Lord Stratford, when he arrived at Constantinople, found the Sublime Porte in a panic. Though Russia had assured the English Government that no question then remained open between her, France, and Turkey, except that of the Holy Places, Menschikoff had demanded from the Porte a treaty, the negotiation of which, he said, must be kept secret from the Powers, acknowledging the right of Russia to a protectorate over all Greek Christians in Turkey. Ultimately he offered to accept a Note; but the objection to the concession in any such shape, was that it virtually transferred to the Russian Czar the allegiance of 12,000,000 of the Sultan’s subjects. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe advised the Porte to begin by settling the question of the Holy Places, which was the fons et origo of the dispute. That question was quickly settled, and then Menschikoff promptly and peremptorily pressed the new claim of Russia to a protectorate over the Greek Church in Turkey. On the 5th of May he sent an ultimatum to the Porte demanding its surrender on this point within five days. On Lord Stratford’s advice the Porte refused to surrender, and Prince Menschikoff and his suite left Constantinople in wrath.[113] At this crisis the voice of Nicholas was for war; but that of Nesselrode, his able and tranquil Minister, was for peace. As a compromise the Czar therefore determined that the Danubian Principalities should be occupied by his troops, and held till Turkey guaranteed to Russia “the rights and privileges of all kinds which have been granted by the Sultan to his Greek subjects.”[114] On the 31st of May Nesselrode wrote to Reschid Pasha that Russian troops would cross the Pruth, and on the 2nd of June Admiral Dundas was ordered to proceed with the Mediterranean squadron to Besika Bay. The French fleet was ordered to go there also, and the allied squadrons made their appearance in Turkish waters about the same time.[115] The quarrel up till now had been one between France and Russia. It was thus suddenly transformed into one between France and England on the one side and Russia on the other. On the 2nd of July Prince Gortschakoff entered the Principalities; and then Austria, which had selfishly held aloof, became nervous as to the control of the Danube, and manifested a desire to act with the Western Powers. Turkey was advised not to treat Russian aggression on the Principalities as a casus belli, and the Porte met it with a protest, though it was very nearly forced by its fanatical Moslem subjects to declare war. In England the Government was condemned for its extreme reticence in Parliament as to the turn affairs were taking; and up to this point the Cabinet certainly committed three blunders. In the first place, they permitted Lord Stratford to encourage the Porte to resist Russia, without having come to a clear and definite determination to support that resistance by force, if Russia proved unbending. Secondly, they relied too much on Count Nesselrode’s smooth, pacific assurances after they knew, or ought to have known, from Prince Menschikoff’s proposal of a secret treaty to the Porte, and from the warlike demonstration on the Moldavian frontier,[116] that these assurances were illusory. Thirdly, they did not meet the proposal for a secret treaty and the demonstration on the frontier by ordering Dundas to Besika Bay, and they met the occupation of the Principalities by sending Dundas, not to the Black Sea, but only to Besika Bay. Lord Aberdeen’s apologists allege that the latter step would have caused Russia to occupy Constantinople. That is a feeble defence, for subsequent events showed that Russia could not even mobilise enough troops to hold the Principalities against the Turks. The English Government did enough to irritate the Czar, and though they did not do enough to check him, they did too much to enable them to extricate themselves with honour from the quarrel.
TOWN HALL, VIENNA.
Something, however, had to be done for the Porte, after it had, at the bidding of England and France, refrained from defending the Principalities, which were in its dominions. A Conference of the Powers was therefore assembled at Vienna, on the 24th of June, to arrive at a pacific solution of the difficulty, and on the 31st they adopted the Vienna Note, which has become famous in European history. It was sent to Russia and Turkey for acceptance as a settlement which, in the opinion of Europe, would be equally honourable and fair to both. The Czar accepted it promptly on the 10th of August. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, in his official capacity, advised Turkey to accept it; but he played his Government false, by plainly indicating his personal objections to it. The Porte acted on his private advice, and refused to accept the Note unless it were modified. Turkey thus dashed all hopes of peace by repudiating the advice of the Powers, and, by thus putting herself in the wrong, she put Russia in the right.
PRINCE MENSCHIKOFF.
