by A. N. Wilson
When Affie discovered that this idea was being proposed in the highest diplomatic circles, he was understandably horrified. The news of the scheme reached him when he was serving on board the perhaps appropriately named ironclad HMS Sultan. ‘I would sooner end the remainder of my days in China to such a fearful prospect,’49 he said. (He knew whereof he spoke, having visited China ten years before.) It was not to be Affie’s last direct involvement in the Eastern Question, since HMS Sultan was in Mediterranean waters, and, as the international crisis warmed to boiling point, the steam-propelled warship was in the Dardanelles.
For the Russians, the crisis was an occasion ‘to awaken Europe to its duty as a Christian Power’.50 For Victoria and Disraeli, it was a cynical piece of power politics. She even suspected the Russians of having ‘instigated the insurrection in the Balkans’. From now onwards, the Queen’s obsession with the matter became so intense that she wrote to Disraeli about it every day, and at high points of crisis, she telegraphed him every hour.
By May, Muslim–Christian conflict had spread way beyond the bounds of Serbia. The French and the German Consuls were murdered by Muslim mobs in Salonika. The Powers, in a draft known as the Berlin Memorandum, insisted that the sultan make peace with the Christian rebels. On 30 May, Sultan Abdul Aziz was deposed in Constantinople and committed suicide with a pair of scissors. He was succeeded by Sultan Murad V, who was himself deposed three months later, and also committed suicide. Abdul Hamid II took power, and was to rule for the next thirty-three years.
By July, Serbia had declared war on Turkey, and Russian troops joined forces with the Serbs, even though Russia was not officially (yet) at war with Turkey. Queen Victoria had formed the impression from Alice that Affie now had the ear of the Russian Royal Family. After all, the Tsarina was a German, of the House of Hesse-Darmstadt, and perhaps the Russians could be persuaded to make peace? For the Tsarina’s part, nothing could have been further from the truth. German by both parents she may have been. In this conflict, however, she was wholly Russian. She found the English attitude puzzling, and in this she was not alone, either at the time or in the eyes of history. The Tsar himself asked Affie to intervene with Queen Victoria to tone down her anti-Russian utterances.51
Among historians, the verdict is still out as to why Disraeli rejected the Berlin Memorandum for peace. On the contrary, he ordered the British Fleet to Besika Bay. But on 9–10 June he made a secret attempt, via Ambassador Shuvalov in London, for a peace accord with Russia. The Queen was in Balmoral at the time, and it is not clear from the existing, published correspondence between them whether Disraeli kept her fully abreast of his conversations with Shuvalov. Victoria’s very undiplomatic contribution was to ask Affie to tell the Tsar Alexander ‘how hated’ was Ignatiev, the Russian Ambassador in Constantinople. Alexander, with the height of diplomatic courtesy, asked his brother-in-law Louis of Hesse to tell Victoria how he rejoiced to know that she clung to peace.52 The situation was now highly critical. No one in Britain wanted a repetition of the Crimean War fiasco, but there was the gravest danger that if the Queen’s policy were followed to its conclusion, hostilities could break out between the Russian and the British fleets. Hence, Disraeli’s cautious stepping back from the brink in his conversations with Shuvalov. As Bismarck shrewdly remarked at the time, ‘mistakes on the part of the Great Powers do not bring their own retribution immediately . . . but they never go unpunished’.53
Events were anyway taken out of the hands of the diplomatists. In May and June 1876, while the Great Powers were deliberating about Serbia, about Constantinople, and about the general future of the Ottoman Empire, Bulgarian Christians had decided to imitate their Serbian co-religionists and rise against the Turks. Turkish irregulars, known as Bashi-Bazouks, moved into their villages and began to massacre Christian men, women and children.
