PALMERSTON.
With none of her Ministers has the Queen ever been in sharper conflict
than with Lord Palmerston. From his third Foreign Secretaryship in 1846
till his dismissal in 1852, the history of their relations was one long
struggle.
Palmerston considered himself the political inheritor of Canning’s
foreign policy, and that he was bound, as the representative of England
to foreign Governments, to be the upholder of political liberty and
the foe of tyranny and oppression all over Europe. In this he carried
with him the whole-hearted sympathy of the mass of English public
opinion. It was not with his opinions and views, but with his way of
giving effect to them, that the Queen quarrelled. But the English
people were not in a position at the time the conflict was going on
to make the distinction. They knew that the Queen and Lord Palmerston
were pulling different ways, and that Lord Palmerston was the friend of
Hungary, and Poland, and Italy; and in proportion as they gave their
sympathy to these countries and to Lord Palmerston, they were hostile
to the Court. Now, as their personal loyalty to the Queen was very
strong, they sought to find a reason for the Queen’s opposition to
Lord Palmerston, and they found it, or thought they found it, in the
person of the Prince. The Queen’s husband was supposed to be a power
behind the throne thwarting the will of her constitutional advisers in
the interests of foreign despots. The popular view was that the Prince
ruled the Queen, and that Stockmar ruled the Prince, and therefore
that the policy of the court was not English, but German. That this
was a complete misunderstanding, the publication of the “Prince
Consort’s Life,” besides many other political memoirs and memoranda,
has abundantly shown. But it was a very natural mistake, and from it
arose, not altogether, it is to be feared, without the connivance of
Lord Palmerston, a degree of hostility against the Prince which reached
an extraordinary height during the early part of the Crimean War.
The question between the Queen and Lord Palmerston is no longer
obscured by side issues; at no time was it based upon a divergence of
political views. What the Queen, and the majority of Lord Palmerston’s
colleagues in the Government, no less than the Queen, objected to, was
his way of sending despatches, calculated seriously to embroil England
with foreign Governments, either entirely without their knowledge
and concurrence, going through the form of submitting despatches to
them for their criticism and approval, and then actually sending off
something entirely different. The despatches submitted by the Foreign
Secretary to the Cabinet and to the Queen, and materially altered
by them, would be sometimes recast by Palmerston in accordance with
his original draft, and thus the Ministers and Sovereign were made
to appear to have consented to that of which they had disapproved.
At other times he would send important despatches to the Queen for
her approval, allowing her quite an inadequate time to digest their
contents, almost forcing the suspicion that he wished her to give her
assent without knowing what they contained. When this practice was
complained of by the Prime Minister, Palmerston excused himself by
saying that the practice of sending off early copies of despatches
for the Queen’s perusal had been discontinued, owing to pressure of
work in the office; “but if it shall require an additional clerk or
two, you must be liberal,” he wrote to Lord John Russell, “and allow
me that assistance.” This plea of economy came rather strangely
from a Foreign Secretary who in 1841 had appointed five new paid
_attachés_ without the smallest necessity, and who in one year had
spent £11,000 in coach-hire to convey messages to overtake the mails
with his letters. The fact is that Lord Palmerston was the sworn
foe of despotism everywhere, except in the Foreign Office, when he
was Foreign Secretary. In the Foreign Office he reigned supreme and
absolute, and would suffer no control either from his colleagues or
his Sovereign. With all this, it was impossible not to like him. He
had a jollity, a _bonhomie_, a complete absence of rancor against
those who had wrestled with him and thrown him, an easy elasticity, a
buoyant faith in himself and in England, which won the hearts of his
countrymen. He made mistakes and went through humiliations that would
have crushed or imbittered any other man, without losing a jot of his
buoyancy and self-confidence. He pursued his own line of policy with
incomparable nerve and tenacity. If he triumphed, he crowed; if he was
defeated, no one would guess it from his demeanor; he would be cutting
his jokes the next day as “game” as ever. No nature could have afforded
a greater contrast to that of the Prince Consort; and while one from
sheer force and vigor, and the other by position and character, were
prominent among the leading politicians of their day, they were certain
to be in sharp and almost perpetual conflict. He thought the Prince’s
hope of German unity a mere dream, impossible of fulfilment, and an
alliance between England and Germany, therefore, entirely useless to
ourselves. This brought them into political conflict just as their
characters brought them into personal conflict. Two or three instances
will suffice to illustrate what Palmerston was at the Foreign Office.
