The British troops remained in Portugal till March, 1828. By that time the disturbances had assumed a purely domestic character, and it was ultimately decided to recall them. But a firmer policy than that actually followed would have been necessary in order to extricate Great Britain from the strife of Portuguese factions, in which her recent action had given a decided advantage to the constitutional party. That party had been driven into opposition before the British troops were recalled. On July 3, 1827, King Peter had issued a decree appointing Dom Miguel his lieutenant, and investing him with all the powers which belonged to him as king under the charter. Miguel, after visiting London, arrived at Lisbon on February 22, 1828, and was sworn in as regent four days later. As he was twenty-five years old, and therefore of full age according to Portuguese law, he could not with any show of equity have been kept out of the regency longer. Miguel's installation as regent was followed by a series of riots as well on the part of the absolutists, who desired to make him king, as on the part of the constitutionalists who feared that he would make himself king. It was not long before he definitely identified himself with the absolutist party.
MIGUEL'S USURPATION.
On March 14 the cortes were dissolved. On May 3 Miguel summoned the ancient cortes in his own name, and on June 26 they acknowledged him as king. The immediate result of this act was that all the ambassadors, except those of Spain and the Holy See, quitted Lisbon, and the lapse of time did not induce them to change their attitude towards Miguel. A further complication was introduced by Peter's definite abdication in favour of his daughter on March 3, executed before he had any suspicion of Miguel's designs, which placed Miguel in the position of regent for his infant niece instead of for his brother. After this formal abdication Peter despatched his daughter to Europe, intending that she should proceed to Vienna. When, however, she arrived at Gibraltar on September 2, her conductors, hearing of Miguel's usurpation, determined to take her to England, and she landed at Falmouth on the 24th. Peter, on hearing of Miguel's usurpation, naturally considered the regency terminated, and claimed to act as the guardian of the infant queen; the Brazilian ministers in Europe acted as his agents, while his partisans assembled in England and attempted to use this country as a basis for warlike operations in Portuguese territories.
The situation of 1826 was thus reversed. Instead of an ultra-royalist party resting on Spain, a constitutionalist party resting on Brazil and attempting to rest on England was now threatening the established government at Lisbon. Wellington was anxious to maintain a strict neutrality, but he failed to prevent a ship of war and supplies of arms and ammunition going from Plymouth to Terceira in the Azores, where Donna Maria was acknowledged as queen. He succeeded, however, in preventing a larger armament, which had been raised under the name of the Emperor of Brazil, with Rio Janeiro as its nominal destination, from landing at Terceira. This action, though the logical consequence of the British opposition to the conduct of Spain in 1826, was severely criticised in England as equivalent to an intervention on behalf of Miguel.
Meanwhile Canning's attempt to prevent the separate action of Russia in the Eastern question had been doomed to disappointment. The destruction of the Turkish navy at Navarino was naturally regarded at Constantinople as an outrage, and the Porte demanded satisfaction from the ambassadors of the allied powers. This they refused to grant on the ground that the Turks had been the aggressors, and they in their turn demanded an armistice between the Turkish troops and the Greek insurgents. As the Porte remained obdurate, the ambassadors of France, Great Britain, and Russia, acting in accordance with their instructions, left Constantinople on December 8, 1827. But though war seemed imminent, the tsar still disowned all idea of conquest, and professed to desire nothing further than the execution of the treaty of London. A protocol was accordingly signed on the 12th by which the three powers confirmed a clause in the treaty, providing that, in the event of war, none of them should derive any exclusive benefit, either commercial or territorial.
