by A. N. Wilson
It is always rather difficult to take the temperature of Queen Victoria’s expressions of puritanism, especially where sex is in question. As her boys grew up, this was usually, but not always, her tone (‘You know what he is . . . ’). But she enjoyed extremely cordial relations with her cousin George Cambridge, while turning a blind eye to his marital irregularities, and if she chose to love a man, such as Lord Melbourne, she would always overlook this side to their nature. Having been brought up by a widow was different from being brought up, as Albert was, in a home broken by adultery; so her distaste for raffishness, though she would loyally echo her husband’s strong moral line, lacked the pathological edge which it possessed in his case.
In the event, the Emperor Napoleon III, who clearly favoured redheads like Harriet Howard, selected as his bride Mademoiselle Eugénie de Montijo, who had been settled in the Parisian demi-monde since 1851. Her pedigree was the subject of speculation. Her mother, daughter of the American Consul in Malaga (William Kirkpatrick), had married an illustrious Spanish aristocrat, the Count of Teba, who died in 1839. Whether the count was Eugénie’s father was never established to the gossips’ satisfaction, some going so far as to imagine that she was the daughter of Lord Palmerston. When Napoleon III himself speculated that she might be the daughter of Lord Clarendon, Eugénie’s mother replied, ‘Mais, sire, les dates ne correspondent pas.’25
Lady Augusta Bruce, lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria’s mother, and already a great friend of the Queen’s, attended the wedding at Notre-Dame, much impressed by the military uniforms, the velvet and ermine and silver of the vestments, the innumerable candles burning, but above all by the beauty of the bride.
Her beautifully chiselled features & marble complexion, her head so nobly put on, her exquisitely proportioned figure & graceful carriage, were most striking & the whole was like a Poet’s vision! I believe she is equally beautiful when seen close by but at the distance at which we saw her, – the effect was more that of a lovely picture – aerial, ideal. On her classically shaped head she wore a diamond crown or diadem, round her waist a row of magnificent diamonds to correspond, – the same as trimming round the ‘basque’ of her gown. A sort of cloud or mist of transparent lace enveloped her.
This thirty-year-old Scottish aristocrat – one of the handful of really interesting and intelligent people in Queen Victoria’s Court, whose letters are in the Sévigné league – was the daughter of the 7th Earl of Elgin, the man who purchased the Parthenon Marbles. Natural patriotism made her worship Eugénie’s beauty, whose ‘grace and dignity . . . came from the blood of Kirkpatrick!!’26
The ceremonies in Notre-Dame were not the only ecclesiastical rites organized that winter season by Napoleon III. A few weeks before his wedding, he had paid for Franciscan friars to march into the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and affix a silver star engraved with the emblem of France on the supposed spot where the Incarnate God had, 1,852 years previously, been laid in a manger.
Although the friars were exercising a privilege established by force in 1099, the Christian Holy Places had, by convention and habit, largely been the possession of the Greek Orthodox Church, whose bishops and monks had traditionally looked to Russia as their protector. What was superficially an ecclesiastical dispute was in fact highly political. The silver star of Bethlehem was a message to the Russians that, if they intended to carve up the Ottoman Empire, and capture the spoils of ‘the Sick Man of Europe’, they would find a rival imperial power in France. Incidentally, the celebrated Russian description of Turkey as ‘the Sick Man of Europe’ drew from Queen Victoria the tart observation, ‘The mode of proceeding at Constantinople is not such as would be resorted to towards a sick friend for whose life there exists much solicitude.’27
Derby’s coalition foundered at about the moment the Franciscans were setting out with their silver star and their screwdrivers for the Church of the Nativity. It was supplanted by another coalition led by the Peelite Lord Aberdeen. Disraeli was replaced as Chancellor of the Exchequer by William Ewart Gladstone. Palmerston, rather strangely for one whose entire political career had been in the sphere of foreign affairs, became, at this crucial moment of national history, the Home Secretary. The Foreign Secretary was Lord John Russell.
