The Life Of
William Ewart Gladstone
By
John Morley
In Three Volumes—Vol. II.
(1859-1880)
Toronto
George N. Morang & Company, Limited
Copyright, 1903
By The Macmillan Company
CONTENTS
Book V. 1859-1868
Chapter I. The Italian Revolution. (1859-1860)
Chapter II. The Great Budget. (1860-1861)
Chapter III. Battle For Economy. (1860-1862)
Chapter IV. The Spirit Of Gladstonian Finance. (1859-1866)
Chapter V. American Civil War. (1861-1863)
Chapter VI. Death Of Friends—Days At Balmoral. (1861-1884)
Chapter VII. Garibaldi—Denmark. (1864)
Chapter VIII. Advance In Public Position And Otherwise. (1864)
Chapter IX. Defeat At Oxford—Death Of Lord Palmerston—Parliamentary
Leadership. (1865)
Chapter X. Matters Ecclesiastical. (1864-1868)
Chapter XI. Popular Estimates. (1868)
Chapter XII. Letters. (1859-1868)
Chapter XIII. Reform. (1866)
Chapter XIV. The Struggle For Household Suffrage. (1867)
Chapter XV. Opening Of The Irish Campaign. (1868)
Chapter XVI. Prime Minister. (1868)
Book VI. 1869-1874
Chapter I. Religious Equality. (1869)
Chapter II. First Chapter Of An Agrarian Revolution. (1870)
Chapter III. Education—The Career And The Talents. (1870)
Chapter IV. The Franco-German War. (1870)
Chapter V. Neutrality And Annexation. (1870)
Chapter VI. The Black Sea. (1870-1871)
Chapter VII. “Day’s Work Of A Giant”. (1870-1872)
Chapter VIII. Autumn Of 1871. Decline Of Popularity. (1871-1872)
Chapter IX. Washington And Geneva. (1870-1872)
Chapter X. As Head Of A Cabinet. (1868-1874)
Chapter XI. Catholic Country And Protestant Parliament. (1873)
Chapter XII. The Crisis. (1873)
Chapter XIII. Last Days Of The Ministry. (1873)
Chapter XIV. The Dissolution. (1874)
Book VII. 1874-1880
Chapter I. Retirement From Leadership. (1874-1875)
Chapter II. Vaticanism. (1874-1875)
Chapter III. The Octagon.
Chapter IV. Eastern Question Once More. (1876-1877)
Chapter V. A Tumultuous Year. (1878)
Chapter VI. Midlothian. (1879)
Chapter VII. The Eve Of The Battle. (1879)
Chapter VIII. The Fall Of Lord Beaconsfield. (1880)
Chapter IX. The Second Ministry. (1880)
Appendix
Footnotes
[Frontispiece: Portrait of Gladstone.]
William Ewart Gladstone; from a painting by Sir J. E. Millais, P.R.A, in
the National Gallery.
BOOK V. 1859-1868
Chapter I. The Italian Revolution. (1859-1860)
Rarely, if ever, in the course of our history has there been such
a mixture of high considerations, legislative, military,
commercial, foreign, and constitutional, each for the most part
traversing the rest, and all capable of exercising a vital
influence on public policy, as in the long and complicated session
of 1860. The commercial treaty first struck the keynote of the
year; and the most deeply marked and peculiar feature of the year
was the silent conflict between the motives and provisions of the
treaty on the one hand, and the excitement and exasperation of
military sentiment on the other.—GLADSTONE.(1)
This description extends in truth much beyond the session of a given year
to the whole existence of the new cabinet, and through a highly important
period in Mr. Gladstone’s career. More than that, it directly links our
biographic story to a series of events that created kingdoms, awoke
nations, and re-made the map of Europe. The opening of this long and
complex episode was the Italian revolution. Writing to Sir John Acton in
1864 Mr. Gladstone said to him of the budget of 1860, “When viewed as a
whole, it is one of the few cases in which my fortunes as an individual
have been closely associated with matters of a public and even an historic
interest.” I will venture to recall in outline to the reader’s memory the
ampler background of this striking epoch in Mr. Gladstone’s public life.
