The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  The movement of warships seemed to Aberdeen needlessly provocative at such a time. But he was constitutionally punctilious. Before the next meeting of the cabinet, on 4 June, he let his colleagues know that he would accept the verdict of a vote to settle the issue. Most of the cabinet favoured the move; and on 5 June Admiral Dundas was ordered to leave Malta for the anchorage of Besika Bay, off Turkey’s Asiatic coast, ten miles south of the entrance to the Dardanelles. At the same time the Prime Minister reluctantly acknowledged that Lord Stratford should be given authority to summon the vessels up to the Bosphorus so as to protect Constantinople from a Russian attack. ‘We are drifting fast towards War,’ the Prime Minister told Clarendon two days later; did the cabinet realize ‘where they are going’, he asked plaintively?[41]

  Lord Aberdeen mistrusted all manifestations of public opinion, especially any which reflected popular concern with foreign affairs. After a particularly noisy outburst of patriotic feeling that summer he wrote tellingly to Palmerston, recalling that Alcibiades, on finding himself applauded by the crowd, asked whether he had said anything unusually foolish.[42] But the Whig members of the Coalition could not affect such aristocratic detachment. The English newspapers were demanding action; some of them contrasted Napoleon III’s apparent firmness with the ‘senile hesitation’ of the British Prime Minister. A new daily newspaper, founded by Benjamin Disraeli, was particularly tiresome: The Press, published for the first time on 7 May, offered a challenge to both the Palmerstonian newspapers and The Times, which consistently supported the Government throughout the first five months of the year. The newcomer sought to exorcize the traditional bogey of Bonapartism and urged Anglo-French collaboration against Russia. ‘England and France are the two policemen of Europe, and they can always keep the peace,’ The Press declared in its nineteenth issue.[43]

  This sudden intensive rivalry between London’s newspapers perplexed Lord Aberdeen. For a prime minister to find himself abused at the breakfast table morning after morning in so many unsigned articles was a new and disagreeable experience. A leader writer in The Press described how his ‘naturally morose’ temper ‘has become peevish. Crossed in his Cabinet, he insults the House of Lords, and plagues the most eminent of his colleagues with the crabbed malice of a maundering witch’.[44] This mischievous character sketch came, anonymously, from Disraeli’s incisive pen; and it was too near the truth to be laughed off as journalistic licence. For in cabinet Aberdeen was intensely irritated by Palmerston and Russell, both of whom assumed that they possessed a detailed understanding of Europe’s affairs. The Prime Minister claimed one advantage over his colleagues; he knew the terrain. Aberdeen had indeed visited Constantinople, exploring the city and the surrounding countryside for eight weeks and seeing for himself the problems of a warship seeking to sail up the Bosphorus against winds sweeping down from the north. By now this experience was halfa century in the past, but everything about the Turkish Empire and the curious conventions of Ottoman government remained vivid in Aberdeen’s memory: ‘I know the spot well,’ he told the First Lord of the Admiralty when problems arose over naval passage of the Straits.[45] Such magisterial finality made for tetchiness in a cabinet which contained, as well as the incumbent Foreign Secretary, four of his predecessors, among them the Prime Minister himself.

  But, to Aberdeen’s satisfaction, once the fleet sailed for Besika Bay, his colleagues became less belligerent. Even when, at the beginning of July, Tsar Nicholas ordered his armies to re-occupy the Danubian Principalities as a means of putting pressure on Turkey, the cabinet did not succumb to the war fever of the rival newspapers. Russia’s action infuriated Austria, whose trade would suffer if the lower Danube became a war zone. The British and French encouraged the Austrians to mediate. Hurriedly the Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Buol, convened a conference in Vienna, attended by British, French and Russian diplomats, but no envoy from the Sultan. Compromise seemed easy. The ‘Vienna Note’ of 1 August, 1853 sought to establish what was virtually a joint Franco-Russian protectorate over the Sultan’s Christian subjects. Lord Aberdeen was optimistic; and so was his Russian friend, Brunnow. When news reached London, late on 5 August, that Russia accepted the ‘Vienna Note’, the Prime Minister was convinced that ‘everything was settled’. Political commentators praised his courage ‘in defying public clamour, abuse and taunts’. The news from Russia was ‘decidedly favourable to the cause of peace,’ the Prime Minister told the Queen next day.[46]

