At the end of August the Queen determined to visit Dublin on her way to Balmoral; and on the 29th she and her family landed at Kingstown Harbour.[132] Thence they proceeded to the Irish capital, where in their progress to the Vice-regal Lodge they met with an enthusiastic reception that recalled pleasant memories of their last tour. In the evening the city was illuminated in honour of its Royal guests. On the 30th they visited the Exhibition of Irish Industry, which had been organised at the sole expense of Mr. Dargan, a public-spirited citizen, whose simple, manly bearing so charmed the Queen that she says in one of her letters, “I would have made him a baronet but he was anxious it should not be done.” Nor was she less delighted with the products of native industry, which she inspected most carefully, and which she says convinced her that the display would be of vast use in encouraging the spirit of the people, by showing them what excellent work they could turn out by their own efforts. Though the Queen met with wretched weather, yet she records her delight with her visit—“a pleasant, gay, interesting time” she calls it—and speaks gratefully of the extreme kindness shown to her by all classes of the people. On the 3rd of September she left Kingstown, and on the 6th was enjoying the bracing air of Balmoral once more.
It was here, on the evening of the 12th, that she heard that the Vienna Note was rejected by the Turks, and that the Eastern question was again simmering in the fatal cauldron of diplomatic incapacity. From that day her Majesty’s great aim was to work, like Lord Aberdeen, for peace; but there was an end to holiday repose at Balmoral. Foreign affairs became more and more unsettled, and on the 6th of October Stockmar was implored to come over and give the Queen and her husband the benefit of his advice. Sir James Graham was staying with them at the time, and his depressed spirits reacted on the Royal family. To refuse to protect the Sultan the Queen saw would so rouse public opinion that the Coalition Ministry, which she was so anxious to support, must fall. To declare war on Russia, Prince Albert assured her, would with equal certainty ultimately destroy that Ministry. One thing only was clear to them. Aberdeen must abandon all idea of resigning in favour of Lord John Russell, and, despite age and infirmity, must remain at the head of affairs till the war-cloud passed away. On the 14th of October the Queen accordingly returned to Osborne, painfully anxious lest the concessions which Lord Aberdeen had made to Palmerston and Russell as leaders of the War Party, and on which she commented caustically in her letter of the 11th of October to the Prime Minister, would bring the country still nearer to war. What were we to go to war for? That was the question which troubled the Queen. She could understand that in some dire extremity it might be right to exact the most terrible of sacrifices from her people, to keep the Russians out of Constantinople, and prevent the balance of power from being upset to the detriment of England. That was an intelligible war
SPITHEAD.
for the tangible interest of England and the civilised Powers. But such a war was a very different affair from the kind of war for which Palmerston clamoured—a war for the maintenance of the complete integrity of the Ottoman Empire. If waged, it must surely not be so waged that it would end by putting the oppressed Christians in Turkey once again in the absolute power of such a cruel dominion as that of the Porte. To this conclusion her Majesty had been forced by her close study of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe’s own despatches, describing the brutal treatment to which the Christians in Turkey were even at that time subjected. But then, of what use was it to suggest these ideas to the Cabinet, even though Lord Aberdeen supported them? When Prince Albert, at the Queen’s request, put them into the form of a Memorandum, Palmerston wrote a flippant reply to it only too closely in harmony with the popular frenzy of the time, the gist of the answer being that it was the duty of England to make war for Turkey and for Turkey alone, quite irrespective of any considerations affecting her treatment of her Christian subjects. To ask Turkey for concessions to civilisation, he argued, somewhat inconclusively, meant that we must connive at her expulsion from Europe. As for all the stories of Turkish fanaticism that had frightened the Queen, Lord Palmerston scoffingly described them as “fables invented at Vienna and St. Petersburg.”[133]
BALMORAL CASTLE FROM THE ROAD.
The Czar’s Manifesto of the 1st of November still further excited the War Party, and it was followed by a letter to the Queen, written by his own hand, begging her Majesty to decide between him and her Government in the dispute which had arisen from his attempt to apply the principles of the Treaty of Kainardji to the new situation which French pretensions in Syria had created in Turkey. To this the Queen replied with dignified courtesy, saying that, after repeatedly reading and studying the 7th Article of that Treaty, she could not fairly say that the Czar’s interpretation of it was correct, and adding that the continued occupation of the Principalities must lead to events “which I should deplore, in common with your Majesty.”[134] The year closed with the ferocious attacks of a certain portion of the Press on Prince Albert, and as for the future, it was dark with the signs and omens of impending war.