After many harassing consultations, the Queen felt that it was impossible for the Cabinet to resist the growing agitation against the Income Tax. The coalition between Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli was too ominous to be disregarded; and so, on the 10th of February, she wrote to King Leopold, “We think we shall be able to reduce the Income Tax and yet maintain an efficient navy, and the organisation of the army, which is even more important than the number of the men.”[296] When Sir George Cornewall Lewis brought in his Budget on the 13th of February, it was found that he reduced the Income Tax from 1s. 4d. to 7d. in the pound; but of course this was still 2d. above the peace limit fixed in 1853. The complaint of the Opposition was that the Government imposed that 2d. merely to promote what Mr. Disraeli called the “turbulent and aggressive policy” abroad by which Lord Palmerston diverted the attention of the country from its own affairs at home.[297] Mr. Gladstone attacked the Budget all along the line. Sir George Lewis, he said, pretended to remit £11,000,000 of taxation. But of that sum £4,470,000 were war taxes, which necessarily dropped when war was over, and though Sir George brought the tea duty down from 1s. 9d. to 1s. 7d. on the lb., and on sugar from 20s. per cwt. to 18s. 4d., that still raised from tea and sugar £1,400,000 more than the old peace duties drew from them. The real remission, then, was not £11,000,000, but £3,184,000. The faults of the Budget were obviously two. It virtually ignored the pledge of the Government in 1853 to abolish the Income Tax in 1860. Instead of cutting down expenditure so as to render it possible to keep that pledge, it increased expenditure above the peace limit, so as to make it impossible to surrender the Income Tax.[298] The accepted financial policy of the country had been to grant an Income Tax during peace solely to enable the Government to remit taxes on articles of popular consumption. It was granted merely to give an elastic revenue time to recover from sudden remissions of indirect taxation. Sir George Lewis, however, still kept the tax above the peace limit, and his small reductions on the tea and sugar duties left them standing above the peace limit also. Moreover, he maintained his expenditure on a scale which created deficits that rendered the continuance of the Income Tax, without compensating remissions of indirect taxes, inevitable. In fact, Sir George Lewis may be said to have introduced the vicious principle of modern finance, by which a temporary Income Tax is insidiously converted into a permanent one, and by which, under cover of extraordinary disbursement during a war, the country is left after peace is declared with a residue of that outlay clinging to the estimates, as ordinary and permanent annual expenditure. The Budget, however, was carried through in a slightly modified form, but the sudden dissolution of Parliament in March compelled Sir George Lewis to levy his new taxes not on a descending scale for three years, but for the ensuing year only. With a view to the popular vote to which Lord Palmerston was about to appeal, Sir George then surrendered 2d. of the tea duty, which brought it down to 1s. 5d. on the pound. But he made no adequate provision for the Persian war, or the war with China. His alteration of the tea duty of course rendered his surplus a myth, and his Budget, with an inflated expenditure, went forth, as Mr. Gladstone complained, with a deficiency of ways and means. In fact, on the eve of an appeal to the constituencies, a prudish Chancellor of the Exchequer “went to the country” with a profligate electioneering Budget.
Mention has been already made of a “little war” that was being waged with Persia. It had sprung out of the irrepressible desire of the Shah to hold Herat, and from the traditional belief of the Foreign Office that when Herat was in Persian hands, “the key of India” was in the pockets of the Czar.[299] In 1851 Persia had promised that she would not meddle with Herat if the Afghans did not attempt to seize it. But the Governor of Candahar advanced on the coveted city, whose ruler appealed to Persia for protection. The Indian Government admitted that there was no danger to India in Persia responding to this appeal. The Foreign Office, however, suspended diplomatic relations with the Court of Teheran.[300] Persia then agreed to retire from Herat when the Afghans withdrew, and negotiations went on in a dilatory fashion till the Crimean War broke out, when the Czar urged Persia to resist and become his ally. The Shah’s Prime Minister held his Imperial master back, and Mr. Thomson, a typical representative of the Foreign Office in Persia, by way of further conciliating the friendly Premier, appointed as First Secretary of the British Legation, a disreputable person who had been dismissed from the Persian service, and whose family were among the most active enemies of the anti-Russian Minister. The Minister refused to receive this individual—Meerza Hashim by name. By way of compensating him Mr. Murray, who succeeded Mr. Thomson, appointed him British agent at Shiraz, a place where we had no right to have an agent at all, but where, by the courtesy of the Persian Government, we had been allowed to have one.[301] The Persian Premier then threatened to arrest Meerza Hashim. As a matter of fact, he arrested his wife, and maliciously insinuated in a despatch, when Mr. Murray demanded her release, that he had compromised himself with the lady. Murray accordingly struck his flag and demanded an apology, whereupon Persia issued a manifesto declaring that the Afghans were advancing on Herat, and threatening to seize that fortress. In July, 1856, a British force was ordered to proceed from Bombay to occupy the island of Karrack and the city of Bushire. By this time the Crimean War was over, and Persia could get no aid from her Russian ally. A Persian ambassador therefore was sent to Paris to negotiate for peace, but he broke his journey at Constantinople to arrange the terms with Stratford de Redcliffe. Whilst there, news came that Persia had captured Herat. Stratford demanded its evacuation, and the dismissal of the Prime Minister. This latter demand the Persian Envoy rejected. The English Government therefore went on with the war. It was, however, declared by the Indian Government that war was waged for the recovery of Herat, which Persia had offered to evacuate, whereas the British Government, in their declaration, stated that their object was the dismissal of the Persian Premier,[302] who had foiled the attempt of Russia to drag the Shah into the Crimean War. The Expedition, led by General Outram, occupied Karrack and captured Bushire. But these victories did not really determine the issue. In England the war had become unpopular. Palmerston had begun it, and carried it on without consulting the House of Commons, by the simple expedient of using the revenues of India to meet its expenses. This was a source of supplies which the House, of course, could not control. At the beginning of the Session it was currently rumoured that the Government would soon be called to account for a proceeding which the Representative Chamber was bound to view with jealousy and suspicion.
