The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  Only Tsar Nicholas remained uneasy. A private visit by Queen Victoria to King Louis-Philippe in 1843 alarmed him, for he always attached great importance to dynastic diplomacy and he feared a reconciliation between Britain and France. He resolved to go to England and breath new life into Nesselrode’s entente by a vigorous display of his masterful personality. Already he had tried to interest Prussia and Austria in the Eastern Question, for he was concerned over what would happen if the Sultan’s weak empire began to fall apart. But Berlin and Vienna had no liking for contingency planning. Nicholas counted on a better response from London.[4]

  Despite their lack of warning, the British improvised a state visit. Nicholas accompanied the court to Windsor and dutifully escorted Victoria to Ascot races. On 5 June a military review was held in his honour in Windsor Great Park. ‘A great event and a great compliment his visit certainly is,’ Victoria wrote to her uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians; ‘Really it seems like a dream when I think that we breakfast and walk out with this greatest of all earthly Potentates.’ She thought Nicholas ‘still very handsome’ and ‘quite alarmingly civil’, but the ‘formidable’ expression of his eyes disturbed her. She was worried at Windsor that some exiled Polish revolutionary might attempt to shoot him. Behind surface charm, she saw an empty character. ‘Politics and military concerns are the only things he takes great interest in,’ she remarked.[5] But it was to talk ‘politics and military concerns’ that her guest had made this thirteen-hundred-mile journey to her capital.

  Nicholas explained Russian policy to his hostess and her husband and to the leading politicians of both parties. With Peel and Aberdeen he could talk at Windsor, the Prime Minister on one occasion leading him away from an open window when he was expressing himself frankly but indiscreetly. ‘I highly prize England; but for what the French say about me, I care not at all — I spit upon it,’ people remembered his saying.[6] His message was clear and concise: ‘Turkey is a dying man,’ he insisted; but the Sultan’s Empire should be kept intact as long as possible, with Russia and Britain encouraging the Powers to enter into discussions if the fall of the Empire seemed imminent. He told the Foreign Secretary that he did not want to see any foreign Power dominant at Constantinople, not even Russia; and he agreed with Lord Aberdeen that it was desirable to keep Egypt from falling under a hostile government which might close ‘the commercial road’ from Alexandria to Suez and on to India and the Orient. To Nicholas, these words were a reassuring sign of British mistrust of France, for throughout successive crises it had always been the French who had favoured a strong and independent Egypt.

  On Sunday evening, 9 June, Prince Albert accompanied Nicholas back to Woolwich, where the steamer Black Eagle was ready for the crossing to Rotterdam. A Marine Guard of Honour lined the quayside, which was flagged out of all recognition. The Tsar embraced the Prince warmly and set out for the Continent well satisfied. The Times might report that twelve hundred protesters meeting in Holborn had denounced the Queen’s guest as the arch-oppressor of Polish liberty, but two nights later he had been warmly received at the opera house when the Queen thrust him forward to take the applause.[7] At Kissingen, where Nesselrode met his imperial master a few days later, Nicholas was still talking of his personal triumph among the English.

  To the sceptical Nesselrode, reality fell short of the Tsar’s make-believe; and he was right. The British attitude to foreigners, he they Russian, French or Austrian, was fickle; and it would not be difficult for the newspapers to rouse old enmities, now lying dormant. British ministers listened to Nicholas’s observations on the Eastern Question with interest, but thought them vague: no estimate of how long he believed Turkey would survive; no discussion on the eventual disposal of the Sultan’s territories. Little more than a month after the Tsar’s departure from Woowich, Nesselrode himself travelled to England for ‘some weeks at Brighton for the benefit of sea bathing’.[8] But the real purpose of his journey was to convert the verbal agreements of Windsor into a written understanding.

  The Foreign Secretary looked ‘forward with the utmost pleasure to the opportunity’ of meeting Nesselrode again.[9] The two men were old friends, who had collaborated closely in the autumn of 1813, when Lord Aberdeen — then not quite thirty — was a diplomat attached to Allied headquarters in Germany and Nesselrode, four years his senior, was minister in attendance on Tsar Alexander I. Together Aberdeen and Nesselrode had witnessed the aftermath of the battle of Leipzig and followed the retreating French army to the Main and beyond, seeing for themselves the burning homes and the stripped bodies of stragglers murdered along the route. From such an experience Aberdeen retained a deep horror of war; and he did not doubt that this sense of revulsion was shared by his Russian colleague.

