CONVENT OF THE NATIVITY, BETHLEHEM.
The Porte endeavoured, by contradictory concessions, such as by publicly reading the firman, and by permitting the Latins to put a star over the altar of the Nativity, to please both parties—but in vain. Russia, towards the end of 1852, had moved a corps d’armée on the frontier of Moldavia. France threatened to send her fleet to Syria; and in the end of February, 1853, the Czar sent Prince Menschikoff on a special mission to Constantinople, for the purpose of enforcing the Russian demands.
The turn in affairs that placed Lord Aberdeen at the head of the Queen’s Government did not tend to moderate these demands, or induce the Czar to treat the Porte with any delicacy. The Czar, in fact, was honestly convinced that his views as to the future of Turkey were, in the main, shared by Lord Aberdeen, and therefore by the British Cabinet. It was
INTERIOR OF THE CHAPEL OF THE NATIVITY, BETHLEHEM.
well known that when the Czar visited England, in 1844, he had discussed the Eastern Question with the Queen and her principal advisers, and that he and Lord Aberdeen had become personal friends. His Majesty had propounded to Peel and Aberdeen his fixed idea that it would be well, in view of the impending dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, that England and Russia should agree as to the disposal of its European provinces. As Austria would follow Russia, an Anglo-Russian coalition would necessarily dictate terms to France, who, by her support of Mehemet Ali, had shown that her interests were as hostile to those of England in Egypt, as they were to those of Russia in Syria. In fact, the Czar’s conversations with the Tory Ministers in 1844 were almost identical with those which he subsequently held with Sir Hamilton Seymour in 1853. Sir Theodore Martin asserts that Peel rejected these overtures, saying that England did not regard the dissolution of Turkey as imminent, that she wanted no Turkish territory for herself, that she merely desired to prevent any government in Egypt from closing the road to India, and that she must decline to pledge herself to accept Russian plans for disposing of the Turkish territory, till events rendered its disposal a pressing question.[105] Sir Theodore Martin, however, admits that there was “a general concurrence in the principle expressed” by the Czar, that no Great Power—least of all France—should be permitted to aggrandise itself at the expense of Turkey. Now, it seems certain that up to the very moment when war was declared, the Emperor Nicholas was convinced that Lord Aberdeen’s Government would never take sides with France against him, in any quarrel about Turkey. He was convinced, despite the despatches of the British Ministry, that the ideas of the British Government and his own in regard to the future of Turkey, were in principle the same—and this conviction he evidently carried away with him from England in 1844. He must have been, therefore, too stupid to correctly understand what Peel said to him, or Peel must have said more to him than Sir Theodore Martin felt himself at liberty to record, in his masterly but discreet biography of Prince Albert. The manifest reluctance of Lord Aberdeen to thwart the Russian Emperor, and his obvious embarrassment when his duty forced him to comment publicly on Russian diplomacy in 1853, indicate that something more was said. What it was has been revealed by Lord Malmesbury in an entry in his Diary under date the 3rd of June, 1853. “There is,” says Lord Malmesbury, who speaks with the authority of one who had held the seals of the Foreign Office, “a circumstance which I think must strongly influence Lord Aberdeen at this moment; which is, that when the Emperor Nicholas came to England in 1844, he, Sir Robert Peel (then Prime Minister), the Duke of Wellington, and Lord Aberdeen (then Foreign Secretary) drew up and signed a memorandum, the spirit and scope of which was to support Russia in her legitimate protectorship of the Greek religion and the Holy Shrines, and to do so without consulting France. When Lord Derby’s government came in, at first, I was unable to understand the mysterious allusions which Brunnow[106] made now and then, and which he retracted when he saw that either I knew nothing of this paper, or that I desired to ignore it. Since it was composed and written, the position of affairs in Europe is totally changed, and is even reversed. In 1840 the events in the East had then estranged England and France from one another, and Louis Napoleon did not exist as a factor in European policy. Now he is Emperor of the French, and the Duke and Peel are dead, yet it is not unnatural to believe that Nicholas, finding Lord Aberdeen Prime Minister, and the sole survivor of these three English statesmen, should feel that the moment had arrived, so long wished for by Russia, to fall upon Turkey.... He believes that Lord Aberdeen never will join France against him, and probably thinks Palmerston stultified by the drudgery of the Home Office.”[107] This passage in Lord Malmesbury’s Diary explains why Lord Beaconsfield used to say that he knew as a fact within his own knowledge, that had Lord Aberdeen not come to power in 1852, the Crimean war would never have broken out.[108] Perhaps it explains why Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright declared that if the Tories had not been driven from Office in 1852, the Crimean war would have been avoided. It is now only too easy to understand that, if he had this Secret Memorandum in his possession, the Czar Nicholas naturally believed that the British Government were not serious in their antagonism. It is also easy to understand why Lord Aberdeen always shrank from speaking the firm word of warning, which would have induced Russia to pause ere her troops crossed the Pruth, and draw back whilst it was possible to draw back with honour.
