “She would speak to one and another, and nod and smile to many more, but she could not do it to all, you know,—we lay there in hundreds,—but we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again, content.”
The regular red-tapists of the War Office of course opposed the sending out of Miss Nightingale and the other ladies; there is no record in the Prince Consort’s Life whether he and the Queen favored her mission at the outset or not. But it is certain that they, with the rest of the nation, very speedily recognized the value of the work she was doing. Her letters from the seat of war were among their sources of information, and were eagerly scanned by the Queen and her husband. After the war was over, in the autumn of 1856, she visited the Queen at Balmoral. The entry in the Prince’s diary is: “She put before us all the defects of our present military hospital system. We are much pleased with her; she is extremely modest.” Is it captious to wonder what they had expected her to be, and if they were surprised to find that she was not a Madame Sans-Gêne?
The letters of Dr. W. H. Russell in The Times first revealed to the nation the frightful breakdown in our military organization. The special correspondent became, from the date of the Crimean War, a force to be reckoned with. Instead of the cut-and-dried official despatches, concealing often more than revealing the truth, and intended to lay before the public only just so much of the facts as the military authorities thought it good for them to know, the special correspondent publishes for all the world to read, a vivid daily narrative of facts in which blunders and incompetence, when they exist, are given quite as much prominence as good generalship and victory. If England was disappointed at the evidence given of her want of efficient military organization, Russia had much more cause to be so. Russia had put her whole strength into her armaments; she was nothing if not a great military power; but she was everywhere unsuccessful. One of the most dramatic incidents during the war was the death of the Czar, on March 2, 1855. It was said that his disease was influenza, followed by congestion of the lungs; but some people thought he might have been said to have died of a broken heart. Punch’s cartoon, “General Février turned traitor,” showing Death, in a general’s uniform, laying his icy hand on his victim, will long be remembered.
The war fever which had fired the whole of England at the beginning of the campaign perhaps led people to expect more than was possible from the army. There was a bitter cry of anger and disappointment that our military successes in the field were not quickly followed up and taken advantage of by our generals, and especially that the sufferings of our soldiers were needlessly aggravated by the waste, incompetence, and utter muddle reigning over the distribution of the food and stores. Lord Aberdeen, the Prime Minister, was blamed; he had been dragged into the war, and never really cordially approved it, it was said. Mr. Gladstone was blamed; he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and thought it his duty to provide the war budget out of income; “penny wise and pound foolish” was the comment on this. War is one of the things that cannot be done cheap. These and other Ministers who were attacked could defend themselves in Parliament; but the phials of public wrath were more especially directed against the Prince, who for months bore every kind of imputation and false accusation poured out against him in the press, without having any opportunity of self-defence. Even before the outbreak of the war, it had been said that he was completely anti-English in his sympathies; that we, therefore, had a traitor in our midst, able and willing to use his position on the steps of the Throne to weaken and humiliate England. So diligently were these false reports circulated in the press and by word of mouth that they were the common topic of conversation all over England. At one time a report was current, and was actually believed, that the Prince had been impeached for high treason and sent to the Tower. Thousands of people assembled outside to see his entrance. If this had been the condition of the public mind before the war began, it is not difficult to imagine that the disease of suspicion and distrust broke out again after the beginning of hostilities, when there was so much to criticise in the organization of the War Department at home. The public wanted a victim, some one to wreak their anger upon, and the Prince served them for this purpose. Even so well informed a politician, and so able a man as Mr. Roebuck, believed, and openly said to the Duke of Newcastle, the War Minister, that of course every one knew that there was a determination “in a high quarter” that the Crimean expedition should not succeed. The Duke thought that the expression, “a high quarter,” was directed against himself, and said so. “Oh, no,” answered Mr. Roebuck, “I mean a much higher personage than you; I mean Prince Albert.”
The Duke immediately endeavored to remove this entirely false impression, and asked Mr. Roebuck if he were not aware that the Queen had been ill with anxiety about her troops. The reply was that no one doubted the Queen’s devotion to her country; that when Lord Cardigan was at Windsor, one of the Royal children had said to him, “You must hurry back to Sebastopol and take it, else it will kill mamma.” Yet almost in the same breath Mr. Roebuck maintained that the Prince was working behind the Queen’s back against the efficient organization of the army, in order to prevent the success of her troops.
An expression made use of by the Prince in a public speech, towards the close of the Crimean War, June, 1855, has become historical. He contrasted the autocratic power of the Czar of Russia, characterized by unity of purpose and action, and when desirable by secrecy, with the Parliamentary Government of the Queen, where every movement of the army or navy, and every stage of every diplomatic negotiation are publicly proclaimed, and have to be explained and defended in Parliament; and he concluded by saying that “Constitutional Government was on its trial,” and could only come through it triumphantly if the country granted a patriotic and indulgent confidence to the Ministry. This was twisted by the Prince’s enemies into an attack on the principles of constitutionalism; but it really was an appeal to the good sense and patriotism of the nation, on which, at bottom, Parliamentary Government must rest.
The Tory and the Radical Press must share the blame of the disgraceful attacks made upon the Prince. The Queen was bitterly wounded by them. Greville, no courtier, as many former extracts prove, said he never remembered anything more atrocious and unjust than these savage libels. That they had been fostered by the hostility between Palmerston and the Prince there can be no doubt. One of the lies in circulation was that there was a pamphlet giving authentic proofs of the Prince’s treachery to England, that the Prince had bought up all the copies but six, which were in Palmerston’s possession; whereupon the Prince had made his peace with Palmerston, in order to secure the continued suppression of the pamphlet. This called forth an authoritative denial in the columns of The Morning Post from Lord Palmerston. It is probable that one motive of the Queen in bestowing the title of Prince Consort upon her husband in 1857, was to give a practical reply to these slanders. It would have been well if this had been preceded by an action for libel against the most conspicuous of the Prince’s traducers; this would have given a chance of the real author of the libels being run to earth.