[202] “Whatever may be the qualities of different Ministers, I am the bond by which they are united together. That once destroyed, the whole fabric falls.”—Letter of Lord Aberdeen to John Wilson Croker, explaining why the factions concentrated their hostility on him personally.—The Croker Papers, Vol. III., p. 348.
[203] Evelyn Ashley’s Life of Palmerston, Vol. II., p. 80.
[204] Palmerston wanted Lord Shaftesbury to be Chancellor of the Duchy. He had to withdraw his offer of the post, and in this letter Lady Palmerston explains why.—Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G., by Edwin Hodder, Vol. II., p. 493 (Cassell and Co.).
[205] Memoirs of an Ex-Minister, Vol. II., p. 8.
[206] Martin’s Life of the Prince Consort, Chap. LXI.
[207] The opposition of the Peelites to the Committee on grounds of high policy and constitutional legality was soon justified. “Lord Stanley,” says Lord Malmesbury on the 3rd of March, “writes that Louis Napoleon objects strongly to the Committee of Inquiry into the War, and says if it takes place, though his army will still act on the same side as ours, it can no longer do so along with it. He is evidently alarmed at the laches of his own Ministers and generals being shown up to Europe and endangering his position.”—Memoirs of an Ex-Minister, Vol. II., p. 11. Little wonder that the investigation was “incomplete” and “inconclusive.”
[208] Mr. Sidney Herbert succeeded Sir George Grey in this office when Palmerston reorganised the Coalition. Mr. Herbert went out with the Peelites a fortnight after the new Ministry was formed.
[209] Hansard, Vol. CXXXVIII., 1075.
[210] This was, of course, discussing and coming to a unanimous agreement with Russia at the very outset on the Second Point—the navigation of the Danube. This was the point in which Austria had had a vital interest. If it had been kept open to the last, she might have been more zealous in overcoming the difficulties as to the Third Point which wrecked the Conference.
[211] The proof of this is as follows: (1) The Turks would have taken the Austrian compromise, which, by the way, was the development of a suggestion made by the French Envoy, as the basis of a feasible plan for giving effect to the Third Point. (2) Lord John Russell—the most violent and bellicose of the anti-Russian Ministers—was in favour of it. (3) The position of Russia in the matter was officially misrepresented to the English people. Russia said her defeats were not such as to justify her as a Great Power in letting the Allies force on her a reduction of her Black Sea fleet. But she had no objection to any plan limiting her preponderance if it sprang from mutual negotiation between her and Turkey—acting as principals on an equal footing—to establish, by mutual consent a naval equilibrium in the Black Sea. (4) She did not absolutely exclude the idea of reducing her fleet as was falsely stated, not only in the English press, but in Parliament. Article 2 of Count Buol’s compromise provided that Turkey and Russia should “propose by common agreement to the Conference the effective equality of the naval forces which the two coast Powers will keep up in the Black Sea, and which shall not exceed the actual number of Russian ships afloat in that Sea.” (See Annual Register, Vol. XCVII., pp. 214-217.) The use of the word “exceed” shows that the Article provided a maximum limit—not a minimum. It was simply foolish to argue, as representatives of the Government did, that negotiations for peace had to be abandoned because Russia refused to accept a practical and reasonable plan for preventing her from having more ships than Turkey in the Black Sea. The statement of facts on this subject by Sir T. Martin in Chap. LXIII. of his Life of the Prince Consort is as misleading as Mr. Spencer Walpole’s account of the Austrian Compromise (History of England, Vol. V., p. 135). Mr. Walpole says that Count Buol’s proposal was one “under which any addition to the Russian Fleet might be followed by the admission of a corresponding number of war vessels of the Allies into the Euxine.” This is not a correct summary of Article 2 of the Compromise.