Diplomacy as a profession is a product of modern history. As Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the dividing walls between State and State were broken down, and Governments found it necessary to have trained agents resident at foreign courts to conduct the questions of growing importance which arose between them. Churchmen were at first best qualified to undertake such duties, and Nicholas Wotton, Dean of Canterbury, who enjoyed the confidence of four Tudor sovereigns, came to be as much at home in France or in the Netherlands as he was in his own Deanery. It was his great nephew Sir Henry (who began his days as a scholar at Winchester, and ended them as Provost at Eton) who did his profession a notable disservice by indulging his humour at Augsburg when acting as envoy for James I, defining the diplomatist as 'one who was sent to lie abroad for his country'.[42] Since then many a politician and writer has let fly his shafts at diplomacy, and fervent democrats have come to regard diplomats as veritable children of the devil. But this prejudice is chiefly due to ignorance, and can easily be cured by a patient study of history. In the nineteenth century, in particular, English diplomacy can point to a noble roll of ambassadors, who worked for European peace as well as for the triumph of liberal causes, and none has a higher claim to such praise than Sir Robert Morier, the subject of this sketch.
The traditions of his family marked out his path in life. We can trace their origin to connexions in the Consular service at Smyrna, where Isaac Morier met and married Clara van Lennep in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Swiss grandfather and Dutch grandmother became naturalized subjects of the British Crown and brought up four sons to win distinction in its service. Of these the third, David, married a daughter of Robert Burnet Jones—a descendant of the famous Bishop Burnet, and himself a servant of the Crown—and held important diplomatic appointments for over thirty years at Paris and Berne. So it was that his only son Robert David Burnet Morier was born in France, spent much of his childhood in Switzerland, and acquired early in life a remarkable facility in speaking foreign languages. To his schooling in England he seems to have owed little of positive value. His father and uncles had been sent to Harrow; but perhaps it was as well that the son did not, in this, follow in his father's footsteps. However much he neglected his studies with two easy-going tutors, he preserved his freshness and originality and ran no danger of being drilled into a type. If he had as a boy undue self-confidence, no one was better fitted to correct it than his mother, a woman of wide sympathies and strong intellectual force. The letters which passed between them display, on his part, mature powers of expression at an early age, and show the generous, affectionate nature of both; and till her death in 1855 she remained his chief confidante and counsellor. In trying to matriculate at Balliol College he met with a momentary check, due to the casual nature of his education; but, after retrieving this, he rapidly made good his deficiency in Greek and Latin, and ended by taking a creditable degree. His time at Oxford, apart from reading, was well spent. He made special friends with two of the younger dons: Temple, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, and Jowett, the future Master of Balliol. The former was carried by rugged force and sheer ability to the highest position in the Church; the latter won a peculiar place, in Oxford and in the world outside, by his gifts of judging character and stimulating intellectual interest. Morier became his favourite pupil and lifelong friend. F. T. Palgrave, the friend of both, tells us how 'Morier went up to Balliol a lax and imperfectly educated fellow; but Jowett, seeing his great natural capacity, took him in the Long Vacation of 1848 and practically "converted" him to the doctrine of work. This was the turning-point in Morier's life.' Together the two friends spent many a holiday in Germany, Scotland, and elsewhere, and must have presented a strange contrast to one another: Jowett, small, frail, quiet and precise in manner, Morier big in every way, exuberant and full of vitality. It was with Jowett and Stanley (afterwards Dean of Westminster) that Morier went to Paris in 1848, eager to study the Revolutionary spirit in its most lively manifestations. Stanley describes him as 'a Balliol undergraduate of gigantic size, who speaks French better than English, is to wear a blouse, and to go about disguised to the clubs'.