The old principles of the European state-system, and the old principles
that inspired the vast contentions of ages, lingered but they seemed to
have grown decrepit. Divine right of kings, providential pre-eminence of
dynasties, balance of power, sovereign independence of the papacy,—these
and the other accredited catchwords of history were giving place to the
vague, indefinable, shifting, but most potent and inspiring doctrine of
Nationality. On no statesman of this time did that fiery doctrine with all
its tributaries gain more commanding hold than on Mr. Gladstone. “Of the
various and important incidents,” he writes in a memorandum, dated
Braemar, July 16, 1892, “which associated me almost unawares with foreign
affairs in Greece (1850), in the Neapolitan kingdom (1851), and in the
Balkan peninsula and the Turkish empire (1853), I will only say that they
all contributed to forward the action of those home causes more continuous
in their operation, which, without in any way effacing my old sense of
reverence for the past, determined for me my place in the present and my
direction towards the future.”
I
(M1) At the opening of the seventh decade of the century—ten years of such
moment for our western world—the relations of the European states with one
another had fallen into chaos. The perilous distractions of 1859-62 were
the prelude to conflicts that after strange and mighty events at Sadowa,
Venice, Rome, Sedan, Versailles, came to their close in 1871. The first
breach in the ramparts of European order set up by the kings after
Waterloo, was the independence of Greece in 1829. Then followed the
transformation of the power of the Turk over Roumanians and Serbs from
despotism to suzerainty. In 1830 Paris overthrew monarchy by divine right;
Belgium cut herself asunder from the supremacy of the Dutch; then Italians
and Poles strove hard but in vain to shake off the yoke of Austria and of
Russia. In 1848 revolts of race against alien dominion broke out afresh in
Italy and Hungary. The rise of the French empire, bringing with it the
principle or idiosyncrasy of its new ruler, carried this movement of race
into its full ascendant. Treaties were confronted by the doctrine of
Nationality. What called itself Order quaked before something that for
lack of a better name was called the Revolution. Reason of State was
eclipsed by the Rights of Peoples. Such was the spirit of the new time.
The end of the Crimean war and the peace of Paris brought a temporary and
superficial repose. The French ruler, by strange irony at once the sabre
of Revolution and the trumpet of Order, made a beginning in urging the
constitution of a Roumanian nationality, by uniting the two Danubian
principalities in a single quasi-independent state. This was obviously a
further step towards that partition of Turkey which the Crimean war had
been waged to prevent. Austria for reasons of her own objected, and
England, still in her Turcophil humour, went with Austria against France
for keeping the two provinces, although in fiscal and military union,
politically divided. According to the fashion of that time—called a comedy
by some, a homage to the democratic evangel by others—a popular vote was
taken. Its result was ingeniously falsified by the sultan (whose ability
to speak French was one of the odd reasons why Lord Palmerston was
sanguine about Turkish civilisation); western diplomacy insisted that the
question of union should be put afresh. Mr. Gladstone, not then in office,
wrote to Lord Aberdeen (Sept. 10, 1857):—
The course taken about the Principalities has grieved me. I do not
mean so much this or that measure, as the principle on which it is
to rest. I thought we made war in order to keep Russia out, and
then suffer life, if it would, to take the place of death. But it
now seems to be all but avowed, that the fear of danger, not to
Europe, but to Islam,—and Islam not from Russia, but from the
Christians of Turkey,—is to be a ground for stinting their
liberties.
In 1858 (May 4) he urged the Derby government to support the declared wish
of the people of Wallachia and Moldavia, and to fulfil the pledges made at
Paris in 1856. “Surely the best resistance to be offered to Russia,” he
said, “is by the strength and freedom of those countries that will have to
resist her. You want to place a living barrier between Russia and Turkey.
_There is no barrier like the breast of freemen._” The union of the
Principalities would raise up antagonists to the ambitions of Russia more
powerful than any that could be bought with money. The motion was
supported by Lord John Russell and Lord Robert Cecil, but Disraeli and
Palmerston joined in opposing it, and it was rejected by a large majority.
Mr. Gladstone wrote in his diary: “May 4.—H. of C.—Made my motion on the
Principalities. Lost by 292:114; and with it goes another broken promise
to a people.” So soon did the illusions and deceptions of the Crimean war
creep forth.
