[27] Mr. Gladstone’s comment on this statement is that it is interesting as coming from an acute contemporary observer. At the same time it expresses an opinion and presents no facts. Mr. Gladstone adds that he is not aware that the question of re-union with the Conservative party was ever presented to him in such a way as to embrace the relations to Mr. Disraeli.
[28] Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, by the Right Hon. Sir George Otto Trevelyan, M.P., vol. ii. p. 340.
[29] Sir Theodore Martin’s Life of the Prince Consort, vol. ii. p. 483.
[30] Pitt became guardian to the young Lord Haddo in 1792.
CHAPTER X
DOWNING STREET AND CONSTANTINOPLE
1853
Causes of the Crimean War—Nicholas seizes his opportunity—The Secret Memorandum—Napoleon and the susceptibilities of the Vatican—Lord Stratford de Redcliffe and the Porte—Prince Menschikoff shows his hand—Lord Aberdeen hopes against hope—Lord Palmerston’s opinion of the crisis—The Vienna Note—Lord John grows restive—Sinope arouses England—The deadlock in the Cabinet.
Many causes conspired to bring about the war in the Crimea, though the pretext for the quarrel—a dispute between the monks of the Latin and Greek Churches concerning the custody of the Holy Places in Palestine—presents no element of difficulty. It is, however, no easy matter to gather up in a few pages the reasons which led to the war. Amongst the most prominent of them were the ambitious projects of the despotic Emperor Nicholas. The military revolt in his own capital at the period of his accession, and the Polish insurrections of 1830 and 1850, had rendered him harsh and imperious, and disinclined to concessions on any adequate scale to the restless but spasmodic demands for political reform in Russia. Gloomy and reserved though the Autocrat of All the Russias was, he recognised that it would be a mistake to rely for the pacification of his vast empire on the policy of masterly inactivity. His war with Persia, his invasion of Turkey, and the army which he sent to help Austria to settle her quarrel with Hungary, not only appealed to the pride of Russia, but provided so many outlets for the energy and ambition of her ruler. It was in the East that Nicholas saw his opportunity, and his policy was a revival, under the changed conditions of the times, of that of Peter the Great and Catherine II.
Nicholas had long secretly chafed at the exclusion of his war-ships—by the provisions of the treaty of 1841—from access through the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, and he dreamed dreams of Constantinople, and saw visions of India. Linked to many lawless instincts, there was in the Emperor’s personal character much of the intolerance of the fanatic. Religion and pride alike made the fact rankle in his breast that so many of the Sultan’s subjects were Sclavs, and professed the Russian form of Christianity. He was, moreover, astute enough to see that a war which could be construed by the simple and devout peasantry as an attempt to uplift the standard of the Cross in the dominions of the Crescent would appeal at once to the clergy and populace of Holy Russia. Nicholas had persuaded himself that, with Lord Aberdeen at the head of affairs, and Palmerston in a place of safety at the Home Office, England was scarcely in a condition to give practical effect to her traditional jealousy of Russia. In the weakness of her divided counsels he saw his opportunity. It had become a fixed idea with the Emperor that Turkey was in a moribund condition; and neither Orloff nor Nesselrode had been able to disabuse his mind of the notion.