by Alan Palmer
The coalition of Whigs and Peelites was headed by the Earl of Aberdeen and seemed full of ministerial talent. Gladstone early made his mark as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and another Peelite, Sir James Graham, returned to the Admiralty, where he had been an energetic reformer twenty years before. Lord John Russell was leader of the Commons and became Foreign Secretary, but held that office for only eight weeks before making way for the more orthodox ex-ambassador, the Earl of Clarendon. Palmerston entered the cabinet as Home Secretary. It was thought, wrongly, that this appointment would keep him muzzled over issues of war and peace; his thoughts ran more naturally to war risks on the lower Danube than to the case for and against a sixty-hour week for factory workers under eighteen. Exclusion from the Foreign Office freed the incorrigible old intriguer from all inhibitions of executive responsibility in international affairs; and in the following summer his speeches in and out of Parliament and his influence over the Morning Post, the Globe, and the Morning Chronicle encouraged a Russophobia which would have hindered his conduct of diplomacy had he been Foreign Secretary.
But, for the moment, Palmerston seemed no threat to the Russians. Nicholas was convinced that the new British Government would be alive to the menace from Napoleon III’s ambitions and that Aberdeen and Clarendon would welcome any chance to improve Anglo-Russian relations.[19] The Tsar was already resolved on a direct approach to Britain over the Eastern Question. In the week that Aberdeen was busy forming his coalition, Nicholas suggested to Nesselrode that the time had come to draw up partition plans for the Ottoman Empire. But, after a long conversation with the British ambassador, Nesselrode decided that his imperial master’s approach to London was misguided: ‘plans for an uncertain future’ would be ‘both dangerous and utterly useless,’ he told the Tsar and warned him that talk of partition might swing the British into lasting hostility. Nicholas, who respected his minister’s long experience of British diplomacy, decided to wait upon events.[20]
Five days later — on Thursday 6 January 1853 — news that Aberdeen was now prime minister reached St Petersburg. The following Sunday was the forty-sixth birthday of the Tsar’s widowed sister-in-law, the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna; and she celebrated the occasion with a private concert at the Mikhailovsky Palace. Among her guests were the British minister, Sir Hamilton Seymour, and his wife. A few weeks before, Seymour had complained in a letter home that, in fifteen months at St Petersburg, he had talked high politics with the Tsar only once.[21] Now was his opportunity, and he made the most of it.
Seymour’s journal (recently acquired by the British Library) gives a more vivid impression of the conversation than the well-known official despatch, with its ‘sick man’ metaphor. ‘The great event of the day was our going to a concert at the Grand Duchess Elena’s,’ Seymour wrote in his diary that evening.
We were made much of— taking tea at the Empress’s tearable. I had a long talk with the Emperor, who was very civil. H.NI. spoke of the close alliance which ought always to exist between us, saying that if England and He, He and England were on good terms in W. Europe, what anyone else thought mattered little...He would send for me soon. As H.M. shook hands by way of parting, I said I should like some assurances as to Turkey to send to England. A curious answer was elicited: the country was falling to pieces — who can say when L’homme est très malade: ce serait un grand malheur si un de ces jours le malade nous échappes.
In his despatch to the Foreign Office, written two days later, Seymour gave a fuller version of this famous exit line: ‘We have a sick man on our hands, a man who is seriously ill; it will be...a great misfortune if he escapes us one of these days, especially before all the necessary arrangements are made.’ After repeating his wish soon to receive Sir Hamilton in audience, Nicholas left for his carriage. As for the Grand Duchess’s concert, Seymour’s diary notes, ‘The music was capital —there at least there was plenty of harmony.’[22]
On 14 January the journal records that ‘the Emperor sent for me’ and that there followed a ‘50 minute conversation about Turkey’, but there was then a gap in these talks, for the Tsar himself became ‘a sick man’. It was, his wife wrote to her sister-in-law in Holland, ‘an exhausting...salutary crisis’; Nicholas was in a high fever for almost a week, ‘sweating violently’, and, although he was said to have ‘gout in the foot’, the symptoms seem similar to the fatal influenza attack which he suffered two years later.[23] Eventually, on 21 January, Nicholas received Seymour, with three further audiences over the following twelve weeks, as well as several meetings of Seymour and Nesselrode.
