by Alan Palmer
Meanwhile, on the fifth day of the Grand Council’s deliberations, an important and less publicized conference took place in the Winter Palace. The Austrians had refused to tone down their demands, and the King of Prussia had again warned the Tsar that Berlin would almost certainly have to follow Vienna’s lead in breaking off all relations with Russia. Esterhazy, the Tsar told his ministers, would leave St Petersburg for the last time on 18 January, three days ahead. What was settled in this second Imperial Council in a fortnight would therefore be decisive. Nesselrode read a memorandum prepared by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which insisted that, if the Russians did not now accept the Franco-Austrian terms, they would be forced to accept even harsher ones sooner or later. Other ministers expressed fears of revolt in Finland and Poland, complained of a shortage of munitions, and conjured up the spectre of national bankruptcy. Long before the meeting ended, the Tsar was nodding his head in approval every time it was suggested that Russia should accept the Austrian demands and hope that private contacts in Paris would offset their harsh character. Far more bitterness was felt towards Francis Joseph than towards Napoleon III.[521]
Alexander Gorchakov informed Count Buol in Vienna in the early evening of 16 January that Russia unconditionally accepted the allied conditions for peace. An enterprising journalist, T.O’M. Bird, telegraphed the news to The Times three hours later, and a special edition was on sale in the City by eleven o’clock on the morning of 17 January.[522] But for the remainder of that month and for most of February there was still uncertainty, particularly in London. After a cabinet meeting on 28 January Panmure wrote urgently to Codrington insisting that although ‘peace looks more definite...you are not to relax any preparations’. Eleven days later he was still discussing with Codrington the coming campaigning season: would ‘one great and vigorous effort to sweep the Crimea’ really ‘be as bloody an affair’ as the General contemplated, he wondered?[523] By then, in Vienna, the Russian, British and French ambassadors and the Austrian Foreign Minister had agreed that peace delegates, with plenipotentiary authority, would assemble in Paris not later than 25 February to conclude an armistice and prepare a final treaty.[524]
The war was not yet over. Suddenly, on 29 January, in a final gesture of belligerency, all the Russian guns in the tiered emplacements from the northern shore up to Star Fort had begun a bombardment of the amputated city and the Karabelnaya district. But apart from the dull thud of explosions as the British demolished the quays and the French blew up Fort Nicholas, there was for the most part a brooding silence around the Sebastopol Heights throughout February. Living conditions for British troops were far better than in the previous winter. But the French, whose standards of sanitation and medical care had been so high under Canrobert, suffered heavy losses in these weeks of inactivity. Nearly 53,000 soldiers were admitted to the fourteen French hospitals around Constantinople in the first three months of 1856, and another 5,000 died on transports between the Crimea and the Bosphorus. Typhus was the greatest scourge, but cholera, too, continued to claim its victims; and there is no doubt that neglect, and a shortage of medical staff, forced the death toll to rise even higher. Unexpectedly those Frenchmen who survived the ravages of disease began to see that, while returned veterans were feted in Paris, those left in the Crimea had become a forgotten army.[525]
Eventually, on 28 February the electric telegraph brought news that an armistice, valid until 31 March, had been signed two thousand miles away, in Paris. Next morning at ten o’clock Major-General Timofiev, an elderly artilleryman, rode down with his staff and an escort of Cossacks under a white flag to the Traktir Bridge, where mounds of improvised graves recalled the summer slaughter twenty-eight weeks before. At the same time a brigade commander from the 3rd Division, General Barnard, together with a group of British, French and Sardinian-Piedmontese officers, came down the slopes towards the Chernaya to greet them. The allied delegation crossed the bridge and began detailed talks to ensure that no more shots were exchanged. More and more officers from both sides wandered curiously forward to the bridge: the Russians carried white kid gloves, some even wore patent leather boots, a British observer noted with surprise. At last Timoeev, Barnard and their staff remounted their horses and rode together through a line of troops on both sides of the bridge. Salutes were exchanged; and ‘our friends, the enemy’ turned back across the river.[526] The campaign, anticlimactic to the end, was over.
Chapter Seventeen – The Coming of Peace
Most European statesmen referred to the forthcoming assembly in Paris as a ‘conference’; they envisaged a series of meetings to draw up a treaty of peace between rival belligerents. Napoleon III had grander ideas. He wished to settle the affairs of all Europe, not simply to seek the latest answer to the interminable Eastern Question; any gathering of foreign ministers and diplomats in the capital of his Empire must therefore follow the precedents set in 1814 at Vienna, on his uncle’s downfall. Visiting diplomats were left in no doubt of the dignity of the occasion for, in the last week of February, the official gazette announced the imminent opening, at the new Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay, of the ‘Congress of Paris’.[527]
As at Vienna, the host country’s Foreign Minister took the chair, although Walewski never won the authoritative prestige possessed by Metternich in 1814-15. France also supplied the Secretary General, Vincente Benedetti, the diplomat who had summoned the French fleet to Turkish waters at the start of the Eastern Crisis, three years before. Four foreign delegates were already resident in Paris: the British ambassador, Lord Cowley, was his country’s second plenipotentiary; and the Austrian, Sardinian-Piedmontese, and Turkish envoys participated in all the preliminary discussions, too. No seat was set aside at the Congress for a Swedish delegate, despite the recent showy bluster of the Canrobert Mission; and the Prussians, who had consistently rebuffed British efforts to tempt them to march against Russia, were only admitted to the discussions in the fourth week of the Congress, as signatories of the 1841 Straits Convention.