  Nesselrode’s visit consummated the Tsar’s more flamboyant personal diplomacy. Aberdeen encouraged him to draw up a memorandum which affirmed the desire of both Britain and Russia to preserve the Turkish Empire as long as possible; if Turkey threatened to fall apart, the two governments would collaborate in discussing ‘the establishment of a new order of things to replace that which exists today’. The first draft of the memorandum was presented to Peel and Aberdeen by Nesselrode in the third week of September 1844. It was never discussed in cabinet and was kept among Aberdeen’s private papers rather than in the Foreign Office archives. Correspondence was exchanged between Aberdeen, Nesselrode and Brunnow over the next four months before the Foreign Secretary felt able to assure the Russians that Peel and himself accepted the memorandum as an accurate summary of their views. He emphasized that the agreement could bind only the present government, but he did not question Nicholas’s assumption that the Turkish Empire was close to disintegration.[10]

  Thereafter official London forgot the Nesselrode Memorandum for almost a decade. There was nothing to recall Nicholas Is surprise visit, apart from engravings in The Illustrated London News and a horse race at Ascot, for which the Tsar offered each year of his life a plate worth £500, with the Imperial Arms upon it.[11]

  Chapter Two – From Friendship to War

  Four years after Nicholas’s visit to London the foundations of the old conservative system imposed on the Continent in 1815 began to crack. Palmerston, who became Foreign Secretary again when Lord John Russell formed a Whig government in July 1846, called the revolutions of 1848 a ‘political earthquake rolling Europe from side to side’. Louis-Philippe’s monarchy gave way to a republic in Paris; Metternich resigned after nearly forty years as Austria’s foreign minister; the Hungarians sought independence from Habsburg rule; and throughout Italy and Germany there were movements for representative government and unified nation states. Russia survived without serious upheaval, but news of revolution in Paris made Nicholas fear that 1792 had come again. At first, his ministers could barely curb the Tsar’s impetuosity. Nicholas, however, possessed a maturity of character rare among Russia’s imperial sovereigns: occasionally he pursued, somewhat furtively, hidden policies of his own devising; but reasoned argument often cooled a choleric temper and induced second thoughts; and, unlike other members of his family, he did not then indulge in third or fourth thoughts, changing his policy to accommodate the views of whoever had spoken to him last. Hence, in the spring of 1848, an imperial manifesto called for the defence of Holy Russia and the army was put on a war footing, but the Tsar was persuaded not to gratify the Russophobes of western Europe by ordering his Cossacks across Germany to hold the line of the Rhine.

  On 3 April, Nicholas sent to Windsor one of the strangest congratulatory letters preserved in royal correspondence: while rejoicing in the birth of the Queen’s sixth child (Princess Louise), the Tsar turned a message of greeting into an appeal for joint action against the Revolution. Since the Windsor conversations, he wrote, ‘hardly four years are passed, and what remains standing in Europe? Great Britain and Russia! Is it not natural to think that our close union may be called upon to save the world?’ But at Windsor such speculation was not ‘natural’; Nicholas’s appeal
evoked no response.[12]

