his annual cruise, his energy revived. He spent seven weeks at Mota,
leaving it towards the end of August to sail for the Santa Cruz group.
On September 20, as he came in sight of the coral reef of Nukapu, he was
speaking to his scholars of the death of St. Stephen. Next morning he
had the boat lowered and put off for shore accompanied by Mr. Atkin and
three natives. He knew that feeling had lately become embittered in this
district over the Labour trade, but the thought of danger did not shake
his resolution. To show his confidence and disarm suspicion he entered
one of the canoes, alone with the islanders, landed on the beach and
disappeared among the crowd. Half an hour later, for no apparent reason,
an attack was started by men in canoes on the boat lying close off the
shore; and before the rowers could pull out of range, Joseph Atkin and
two of the natives had been wounded by poisoned arrows which, some days
later, set up tetanus with fatal effect. They reached the ship; but
after a few hours, when their wounds had been treated, Mr. Atkin
insisted on taking the boat in again to learn the Bishop's fate. This
time no attack was made upon them; but a canoe was towed out part of the
way and then left to drift towards the boat. In it was the dead body of
the Bishop tied up in a native mat. How he died no one ever knew, but
his face was calm and no anguish seems to have troubled him in the hour
of death. 'The placid smile was still on the face: there was a palm leaf
fastened over the breast, and, when the mat was opened, there were five
wounds, no more. The strange mysterious beauty, as it may be called, of
the circumstances almost make one feel as if this were the legend of a
martyr of the Primitive Church.'[41]
Miss Yonge, from whom these lines are quoted, goes on to show that the
five wounds, of which the first probably proved fatal, while the other
four were deliberately inflicted afterwards, were to be explained by
native custom. In the long leaflets of the palm five knots had been
tied. Five men in Fiji were known to have been stolen from this island,
and there can be little doubt that the relatives were exacting, in
native fashion, their vengeance from the first European victim who fell
into their power. The Bishop would have been the first to make allowance
for their superstitious error and to lay the blame in the right quarter.
His surviving comrades knew this, and in reporting the tragedy they sent
a special petition that the Colonial Office would not order a
bombardment of the island. Unfortunately, when a ship was sent on a
mission of inquiry, the natives themselves began hostilities and
bloodshed ensued. But at last the Bishop had by his death secured what
he was labouring in his life to effect. The Imperial Parliament was
stirred to examine the Labour trade in the Pacific and regulations were
enforced which put an end to the abuse.
[Note 41: _Life of John Coleridge Patteson_, by Charlotte Yonge, 2
vols. (Macmillan, 1874).]
'Quae caret ora cruore nostro?' The Roman poet puts this question in his
horror at the wide extension of the civil wars which stained with Roman
blood all the seas known to the world of his day.
Great Britain has its martyrs in a nobler warfare yet more widely
spread. Not all have fallen by the weapons of war. Nature has claimed
many victims through disease or the rigour of unknown climes. The death
of some is a mystery to this day. India, the Soudan, South and West
Africa, the Arctic and Antarctic regions, speak eloquently to the men of
our race of the spirit which carried them so far afield in the
nineteenth century. Thanks to its first bishop, the Church of Melanesia
shares their fame, opening its history with a glorious chapter enriched
by heroism, self-sacrifice, and martyrdom.
[Illustration: SIR ROBERT MORIER
From a drawing by William Richmond]
SIR ROBERT D. B. MORIER, G.C.B., P.C.
1826-93
1826. Born at Paris, March 31.
1832-9. Childhood in Switzerland.
1839-44. With private tutors.
1845-9. Balliol College, Oxford.
1850. Clerk in Education Office.
1853. Attaché at Vienna Embassy.
1858. Attaché at Berlin.
1861. Marriage with Alice, daughter of General Jonathan Peel.
1865. Commissioner at Vienna. Commercial Treaty. C.B. Chargé
d'Affaires at Frankfort.
1866-71. Chargé d'Affaires at Darmstadt.
1870. Tour in Alsace to test national feeling.
1871. Chargé d'Affaires at Stuttgart.
1872-6. Chargé d'Affaires at Munich.
