[212] Martin’s Life of the Prince Consort, Chap. LXIII.
[213] “If,” writes Prince Albert in a Memorandum dated 3rd of May, 1855, “Austria, Prussia, and Germany will give the diplomatic guarantee for the future which I have here detailed, we shall consider this an equivalent for the material guarantee sought for in the limitation of the Russian Fleet.”—Martin’s Life of the Prince Consort, Chap. LXIII. But the odd thing to note is, that the Prince was one of those responsible, not perhaps for suspending, but for finally breaking up the Conference of Vienna, that had already adopted the principle of his plan. He and the Queen ignored the fact that it was already embodied in the Memorandum agreed to by the Conference, for giving effect to Ali Pasha’s project for more completely connecting Turkey with “the European equilibrium.” The Queen first coerced—for her note to Clarendon was a coercive instrument—Palmerston to abandon negotiations in Conference, because Russia would not submit to a humiliating material guarantee. Then Prince Albert suggests as a substitute for that a diplomatic guarantee, which Russia had already accepted, and which was a far less effective protection to Turkey than the Austrian compromise which the Queen imperiously condemned. The only original point in the Prince’s plan is the inclusion of Prussia. She had been excluded from the Conference in deference to the prejudices of those who hated peace negotiations, and who declared that she was a mendacious slave of the Czar.
[214] And yet on the day before the Prince wrote to Aberdeen he says, in a letter to Stockmar:—“The Vienna Conferences, which it would have been better to have left open, must now be closed, if only to get the Ministry rest in Parliament. Oh, Oxenstiern! Oh, Oxenstiern!”—Martin’s Life of the Prince Consort, Chap. LXIV.
[215] Mr. Sidney Herbert was another Peelite who resisted Prince Albert’s intimidation.
[216] Canrobert’s neglect to seize the Mamelon Hill before the Russians crept into it on the 9th of March and fortified it, was one of the fatal blunders that protracted the siege.
[217] Lord Malmesbury records a conversation in his Diary with Persigny on this point. “Persigny strongly for peace, and says France is all for it.... He says, if the Emperor is to go to the Crimea, there must be peace at any price to prevent it. If not, the war ought to go on; but if the French army is lost then there will be a revolution.”—Memoirs of an Ex-Minister, Vol. II., p. 16.
[218] The War, by W. H. Russell, p. 498. London: Routledge and Co., 1855.
[219] Napoleon III. was abjectly ignorant of military geography. At the council of 1854, said Persigny to Lord Malmesbury, his Majesty “announced the attack on Baltic.” Persigny asked if he meant Cronstadt. “No, of course not, it would require 100,000 men, cavalry included,” said the Emperor, loftily. “But,” replied Persigny, “Cronstadt is an island.” “No, it is not,” said the Emperor, as he went for a map. Everything, said Persigny, was done with the same ignorance and carelessness. Yet it was a campaign—devised by this charlatan against the opinion of his best officers, that Lord Raglan, according to Sir T. Martin, approved! See Memoirs of an Ex-Minister, Vol. II., p. 15.
[220] Reminiscences and opinions of Sir F. H. Doyle (Longmans, 1886), p. 414. There was a terrible snow storm in Devonshire this year. It was made memorable by the footmarks of some creature which nobody could identify. These created a sort of panic in the West of England, for the people thought that the devil was abroad among them.
[221] Letters of Sir George Cornewall Lewis, p. 295. His additional taxes were, (1), 3s. per cwt. on sugar; (2), 1d. per pound on coffee, raising the duty from 3d. to 4d.; (3), 3d. per pound on tea, raising the duty from 1s. 6d. to 1s 9d.; (4), equalisation of duty on Scotch and English spirits, bringing the former from 6s. to 7s. 10d. per gallon; (5), increase of duty on Irish spirits from 4s. to 6s; (6), increase of 2d. on Income Tax, raising it from 1s. 2d. to 1s. 4d. in the £.