La Valette’s aggressive proclamation that the Latin right to the Holy Places had been ‘clearly established’, backed up by his threat of using the French navy to support these claims against Russia, was greeted with approval by the ultra-Catholic press in France. Napoleon himself was more moderate and conciliatory in his approach to the Holy Lands dispute. He confessed to the chief of the political directorate, Édouard-Antoine de Thouvenel, that he was ignorant about the details of the contested claims and regretted that the religious conflict had been ‘blown out of all proportion’, as indeed it had. But his need to curry favour with Catholic opinion at home, combined with his plans for an alliance with Britain against Russia, also meant that it was not in his interests to restrain La Valette’s provocative behaviour. It was not until the spring of 1852 that he finally recalled the ambassador from the Turkish capital, and then only following complaints about La Valette by Lord Malmesbury, the British Foreign Secretary. But even after his recall, the French continued with their gunboat policy to pressure the Sultan into concessions, confident that it would enrage the Tsar and hopeful that it would force the British to ally with France against Russian aggression.5
The policy paid dividends. In November 1852 the Porte issued a new ruling granting to the Catholics the right to hold a key to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, allowing them free access to the Chapel of the Manger and the Grotto of the Nativity. With Stratford Canning away in England, the British chargé d’affaires in Constantinople, Colonel Hugh Rose, explained the ruling by the fact that the latest gunship in the French steam fleet, the Charlemagne, could sail at eight and a half knots from the Mediterranean, while its sister ship, the Napoleon, could sail at twelve – meaning that the French could defeat the technologically backward Russian and Turkish fleets combined.6
The Tsar was furious with the Turks for caving in to French pressure, and threatened violence of his own. On 27 December he ordered the mobilization of 37,000 troops from the 4th and 5th Army Corps in Bessarabia in preparation for a lightning strike on the Turkish capital, and a further 91,000 soldiers for a simultaneous campaign in the Danubian principalities and the rest of the Balkans. It was a sign of his petulance that he made the order on his own, without consulting either Nesselrode, the Foreign Minister, Prince Dolgorukov, the Minister of War, or even Count Orlov, the chief of the Third Section, with whom he conferred nearly every day. At the court there was talk of dismembering the Ottoman Empire, starting with the Russian occupation of the Danubian principalities. In a memorandum written in the final weeks of 1852, Nicholas set out his plans for the partition of the Ottoman Empire: Russia was to gain the Danubian principalities and Dobrudja, the river’s delta lands; Serbia and Bulgaria would become independent states; the Adriatic coast would go to Austria; Cyprus, Rhodes and Egypt to Britain; France would gain Crete; an enlarged Greece would be created from the archipelago; Constantinople would become a free city under international protection; and the Turks were to be ejected from Europe.7
At this point Nicholas began a new round of negotiations with the British, whose overwhelming naval power would make them the decisive factor in any showdown between France and Russia in the Near East. Still convinced that he had forged an understanding with the British during his 1844 visit, he now believed that he could call on them to restrain the French and enforce Russia’s treaty rights in the Ottoman Empire. But he also hoped to convince them that the time had come for the partition of Turkey. The Tsar held a series of conversations with Lord Seymour, the British ambassador in St Petersburg, during January and February 1853. ‘We have a sick man on our hands,’ he began on the subject of Turkey, ‘a man gravely ill; it will be a great misfortune if he slips through our hands, especially before the necessary arrangements are made.’ With the Ottoman Empire ‘falling to pieces’, it was ‘very important’ for Britain and Russia to reach an agreement on its organized partition, if only to prevent the French from sending an expedition to the East, an eventuality that would force him to order his troops into Ottoman territory. ‘When England and Russia are agreed,’ the Tsar told Seymour, ‘it is immaterial what the other powers think or do.’ Speaking ‘as a gentleman’, Nicholas assured the ambassador that Russia had renounced the territorial ambitions of Catherine the Great. He had no desire to conquer Constantinople, which he wanted to become an international city, but for that reason he could not allow the British or the French to seize control of it. In the chaos of an Ottoman collapse he would be forced to take the capital on a temporary basis (en dépositaire) to prevent ‘the breaking up of Turkey into little republics, asylums for the Kossuths and Mazzinis and other revolutionists of Europe’, and to protect the Eastern Christians from the Turks. ‘I cannot recede from the discharge of a sacred duty,’ the Tsar emphasized. ‘Our religion as established in this country came to us from the East, and these are feelings, as well as obligations, which never must be lost sight of.’8