1875. Danger of second Franco-German War.
1876. Minister at Lisbon.
1881. Minister at Madrid. 1882. K.C.B.
1884. Bismarck vetoes Morier as Ambassador to Berlin.
1885-93. Ambassador at St. Petersburg.
1886. Bulgaria, Batum, and Black Sea troubles.
1887. G.C.B. 1889. D.C.L., Oxford.
1891. Appointed Ambassador at Rome: retained at St. Petersburg.
1893. Death at Montreux. Funeral at Batchworth.
ROBERT MORIER
DIPLOMATIST
Diplomacy as a profession is a product of modern history. As Europe
emerged from the Middle Ages, the dividing walls between State and State
were broken down, and Governments found it necessary to have trained
agents resident at foreign courts to conduct the questions of growing
importance which arose between them. Churchmen were at first best
qualified to undertake such duties, and Nicholas Wotton, Dean of
Canterbury, who enjoyed the confidence of four Tudor sovereigns, came to
be as much at home in France or in the Netherlands as he was in his own
Deanery. It was his great nephew Sir Henry (who began his days as a
scholar at Winchester, and ended them as Provost at Eton) who did his
profession a notable disservice by indulging his humour at Augsburg when
acting as envoy for James I, defining the diplomatist as 'one who was
sent to lie abroad for his country'.[42] Since then many a politician
and writer has let fly his shafts at diplomacy, and fervent democrats
have come to regard diplomats as veritable children of the devil. But
this prejudice is chiefly due to ignorance, and can easily be cured by a
patient study of history. In the nineteenth century, in particular,
English diplomacy can point to a noble roll of ambassadors, who worked
for European peace as well as for the triumph of liberal causes, and
none has a higher claim to such praise than Sir Robert Morier, the
subject of this sketch.
[Note 42: The Latin form in which this epigram was originally
couched--_mentiendi causa_--does away with all ambiguity.]
The traditions of his family marked out his path in life. We can trace
their origin to connexions in the Consular service at Smyrna, where
Isaac Morier met and married Clara van Lennep in the latter half of the
eighteenth century. Swiss grandfather and Dutch grandmother became
naturalized subjects of the British Crown and brought up four sons to
win distinction in its service. Of these the third, David, married a
daughter of Robert Burnet Jones--a descendant of the famous Bishop
Burnet, and himself a servant of the Crown--and held important
diplomatic appointments for over thirty years at Paris and Berne. So it
was that his only son Robert David Burnet Morier was born in France,
spent much of his childhood in Switzerland, and acquired early in life
a remarkable facility in speaking foreign languages. To his schooling
in England he seems to have owed little of positive value. His father
and uncles had been sent to Harrow; but perhaps it was as well that the
son did not, in this, follow in his father's footsteps. However much he
neglected his studies with two easy-going tutors, he preserved his
freshness and originality and ran no danger of being drilled into a
type. If he had as a boy undue self-confidence, no one was better fitted
to correct it than his mother, a woman of wide sympathies and strong
intellectual force. The letters which passed between them display, on
his part, mature powers of expression at an early age, and show the
generous, affectionate nature of both; and till her death in 1855 she
remained his chief confidante and counsellor. In trying to matriculate
at Balliol College he met with a momentary check, due to the casual
nature of his education; but, after retrieving this, he rapidly made
good his deficiency in Greek and Latin, and ended by taking a creditable
degree. His time at Oxford, apart from reading, was well spent. He made
special friends with two of the younger dons: Temple, afterwards
Archbishop of Canterbury, and Jowett, the future Master of Balliol. The
former was carried by rugged force and sheer ability to the highest
position in the Church; the latter won a peculiar place, in Oxford and
in the world outside, by his gifts of judging character and stimulating
intellectual interest. Morier became his favourite pupil and lifelong
friend. F. T. Palgrave, the friend of both, tells us how 'Morier went up
to Balliol a lax and imperfectly educated fellow; but Jowett, seeing his
great natural capacity, took him in the Long Vacation of 1848 and
practically "converted" him to the doctrine of work. This was the
turning-point in Morier's life.' Together the two friends spent many a
holiday in Germany, Scotland, and elsewhere, and must have presented a
strange contrast to one another: Jowett, small, frail, quiet and
precise in manner, Morier big in every way, exuberant and full of
vitality. It was with Jowett and Stanley (afterwards Dean of
Westminster) that Morier went to Paris in 1848, eager to study the
Revolutionary spirit in its most lively manifestations. Stanley
describes him as 'a Balliol undergraduate of gigantic size, who speaks
French better than English, is to wear a blouse, and to go about
disguised to the clubs'.
