But just as Peel fell on the morrow of his great victory on the Corn Laws, so within a week of the division on the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill Russell encountered defeat in resisting a motion to extend the Franchise. He resigned office: the Queen sent for Lord Stanley, who recommended that an attempt should be made by Russell to form a coalition Cabinet with the help of the party of the late Robert Peel. |Defeat of Ministers on the Question of the Franchise.| But the recent debate had raised implacable bitterness between the Peelites and the Whigs. Next, Lord Aberdeen refused to attempt the formation of a Ministry, on the ground that no Ministry could stand which would not undertake to deal with Papal aggression, which he was determined not to do. Lord Stanley then reluctantly tried his hand and failed. The situation was more embarrassing than any that had arisen since 1812, when the Lords Wellesley, Moira, Grey, and Grenville had successively failed to form a Cabinet. The deadlock brought about a touching incident. Her Majesty resolved to ask the advice of her well-tried servant, the Duke of Wellington, then in his eighty-third year. He gave it in terms as concise as one of his own general orders: “That the party still filling the offices, till Her Majesty’s pleasure shall be declared, is the one best calculated to carry on the Government at the present moment.” |Lord Russell Resumes.| On March 3, therefore, Lord John Russell, on Her Majesty’s invitation, returned to office. The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill was resumed, but the more stringent clauses were withdrawn, and in the form in which it finally received the Royal Assent it did no more than declare the illegality of the English titles assumed by the Roman Catholic hierarchy.E

While this agitation and these debates were in progress, it may be believed that many people were far from hospitably disposed towards the crowds of foreigners which the Great Exhibition was designed to draw to London. |Opening of the Great Exhibition.| But all hostile criticism was reduced, first to whispers, by the marvellous success of the structure itself, and then to silence, by the splendour of the opening ceremony and of the display within the building. It is the poet’s gift to store the essence of events in very small phials, and Thackeray’s May Day Ode vividly reflects the feelings of the nation on that far-off spring morning:

A generation has sprung up since that day, satiated with marvels and surprised by no achievement of hand and brain. But no such visible, tangible accomplishment in the arts of peace had ever been manifested up to that time; if Prince Albert’s idea had been one of startling novelty, the celerity of its realisation was still more startling.

“God bless my dearest Albert!” wrote the Queen with no feigned emotion, “God bless my dearest country, which has shown itself so great to-day! One felt so grateful to the great God, who seemed to pervade all and bless all.”

More than mere womanly emotion, this, in presence of an exciting scene. The May Day poet put on it the same interpretation:

One note of discord, and one only, was heard; rather, one note necessary to make the complete harmony was silent. It would have fulfilled the international character of the Exhibition and emphasised it as an echo of the message of peace on earth and goodwill towards men had the Corps Diplomatique availed themselves of Prince Albert’s invitation to present an address to the Queen. But, strangely as it may sound at the present day, most of the great Continental rulers held severely aloof from the whole project of the Exhibition. They were apprehensive of the effect which contact with English institutions, so dangerously liberal, might have on their own subjects, and the foreign Ambassadors agreed, by a majority of three, to decline to present an address.

The success of the opening ceremony attended the Exhibition to its close on October 15. |Its Success and Close.| Between six and seven millions of persons visited it, and the surplus funds accruing to the Commissioners, amounting to upwards of £200,000, were afterwards applied, on Prince Albert’s suggestion, to the purchase of the South Kensington estate, now occupied by various institutions for the encouragement of Science and Art.

As inaugurating an era of universal peace, which its most enthusiastic supporters expected it to do, the Great Exhibition of 1851 proved a failure; but as a means of diffusing among the people of Great Britain views about foreigners more enlightened than those they entertained before, as an impetus to commerce and manufacture and a stimulus to artistic production, the “Crystal Palace” has fully fulfilled the most sanguine anticipation.

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CHAPTER VII.
1851–1853.

Louis Napoleon’s Coup d’État—Condemned in the English Press—Lord Palmerston’s Indiscretion Rebuked by the Queen—He Repeats it and is Removed from Office—Opening of the New Houses of Parliament—French Invasion Apprehended—Russell’s Militia Bill—Defeat and Resignation of Ministers—The “Who? Who?” Cabinet—Death of the Duke of Wellington—His Funeral—The Haynau Incident—General Election—Disraeli’s First Budget—Defeat and Resignation of Ministers—The Coalition Cabinet—Expansion of the British Colonies—Repeal of the Transportation Act.