This was the Cabinet which would eventually take Britain to war in the Crimea: a fact shimmering with paradox, since the Prime Minister, Aberdeen, was probably one of the least bellicose politicians in history, while his old Harrovian contemporary, Pam, as unlike Aberdeen as chalk and cheese, was, notionally at least, involved with domestic matters. Palmerston, as so often in his life, was blessed with a mixture of amazing political luck and nous. As Home Secretary, he could scarcely be held to blame for the blunders which led Britain to war, nor for the maladroit way in which the war was conducted. As Home Secretary, he rightly attracted kudos for putting his weight and dynamism behind such very necessary reforms as forcing through the long-delayed Factory Act, controlling the hours which could be forced on workers. He also was swift to act on the discovery made by the enlightened Dr John Snow that cholera was water-borne, and he was the Home Secretary who began the work of clearing up London’s pollution and constructing proper drainage for the capital. He also brought to an end transportation to Tasmania as a criminal punishment, and introduced reform schools, rather than prison, for juvenile offenders. Nevertheless, the flavour of Palmerston’s home secretaryship was nicely captured by an anecdote in Greville’s diaries. Industrial strikes threatened to paralyse the North of England as workers demanded a 10 per cent increase in their wages. The Queen asked her Home Secretary whether he had heard any news of these strikes. ‘No, Madam,’ was the reply, ‘I have heard nothing, but it seems certain that the Turks have crossed the Danube.’28
All the while, of course, the minds of the Cabinet, of the press, of the Royal Family, and of the whole of Europe, were focused on Russia and Turkey.
Alarmed by the aggression represented by the Bethlehem Star, the Russian Emperor, Nicholas I, felt the moment had been reached when his Empire should reassert his traditional role as protector of the Holy Places. One of the many unfortunate circumstances in the whole story was that he chose as his legate an insensitive diplomat called Prince Menshikov. In April 1853, Menshikov went to Constantinople, where he conducted negotiations with the sultan and with representatives of the French and British Governments: the British Ambassador was Stratford Canning, now Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe. Menshikov pulled off what at first sight seemed like a Russian victory. Fuad Pasha, the Grand Vizier who had granted the Latins the privilege of putting the silver star in the Church of the Nativity, was forced to resign. The sultan reasserted the Russian right to protect the Holy Places. Menshikov, however, then pushed things too far by asking the Turks to agree to Nicholas I being the protector of all Orthodox believers within the Ottoman Empire. Negotiations were broken off, and Menshikov returned to Russia towards the end of May.
Following this failure, Russia occupied the Romanian principalities – where the Orthodox felt particularly threatened by the Muslims – on 2 July, and diplomatic relations between Russia and Turkey were broken off. To this day, historians disagree about the part played in events – up to the summer months of 1853 – by Britain. Did Stratford actually want to provoke a war with Russia? Did he yield so readily to Menshikov’s demand for the Holy Places in order to make him seem aggressive when he then expressed what he wanted more – namely protection of the Romanian Orthodox? Russian and Turkish politics reverberate with conspiracy theories. It is easy to see why, since the Crimean War was really in no one’s interest; and it is hard to see what ‘victory’ on either or any side would have achieved.
In the second half of 1853, there was an electric tension about the situation. The British Fleet was on alert, though where it should be deployed was a debatable matter. Russia was a vast empire, and as soon as the ‘hawks’ in Cabinet and the upper military echelons realized that war was a
possibility, they saw it as a chance to do much more than simply keep the Russians out of Constantinople. Here was an opportunity to control the Baltic, force Russia to return Åland and Finland to Sweden, to re-establish Poland as a sovereign state, to restore the mouth of the Danube to Turkey, to establish an independent Georgia, and many other aims.29
A conference of the Great Powers met in Vienna in July. The ambassadors drew up a form of words suggested partly by Napoleon III, and partly by Lord Clarendon, who had become Foreign Secretary in February. This document came to be known as the Vienna Note. It asked the sultan to promise not to modify any of the existing rules respecting the Christian subjects of his empire without first consulting France and Russia. The Russians accepted the Note; the Turks, obviously, rejected it, since it gave the Russians and the French the right, in effect, to police the Ottoman domains. The sultan said he would be faithful to previous agreements, but rejected the right of the French and the Russians to interfere.
