The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  If this had been a serious war – that is, had there been any need for British and French troops to be in the Crimean peninsula (defending, for instance, their own national security) – then the Charge of the Light Brigade would have been a catastrophe. Raglan now could not risk his two infantry divisions in an attempt to move the Russian forces from Causeway Heights; he dared not risk losing possession of the port of Balaclava and being cut off from the sea. The siege of Sebastopol could not get going until the brisk infantry victory at Inkerman had brought about the worst battle casualties of the war, on 5 November. (‘Quel abattoir! – What a slaughterhouse! – as one French officer observed.13)

  By then the winter had set in, and many seriously wondered whether the allied troops, with totally inadequate summer clothes and provisions, could survive the months of dark, wet and cold on those bleak uplands. But Russell had written one of his great journalistic set-pieces – ‘A more fearful spectacle was never witnessed than by those who, without the power to aid, beheld their heroic countrymen rushing to the arms of death …’14 And, reading it over his breakfast porridge at Farringford, Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight, the poet laureate could be moved to write lines about ‘the noble six hundred’, one of those rare poems known by those who do not read or know poetry. He had penned it within ‘a few minutes’ of reading The Times.15 Though Tennyson, in the Epilogue to his poem about the Heavy Brigade, was to assert that

  Who loves war for war’s own sake

  Is fool, or crazed or worse;

  the public appetite for this war could not be explained by any simple political or religious ‘cause’.16

  An earlier generation of historians was able to read the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a diplomatic carve-up, organized by the chief ministers and ambassadors of the European powers. One of the most stylish of such accounts was A.J.P. Taylor’s The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918, a work published half a century ago. By this view of events, the Crimean War had nothing to do with the possession or administration of the Holy Places, and not much to do with the administration of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. It was entirely a struggle between the European superpowers, and could be seen as the ominous first stage in a tragedy which would reach a climax on the battlefields of Flanders and Northern France in 1914–18, a fiery denouement thirty years beyond that as the Russians pounded and bombed their way into the smouldering ruins of Berlin. This view of history sees the aims of Russia as opportunistic, wishing to establish its influence in the Christian East, clashing with the revived opportunism of Napoleon III and ‘the gang of Bonapartist adventurers who ran France’.17 Napoleon III had no wish to overwhelm the Russians, merely to check their power, in order to bring them into an alliance with France against the emergent powers of Prussia.

  The rivalry between France and Germany, erupting into the Franco-Prussian war and all its cataclysmic consequences, is not something which hindsight can ignore. The defeat of Russia in the Crimean War, if seen in this light, is the crucial event of mid-nineteenth-century European history. Had Russia won, and established a claim on the Ottoman Empire: had she, in effect, taken over the running of the Eastern Empire: had Napoleon III been chucked out, and Palmerston’s foreign policy, based on a breezy assumption that Britain allied itself with ‘liberal’ régimes, been discredited … From such unfinished and fruitless speculations, historians can play a parlour-game of what-ifs and might-have-beens. No Napoleon III, no power games in Europe, but a developing recognition of the economic and political strengths of the Prussian Empire … Might this have led to the sort of federalism and spirit of European reconciliation which made the closing decades of the twentieth century so much more peaceful than those of the nineteenth? A Europe in which there was no First World War, no Russian Revolution, is tragically unimaginable for us.

  Such speculation is painful in special ways for every and each European nationality. Undoubtedly for the Russian patriot, then as now, there must be bafflement not only at the cynical secularism of the French and British governments at the time, but at the secularism of the historians such as Taylor who see the war as something effectively determined and promoted by realpolitik. The more speedily they took leave of the faith and ideas of pre-industrial, pre-Enlightenment life, the more the Victorians loved faking up the externals of the Middle Ages. For each individual medieval ‘revivalist’, the task of bringing ‘back’ Gothic architecture, or some other aspect of medieval art, usually involved some protest against contemporary politics, or materialism. This is true of Pugin, Holman Hunt, D.G. Rossetti; it will be even truer, as the century wears on, of William Morris and his associates. Carlyle’s great treatise on the medieval ruins and medieval life of St Edmundsbury, Past and Present, was their key text because it touched on a matter not simply of concern to aesthetes but which was still a fact of political life. The aesthetic topsy-turvydom of Gothic railway stations, or a neo-medieval Parliament building in which to pass further reform bills, was matched by the cussed and awkward survivals from an actual past clashing miserably with an industrially greedy, culturally blind present.