In 1819, the Neapolitans being in insurrections against the infamous
misgovernment under which they suffered, Lord Palmerston supplied
them with war material out of the stores of the English Government
without the knowledge or consent of his colleagues. Now it may be
right or wrong to sympathize with insurgents; but for a Government of
another country to supply them with arms is an act of war, of which no
single Minister has the right to undertake the responsibility. On this
occasion Palmerston was compelled to make a formal official apology to
the King of Naples. A question asked in the House of Commons was the
first intimation the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, had of what his
colleague had done.
One of the special objects of Palmerston’s abhorrence was Austria; and
it was a state of mind with which there was much sympathy in England.
Neither in Italy nor in Hungary could the English people regard the
Austrian Government otherwise than as a cruel and perfidious tyranny.
This national feeling had burst out in England on the occasion of the
visit to London in 1850 of the Austrian General Haynau. In Italy and
Hungary the name of this man was associated with acts of barbarous
cruelty in putting down the national movement. He was especially
charged, and the charge was universally believed in England, with
the responsibility of having ordered the flogging of women among the
Hungarian insurgents. When in London he made a visit to Barclay’s
brewery. The draymen and other employés got wind who their foreign
visitor was; they gathered together in the yard of the brewery, and
rushed upon him with a torrent of abusive epithets; the general cry
was, “Down with the Austrian butcher;” they dropped a truss of straw
upon him, pelted him with small missiles, and tore his coat, and
knocked his hat over his eyes. He and his friends fought their way out
of the brewery, only to find an equally warm reception outside from the
people in the streets; he was again pelted, struck, and dragged along
the road by his mustache. He finally got shelter in the upper part of
a public-house, and the police contrived his escape by the river. The
general feeling in the country was “serve him right;” but the Queen was
seriously annoyed, and dwelt, not without justice, on the cowardice
of an attack by a whole mob upon a single unarmed man. At the desire
of the Queen, Palmerston expressed in person to the Austrian _chargé
d’affaires_ the regret of the Government at the incident; but at the
same time advised that no prosecution should be instituted by Haynau,
as this would involve a minute recapitulation of the barbarities of
which he was accused. Palmerston’s private opinion on the affair was
expressed in a letter to Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, in
which he says: “The draymen were wrong in the particular course they
adopted. Instead of striking him, ... they ought to have tossed him in
a blanket, rolled him in the kennel, and then sent him home in a cab,
paying his fare to the hotel.” It may be easily imagined that he did
not cordially respond to an order to send a formal written apology to
the Austrian Government, and there was a prolonged duel between Lord
Palmerston on the one side, and the Prime Minister and the Queen on the
other, upon the wording of it. As originally drafted by Palmerston,
it contained a paragraph implying that it would have shown better
taste on the part of General Haynau to take his autumn holiday nearer
home. This was corrected in the draft by the Prime Minister, and the
correction was indorsed by Her Majesty; the amended despatch was then
returned to the Foreign Secretary, who, in the mean time, had sent off
to the Austrian Government the despatch as originally drawn by himself.
Then began a regular pitched battle. Palmerston said he would rather
resign than withdraw the despatch and substitute the one approved by
the Queen and Prime Minister. Sir Theodore Martin says that Palmerston
ultimately gave way. Greville says he never did. Mr. Evelyn Ashley
says nothing. It is certain that the Haynau incident was for years
considered enough to account for the hostility of Austria to England.
It was for this that Austria alone of all the great Powers refrained
from sending a representative to the Duke of Wellington’s funeral; and
some people thought it was this that prevented her joining her forces
to those of England and France in the Crimean War. But Palmerston was
not long in giving Austria other items to add to her account against
England.
