When Lord John Russell excused himself for first recommending the Austrian compromise, and then backing out of his opinion and advocating war, he said mysteriously that something had come to his knowledge which altered his views. It was suggested at the time by Mr. Disraeli that Lord John was overawed by the objections of the Emperor of the French to the compromise. Even had that been the case, it would not have justified him in remaining in the Cabinet, seeing that the Emperor’s Minister, who was in
THE HUNDRED STEPS, WINDSOR CASTLE.
like case, had resigned rather than hold himself responsible for an indefensible war. It is, however, possible to account for Lord John’s conduct more easily by attributing it to sycophancy than to treachery, for it is a regrettable fact that when the Austrian project was laid before the Queen by Lord Clarendon, she used all her influence to quash it. She wrote to him a curt note saying:—“How Lord John Russell and M. Drouyn can recommend such proposals to our acceptance is beyond her (the Queen’s) comprehension.” Then she encloses a brief memorandum from Prince Albert, in which he says:—“To limit the Russian naval power to that existing in 1853 would therefore be simply to perpetuate and legalise the preponderance of Russia in the Black Sea, a proposal which can neither be made nor accepted as a development of the Third Point.”[212] It is unfortunate that such clear thinkers as the Queen and her husband did not observe that what Austria fixed was merely the maximum and not the minimum limit, that by mutual agreement Russia and Turkey might cut down their ships from six to one if they chose, and that even the maximum could be always counterbalanced by Turkey. Yet Prince Albert would insist that a proposal which automatically established an equilibrium was one to perpetuate a preponderance! It is only fair to the memory of the late Emperor of the French to say that, according to Sir Theodore Martin’s admissions, the first strong and contemptuous rejection of the Austrian compromise came from the Queen; that when Napoleon III. first considered the matter he hesitated before endorsing the views which Palmerston and his colleagues meekly accepted from the Court. What renders the policy of the Court—or rather of Baron Stockmar, who inspired it—at this stage unintelligible is, that a month afterwards it actually pressed upon the Cabinet a proposal for organising a great League of the Powers to defend Turkey diplomatically against Russia. This proposal was made on the ground that it was impossible to inflict on Russia such losses as would force her to submit to humiliating terms.[213]
Nor was this the only instance which can be adduced of mistaken interference on the part of the Court. When Palmerston succeeded in forming his Government, he pledged himself to follow out the foreign policy of Lord Aberdeen. Aberdeen’s friends had publicly declared that the terms which we sought to impose on Russia were needlessly humiliating, and that in the Austrian compromise there was an ample basis for a fair settlement, and a good reason for continuing negotiations at Vienna. It was a matter of notoriety that Aberdeen himself shared these views, and there were many who complained querulously that if they had not destroyed his Ministry, the Vienna Conference would not have been abortive. In these circumstances Prince Albert, knowing Aberdeen’s devotion to the Queen, wrote to him complaining especially about Mr. Gladstone’s speech on Mr. Disraeli’s motion of the 24th of May. For the rejection of that motion had not ended the controversy. Sir F. Baring’s amendment, which was finally carried, was coming up for discussion on the 4th of June, and the Court evidently did not desire a repetition of speeches containing unanswerable arguments against abandoning negotiations for peace.[214] Aberdeen, in fact, is summoned in this letter to the Palace to be lectured. He is warned that the conduct of his party has displeased the Queen, and he is warned in a tone only to be justified by the close relations of personal friendship, which bound him to the Court, and the Court to him.
The Queen and Prince Albert, however, utterly failed to gag the Peelites in the debate, or browbeat them into approving of the continuance of a bloody and wasteful war, when an honourable peace could be obtained by patient diplomacy. To his honour it must be stated that Sir James Graham,[215] Lord Aberdeen’s representative in the House of Commons, delivered a speech which was even much more damaging and convincing than Mr. Gladstone’s. Nobody attempted to answer it except Mr. Roebuck. His tirade of invective sprang from a delusion that Graham was willing to be satisfied with paltry concessions as the result of a great war. As he afterwards confessed, he was completely misled by the ferocity with which Lord John Russell in this debate condemned as worthless the very settlement which he had vainly urged his colleagues to accept as satisfactory. In truth, there is some reason to suspect that the harassing toil of winter, the prolonged and exhausting anxieties of a sad and pitiless war, had temporarily blunted Prince Albert’s keen perceptions. Had this not been the case he would hardly have delivered at the Trinity House banquet in June, the famous speech in which he said that “Constitutional Government is under a heavy trial”—as if the failure of obsolete leaders in the field, or the stupid bigotries and moral cowardice of place-hunters in council, proved that Constitutional Government was a dubious experiment. At a moment when the Queen’s personal interference with the Foreign Policy of her Government, usually so wise, prudent, and beneficial, had led to bad results, it was maladroit on the part of Prince Albert to gird at Constitutional Government. Very little reflection should have served to show the Court that it was only under the Muscovite autocracy that blunders in war and statecraft, more ghastly even than our own, could possibly be perpetrated.