They were a strange series of conversations, and Seymour’s perplexity shows through the cautious gradations of officialese in his despatches to London. The Tsar repeatedly returned to his main theme: ‘The Bear [Turkey] is dying; you may give him musk, but even musk will not keep him alive’. Nicholas did not, he insisted, wish to discuss immediate issues or seek any formal agreement: ‘A general understanding...between gentlemen is sufficient,’ he told Seymour in the third week of February.[24] Sometimes Seymour could not remember the precise terms in which the Tsar outlined his views on the future of south-eastern Europe, notably ‘the commercial policy’ to be followed at the Straits after Turkey had collapsed. But the sweep of Nicholas’s vision was startling enough: a hint that Serbia, Bulgaria and the Danubian Principalities should become ‘independent’ states ‘under my protection’; a suggestion that Britain might find compensation in Egypt, while the island of ‘Candia’ (Crete) ‘might suit you and I do not know why it should not become an English possession’; an inference that what St Petersburg decided would be acceptable to Vienna — and all without reference to the parvenu emperor in Paris. Such talk came close to the partition proposals against which his foreign minister had warned Nicholas at the start of the year; and Nesselrode barely concealed his disquiet from Seymour. In April he admitted that he thought there was ‘inconvenience in the prolonged discussion of a matter of so much delicacy as that upon which the Emperor has spoken.’[25]
This was a diplomatic understatement. The response in London to Nicholas’s initial remarks was cautious, but not hostile. Aberdeen told the Queen that Tsar Nicholas anticipated ‘an early dissolution of the Turkish Empire’ but was prepared, in such a case, to work in harmony with Great Britain.[26] Yet, as the conversations continued, the mood in London hardened: no one in the cabinet liked the hypothetical discussion of remote problems, least of all the suggestion that anarchy at Constantinople might lead Russia ‘temporarily’ to occupy the Turkish capital; and the British made it clear that they wanted no territorial aggrandizement at the expense of Turkey.[27] Had the Seymour conversations taken place in a diplomatic void, with no Russian pressure exerted on the Sultan’s government and no reports of troops massing north of Turkey’s Danubian frontier, Nicholas might, perhaps, have dispelled the suspicion which habitually vitiated every move towards an Anglo-Russian understanding. But the three months of amicable exchanges in St Petersburg coincided with the most overt Russian coercion of Turkey for twenty years. The Tsar who spoke so sincerely to Seymour in February of his need to concert arrangements with Lord Aberdeen had already decided, at the beginning of the month, to send Prince Menshikov on a special mission to Constantinople. The Prince arrived in the Bosphorus in great state three weeks later aboard the Gromovnik (Thunderer). The vessel — an armed paddle-steamer, unimpressive compared with France’s ninety-gun Charlemagne — was, for Menshikov’s purpose, aptly named.
Alexander Menshikov, sixty-six in that spring of 1853, was descended from a disgraced favourite of Peter the Great. While so many other counsellors in St Petersburg were as German in ancestry as the dynasty itself, Menshikov prided himself on being a Russian, through and through. He had first fought against the Turks as a cavalry officer in his early twenties and by 1817 had become a full general, basking in Tsar Alexander I’s favour until 1821 when he made the mistake of quarrelling with the influential General Arakcheev. Nicholas I welcomed him back to cou