THE Great Exhibition closed on October 15, 1851, and hardly had the contractors begun to dismantle the glittering fabric, before the vision of universal peace, which some |Louis Napoleon’s Coup d’État.| spirits had hailed in it, was rudely shattered by events in France. The coup d’état whereby Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte seized on the government of the country and suspended the Constitution took place on the morning of December 2. This event concerns the present narrative only in one respect. When the news came to England it caused an almost unanimous feeling of horror at the massacre of peaceful citizens. The Queen, who was at Osborne, was informed on December 4 of what had taken place, and at once wrote to the Prime Minister, enjoining on him the necessity “that Lord Normanby (her Ambassador at Paris) should be instructed to remain entirely passive, and should take no part whatever in what is passing.” These instructions were conveyed to Lord Normanby next day by the Foreign Minister, Lord Palmerston. But, in a despatch written by Lord Normanby to Lord Palmerston on December 6, informing him that he had made known to M. Turgot, the French Foreign Minister, that he had received Her Majesty’s commands to make no change in his relations with the French Government in consequence of what had passed, the following startling passage occurred:—“Monsieur Turgot said that ... he had two days since heard from M. Walewski (French Ambassador in London) that your lordship had expressed to him your entire approbation of the act of the President, and the conviction that he could not have acted otherwise than he had done.”

|Lord Palmerston’s Indiscretion.| On reading a statement attributed to her Foreign Minister so far at variance with her own opinion and the decision of her Cabinet, the Queen wrote to Lord John Russell, asking him if “he knew anything about the alleged approval, which, if true, would again expose the honour and dignity of the Queen’s Government in the eyes of the world.”

The word “again” used by the Queen in this letter had reference to Lord Palmerston’s action in regard to the visit of Kossuth, the Hungarian refugee, to England in the previous October. There had been much sympathy in England with the cause of Hungarian independence; Kossuth had been fêted in many towns as an illustrious patriot and exile, and Palmerston consented to receive a visit from him. This was more than the susceptibilities of the Austrian Government could endure; Russell having summoned a Cabinet Council to consider the intended reception by the Foreign Minister, Palmerston reluctantly yielded to the opinion of his colleagues, and the reception was given up. But he consoled himself by receiving at the Foreign Office addresses from Radical meetings, in which the Emperors of Russia and Austria were described as “odious and detestable assassins” and “merciless tyrants and despots”; and, in expressing himself “extremely flattered and highly gratified” at the terms directed towards himself, he added that “it could not be expected that he should concur in some of the expressions which had been used in the addresses.” It was in receiving the deputation conveying these addresses that this characteristically English Minister earned one of his most-enduring nicknames. He said in the course of his speech that the conduct of Foreign Affairs required “a great deal of good generalship and judgment, and during the pending struggle a good deal of judicious bottle-holding was obliged to be brought into play.” However much this allusion to the prize ring may have scandalised some of the “unco guid,” it was just one of those sayings that tickle the popular fancy, and the “Judicious Bottle-holder” furnished the subject of one of Punch’s lively cartoons.

But it was necessary to put a check on the Foreign Secretary’s recklessness. It was intimated to him that his conduct was calculated to place the Sovereign in a most painful position towards her allies, and this rebuke, Russell wrote to the Queen, it was hoped would “have its effect on Lord Palmerston.” This incident closed on December 4, only two days after the French coup d’état, and when it became apparent that the Foreign Secretary had perpetrated a further indiscretion, strong measures had to be taken. The dismissal of a Minister is an extreme exertion of the Royal Prerogative, though it is one that was not uncommon in former reigns. Nevertheless, it is the only expedient when a Minister refuses to carry out the policy of the Queen’s Government or enters upon an independent one of his own.

