The Crimean War

by Figes, Orlando

  Even Baron Brunov, the Russian ambassador in London, was not told the precise details of the Tsar’s itinerary. Not knowing when his steamer would arrive, Brunov had spent the whole of Saturday at the Woolwich docks. Finally, at ten o’clock in the evening, the steamer pulled in. The Tsar disembarked – barely recognizable in a grey cloak he had worn during the Turkish campaign of 1828 – and hurried off with Brunov to the Russian embassy at Ashburnham House in Westminster. Despite the late hour, he sent a note to the Prince Consort requesting a meeting with the Queen at her earliest convenience. Accustomed as he was to summoning his ministers at all hours of the day and night, it had not occurred to him that it might be rude to wake Prince Albert in the early hours of the morning.1

  This was not the Tsar’s first trip to London. He had fond memories of his previous visit, in 1816, when as a 20-year-old and still a Grand Duke, he had been a great success with the female half of the English aristocracy. Lady Charlotte Campbell, a famous beauty and lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales, had declared of him: ‘What an amiable creature! He is devilish handsome! He will be the handsomest man in Europe.’ From that trip, Nicholas had gained the impression that he had an ally in the English monarchy and aristocracy. As the despotic ruler of the world’s greatest state, Nicholas had little sense of the limitations on a constitutional monarchy. He presumed that he could come to Britain and decide matters of foreign policy directly with the Queen and her most senior ministers. It was ‘an excellent thing’, he told Victoria at their first meeting, ‘to see now and then with one’s own eyes, as it did not do always to trust to diplomatists only’. Such meetings created ‘a feeling of friendship and interest’ between reigning sovereigns, and more could be achieved ‘in a single conversation to explain one’s feelings, views and motives than in a host of messages and letters’. The Tsar thought that he could strike a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ with Britain about how to deal with the Ottoman Empire in the event of its collapse.2

  Nor was this the first attempt that Nicholas had made to enlist the support of another power in his partition plans for the Ottoman Empire. In 1829 he had suggested to the Austrians a bilateral division of its European territories to forestall the chaos which he feared would follow its collapse, but they had turned him down to preserve the Concert of Europe. Then, in the autumn of 1843 he again approached the Austrians, resurrecting the idea of a Greek empire backed by Russia, Austria and Prussia (the Triple Alliance of 1815) to prevent the British and the French from dividing the spoils of the crumbling Ottoman Empire between themselves. Insisting that Russia did not want to expand into the Balkans, Nicholas proposed that the Austrians should be given all the Turkish lands between the Danube and the Adriatic, and that Constantinople should become a free city under Austrian guardianship. But nothing he said had been able to dispel Vienna’s deep mistrust of Russia’s ambitions. The Austrian ambassador in St Petersburg believed that the Tsar was trying to engineer a situation where Russia could use the excuse of defending Turkey to intervene in its affairs and impose its own partition plans by military force. What the Tsar really wanted, the ambassador maintained, was not a Greek empire backed by the three powers but a ‘state tied to Russia by interests, principles and religion, and governed by a Russian prince … . Russia can never lose sight of this aim. It is a necessary condition for the fulfilment of her destiny … Present-day Greece would be swallowed up in the new state.’3 Deeply suspicious, the Austrians would have nothing to do with the Tsar’s partition plans without the agreement of the British and the French. So Nicholas now came to London in the hope of winning over Britain to his point of view.

  On the face of it, there was not much to suggest that Nicholas could forge a new alliance with Britain. The British were committed to their liberal reform plans to save the Ottoman Empire, and saw the ambitions of the Russians as a major threat. But the Tsar was encouraged by the diplomatic rapprochement between Russia and Britain during recent years, prompted by their shared alarm at France’s growing involvement in the Middle East.