He took his degree in November 1849, and a month later he was visiting
Dresden and Berlin, making German friends and initiating himself in
German politics and German ways of thought. Though his British
patriotism was fervid and sustained, he was capable of understanding men
of other nations and recognizing their merits; and in knowledge of
Germany he acquired a position among Englishmen of his day rivalled only
by Odo Russell, afterwards Ambassador at Berlin. Morier's father had for
many years represented Great Britain in Switzerland and could guide him
both by precept and by example. Free intercourse with the most liberal
minds in Oxford had developed the lessons which he had learnt at home.
But his own energy and application effected more than anything. He was
not satisfied till he had mastered a problem; and books, places, and
people were laid under contribution unsparingly. He started on his tour
carrying letters of introduction to some of the famous men in Germany,
including the great traveller and scientist, Alexander von Humboldt. Of
a younger generation was the philologist Max Müller, who was a frequent
companion of Morier in Berlin, and gave up his time to nursing him back
to health when he was taken ill with quinsy. He found friends in all
professions, but chiefly among politicians. A typical instance is von
Roggenbach, who rose to be Premier of Baden in the years 1861 to 1865,
when the destinies of Germany were in the melting-pot. Baden was in
some ways the leading state in South Germany at that time, combining
liberal ideals with a fervent advocacy of national union, and the views
of Roggenbach on political questions attracted Morier's warmest
sympathy. Another state in which Morier felt genuinely at home was the
Duchy of Coburg, from which Prince Albert had come to wed our own Queen
Victoria. The Prince's brother, the reigning Duke, treated Morier as a
personal friend; and here, too, he found Baron Stockmar, a Nestor among
German Liberals, who had spent his political life in trying to promote
goodwill between England and Germany. He received Morier into his family
circle and adopted him as the heir to his policy. This intimacy led to
further results; and, thanks in part to Morier's subsequent friendship
with the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, generous ideals and a
liberal spirit were to be found surviving in a few places even after
1870, though Bismarck had poisoned the minds of a whole generation by
the material successes which he achieved.
In 1849 the doors of the Foreign Office were closed to Morier. The
Secretary of State, Lord Palmerston, had treated his father unfairly, as
he thought, some years before, and Morier would ask no favours of him.
He continued his education, keeping in close touch with Jowett and
Temple, and, when he saw a chance of studying politics at first hand, he
eagerly availed himself of it. The troubles of Schleswig-Holstein, too
intricate to be explained briefly, had been brewing for some time. In
1850, the dispute, to which Prussia, Denmark, and the German Diet were
all parties, came to a head. The Duchies were overrun by Prussian
troops, while the Danish Navy held the sea. Morier rushed off to see for
himself what was happening, and spent some interesting days at Kiel,
talking to those who could instruct him, and forming his own judgement.
This was adverse to the wisdom of the Copenhagen Radicals, who were
trying to assert by force their supremacy over a German population. In
the circumstances, as Prussia gave way to the wishes of other powers, no
satisfactory decision could be reached; but ten years later the issue
was in the ruthless hands of Bismarck, and was settled by 'blood and
iron'.
In 1850 Morier accepted a clerkship in the Education Office at £120 a
year. The work was not to his taste, but at least it was public service,
and he saw no hope of employment in the Foreign Office. He found some
distractions in London society. He kept up relations with his old
friends, and he took a leading part in establishing the Cosmopolitan
Club, which later met in Watts's studio, but began its existence in
Morier's own rooms. He enjoyed greatly a meeting with Tennyson and
Browning, and wrote with enthusiasm of the former to his father, as 'one
who gave men an insight into the real Hero-world, as one from whom he
could catch reflected something of the Divine'. But Morier's spirits
were mercurial, and between moments of elation he was apt to fall into
fits of melancholy, when he could find no outlet for his energies.