These mutterings of hostility alarmed Palmerston, for he had already determined to dissolve Parliament and appeal to the country against the condemnation which the House of Commons had passed on his policy in China. Whilst, as yet, the full bearing of his Persian policy was imperfectly understood by the constituencies, he hastened to make peace, and Persia, after her defeats, was not disposed to be obstinate. But the Shah refused to dismiss his Prime Minister, and Palmerston was accordingly fain to withdraw his demand, and be content with an apology for the imputations which had been cast on Mr. Murray’s character. Such was the inglorious end of a war which is one of the least creditable events in Lord Palmerston’s career. As might be expected, when the General Election was over, and the new Parliament met, Ministers were fiercely attacked for declaring and prosecuting the war unconstitutionally without consulting the House of Commons. The country was now fully alive to the danger that lurked in such a monstrous extension of the Queen’s prerogative as would permit her to use the revenues of India, which the House of Commons could not control, for carrying on war outside the Indian Empire. The only real control which the people have over the Crown is their power to stop supplies for the army. The Persian War, however, proved that the Crown could draw supplies and troops from India, without any Parliamentary sanction whatever. Palmerston’s policy had thus put into the hands of the Queen a deadlier weapon of despotism than either the Tudors or the Stuarts had dared to wield. But the attack, damaging as it was, failed to upset the Ministry; though the House, in 1858, at Mr. Gladstone’s suggestion, forced the Government to accept a clause in the India Bill which disallowed such pretensions on the part of the Crown.[303]
But at the beginning of the Session of 1857 it was not Persia but China that really engrossed the attention of the country. A dispute between Sir John Bowring, Governor of Hong Kong, and the Chinese authorities at Canton, raised an issue which made it easy for the Peelites to unite with the Tories, and the Cobdenites with both.
The Chinese War of 1857 occupies an unique place in the events of the Victorian epoch, because it was a war which was provoked by a member of the Peace Society. In October, 1856, the Chinese authorities arrested twelve Chinamen on board a native lorcha called the Arrow, on a charge of piracy. The British Consul, asserting that the Arrow was a British ship, contended very properly that the accused should have been demanded from him. Nine of the Chinamen were released. Sir John Bowring thereupon insisted on the release of the other three, and an apology within forty-eight hours, on pain of immediate reprisals. The three men were released; but the Chinese Governor courteously refused to apologise, because, he said, as the Arrow was not a British ship, no wrong had been done to the British flag. This was literally true, for Sir J. Bowring, as everybody now admits, was utterly mistaken as to the nationality of the lorcha. The courtesy of the Chinese in surrendering the prisoners in deference to an illegal demand, which Bowring had couched in terms of offensive arrogance, was rewarded next day by the bombardment of the luckless commercial city of Canton—a barbarous act which could be justified by the laws neither of God nor of man. In fact, “a prancing pro-Consul,” to use a famous phrase of Sir William Harcourt’s, had virtually usurped the prerogative of the Crown, and levied war on a foreign Government on his own responsibility. Instead of recalling Bowring and the British Consul, Lord Palmerston, without giving the matter much thought, identified himself with their proceedings, though many Members of his Cabinet, notably Lord Granville and Mr. Labouchere, who afterwards were forced to defend Bowring in Parliament, personally disapproved of his conduct.[304] But Ministers virtually abandoned the case of the Arrow when the controversy grew hot. “As usual,” writes Mr. Morley, “they shifted the ground from the particular to the general; if the Chinese were right about the Arrow they were wrong about something else; if legality did not exactly justify violence, it was at any rate required by policy; Orientals mistake justice for fear; and so on through the string of well-worn sophisms, which are always pursued in connection with such affairs.”