In no long time (1858) Roumania was created into a virtually independent
state. Meanwhile, much against Napoleon’s wish and policy, these
proceedings chilled the alliance between France and England. Other powers
grew more and more uneasy, turning restlessly from side to side, like sick
men on their beds. The object of Russia ever since the peace had been,
first to break down the intimacy between England and France, by flattering
the ambition and enthusiasm of the French Emperor; next to wreak her
vengeance on Austria for offences during the Crimean war, still pronounced
unpardonable. Austria, in turn, was far too slow for a moving age; she
entrenched herself behind forms with too little heed to substance; and
neighbours mistook her dulness for dishonesty. For the diplomatic air was
thick and dark with suspicion. The rivalry of France and Austria in Italy
was the oldest of European stories, and for that matter the
Lombardo-Venetian province was a possession of material value to Austria,
for while only containing one-eighth of her population, it contributed
one-fourth of her revenue.
(M2) The central figure upon the European stage throughout the time on
which we are now about to enter was the ruler of France. The Crimean war
appeared to have strengthened his dynasty at home, while faith in the
depth of his political designs and in the grandeur of his military power
had secured him predominance abroad. Europe hung upon his words; a
sentence to an ambassador at a public audience on new year’s day, a
paragraph in a speech at the opening of his parliament of puppets, a
pamphlet supposed to be inspired, was enough to shake Vienna, Turin,
London, the Vatican, with emotions pitched in every key. Yet the mind of
this imposing and mysterious potentate was the shadowy home of vagrant
ideals and fugitive chimeras. It was said by one who knew him well,
_Scratch the emperor and you will find the political refugee_. You will
find, that is to say, the man of fluctuating hope without firm calculation
of fact, the man of half-shaped end with no sure eye to means. The sphinx
in our modern politics is usually something of a charlatan, and in time
the spite of fortune brought this mock Napoleon into fatal conflict with
the supple, positive, practical genius of Italy in the person of one of
the hardiest representatives of this genius that Italy ever had; just as
ten years later the same nemesis brought him into collision with the
stern, rough genius of the north in the person of Count Bismarck.
Meanwhile the sovereigns of central and northern Europe had interviews at
Stuttgart, at Teplitz, at Warsaw. It was at Warsaw that the rulers of
Austria and Prussia met the Czar at the end of 1860,—Poland quivering as
she saw the three crowned pirates choose the capital city of their victim
for a rendezvous. Russia declined to join what would have been a coalition
against France, and the pope described the conference of Warsaw as three
sovereigns assembling to hear one of them communicate to the other two the
orders of the Emperor of the French. The French empire was at its zenith.
Thiers said that the greatest compensation to a Frenchman for being
nothing in his own country, was the sight of that country filling its
right place in the world.
The reader will remember that at Turin on his way home from the Ionian
Islands in the spring of 1859, Mr. Gladstone saw the statesman who was
destined to make Italy. Sir James Hudson, our ambassador at the court of
Piedmont, had sounded Cavour as to his disposition to receive the
returning traveller. Cavour replied, “I hope you will do all you can to
bring such a proceeding about. I set the highest value on the visit of a
statesman so distinguished and such a friend of Italy as Mr. Gladstone.”
In conveying this message to Mr. Gladstone (Feb. 7, 1859), Hudson adds, “I
can only say I think your counsels may be very useful to this government,
and that I look to your coming here as a means possibly of composing
differences, which may, if not handled by some such calm unprejudiced
statesman as yourself, lead to very serious disturbances in the European
body politic.” Mr. Gladstone dined at Cavour’s table at the foreign
office, where, among other things, he had the satisfaction of hearing his
host speak of Hudson as _quel uomo italianissimo_. Ministers, the
president of the chamber, and other distinguished persons were present,
and Cavour was well pleased to have the chance of freely opening his
position and policy to “one of the sincerest and most important friends
that Italy had.”(2)
Among Cavour’s difficulties at this most critical moment was the attitude
of England. The government of Lord Derby, true to the Austrian sympathies
of his party, and the German sympathies of the court, accused Italy of
endangering the peace of Europe. “No,” said Cavour, “it is the statesmen,
the diplomatists, the writers of England, who are responsible for the
troubled situation of Italy; for is it not they who have worked for years
to kindle political passion in our peninsula, and is it not England that
has encouraged Sardinia to oppose the propaganda of moral influences to
the illegitimate predominance of Austria in Italy?” To Mr. Gladstone, who
had seen the Austrian forces in Venetia and in Lombardy, he said, “You
behold for yourself, that it is Austria who menaces us; here we are
tranquil; the country is calm; we will do our duty; England is wrong in
identifying peace with the continuance of Austrian domination.” Two or
three days later the Piedmontese minister made one of those momentous
visits to Paris that forced a will less steadfast than his own.
