by Alan Palmer
Layard’s speech was an embarrassment for the Government on several counts. Lord Clarendon had no wish to see the Polish Question raised at that moment, for on 2 December Austria, one of the traditional despoilers of the old Polish kingdom, had formally joined the Anglo-French alliance. There was still no guarantee that the Austrians would declare war on Russia and fight alongside their allies, but the three governments could now work together politically. Moreover Clarendon had every hope that the Austrians would check pro-Russian sentiment at Berlin. Francis Joseph and his ministers might even tolerate Polish patriotic propaganda, provided it was specifically anti-Russian in character. But Clarendon was, at the same time, following up hints of intervention in the war from Count Cavour, the Piedmontese prime minister, a natural enemy of Austrian pretensions in Italy. The attraction, for the British and French, was the evident willingness of Cavour to send some 15,000 men from Sardinia-Piedmont’s efficient little army to fight in the Crimea itself. Yet it is hardly surprising if, in private, Lord Aberdeen confessed that he found his Foreign Secretary’s pursuit of a Sardinian alliance on top of the Austrian alliance ‘rather strange’.[368] Clarendon was not so skilled a diplomatic juggler that he could handle the intensely nationalistic Polish exiles at the same time.
Had the Poles depended entirely on the goodwill of their compatriot, Count Walewski, Napoleon’s ambassador in London, Clarendon might, even so, have found a place for them in his act. The danger for those who shaped British and French policy lay in the close links of exiled Poles with exiled Hungarians. Three days before Austria joined the allies, the twenty-fourth anniversary of Poland’s anti-Russian insurrection was celebrated in London with a speech from the Hungarian patriot, Lajos Kossuth, in which he criticized Britain and France for concentrating on the entrenched camp of Sebastopol rather than seeking to rouse the ‘oppressed nationalities’ against Tsar Nicholas’s despotism. The Peelite members of the Aberdeen Coalition consistently mistrusted Kossuth, but there remained widespread sympathy for the Poles, and the cabinet had already given some thought to raising a Polish Legion. The proposal worried the Secretary of War: ‘We must get men where we can,’ Newcastle wrote to Clarendon on the day after Inkerman, ‘but I have very little faith in Poles of the English and French refugee class. They are great rogues’; and the Prime Minister agreed with him.[369] So long as Aberdeen presided over his Coalition cabinet, British policy was more interested in checking Napoleon’s enthusiasm for national revolutions than in sponsoring the Polish cause. Already, however, Palmerston, the most European-minded member of the Government, was convinced that not only Britain and France but Austria and Prussia too should ‘restore a substantive Kingdom of Poland’; and, as he had told Clarendon in September, he found it hard to believe that Aberdeen ‘can have discouraged the idea’.[370]
Yet it was another passage in Layard’s speech which threatened to rock the cabinet, for Layard mischievously urged Lord John Russell ‘as the head of the great Liberal party...to prevail upon his colleagues to adopt, ere it be too late a policy...more consistent with the honour, the true interests, and the immortal traditions of this mighty empire’.[371] To those members of the Government who did not belong to the ‘great Liberal party’, Layard seemed to be trying to break up the Coalition by flattering its most restless and quarrelsome member. Lord John hardly needed encouragement from a back-bencher with a personal interest in foreign affairs. He could now convince himself that he commanded a following in the Commons, even though twenty-one Liberals had voted against the Foreign Enlistment Bill and there remained a rift between Russellites and Palmerstonians. Uncertainty over Russell’s intentions marred the satisfaction of Aberdeen’s fellow Peelites — Gladstone, Graham and Herbert, in particular — at the size of the Government’s majorities.
