The whole scheme of Palmerstonian diplomacy seemed revealed, as if by a lightning-flash, in all its impotent meddlesomeness. In a matter of no very great importance concerning a foreign country, England was to talk daggers, but use none, if her antagonist chanced to be too strong to be cowed by menaces. The House of Commons instinctively felt that this was not a policy worthy of a great nation. It received the Prime Minister’s statement in a manner that convinced him that his spell over it was broken. He made one final effort to regain his influence by appealing to its foibles. He accordingly uttered dark and terrible threats of vengeance if Austria and Prussia attacked “the existence of Denmark as an independent Power in Europe,” and did other things which everybody knew they had no temptation to do. “If,” said he, “we should see at Copenhagen the horrors of a town taken by assault—the destruction of property, the sacrifice of the lives, not only of its defenders but of peaceful inhabitants, the confiscation which would arise, the capture of the Sovereign as a prisoner of war, or events of that kind—I do not mean to say that if any of these events were likely to happen, the position of this country might not possibly be a fit subject for reconsideration.” Then he paused to see if his old trick of rhetoric would do its work. It failed him, however, and, instead of the cheers for which he waited, his declamation was greeted with shouts of contemptuous derision. The cheers did not come till Mr. Disraeli condemned the utterance as “a continuation of those senseless and spiritless menaces by which her Majesty’s Government had lowered the influence of England in the Councils of Europe.” And they came again and again from every quarter of the House when the Tory leader declared “he should prefer that the foreign policy of this country should be conducted by Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, for the result would have been the same as in the hands of her Majesty’s Government, while they would not have lured on Denmark by fallacious hopes, and exasperated the German Powers by exaggerated expressions of menace and condemnation of their conduct.” As for Lord Russell, he seemed to feel his humiliation so keenly that it was with difficulty he made his statement audible in the House of Lords. “I heard enough,” writes Lord Malmesbury in his terse summary of it, “to know that the Government were for peace at any price, and meant to desert the Danes.”
Of course the Opposition felt bound to challenge the policy of the Ministry by a vote of censure, though they were far from being unanimous as to their tactics. Writing on the 3rd of July, Lord Malmesbury says:—“Lord Derby is so ill with the gout, that he cannot bring on the question of the correspondence between Denmark and Germany next Friday, and he has deputed me to do it in his place, and Lords Salisbury,[206] Donoughmore, Colville, Hardwicke, Carnarvon, and Chelmsford came this afternoon at one o’clock to consult with me respecting the motion to be made in the House of Lords. Lord Derby is nervous in consequence of some objections made by the Duke of Buccleuch and Lord Stanhope, who talk of a collision between the two Houses, and he fears the Party will not be unanimous. I am for going on with it, and so were the rest. We adjourned at two o’clock, when a large meeting took place, I being in the chair. The two above-named Peers, with Lords Winchester and Bath, made some difficulties, but ended by giving way, and it was settled unanimously that the same resolution
WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM THE BERKSHIRE SHORE.
which Disraeli makes to-day in the Commons is to be moved on Friday in the Lords. I went yesterday to Disraeli to settle about this, he merely pointing to a chair. I did not sit down, but gave him the message Lord Derby had sent, and went away.[207] After the meeting at Lord Salisbury’s I went to Lord Derby’s to report what had occurred. He was pleased to hear that the motion was not given up, but he was in such dreadful pain that I did not stay.”[208] The vote of censure in the House of Lords was rejected by a majority of 9, and little attention was paid to the struggle there. But all eyes turned to the arena of strife in the House of Commons, where the issue was doubtful, and where on the 4th of July Mr. Disraeli moved a Resolution “to express to her Majesty our great regret that, while the course pursued by her Majesty’s Government has failed to maintain their avowed policy of upholding the independence and integrity of Denmark, it has lowered the just influence of this country in the councils of Europe, and thereby diminished the securities for peace.” His indictment of Palmerston’s Foreign Policy was unanswerable. In alliance with France and Russia, England might have controlled the Danish Question. But Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell, after annoying Russia because she persecuted Poland, provoked France by refusing to join her in protecting the Poles from persecution. When the English Government discovered that France was immovably neutral on the Danish Question, they should either have declared frankly that they would, if need be, defend Denmark by force, or, like France, they should have abstained from either menacing the German Powers, or holding out to Denmark delusive hopes of succour. The latter, said Mr. Disraeli, would have been his policy; on the other hand, the British Ministers wavered between peace and war—indulging in unaccomplished threats and unfulfilled promises. The undignified part that Lords Palmerston and Russell made England play at the Conference—which, as Mr. Disraeli observed, “lasted about as long as a Carnival and, like a Carnival, was an affair of masks and mystifications,”—laid them open to a disastrous attack. Palmerston’s first aim was to maintain the integrity of Denmark. In the Conference the English plenipotentiary was the first to accept and even suggest her dismemberment. His second aim was professedly to maintain the independence of Denmark and lessen the risk of a great war in Europe. In the Conference the English representative, however, proposed to put Denmark under the joint guarantee of the Great Powers. “They would,” as Mr. Disraeli pointed out, “have created another Turkey in Europe, in the same geographical situation, the scene of the same rival intrigues, and the same fertile source of constant misconceptions and wars.” Mr. Gladstone virtually acknowledged the diplomatic defeat of the Government. They had tried, he said in effect, to induce France and Russia—the natural enemies of England—to join them in going to war with Germany—her natural ally. But having failed they ceased to menace the German Powers, who were too strong to be intimidated by Lord Palmerston.