The French Emperor in his dealings with Cavour had entangled himself, in
Mr. Gladstone’s phrase, with “a stronger and better informed intellect
than his own.” “Two men,” said Guizot, “at this moment divide the
attention of Europe, the Emperor Napoleon and Count Cavour. The match has
begun. I back Count Cavour.” The game was long and subtly played. It was
difficult for the ruler who had risen to power by bloodstained usurpation
and the perfidious ruin of a constitution, to keep in step with a
statesman, the inspiring purpose of whose life was the deliverance of his
country by the magic of freedom. Yet Napoleon was an organ of European
revolution in a double sense. He proclaimed the doctrine of nationality,
and paid decorous homage to the principle of appeal to the popular voice.
In time England appeared upon the scene, and by his flexible management of
the two western powers, England and France, Cavour executed the most
striking political transformation in the history of contemporary Europe.
It brought, however, as Mr. Gladstone speedily found, much trouble into
the relations of the two western powers with one another.
The overthrow of the Derby government and the accession of the whigs
exactly coincided in time with the struggle between Austria and the
Franco-Sardinian allies on the bloody fields of Magenta and Solferino. A
few days after Mr. Gladstone took office, the French and Austrian emperors
and King Victor Emmanuel signed those preliminaries of Villafranca (July
11, 1859), which summarily ended an inconclusive war by the union of
Lombardy to the Piedmontese kingdom, and the proposed erection of an
Italian federation over which it was hoped that the pope might preside,
and of which Venetia, still remaining Austrian, should be a member. The
scheme was intrinsically futile, but it served its turn. The Emperor of
the French was driven to peace by mixed motives. The carnage of Solferino
appalled or unnerved him; he had revealed to his soldiers and to France
that their ruler had none of the genius of a great commander; the clerical
party at home fiercely assailed the prolongation of a war that must put
the pope in peril; the case of Poland, the case of Hungary, might almost
any day be kindled into general conflagration by the freshly lighted torch
of Nationality; above all, Germany might stride forward to the Rhine to
avenge the repulse of Austria on the Po and the Mincio.(3)
Whatever the motive, Villafranca was a rude check to Italian aspirations.
Cavour in poignant rage peremptorily quitted office, rather than share
responsibility for this abortive end of all the astute and deep-laid
combinations for ten years past, that had brought the hated Austrian from
the triumph of Novara down to the defeat of Solferino. Before many months
he once more grasped the helm. In the interval the movement went forward
as if all his political tact, his prudence, his suppleness, his patience,
and his daring, had passed into the whole population of central Italy. For
eight months after Villafranca, it seemed as if the deep and politic
temper that built up the old Roman Commonwealth, were again alive in
Bologna, Parma, Modena, Florence. When we think of the pitfalls that lay
on every side, how easily France might have been irritated or estranged,
what unseasonable questions might not unnaturally have been forced
forward, what mischief the voice and spirit of the demagogue might have
stirred up, there can surely be no more wonderful case in history of
strong and sagacious leaders, Cavour, Farini, Ricasoli, the Piedmontese
king, guiding a people through the ferments of revolt, with discipline,
energy, legality, order, self-control, to the achievement of a
constructive revolution. Without the sword of France the work could not
have been begun; but it was the people and statesmen of northern and
central Italy who in these eight months made the consummation possible.