  In 1839 the French had given their support to a second insurrection by the Egyptian ruler Mehmet Ali against the Sultan’s rule in Syria. With French backing, the Egyptians defeated the Ottoman army, raising renewed fears that they would march against the Turkish capital, as they had done six years before. The young Sultan Abdülmecid appeared too weak to resist Mehmet Ali’s renewed demands for a hereditary dynasty in Egypt and Syria, especially after the Ottoman navy defected to the Egyptians at Alexandria, and once again the Porte was forced to ask for foreign help. In 1833 the Russians had intervened on their own to rescue the Ottoman Empire, but in this second crisis they looked to work with Britain for the restoration of the Sultan’s rule – their aim being to come between the British and the French.

  Like the Russians, the British were alarmed by the growing French involvement in Egypt. This was where Napoleon had threatened to bring down the British Empire in 1798. France had invested heavily in the booming cotton cash crop and industrial economy of Egypt during the 1830s. It had sent advisers to help train the Egyptian army and navy. With French support, the Egyptians were not only a major threat to Turkish rule. As head of a powerful Islamic revival movement against the intervention of the Christian nations in the Ottoman Empire, Mehmet Ali was also an inspiration to the Muslim rebels against tsarist rule in the Caucasus.

  Consequently, Russia and Britain with Austria and Prussia urged Mehmet Ali to withdraw from Syria and accept their terms for a settlement with the Sultan. These terms, set down in the London Convention of 1840 and ratified by the four powers with the Ottoman Empire, allowed Mehmet Ali to establish a hereditary dynasty in Egypt. To ensure his withdrawal, a British fleet sailed to Alexandria, and an Anglo-Austrian force was sent to Palestine. For a while the Egyptian leader held out, in the expectation of French support; there were scares of a war in Europe when the French government rejected the peace terms proposed by the four powers and pledged to help Ali. But at the final moment the French, unwilling to be drawn into war, backed down and Mehmet Ali withdrew from Syria. By the terms of a subsequent London Convention of 1841, which the French signed reluctantly, Mehmet Ali was recognized as the hereditary ruler of Egypt in exchange for his recognition of the Sultan’s sovereignty in the rest of the Ottoman Empire.

  The importance of the 1841 Convention extended beyond securing Mehmet Ali’s surrender. Agreement had also been reached to close the Turkish Straits to all warships except those of the Sultan’s allies during wartime – a very big concession by the Russians because potentially it allowed the British navy into the Black Sea, where it could attack their vulnerable southern frontiers. By signing the convention, the Russians had given up their privileged position in the Ottoman Empire and their control of the Straits, all in the hope of improving relations with Britain and isolating France.

  From the Tsar’s point of view, propping up the Sultan’s power could only be a temporary measure. With the French weakened by their support for this insurrection, and Russia having reached what Nicholas believed was a new understanding with the British in the Middle East, he concluded that the London Convention opened the possibility of a more formal alliance between Russia and Britain. The election of a Conservative government headed by Sir Robert Peel in 1841 gave the Tsar some added grounds to be hopeful on this score, for the Tories were less hostile to the Russians than the previous Whig administration of Lord Melbourne (1835–41). The Tsar was convinced that the Tory government would listen favourably to his suggestion that Russia and Britain should take the lead in Europe and decide the future of the Ottoman Empire. In 1844, confident that he could bring the British round to his partition plans, the Tsar departed for London.

  The suddenness of his June arrival took everybody by surprise. There had been vague talk of his visit since the spring. Peel had welcomed the idea at a banquet for the Russian Trading Company in the London Tavern on 2 March, and three days later Lord Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary, had sent a formal invi
tation via Baron Brunov, reassuring the Tsar that his presence would ‘dispel any Polish prejudices’ against Russia in Britain. ‘For such a reserved and nervous man as Aberdeen to speak so confidently on this matter is significant,’ Brunov wrote to Nesselrode. As for the Queen, at first she was reluctant to receive the Tsar, on the grounds of his long-standing conflict with her uncle Leopold, king of the newly independent Belgium, who had attracted many Polish exiles to his army during the 1830s. Determined to uphold the legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance, Nicholas had wanted to restore the monarchies deposed by the French and Belgian revolutions of 1830, and had been prevented only by the outbreak of the Polish uprising in Warsaw in November of that year. His threats of intervention had earned him the mistrust of West European liberals, who labelled him the ‘gendarme of Europe’, while the Polish rebels who fled abroad after the suppression of their uprising had found a welcome refuge in Paris, Brussels and London. These were the developments that worried Queen Victoria, but eventually she was persuaded by her husband, Prince Albert (who was also a nephew of King Leopold), that a visit by the Tsar would help to mend relations between the ruling houses on the Continent. In her invitation to the Tsar, Victoria had said that she would welcome him in late May or early June, but no date had been set. In mid-May it was still not clear if Nicholas would come. In the end, the Queen learned of his arrival a few hours before his steamer landed at Woolwich. Her staff were thrown into a panic, not least because they were expecting a visit from the King of Saxony on the same day, and hasty preparations to receive the Tsar needed to be improvised.4