  It was a literal and horrible truth that the Irish had suffered in the nineteenth century a famine of thirteenth-century proportions. By a similar token, neither the secularists of the Russell/Palmerston breed nor their mid-twentieth-century historians could begin to understand the extent to which the Orthodox religion was still a living force for the majority of Russians, and Slavs generally. The Enlightenment Petersburg liberals who had befriended Pushkin or who in a later generation were depicted in the novels of Turgenev were a tiny minority in the Empire. In many respects the Slavophil conservatives in Russia were right to think the influence of liberalism would destroy the whole fabric of Russian life: certainly this was what Dostoevsky came to believe as the century advanced.

  But one of the most dismaying things about the Crimean War was the lack of comprehension, ideologically speaking, between the two sides. Kinglake, whose history of the Invasion of the Crimea fills many volumes, is best known for his earlier volume Eothen, one of the most imaginatively successful travel books, evoking the life and texture of the Near East and the Levant. Few Englishmen possessed Kinglake’s ability to understand alien cultures – Russian piety for example. At the beginning of his immense war chronicle he told his readers: ‘When the Emperor of Russia sought to gain or to keep for his Church the holy shrines of Palestine, he spoke on behalf of fifty millions of brave, pious, devoted subjects, of whom thousands for the sake of the cause would joyfully risk their lives. From the serf in his hut, even up to the great Tsar himself, the faith professed was the faith really glowing in his heart and violently swaying the will.’18

  The Times, urging moderation on the government before the Aberdeen coalition found itself at war, could insist that ‘a European war over the tomb of our Saviour would be too monstrous in the nineteenth century’.19 Paradoxically, as things turned out, The Times itself, with its newly invented Applegarth presses, rolling out 200 copies per minute of Russell’s reports, was able to make this the first war in history which could be treated by a large public as a spectator sport.

  And the British loved it. Their love of that war is reflected in almost every town in England to this day, where old men in ‘cardigans’ or young men in balaclava helmets can still be found in Alma Villas and Inkerman Crescents. The Second World War, whatever the rights and wrongs of how it might have been avoided, was fought – as most British people continue to believe – for high moral motives. It was a war which had to be won, to defend European freedom – or so it is said. Yet surprisingly few Dunkirk Squares or Dresden Terraces have resulted from it. We don’t wear Montgomery berets, though some of us still possess Raglan overcoats. No British generals or admirals of the Hitler war were invested with the Homeric status which the Victorians gave to the quarrelsome and incompetent old men who led the Crimean invasion.

  Once it was clear that the ‘victory’ of Inkerman notwithstanding, the Russi
ans and their oldest ally, the winter, would insist on a long struggle, there was an overwhelming case for a negotiated settlement to the war. Such a flat outcome to the story was inevitably going to come, but not until the Peace of Paris in 1856, and many lives were to be lost before then. Tsar Nicholas himself died on 2 March 1855, and perhaps if his successor Alexander II had not been bound to appease patriotic fervour at home, many of the miseries of 1855 could have been avoided – the dreadful sufferings during the siege of Sebastopol, the ‘forgotten war’ afterwards, the fighting in Armenia (Kars and Erzerum) during that grim year. The Times by its repeated exposures of British inefficiency and weakness was the classic example of exercising ‘power without responsibility’. Russell’s dispatches could work up public rage, most notably during the terrible winter of 1855, about the absence of provisions and supplies. It could find no shortage, moreover, of Guilty Men – sometimes suggesting that The System itself was to blame, sometimes finding a scapegoat – Raglan and his staff officers, Lord John Russell, Aberdeen. At the same time, the newspaper created a public hunger for a satisfactory end to the story, and that end could only be outright military victory. Perhaps this is why the war created such peculiar alliances. Christian socialist F.D. Maurice believed that The Times was horribly wicked, that the press was killing the nation’s mystic unity. Extremists of left and right, however, could unite in Russophobia.20