And England, too, had no inconsiderable share; for it was she who secured
the principle of non-intervention by foreign powers in Italian affairs; it
was she who strongly favoured the annexation of central Italy to the new
kingdom in the north. Here it was that England directly and unconsciously
opened the way to a certain proceeding that when it came to pass she
passionately resented. In the first three weeks of March (1860) Victor
Emmanuel legalised in due form the annexation of the four central states
to Piedmont and Lombardy, and in the latter half of April he made his
entry into Florence. Cavour attended him, and strange as it sounds, he now
for the first time in his life beheld the famed city,—centre of undying
beauty and so many glories in the history of his country and the genius of
mankind. In one spot at least his musings might well have been
profound—the tomb of Machiavelli, the champion of principles three
centuries before, to guide that armed reformer, part fox part lion, who
should one day come to raise up an Italy one and independent. The
Florentine secretary’s orb never quite sets, and it was now rising to a
lurid ascendant in the politics of Europe for a long generation to come,
lighting up the unblest gospel that whatever policy may demand justice
will allow.(4)
(M3) On March 24 Cavour paid Napoleon a bitter price for his assent to
annexation, by acquiescing in the cession to France of Savoy and Nice,
provinces that were, one of them the cradle of the royal race, the other
the birthplace of Garibaldi, the hero of the people. In this transaction
the theory of the _plébiscite_, or direct popular vote upon a given
question, for the first time found a place among the clauses of a
diplomatic act. The _plébiscite_, though stigmatised as a hypocritical
farce, and often no better than a formal homage paid by violence or
intrigue to public right, was a derivative from the doctrines of
nationality and the sovereignty of the people then ruling in Europe. The
issue of the operation in Savoy and Nice was what had been anticipated.
Italy bore the stroke with wise fortitude, but England when she saw the
bargain closed for which she had herself prepared the way, took fierce
umbrage at the aggrandisement of France, and heavy clouds floated into the
European sky. As we have seen, the first act of the extraordinary drama
closed at Villafranca. The curtain fell next at Florence upon the fusion
of central with upper Italy. Piedmont, a secondary state, had now grown to
be a kingdom with eleven or twelve millions of inhabitants. Greater things
were yet to follow. Ten millions still remained in the south under the
yoke of Bourbons and the Vatican. The third act, most romantic, most
picturesque of all, an incomparable union of heroism with policy at double
play with all the shifts of circumstance, opened a few weeks later.
The great unsolved problem was the pope. The French ambassador at the
Vatican in those days chanced to have had diplomatic experience in Turkey.
He wrote to his government in Paris that the pope and his cardinals
reminded him of nothing so much as the sultan and his ulemas—the same
vacillation, the same shifty helplessness, the same stubborn
impenetrability. The Cross seemed in truth as grave a danger in one
quarter of Europe as was the Crescent in another, and the pope was now to
undergo the same course of territorial partition as had befallen the head
of a rival faith. For ten years the priests had been maintained in their
evilly abused authority by twenty thousand French bayonets—the bayonets of
the empire that the cardinals with undisguised ingratitude distrusted and
hated.(5) The Emperor was eager to withdraw his force, if only he were
sure that no catastrophe would result to outrage the catholic world and
bring down his own throne.
Unluckily for this design, Garibaldi interposed. One night in May (1860),
soon after the annexation to Piedmont of the four central states, the hero
whom an admirer described as “a summary of the lives of Plutarch,” sailed
forth from Genoa for the deliverance of the Sicilian insurgents. In the
eyes of Garibaldi and his Thousand, Sicily and Naples marked the path that
led to Rome. The share of Cavour as accomplice in the adventure is still
obscure. Whether he even really desired the acquisition of the Neapolitan
kingdom, or would have preferred, as indeed he attempted, a federation
between a northern kingdom and a southern, is not established. How far he
had made certain of the abstention of Louis Napoleon, how far he had
realised the weakness of Austria, we do not authentically know. He was at
least alive to all the risks to which Garibaldi’s enterprise must
instantly expose him in every quarter of the horizon—from Austria, deeming
her hold upon Venetia at stake; from the French Emperor, with hostile
clericals in France to face; from the whole army of catholics all over the
world; and not least from triumphant Mazzinians, his personal foes, in
whose inspirations he had no faith, whose success might easily roll him
and his policy into mire and ruin. Now as always with consummate
suppleness he confronted the necessities of a situation that he had not
sought, and assuredly had neither invented nor hurried. The politician, he
used to tell his friends, must above all things have the tact of the
Possible. Well did Manzoni say of him, “Cavour has all the prudence and
all the imprudence of the true statesman.” Stained and turbid are the
whirlpools of revolution. Yet the case of Italy was overwhelming. Sir
James Hudson wrote to Mr. Gladstone from Turin (April 3, 1859)—“Piedmont
cannot separate the question of national independence from the accidental
existence of constitutional liberty (in Piedmont) if she would.