  Although Britain made no move, Russia was not able long to remain on the sidelines. Liberal unrest in the nominally Turkish ‘Danubian Principalities’ of Moldavia and Wallachia led to Russian occupation in the last week of July 1848. None of the Powers protested. As Palmerston told Parliament, the Russians were entitled to be in the Principalities, for the treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji of 1774 accorded them rights to protect the Christian population of Moldavia and Wallachia, and their presence had been tolerated by the Roumanian inhabitants of the Principalities from 1829 to 1834. But Russia’s action had greater significance than Palmerston appreciated, for by advancing into the Danubian plains the Tsar’s armies were poised like a crescent around eastern Hungary, ready for a show of conservative solidarity should the Habsburgs need aid against their rebellious Magyar subjects. And in the spring of 1849 the young Emperor Francis Joseph did indeed ask for Russian assistance in stamping out the independent Hungary of Lajos Kossuth’s creation.[13] There followed a summer campaign of some eight weeks, in which the Hungarians found it impossible to defy the imperial armies of both Russia and Austria. Four thousand Hungarians sought sanctuary across the frontier of the Turkish Empire, and with them were eight hundred Poles, veteran revolutionary enemies of the Tsarist system. When the Tsar put pressure on the Turks to hand over four leading Polish generals, British and French naval squadrons sailed for the Dardanelles to give the Sultan protection against what was seen in London and Paris as Russian intimidation. Nicholas did not persist with his demands.[14]

  The Tsar’s armed intervention in Hungary and the much-publicized storm in a samovar glass over the Polish generals conjured up the old Russian bogey in Britain. In the mind of every liberal progressive, St Petersburg became the centre of international reaction, and the Tsarist state machine was denounced as a cumbersome despotism which menaced western civilization. Tories and Whig businessmen deplored the incursion of Russian traders in the Far East and along the borders of Central Asia as well as in the eastern Mediterranean. Almost every political group in Britain had a grievance, genuine or feigned, against Russia. At the same time, a restless national pride gripped large sections of the country. In the spring of 1850 Palmerston ordered Admiral Parker’s Mediterranean squadron to sail to Phaleron Bay and impose a blockade of the harbours serving Athens in order to enforce the pecuniary claims against the Greek Government of a number of British subjects, the most famous being the Gibraltar-born moneylender, David Pacifico. This high-handed action, which left Britain diplomatically isolated in Europe, was attacked in the Commons by a formidable array of gifted parliamentarians including Peel, Cobden, Gladstone and Disraeli; but it was defended by the Foreign Secretary in a speech which made Palmerston the darling hero of Britain’s patriotic Radicals. At a dinner in his honour in the Reform Club, the members greeted their guest with a vigorous rendering of ‘Rule Britannia!’

  This blustering national belligerence ran counter to the ideal with which, in 1851, Prince Albert promoted his ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations’. When, barely ten months after the Pacifico debate, the Queen opened the Great Exhibition she emphasized that it was, above all, a ‘peace festival’ and she continued to hope throughout the summer that the Exhibition’s success would encourage friendly competition between the nations. But Victoria and Albert were out of touch with the public mood, for the thousands who flocked to the Crystal Palace delighted in specifically British achievements and were content to cast curious glances of patronizing approval on what had come from overseas. With some satisfaction they noted, in this first week of May 1851, that only one country had failed to ship its exhibits to London in time for the opening ceremony; as the Queen and her consort, the Prince and Princess of Prussia, a bevy of younger royalty and the indomitable Duke of Wellington inspected the six-hundred-yard glass and iron conservatory there was not a single exhibit from Russia to catch their eye. The Great Exhibition did nothing to allay Russophohia. Within a fortnight of its closure in October, cheering crowds were greeting Kossuth in London and the provinces, thrilled by the masterly rhetoric of his fluent English as he denounced the twin tyrannies of Vienna and St Petersburg. It was Russian intervention which rankled most of all. ‘Do not give a charter to the Tsar to dispose of the World’, was Kossuth’s message to ‘the English people’ at a monster open-air meeting in Islington’s Copenhagen Fields.[15]