  Marx’s obsessions with the dangers of Pan-Slavism filled many of his articles at this time. Read today, they seem indistinguishable from Hitler’s comparable fears in Mein Kampf – written seventy years later, but reflecting the same dread that the 15 million Slavs subject to the Austrian emperor – or in Hitler’s day, living in the scattered remnants of the Austro-Hungarian empire – would unite against the rest of Europe. ‘Panslavism is now, from a creed, turned into a political programme, with 800,000 bayonets to support it.’21 Like Hitler, Marx saw the political structures of Europe as essentially fragile, transitory. The constant of European history was racial difference, the eternal struggle which had been conducted since Attila’s warriors first surged over the icy plains of Northern Europe, between Slav and Teuton. Marx influenced Hitler to believe that there was a new player in the power struggle – and that the war would raise again ‘a sixth Power of Europe’: the Revolution.22

  One aspect of Marx’s thinking on the Eastern Question which has puzzled students of his writings was his paranoid conviction that Lord Palmerston, outwardly the most jingoistic of government ministers, and replacing Lord Aberdeen as prime minister at the darkest hour of the war, was in fact a Russian spy. Marx had been convinced of this theory by reading the voluminous writings of an independent and endearing Tory called David Urquhart. Marxists are coy about this fact – particularly Russian Marxists – since for reasons which do not need to be explained it embarrasses them that the philosopher who inspired the Russian Revolution should have been personally violently anti-Russian.

  Urquhart, from 1795, had travelled in the Mediterranean in the lifetime of Lord Byron. Like Byron, he knew Albania well, and in his twenties he spent much time in Constantinople, where he went native, smoked a hookah and became a real expert in Turkish grammar and literature. He was first secretary of the British embassy there in the 1830s but did not get on well with the career diplomats. The Turks loved him, and called him Daoud Bey. From the 1830s he was bombarding the Duke of Wellington with evidence of Russian expansionism and Russian designs on the Ottoman Empire. He was sacked in 1837 at the instigation of Palmerston, which was when his obsession with Palmerston (and his belief that he was a paid agent of the Russians) began. When he came back to England he stood for Parliament as an independent. Like other independent-minded Tories he had sympathies with the Chartists, despite believing them to have been infiltrated by foreign powers. His paranoia did not extend to the Catholic Church however. Though a lifelong Protestant, he believed that the Papacy was ‘the only moral force in Europe’. His house in Rickmansworth, decorated with rich Iznik tiles and heavy with the odours of Latakia, was a Turkish haven and he campaigned (semi-successfully) for the introduction of Turkish baths in England. He wore Turkish dress at home, but appears to have been heterosexual – or at least sufficiently heterosexual to marry at the age of fifty-nine. (One of his sons was the legendary Oxford don Sligger Urquhart, outside whose windows an inebriated Evelyn Waugh was to chant, ‘The Dean of Balliol wears women’s clothes.’)23

  He believed that Palmerston was utterly corrupt and when an MP, Urquhart tried to have Pam impeached: ‘England thought herself to be rich because great masses of wealth were accumulated into the hands of the few, whereas she was poor in all real wealth and was, moreover, smitten with the sore distress of corruption and blindness. Material poverty matters little. A nation may be poor in gold and possessions and yet, like Spain and India and the East, in fact all the countries where the old traditions still linger, may be not only healthier, but richer than England.’