The Austrians sought to exclude any representatives of Sardinia-Piedmont because, as Buol complained to Clarendon, to ‘erect Sardinia into a first-class Power...could disturb the settled order of things in Europe’. But the British public admired their Italian ally; letters home from the Crimea mentioned with affectionate tolerance the ‘Sardines’ who wore a ‘kind of wide-awake hat with feathers in it’ and ‘General Marmalade’, their Commander-in-Chief, who looked so extraordinarily like the Emperor of the French. La Marmora, Queen Victoria declared, was ‘a universal favourite’ when he visited Windsor in January. ‘The Queen has the greatest respect for that noble little country,’ she wrote to Clarendon, adding that she rejoiced ‘to hear Count Cavour is coming to Paris’.[528] Throughout the Congress, the British warmly supported the Piedmontese, partly from genuine sympathy with Cavour’s anti-papist liberalism and partly from self-interest, for an Italian commercial dependency would offer good markets for trade and investment. Before setting out for Paris, Clarendon told the French ambassador in London that as Sardinia-Piedmont had fought not for narrowly territorial gains but for the cause of Europe, King Victor Emmanuel’s envoys had a right to discuss matters of concern to the Continent as a whole.[529]
The first plenipotentiary to reach Paris for the peace talks was Baron Brunnow, who had been serving as the Tsar’s envoy to the German Diet at Frankfurt since his departure from London two years before. The British Foreign Secretary arrived soon afterwards, on 16 February, and two days later Lady Clarendon could write to her niece that ‘George is glad that he came here’, as his presence ‘has a salutary effect on Walewski...of whom he has nothing to complain, he tells me’. Lady Clarendon also commented on how curious it seemed ‘to meet and almost to fall into Brunnow’s arms tonight’, dinner chez Walewski promising the renewal of old friendships rent asunder.[530] This, however, was a superficial judgement. Neither Clarendon nor ‘the chief in London trusted Walewski and deep suspicion and resentment continued to sep
arate the British and French throughout the Congress, especially when the Tsar’s principal plenipotentiary, Prince Orlov, arrived later that week.
Had Clarendon possessed the relative independence enjoyed by Castlereagh at Vienna or by Wellington at the Congress of Verona, his task might have been easier. But railways, steamships and the electric telegraph were bringing Paris nearer to Westminster. Almost daily the Foreign Secretary received precisely worded letters of advice and instruction — often ten pages or more in length — from his Prime Minister. When this rich source of unsolicited experience began to dry up, there followed a stream of cipher telegrams. If constitutional precedent had allowed the head of a British government to attend a protracted summit conference abroad, Palmerston would have come to Paris in person. He remained a convinced Russophobe, anxious to check the power of the Tsar’s army and navy in the Baltic and the Caucasus, as well as in south-eastern Europe. ‘The main and real object of the war,’ he had already told Lord Cowley, was ‘to curb the aggressive ambitions of Russia’; so far as the Ottoman Empire was concerned, Britain had fought ‘not so much to keep the Sultan and his Mussulmans in Turkey as to keep the Russians out of Turkey’; and Clarendon was warned against Orlov, who ‘is civil and courteous externally, but his inward mind is deeply impregnated with Russian insolence, arrogance and pride’.[531] These feelings were reciprocated. Nesselrode, for his part, no longer had any illusions about the British: ‘England is and will remain our chief and implacable foe,’ he wrote in the draft instructions prepared for Orlov before the Prince set out from St Petersburg in the second week of February.[532]
The Congress began in the pristine marble splendour of the Quai d’Orsay on 25 February. Over the following seven and a half weeks there were, technically, twenty-four sessions for the ministers and diplomats seated at the round green table of the Salon des Ambassadeurs. The Peace Treaty itself was signed on 30 March but diplomatic exchanges over the future of Italy, problems of maritime law, and international arbitration continued until 16 April. But, as at earlier congresses, most vital decisions were reached in private talks outside the Salon, many of them depending on conversations with the Emperor at the Tuileries. Napoleon’s plans had by now gone beyond any idea of a simple prestigious victory over Russia. He sought recognition as arbiter of Europe, redistributing territories according to principles of nationality which, though confusing to other statesmen, were clearly set out in his mind. Unlike Palmerston, he was not interested in the Caucasus, nor would he concern himself with Sweden and Finland if there was to be no more campaigning against the Russians. But there were three regions on which Bonapartist sentiment and the Paris Bourse concentrated his thoughts. He wanted to ‘do something for Italy’ and restore some form of Polish state; he would have liked an excuse to win for France the left bank of the Rhine; and he was responsive to an influential pressure group in his capital who reminded him that the Roumanian inhabitants of the Danubian Principalities were a Latin people claiming national recognition. As for Pélissier’s army in the Crimea, the sooner what remained of those 150,000 men returned to France the better: ‘The Emperor himself admitted to me,’ Clarendon wrote to Stratford de Redcliffe when the Congress was over, ‘that with 22,000 men in hospital, and likely to be more, peace had almost become a military as well as a financial and political necessity for him.’[533]