After some correspondence between Russell and Palmerston, the former wrote, on December 17, informing Palmerston “that the conduct of Foreign Affairs could no longer be left in his hands with advantage to the country,” and offering him the Lord-Lieutenancy of Ireland. |Dismissal of Palmerston.|Of course Lord Palmerston resigned, and the Queen accepted the resignation. “The distinction,” wrote Her Majesty to the Prime Minister, “which Lord Palmerston tries to establish between his personal and his official acts is perfectly untenable.”

In this year (1852) the Houses of Lords and Commons took possession of the new Palace of Westminster, built from the design of Barry on the site of the old Palace, destroyed by fire in 1835. The style of architecture selected—the Tudor-Gothic—is not one which lends itself readily to grand or massive treatment, owing to the infinite repetition of detailed ornament; but it has this to recommend it, that it is exclusively indigenous to England, and the architect was successful in erecting on a very unpromising site a crowning example of that particular form of Gothic building. |The New Houses of Parliament.| The cost of the new Palace as it stands amounted to about £3,000,000; but it should be said that Barry’s design has never been completed. It was intended to extend the buildings to form a quadrangle round the court at the foot of the Clock Tower, to accommodate various Public Departments now housed in Whitehall and Downing Street.

The political convulsions in France were mildly reflected in Great Britain during the year 1852—the year of three Administrations. In the first-named country, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Prince-President of the Republic which he had turned into a farce, had secured the good will of the Army by restoring to them their Napoleonic Eagles, and then, with the whole armed force of the nation at his back, had issued an appeal to the people in the form of a plebiscite. By 7,824,189 votes to 253,145 they had bestowed on him the title and dignity of Emperor Napoleon III. Such an appeal and such a response could only be interpreted as the resurrection of the Napoleonic idea. |French Invasion Apprehended.| In the forefront of the policy of the new Emperor must surely be found vengeance for Waterloo and the humiliation of England. If this was not expressed in so many words, there were frequent passages in the speeches of Louis Napoleon which could bear no other interpretation. England awoke to her danger; the “nation of shopkeepers” did not wait for legislative measures, but quietly began arming and drilling, encouraged by the authorities, thus laying the foundation of that splendid defensive force of artillery and infantry of which the Volunteers are composed at this day. Great Britain possessed in 1852 a small army—about 24,000 infantry at home—absolutely without any reserve force. The Cabinet devised a scheme for creating a local Militia, to be drilled for fourteen days in each year, and to serve exclusively within their own counties. |Resignation of Ministers.| Prince Albert saw grave defects in the plan, and the Duke of Wellington liked it even less than he did; nevertheless Lord John Russell introduced his Bill to give effect to it. Then came Palmerston’s opportunity. He was a free agent now, and rendered good service in opposing an inadequate and almost wholly useless measure. On his motion the Government were defeated by eleven votes on February 20, and next day the resignation of Ministers was in the hands of the Queen. The Earl of Derby (the irreconcilable Lord Stanley of Peel’s Cabinet) undertook to form a Ministry, which, inasmuch as it could only be drawn from Protectionist ranks, was in a hopeless minority in the House of Commons. Lord Malmesbury took the seals of the Foreign Office, and Mr. Disraeli became, per saltum, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons—an instance unique in recent times of such a position being assumed by one who had never before held office. |The “Who? Who?” Cabinet.| The rest of the Cabinet was made up of men then untried and unknown, though some of them afterwards rose to distinction, and got the name of the “Who? Who?” Ministry. The origin of the nickname was a conversation overheard in the House of Lords between the Prime Minister and the Duke of Wellington, who was eagerly questioning Lord Derby about the composition of his new Cabinet. The old Duke had grown very deaf, and all his inquiries were plainly audible to the House, as well, of course, as the Premier’s replies. “Who? Who?” asked the old Duke, as, hand to ear, he strove to identify the unfamiliar names, and “Who? Who?” became the title of the new Government. Weak as it was, however, and holding office as it did on sufferance only, the Derby Ministry was able to prepare and carry a Militia Bill which satisfied even so critical an expert as the Iron Duke himself.

