I hold that the real policy of England – apart from questions which involve her own particular interests, political or commercial – is to be the champion of justice and right; pursuing that course with moderation and prudence, not becoming the Quixote of the world, but giving the weight of her moral sanction and support wherever she thinks that justice is, and wherever she thinks that wrong has been done.20
Urquhart’s Russophobia may have been at odds with Britain’s foreign policy in the 1840s but it had considerable support in Parliament, where there was a powerful lobby of politicians who backed his calls for a tougher line against Russia, including Lord Stanley and Stratford Canning, who replaced Ponsonby as ambassador to Constantinople in 1842. Outside Parliament, Urquhart’s backing for free trade (the major reform issue of the 1840s) won him a broad following among Midlands and northern businessmen, who were persuaded by his frequent public speeches that Russian tariffs were a major cause of Britain’s economic depression. He also had the support of influential diplomats and men of letters, including Henry Bulwer, Sir James Hudson and Thomas Wentworth Beaumont, co-founder of the British and Foreign Review, which became increasingly hostile to Russia under Urquhart’s influence.
As the decade wore on, a mood of growing Russophobia was to be found in even the most moderate intellectual circles. Highbrow periodicals like the Foreign Quarterly Review, which had previously discounted the ‘alarmist’ warnings of a Russian threat to the liberty of Europe and British interests in the East, succumbed to the anti-Russian atmosphere. Meanwhile, among the broader public – in churches, taverns, lecture halls and Chartist conventions – hostility to Russia was rapidly becoming a central reference point in a political discourse about liberty, civilization and progress that helped shape the national identity.
Sympathies for Turkey, fears for India – nothing fuelled Russophobia in Britain as intensely as the Polish cause. Championed by liberals throughout Europe as a just and noble fight for freedom against Russian tyranny, the Polish uprising – and its brutal suppression – did more than any other issue to involve the British in the affairs of the Continent and exacerbate the tensions that led to the Crimean War.
Poland’s history could hardly have been more tormented. During the previous half-century the large old Polish Commonwealth (the Kingdom of Poland united with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) had been partitioned no less than three times: twice (in 1772 and 1795) by all three neighbouring powers (Russia, Austria and Prussia) and once (in 1792) by the Russians and the Prussians on the grounds that Poland had become a stronghold of revolutionary sentiment. As a result of these partitions the Polish kingdom had lost more than two-thirds of its territory. Despairing of ever regaining their independence, the Poles turned to Napoleon in 1806, only to see their territory further carved up on his defeat. In 1815, in the Treaty of Vienna, the European powers established Congress Poland (an area roughly corresponding to the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw) and placed it under the protection of the Tsar on condition that he maintain Poland’s constitutional liberties. But Alexander never fully recognized the new state’s political autonomy – it was a tall order to combine autocracy in Russia and constitutionalism in Poland – while the repressive rule of Nicholas I further alienated many Poles. Throughout the 1820s the Russians violated the terms of the treaty – rolling back the freedoms of the press, imposing taxes without the consent of the Polish parliament, and using special powers to persecute the liberals opposed to tsarist rule. The final straw came in November 1830 when the viceroy of Poland, the Tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Constantine, issued an order to conscript Polish troops for the suppression of revolutions in France and Belgium.
The uprising began when a group of Polish officers from the Russian Military Academy in Warsaw rebelled against the Grand Duke’s order. Taking arms from their garrison, the officers attacked the Belvedere Palace, the main seat of the Grand Duke, who managed to escape (disguised in women’s clothes). The rebels took the Warsaw arsenal and, supported by armed civilians, forced the Russian troops to withdraw from the Polish capital. The Polish army joined the uprising. A provisional government was established, headed by Prince Adam Czartoryski, and a national parliament was called. The radicals who took control declared a war of liberation against Russia and in a ceremony to dethrone the Tsar proclaimed Polish independence in January 1831. Within days of the proclamation, the Russian army crossed the Polish border and advanced towards the capital. The troops were led by General Ivan Paskevich, a veteran of the wars against the Turks and the Caucasian mountain tribes, whose brutal measures of repression made his name a byword for Russian cruelty in Poland’s national memory. On 25 February a Polish force of 40,000 men fought off 60,000 Russians on the Vistula to save Warsaw. But Russian reinforcements soon arrived and gradually wore down the Polish resistance. They surrounded the city, where hungry citizens began to loot and riot against the provisional government. Warsaw fell on 7 September after heavy fighting in the streets. Rather than submit to the Russians, the remainder of the Polish army, some 20,000 men, fled to Prussia, where they were captured by the Prussian government, another ruler of annexed Polish territory and an ally of Russia; Prince Czartoryski made his way to Britain, while many other rebels escaped to France and Belgium, where they were welcomed as heroes.
