... When Parliament assembled on January 23, 1855, Mr. Roebuck on the first night of the session gave notice of a motion for a Committee of Inquiry. Lord John Russell attended to the formal business, and when the House was up went home, accompanied by Sir Charles Wood. Nothing of consequence passed between the two colleagues, and no word was said to Wood in the direction of withdrawal. The same evening, as the Prime Minister was sitting in his drawing-room, a red box was brought in to him by his son, containing Lord John Russell's resignation. He was as much amazed as Lord Newcastle, smoking his evening pipe of tobacco in his coach, was amazed by the news that the battle of Marston Moor had begun. Nothing has come to light since to set aside the severe judgment pronounced upon this proceeding by the universal opinion of contemporaries, including Lord John's own closest political allies. That a Minister should run away from a hostile motion upon affairs for which responsibility was collective, and this without a word of consultation with a single colleague, is a transaction happily without precedent in the history of modern English Cabinets. [43]
Mr. Herbert Paul, in his brilliant "History of Modern England," gives a version of this occurrence, which, on the whole, is hardly less harsh towards Lord John.
Well might Lord Palmerston complain of such behaviour as embarrassing. It was crippling. It furnished the Opposition with unanswerable arguments. "Here," they could say, "is the second man in your Cabinet, in his own estimation the first, knowing all that you know, and he says 'that an inquiry by the House is essential. How then can you deny or dispute it?'" In a foot-note he adds, "Lord John offered to withdraw his resignation if the Duke of Newcastle would retire [from the War Office] in favour of Palmerston. It had been settled before Christmas between Lord Aberdeen and the Duke that this change should be made. But no one else was aware of the arrangement, and Lord Aberdeen, though he had assented to it, declined to carry it out as the result of a bargain with Lord John."
Now both these versions leave out an important fact in the private history of the Aberdeen Cabinet. Lord John had on two occasions at least, subsequent to giving way upon the question of the Reform Bill, tried to resign. Only the entreaties of the Queen and his colleagues had induced him to remain in the Ministry; and then, it was understood, only until some striking success of arms should make his resignation of less consequence to them. But Sevastopol did not fall, and Lord John hung on, urging in the meantime, emphatically and repeatedly, that the efficiency of the war administration must be increased, that the control must be transferred from the hands of the two Secretaries of War to the most vigorous Minister, Palmerston. At the Cabinet meeting of December 6th, Lord John desisted from pressing this particular change, owing to Palmerston having written to him that he thought there were "no broad and distinct grounds" for removing the Duke of Newcastle, and confined himself, after criticizing the general conduct of the war, to announcing his intention of resigning in any case after Christmas. When it was objected that such an announcement was inconsistent with his remaining leader of the House of Commons till then, he offered to resign at once. He would have gladly done so had they not implored him to remain. On December 30th he drew up a memorandum of his criticisms upon the conduct of the war; and on January 3rd he wrote to Lord Aberdeen: "Nothing can be less satisfactory than the result of the recent Cabinets. Unless you will direct measures for yourself, I see no hope for the efficient prosecution of the war...."[44]
When, therefore, on January 23rd, the Opposition demanded an inquiry, he was in a very awkward position. He had either to bar the way to changes he had been urging himself all along, or he was obliged to admit openly that he agreed with the critics of the Government. Had he chosen the first alternative he would have been untrue to his conviction that a change of method in conducting the war was absolutely essential to his country's success; yet in choosing the second he was turning his back on his colleagues. No doubt the custom of the Constitution asks either complete acceptance of common responsibility from individual Ministers or their immediate resignation. Lord John had protested and protested, but he had not resigned; he was therefore responsible for what had been done while he was in the Cabinet. He had not resigned because he thought it bad for the country that the Government should be weakened while the war was at its height, and he had hoped that by staying in the Cabinet he would be able to induce the Ministry to alter its methods of conducting the war. When he discovered that, in spite of reiterated protests, he could not effect these all-important changes from within, and when the House of Commons began to clamour for them from without, he decided that no considerations of loyalty to colleagues ought to make him stand between the country and changes so urgently desirable. It may be said that since he had acted all along on the ground that in keeping the strength of the Government intact lay the best chance of helping to bring the war to a successful and speedy conclusion, he was inconsistent, to say the least, in deserting his colleagues at a juncture which made their defeat inevitable. But the inconsistency is only superficial; when he once had lost hope that the Government could be got to alter their methods of conducting the war, their defeat and dissolution, which he had previously striven to prevent, became the lesser of two evils. It was not an evil at all, as it turned out, for the dissolution brought the right man--Palmerston--into power. Lord John's mistake was in thinking that his long-suffering support of a loose-jointed, ill-working Ministry, like the Aberdeen Ministry, could have ever transformed it into a strong one.
Lord Wriothesley Russell,[45] whom Lady John wrote of years before as "the mildest and best of men," sent her a letter on February 8, 1855, containing the following passages:
It is impossible to hear all these abominable attacks in silence. It makes me sad as well as indignant to hear the world speaking as if straight-forward honesty were a thing incredible--impossible. A man, and above all a man to whom truth is no new thing, says simply that he cannot assent to what he believes to be false, and the whole world says, What can he mean by it--treachery, trickery, cowardice, ambition, what is it? My hope is that our statesmen may learn from John's dignified conduct a lesson which does not appear hitherto to have occurred to them--that even the fate of a Ministry will not justify a lie. We all admire in fiction the stern uprightness of Jeanie Deans: "One word would have saved me, and she would not speak it." ... Whether that word would have saved them is a question--it was their only chance--and he would not speak it; that word revolted his conscience, it would have been false. I know nothing grander than the sublime simplicity of that refusal.