When Kossuth was in England in 1851, he having been the leader of
the unsuccessful Hungarian insurrection against Austria, he was
received with tremendous enthusiasm all over England. The Austrians
were furious, and their anger was intensified by the report that
Lord Palmerston was going to receive him at the Foreign Office.
Many politicians thought that this would be regarded by Austria as
equivalent to a declaration of war. The Cabinet remonstrated, and
Palmerston, to their relief and surprise, yielded. A day or two after
this, Greville saw Lord John Russell and Palmerston at Windsor, “mighty
merry and cordial, laughing and talking together. Those breezes leave
nothing behind, particularly with Palmerston, who never loses his
temper, and treats everything with levity and gayety.” But Palmerston
docile was more dangerous than Palmerston pugnacious. The next week
he was receiving addresses at the Foreign Office from Finsbury and
Islington, thanking him for the protection he had given to Kossuth,
and for the sympathy he had shown to the Hungarian cause. In his
reply he gave warm expression to his sympathy with Hungary, and spoke
of the position of the British Government as that of the “judicious
bottle-holder” during the conflict between Hungary and her foe. The
phrase has been remembered after the occasion on which it was used has
been forgotten. The people applied it to Palmerston himself, and liked
him all the more for it. But the proceeding was strongly and formally
censured in the Cabinet and by the Queen. Her Majesty’s anger was not
appeased by those who told her that although the Emperor of Austria
might be angry, the action of the Foreign Secretary was not unpopular
with the English people. Her Majesty replied:--
“It is no question with the Queen whether she pleases the Emperor of
Austria or not, but whether she gives him a just ground of complaint
or not. And if she does so, she can never believe that this will add
to her popularity with her own people.”[25]
Lord John communicated the Queen’s views to Lord Palmerston, and he was
especially cautioned as to the future upon “the necessity of a guarded
conduct.” Lord John writing to the Queen was sanguine enough to hope
that this remonstrance would “have its effect upon Lord Palmerston.”
The ink of his letter was hardly dry when like a clap of thunder came
the news of the _coup d’état_ in Paris; Louis Napoleon, then President
of the Republic, had had his political opponents seized in the night
and thrown into prison, nearly 500 persons were shipped off to Cayenne
without any form of trial, thousands were shot down in the streets, and
the Prince President became first by military force and then by popular
election Napoleon III. and Emperor of the French.
The Queen, true to her principles of non-intervention, at once wrote
to the Prime Minister, instructing him to caution Lord Normanby, our
ambassador in Paris, to observe strict neutrality, and to remain
absolutely passive towards the new Government. Lord Palmerston
accordingly sent a despatch to Lord Normanby in that sense. At the
same time, however, that he was sending his despatch to Paris, he was
seeing Count Walewski, the French ambassador in London, and expressing
his entire approbation of the _coup d’état_ and his conviction that the
President could not have acted otherwise than he had done! On the 16th
December he followed this up by a despatch to Lord Normanby, expressing
his conviction that the action of Louis Napoleon was for the benefit
of France and also of the rest of Europe. This despatch was sent off
without the knowledge or approval of the Queen or the Prime Minister,
and in contravention of their express wishes. This was the end. Lord
Palmerston was dismissed, not at the instance of the Queen, but with
her entire approval. Lord John Russell offered him, as a consolation,
the Lord Lieutenantcy of Ireland and a British Peerage, both of which
were curtly declined. The general opinion of the political world was
that Palmerston’s career was over. Disraeli spoke of him in the past
tense, as if he were dead. There was tremendous rejoicing over his fall
in every stronghold of despotism in Europe, especially in Austria,
where the heads of the Government took credit to themselves for his
overthrow, and gave balls in honor of the event; a rhyme was current
in Austria at the time which expresses the feelings Palmerston had
awakened:--
“Hat der Teufel einen Sohn,
So ist er sicher Palmerston.”[26]
In the debate in the House of Commons which followed these events,
Lord John made a most successful speech, in which he showed the
impossibility of working with a colleague who deliberately defied
the express views of the whole Cabinet; he read the memorandum drawn
up by the Queen for Lord Palmerston’s guidance on the occasion of a
former dispute. In this paper Her Majesty had claimed her right to
know distinctly what the proposals were to which she was asked to give