The reaction of the British public was just as sympathetic. After the suppression of the uprising, there were mass rallies, public meetings and petitions to protest against the Russian action and demand intervention by Britain. The call for war against Russia was joined by many sections of the press, including The Times, which asked in July 1831: ‘How long will Russia be permitted, with impunity, to make war upon the ancient and noble nation of the Poles, the allies of France, the friends of England, the natural, and, centuries ago, the tried and victorious protectors of civilized Europe against the Turkish and Muscovite barbarians?’ Associations of Friends of Poland were set up in London, Nottingham, Birmingham, Hull, Leeds, Glasgow and Edinburgh to organize support for the Polish cause. Radical MPs (many of them Irish) called for British action to defend the ‘downtrodden Poles’. Chartist groups of working men and women (engaged in the struggle for democratic rights) declared their solidarity with the Polish fight for freedom, sometimes even stating their readiness to go to war for the defence of liberty at home and abroad. ‘Unless the English nation rouses itself,’ declared the Chartist Northern Liberator, ‘we shall see the damnable spectacle of a Russian fleet armed to the teeth and crammed with soldiers, daring to sail through the English Channel, and probably to anchor at Spithead or Plymouth Sound!’21
The fight for freedom in Poland captured the imagination of the British public, who readily assimilated it to the ideals they liked to think of as ‘British’ – in particular, a love of liberty and the commitment to defend the ‘little man’ against ‘bullies’ (the principle upon which the British told themselves they went to war in 1854, 1914 and 1939). At a time of liberal reforms and new freedoms for the British middle class, powerful emotions were stirred by this association with the Polish cause. Shortly after the passing of the parliamentary Reform Act in 1832, the editor of the Manchester Times told a meeting of the Association of Friends of Poland that the British and the Poles were fighting the same battle for freedom:
It was our own fight (Hear, hear). We were fighting abroad upon the same principle as we were fighting against the boroughmongers at home. Poland was only one of our outposts. All the distresses of England and the continent might be traced to the first division of Poland. If that people could have remained free and unshackled, we should never have seen the barbarian hordes of Russia ravaging all Europe; and the Kalmyks and Cossacks of the despot bivouacking in the streets and gardens of Paris … Was there a single sailor in our navy, or a single marine, who would not rejoice to be sent forth to lift up his hand in the cause of freedom and in aid of the unfortunate Poles? (Cheers) The expense would not be great to blow the castle of Kronstadt around the Russian despot’s ears. (Cheers
) In a month … our navy should have swept every Russian merchant vessel from every sea upon the face of the globe. (Cheers) Let a fleet be sent to the Baltic to close up the Russian ports, and what would the Emperor of Russia be then? A Kalmyk surrounded by a few barbarian tribes (Cheers), a savage, with no more power upon the sea, when opposed by England and France, than the Emperor of China had (Cheers).22
The presence of Prince Czartoryski, ‘Poland’s uncrowned king’, in London increased British sympathy for the Polish cause. The fact that the exiled Pole was a former Russian foreign minister gave his warnings about Russia’s menace to Europe even greater credibility. Czartoryski had entered the foreign service of Tsar Alexander I at the age of 33 in 1803. He thought that Poland could regain her independence and a good deal of her land by fostering friendly relations with the Tsar. As a member of the Tsar’s Secret Committee he had once submitted an extensive memorandum aiming at the complete transformation of the European map: Russia would be protected from the Austrian and Prussian threat by a restored and reunited Kingdom of Poland under the protection of the Tsar; European Turkey would become a Balkan kingdom dominated by the Greeks with Russia in control of Constantinople and the Dardanelles; the Slavs would gain their freedom from the Austrians under the protection of Russia; Germany and Italy would become independent nation states organized on federal lines like the United States; while Britain and Russia together were to maintain the equilibrium of the Continent. The plan was unrealistic (no tsar would consent to the restoration of the old Polish-Lithuanian kingdom).