Seymour was not shocked by the Tsar’s partition plans, and in his first report to Lord John Russell, the Foreign Secretary, he even seemed to welcome the idea. If Russia and Britain, the two Christian powers ‘most interested in the destinies of Turkey’, could take the place of Muslim rule in Europe, ‘a noble triumph would be obtained by the civilization of the nineteenth century’, he argued. There were many in the coalition government of Lord Aberdeen, including Russell and William Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who wondered whether it was right to go on propping up the Ottoman Empire while Christians were being persecuted by the Turks. But others were committed to the Tanzimat reforms and wanted time for them to work. Procrastination certainly suited the British, since they were caught between the Russians and the French, whom they distrusted equally. ‘The Russians accuse us of being too French,’ the astute Queen Victoria remarked, ‘and the French accuse us of being too Russian.’ The cabinet rejected the Tsar’s notion that an Ottoman collapse was imminent and agreed not to plan ahead for hypothetical contingencies – a course of action likely in itself to hasten the demise of the Ottoman Empire by provoking Christian uprisings and inspiring repressions by the Turks. Indeed, the Tsar’s insistence on an imminent collapse raised suspicions in Westminster that he was plotting and precipitating it by his actions. As Seymour noted of his conversation with the Tsar on 21 February, ‘it can hardly be otherwise but that the Sovereign who insists with such pertinacity upon the impending fate of a neighbouring state must have settled in his own mind that the hour of its dissolution is at hand’.9
In his later conversations with Seymour, Nicholas became more confident and even more revealing about his partition plans. He talked of reducing Turkey to a vassal state, as he had done with Poland, and of giving independence to the Danubian principalities, Serbia and Bulgaria, under Russian protection; and he claimed that he had the support of Austria. ‘You must understand,’ he told Seymour, ‘that when I speak of Russia, I speak of Austria as well. What suits the one, suits the other, our interests as regards Turkey are perfectly identical.’ Seymour for his part was increasingly put off by the Tsar’s ‘rash and reckless’ plans – he seemed prepared to gamble everything on a war against Turkey – and put them down to the arrogance of autocratic power accumulated over nearly thirty years.10
The Tsar’s confidence was surely also based on his misapprehension that he enjoyed the support of the British government; he felt that he had formed a bond with Lord Aberdeen in 1844, when Aberdeen, now Prime Minister and the most pro-Russian of all the British leaders, was Foreign Secretary. Nicholas assumed that Aberdeen’s backing for Russia’s position in the Holy Lands dispute implied British agreement with his partition plans. In a dispatch from London in early February, the Russian ambassador Baron Brunov informed the Tsar that Aberdeen had remarked off the cuff that the Ottoman government was the worst in the world and that the British had little inclination to support it any longer. The report encouraged Nicholas to speak more freely to Seymour and (in the belief that an Anglo-French alliance was no longer to be
feared) to take a more aggressive line against the French and the Turks in the spring of 1853.11 He had no idea of the growing isolation of Aberdeen within his own cabinet on the Eastern Question; no appreciation of the general drift in British policy against Russia.
To force the Sultan to restore Russia’s rights in the Holy Places, the Tsar dispatched his own envoy to Constantinople in February 1853. The choice of envoy was deliberate and itself a sign of his militant intentions for the mission. Instead of choosing a seasoned diplomat who might have furthered peace, Nicholas decided on a military man with a fearful reputation. Prince Alexander Menshikov was 65 years old, a veteran of the wars against the French in 1812, and an admiral in the war against the Turks in 1828–9, when he was castrated by a cannonball. He had experience as a naval minister involved in plans to seize the Turkish Straits, as governor-general of occupied Finland in 1831 and as a negotiator with Persia. Menshikov was a ‘remarkably well informed man’, in Seymour’s estimation, ‘with more independence of character than perhaps belongs to any of the Emperor’s associates, his peculiar turn of thought constantly showing itself by sarcastic observations which make him a little dreaded in St Petersburg’. But he lacked the necessary tact and patience to act as an appeaser with the Turks, which, as Seymour wrote, was noteworthy.
