When October brought the first hints of bad news from the Crimea, the heart of the Queen grew heavy with anxiety. She now knew, by advices from Raglan, that he had not enough troops for the task that was imposed on him. The country was growing restive over the sluggishness of the attack. The Queen and Prince Albert therefore implored Lord Aberdeen to consider how reinforcements were to be sent out. On the 11th of November her Majesty asked the Prime Minister to visit her at Windsor, and, with the Duke of Newcastle, talk over a project of the Prince’s for raising the Militia by ballot and sending them abroad, and for organising a legion of foreign mercenaries. The Queen desired this step to be taken at once, assuring her Ministers that they would have no difficulty in getting a Bill of Indemnity from Parliament; but her suggestion was overruled. And yet at this time Raglan was begging the Secretary for War to send out 10,000 troops without delay! Meanwhile Napoleon III. was alarmed to find that the English army was vanishing before Canrobert’s eyes. Hence he offered to send out every French soldier he could muster, if England would only find the transports. Sir James Graham found them, and they carried, not only French troops to the Crimea, but all the lavish stores of food and comforts which never reached those for whom they were supplied. The terrible loss of life at Inkermann again prompted the Queen to press on the Duke of Newcastle the necessity for reinforcing our shattered army. Prince Albert was equally urgent in his importunity, and on the 1st of December he was successful in persuading the Cabinet to adopt his plan for forming an Army of Reserve at Malta.
Meantime, diplomacy was again appealed to for the purpose of ending the war. “If Austria did her duty,” writes the Queen when as yet the tidings of carnage were fresh in her mind, “she might have prevented much of this bloodshed. Instead of this, her Generals do nothing but juggle the Turks of the Principalities, and the Government shuffles about, making advances and then retreating. We shall see now if she is sincere in her last propositions.”[197] These were that certain demands should be made by her on Russia. If Russia rejected them, then Austria would be willing to join us in the war. But, on the other hand, if Russia accepted the Austrian proposals, England and France must agree to make peace. What then, asked Austria, were the terms which France and England would insist on having? Prince Albert was asked by Lord Clarendon to suggest an answer. The Prince replied very sensibly that he should not ask for anything beyond the “Four Points” on which Austria was prepared to insist, though it might be well, he said, to define their somewhat elastic terms. These points were the substitution of a European for a Russian Protectorate over the Principalities; the freedom of navigation on the Danube; the revision of the Treaty of 1841 so as to destroy the preponderance of Russia in the Black Sea; a guarantee from the Sultan to the Great Powers confirming the liberties and privileges of his Christian subjects, instead of a guarantee from the Sultan to Russia alone. The Queen greatly approved of the Ministerial Despatch which was drawn up on the lines of Prince Albert’s advice, and in a letter to Lord Clarendon she gave him sound reasons for her belief that Austria was acting honestly in the transaction, and not, as Lord Clarendon suspected, seeking to evade her moral responsibilities.
But it was the condition of the army itself during the winter of 1854 in the Crimea, rather than the diplomacy of the struggle that disturbed most grievously the mind of the Queen. Official Despatches, especially those of Lord Raglan, were culpably silent on the subject. Private letters, however, from officers and men, teemed with complaints, and officers in the Guards kept the Court well informed about the actual state of things. Early in October, the Times newspaper generously opened a subscription for the benefit of the army, and sent Mr. Macdonald to the Crimea to administer it. The services which this gentleman rendered to the troops will never be forgotten. He seemed to make his pence go as far as other men’s pounds, and to his skilful administration may be traced many most important reforms which were adopted by the Government in their methods of issuing rations to the army. The Queen was now of opinion that the time had come for appealing to the generosity of the people on behalf of the sufferers from the war. On the 13th of October a Royal Commission was issued, headed by Prince Albert, to establish the Patriotic Fund for the relief of the families of those who had perished in the Crimea. A staff of hospital nurses was organised under Miss Florence Nightingale—a lady whose good deeds and kindly offices to the sick and wounded at Scutari have given her imperishable fame. On the 5th of November she reached the scene of her labours—as the wounded men were being brought in from Balaclava—and the hospital which had been a foul and disorderly pest-house, was soon rendered a wholesome and serviceable sanatorium. It was Mr. Sidney Herbert who requested Miss Nightingale to undertake this work, and he was bitterly condemned at the time for sanctioning such an innovation as the introduction of a volunteer staff of thirty-seven lady nurses into a military hospital.[198] Nor was the Queen contented merely to help all these good works by her counsel, sympathy, and support. With her own hands she, her daughters, and the ladies of her Household knitted woollen comforters, socks, and mittens, and plied their needles as busily as the most toilworn seamstresses in the East-end, making under-clothing for the soldiers. Their example was quickly followed by every lady of leisure in the three kingdoms. Prince Albert sent fur coats to his brother officers in the Guards, and bountiful supplies of tobacco for the men. He devised a series of forms in order to extract, or rather extort, full information from Lord Raglan and his subordinates as to the condition of the troops, and it was not till his system of tabulated returns was adopted that the Government had the data necessary for devising measures of relief for the miseries of the army. On the first day of the year 1855, the Queen, in sending her congratulations to Lord Raglan, speaks in touching language of the grief which a long stream of Crimean reports have caused her. She urges vehemently that every effort be made to save her troops from privation. She even goes into particulars, and speaks sharply about the blunder which led to green coffee beans instead of ground coffee being served out—a blunder that was one of the notorious scandals of the time.[199]
MISS NIGHTINGALE AND THE NURSES IN THE BARRACKS HOSPITAL AT SCUTARI.