her sanction, and, secondly, that, having once given her sanction to
a despatch, it was not to be arbitrarily altered or modified by the
Minister. She also claimed her right to be kept informed of what passed
between the Foreign Secretary and the ambassadors before important
decisions were taken, and to receive the despatches in good time, so
that she could acquaint herself with their contents. Lord John Russell
completely carried the House with him. It was felt that the demands
of the Queen and the Cabinet had been strictly reasonable, and that
it would be impossible to carry on the business of the country on
any other basis. Lord Palmerston practically had no defence, and he
abandoned any attempt to manufacture one. Of the Queen’s memorandum he
said not a word. Greville says the effect of Lord John’s speech was
prodigious, and that Palmerston’s reply was weak and ineffective. He
had resigned the seals of the Foreign Office before Parliament met,
and Lord Granville had been appointed his successor. He bore the whole
position with admirable good temper. He received Lord Granville with
the greatest cordiality, spent three hours with him putting him in
possession of the threads of his diplomacy, spoke of the Court without
bitterness, and in strong terms of the Queen’s “sagacity,” and ended
by offering to give any information or assistance that was in his
power. He pursued the same line of conduct when in a few weeks Lord
John Russell’s Government fell and was succeeded by Lord Derby’s; Lord
Malmesbury becoming Foreign Secretary. Palmerston at once came to see
him, and offered to coach him in Foreign Office policy. He gave the
new Foreign Secretary a masterly sketch of the _status quo_ in Europe,
as well as general hints upon the principles by which English policy
should be guided; the pith of these was, “Keep well with France.” By
this means, though ousted from office, Palmerston remained practically
the director of the policy of the Foreign Office.
All the contemporary records agree upon the main outward and visible
facts; but they are provokingly silent upon Palmerston’s real motives.
He was neither a hot-headed youth, acting on the impulse of the
moment, neither was he “an old man in a hurry;” he was sixty-seven
years old, about the prime of life for a statesman, and steeped to
the lips in an absorbing interest in England’s foreign politics. His
whole tradition had been to oppose despotism and support civil and
political liberty against despots all over Europe. Why did he go out
of his way to establish, so far as he could, a cordial understanding
with a despot who was also an upstart, and whose Government was founded
on violence, and carried on by crushing every vestige of liberty in
France? Some have thought an answer could be found in his hostility
to the Orleans family; but this does Palmerston less than justice. It
is true he hated Louis Philippe, and rejoiced in his fall, which he
attributed to the King’s perfidy about the Spanish marriages. When the
French King was fugitive in England, Palmerston had tried to prevent
his receiving the shelter of Claremont, although the Government really
had no business whatever to interfere, as Claremont had been settled
for his life on Leopold, King of the Belgians, and if he chose to lend
it to his father-in-law, no one else had any business in the matter.
Louis Philippe died in 1850, and in 1851, although Palmerston said the
Orleans Princes were plotting for a restoration, and if Louis Napoleon
had not struck when he did, he would himself have been overthrown, the
excuse was not a good one. Some contend that Palmerston was afraid of
the red spectre in France, and thought Louis Napoleon the only man
capable of laying it. But Palmerston was not afraid of the reds in any
other European country. The real explanation of his conduct must be
sought elsewhere. At the end of 1851, it required no superhuman power
of prophecy, especially to one who surveyed Europe from the watch-tower
of the London Foreign Office, to foresee that the time was approaching
when England would have to face the alternative of either relinquishing
her traditional policy of maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman
Empire, or fight Russia in order to sustain it. Palmerston, it need
hardly be said, was all for fighting; but the question was whether
England would face Russia alone, or whether Russia would restore the
Holy Alliance, and thus lead a combination of European powers against
England; or whether, as a third possibility, England could succeed
in isolating Russia and in obtaining an ally for herself. It is not
extravagant to suppose that it was to make this third possibility a
probability that Palmerston hastened to make friends with a man whom
he could not have trusted, and whose cruelty and despotism he must
have loathed. It was impossible for England to look for any other ally.