If it were necessary to send a military man to Constantinople the Emperor could hardly have made a better selection … than he has done; it is however impossible not to reflect that the choice of a soldier has in itself a certain significance, and that should a negotiation … prove ineffectual, the negotiator may readily become the commander who has authority to call in 100,000 soldiers and to place himself at their head.12
Menshikov’s mission was to demand from the Sultan the nullification of the November ruling in favour of the Catholics, the restoration of Greek privileges in the Holy Sepulchre, and reparation in the form of a formal convention or sened that would guarantee the treaty rights of Russia (supposedly dating back to the 1774 Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji) to represent the Orthodox not just in the Holy Lands but throughout the Ottoman Empire. If the French resisted Greek control of the Holy Sepulchre, Menshikov was to propose a secret defensive alliance in which Russia would put a fleet and 400,000 Russian troops at the Sultan’s disposal, should he ever need them against a Western power, on condition that he exercised his sovereignty in favour of the Orthodox. According to his diary, Menshikov was given the command of the army and the fleet ‘and the post of envoy-plenipotentiary of peace or war’. His instructions were to combine persuasion with military threats. The Tsar had already approved plans to occupy the Danubian principalities and grant them independence if the Turks rejected Menshikov’s demands. He had ordered the advance of 140,000 soldiers to the frontiers of the principalities, and was prepared to use these troops with the Black Sea Fleet to seize Constantinople if that should be needed to force the Sultan into submission. There was a flamboyant review of the fleet at Sevastopol to coincide with Menshikov’s departure for the Turkish capital, where he arrived on the aptly named steam frigate Thunderer on 28 February. Cheered by a huge crowd of Greeks who had gathered at the port to welcome him, Menshikov was accompanied by a large suite of military and naval officers, including General Nepokoichitsky, chief of staff of the 4th Army Corps, and Vice-Admiral Vladimir Kornilov, chief of staff of the Black Sea Fleet, whose mission was to spy on the defences of the Bosporus and Constantinople in preparation for a lightning attack.13
Menshikov’s demands stood little chance of being met in their original form. The fact that the Tsar had even thought they might succeed suggests how far removed he was from political reality. The draft of the sened prepared by Nesselrode went well beyond the dispute in the Holy Lands. In effect, Russia was demanding a new treaty that would reassert its rights of protection of the Greek Church throughout the Ottoman Empire and (in so far as the Orthodox patriarchs were to be appointed for life) without any control by the Porte. European Turkey would become a Russian protectorate, and the Ottoman Empire would in practical terms become a dependency of Russia, always threatened by her military might.
But whatever chances of diplomatic success the admiral might have had, they were ruined by the way Menshikov behaved in the Turkish capital. Two days after he arrived he broke with diplomatic precedent and insulted the Turks by appearing in civilian clothes and an overcoat instead of full uniform for his ceremonial welcome by the Porte. Meeting the Grand Vizier Mehmet Ali, Menshikov immediately demanded the dismissal of Fuad Efendi, the Foreign Minister, who had caved in to the French in November, and refused to begin negotiations until a new Foreign Minister, more amenable to Russia’s interests, had been appointed. In a calculated affront to Fuad, Menshikov refused to speak with him, in full view of a large crowd; it was an act to demonstrate that a minister hostile to Russia ‘would be humiliated and punished even in the midst of the sultan’s court’.14
The Turks were appalled by Menshikov’s behaviour, but the build-up of Russian troops in Bessarabia was worrying enough to make them acquiesce to his demands. Swallowing their pride, they even allowed the Russian dragoman to interview Fuad’s successor, Rifaat Pasha, on behalf of Menshikov before appointing him as Foreign Minister. But Menshikov’s continued bullying, his threats to break off relations with the Porte unless it satisfied his demands at once, also alienated the Turkish ministers and made them more inclined to resist his pressure by turning to the British and the French for help. It was a question of defending Turkey’s sovereignty.