Here Lord Aberdeen and his colleagues committed another blunder. On balancing the gain against the loss to Turkey which was likely to accrue from concessions that would prevent war, they might fairly enough have told the Porte that, if it rejected the Vienna Note, it would be left to struggle with Russia single-handed. Austria, however, followed by France, England, and Prussia, asked the Czar to accept the modifications of Turkey. The Czar refused to do this, and instructed Count Nesselrode to give his reasons for refusing, whereupon Austria and Prussia veered round, and again recommended the Porte to accept the original Note. England and France, on the contrary, alleging that Count Nesselrode’s despatches proved that the Czar attached a different meaning to the Note from that which they attributed to it, declined to join Austria and Prussia in pressing Turkey to accept it. The European concert was destroyed, and it was the European concert which alone rendered war impossible.[117] Unfortunately, on this occasion, the Queen, wary and ingenious as she has shown herself during other crises in checking the “drift” of Cabinets towards war, fell too easily under the influence of Lord Aberdeen, for whom personally she ever entertained the warmest regard. He sent Nesselrode’s despatch to her, but he prepossessed her mind by pointing out to her first, that Nesselrode’s reasons for refusing to accept the Turkish modifications of the Vienna Note, showed that Russia put a different interpretation on it from that which its framers meant it to bear; and secondly, that it would be dishonourable to ask the Porte to accept it in the face of this fact. Her Majesty, easily touched by such an appeal, wrote from Balmoral a strong letter to Lord Aberdeen supporting his view with much ability. “It is evident,” she said, “that Russia has hitherto attempted to deceive us, in pretending that she did not aim at the acquisition of any new right, but required only a satisfaction of honour, and an acknowledgment of the rights she already possessed by treaty—and that she does intend, and for the first time lays bare that intention, to acquire new rights of interference.” The Queen then made a suggestion which was carried out. It was that England should lay the whole case before Europe, declaring that the Russian demands were inadmissible, and “that the continuance of the occupation of the Principalities, in order to extort these demands, constitutes an unwarrantable aggression upon Turkey, and infraction of the public law of Europe.”[118] As matters stood, such an intimation to the fiery Czar was virtually a challenge to mortal combat.
Those who hold the destinies of great nations in their hands are now chary of committing themselves to war for the sake of honour or the public law of Europe. The subterfuges by which Russia disorganised Bulgaria in 1886, and got rid of Prince Alexander, whose anti-Russian proclivities had been encouraged by England, touched British honour more closely than the “explicative Note” of Count Nesselrode. Yet England, guided solely by her interests, did not make Russian interference with Bulgaria in 1886, a casus belli. A greater statesman than Aberdeen in 1853, also eliminated all considerations of “honour” from his policy, and looked solely to the material interest of his country. Prussia was scoffed at by Prince Albert as “a reed shaken by the wind.” But Prussia not only refused to join the Western Powers against Russia, but deterred Austria from joining them. And why? Because Herr von Bismarck had enough influence with the King to convince him that the interest of Prussia did not lie in strengthening the Western Powers, or in offending Russia, whose benevolent neutrality might one day be valuable to his country. Why, he argued, should Prussia waste her strength in helping France and Austria to weaken Russia, without the prospect of winning for Prussia “a prize worthy of us”? He was “appalled” by the notion that “we may plunge into a sea of trouble and danger on behalf of Austria, for whose sins the King displays as much tolerance as I only hope God in Heaven will one day show to mine.” The “interest of Prussia,” he said, after the Crimean war was over, “is my only rule of action, and had there ever been any prospect of our promoting this interest by taking part in the war, I should certainly never have been one of its opponents.”[119] Lord Salisbury, on the 9th of November, 1886, speaking at the Guildhall, has in our time said that England has no interest to resist Russian aggression in European Turkey, where Austria has none. Tested by that principle the policy of the Cabinet and the Crown in 1853 was chivalrous, but indefensible. Yet if the Sovereign and her Ministers erred, what is to be said of the Nation? It was simply mad for war with Russia, and the section of the Cabinet headed by Palmerston and Russell vied with the Tories in inflaming the war-fever of the hour. Aberdeen was vilified as a Russian agent—because he was desirous of maintaining peace. Prince Albert was attacked with equal scurrility as a tool of the Czar, because he was not a Russophobe, and because he did not conceal his opinion that the Turkish Government was brutal, fanatical, and ignorant.