Brief as was the duration of the Derby Ministry it outlived the days of one of its warmest friends. The Duke of Wellington drew his last breath at Walmer Castle on September 14, 1852. |Death of the Duke of Wellington.| To say that he was the most popular individual in the United Kingdom would be to apply a term which perhaps, of all others, he would have relished least; but without doubt “the Duke” was the best beloved. The first soldier in Europe, thirty-seven years of peace had not dimmed the lustre of his great renown in war, nor prevailed to make the nation forget his services in the hour of England’s greatest need. If, as a statesman, he could not command the same unanimous meed of “Well done!” he had established a standard of public life too often obscured in the heat of party strife. Vittoria, Salamanca, Talavera, Waterloo—the radiance from those far off conflagrations still glowed round that venerable head, but it was the honest purpose, bluntly spoken and fearlessly acted on, that won for Wellington a place in the hearts of his countrymen far more enduring than the reward of any commander, however successful—of any orator, however powerful.

There was the precedent of the obsequies of Nelson to justify the Queen in commanding a funeral of the Great Duke at the public expense; but Her Majesty was desirous to associate her people with herself in doing honour to the memory of her greatest subject. The body of the Duke, therefore, was put in charge of a guard of honour till the meeting of Parliament in November, when the consent of both Houses was immediately given to a funeral at the public expense and the interment of Wellington in St. Paul’s Cathedral, beside the tomb of Nelson. All the Great Powers of Europe, save one, sent representatives to the ceremony. It would have caused no surprise had France, with a Napoleon once more in supreme power, refused to allow her Ambassador to attend the funeral of her ancient foe, but Louis Napoleon told Count Walewski he wished to forget the past and to continue on the best of terms with England. It was not France, but Austria, who was conspicuous by the absence of her Ambassador from St. Paul’s on this November day; and the reason was found in an extraordinary circumstance which had occurred a few weeks previously. |The Haynau Incident.| An Austrian notable, General Haynau, arrived in England early in September, on an unofficial visit. He had earned an unenviable reputation for cruelty in putting down insurrections in Italy and Hungary; ugly stories had been circulated about the flogging of Hungarian women and other barbarities, enough, whether true or not, to make his name detested by all who sympathised with the national movement on the Continent. One day he went to inspect Barclay’s brewery, and as soon as his identity with the “Austrian butcher” became known to the workmen there, they rushed at him with loud cries, pelted him, tore his coat and tried to cut off his long moustaches. Escaping from the brewery, he was assailed with equal fury in the street, and had to take refuge in a public house till the police came to his assistance. The Austrian Chargé d’Affaires appealed for redress, and Lord Palmerston called in person to express the deep regret of Her Majesty’s Government at the outrage.

Parliament had been prorogued on July 1 by the Queen in person and dissolved immediately after by Royal Proclamation. The elections which followed left the relative strength of parties nearly the same as in the old Parliament, that is, with no working majority on either side. |Disraeli’s First Budget.| The new Parliament met on November 4, and on December 3 Mr. Disraeli introduced his Budget in a speech which lasted five hours. The debate which followed is memorable as the occasion of the first encounter between two men who, for a quarter of a century afterwards, were to be as conspicuously the protagonists of their respective parties as Pitt and Fox had been at the beginning of the century. Disraeli—by this time fully conscious, and embittered by the consciousness, that he was fighting for a losing cause—concluded a speech full of stinging invective at two o’clock on the morning of December 11. To answer him rose one whom Macaulay had described in 1838 as “the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories who follow reluctantly and mutinously a leader (Peel) whose experience is indispensable to them, but whose cautious temper and moderate opinions they abhor.” Mr. Gladstone had been a Member of Parliament for more than twenty years, and was already distinguished for power and poignancy in debate; but the moment had come when, for the first time, the House of Commons was to come under the full influence of his superb command of language, his impressive use of gesture and his singularly resonant voice.

Gladstone’s speech closed the debate on Disraeli’s First Budget, and it was decisive. The Government suffered defeat by nineteen votes, and next day Lord Derby went to Osborne to tender his resignation. Her Majesty laid her commands on the Earl of Aberdeen who, as a Peelite Conservative, assisted by the Whig Marquis of Lansdowne, proceeded to form a Coalition Cabinet.