After Poland’s national aspirations were dashed with Napoleon’s defeat, Czartoryski found himself in exile in Europe, but returned to Poland in time for the November uprising. He joined the revolutionary executive committee, was elected president of the provisional government, and convened the national parliament. After the suppression of the insurrection, he fled to London, where he and other Polish émigrés carried on the fight against Russia. Czartoryski tried to persuade the British government to intervene in Poland and, if necessary, to fight a European war against Russia. What was now at hand, he told Palmerston, was an unavoidable struggle between the liberal West and the despotic East. He was vocally supported by several influential liberals and Russophobes, including George de Lacy Evans, Thomas Attwood, Stratford Canning and Robert Cutlar Fergusson, who all made speeches in the House of Commons calling for a war against Russia. Palmerston was sympathetic to the Polish cause and joined in condemnations of the Tsar’s actions, but, given the position of the Austrians and Prussians, who were unlikely to oppose Russia as they also owned chunks of Poland, he did not think it ‘prudent to support by force of arms the view taken by England’ and risk ‘involving Europe in a general war’. The appointment of the anti-Russian Stratford Canning as ambassador to St Petersburg (an appointment refused by the Tsar) was about as far as the British government would go in demonstrating its opposition to the Russian actions in Poland. Disillusioned by Britain’s inaction, Czartoryski left for Paris in the autumn of 1832. ‘They do not care about us now,’ he wrote. ‘They look to their own interests and will do nothing for us.’23
Czartoryski next took up residence at the Hôtel Lambert, the centre of the Polish emigration in Paris and in many ways the seat of the unofficial government of Poland in exile. The Hôtel Lambert group kept alive the constitutional beliefs and culture of the émigrés who gathered there, among them the poet Adam Mickiewicz and the composer Frédéric Chopin. Czartoryski maintained close relations with British diplomats and politicians calling for a war against Russia. He developed a strong friendship with Stratford Canning, in particular, and no doubt influenced his increasingly Russophobic views during the 1830s and 1840s. Czartoryski’s chief agent in London, Władisław Zamoyski, a former aide-de-camp to the Grand Duke Constantine who had played a leading part in the Polish uprising, kept good ties to Ponsonby and the Urquhart camp – he even helped to finance the Vixen adventure. Through Stratford Canning and Zamoyski, there is no doubt that Czartoryski exercised a major influence on the evolution of Palmerston’s thinking during the 1830s and 1840s, when the future British Crimean War leader gradually came round to the idea of a European alliance against Russia. Czartoryski also cultivated close relations with the liberal leaders of the July Monarchy in France, in particular with Adolphe Thiers, the Prime Minister of 1836–9, and François Guizot, the Foreign Minister of the 1840s and last Prime Minister of the July Monarchy, from 1847 to 1848. Both French statesmen realized the value of the Polish émigré as a friendly link to the British government and public opinion, which at that time were cool in their relations towards France. In this sense, through his exertions in London and Paris, Czartoryski was to play a signficant part in bringing about the Anglo-French alliance that would go to war with Russia in 1854.
Czartoryski and the Polish exiles of the Hôtel Lambert group also played a significant role in the rise of French Russophobia, which gained strength in the two decades before the Crimean War. Until 1830, French views of Russia were relatively moderate. Enough Frenchmen had been to Russia with Napoleon and returned with favourable impressions of its people’s character to counteract the writings of Russophobes, such as the Catholic publicist and statesman François-Marie de Froment, who warned against the dangers of Russian expansionism in Observations sur la Russie (1817), or the priest and politician Dominique-Georges-Frédéric de Pradt, who represented Russia as the ‘Asiatic enemy of liberty in Europe’ in his best-selling polemic Parallèle de la puissance anglaise et russe relativement à l’Europe (1823).24 But the Tsar’s opposition to the July 1830 Revolution had made him hated by the liberals and the Left, while Russia’s traditional allies, the legitimist supporters of the Bourbon dynasty, had strong Catholic opinions, which alienated them from the Russians on the question of Poland.