Waiting for his true profession tried him sorely, and he was even
resigning himself to the prospect of a visit to Australia as a
professional journalist, when fortune at last smiled upon him.
Palmerston retired from the Foreign Office, and when Clarendon succeeded
him, Morier's name was placed on the list of candidates for an
attachéship. At Easter 1853 he started for another visit to the
Continent, full of hope and more than ever determined to qualify himself
for the profession which he loved.
He was rewarded for his zeal a few weeks later, when he paid a visit to
Vienna, won the favour of the Ambassador, Lord Westmorland, and was
commended to the Foreign Office. At the age of twenty-seven he was
appointed to serve Her Majesty as unpaid attaché, having already
acquired a knowledge of European politics which many men of sixty would
have envied. In figure he was tall, with a tendency already manifested
to put on flesh, good-looking, genial and sympathetic in manner, a _bon
vivant_, passionately fond of dancing and society, an excellent talker
or listener as the occasion demanded. His intelligence was quick, his
powers of handling details and of grasping broad principles were alike
remarkable. He wrote with ease, clearness, and precision; he knew what
hard work meant and revelled in it. Unfortunately he was subject already
to rheumatic gout, which was to make him acquainted with many
watering-places, and was to handicap him gravely in later life. But at
present nothing could check his ardour in his profession, and during his
five years at Vienna he took every chance of studying foreign lands and
of making acquaintance with the chief figures in the diplomatic world.
He enjoyed talks with Baron Jellaçiç, who had saved the monarchy in
1848, and with Prince Metternich, whose political career ended in that
year of revolutions and who was now only a figure in society. After the
Crimean War Morier obtained permission to make a tour through South-east
Hungary and to study for himself the mixture of Slavonic, Magyar, and
Teutonic races inhabiting that district. He followed this up by another
tour of three months, which carried him from Agram southwards into
Bosnia and Herzegovina, having prepared for it by working ten to twelve
hours a day for some weeks at the language of the southern Slavs.
Incidentally he enjoyed some hunting expeditions with Turkish pashas,
and obtained some insight into the weakness of the British consular
system. All his life he believed strongly in the value of such tours to
obtain first-hand information; and thirty years later, as Ambassador, he
encouraged his secretaries to familiarize themselves with the outlying
districts of the Russian empire.
In 1858, at the age of thirty-two, Morier passed from Vienna to Berlin.
It was the year in which the Princess Royal, the eldest daughter of
Queen Victoria, married the Crown Prince of Prussia.[43] Her father, the
Prince Consort, was very anxious that Morier should be at hand to advise
the young couple, and the appointment to Berlin was his work. Then it
was that Morier became involved in the struggle between Bismarck and the
Liberal influences in Germany, which had no stronger rallying-point than
the Coburg Court. This conflict only showed itself later, and at first
the young English attaché must have seemed a sufficiently unimportant
person; but before 1862 Bismarck, coming home to Berlin from the St.
Petersburg Embassy, and discerning the nature of Morier's character, had
declared that it was desirable to remove such an influence from the path
of his party, who were determined to bring Liberal Germany under the
yoke of a Prussia which had no sympathy for democratic ideals.
[Note 43: The ill-fated Emperor Frederick III, who died of cancer in
1888.]