On the morning that the parliamentary session closed, a change in policy by the editor of The Times emphasized this weakness. Eleven days earlier the paper had come down firmly in favour of the Government: ‘Never was war prosecuted so vigorously and resolutely as this one at this moment,’ a leading article declared on 12 December. But, while the debates were in progress, extracts from more and more letters home were forwarded to the editorial offices at Blackfriars, and the first sick or wounded heroes were welcomed back to their London clubs, coming ‘with an awful budget of stories,’ as Thackeray noted after meeting one of them.[372] The testimony of these letters and the tales of the returned veterans corroborated Howard Russell’s mounting list of failings. Disparities between reports from the battle front and the bland assurances of ministers in Parliament suggested a ‘cover up’ for Raglan and his staff. Accordingly, on 23 December, The Times sent its readers off to Christmas with a thunderous leading article. Nobody in authority was spared, least of all Lord Raglan, a commander-in-chief of whom ‘with the extremest reluctance,’ the article said, ‘no one sees or hears anything’. The festive mood at home was contrasted with the plight of ‘the noblest army ever sent from these shores’: ‘Incompetence, lethargy, aristocratic hauteur, official indifference, favour, routine, perverseness and stupidity reign, revel and riot in the camp before Sebastopol, in the harbour of Balaklava, in the hospitals of Scutari, and how much nearer home we do not venture to say.’ By printed prose, by verse, by letters from the post and by word of mouth the British public was not allowed to forget this Christmas that ‘someone had blundered’. And in the New Year they were to seek the reason why.[373]
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Before Sebastopol the weather was fine and frosty but it remained a wretched Christmas. Apart from occasional night alarms and a curious sortie by ‘about 300 men all well primed with Brandy and three parts drunk’ on 12 December, there had been little action since the blizzard. But by now the siege of Sebastopol was largely nominal. There were reports of British troops so preoccupied with fighting the Russian winter that they grew careless, exposed themselves to enemy fire or were surrounded while on outpost duty and captured or killed. On Christmas Day itself an extra ration of fresh meat was distributed; ‘We made a pudding after a fashion,’ Temple Godman wrote unenthusiastically to his father a few days later. Conditions were better for the vessels remaining in Balaclava harbour: Assistant Surgeon Henry Taylor, who was being sent to Constantinople for a month’s convalescent leave, had ‘a capital Christmas dinner’ aboard the steamship Australian, still unloading her cargo several days after she should have sailed. Captain Duberly and his wife were able to give a small Christmas dinner party, ‘which somehow was prolonged long into the night’; but it cannot have been the cheeriest of gatherings, for there was no heating whatsoever aboard the depot ship Star of the South in which Mrs Duberly had her cabin.
A generous supply of Christmas gifts had left England for the East in good time; and officers’ letters home mention the safe arrival of bottles of old port, fur boots, socks, hampers from Fortnum and Mason, books and magazines. But there are also references to long delays in unloading ships at the quayside. ‘The “Royal Albert” has arrived but as yet we cannot find out where she has sent her parcels,’ Strange Jocelyn told his father three days after Christmas. There was a general conviction that troops under canvas around Balaclava fared better than the infantry regiments up in the hills. ‘Comforts of all kinds arrive daily at Balaclava for the men, but we don’t see much of them in camp,’ Captain Clifford wrote from 2nd Division headquarters on the Heights. Earlier that month Henry Clifford, like many other bored officers, had been reading ‘Dickens’s new work Hard Times’. ‘I wish he could sit, with my pen and paper, and write a book, “Hard Times” in the Crimea,’ he added ruefully. ‘Only just what is passing in front of the door of my comfortable little tent would give him plenty of matter.’[374]
Already, before Christmas, many officers who had come from Varna and marched south to Balaclava had left the Crimea. Some, like Lord Lucan and Henry Taylor, were content with a short spell of leave in Constantinople. But a considerable number returned to England, some as invalids, others on compassionate grounds,
and some on a flying visit to settle business affairs, for those who sailed out in the spring had assumed that they would be home again before the end of the year. The Duke of Cambridge finally got away on 25 November in the steamship Trent, refusing to come aboard this time until the vessel was about to leave for the Bosphorus. General De Lacy Evans MP, the Peninsula veteran and titular commander of the Light Division, was on his way home before the end of the month. Lord Cardigan asked for sick leave five days after the November hurricane, was pronounced unfit on 3 December, and sailed offin his yacht Dryad on the following Friday. He lingered in Constantinople and was a guest at Stratford de Redcliffe’s New Year’s Eve Ball where, to their mutual annoyance, he met Lucan. But Cardigan was back in London by the middle of January; and five days after his return he entertained the royal family by re-enacting his charge (unmounted) down the Long Corridor of Windsor Castle. By contrast Lord George Paget, who on Balaclava morning first spotted the warning signals from the Turkish redoubt, was cold-shouldered by London society as though he were a deserter. Ironically, unlike Cardigan, Paget had every intention of returning to the Crimea, and was back with the Light Brigade by early summer, accompanied by his young wife.[375]