  But what of the Turks? For more than a fortnight no hard news came from Constantinople, only rumour. Gradually Aberdeen’s inner circle of ministers became suspicious of Stratford’s activity. Lady Clarendon was only echoing her husband’s doubts when, in mid-August, she explained to her sister-in-law that the Eastern Crisis ‘might soon be settled, yet there are hitches and bothers at every turn and I am afraid Lord Stratford will be an empêchement, he is so evidently bent upon getting a triumph over Russia’.[47] Legend insists that the Great Elchi was, in Lady Clarendon’s words, ‘a dreadfully unsafe man’, who encouraged the warlike mood of the Sultan’s chief counsellors. But, although Stratford considered the Vienna Note impolitic because it imposed Great-Power surveillance on Turkey, he tried to make it acceptable to the Sultan. When at last the Turks rejected the existing form of the Note and sought amendments, Stratford was blamed by Aberdeen and his colleagues for the failure of a policy never thought out carefully in London. Already the Peelite members of the cabinet had talked among themselves about the possibility of recalling Stratford; but, with the newspapers building him up as a popular idol, they knew that any move against the ambassador would topple the Coalition Government and bring Russell, Palmerston and the fire-and-thunder patriots into office. ‘Lord Aberdeen believes that there is a strong party at Constantinople desirous of war and that this party has been greatly encouraged by the hope of English and French assistance,’ the Prime Minister told the Queen in the first week of September.[48] A few days later anti-Russian riots, instigated by the Turkish Minister of War, threatened European life and property in the Sultan’s capital.

  Yet by the middle of September Aberdeen and Clarendon were ready to believe that Stratford was right in stiffening the Sultan’s resistance, for comments by Nesselrode, leaked to a newspaper in Berlin, showed that he interpreted the Vienna Note as a means of perpetuating Russian dominance at Constantinople. This ‘violent interpretation’ (to use a phrase coined by Clarendon) brought Britain close to war that autumn. For the first time, Aberdeen’s belief that Nicholas sought a reasonable settlement of the Eastern Question was undermined. The newspapers resumed their demand for action. Once again, there were public meetings to denounce Russian tyranny. On 23 September Clarendon ordered Stratford to summon Admiral Dundas’s squadron up from Besika Bay. It was to sail through the Dardanelles and anchor in the Golden Horn, off the Sultan’s palace. There it could defend Constantinople from any invader and help keep order in a city where the riots were undermining the Sultan’s authority.[49]

  ‘I see little chance of averting war, which even in the most sacred cause is a horrible calamity; but for such a cause as two sets of Barbarians quarrelling over a form of words, is not only shocking but incredible,’ wrote Clarendon to a friend early in October.[50] But the war which everyone by now anticipated was astonishingly slow to come. Stratford delayed summoning the fleet to Constantinople for fear that the arrival of British warships, followed by a French squadron, would stampede the Turks into a rash declaration of war on Russia. Momentarily indeed, it seemed as if the Austrians might successfully mediate, after all: Nicholas met Francis Joseph at Olmütz and approved a revised version of the Vienna Note, circulated to the British and French ambassadors in Vienna in Buol’s name. But bungling diplomacy left this ‘Buol Project’ stillborn. Napoleon III was prepared to accept it and join Britain in putting pressure on the Sultan, but for the sake of prestige he would not initiate a diplomatic retreat; and since, to the British, Buol was an untrustworthy Russian puppet, Aberdee
n denied the Project the backing which he had given to the original Vienna Note five weeks before. Between 1815 and 1848 fear of general upheaval on the Continent ensured that Europe’s statesmen kept the braking system of diplomacy well greased. In the decade which followed the Year of Revolutions mutual suspicion prevented effective maintenance of the old safeguards.

  It was, perhaps, already too late. Turkey formally declared war on Russia on 5 October, complaining that the Tsar had refused to withdraw his armies from Moldavia and Wallachia. There was still a faint hope of a rapid settlement, and over a fortnight passed without any sign of military operations. Tsar Nicholas spent much of September and early October emphasizing the solidarity of the three eastern autocrats. He visited Berlin before going to Olmütz, entertained the Austrian and Prussian rulers at Warsaw for five days, and travelled to Potsdam finr further conversations. ‘The reunion of the three of us had the aim of showing to the world that we need none other and that in a moment of danger they will find us together,’ Nicholas explained in a private letter to his sister Anna, the Queen Mother of the Netherlands. ‘The blind hate of the English knows no limits,’ he added. ‘It seems Louis Napoleon has condemned himself to march at their bidding. These follies take us straight to war. I do not look for it but I shall not flee from it.’[51]