One curious change in the organisation of the Ministry took place in 1854, which, however, does not seem to have greatly concerned the Court. The Secretaryship of State for War had hitherto been an appendage of the Colonial Office. It was now made a separate Secretaryship, and, in an unfortunate moment for himself, the Duke of Newcastle elected to take the appointment, letting Sir George Grey become Secretary of State for the Colonies. Mr. Sidney Herbert remained as “Secretary at War”—a Parliamentary secretary representing the War Office in the House of Commons,[200] Lord John Russell becoming President of the Council.[201] Lord John, however, who seems to have been the fly in the ointment pot of the Coalition, soon began to find fault with the readjustment of offices. In November he told Lord Aberdeen that the War Office ought to be put in stronger hands than those of the Duke of Newcastle. This suggestion, described afterwards by Mr. Disraeli as “a profligate intrigue” worthy of the “Memoirs” of Bubb Doddington, gave offence to the Queen. It seemed to her a treacherous attempt to disintegrate the Cabinet, and she did not conceal her sympathy with the statesman thus attacked. The Duke, however, generously offered to sacrifice himself so that Lord John Russell might not have a pretext for embarrassing the Crown by breaking up the Government at a critical moment; but the Cabinet would not permit the Duke to be sacrificed. Even Palmerston, to do him justice, repudiated the idea, and so Lord John again threatened to resign. Aberdeen met this threat by persuading the Queen to overcome her personal aversion to Palmerston, and obtaining her leave to appoint him Leader of the House of Commons, in the event of Lord John Russell deserting his post.
Lord John, now finding that he had made a mistake, succumbed on the 16th of December; and so the scandal was hushed up. The Queen, however, felt ill at ease, for, by this time, she knew that the Ministry had no stability, and that Lord John would soon again give his colleagues more serious trouble. But he remained in the Cabinet fully cognisant of everything that was done by the War Department, and never expressing the least disapproval of its management till Parliament met in January, 1855. Then, when Mr. Roebuck gave notice of his motion for inquiring into the conduct of the war, Lord John, without the slightest warning, resigned, saying that as he agreed with Mr. Roebuck he did not see how the motion could be resisted. The Duke of Newcastle again offered to retire in favour of Lord Palmerston, if haply Lord John Russell could be thereby induced to withdraw his resignation. But again, his colleagues refused to sacrifice him, and so they all offered to resign. This was a cruel blow to the Queen. She protested that there was no precedent for a Ministry resigning in the midst of a war till they were dismissed. She implored Lord Aberdeen not to desert her at a moment when the very worst possible effect would be produced by the spectacle of the nation struggling through war without a Government. The Cabinet accordingly determined to face Mr. Roebuck’s motion; but when he carried it against them, as has already been recorded, they were compelled to retire from office. Then the Queen had to meet one of the most perplexing and anxious Ministerial crises of her reign. Lord Derby was appealed to. But he found he could only obtain “independent support” from Lord Palmerston, Mr. Sidney Herbert, Mr. Gladstone, and Lord Aberdeen’s friends—which, he observed cynically, was “support which could never be depended on.” He did not seem to have much faith in his own colleagues, and he consequently declined to form a Ministry. But he sympathised with the Queen in her vexation at the turn which events had taken—quoting to her a remark of Walewski’s—“What influence can a country like England pretend to have without an army and without a Government?” Lord Lansdowne was next consulted. He was willing to form a Cabinet, but then he was old and broken in health. He could not possibly serve for more than a few months, and obviously his enforced retirement would again cast everything into confusion. Lord John Russell, of course, had long been under the hallucination that he could form an Administration without the aid of the Peelites. His cantankerous treachery to his colleagues, and his unscrupulous pertinacity in disintegrating the Coalition Cabinet in circumstances most damaging to the country, rendered him objectionable to the Queen. But still acting on Lansdowne’s advice, she determined to let him try, so that the mortification of failure might perchance dispel his delusion that he had still a name to conjure with as a Party leader. He tried, and, of course, failed ignominiously. No man trusted him or cared to serve under or with him. The Queen, however, in her letter to Lord John, very shrewdly and gracefully held out the olive branch to Palmerston by saying that it would give her great pleasure if he would join the new Government. Palmerston, feeling that the crisis was one which also called for sacrifices on his part, offered to serve even under Lord John as Secretary for War, if he could thereby extricate the Crown from its difficulties. But he deemed it imperative that Lord Clarendon should join the Ministry, and this Lord Clarendon stoutly refused to do. His colleagues, he said, had all been loyal to him, and he would not serve under a man who, from the time he entered the late Ministry, had persistently embarrassed it, and intrigued for its destruction. Lord John found that he had attempted the impossible, and on the 4th of February the country was still without a Government, to the infinite damage