For less fortunate officers and men, who were left to face the worst weeks of a Crimean winter, there was something demoralizing about this exodus. Apart from the Rifle Brigade, all pride in regimental dress and all sense of cleanliness seemed to disappear. Deep resentment festered among men who believed that there was a privileged caste at General Headquarters. As early as 12 December Captain Duberly (whose prose style was far clumsier than his wife’s) was bitterly hostile to Raglan and his staff. Henry Duberly told his brother-in-law: ‘I know of a letter that goes by the mail from one of the Guards, part of it was read to me and, as sure as it goes it will be read by Prince Albert, and I know of many other letters from men out here whose relatives have great influence in high places and so I expect that people’s eyes will be opened as to the shameful mismanagement here.’ The toughest and loyalest officers began to complain of those ‘lazy, idle, drinking and swearing fellows’ who filled ‘that nest of noodles’, otherwise known as Lord Raglan’s staff. The fact that five of the Commander-in-Chief’s aides-de-camp were blood relations and that Raglan himself seldom left his ‘comfortable farmhouse’ angered an aristocratic Guards officer like Strange Jocelyn; and Colonel Alexander Gordon, who disliked most journalists (and Times reporters in particular), told Lord Aberdeen some weeks later that, in one respect, ‘The Times was right, and it is worth being related to the Commander-in-Chief.’[376]
Yet what annoyed Major Jocelyn even more than nepotism at headquarters was the ‘falsehoods’ of ministers in Parliament during the pre-Christmas session. On 12 December Sidney Herbert had told the Commons, with impressive precision, that when the troops on their way and awaiting embarkation had reached Balaclava, ‘no fewer than 54,736 officers and men would, from first to last, have passed under the command of Lord Raglan’. But these figures were received with cynical incredulity when newspaper reports of the speech reached the Crimea. ‘It makes me so angry to read them,’ Strange Jocelyn told his father on to January. ‘After all the drafts sent out to us, three weeks ago and many before, what is my Battalion on Parade? Only 280 men, including servants and Corporals; the same with the Coldstreams....The 9th and 63rd Regiments have actually not a dozen men left in each regiment.’ England does not know what we are come to, by mere mismanagonent,’ Jocelyn added. ‘The wooden huts, people in England took so much trouble and expense about, are littering about the Streets of Balaclava. and mostly used as planks for crossing through the mud.’ There was widespread disappointment over the huts, whose provision had been given such prominence at Westminster and in the newspapers. Colonel Gordon, writing home a day after Major Jocelyn, reported that the huts had arrived from England, but were too heavy to be moved to the Heights along muddy tracks rendered almost impassable by rain and sleet. Six days later Captain Duberly felt certain ‘there are not 12 wooden huts at present erected in the Crimea’.[377]
When, over the first five weeks of 1855, The Times published extracts from letters sent by officers in the Crimea, many people asserted that they could not be genuine; this bitter catalogue of ill-natured grievances must surely he a weapon in the private vendetta of Delane and the army authorities, they claimed. But the tone and content of the letters is so similar to genuine correspondence that there is no reason to question their authenticity. The Morning Herald, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily News, as well as The Times published articles which used the evidence of the letters to ridicule an antiquated military system. The Queen was indignant at the presumption of the newspapers in attacking her army. She had long been at odds with them over their treatment of Lord Aberdeen for whom she possessed a protective affection, quite distinct from her feelings for other favourite prime ministers. A few weeks previously Aberdeen’s 25-year-old son and private secretary, Arthur Gordon MP, was accosted by his sovereign during a visit to Windsor. ‘Why do you let Lord Aberdeen read all these attacks on him in the newspapers?’ the Queen demanded. ‘It can do no good and I know it worries him.’ ‘It is not with my goodwill be reads them, Ma’am,’ Arthur Gordon explained, apologetically. ‘But you should take them all away and put them in the fire — say I told you,’ the Queen replied. ‘It is really no use, and Lord Aberdeen has public and private anxiety enough without those scribblers. I am quite annoyed at it’.[378] If Arthur Gordon passed the Queen’s remarks on to his father, it made no difference; the articles were read, and inwardly digested.