Misgovernment in central Italy, heavy taxation and dearth in Lombardy,
misgovernment in Modena, vacillation in Tuscany, cruelty in Naples,
constitute the famous _grido di dolore_. The congress of Paris wedded
Piedmont to the redress of grievances.”
(M4) In August (1860) Garibaldi crossed from Sicily to the mainland and
speedily made his triumphant entry into Naples. The young king Francis
withdrew before him at the head of a small force of faithful adherents to
Capua, afterwards to Gaeta. At the Volturno the Garibaldians, meeting a
vigorous resistance, drove back a force of the royal troops enormously
superior in numbers. On the height of this agitated tide, and just in time
to forestall a fatal movement of Garibaldi upon Rome, the Sardinian army
had entered the territories of the pope (September 11).
II
In the series of transactions that I have sketched, the sympathies of Mr.
Gladstone never wavered. From the appearance of his Neapolitan letters in
1851, he lost no opportunity of calling attention to Italian affairs. In
1854 he brought before Lord Clarendon the miserable condition of Poerio,
Settembrini, and the rest. He took great personal trouble in helping to
raise and invest a fund for the Settembrini family, and elaborate accounts
in his own handwriting remain. In 1855 he wrote to Lord John Russell, then
starting for Vienna, as to a rumour of the adhesion of Naples to the
alliance of the western powers: “In any case I can conceive it possible
that the Vienna conferences may touch upon Italian questions; and I
sincerely rely upon your humanity as well as your love of freedom, indeed
the latter is but little in question, to plead for the prisoners in the
kingdom of the two Sicilies detained for political offences, real or
pretended. I do not ask you to leave any greater duty undone, but to bear
in mind the singular claims on your commiseration of these most unhappy
persons, if occasion offers.”
As we have already seen, it was long before he advanced to the view of the
thoroughgoing school. Like nearly all his countrymen, he was at first a
reformer, not a revolutionary. To the Marquis Dragonetti, Mr. Gladstone
wrote from Broadstairs in 1854:—
Naples has a government as bad as anarchy; Rome unites the evils
of the worst government and the most entire anarchy. In those
countries I can hardly imagine any change that would not be for
the better. But in the wild opinions of some of your political
sectaries, I see the best and most available defence of the
existing system with its hideous mischiefs. Almost every Italian
who heartily desires the removal from Italy and from the face of
the earth of the immeasurable evils which your country now suffers
through some of its governments, adopts Italian union and national
independence for his watchwords.... Do not think it presumption,
for it is the mere description of a fact, if I say, we in England
cannot bring our minds to this mode of looking at the Italian
question. All our habits, all our instincts, all our history lead
us in another direction. In our view this is not building from the
bottom upwards, but from the top downwards.... All our experience
has been to the effect that the champion of liberty should take
his ground, not upon any remote or abstract proposition, but upon
the right of man, under every law divine and human, first to good
government, and next to the institutions which are the necessary
guarantees of it.... We sympathise strongly, I believe, with the
victims of misgovernment, but the English mind is not shocked _in
limine_ at the notion of people belonging to one race and
language, yet politically incorporated or associated with another;
and of Italian unity, I think the language of this nation would
be, We shall be glad if it proves to be feasible, but the
condition of it must be gradually matured by a course of
improvement in the several states, and by the political education
of the people; if it cannot be reached by these means, it hardly
will be by any others; and certainly not by opinions which closely
link Italian reconstruction with European disorganisation and
general war.