He took his degree in November 1849, and a month later he was visiting Dresden and Berlin, making German friends and initiating himself in German politics and German ways of thought. Though his British patriotism was fervid and sustained, he was capable of understanding men of other nations and recognizing their merits; and in knowledge of Germany he acquired a position among Englishmen of his day rivalled only by Odo Russell, afterwards Ambassador at Berlin. Morier's father had for many years represented Great Britain in Switzerland and could guide him both by precept and by example. Free intercourse with the most liberal minds in Oxford had developed the lessons which he had learnt at home. But his own energy and application effected more than anything. He was not satisfied till he had mastered a problem; and books, places, and people were laid under contribution unsparingly. He started on his tour carrying letters of introduction to some of the famous men in Germany, including the great traveller and scientist, Alexander von Humboldt. Of a younger generation was the philologist Max Müller, who was a frequent companion of Morier in Berlin, and gave up his time to nursing him back to health when he was taken ill with quinsy. He found friends in all professions, but chiefly among politicians. A typical instance is von Roggenbach, who rose to be Premier of Baden in the years 1861 to 1865, when the destinies of Germany were in the melting-pot. Baden was in some ways the leading state in South Germany at that time, combining liberal ideals with a fervent advocacy of national union, and the views of Roggenbach on political questions attracted Morier's warmest sympathy. Another state in which Morier felt genuinely at home was the Duchy of Coburg, from which Prince Albert had come to wed our own Queen Victoria. The Prince's brother, the reigning Duke, treated Morier as a personal friend; and here, too, he found Baron Stockmar, a Nestor among German Liberals, who had spent his political life in trying to promote goodwill between England and Germany. He received Morier into his family circle and adopted him as the heir to his policy. This intimacy led to further results; and, thanks in part to Morier's subsequent friendship with the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, generous ideals and a liberal spirit were to be found surviving in a few places even after 1870, though Bismarck had poisoned the minds of a whole generation by the material successes which he achieved.
In 1849 the doors of the Foreign Office were closed to Morier. The Secretary of State, Lord Palmerston, had treated his father unfairly, as he thought, some years before, and Morier would ask no favours of him. He continued his education, keeping in close touch with Jowett and Temple, and, when he saw a chance of studying politics at first hand, he eagerly availed himself of it. The troubles of Schleswig-Holstein, too intricate to be explained briefly, had been brewing for some time. In 1850, the dispute, to which Prussia, Denmark, and the German Diet were all parties, came to a head. The Duchies were overrun by Prussian troops, while the Danish Navy held the sea. Morier rushed off to see for himself what was happening, and spent some interesting days at Kiel, talking to those who could instruct him, and forming his own judgement. This was adverse to the wisdom of the Copenhagen Radicals, who were trying to assert by force their supremacy over a German population. In the circumstances, as Prussia gave way to the wishes of other powers, no satisfactory decision could be reached; but ten years later the issue was in the ruthless hands of Bismarck, and was settled by 'blood and iron'.
In 1850 Morier accepted a clerkship in the Education Office at £120 a year. The work was not to his taste, but at least it was public service, and he saw no hope of employment in the Foreign Office. He found some distractions in London society. He kept up relations with his old friends, and he took a leading part in establishing the Cosmopolitan Club, which later met in Watts's studio, but began its existence in Morier's own rooms. He enjoyed greatly a meeting with Tennyson and Browning, and wrote with enthusiasm of the former to his father, as 'one who gave men an insight into the real Hero-world, as one from whom he could catch reflected something of the Divine'. But Morier's spirits were mercurial, and between moments of elation he was apt to fall into fits of melancholy, when he could find no outlet for his energies. Waiting for his true profession tried him sorely, and he was even resigning himself to the prospect of a visit to Australia as a professional journalist, when fortune at last smiled upon him. Palmerston retired from the Foreign Office, and when Clarendon succeeded him, Morier's name was placed on the list of candidates for an attachéship. At Easter 1853 he started for another visit to the Continent, full of hope and more than ever determined to qualify himself for the profession which he loved.
He was rewarded for his zeal a few weeks later, when he paid a visit to Vienna, won the favour of the Ambassador, Lord Westmorland, and was commended to the Foreign Office. At the age of twenty-seven he was appointed to serve Her Majesty as unpaid attaché, having already acquired a knowledge of European politics which many men of sixty would have envied. In figure he was tall, with a tendency already manifested to put on flesh, good-looking, genial and sympathetic in manner, a bon vivant, passionately fond of dancing and society, an excellent talker or listener as the occasion demanded. His intelligence was quick, his powers of handling details and of grasping broad principles were alike remarkable. He wrote with ease, clearness, and precision; he knew what hard work meant and revelled in it. Unfortunately he was subject already to rheumatic gout, which was to make him acquainted with many watering-places, and was to handicap him gravely in later life. But at present nothing could check his ardour in his profession, and during his five years at Vienna he took every chance of studying foreign lands and of making acquaintance with the chief figures in the diplomatic world. He enjoyed talks with Baron Jellaçiç, who had saved the monarchy in 1848, and with Prince Metternich, whose political career ended in that year of revolutions and who was now only a figure in society. After the Crimean War Morier obtained permission to make a tour through South-east Hungary and to study for himself the mixture of Slavonic, Magyar, and Teutonic races inhabiting that district. He followed this up by another tour of three months, which carried him from Agram southwards into Bosnia and Herzegovina, having prepared for it by working ten to twelve hours a day for some weeks at the language of the southern Slavs. Incidentally he enjoyed some hunting expeditions with Turkish pashas, and obtained some insight into the weakness of the British consular system. All his life he believed strongly in the value of such tours to obtain first-hand information; and thirty years later, as Ambassador, he encouraged his secretaries to familiarize themselves with the outlying districts of the Russian empire.