By September, when the Royal Family had gone to Balmoral, the crisis had deepened. The Queen’s journal makes clear that conversation was of little else, except for those joyous moments when the prince or one of his guests shot a stag. Late in September, Palmerston spent nine days at the Castle, though the only thing the Queen recorded him doing was playing billiards with the prince. It would have been fascinating to watch these games. Did the two, whose antipathy was strong and mutual, play in silence, or did they talk about the Vienna Note, the Royal Navy, the Russian Emperor, Napoleon – as everyone else in the house was doing? The Queen merely noted how short-sighted and old Palmerston seemed. Another of the guests was Prince Alexander of Württemberg – one day to be the ‘Grosspapa’ of Queen Mary. He was stationed in St Petersburg and was probably closer than anyone else in the house party at Balmoral to knowing the situation in Russia. Alexander was convinced that there were ‘some Priests and Confessors . . . in the background, pushing on the Emperor, for the sake of the Greek Orthodox Church’.30 While Victoria urged him to get out of St Petersburg, and pursue a military career in Germany,31 he told them that the Emperor Nicholas had talked to him ‘constantly’ about the imminent downfall of the Ottoman Empire, and the necessity of settling with the other Great Powers what should be done about it.32 This conversation occurred two days before an unsuccessful grouse shoot, attended by the gillies Macdonald and John Brown, and during which the first and second drives failed.
The Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, was also staying at Balmoral. He had changed his mind so much about the progress of affairs in the previous few weeks that it was difficult to know where he stood. Worse still, he and the Queen were not good at talking directly to one another.
The Queen’s political inarticulacy was to be a problem for her later in her reign. With a dithering, indecisive Prime Minister, and a country which either might, or might not, go to war, it was clearly unsatisfactory, to say the least. When the politicians had left to go south to London, the news came that Turkey – on 4 October – had declared war on Russia. Reports reached Europe (some inaccurate, others exaggerated) of street fighting in Constantinople, and it was thought necessary, both in Paris and London, that the French and English needed to stand by.
The Prime Minister had left Balmoral with the impression that his sovereign was a hawk. He was surprised to discover otherwise, when, in the middle of October, she implored him to do anything possible to maintain the peace. After a long and painful audience at Windsor Castle on 16 October, Aberdeen admitted that, ‘Had he known what the Queen’s opinion exactly was, he might have been more firm, feeling himself supported by the Crown, but he had imagined from her letters that there was more animosity against Russia and leaning to war, in her mind.’33
Stratford was instructed by the Cabinet to ask the sultan not to send his fleet into the Black Sea. The British Navy was standing by to protect Constantinople from Russian invasion. The advice was too late to prevent the dispatch of a small flotilla to Sinope, which encountered the Russian Navy. The Turkish ships were destroyed.
Such was the mysterious war fever growing in Britain that Aberdeen was held responsible for this ‘massacre’ of Turkish war vessels. This point of view overlooked the fact that it was the Turks who had declared war on the Russians, that the two nations were at war, and that the flotilla appeared to be crossing the Black Sea to invade the Caucasus. Palmerston, ever with his eye to the main chance, resigned from the Cabinet. By now, the hawks were having it all their own way. The British Fleet was ordered into the Black Sea, and Aberdeen agreed to allow the French and the British to besiege the Russians at the Black Sea port of Sevastopol, to prevent further aggression against Turkey. Early in February, the Emperor Nicholas withdrew his ambassadors from Paris and London, and on 27 March (France) and the 28th (Britain) 1854, Turkey’s two new allies declared war on Russia.
PART THREE
TEN
AT WAR
ON 29 JANUARY 1854, crowds assembled outside the Tower of London. They had come to see Prince Albert and the Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, being led away to the Bloody Tower in chains. The rumour was the prince and the Prime Minister had been arrested for treason. Effigies of Aberdeen and Albert were set alight. Such is the nature of war fever. Within six weeks, France and Britain, somewhat improbable allies, would be at war with Russia over the relatively obscure question of who controlled the Holy Places of Palestine. The war was in reality a conflict about whether Russia could exercise control over the enfeebled Ottoman Empire, which stretched from the Balkans to what we now term the Middle East, and included large parts of North Africa. Much of the discussion in the British Foreign Office, and between Queen Victoria and her Government, in the run-up to the war, concerned the extent to which Russia had designs on Constantinople itself, the Ottoman imperial capital. This was why the war, when it came, was fought not in Palestine, but in the Crimean highlands adjoining the Black Sea.