So far removed at this date was Mr. Gladstone from the glorified democracy
of the Mazzinian propaganda. He told Cobden that when he returned from
Corfu in the spring of 1859, he found in England not only a government
with strong Austrian leanings, but to his great disappointment not even
the House of Commons so alive as he could have wished upon the Italian
question. “It was in my opinion the authority and zeal of Lord Palmerston
and Lord John Russell in this question, that kindled the country.”
While Europe was anxiously watching the prospects of war between France
and Austria, Mr. Gladstone spoke in debate (April 18, 1859) upon the
situation, to express his firm conviction that no plan of peace could be
durable which failed to effect some mitigation of the sore evils
afflicting the Italian peninsula. The course of events after the peace
speedily ripened both his opinions and the sentiment of the country, and
he was as angry as his neighbours at the unexpected preliminaries of
Villafranca. “I little thought,” he wrote to Poerio (July 15, 1859), “to
have lived to see the day when the conclusion of a peace should in my own
mind cause disgust rather than impart relief. But that day has come. I
appreciate all the difficulties of the position both of the King of
Sardinia and of Count Cavour. It is hardly possible for me to pass a
judgment upon his resignation as a political step: but I think few will
doubt that the moral character of the act is high. The duties of England
in respect to the Italian question are limited by her powers, and these
are greatly confined. But her sentiments cannot change, because they are
founded upon a regard to the deepest among those principles which regulate
the intercourse of men and their formation into political societies.” By
the end of the year, he softened his judgment of the proceedings of the
French Emperor.
(M5) The heavy load of his other concerns did not absolve him in his
conscience from duty to the Italian cause:—
_Jan. 3, 1860._—I sat up till 2 A.M. with my letter to Ld. J.
Russell about Italy, and had an almost sleepless night for it.
4.—2-½ hours with the Prince Consort, _à deux reprises_, about the
Italian question, which was largely stated on both sides. I
thought he admitted so much as to leave him no standing ground.
5.—Went down to Pembroke Lodge and passed the evening with Lord
John and his family. Lord John and I had much conversation on
Italy.
In a cabinet memorandum (Jan. 3, 1860), he declared himself bound in
candour to admit that the Emperor had shown, “though partial and
inconsistent, indications of a genuine feeling for the Italians—and far
beyond this he has committed himself very considerably to the Italian
cause in the face of the world. When in reply to all that, we fling in his
face the truce of Villafranca, he may reply—and the answer is not without
force—that he stood single-handed in a cause when any moment Europe might
have stood combined against him. We gave him verbal sympathy and
encouragement, or at least criticism; no one else gave him anything at
all. No doubt he showed then that he had undertaken a work to which his
powers were unequal; but I do not think that, when fairly judged, he can
be said to have given proof by that measure of insincerity or
indifference.” This was no more than justice, it is even less; and both
Italians and Englishmen have perhaps been too ready to forget that the
freedom of Italy would have remained an empty hope if Napoleon iii. had
not unsheathed his sword.
(M6) After discussing details, Mr. Gladstone laid down in his memorandum a
general maxim for the times, that “the alliance with France is the true
basis of peace in Europe, for England and France never will unite in any
European purpose which is radically unjust.” He put the same view in a
letter to Lacaita a few months later (Sept. 16): “A close alliance between
England and France cannot be used for mischief, and cannot provoke any
dangerous counter combination; but a close alliance between England and
other powers would provoke a dangerous counter combination immediately,
besides that it could not in itself be trusted. My own leaning, therefore,
is not indeed to place reliance on the French Emperor, but to interpret
him candidly, and in Italian matters especially to recollect the great
difficulties in which he is placed, (1) because, whether by his own fault
or not, he cannot reckon upon strong support from England when he takes a
right course. (2) Because he has his own ultramontane party in France to
deal with, whom, especially if not well supported abroad, he cannot afford
to defy.”
As everybody soon saw, it was the relation of Louis Napoleon to the French
ultramontanes that constituted the tremendous hazard of the Piedmontese
invasion of the territories of the pope. This critical proceeding
committed Cavour to a startling change, and henceforth he was constrained
to advance to Italian unity. A storm of extreme violence broke upon him.