rt and in 1827 appointed him Chief of Naval Staff. These new responsibilities did not prevent Menshikov from seeing active service again against Turkey in the following year; but on this occasion he was seriously wounded by Turkish roundshot. He became a member of the Council of State in 1830 and a full admiral in 1833; he was Governor-General of Finland for several uneventful years and thereafter attained some celebrity in St Petersburg society for an ostentatious show of wealth, a mordant wit, and an open mistrust of almost every other public figure whether in the army or navy, the diplomatic service or the civil administration. He was particularly envious of the honey-tongued Count Orlov, whose tactful charm made him Nicholas’s ablest negotiator. In 1833 Orlov had achieved remarkable success at Constantinople in persuading Sultan Mahmud II to accept the treaty of Unkiar Skelessi. Twenty years later, to Menshikov’s satisfaction, Russia’s church leaders persuaded their Tsar to send him rather than the more westernized Orlov on this latest special mission to the Straits. By now Menshikov’s health was poor and he no longer thought his long years of service would end with victory in war; but the opportunity of carrying off a diplomatic triumph at Byzantium was attractive. ‘I have high hopes that this will provide me with the last official undertaking of my...life, which now requires repose,’ he wrote to a friend on the eve of his departure for Sebastopol, where he reviewed the Black Sea Fleet before embarking for Constantinople.[28]
Nesselrode had wished the Tsar to send Orlov, and his disquiet is clear from the confused instructions which, as Foreign Minister, he gave Menshikov. The Prince was warned that ‘the Ottoman Empire would dissolve at the first clash of arms’ and that Tsar Nicholas ‘did not wish to precipitate this catastrophe’; but he was authorized to use ‘threatening or friendly language’ to secure a convention recognizing Russia’s right to protect Turkey’s Orthodox Christians. Sultan Abdul Medjid would be offered a secret defensive alliance so that he might safely rescind every concession to the French. Should Abdul Medjid prove obdurate, Menshikov was to leave for Sebastopol within three days.[29]
Menshikov began sensationally. He summoned the Grand Vizier to come outside the walls and escort him in state through the gates of the city and he refused to negotiate with the Foreign Minister, holding that he had shown ‘bad faith and duplicity’ in his dealings with Russia. No elchi (ambassador) was ever received in such state as the Prince demanded and the Grand Vizier would not sanction so great a variation in protocol. But Menshikov had his way over the Foreign Minister: Rifaat Sadyk, who was allegedly pro-Russian, was given the post. The Sultan was duly assured that Menshikov had not intended to insult his authority and talks began on the old question of Orthodox rights at the Holy Places. Menshikov thereupon dropped his peremptory manner — and with good reason, for although in St Petersburg he was renowned for his excellent memory and attention to detail, someone on his staff had blundered: the Tsar’s personal envoy had arrived in Constantinople without the collection of maps essential for any discussion of Turkish affairs. Several weeks went by before Menshikov could be sure that he had the necessary geographical information at his fingertips.[30]
The delay enabled the British and French governments to reshape their policies in the light of Menshikov’s mission. Curiously enough, neither country had an ambassador in Constantinople at that time. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, who had spent nineteen years safeguarding British interests in the Ottoman Empire, left the Bosphorus in June 1852 on leave; and it was assumed that the ‘Great Elchi’ — as the Turks called Stratford — would not return for a sixth term of residence at Constantinople. In the absence of an ambassador, Great Britain was represented by a chargé d’affaires, Colonel Hugh Rose, who had served as consul-general at Beirut for ten years before becoming secretary of Stratford’s embassy in 1851. The fiery French ambassador, the Marquis de Lavalette, was recalled to Paris a few weeks before Menshikov arrived, and France, too, was represented by a charge d’affaires, Vincente Benedetti, a professional diplomat who was to win his moment of fame seventeen years later in an encounter with the King of Prussia on the promenade at the spa town of Ems.