  The froth and bubble of this newest wave of English hostility did not unduly disturb Nicholas I. He was more concerned with the pretensions of France’s Prince President; for Louis Napoleon, nephew of the Emperor whose army had entered Moscow in 1812, had been elected head of the Second French Republic in December 1848. Resurgent Bonapartism threatened to destroy the peace settlement of 1814-15, seeking to draw a new map of Europe based upon respect for the continent’s submerged nationalities. Most immediately, Louis Napoleon challenged Russian primacy in the Levant, for in May 1850 he took up the defence of Roman Catholic rights in the Palestinian Holy Places of the Turkish Empire. Britain and Austria recognized that Louis Napoleon was only reviving claims traditionally exercised by France’s Bourbon rulers and asserted by King Louis-Philippe as recently as 1842; and they assumed that his initiative was intended primarily for domestic consumption, a move to ensure clericalist support for his general policies. But Nicholas, for whom even the judiciously circumspect Louis-Philippe had seemed a dangerous interloper, saw in Louis Napoleon’s championship of ‘the Latins’ a direct threat to Russian influence on the Straits. The Prince President was in a hurry to win prestige for the French Republic; and the Tsar could not understand why Britain, the only Great Power other than Russia to remain unscathed by the revolutions of 1848, should not share his apprehensions. It was, he felt, one of the failings of that ‘perfidious pig’, Lord Palmerston, not to perceive that the nephew was potentially as grave a menace to the peace of Europe as his uncle, the First Consul, fifty years before.[16]

  On 2 December 1851 a military coup d’état in Paris destroyed the parliamentary trappings of the French Republic and made Louis Napoleon a virtual dictator. But it was with some satisfaction that Tsar Nicholas learnt that, on this occasion, two of his personal enemies had tripped over each other. For Palmerston failed, for once, to cast his spell on the British public; private congratulations to Paris on the Prince President’s coup offended his sovereign, his colleagues and his supporters. Palmerston left office, but the Whigs could not survive without him and by the end of February 1852 Britain had a Conservative government again. In April a scare that the French would march into Belgium led to amicable conversations between Brunnow and the new Foreign Secretary, Viscount Malmesbury; perhaps a Russian expeditionary force of 60,000 men might help the British defend the Low Countries once again from a Napoleonic army. But the French threat to Belgium’s independence soon receded and nothing more was heard of any Anglo-Russian military alliance. Nevertheless Nicholas was well satisfied. With Palmerston gone, relations with Britain seemed as friendly as in the year of his visit to Windsor.[17]

  By contrast, Russo-French relations remained strained. Early in February 1852 the Sultan made concessions to the French over the vexed question of access to the Holy Places; but at the same time he tried to reassure the Orthodox believers that there would be no change in ‘the existing state of things’. The dispute was therefore resumed, with the French taking an even stronger line in their negotiations with the Sultan’s ministers. At midsummer France’s ambassador, the Marquis de Lavalette, returned to Turkey from Paris in great state, sailing through the Dardanelles in the heavily-armed and steam-powered warship Charlemagne, a breach of the Straits Convention. The Turks were much impressed: here was a floating fortress able to challenge ‘the most rapid currents of the Bosphorus by the sole power of the screw’.[18] Thereafter they assumed that Louis Napoleon’s warships could outspeed and outgun any Russian or Turkish vessels. To the Tsar’s chagrin, Sultan Abdul Medjid was inclined more and more to listen to the French. In Oc
tober he appointed a Grand Vizier, Mehemet Ali, who found the bribes offered by the French gratifyingly generous; and on 6 December instructions were sent to Jerusalem requiring ‘the Greeks’ to surrender certain keys to the Holy Places in Bethlehem to the French-backed ‘Latins’.

  Nicholas looked upon this decision as a personal affront. Here, he felt, was confirmation of all that he had preached over the years to the other Great Powers: Turkey was feeble and corrupt, incapable of resisting external pressure or internal uriheaval. As news reached Vienna and St Petersburg of vicious clan warfare along Turkey’s north-west frontier, it seemed self evident to him that the Sultan’s emissaries could no longer hold together an empire which stretched from the Balkan ranges to the Caucasus and down to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. The alternative was partition.

  *

  In retrospect these winter months of 1852-3 stand out as the moment when an Anglo-Russian entente drifted finally beyond reach. But at Epiphany it still seemed attainable to Nicholas, remote in his dark red palace flanking the frozen Neva. The ambassadorial reports from western Europe, delayed as ever by the frost and snow, made interesting reading. Two days before the Sultan settled the Holy Places dispute in France’s favour, Louis Napoleon was proclaimed ‘Emperor of the French’ in Paris. A fortnight later, across the Channel, Lord Derby’s Conservative administration was defeated over the budget, and before Christmas the British people had their first avowed coalition government for nearly half a century.