Often the anonymous extracts from people’s Crimean correspondence must have made familiar reading to the Prime Minister, for they seem to voice in stronger language Colonel Alexander Gordon’s complaints. The four letters which Aberdeen received in December and January gave him a clearer indication of the mood of Raglan’s army than any judiciously phrased despatch from headquarters to the War Secretaries. It was Alexander Gordon who let his father know of Sir George De Lacy Evans’s farewell conversation with the commander-in-chief, two months before the General — who was a Member for Westminster — arrived back in the Commons: ‘His parting advice to Raglan was “My Lord, Save your Army, and raise the siege”,’ Colonel Gordon reported, and he added, ‘I believe the same advice would be given by every General and Officer of Experience in this Army, if his opinion were asked’.[379] Fresh food remained scarce because of the rain, mud and lack of transport, the Prime Minister was told in the first week of December; ‘Our cavalry are dying List,’ a letter reported ten days later; boots, newly arrived from England, were so small that the men could not wear them in the trenches and were suffering from frost-bite; and illness had left some batteries so short of sentries that some guns would have to be spiked and abandoned.[380] All these misfortunes were known to Lord Aberdeen long before they appeared in the evidence of any committee of inquiry.
But the most impressive messages for the Prime Minister from a soldier son of undoubted personal courage were pleas for a negotiated peace, an end to a war whose character he doubted whether the Government had ever begun to understand. A rumour spread through the army at Christmas that peace talks had begun. ‘We hear we are to have peace directly,’ Alexander Gordon wrote on Boxing Day. ‘The whole army would be delighted if so for they are suffering very much from cold and wet. We hear from good authority (Lord Stratford) that the only difficulty about peace is the indemnity. I hope no such petty consideration will interfere to prevent it and it will be as well to bear in mind that we are not in Sebastopol yet — and that the place is five times stronger than on 17th October when we fired the first shots.’ Four weeks later the Colonel sent home a stark assessment of the situation: ‘If put to the vote in the army we should have peace immediately, for the men are suffering severely from wet and cold — about 200 become non-effective every day, of whom 50 or 60 die...Our infantry electives in the camp before Sebastopol today are 10,504. Deaths in the last 24 hours, 64. Tot
al sick here and at Scutari 16,588’; and he sent a final blunt and brief message on 2 February: ‘My humble opinion is that you had better make peace as soon as you can and not be too particular over the terms.’ But by then his father was no longer prime minister.[381]
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Fanny Duberly, too, had picked up the Christmas peace rumour: ‘Here is a report come from Lord Raglan’s that peace is proclaimed in London. Can this be true?’ she wrote to her sister on Holy Innocents’ Day.[382] But, whereas Colonel Gordon thought the army would be thankful if the war were brought to a speedy end, Mrs Duberly was horrified. Had all these sacrifices been in vain, then? A peace short of victory would make the ‘English people rise up and denounce the idea,’ she believed. The report was, to say the least of it, premature, but by the end of the first week in January there seemed a better prospect of peace than for many months. The Russians informed Buol, the Austrian Foreign Minister, and the British and French ambassadors in Vienna that they were prepared to discuss a peace settlement based upon the Four Points, provided that it did not impose any conditions concerning Russia’s position in the Black Sea which would wound the Tsar’s ‘honour and dignity’. Napoleon III was less interested in a compromise peace than in forcing Russia to break off negotiations, thus provoking Austria into active participation in the war alongside her allies. Palmerston, who had visited Napoleon in Paris at the end of November, was sympathetic to this policy, and so too were several British diplomats. But not Lord Aberdeen. Arthur Gordon describes in his diary for 8 January 1855 how on hearing of Russia’s willingness to discuss peace, his father ‘not a little rejoiced thereat’. The Prime Minister’s only doubts were whether the Tsar was sincere and whether he personally had enough standing in Britain to get away with a compromise settlement. Palmerston, he suspected, could gain acceptance of peace terms which the country would never allow him to consider.[383]