It had been nearly forty years since Britain had been engaged in a European war. There existed no officer-training staff college, as in Prussia.1 No British officer had been trained in the writing or the transmission of orders. The French, Italians and above all the Prussians had a permanent military staff, ready to supply, inform and guide troops in the field. Forces of the Crown had, it is true, been engaged in almost continuous combat since the beginning of the reign, in Afghanistan, in Egypt, in parts of India. As recently as May 1852, the British had finally conquered Burma, having taken Rangoon and Bassein.
But the truth was, there were really two Victorian armies. There was a small, more or less professional, army, which did the fighting – chiefly in and around India, but also, sporadically, in the Cape colony, in Ashanti and in North Africa. The rest of the Queen’s army was the one which stayed at home. Its officers, all aristocrats who had bought their commissions, designed more and more elaborate uniforms for themselves, and did very little in the way of active service, unless a magistrate called out the militia to subdue the disgruntled populace.2 It was this army, the army of lords Cardigan, Raglan and Lucan, which was now to be put to the test. The Queen, and the diplomats, and the politicians, had been so concerned about the acceptability, or not, of the Vienna Note, the likelihood, or not, of the Turks or the Russians taking this or that course of action, in the latter half of 1853, that none of them had been unpatriotic enough to ask whether Her Majesty’s troops were in a position to fight a war against another great European army.
Wellington had wanted Prince Albert to succeed him as Commander-in-Chief of the British Army. Though no warrior, the prince would certainly have brought to the task all his customary efficiency, and what in a later age would have been called his management skills would have saved many lives. Viscount (Sir Henry) Hardinge, a clergyman’s son, who had proved himself an exemplary staff officer in the early days at Torres Vedras in 1814, and had a second bout of success thirty years later in the Sikh wars of 1845, was now sixty-seven years old. The inadequate prepara
tions for the Crimean War were laid at his door, and though his defenders would say that the deficiencies were not Hardinge’s fault alone, he could scarcely be absolved of responsibility.
Lord Raglan was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, and Marshal Arnaud of the French (Arnaud died in September to be replaced by Canrobert). Although it is called the Crimean War, there were in fact three fronts: the Danube, the Crimea and the Baltic. In March 1854, the Queen, Prince Albert and the four eldest children saw a ‘never to be forgotten sight’, the fleet sailing from Spithead. ‘My prayers will ever attend my great and splendid Navy!’ the Queen told her journal,3 as they sailed off to the Baltic (there was an early thaw that year) on an abortive and ill-prepared naval campaign against Russia. They failed to enlist the help of Sweden, which had been part of the plan, and by summer, this battle-front had been abandoned. Things proceeded with apparently more success in Turkey. Gallipoli and Constantinople were secured, and in July the decision was taken to enter the Black Sea and head for the Crimea, the aim being to hold the Russians in their own territory by a siege of Sevastopol. There were 80,000 Russian troops amassing in the Crimean peninsula. The British force was about 26,000, the French about 30,000 and the Turks 5,000. By the time autumn had set in, the troops, ill-equipped and badly prepared, were beginning to suffer the consequences of poor food and lack of cleanliness. Disease was sweeping through the ranks.
Raglan’s initial assault on the Russians on the banks of the River Alma were victorious – though there were setbacks: the French found all their equipment had been left on the wrong side of the river. It was a defeat in the field for the Russians, but Raglan took no prisoners, allowing the Russians to straggle away and take refuge in Sevastopol. The Russians, who had begun to think they would dig in at Sevastopol for the winter, realized that they would be besieged unless they attacked. Early in the morning of 25 October, they made a surprise assault on the British garrison in the port of Balaklava.