  Pilgerstein, as Queen Victoria and Prince Albert nicknamed Palmerston, embodied for Urquhart, as for Marx, all that was most corrupt about Victorian England. Resembling one of the pomaded old lechers in Thackeray’s seedier pages, he was in fact an incompetent, not to say near hopeless, war leader when he succeeded to the premiership. Though louder and more vulgar than Lord Aberdeen he was no more decisive. ‘I cannot say we have improved in order and regularity under the new chief,’ said Sir Charles Wood. Gladstone’s description of the first Cabinet meeting with Pam in the chair was equally devastating. ‘It was more acephalous than ever; less order, less unity of purpose: Charles Wood had twice cried, “Will the Cabinet decide something upon some point?” P thought he had appeared more éveillé than usual, had taken no lead.’24

  Though ingenious conspiracy theorists might think this indicated that Palmerston was cleverly contriving that his secret paymasters the Russians should win the war, the likelier explanation for his behaviour in Cabinet is that he was seventy years old – and more than half tight much of the time: as was that other old Harrovian who became a wartime prime minister when full of years, Winston Churchill – though Palmerston was as old at the beginning of the Crimean War as Churchill had been at the end of his.25 There are obvious points of comparison – both aristocratic leaders distrusted by their own kind, both politically indefinable in terms of party, both swept to power in the teeth of objections from the reigning monarch, and from the political classes, because of their populism and their rapport with that indefinable person the ordinary Englishman. There were also very obvious differences. Churchill spent the greater part of his grown-up life in political exile. He was a great war leader but by general consent he allowed the Americans and the Russians to bamboozle him at Yalta. Palmerston was not a great war leader but he was a consummate diplomat and international wheeler-dealer. (One does not use the word diplomat here to suggest tact – but he had trod the stage of international politics for nearly half a century by the time he was prime minister and he knew how to dress up a negotiated settlement to the war – the treaty of Paris of 1856 – as if it were an out-and-out victory.)

  Aberdeen’s coalition had collapsed at the beginning of 1855 and the Queen had made heroic struggles against the inevitable – a Liberal government with Palmerston as prime minister. She asked Lord Derby to form another administration with a Conservative minority in the Commons; Derby offered Palmerston the post of secretary for war and Pam’s reply was that he could only serve if Clarendon – Derby’s deadliest political foe – were made foreign secretary. When the idea of a Derby government instantly collapsed, the Queen summoned Lord Lansdowne, but he told her he was too old. (Four years older than Palmerston – the two were rival candidates as MP for the University of Cambridge as long ago as 1806 – when Byron, another Harrovian, in ‘Hours of Idleness’ had mocked them.)

  Then Victoria asked Lord John Russell, who had regarded Palmerston as a political rival for decades, but he found on consulting colleagues that they would not serve under him ag
ain – though he was destined to become prime minister one last time when Palmerston died in the office in October 1865. The Queen begged Clarendon to serve under Russell – ‘Lord John Russell may resign, and Lord Aberdeen may resign, but I can’t resign. I sometimes wish I could,’ she complained.26

  There was nothing for it. On 4 February 1855 Palmerston was summoned to Buckingham Palace and invited to form a government. The Queen’s objections to him were based partly on deep personal revulsion. Palmerston’s wife, when Lady Cowper, had been a much-trusted lady-in-waiting in the dear days of Lord M., but Lord Palmerston had disgraced himself, when staying at Windsor Castle, by a ‘brutal attack on one of the ladies’ – in effect, a rape. The Queen and Prince Albert had also fallen out with Pilgerstein in 1846–7 when they discovered that he had been sending dispatches to Portugal and taking sides in the civil war without consulting his sovereign.

  For others, however, Palmerston’s arrival in the premiership was what the middle classes had been longing for, during the previous year of drift and muddle. The man who settled the Don Pacifico matter by blockading Greek ports with gunboats would succeed in ‘seeing off’ the autocratic Russians. Peter Bayne, a journalist writing thirteen years later, described the feelings of ‘the ordinary Englishman’ when he heard that Palmerston had become prime minister: ‘When we were at war with Russia and when the nation, after trying statesman after statesman, continued in the distressing consciousness that the administration lacked vigour, the man who, for a quarter of a century, had been checkmating the policy of Russia was naturally called for.’ The importance here was the perception of the Palmerston ‘myth’, since as Urquhart and others would wish to say, Pam had been if anything pro-Russian in the years leading up to the war. But – as Bayne told the readers of St Paul’s Magazine – Palmerston was the man to whom the business of war could be committed, and in whose hands the name of England was safe.27