  The Tsar’s impromptu visit was one of many signs of a growing rashness in his behaviour. After eighteen years on the throne he had begun to lose those qualities that had characterized his early rule: caution, conservatism and reserve. Increasingly affected by the hereditary mental illness that had troubled Alexander in his final years, Nicholas became impatient and impetuous, and inclined to impulsive behaviour, like rushing off to London to impose his will on the British. His erratic nature was noted by Prince Albert and the Queen, who wrote to her uncle Leopold: ‘Albert thinks he is a man inclined to give way too much to impulse and feeling which makes him act wrongly often.’ 5

  The day after his arrival, the Queen received the Tsar at Buckingham Palace. There was a meeting with the dukes of Cambridge, Wellington and Gloucester, followed by a tour of London’s fashionable West End streets. The Tsar inspected the building work at the Houses of Parliament, which at that time were being reconstructed after the fire of 1834, and visited the newly finished Regent’s Park. In the evening the royal party travelled by train to Windsor, where they remained for the next five days. The Tsar astonished the servants with his spartan habits. The first thing his valets did on being shown his bedroom at Windsor Castle was to send to the stable for some straw to stuff the leather sack which served as the mattress of the military campbed on which the Tsar always slept.6

  Because the Queen was heavily pregnant and the Saxe-Coburgs were in mourning for Prince Albert’s father, there was no royal ball in the Tsar’s honour. But there were plenty of other amusements: hunting parties; military reviews; outings to the races at Ascot (where the Gold Cup was renamed the Emperor’s Plate in honour of the Tsard); an evening with the Queen at the opera; and a glittering banquet where more than sixty guests ate their way through fifty-three different dishes served from the Grand Service, possibly the finest collection of silver-gilt dining plate in the world. On his last two evenings, there were large dinners where the male guests dressed in military uniform, in line with the wishes of the Tsar, who felt uncomfortable en frac and admitted to the Queen that he was embarrassed when not dressed in a uniform.7

  As an exercise in public relations, the Tsar’s visit was a great success. Society women were charmed and delighted by his good looks and manners. ‘He is still a great devotee to female beauty,’ noted Baron Stockmar, ‘and to his old English flames he showed the greatest attention.’ The Queen also warmed to him. She liked his ‘dignified and graceful’ demeanour, his kindness to children, and his sincerity, though she thought him rather sad. ‘He gives Albert and myself the impression of a man who is not happy, and on whom the burden of his immense power and position weighs heavily and painfully,’ she wrote to Leopold on 4 June. ‘He seldom smiles, and when he does, the expression is not a happy one.’ A week later, at the end of the trip, she wrote again to her uncle with a penetrating assessment of the Tsar’s character:

  There is much about him which I cannot help liking, and I think his character is one which should be understood, and looked upon for once as it is. He is stern and severe – with fixed principles of duty which nothing on earth will make him change; very clever I do not think him, and his mind is an uncivilized one; his education has been neglected; politics and military concerns are the only things he takes great interest in; the arts and all softer occupations he is insensible to, but he is sincere, I am certain, sincere even in his most despotic acts, from a sense that that is the only way to govern.

