Just before the allied fleets were sent to defend Turkey in the Black Sea the Porte ordered Omar Pasha to demand the evacuation of Moldavia within fifteen days, and, failing compliance, to attack the Russians at once. The Russians held their ground, standing on the defensive, and the Turks crossed the Danube, inflicting on them defeats that, of course, deeply wounded the pride of the Czar. He therefore ordered the Russian squadron at Sebastopol to retaliate in the Euxine. On the 30th of November it discovered a Turkish fleet at Sinope, which, the Turks declared, was bound for Batoum. The Russian admiral, however, believed it was on its way to the Circassian coast, for the purpose of stirring up an insurrection against Russia in the Caucasus. Instead of watching it or blockading it, as he might have done, he attacked and destroyed it.
This catastrophe, of course, brought England nearer to war. A fierce cry of wrath went up from the English people. Their fleet had been sent to defend Turkey against Russia, yet it had tamely allowed Russia to perpetrate “the massacre of Sinope.” Russia knew that England stood pledged to protect Turkey from attack in the Euxine. Sinope was, therefore, a direct challenge to England, and it must be promptly taken up. The foresight of Prince Albert was thus amply justified. The Government had stupidly sent to the Black Sea a fleet strong enough to provoke Russia, but not strong enough to protect Turkey, and insinuations of treason were freely made. “The defeat of Sinope,” wrote the Prince, “upon our own element—the sea—has made the people furious; it is ascribed to Aberdeen having been bought over by Russia.” Nor was Aberdeen the only one who suffered. Prince Albert was scurrilously attacked by Tories and Radicals of the baser sort, and, almost in as many words, accused of being a Russian spy, whose influence with the Queen was paralysing her Government. But if the English Government blundered foolishly in sending the British fleet to the Black Sea with orders to protect Turkey, without first making sure that Turkey would not provoke attack, or that our fleet was strong enough to defend her, Russia blundered, not foolishly, but criminally, in attacking the Turks at Sinope. Mr. Spencer Walpole says:—“Though the attack on Sinope may be justified, its imprudence cannot be excused.”[125] But surely if it cannot be excused it is idle to “justify” it. The Czar was warned that England and France would defend Turkey if the latter was assailed in the Euxine. An attack on Turkey at Sinope, in spite of that warning, he must have known would be taken by the English and French people as a defiance, which would so madden them, that the war party in France and England must forthwith control the situation. Therefore, to say it was an “imprudence” is to say that, in the circumstances, it was a crime against civilisation. As will be seen later on, it provoked France and England to order their fleets to patrol the Black Sea, and require every Russian ship they met to put back into Sebastopol, so that a second Sinope might be prevented.
During most of this anxious time it is hardly necessary to say that the domestic life of the Queen was one of wearing excitement. At the outset of the diplomatic disputes in which her Government entangled the country it seems that she paid rather less attention than usual to foreign affairs. Palmerston was no longer at the Foreign Office, and in Lord Aberdeen, who was at the head of the Government, the Queen put the most implicit confidence. She had formed a habit of regarding him as the beau idéal of a “safe” Minister, and thus, when she sat down every morning to read her official correspondence, her Majesty approached all the projects of her Government, if not with a decided bias in favour of them, at any rate without that wholesome prepossession of suspicion, that rendered her a keen and searching critic of the Foreign Policy of the country when it was under the direction of Lord Palmerston. It was not till late in the autumn that the Queen’s correspondence, so far as it has been made public, shows a disposition on her part to resume the tone of independent, outspoken, but confidential criticism, that so often checked the vagaries of Lord John Russell’s Cabinet. The Queen, in fact, put too much confidence in the sagacity of the Coalition Government. The Coalition Government, conscious that, so long as Aberdeen could be persuaded to endorse their doings, they would not be very jealously scrutinised by the Crown, entered with a light heart on the most dangerous course of diplomacy. The Queen, the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, and the Czar all set out with the most sincere and unbounded confidence in each other. In little more than twelve months they were accordingly in almost irreconcilable controversy.
THE THRONE ROOM, WINDSOR CASTLE.
After the Coalition Ministry was formed, what the Queen dreaded most was that it might break up over the question of Parliamentary Reform, or over some dispute as to the Premiership, in the event of Lord Aberdeen resigning office. Aberdeen was old and somewhat infirm, and there can be little doubt that he would have resigned soon after the Coalition was organised had not the Eastern Question risen to tie him to his post. Lord John Russell had some notion that he would be Aberdeen’s successor, and it was his fixed idea that his scheme for reforming Parliament would not have a fair chance, unless it were launched by him with all the prestige of the Premier’s advocacy in its favour. Some members of the Cabinet did not desire that this scheme should be launched at all; others, like Palmerston, were determined that it should not be launched, and that Lord John should not be Premier. A few weeks after the Ministry was constituted Lord John resigned the seals of the Foreign Office to Lord Clarendon, becoming a Minister without an office, but retaining the leadership of the House of Commons. The Queen warned him that he would grow discontented with
SEBASTOPOL.