Both Rose and Benedetti witnessed Menshikov’s dramatic entry into Constantinople and were alarmed by such an arrogant display of Russian strength. Rose was an astute soldier who, in later years, distinguished himself as commander-in-chief in India and Ireland, gaining a peerage (Lord Strathnairn) and a field marshal’s baton. Persistent reports of Russian troop movements north of the Danube troubled his military mind. Without waiting for his government’s approval, he therefore sent an urgent appeal to Admiral Dundas, at Malta, to bring his fleet ‘to Vourla Bay’, an anchorage near the modern town of Izmir and over a hundred miles south of the approaches to the Dardanelles.[31] At the same time Benedetti appealed to Paris for the despatch of French warships to Turkish waters. Napoleon III was glad of an excuse to counter the Menshikov mission with a show of force. Although the British made it clear in Paris that they were opposed to a build-up of naval forces, a French squadron left Toulon for the Aegean on 25 March. It did not return to the western Mediterranean until the Crimean War had been fought and won.[32]
Rose’s message to Malta had a different fate. Dundas refused to sail without orders from London, and the First Lord of the Admiralty was astounded that Rose should think he could ‘treat Admirals with their fleets’ in such a way ‘with impunity’.[33] The British Government did not wish to see the Mediterranean Fleet so closely involved in Turkish affairs. Only a few weeks before, Aberdeen had discussed with Lord John Russell and with Lord Clarendon the merits and risks of employing naval power as an auxiliary to diplomacy. Russell wished Stratford de Redcliffe to set out once more for Constantinople, partly because he was the one ambassador whom the Turks held in high respect, but also because if Stratford chose to remain in London and speak on foreign affairs in the Lords, he could be an infernal nuisance to the Government. Aberdeen, however, was uneasy. Stratford wanted permission to summon British warships to enter the Straits and bolster the Sultan’s authority in times of crisis; ‘We ought not to trust the disposal of the Mediterranean fleet (which is peace or war) to the decision of any man,’ Aberdeen told Russell.[34] Stratford was duly informed that, although as ambassador at Constantinople he might ‘in case of imminent danger to the existence of the Turkish government’ ask the commanding admiral at Malta to hold his fleet in readiness, no British warship should enter the Dardanelles without direct orders from London. It is not surprising that Colonel Rose received a curt rejoinder from the Foreign Office: ‘Admiral Dundas has been ordered to remain at Malta,’ Rose was told.[35]
The British cabinet, still interested that April in Seymour’s exchanges with the Tsar at St Petersburg, had no wish to precipitate a crisis on the Straits. Seymour reported that Nesselrode was pleased to learn that Aberdeen and Clarendon had refused to send the fleet eastwards from Malta; their decision seemed to him proof that the government in London was much too sensible to believe exaggerated rumours put about by the French and the Turks. When Lord Stratford arrived back in Constantinople on 5 April he sent reassuring messages to London. With Stratford’s assistance the original dispute over Orthodox and Christian rights of guardianship at the Holy Places was settled by the end of the month.[36] ‘We did quite right in showing confidence in the pledged word of the Emperor of Russia,’ Clarendon wrote contentedly to Stratford in mid-April.[37]
Nicholas, however, wanted a clear-cut political victory. Briefly he considered a military expedition, with the Black Sea fleet covering the landing of several divisions between Lake Derkos and the entrance to the Bosphorus, some twenty miles north of Constantinople. His military advisers insisted that neither the army nor the navy was ready for so ambitious a project. Nevertheless, at the very time that Clarendon in London was commending the Tsar’s good faith, Nicholas was emphasizing to Nesselrode the need for ‘a show of strength’ at Constantinople in order that his embassy might ‘recover the degree of influence which it had earlier exercised’ at the Porte.[38] On 5
May Menshikov accordingly gave Rifaat a draft convention which, although couched in vague language, was assumed by the Turks, the British and the French to assure Russia a protectorate over all the Orthodox subjects of the Sultan, both in Europe and in Asia. It was this demand which brought a long-simmering Eastern crisis to the boil.
Abdul Medjid did not turn down the Russian proposals out of hand; he even changed the Grand Vizier and the Foreign Minister, yet again, at Menshikov’s request. But his new counsellors listened more and more to Stratford, who urged them to reject Russia’s draft convention. Menshikov, who was naturally impatient, had had enough. On 21 May he left for Odessa, furious with the Sultan and the British ambassador. Stratford, he reported to St Petersburg, had ‘betwitched’ Abdul Medjid’s advisers by his ‘frantic activity’.[39]
*
Stratford rejoiced that the Turks had stood up to Menshikov. ‘All now depends upon our cabinet at home,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘Shilly-shally will spoil all.’ But shilly-shallying was by now part of Aberdeen’s nature. When the cabinet met on 28 May the Prime Minister, still confident that the Tsar did not want war, persuaded his colleagues that Britain should, for the moment, take no action whatsoever. It was, they agreed on that Saturday morning, far better to wait until more information reached them from the Turkish and Russian capitals. Brunnow, who on the following Tuesday was travelling back to St Petersburg for consultations, encouraged Aberdeen to believe that the diplomats would find a solution to the crisis; and the Prime Minister hoped that Nesselrode and Orlov might persuade their imperial master to disavow Menshikov. But a weekend of rumour and reflection dented cabinet unity.[40] Pressure mounted for the fleet to be sent once again to Turkish waters.