The atrocities were to have wide-ranging consequences, and not just in Bulgaria. As far as British foreign policy was concerned, the Queen and Disraeli now appeared to be on the side of a decayed, moribund, corrupt Islamic regime against Christians struggling for their religious and national freedoms. Before the Bulgarian atrocities, the cynical attempt to curb Russian power, by cautiously propping up the sultans, might have looked like hard-nosed realism. After the outrages, it was a position much harder to sustain. The more Turcophobic ministers in Disraeli’s own Cabinet – figures such as Lord Carnarvon or Lord Salisbury, and indeed the Foreign Secretary himself, Lord Derby – were all very uneasy about the Government’s position. But their unease was as nothing to the public outcry against the Bulgarian Horrors, which first came to light in July in articles in the Liberal paper the Daily News. Disraeli badly misjudged the impact of these articles, even making the catastrophic mistake of attempting a joke in the House of Commons. True, he admitted, the Bulgarians had been subject to ‘proceedings of an atrocious character’, but he denied the allegation that they had been tortured. ‘Oriental people seldom resort to torture but generally terminate their connexion with culprits in a more expeditious manner.’54
He had completely misread the mood of the country, and of Parliament. He had also misread his greatest political opponent, W. E. Gladstone. By this stage of things, Gladstone had resigned the leadership of the Liberal Party, and was not much seen in the House of Commons. He was hard at work on his third book about Homer – Homeric Synchronism – and at sixty-seven years old, he appeared to offer no particular threat to Disraeli. It was surely safe, then, for the Prime Minister to accept a peerage from his monarch and to sit in the House of Lords as Lord Beaconsfield, since there was no danger of Gladstone arising on the back benches of the Commons to make life difficult for the Government.
Disraeli could not possibly have guessed, as he made his very ill-judged remark, that Gladstone was lying in bed with lumbago and dashing off, in a fervid three days, a pamphlet which was one of the most celebrated and inflammatory pieces of political writing ever circulated in Britain. By 6 September, Disraeli had been sent an advance copy of the work which would eventually seal his fate, and make Gladstone a popular hero: The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East.
‘The Queen understands Lord Beaconsfield’s motive for not expressing “horror” at the “Bulgarian atrocities”.’ But she gently tried to warn him that ‘a word of sympathy, if an occasion offered’55 might not come amiss. Beaconsfield, as we shall now call him, was not simply unwilling to ‘emote’ for the sake of impressing readers of the Daily News. He saw no reason to change his broadly anti-Russian foreign policy.
As far as British politics was concerned, however, an extraordinary hurricane was blowing. In one week 40,000 copies of Gladstone’s pamphlet had been sold, and by the end of the month, 200,000. The mad clergyman of Hawarden Castle and the wily Westminster politician had once seemed like two persons. Now they coalesced at last into the People’s William. He had made politics a secular version of those Nonconformist chapels to which so many Liberal supporters were attached. Politics was a mission, and the politics of the left in Britain, for as long as its heyday lasted, never lost this quality.
There was now an absolute political division, which would be played out in epic scale for the rest of Gladstone’s life. From now onwards, he was to stand for ideas and values, almost regardless of whether they had any hope of success. The electorate could choose between a man who had taken upon himself the mantle of the prophets versus political expediency. Those who espoused the Conservative side of the argument – whether it was about the Eastern Question, or the Irish Question, or affairs at home – had to play a delicate balancing trick. On the one hand, for Beaconsfield, as for Salisbury his successor, politics was very largely a matter of what is practical. To that extent, they seemed like cynics, even if, in religious matters, Salisbury and Gladstone were so close. But on the other hand, the Tories themselves would be anxious to demonstrate that the left in politics did not have the monopoly of ideals.