The existence of an informal understanding between the Czar and the old Tory Government of 1844 shows us why his Majesty, in conversation with Sir Hamilton Seymour, on the 9th and 14th of January, 1853, reopened the question which he believed he had virtually arranged with that Government. The last living representative of it—Lord Aberdeen—was Prime Minister of England; Turkey was in a more decrepit condition than ever; France seemed bent on reviving the Napoleonic legend—of evil omen to England in Egypt; nay, she was challenging the claim of Russia to secure protection for the Greek Christians in the Ottoman Empire—a claim which the Tory leaders in 1844 were disposed to favour.[109] The Czar therefore thought it most opportune to say to Sir Hamilton Seymour, as he had said to Wellington and Peel, that Turkey, “the Sick Man,” was dying on their hands, that England and Russia should either agree what should or should not be done with his heritage when he died, and, further, to suggest that the Christian provinces of Turkey should be organised as independent States under Russian protection, whilst England occupied Egypt and Candia.[110] Lord John Russell’s reply to these conversations must have also misled the Czar, preoccupied as he was with the fact that, in terms of the Secret Memorandum of 1844, England and Russia had agreed on a common policy in Turkey. Lord John, in effect, said that, as the British Government did not think that the Turk was quite moribund, it was premature to discuss any project, negative or positive, for disposing of his territory, and that England had no desire for territorial aggrandisement. But he went on to add that he thought the Sultan should be “advised” to treat his Christian subjects justly and humanely, because, if he did so, the Czar would not find it “necessary to apply that exceptional protection which his Imperial Majesty has found so burdensome and inconvenient, though no doubt prescribed by duty and sanctioned by treaty.” The words here italicised were not altogether in accord with the facts, for no treaty sanctioned in plain, definite terms this “exceptional protection;” moreover, they admitted the whole Russian case; for, as will be seen, it was precisely because the Czar was supposed to be bent on extorting from Turkey an extension of the sanction given by existing treaties to the Russian Protectorate over her oppressed Christian subjects, that Turkey and England went to war with Russia. Whether that war was right or wrong, this is certain: it was waged by the English Government to rebut a claim, which that Government at the outset admitted. The Czar, through Count Nesselrode, expressed himself satisfied with the self-denying pledges which had passed between the Russian and English Governments, and, as England had promised not to entertain any project for the protection of Turkey without a previous understanding with Russia, so Russia, he said, gave a similar undertaking to England. But he observed that the surest way to prevent the fall of Turkey would be to induce the Porte to treat the Greek Christians with equity and humanity. The English Government, delighted with this friendly communication, advised the Porte to compose the dispute between France and Russia, by offering to accept any arrangement which these two Powers would take as satisfactory. It remonstrated with France for having been the first, not only to raise the quarrel about the Holy Places, but also to support her demands by a threat of war. This was a second admission on the part of England that in this controversy Russia was in the right. Napoleon III. recalled M. de Lavalelle, his hectoring Envoy at Constantinople, and sent M. de La Cour in his place. Russia ceased her warlike preparations on the Moldavian frontier, and the war-cloud on the horizon began to melt away.