Gortchakoff said that if geography had permitted, the Czar would betake
himself to arms in defence of the Bourbon king. Prussia talked of reviving
the holy alliance in defence of the law of nations against the overweening
ambition of Piedmont. The French ambassador was recalled from Turin. Still
no active intervention followed.
One great power alone stood firm, and Lord John Russell wrote one of the
most famous despatches in the history of our diplomacy (October 27, 1860).
The governments of the pope and the king of the Two Sicilies, he said,
provided so ill for the welfare of their people, that their subjects
looked to their overthrow as a necessary preliminary to any improvement.
Her Majesty’s government were bound to admit that the Italians themselves
are the best judges of their own interests. Vattel, that eminent jurist,
had well said that when a people for good reasons take up arms against an
oppressor, it is but an act of justice and generosity to assist brave men
in the defence of their liberties. Did the people of Naples and the Roman
States take up arms against their government for good reasons? Upon this
grave matter, her Majesty’s government held that the people in question
are themselves the best judges of their own affairs. Her Majesty’s
government did not feel justified in declaring that the people of Southern
Italy had not good reasons for throwing off their allegiance to their
former governments. Her Majesty’s government, therefore, could not pretend
to blame the King of Sardinia for assisting them. So downright was the
language of Lord John. We cannot wonder that such words as these spread in
Italy like flame, that people copied the translation from each other,
weeping over it for joy and gratitude in their homes, and that it was
hailed as worth more than a force of a hundred thousand men.(6)
The sensation elsewhere was no less profound, though very different. The
three potentates at Warsaw viewed the despatch with an emotion that was
diplomatically called regret, but more resembled horror. The Prince Regent
of Prussia, afterwards the Emperor William, told Prince Albert that it was
a tough morsel, a disruption of the law of nations and of the holy ties
that bind peoples to their sovereigns.(7) Many in England were equally
shocked. Even Sir James Graham, for instance, said that he would never
have believed that such a document could have passed through a British
cabinet or received the approval of a British sovereign; India, Ireland,
Canada would await the application of the fatal doctrine that it
contained; it was a great public wrong, a grave error; and even Garibaldi
and Mazzini would come out of the Italian affair with cleaner hands. Yet
to-day we may ask ourselves, was it not a little idle to talk of the holy
ties that bind nations to their sovereigns, in respect of a system under
which in Naples thousands of the most respectable of the subjects of the
king were in prison or in exile; in the papal states ordinary justice was
administered by rough-handed German soldiers, and young offenders shot by
court-martial at the drumhead; and in the Lombardo-Venetian provinces
press offences were judged by martial law, with chains, shooting, and
flogging for punishment.(8) Whatever may be thought of Lord John and his
doctrine, only those who hold to the converse doctrine, that subjects may
never rise against a king, nor ever under any circumstances seek succour
from foreign power, will deny that the cruelties of Naples and the
iniquities connected with the temporal authority of the clergy in the
states of the church, constituted an irrefragable case for revolt.
(M7) Within a few weeks after the troops of Victor Emmanuel had crossed
the frontier (Sept. 1860), the papal forces had been routed, and a popular
vote in the Neapolitan kingdom supported annexation to Piedmont. The papal
states, with the exception of the patrimony of St. Peter in the immediate
neighbourhood of Rome itself, fell into the hands of the king. Victor
Emmanuel and Garibaldi rode into Naples side by side (Nov. 7). The Bourbon
flag after a long stand was at last lowered at the stronghold of Gaeta
(Feb. 14, 1861); the young Bourbon king became an exile for the rest of
his life; and on February 18 the first parliament of united Italy
assembled at Turin—Venice and Rome for a short season still outside. A few
months before, Mr. Gladstone had written a long letter to d’Azeglio. It
was an earnest exposition of the economic and political ideals that seemed
to shine in the firmament above a nation now emerging from the tomb. The
letter was to be shown to Cavour. “Tell that good friend of ours,” he
replied, “that our trade laws are the most liberal of the continent; that
for ten years we have been practising the maxims that he exhorts us to
adopt; tell him that he preaches to the converted.”(9) Then one of those
disasters happened that seem to shake the planetary nations out of their
pre-appointed orbits. Cavour died.(10)