The soaring
rhetoric of Gladstone’s pamphlet was deliberately rabble-rousing. Beaconsfield and, later, Salisbury had to rouse their own rabbles. They would do so by the means of cloaking themselves in the flag and supporting the monarchy. From now onwards, it would be clear that when they spoke of the monarch being ‘above politics’, they meant she was above Liberal politics. In all central respects, Victoria was a Tory populist and she was happy to allow herself to be used as the figurehead for popular Toryism. The resurrection of Gladstone was for her a nightmare. Any liberalism, whether formal Liberalism with a capital ‘L’ or mere sympathy with liberal points of view, was from now onwards openly suspect for Victoria. ‘We must and will take some marked line to show that Russia is not to have all her own way,’ she wrote to Vicky in spring 1877, ‘which thanks to the most unfortunate and ill-judged agitation of last autumn’ – the Bulgarian pamphlet and its aftermath – ‘has led Russia on to think she may do anything, and they are the cause of what is happening now!’ The Russians had declared war on Turkey on 24 April. This was all Gladstone’s fault. ‘You never answer when I tell you this,’ the Queen went on, ‘as if you thought the Liberals and that madman Gladstone must be right and the Government wrong!’56
The Russo-Turkish War lasted less than a year. It excited in Queen Victoria the strongest emotions. While Russia and Turkey fought it out, the Great Powers, including Britain, stood back. When the Prime Minister, eagerly encouraged by the Queen, moved the British Fleet closer to the scene of conflict, Lord Derby resigned as Foreign Secretary, to be replaced by Lord Salisbury. In addition, Lord Carnarvon resigned as Colonial Secretary. A High Churchman, he deplored the notion that Britain should side with a Muslim country, Turkey, against the Christian Russia and he said that Britain should not sanction a repetition of the Crimean War. The Queen, in accepting the resignation, ‘regrets he should persist in views which she must consider so detrimental to the interests of the Country and Sovereign’. She further pointed out to Lord Carnarvon that the Prime Minister was performing the ‘arduous task of maintaining the honour and interests of this country as well as the balance of power in Europe which is so seriously endangered by Russia’s duplicity and aggressive policy’.57 The Foreign Secretary cautiously warned the Queen of the ‘evident and scarcely disguised wish of Prince Bismarck to push England into a quarrel with Russia’.58 Vicky, writing from Berlin, thought Bismarck blatantly pro-Russian. ‘How I do long for one good roar of the British lion from the housetops and for the thunder of a British broadside!’59 she wrote, sentiments which her mother heartily echoed. How much things had changed since Prince Albert’s support for the anxious Aberdeen, and the royal contempt for Palmerston’s gunboat diplomacy. Affie, by contrast, told the German Ambassador to the Sublime Porte that he feared his mother would ‘drive the country [Britain] into war by a false view of what constituted British interests’.60 The closest the British came to war was when they warned the Russians that their entry into Constantinople would be a casus belli. Affie waited anxiously on board HMS Sultan in the Dardanelles to see whether he would be required to open fire on ships obedient to his father-in-law.
At first the war went well for the Russians. Their troops crossed the Danube. Sandro, son of Alexander of Hesse-Darmstadt, was the only German officer who was permitted by his emperor to join the Russians, by virtue of his being the nephew of the Tsarina. This lieutenant in the Hessian Dragoons took part in the siege of Trnova and concluded that ‘the country is simply magnificent but the Bulgars are just as fiendish as the Turks . . . We live among blood and corpses and see such horrible things that all our officers are disgusted with war and would much rather go home again.’61 After their initial successes, however, the Russians found themselves confronted by the brilliant Turkish General, Osman Pasha, who defeated the Russian advance into the Balkans, cut them off on three sides and inflicted very heavy casualties in a number of decisive battles. By the end of the year, the Tsar was proposing peace at San Stefano, on the shores of the Sea of Marmara. His terms for peace included the request for an independent Bulgaria, with his nephew by marriage, Sandro, as the head of the new country; he also wanted the reintegration into Russia of Bessarabia, lost after the Crimean War.
There was no certainty that these peace proposals by Russia would be acceptable, either to Turkey, or to the other Great Powers. ‘We are in an awkward position just now,’ said Ponsonby, now a lieutenant general, ‘with our fleet at the entrance to the Dardanelles, sniffing like a dog for fear he may find a badger instead of a rabbit inside’.62
The fleet then moved further up the coast, and entered the Sea of Marmara. Docked at one of the Prince’s Islands, a mile or so out to sea from Constantinople, Affie entertained Sandro to luncheon on board the Sultan. It is true that Sandro had fought for Russia, but Britain was not actually at war with Russia, and he was family. His uncle was married to Affie’s favourite sister Alice.
When she heard about this family luncheon, Queen Victoria was ‘beside herself with rage’. Affie had been entertaining ‘a Russian spy’. She was ‘furious’ with him for his ‘anti-natural’ behaviour. Although the Russian Royal Family absorbed the explosion, dismissing the Queen’s outburst as that of a ‘crazy old hag’, it was a bruising rebuke, even for one who was used to Victoria’s rants. HMS Sultan found itself being transferred to the Channel fleet.63
In fact, if anyone was the ‘Russian spy’ in the family, it was not Sandro, but Affie himself, who showed his mother’s letters to his wife, who in turn passed them on to her mother and father. ‘The insulting things the Queen says in her letters to Alfred,’ confided the Tsarina, ‘about the Tsar and the Russian people are worthy of a fish-wife. Added to this is her grief that “our dear Marie” should belong to a nation from whose vocabulary the words truth, justice and humanity are lacking. Silly old fool.’64
The Treaty of San Stefano, which had been engineered by Ambassador Ignatiev, was not approved internationally. Lord Derby, who had resigned as Foreign Secretary in April 1878, was replaced by Lord Salisbury. It was clear that Britain, having been excluded from earlier international conversations, would insist upon playing a role at the Congress of Berlin which was summoned to decide, narrowly, the outcome of the war and, more broadly, some future answers to the Eastern Question.