The image of Poland as a martyred nation was firmly established in the French Catholic imagination by a series of works on Polish history and culture in the 1830s, none more influential than Mickiewicz’s Livre des pèlerins polonais (Book of Polish Pilgrims), translated from the Polish with a preface by the extreme Catholic publicist Charles Montalembert, and published with the addition of a ‘Hymn to Poland’ by the priest and writer Félicité de Lamennais.25 French support for Poland’s national liberation was strongly reinforced by religious solidarity, which extended to the Ruthenian (Uniate) Catholics of Belarus and western Ukraine, territories once dominated by Poland, where Catholics were forcibly converted to the Russian Church after 1831. The religious persecution of the Ruthenians attracted little attention in France during the 1830s, but when that persecution spread to Congress Poland in the early 1840s Catholic opinion was outraged. Pamphlets called for a holy war to defend the ‘five million’ Polish Catholics forced by Russia to renounce their faith. Encouraged by a papal manifesto – ‘On the Persecution of the Catholic Religion in the Russian Empire and Poland’ – in 1842, the French press joined in condemnations of Russia. ‘Since today all that remains of Poland is its Catholicism, the Tsar Nicholas has picked on it,’ declared the influential Journal des débats in an editorial in October 1842. ‘He wants to destroy the Catholic religion as the last and strongest principle of Polish nationality, as the last freedom and sign of independence that this unhappy people has, and as the last obstacle to the establishment in his vast empire of a unity of laws and morals, of ideas and faith.’26
French anger at the Tsar’s persecution of the Catholics reached fever pitch in 1846, when reports arrived of the brutal treatment of the nuns of Minsk. In 1839, the Synod of Polotsk, in Belarus, had proclaimed the dissolution of the Greek Catholic Church, whose pro-Latin clergy had actively supported the Polish insurrection of 1831, and ordered all its property to be transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church. The leader of the Polotsk Synod was a pro-Russian bishop called Semashko, who had previously been chaplain to a convent of 245 nuns in Minsk. One of his first acts on taking over the episcopate was to order the nuns to submit to the Russian Church. Accordin
g to the reports that arrived in France, when the nuns refused, Semashko had them arrested. With their hands and feet bound in irons, the nuns were taken to Vitebsk, where fifty of them were imprisoned and forced to perform heavy manual labour in their iron chains, and suffered dreadful torture and beatings by the guards. Then, in the spring of 1845, four of the sisters managed to escape. One of them, the abbess of the convent, Mother Makrena Mieczysławska, then aged 61, made her way to Poland, where she was helped by the Archbishop of Poznan, and then taken by his Church officials to Paris. She recounted her appalling tale to the Polish émigrés of the Hôtel Lambert group. Makrena next brought her account to Rome, and met with Pope Gregory XVI just before the Tsar’s visit to the Vatican in December 1845. It is said that Nicholas emerged from his audience with the Pope covered with shame and confusion, having had his denials of the persecution of the Catholic Ruthenians refuted by documents in which he himself had praised the ‘holy deeds’ of Semashko.
The story of the ‘martyred nuns’ of Minsk was first published in the French newspaper Le Correspondant in May 1846 and retold many times in popular pamphlets. It quickly spread throughout the Catholic world. Russian diplomats and government agents in Paris tried to discredit Makrena’s version of events, but a medical examination by papal authorities confirmed that she had indeed been beaten over many years. The story had a powerful and lasting impact on French Catholics as an illustration of how the Tsar was ‘spreading Orthodoxy to the West’ and converting Catholics ‘by force of arms’.27 This idea was a major influence on French opinion in the Holy Lands dispute against Russia.f
The fear of religious persecution was matched by the fear of a gargantuan Russia sweeping away European civilization. One of Czartoryski’s fellow-exiles, Count Valerian Krasinki, was the author of a series of pamphlets warning of the dangers to the West of a Russian Empire stretching from the Baltic and Adriatic seas to the Pacific Ocean. ‘Russia is an aggressive power,’ Krasinki wrote in one of his most widely circulated books, ‘and a single glance at the acquisitions she has made in the course of one century is sufficient to establish this fact beyond every controversy.’ Since the time of Peter the Great, he argued, Russia had swallowed up more than half of Sweden, territories from Poland equal to the size of the Austrian Empire, Turkish lands greater in size than the Kingdom of Prussia, and lands from Persia equal to the size of Great Britain. Since the first partition of Poland in 1772, Russia had advanced her frontier 1,370 kilometres towards Vienna, Berlin, Dresden, Munich and Paris; 520 kilometres towards Constantinople; to within a few kilometres of the Swedish capital; and it had taken the Polish capital. The only way to safeguard the West from this Russian menace, he concluded, was through the restoration of a strong and independent Polish state.28
The Crimean War Page 11