Palmerston wanted no appeasement of the Russians. He even hoped to set up autonomous Georgian and Circassian principalities, which were apparently to acknowledge the Sultan’s suzerainty.[534] Clarendon, however, sensed the dangers of isolation as soon as the Congress began, for Orlov wanted to link the return of the captured fortress of Kars to the Turks with concessions over Bessarabia. The French and the Austrians were willing to negotiate over these matters. Clarendon sought fresh instructions from London, warning Palmerston, ‘We may in the next forty-eight hours find ourselves standing alone and having to decide the grave question of peace or war.’ But the chief was in what the Foreign Secretary regarded as ‘his jaunty mood’: ‘Faint heart never won fair Lady,’ Palmerston replied on leap-day’s eve. ‘Fortune is the Lady, and our stoutness will win her in spite of all difficulties among friends and bluster from our opponents’; the most that the Prime Minister would admit was that it would be a mistake to ‘press Austria to make war in the event of hostilities being renewed in consequence of our refusal to let the Russians off about the Bessarabian frontier. This would be a sure way to go over to the side of Russia.’ Clarendon thereupon lost patience: ‘When you talk of “we” and of “our” going on with the war if the Russians are intractable, you are probably thinking of the France of two years ago, whereas it is no such thing,’ he replied. ‘Except the Emperor and Walewski, who does not care to act contrary to the Emperor’s orders, we have nobody here who is not prepared to make any peace.’ There was too, as Clarendon warned Palmerston, a danger that Napoleon would become an emperor of the revolutionaries, seeking to liberate all the oppressed nationalities of Europe, not merely Italians and Poles, but Roumanians, Hungarians and South Slavs as well. This was far too radical a crusade to be welcomed by a Whig flying liberal colours; and, faced by murmurs of dissent within his cabinet, Palmerston became less insistent on securing the unattainable.[535]
Meanwhile Orlov successfully toned down the allied demands.[536] Nothing more was said about autonomous Caucasian states, and with a show of magnanimity the Russians agreed to hand hack Kars in return for major concessions in Bessarabia. The Tsar was still forced to accept withdrawal from the banks of the Danube, but Russia retained more than two-thirds of the region in Bessarabia which the allies had originally sought to detach from his Empire. The small segment of southern Bessarabia which was handed over to the Danubian Principality of Moldavia was the only territory lost by Russia in the peace settlement. Only one minor change was made in northern waters: a separate convention signed by the plenipotentiaries of Britain, France and Russia on the same day as the Treaty of Paris provided that the Aaland Islands would no longer be fortified, nor would any military or naval establishment ever again be established in the archipelago. But, although Bomarsund might be a neutralized historical relic, the Tsar’s troops continued to garrison Kronstadt, Sveaborg and the other fortresses which had defied Admirals Napier and Richard Dundas in the Gulf of Finland until Imperial Russia collapsed in revolution more than sixty years later.
On 4 March the Congress began to consider a vital question for the Russians, the Third Point in the original demands of the allies, neutralization of the Black Sea. Reluctantly Alexander II had recognized, before Orlov left St Petersburg, that there was little hope of saving what remained of the dockyards and fortifications of Sebastopol from destruction. Nevertheless Orlov and Brunnow claimed that the demand for razing to the ground all naval arsenals did not require the dismantling of forts that were not in themselves depots. This argument made little impression on other delegations. Nor did the claim that warships were necessary on the Black Sea in order to check the slave trade and the carriage of dangerous contraband from small harbours in the Caucasus and Turkey’s Armenian coast to Western Europe. But the Russians gained more concessions than they had anticipated: against British pleas, the Congress did not specifically include the Sea of Azov in the clauses of the peace treaty which provided for neutralization of the Black Sea; and the Russians were allowed to keep shipyards and forts at the river ports of Nikolayev and Kherson, as well as some small armed vessels for coastal guard duties. Moreover the treaty specifically excluded ‘the Flag of War...of any other Power’ from the waters of the Black Sea; and once again, as in 1841, a revised Straits Convention closed the Dardanelles and Bosphorus to the passage of foreign warships so long as the Ottoman Empire was at peace. It was, however, these Black Sea clauses in Article XI of the Treaty of Paris which most rankled in St Petersburg. Never before had Europe’s statesmen restricted the right of a Great Power to maintain a fleet in its territorial waters.[537]