By the end of the first week of Menshikov’s mission, the gist of his instructions had been leaked or sold by Turkish officials to all the Western embassies, and a nervous Mehmet Ali had consulted with the French and British chargés d’affaires, secretly requesting them to call up their fleets to the Aegean in case they were needed to defend the Turkish capital against an attack by the Russians. Colonel Rose was particularly alarmed at Menshikov’s actions. He feared that the Russians were about to impose on the Turks a new Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi, ‘or something worse’, by the occupation of the Dardanelles (a clear abrogation of the 1841 Straits Convention). He believed he had to act, without waiting until the return of Stratford Canning, who had resigned the ambassadorship in January but had been reappointed by the Aberdeen government in February. On 8 March Rose sent a message by fast steamer to Vice-Admiral Sir James Dundas in Malta calling on him to bring up his squadron to Urla near Izmir. Dundas refused to obey the order without confirmation from the government in London, where a group of ministers, who were later to become the ‘inner cabinet’ of the Crimean War,i met to discuss Rose’s appeal on 20 March. The ministers were concerned by the Russian military build-up in Bessarabia, by the ‘vast naval preparations at Sevastopol’, and the ‘hostile language’ used by Menshikov towards the Porte. Convinced that the Russians were preparing to destroy Turkey, Russell was inclined to let their fleets advance into the Bosporus and seize the Turkish capital so that Britain and France could use the defence of the Straits Convention as a reason to launch a full-out naval war against Russia in the Black Sea and the Baltic. Supported by Palmerston, Russell would have had the majority of the British public on his side. But the other ministers were more cautious. They were wary of the French, whom they still regarded as a military threat, and disagreed with Russell that an Anglo-French alliance would counteract the challenge of the French steam fleet to British maritime power. They took the view that the French had provoked the Russians, who deserved a concession in the Holy Lands, and trusted the assurances of Baron Brunov (‘as a gentleman’) that the Tsar’s intentions remained peaceful. On this basis they rejected Rose’s request for a squadron. It was not up to chargés d’affaires, it seemed to them, to call up fleets or decide matters of war and peace; and Rose had allowed himself to be swayed by ‘the alarm of the Turkish government … and the rumours that obtained general credit at Constantinople of the advancing army and fleet of Russia’. The ministers decided that they would wait for Stratford Canning to re
turn to the Turkish capital and sort out a peaceful settlement.15
News of Rose’s summons to Dundas arrived in Paris on 16 March.
In a cabinet meeting to discuss the situation three days later, Drouyn de Lhuys, the Foreign Minister, painted a picture of imminent catastrophe: ‘The last hour of Turkey has been tolled, and we must expect to see the double-headed eagle [of the Romanovs] planted on the towers of St Sophia.’ Drouyn rejected the idea of sending in a fleet, at least not until the British did, in case they should be isolated in Europe, which feared the reassertion of Napoleonic France. This was also the position of the other ministers, except Persigny, who claimed that Britain ‘would rejoice and join our side’ if France took a stand ‘to stop the march of Russia towards Constantinople’. For Persigny it was a question of national honour. The army that had carried out the coup d’état of 2 December was an ‘army of praetorians’ with a heritage of glory to defend. He warned Napoleon that if he temporized, as his ministers advised, ‘the first time you pass before your troops, you will see their faces saddened, the ranks silenced, and you will feel the ground shake beneath your feet. So, as you well know, to win back the army you must take some risks; and you, Messieurs, who would have peace at any price, you will be thrown into a terrible conflagration.’ At this point the Emperor, who had been wavering over what to do, succumbed to the argument of Persigny and ordered the advance of the French fleet, not as far as the Dardanelles, but to Salamis, in Greek waters, as a warning to the Russians that ‘France was not disinterested in what took place in Constantinople’.16
The Crimean War Page 14