Russia, Austria, and Prussia were wild against England, regarding her
as the great stronghold of constitutional principles, and believing
that to her encouragement was due the revolutionary outbreak of 1848.
The immunity of England herself from disorder did not open their
eyes to see that it was their own misgovernment which had produced
revolution. It only rendered them the more furious, as they believed
that England had preached insurrection, while other Governments bore
its penalties. It was touch-and-go in the first year of Napoleon III.’s
reign whether he would try to put himself at the head of a European
combination against us, or whether he would become our ally and fight
one of the other Powers. He certainly believed that war was necessary
in order to divert the attention of France from domestic politics, to
conciliate the army, and thus on both sides to consolidate his own
position. The almost universal feeling in England was that he was
going to fight us. The common opinion was that the new Emperor’s first
thought would be to avenge Waterloo. By 1853, however, Louis Napoleon
had decided not to fight us, but to fight with us against Russia. This
was due more to Palmerston than to any other Englishman.
Greville reports a conversation early in 1853 between himself and
Comte de Flahault (afterwards French ambassador in London), who had
just returned from Paris, where he had been in constant communication
with the Emperor. Flahault said that the rancor and insolence against
England on the part of Austria, Russia, and Prussia, were almost
inconceivable; he added that Louis Napoleon had offered to him in
the first year of his reign a position which it had been the object
of his uncle’s life to attain,--the leadership of a European league
against us; that he decided to decline these flattering overtures,
and to consolidate his alliance with England. Flahault went on to
say that he had supported Louis Napoleon in this determination, and
had represented to him that the Northern Powers had long withheld
any recognition of his Imperial position; whereas England had at
once recognized him, and that if she had not done so, probably the
acknowledgment of the other Powers would have been still further
delayed. Flahault represented to Greville that, greatly to his
surprise, the Emperor had wholly concurred in this view.
It is needless to say that the importance of this conversation is not
derived from its truth, but from its representing what Louis Napoleon
wished to be believed in England in the spring of 1853. He was strongly
desirous for his own purposes of the English alliance, and knew that
it was the only one he could hope for at that time in Europe. So far
from declining flattering proposals from the Czar, his vanity had just
been bitterly wounded by the absolute refusal of the Russian monarch to
greet him as “_mon frère_.”
There can be little doubt that Palmerston availed himself of the
Emperor’s isolated position in Europe, and “captured” him as an ally of
England. It was the wish to secure him more surely that made Palmerston
endeavor in 1852-3 to promote a marriage between Louis Napoleon and the
Queen’s niece, the Princess Adelaide of Hohenlohe. There was a definite
proposal made to bring this about, the Emperor stating that his wish
was to _reserrer les liens entre les deux pays_. The offer was declined
by the Queen on behalf of her niece, on the ground of the latter’s
youth and inexperience. In 1854, another matrimonial project between
the two families was started with the same object, between Princess
Mary of Cambridge and Prince Jerome Napoleon. Malmesbury heard of it,
and said he hoped it was not true, for the sake of the Princess; but it
was strongly pressed by Palmerston on the Queen, and was only put an
end to by the Princess’s absolute refusal to listen to it.
If Palmerston ever believed in the Emperor’s fidelity to the
English alliance, he did not do so permanently.[27] All through the
negotiations which finally led up to the Crimean War, Palmerston and
his coadjutor at Constantinople, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, urged on
his country, not only to war, but to immediate war. Palmerston knew his
man. It was Louis Napoleon’s present purpose in 1853 and 1854 to fight
on our side; England’s policy, in Lord Palmerston’s view, was to clinch
the matter before he had turned against us.
When Palmerston was dismissed in 1851, his defence of himself in the
House of Commons at the opening of the Session of 1852 was such a
complete failure that people went about saying “Palmerston is smashed.”