  Four days after Nicholas wrote this letter from Tsarskoe Selo, Turkish troops were ferried silently across the Danube at dawn and surprised Russian outposts facing Tutrakan, the nearest point to Bucharest along the great river. As yet, Great Britain and France stood aside. Russia and Turkey had fought against each other in four long campaigns during the previous ninety years and on no occasion had the Turks received active military support from any ally in the West. But Nicholas was under no illusions: Russia, he knew, was about to face a harder struggle than ever before in defence of her Black Sea steppe lands. When news of the Turkish crossing of the Danube reached St Petersburg, Nicholas urged his loyal subjects to show unity with their sovereign in protecting the Orthodox faith by taking up arms for a just and sacred cause. Like his brother, Alexander I, in 1812, the Tsar turned to the scriptures and found inspiration for his peoples in the Psalms. To wage war against the Turk was, he told his sister Anna, ‘a holy vocation to which Russia is once more called’.[52]

  Chapter Three – Sinope

  ‘Things get worser and worser,’ Lord Clarendon wrote to his wife from the Foreign Office on the first Monday in October. ‘The beastly Turks have actually declared war.’[53] Such spluttering indignation did not correspond with the general response of the British public to news of Turkey’s decision to challenge the might of Russia. Mass meetings in London, Glasgow and several northern towns denounced the barbarism of the Tsar, with frequent references to the suppressed liberties of Poland and Hungary, and there were calls for immediate help to the Sultan. One cabinet minister went even further. On 4 October Lord John Russell sent the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary a memorandum in which he argued that, if Russia would not now accept a ‘fair’ settlement, British troops should be prepared to serve ‘as auxiliaries of Turkey’. He raised, too, the question whether ‘England and France’ ought then to become major participants in the conflict. If so, he argued, they should ‘not confine themselves to operations in the Bosphorus and the Black Sea, but employ their mighty resources in the Baltic and at every point where Russia can be resisted or attacked’. These proposals — the first suggestion by a responsible member of the Government that Britain might embark on a major war against the Russian Empire — received scant attention from Lord Aberdeen, who seems to have treated them as a move in Russell’s bid for the premiership. At Russell’s request, however, Aberdeen sent a copy of the memorandum to Prince Albert later in the month; but the Prime Minister added the damning comment that he thought these proposals ‘not very practical, or very consistent’.[54] In Aberdeen’s opinion, Palmerston had more cogent recommendations to lay before the cabinet, for they relied primarily on the traditional use of sea power: an immediate pledge of support to the Sultan, with naval patrols protecting the Black Sea approaches to the Bosphorus and a formal convention authorizing the Queen’s subjects to serve in Turkey’s army or navy in return for an undertaking that London would be consulted over the eventual Russo-Turkish peace treaty. Aberdeen did not agree with Palmerston, but he recognized the force of his argument.[55]

  No other cabinet minister looked so far ahead as Russell and Palmerston, and none contemplated with such equanimity the prospect of general war. Each successive report from Constantinople confirmed the Foreign Secretary’s contempt for everything Turkish. Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, loathed the thought of military or naval operations but feared that it might be difficult to stay out of the conflict. Sidney Herbert, who as Secretary-at-War was the executive minister responsible for army administration, hoped the conflict could remain localized and be speedily ended, but he was as pessimistic as the Chancellor.[56] The cabinet had not met at all during September, and when ministers came together at the end of the first week in October one of its least belligerent members — Sir James Graham, the First Lord of the Admiralty — was at Balmoral in attendance on the Queen; but, even so, Lord Aberdeen was satisfied with the mood of his colleagues. ‘The aspect of the Cabinet was, on the whole, very good,’ he wrote to Graham. ‘Gladstone, active and energetic for Peace.... Lord John warlike enough, but subdued in tone; Palmerston urged his views perseveringly, but not disagreeably.’[57] The cabinet, following Clarendon’s lead, ‘came at last to a sort of compromise’: the fleet would remain off Constantinople and only enter the Black Sea if the Russians attacked the Turkish coast or crossed the Danube and began to penetrate the Balkans. Graham thought even this proposal fraught with danger, and in a letter from Balmoral he echoed the doubts of the Queen and Prince Albert. Suppose that British sympathy encouraged the Turks to rash behaviour which culminated in disaster, he asked: ‘Are we bound in that case to be dragged into hostilities by a Barbarian whom we are unable to control?’[58]