The British government imagined that the powers might still effect their object by diplomacy, and that it would not be necessary to abandon the Turkish alliance. But any such idea must have been rudely shaken by the hati-sherif of December 20. In that document the sultan enlarged on the cruelty and perfidy of the Christian powers and summoned the Muslim nations to arms: he denounced Russia in particular as the prime mover of the Greek rebellion, the instigator of the other powers, and the arch-enemy of Islam; and he declared the treaty of Akkerman, by which the outstanding disputes between Russia and the Porte had been settled in October, 1826, to have been extorted by force and only signed in order to save time. This defiance of Russia, if not of all Christendom, was followed by a levy of Turkish troops and the expulsion of most of the Christian residents from Constantinople. No course was now open to Russia but to make war. It remained to be seen whether any other power would join her. On January 6, 1828, a Russian despatch announced the tsar's intention of occupying the Danubian principalities, and suggested that France and Great Britain should force the Dardanelles and thus compel the Porte to comply with the provisions of the treaty of London.
WELLINGTON'S EASTERN POLICY.
It is possible that if the direction of British foreign policy had remained in the hands of Goderich and Dudley, our government might have lent its support to a settlement of the Eastern question which would in effect have been the work of Russia only. The more daring policy of Canning, by which Great Britain had attempted to take the lead as opportunity offered, either in active co-operation with Russia or in active opposition to her, could only be directed by a more versatile statesman than the nation now possessed. The accession to office of Wellington, though it left Dudley at the foreign office, was really marked by a return to the policy of Castlereagh, a policy which, if not brilliant, was at least honourable, consistent, and considerate, and which in the hands of Wellington was managed with a sufficient measure of firmness, though with less tact and insight than had been shown by Castlereagh. The first object of this policy was to keep the special grievances of Russia distinct from the complaints which Europe at large or, in the present situation, the three allied powers were able to bring against the Porte. By so doing the British government hoped to prevent Russia from dragging other powers into a war for her private benefit, and also to render it impossible for Russia to use her special grievances as a lever by which she might effect a separate settlement of the general question. For some years this policy was successful. Russia did indeed wage a separate war with the Turks, but the Greek question was settled by the three powers conjointly, and Great Britain rather than Russia took the lead in the settlement. It was only after Palmerston had succeeded to the direction of our foreign policy in 1830, that it was discovered how far the victory of Russia in war had placed her in a position to dictate the general policy of the Ottoman court.
Wellington experienced no difficulty in striking out a line of policy along which he could carry France with him. On February 21 De la Ferronays, who had been recalled from the French embassy at St. Petersburg to occupy the post of foreign minister in the new liberal administration, which had been formed in France in December, 1827, despatched a note urging the immediate employment of energetic measures against the Porte. He saw that the hati-sherif gave special occasion of war to Russia, and he was naturally anxious to anticipate her isolated action by combined measures of coercion. He had, however, nothing better to suggest than the execution of the Russian proposals of January 6. Wellington, in his reply, dated the 26th, rightly minimised the seriousness of the hati-sherif, and characterised the proposed measures of coercion as destined to be ineffectual. He also expressed the fear that if the three powers combined to make war on the Turks there would be a general insurrection of the subject races in the Turkish dominions which might last indefinitely. He therefore proposed first to settle the Greek question by local pressure, after which he anticipated no serious trouble about events at Constantinople. On the same day he drafted a memorandum to the cabinet in which he proposed that the allied squadrons should proceed to the Archipelago, blockade the Morea and Alexandria, destroy the Greek pirates, stop the warfare in Chios and Crete, and call upon the Greek government to withdraw the forces which were operating in western and eastern Greece respectively under the command of two foreign volunteers, General Church and Colonel Fabvier. In other words, he proposed to coerce not the Porte but the actual combatants, Greece and Egypt, and to check each party where it was the aggressor. If the prime object of the government in the eastern question was the maintenance of order, these proposals were excellent. The one capital defect of the whole scheme was that it ignored the Russian desire for war, which rendered it impossible for the tsar to postpone the settlement of his own grievances until an arrangement should be come to on the Greek question; on the other hand, by isolating the Greek question, it left it possible for the western powers to proceed with its solution in spite of the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and the Turks.[95]
WAR BETWEEN RUSSIA AND TURKEY.