  Lord Melbourne, one of the most anti-Russian of the Whigs, got on very well with Nicholas at a breakfast at Chiswick House, the centre of the Whig establishment. Even Palmerston, the former Whig spokesman on foreign policy, who was well known for his hard line against Russia, thought it was important for a ‘favourable impression of England’ to be given to the Tsar: ‘He is very powerful and may act in our favour, or bring us harm, depending on whether he is well disposed or hostile towards us.’8

  During his stay in England the Tsar had a number of political discussions with the Queen and Prince Albert, with Peel and Aberdeen. The British were surprised by the frankness of his views. The Queen even thought he was ‘too frank, for he talks so openly before people, which he should not do, and with difficulty restrains himself’, as she wrote to Leopold. The Tsar had come to the conclusion that openness was the only way to overcome British mistrust and prejudice against Russia. ‘I know that I am taken for an actor,’ he told Peel and Aberdeen, ‘but indeed I am not; I am thoroughly straightforward; I say what I mean, and what I promise I fulfil.’9

  On the question of Belgium, the Tsar declared that he would like to mend his relations with Leopold, but ‘while there are Polish officers in the service of the king, that is completely impossible’. Exchanging views with Aberdeen, ‘not as an emperor with a minister, but as two gentlemen’, he explained his thinking, voicing his resentment of Western double standards against Russia:

  The Poles were and still remain in rebellion against my rule. Would it be acceptable for a gentleman to take into service people who are guilty of rebellion against his friend? Leopold took these rebels under his protection. What would you say if I became the patron of [the Irish independence leader Daniel] O’Connell and thought of making him my minister?

  When it came to France, Nicholas wanted Britain to join Russia in a policy of containment. Appealing to their mistrust of the French after the Napoleonic Wars, he told Peel and Aberdeen that France ‘should never be allowed again to create disorder and march its armies beyond its borders’. He hoped that with their common interests against France, Britain and Russia might become allies. ‘Through our friendly intercourse,’ he said with feeling, ‘I hope to annihilate the prejudices between our countries. For I value highly the opinion of Englishmen. As to what the French say of me, I care not. I spit on it.’10

  Nicholas particularly played on Britain’s fear of France in the Middle East – the main subject of his talks with Peel and Aberdeen. ‘Turkey is a dying man,’ he told them.

  We may endeavour to keep him alive, but we shall not succeed. He will, he must, die. That will be a critical moment. I foresee that I shall have to put my armies into motion and Austria must do the same. In this crisis I fear only France. What does she want? I expect her to make a move in many places: in Egypt, in the Mediterranean, and in the East. Remember the French expedition to Ancona [in 1832]? Why could they not undertake the same in Crete or Smyrna? And
if they did wouldn’t the English mobilize their fleet? And so in these territories there would be the Russian and the Austrian armies, and all the ships of the English fleet. A major conflagration would become unavoidable.

  The Tsar argued that the time had come for the European powers, led by Russia and Britain, to step in and manage a partition of the Turkish territories to avoid a chaotic scramble over their division, possibly involving national revolutions and a Continental war, when the Sultan’s empire finally collapsed. He impressed on Peel and Aberdeen his firm conviction that the Ottoman Empire would soon cave in and that Russia and Britain should act together to plan for that eventuality, if only to prevent the French from taking over Egypt and the eastern Mediterannean, a concern uppermost in British thinking at that time. As Nicholas told Peel,

  I do not claim one inch of Turkish soil, but neither will I allow that any other, especially the French, shall have an inch of it … . We cannot now stipulate as to what shall be done with Turkey when she is dead. Such stipulations would only hasten her death. I shall therefore do all in my power to maintain the status quo. But we should keep the possible and eventual case of her collapse honestly and reasonably before our eyes. We ought to deliberate reasonably, and endeavour to come to a straightforward and honest understanding on the subject.11

  Peel and Aberdeen were ready to agree on the need to plan ahead for the possible partition of the Ottoman Empire, but only when that need arose, and they did not see that yet. A secret memorandum containing the conclusions of the conversations was drafted by Brunov and agreed (though not signed) by Nicholas and Aberdeen.