In 1858, at the age of thirty-two, Morier passed from Vienna to Berlin. It was the year in which the Princess Royal, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, married the Crown Prince of Prussia.[43] Her father, the Prince Consort, was very anxious that Morier should be at hand to advise the young couple, and the appointment to Berlin was his work. Then it was that Morier became involved in the struggle between Bismarck and the Liberal influences in Germany, which had no stronger rallying-point than the Coburg Court. This conflict only showed itself later, and at first the young English attaché must have seemed a sufficiently unimportant person; but before 1862 Bismarck, coming home to Berlin from the St. Petersburg Embassy, and discerning the nature of Morier's character, had declared that it was desirable to remove such an influence from the path of his party, who were determined to bring Liberal Germany under the yoke of a Prussia which had no sympathy for democratic ideals.
For the moment the ship of State was hanging in the wind; light currents of air were perceptible; sails were filling in one parliamentary boat or another; but the chief movement was to be seen not in parliamentary circles but in the excellent civil service, which preserved that honesty and efficiency which it had acquired in the days of Stein. There were marked tendencies towards Liberalism and towards unification in different parts of Germany; and, if the Liberal party could have produced one man of firmness and decision, these forces might have triumphed over the reactionary Prussian clique. In this conflict Morier was bound to be a passionate sympathiser with the parties which included so many of his personal friends and which advocated principles so dear to his heart. With the triumph of his friends, too, were associated the prospects of a good understanding between England and Germany, for which Morier himself was labouring; and he was accused of having meddled indiscreetly with local politics. When King William broke with the Liberals over the Army Bill, caution was doubly necessary. Bismarck became Minister in 1862, and, great man though he was, he was capable of any pettiness when he had once declared war on an opponent. From that time the policy of working for an Anglo-Prussian entente was a losing game, not only because Bismarck detested the parliamentarism which he associated with England, but also because, on our side too, extremists were stirring up ill-feeling. In his letters Morier makes frequent reference to the 'John Bullishness' of The Times. When this journal, to which European importance attached during the editorship of Delane, was not openly flouting Prussia, it was displaying reckless ignorance of a people who were making the most solid contributions to learning and raising themselves by steady industry from the losses due to centuries of Continental warfare.
From time to time he paid visits to friends at Dresden, at Baden, and elsewhere. One year he was sent to Naples on a special mission, another year he was summoned to attend on Queen Victoria, who was visiting Coburg. In 1859 he is lamenting the monotony of existence at Berlin, which he calls 'a Dutch mud canal of a life, without even the tulip beds on the banks'. But when later in that year Lord John Russell, who knew and appreciated his talents, became Foreign Secretary and called on him for frequent reports on important subjects, Morier found solace in work. He was only too willing to put his wide knowledge of the country in which he was serving at the disposal of his superiors at home. He wrote with equal ability on political, agrarian, and financial subjects. That he could take into account the personal factor is shown by the long letter which he wrote in 1861 to Sir Henry Layard, then Political Under-Secretary of State.[44] It contained a masterly analysis of the character and upbringing of King William, showing how his intellectual narrowness had hampered Liberal Governments, while his professional training in the army had made him a most efficient instrument in promoting the aims of Junker politicians and ministers of war.
On Schleswig-Holstein, above all, Morier exerted himself to convey a right view of the question to those who guided opinion in London, whether newspaper editors or responsible ministers. He appealed to the same principle which had won support for the Lombards against Austria. The inhabitants of the disputed Duchies were for the most part Germans, and the Danish Government had done violence to their national sentiment. If England could have extended its sympathy to its northern kinsmen in time, the question might have been settled peacefully before 1862, and Bismarck could never have availed himself of such a lever to overthrow his Liberal opponents. As it was, Prussia ignored the Danish sympathies displayed abroad, especially in the English press, went her own way and invaded the Duchies, dragging in her train Austria, her confederate and her dupe. Palmerston, who controlled our foreign policy at the time, waited till the last moment, blustered, found himself impotent to move without French support, and left Denmark smarting with a sense of betrayal which lasted till 1914. By such bungling Morier knew that we were incurring enmity on both sides and lowering our reputation for courage as well as for statesmanship.