But the epithet was misapplied. The Government of which he had been
the life and soul was smashed. In less than three weeks’ time from
the debate on his dismissal, the Government was defeated, and the
Russell Administration resigned. Palmerston wrote to his brother: “Dear
William,--I have had my tit-for-tat with John Russell, and I turned him
out on Friday last.” Lord Derby formed a Government which he invited
Lord Palmerston to join. The offer was declined, but, as already
pointed out, Palmerston continued practically to direct our foreign
policy. The Conservative Government was of very short duration. Before
the year was out, Mr. Disraeli’s Budget was defeated, the Government
resigned, and Lord Aberdeen became the head of a Coalition Government
formed by a union of the Whigs with the Peelites. In this Government,
Lord Palmerston was Home Secretary. Greville mentions that when the
Queen went to Scotland in 1853, she desired that Lord Granville should
be the Minister-in-Attendance, because she did not wish for the
presence of the Home Secretary at Balmoral. But this feeling was not
of long duration. Lord Clarendon, the new Foreign Secretary, labored
diligently to change it. He told the Queen everything he could likely
to make her regard Palmerston in a more favorable light, and showed
her notes and memoranda by him calculated to please her. Lord Aberdeen
also used his influence in the same direction. The Queen is never
implacable, and always ready to recognize good service, and before
the autumn was out Palmerston took his turn as Minister-in-Attendance
on the Queen at Balmoral. An anecdote is told, illustrative of his
continued absorption in foreign politics, although he was now Home
Secretary. The Queen was much interested in some strikes and labor
troubles that were taking place in the North of England, and asked
Palmerston for details about them which, as Home Secretary, he might
be expected to know. However, she found him absolutely without
information. “One morning, after previous inquiries, she said to him,
‘Pray, Lord Palmerston, have you any news?’ To which he replied, ‘No,
Madam, I have heard nothing; but it seems certain _that the Turks have
crossed the Danube_!’” Palmerston was at the Home Office during the
outbreak of cholera in 1854. His measures against it were said to have
been conceived in the spirit of treating Heaven as if it were a Foreign
Power.
Palmerston really directed the foreign policy of England from the
Home Office during the year which led up to the Crimean War. When the
Government refused to take his view, he resigned, ostensibly because
he did not like Lord John Russell’s Reform Bill; really because when
the Turks refused to accept the Vienna note, the majority of the
Cabinet wished to leave them to their fall. Palmerston took an exactly
opposite line, and urged the entry of the allied French and English
fleets into the Black Sea, which really amounted to an act of war. As
soon as he got his own way he rejoined the Government. As some excuse
was necessary to the outer world, he had said he was not prepared to
sit out debates on the Reform Bill in the House of Commons at “_his
time of life_.” Clarendon said that no one had ever before heard him
acknowledge that he had a time of life.
The Queen went heartily with Palmerston in his war policy. She was
convinced of the justice of the Russian War, and that it could not have
been avoided. Her intense interest in its progress will be described
in the coming chapter. It is sufficient here to say that her former
feeling of hostility to Palmerston was very much softened by seeing the
whole-hearted devotion with which he threw himself into the success
of the British arms. As is well known, the events of the war made
Palmerston Prime Minister. She gave him her entire confidence in that
capacity. On the signing of the Treaty of Peace in April, 1856, she
bestowed upon him the Order of the Garter, as a special and public
token of her appreciation of his zealous and able services to his
country.
There was no love lost between Palmerston and Lord John Russell. In
1857-58, there was great uneasiness in the ranks of the Whigs, lest
these two should never be able to overcome their mutual hostility. Lady
William Russell said of them at this time, “They have shaken hands and
embraced, and hate each other more than ever.” However, by degrees the
stronger nature dominated the weaker, and from 1859 till 1865, when
Palmerston died, Lord John may be said to have danced to Palmerston’s
piping.
[25] Letter from the Queen to Lord John Russell, Nov. 21st, 1851.
[26]
If the Devil has a son,
Sure his name is Palmerston.
[27] See letter from Lord Palmerston to Lord Clarendon, vol. ii. p.
127, Ashley’s “Life of Palmerston.”