For the moment the ship of State was hanging in the wind; light currents
of air were perceptible; sails were filling in one parliamentary boat or
another; but the chief movement was to be seen not in parliamentary
circles but in the excellent civil service, which preserved that honesty
and efficiency which it had acquired in the days of Stein. There were
marked tendencies towards Liberalism and towards unification in
different parts of Germany; and, if the Liberal party could have
produced one man of firmness and decision, these forces might have
triumphed over the reactionary Prussian clique. In this conflict Morier
was bound to be a passionate sympathiser with the parties which included
so many of his personal friends and which advocated principles so dear
to his heart. With the triumph of his friends, too, were associated the
prospects of a good understanding between England and Germany, for which
Morier himself was labouring; and he was accused of having meddled
indiscreetly with local politics. When King William broke with the
Liberals over the Army Bill, caution was doubly necessary. Bismarck
became Minister in 1862, and, great man though he was, he was capable of
any pettiness when he had once declared war on an opponent. From that
time the policy of working for an Anglo-Prussian _entente_ was a losing
game, not only because Bismarck detested the parliamentarism which he
associated with England, but also because, on our side too, extremists
were stirring up ill-feeling. In his letters Morier makes frequent
reference to the 'John Bullishness' of _The Times_. When this journal,
to which European importance attached during the editorship of Delane,
was not openly flouting Prussia, it was displaying reckless ignorance of
a people who were making the most solid contributions to learning and
raising themselves by steady industry from the losses due to centuries
of Continental warfare.
From time to time he paid visits to friends at Dresden, at Baden, and
elsewhere. One year he was sent to Naples on a special mission, another
year he was summoned to attend on Queen Victoria, who was visiting
Coburg. In 1859 he is lamenting the monotony of existence at Berlin,
which he calls 'a Dutch mud canal of a life, without even the tulip beds
on the banks'. But when later in that year Lord John Russell, who knew
and appreciated his talents, became Foreign Secretary and called on him
for frequent reports on important subjects, Morier found solace in work.
He was only too willing to put his wide knowledge of the country in
which he was serving at the disposal of his superiors at home. He wrote
with equal ability on political, agrarian, and financial subjects. That
he could take into account the personal factor is shown by the long
letter which he wrote in 1861 to Sir Henry Layard, then Political
Under-Secretary of State.[44] It contained a masterly analysis of the
character and upbringing of King William, showing how his intellectual
narrowness had hampered Liberal Governments, while his professional
training in the army had made him a most efficient instrument in
promoting the aims of Junker politicians and ministers of war.
[Note 44: _Memoirs of Sir Robert Morier_, 1826-76, by his daughter,
Lady Rosslyn Wemyss, vol. i, p. 303 (Edward Arnold, 1911).]
On Schleswig-Holstein, above all, Morier exerted himself to convey a
right view of the question to those who guided opinion in London,
whether newspaper editors or responsible ministers. He appealed to the
same principle which had won support for the Lombards against Austria.
The inhabitants of the disputed Duchies were for the most part Germans,
and the Danish Government had done violence to their national sentiment.
If England could have extended its sympathy to its northern kinsmen in
time, the question might have been settled peacefully before 1862, and
Bismarck could never have availed himself of such a lever to overthrow
his Liberal opponents. As it was, Prussia ignored the Danish sympathies
displayed abroad, especially in the English press, went her own way and
invaded the Duchies, dragging in her train Austria, her confederate and
her dupe. Palmerston, who controlled our foreign policy at the time,
waited till the last moment, blustered, found himself impotent to move
without French support, and left Denmark smarting with a sense of
betrayal which lasted till 1914. By such bungling Morier knew that we
were incurring enmity on both sides and lowering our reputation for
courage as well as for statesmanship.
In 1865 he was chosen as one of the Special Commissioners to negotiate a
treaty of commerce between Great Britain and Austria. He had always
been a Free-trader, and he was convinced that such economic agreements
could do much to improve the world and to strengthen the bonds of peace.
So he was ready and willing to do hard work in this sphere, and finding
a congenial colleague in Sir Louis Mallet, one of the best economists of
the day, he spent some months at Vienna in fruitful activity and won the
good opinion of all associated with him. For his services he received
the C.B. and high commendation from London.
This same year brought promotion in rank, though for long it was
uncertain where he would go. In August he accepted the offer of First
Secretary to the Legation in Japan, most reluctantly, because he saw his
peculiar knowledge of Germany would be wasted there. Ten days later this
offer was changed for a similar position at the Court of Greece, which
was equally uncongenial; but at the end of the year the Foreign Office
decided that he would be most useful in the field which he had chosen
for himself, and after a few months at Frankfort he was sent in the year
1866 as chargé d'affaires to the Grand Ducal Court of Hesse-Darmstadt.