The resolution was only a party device to drive Ministers from office by drawing a sensational picture of the degradation to which England had been exposed by Ministerial diplomacy. Mr. Kinglake, however, interfered, and proposed a resolution drafted by Cobden evidently for the purpose of humiliating Palmerston, and yet offering a loophole of escape from a vote of censure that must, if carried, have cut short his career, and brought a Tory Ministry with violent anti-German sympathies back to power. This resolution ironically expressed the satisfaction of the House that the Queen had been advised not to aid Denmark by force of arms. Mr. Kinglake then showed Lord Palmerston a list of the Liberals who intended to vote for Mr. Disraeli’s motion, in the event of the Government declining to accept what Count Vitzthum calls Mr. Cobden’s “humiliating absolution,” so that the Prime Minister had but little choice. “He was bound either to retire from office, or swallow the bitter pill offered to him by the Manchester School and pledge himself to maintain the strictest neutrality.”[209] He agreed to swallow the pill, which Mr. Cobden refused to gild; for in his speech of the 6th of July Cobden delivered a scathing attack on the futility of Lord Palmerston’s whole scheme of foreign policy, which had subjected England to humiliation in all parts of the world. The final demonstration of its failure, he argued, was the complete justification of those principles of non-intervention which he and Mr. Bright had preached for many long and weary years. It was admitted that he laid down with a masterly hand the foreign policy which future Governments, whether Whig or Tory, would be compelled by the people to follow. “Our country,” said Cobden, amidst cheers from every part of the House, “requires peace. Some people think it is very degrading and very base that an Englishman should speak of his country as requiring peace, and as being entitled to enjoy its blessings; and if we allude to our enormous commercial and industrial engagements as a reason why we should avoid these petty embroilments, we are told that we are selfish and grovelling in our politics. But I say we were very wrong to take such measures as were calculated to extend our commerce, unless we were prepared to use prudential precautions to keep our varied manufacturing and mercantile operations free from the mischief of unnecessary war.” England had no armies to spare for Continental interference. She had 79,000 troops locked up in India. In China she had two little armies separated by thousands of miles; she had another detachment in Japan; she had 10,000 men “fighting somebody’s battles” in New Zealand; she had from 10,000 to 15,000 troops in North America, “committed as a point of honour to defend a frontier of 1,500 miles against a country which can keep 700,000 men on the field;” she had also troops at the Cape, the West Indies, West Africa, Malta, and Gibraltar. Surely the world never saw, said Cobden, such a dispersion of force as this by a Power that attempted to interfere with Continental affairs. Hence the time had come for the new departure in foreign politics, for, with the failure of Lord Palmerston’s Danish policy, it was clear our whole system of conducting our relations with foreign countries had broken down. The Foreign Office had lost its credit abroad. Foreign Governments now knew that its threats and its pledges were vain and empty, because the real power now lay, not in the Foreign Office, but in the House of Commons. It was not the Ministry he desired to change, but the system; so that, though he was prepared to vote against Mr. Disraeli’s censure, Mr. Cobden, as Lord Robert Cecil observed, was about as true a friend to the Ministry, as the Ministry had been to Denmark. The only difference was, that whilst the Government gave Denmark fair words and no succour, Mr. Cobden had given Lord Palmerston valuable succour, but no fair words. It was past midnight on the 9th of July when Palmerston rose to defend his position, but he added nothing to the debate. As Mr. Evelyn Ashley, his adoring biographer, says, “he had, in truth, a difficult task. There had been a conspicuous failure; of that much there could be no doubt. Allies, colleagues, and circumstances had proved adverse; yet the excuses for failure could not be laid on any of them. So, with the exception of a dexterous allusion to the words of the resolution as ‘a gratuitous libel upon the country by a great Party who hoped to rule it,’ he did not detain the House for long on the points immediately at issue, but, dropping the Danish matter altogether, went straight into a history of the financial triumphs of his Government.”[210] After all, for these he was indebted to Mr. Gladstone with whom he was rarely in agreement on matters of general policy; and his obvious evasion of the matter in dispute was resented by the House, which interrupted him with angry cries of “Question!” His defence certainly had no bearing on the issue; but, as Mr. Ashley observes, with unconscious cynicism, “it had all to do with the Party question, for it decided the votes of doubting men, who, caring little about Sleswig-Holstein, cared a great deal about English finance. Anyhow, it commanded success, for the Government got a majority of eighteen, and thus renewed their lease of power.” Lord Palmerston had expected only a majority of three, but several Tories had voted with the Liberals, and eleven abstained from voting at all. “This,” writes Count Vitzthum, “is explained by the fear of a Roman Catholic intrigue. The Vatican had been anxious to make use of the opportunity for overthrowing the hated Premier. Some Monsignori especially sent from Rome are said to have been busily engaged in the lobby in inducing the Irish Members to vote with the Opposition. Be that as it may, a majority of eighteen votes was a godsend so unexpected, that the Premier begged some young ladies, who had no notion of what had happened, to congratulate him. Lady Palmerston was delighted at the hand-shakings lavished on the Prime Minister by the crowd that thronged the lobby.”