Beaconsfield was by now a wheezy old man, his sad eyes like those of a hooded hawk, and seriously ill for much of the Congress. His doctor was just able to get his patient upright in order to attend the formal ratification of the Treaty. Nevertheless, Beaconsfield’s contribution to the Congress was generally considered masterly,65 and he brought home some prizes which cheered the Queen’s heart. The Russian demand for an independent Bulgaria was curtailed. The young Alexander of Hesse-Darmstadt, Sandro, became the ad hoc ruler of Bulgaria, of the people he had initially supposed as ‘fiendish as the Turks’. It might have been supposed that Queen Victoria would have viewed this promotion – of a man she had so recently believed to be a ‘Russian spy’ – with dismay. But when Sandro went to London, he found the Queen to be friendly. She was almost roguish in the way she ribbed him about being too Russian. It transpired that John Brown approved of the independence of Bulgaria, a rocky, mountainous, stubborn nation which he believed to have spiritual kinship with Aberdeenshire. Guided by the great expertise of Brown in Balkan affairs, she was able to assure her new Foreign Secretary, ‘The Queen is convinced that Prince Alexander has no Russian proclivities and only asks to be left alone. But if he is worried from Constantinople, he will seek refuge in the support of St Petersburg.’66 ‘It appears that Brown has deigned to approve of the new Bulgaria,’ wrote the Tsarina. ‘I should have liked to see the two boys [Sandro and his brother Louis of Battenberg – the nephews of Alice’s husband Louis] while they were in her toils.’67 The Russians got Bessarabia. Britain took control of Cyprus, an ‘insane covenant’ in Gladstone’s view. It added to British security in the Mediterranean, but taking over an island as violently divided as Cyprus would perhap
s prove, in the long run, to be confirmation of the Bismarck rule that ‘mistakes on the part of great powers . . . never go unpunished’. As far as the Queen was concerned, Beaconsfield came back from Berlin covered in glory. ‘High and low are delighted, excepting Mr Gladstone who is frantic.’68
News of the Armistice between Turkey and Russia and developments from Berlin reached the Queen by telegram. While such intelligence was being received, however, she was an early witness to an invention which would make telegrams a secondary, if not redundant, means of communicating. ‘After dinner,’ she told her journal on 14 January 1878, ‘we went to the Council Room & saw the Telephone. A Professor Bell explained the whole process, which is most extraordinary. It had been put in communication with Osborne Cottage, & we talked with Sir Thomas & Mary Biddulph, also heard some singing quite plainly. But it is rather faint, & one must hold the tube close to one’s ear.’ The nervous inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, did not impress her, however. ‘The man, who was very pompous, kept calling Arthur Lord Connaught! [her son the Duke of Connaught] which amused us very much.’ A telephone line from Cowes to the post room at Osborne was installed in 1885.
NINETEEN
‘PROSTRATE THOUGH DEVOTED’
ALAS, THE QUEEN’S happiness about the Congress of Berlin was soon to be overshadowed by personal tragedy. No year passed without a great catalogue of deaths, very many of which either fascinated or moved the Queen, sometimes both. She was obsessed not merely by death itself, but, as Lady Ely, now her favourite lady-in-waiting, shrewdly noticed, ‘She likes every detail.’1
Nothing she had hitherto said or written suggested much sympathy for the Roman Pontiff. Yet when Pius IX died in February, she fired off a telegram to Sir Augustus Paget, the British Ambassador in Rome: ‘HAVE JUST HEARD BY REUTER OF THE POOR OLD POPE’S DEATH ANXIOUS TO HEAR SOME PARTICULARS AND IF ALL IS QUIET. THE QUEEN.’