When the Conference at Vienna closed, Austria, as might have been foreseen, refused to join England in carrying on the war. On the other hand, the King of Sardinia had, on 26th January, entered into a military convention with the Allies, and, in return for their guarantee of his territory, engaged to send an army of 15,000 men to the Crimea.
The war in 1855 was carried on under more favourable conditions than in the previous year. Reinforcements were sent out quickly. The commissariat, sanitary, and transport services were put into effective working order. On the 17th of February, the Turks under Omar Pasha gallantly repelled a Russian attack on Eupatoria—a feat which revived the drooping spirits of the Allies, and restored confidence in the fighting power of the Osmanli. The news of this defeat was peculiarly humiliating to the Czar, whose contempt for the Turk was unbounded, and his bitter vexation at being beaten by a despised enemy, perhaps had some effect in undermining the vitality of his iron constitution. The bombardment of Sebastopol began again in April—but, though the allied trenches were pushed closer and closer to the fortress, no serious impression was made on it. The English troops were eager for action, but Canrobert’s weakness and irresolution held Lord Raglan back.[216]
On the 19th of May Canrobert resigned in favour of Pélissier—a soldier with a name stained by barbarous atrocities in Africa, but still a man of energy and determination. In a moment of happy inspiration it was determined to intercept the supplies which the enemy was drawing from his Circassian provinces; and on the 22nd of May an expedition of 3,800 English, 7,500 French, and 5,000 Turks, under Sir George Brown and General d’Autemarre, left for Cape Takli at the south-west extremity of the Straits of Kertch. It arrived there on the 24th. The Russians evacuated Kertch on the 25th, destroying before they left vast quantities of food and forage. The troops penetrated as far as Yenikale, and Captain Lyons, with his little fleet of steamers, advancing up the Sea of Azov, destroyed not only many ships but a large amount of stores. This expedition was cleverly planned, and it destroyed supplies sufficient for an army of 100,000 men for four months. It returned on the 12th of June. Writing to Stockmar on the 17th of June Prince Albert says, “At the seat of war everything is going on well.... Pélissier is a trouvaille, energetic, and determined. Oddly enough, they are in Paris (I mean Louis Napoleon is) very much dissatisfied since our successes, ‘low’ about our prospects, anxious, &c. I am at a loss to know why.” The fact is, that the war was more unpopular in France than ever, since the rejection of the Austrian compromise at Vienna, and the Emperor’s proposal to go out to the Crimea, and command in person alarmed Persigny and the Bonapartists as to the safety of the Imperial régime. Failure meant ruin, and failure was on the cards.[217] Yet, on the 7th of June, the Allies had met with a brilliant success. The French stormed the Mamelon, and the English the Gravel Pits—an outwork in front of the Redan. But the two formidable works—the Malakoff and Redan—were yet to be taken, and in an evil moment Lord Raglan was persuaded by Pélissier to sanction a combined attack on these strong-holds. The ablest practical soldiers in the British camp declared that the Redan could not be taken by direct assault, though it must fall if the Malakoff were captured. Raglan was of that opinion himself. But he yielded to his French colleague, and the result of the combined attack on both places was a painful failure. French and English were alike repulsed, and the loss of life which this blunder caused was sickening to contemplate. “Cries of ‘Murder!’” writes Mr. Russell, the Times correspondent, “from the lips of expiring officers have been echoed through the camp, but they have now died away in silence, or in the noise of active argument and discussion.”[218] Heartbroken by this defeat, Lord Raglan took to his bed and died on the 28th of June.