  Aberdeen was alive to the danger. For two months there was a flurry of diplomatic activity in London, Paris, Vienna and Constantinople as peace proposals followed each other in quick succession, ‘the Thousand and One Notes’ as Stratford de Redcliffe’s secretary quipped at the time.[59] By the end of November the Russians were willing to accept mediation by the other four Great Powers. Soon, Aberdeen hoped, the Turks, too, would welcome peace talks. Amicable messages were exchanged between Nicholas at Tsarskoe Selo and his former hostess at Windsor; and Nesselrode authorized the Russian field commander in the Danubian Principalities to negotiate with any Turkish plenipotentiary who might come, under a flag of truce, to his headquarters. But no peace envoy crossed the Danube.[60]

  In Paris Napoleon III was edging away from the brink of a war he had at first seemed to welcome. The prestige of successful arbitration — ideally a congress in his own capital — would establish the Second Empire’s status in Europe as effectively as a string of victories from little-known shores around the Black Sea. Privately Napoleon was heard to wish that the Turks would suffer a defeat and come to the conference table chastened and realistic in mind.[61] He sensed that the prospect of new Russian campaigns, conjured up in the French press earlier that year, aroused no response from his strongest supporters in France, the commercial classes and the peasantry. Anxiously, in Paris and in London, responsible ministers awaited news from the Danubian Principalities and from that even more remote theatre of war across the Black Sea, where Russian outposts kept watch over the valleys of the Caucasus.

  *

  In St Petersburg, too, they awaited news of battles or peace parleys from the south, where the war zones were as distant from the Russian capital as the Channel coast of France. First reports were gloomy. Prince Michael Gorchakov, the Tsar’s commander-in-chief on the Danube, had strictly observed the orders issued when his troops occupied the Principalities in July: he remained on the defensive, concentrating on the defence of Buc
harest, but he authorized his subordinate commanders to counter-attack individual Turkish units which were digging in north of the Danube. But the Russians were beaten off at Kalafat on 28 October; a week later they were forced to fall back on Bucharest when they mounted a determined assault on Turkish positions at Oltenitza, 250 miles downstream from Kalafat and close to the point where the invaders had first crossed the great river. Russian veterans successfully fought off a surprise Turkish incursion in the southern Caucasus; but on that front the commander-in-chief, Prince Vorontsov, warned St Petersburg that his armies were below strength. It would be difficult, he said, to hold the Georgian coast and the southern foothills of the mountain chain next spring if, during the winter, a Turkish fleet brought men and munitions across the Black Sea.[62]

  Nicholas I prided himself on being a soldier. He was ill-at-ease out of uniform, and he thought no military detail too insignificant to merit his attention. Successive ministers of war had been, not formulators of policy, but mere executive adjutants of their sovereign’s will. The most impressive architectural achievement of his reign, the General Stall Building in St. Petersburg, was a vast neo-classical crescent, fittingly planned so that most of the seven hundred windows looked out towards the Winter Palace; for the building housed a military secretariat as dependent on the whim of the autocrat across the square as Tsar Paul’s terrified garrison commanders had been sixty years before, when Nicholas’s paranoiac father had set out on his provincial tours of inspection.

  The Tsar listened to the advice of all his generals. He recognized that many possessed a campaigning experience denied him because of his princely and imperial status. But among these generals there was only one whom Nicholas considered a great soldier, in the tradition of Suvorov. When Nicholas, too young to serve in the field against Napoleon, had joined the army of occupation in Paris in June 1814 he had admired a 32-year-old veteran of bayonet charges against the Turks and of the terrible battles of Austerlitz and Borodino, Lieutenant-General Ivan Paskevich.[63] Now, more than forty years after these campaigns, Field Marshal Paskevich, Prince of Warsaw and Commander-in-Chief of the Active Army, was still serving his sovereign, his reputation as a general inflated by victories over the rebellious Poles and Magyars. The million-strong army which owed its allegiance that autumn to the Tsar of Russia owed its training and operational assignments to the Prince of Warsaw. But it was not a debt for which Paskevich deserved to feel any pride in achievement.