Before entering upon a review of the events which brought to a violent close the peace which Great Britain had maintained for thirty-nine years with the other European Powers, the present seems a fitting place to give a sketch of salient points in the expansion of British Colonies in various parts of the world—Colonies which, for the greater part, had no existence before Queen Victoria came to the throne. |Expansion of British Colonies.| It was in 1858 that the discoveries of gold in British territory, as well as in California, had begun to fill the channels of trade and enrich the manufacturers of the home country in a degree beyond all previous experience. The great Continent of Australia, discovered by Captain Cook in 1770 and by him named New South Wales, was hardly known to people in England during the first forty years of the present century except as a penal settlement, although a number of British emigrants found their way there when the Army and Navy were reduced after the long European wars had come to an end in 1815. But it was not until the gold-fields were discovered in 1851 that the full tide of immigration set in. The growth and development of the European community since that time have been immense. From the original settlement at Botany Bay in 1788 have arisen the States of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Western Australia, each with its separate representative constitution and legislature, and a governor appointed by the Queen. The population, rapidly increasing, already amounts to three millions and a quarter, with an annual export trade of more than £70,000,000. The gold-fields, since their discovery in 1851, have added about £300,000,000 to the wealth of the world, nor is there any near prospect of the supply failing. On the contrary, the newly-opened mines at Coolgardie, in Western Australia, promise to prove the richest field in the whole island.

New Zealand was first colonised in 1839, though Europeans had settled there as far back as 1814, and in 1841 it was created by letters patent a colony distinct from New South Wales. The chief wealth of this island is pastoral and agricultural, though New Zealand contributes also to the Pactolus flowing north, having exported gold to the value of more than a million sterling in 1895.

Tasmania, formerly Van Diemen’s Land, is another insular possession of Great Britain in the South Pacific, originally occupied in 1803 as a penal settlement; and the Australasian Dominions of the Crown were completed by the annexation of the Fiji group of islands in 1874, and British New Guinea in 1888. This vast territory, with its almost inexhaustible mineral wealth and fertility, may be said with almost literal accuracy to be the peculiar creation of the reign of Queen Victoria.

In 1853 an important change in the penal code of Great Britain was effected by the Act altering the punishment of transportation of convicts into that of penal servitude. |Repeal of the Transportation Act.| The Lord Chancellor admitted, in moving the Second Reading of the Bill, that transportation answered the end of punishment better than anything else which could be devised; it was the strongest deterrent, short of a capital sentence, which could be employed without the infliction of physical pain, and, had the United Kingdom only been concerned, no alteration in the law would have been proposed. But the interests of the Colonies must be taken into account also; the strong representations laid before the Government by the Colonists, coupled with the extraordinary discoveries of gold in Australia, made it imperative that these growing communities should cease to be the slumping ground for the refuse of British civilisation, and other provision must be made for the disposal of criminals. The measure became law, and the Australasian settlements, relieved from the slur which had become wellnigh intolerable, entered on a career of expansion and profitable industry of which no man can yet foretell the ultimate result.

Besides British India, of which the growth and consolidation is described elsewhere, the chief expansion of the Empire and its protectorate during the present reign has taken place in South Africa. The Cape Colony was ceded to the British Crown in 1814; the Colony of Natal was added to it in 1843, was erected into a separate Colony in 1856, and was made self-governing in 1893. Basutoland was annexed to the Cape Colony in 1871, but in 1884 it was constituted a separate Crown Colony, and neither it nor Bechuanaland, which, having been annexed in 1885, is governed from the Cape, have yet developed representative institutions.

In dealing with its great Dominion in South Africa the British Government is confronted with a problem which has never presented itself in Australasia. There the aboriginal population has died out everywhere, except in New Zealand, from the mere contact with civilisation, and, except in the Island of New Guinea of which the Germans possess a moiety, British influence is not hampered by any competing European race. But it is far otherwise in South Africa. There, also, what may be regarded as the aboriginal races, the Hottentots and Bushmen, have been crushed wellnigh out of existence, but they have been replaced on the one hand by the powerful Bantu people, consisting of Kaffirs, Zulus, Bechuanas, and other Negroid tribes, and on the other by the Boers, descended from Dutch settlers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Administration of South Africa has to provide for the development of British enterprise and to secure peaceful relations between the diverse elements of the population. It cannot be doubted that South Africa contains the material of enormous wealth. The climate of the high veldt, a wide belt of land ranging between 4,000 and 5,000 feet above sea-level, is exceedingly salubrious. Diamonds and gold already have been worked in large quantities, though a few years ago their very existence was unsuspected. At the present time the yield of gold is equal to that of either Australia or America, amounting to one-fifth of the total annual output of the world. Should the gold ever be worked out there is abundant mineral wealth of other kinds, including an almost virgin coal-field, covering an area of nearly a thousand square miles between Pretoria and Delagoa Bay.

In America, the most notable feature in the recent history of the British possessions is found in the growth of wealth and population in the Dominion of Canada. It has been shown how that Colony rose in rebellion in the first year of the present reign, and how Lord Durham framed a Constitution for it in his report. Lord Durham died, and his scheme lay in a pigeon-hole of the Colonial Office till 1867, when it was virtually carried into effect by Lord Carnarvon’s Act for the Confederation of the British North American Provinces. Upper and Lower Canada, the English and French territories of the rebellion, are now known as the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec, and with them are confederated New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, British Columbia, Manitoba, and the North-West Territories. The population of Canada has risen from about one million and a half in 1841 to five millions at the present day, and progress in commerce and wealth has been equally rapid.

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CHAPTER VIII.
1853–1854.

The “Sick Man”—Position of the Eastern Question—Projects of the Emperor Nicholas—The Custody of the Holy Places—Prince Menschikoff’s Demand—Russian Invasion of Moldo-Wallachia—The Vienna Note—Declaration of War by the Porte—Destruction of the Turkish Fleet—Resignation of Lord Palmerston—Great Britain and France Declare War with Russia—State of the British Armaments.

“WE have on our hands a sick man—a very sick man; it will be a great misfortune if one of these days he should slip away from us before the necessary arrangements have been made.”

|The “Sick Man.”|This sentence, spoken on January 9, 1853, by Nicholas, Czar of Russia, to the British Minister at St. Petersburg, Sir George Hamilton Seymour, supplied a phrase which has become historic, and remains as appropriate to the present state of Turkey-in-Europe as it was forty-four years ago. The Ottoman Empire in Europe had become an anachronism, not because it was a heritage won by mediæval conquest, for that may be assigned as the origin of almost every European State, but because the Turk maintained his rule in modern times by mediæval methods. In the days when nations were kept in subjection by the violence of their governors, the Turk had been a standing menace to all Europe, for he was as powerful as any Christian Monarch; but in proportion as the other nationalities acquired the solidarity which follows on the growth of constitutional rights and the limitation of absolute rule, he became a terror only to the subject races within the Ottoman dominions. To the rising tide of Western civilisation he opposed the breastwork of philosophic indifference, though the ancient Saracen instinct for war still caused him to adopt eagerly the successive inventions in military armament. The weakest principality had nothing to fear in the nineteenth century from Turkish invasion, but the most powerful states had realised that it would be a formidable task to make the Porte comply with the concert of Europe—such is the quality of genuine vis inertiæ. Nevertheless the real guarantee for the integrity of the Ottoman Empire had come to be—not her army and fleet, nor the fervour of her Moslem subjects—but the mutual jealousy and suspicion existing between other Powers regarding the disposal of Ottoman territory. It had come to this, then, that the Christian states acquiesced in the continuance of the Ottoman Empire in Europe as a kind of buffer state—a barrier against such a collision of interests and ambitions as might revive warfare on a Napoleonic scale. The heirs of the “sick man” dreaded his death because of the conflict sure to ensue among his heirs.

Three European Great Powers were more closely affected than others by the Eastern question—Russia, by reason of her office as guardian of the Eastern Church, as well as by her hereditary policy of absorbing neighbouring territories—Austria, on account of her claim to the Danubian provinces of the Porte—and England, because she could not suffer the advance of Russia between her and her Asiatic dominions. The interest of England may seem to have been less direct than that of the other Powers; nevertheless, the continual encroachment of Russia in Asia, and the steady extension of the Russian frontier towards that of British North-West India, had so powerfully impressed British statesmen with the danger of a collision in that quarter, that the integrity of the Ottoman Empire had become a cardinal principle in the Continental diplomacy of England.