[305] The real truth, as the Tory leaders said in the debates in both Houses of Parliament, was that Bowring’s vanity had been hurt because the Chinese had refused to receive him in Canton. When he sent Admiral Sir M. Seymour to bombard the port he tacked on to his original ultimatum a demand that foreigners should be freely admitted to the city, on the ground that this privilege, though ceded by the Treaty of 1846, had never been granted. Admitting that his interpretation of this disputed point in the Treaty was correct, neither he nor Lord Palmerston had any right to force that interpretation on China by war. Their duty was to have acted in concert with the Governments of France and the United States, who were equally interested in the question, and in this way to exhaust the resources of diplomacy, before appealing to the arbitrament of the sword. Every Member of both Houses of Parliament who was not an infatuated partisan of Lord Palmerston’s took this view of the case; and when Mr. Cobden, on the 26th of February, brought forward a motion condemning the policy of the Government, he carried it, after a debate which lasted many nights, by a majority of sixteen.[306] In the House of Lords the Government repelled the attack, on the 27th of February, by a majority of thirty-six; and had the division been taken on the same night in the Commons, the majority, after Cobden’s and Russell’s speeches, would have been so enormous that Palmerston would hardly have dared to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament. But he adroitly delayed matters, held a meeting of his Party, harangued them, and threatened them with a dissolution, and so, by the 4th of March, when the division was taken, the majority against him dwindled to sixteen. On the 5th of March, Ministers announced that Parliament would be dissolved and the sense of the country taken on the issue. The antipathy of the Queen to “penal dissolutions,” indeed, to any dissolution of Parliament, if it can be avoided, was overcome by Lord Palmerston representing that the majority against him was exceedingly small—that it was made up of a coalition of factions, whose leaders, agreeing only on one point, could not possibly form a stable Government. On the other hand, from a General Election a Government of some kind would be evolved with a solid working majority, an advantage of supreme importance in the eyes of the Sovereign.
Then the game of intrigue began. Lord Malmesbury was sent to Mr. Sidney Herbert to negotiate an alliance between the Tories and the Peelites, his proposal being, says Lord Malmesbury, “that we should not take a hostile part towards each other’s candidates.” By this arrangement it was supposed that no personal enmities would be made, and the difficulty of organising an actual coalition, if such should be deemed necessary, would therefore be minimised.[307] Mr. Herbert rejected these overtures, because the Peelites had become so much divided in opinion and so weak in influence, that his desire was to see them dispersed. Lord Malmesbury then sounded Mr. Gladstone at the Carlton Club. “He had,” writes his lordship, “seen Sidney Herbert, who told him of our interview, and Gladstone said he quite disagreed with his views, and had told him so.... His leanings are apparently towards us, but he was quite of my opinion that no sort of agreement should be made beyond the one I had proposed.”[308] In fact, Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Herbert had very nearly quarrelled over the matter. Writing to Sir George Lewis on the 16th of March, the late Mr. A. Hayward says, “Gladstone and S. Herbert have come to an explanation which has ended very like the lovers’ separation in Little’s poems:—
Sidney Herbert takes the Liberal and Gladstone the Derbyite turn. I know no one who will follow Gladstone’s lead in the matter, except, perhaps, Lord A. Harvey.”[309]
As a rule in England, the Minister who dissolves Parliament and appeals to the country is beaten. The General Election of 1857 was a startling exception to that rule. For Palmerston it was a complete victory. For his opponents it was not a defeat—but a rout. Cobden, Bright, Gibson, Fox, and Miall were rejected by the very men whose fortunes they had made by their Free Trade policy. As Mr. Morley says, “nothing had been seen like it since the disappearance of the Peace Whigs in 1812, when Brougham, Tierney, Lamb, and Horner all lost their seats.”[310] The Peelites suffered almost as cruelly. The Conservative ranks were sadly thinned, for twenty-four counties were won by the Ministry; in fact, the Times declared, that the Tories would “never again, as a party, become candidates for office.”[311] The “Manchester School” lost its supporters, (1), because it had got the reputation of factiously opposing all Governments; (2), because the manufacturers, enriched by Free Trade, had ceased to be Radical; and (3), because they thought that when Palmerston forced Bowring into Canton at the point of the bayonet, cotton goods would go in with him. The Peelites were beaten (1), because they were divided among themselves; and (2), because they were a small faction, and in a General Election a small faction generally is crushed in the collision between the great parties. The Tories lost adherents (1), because the farmers resented their support of an amendment moved by their natural enemy, Mr. Cobden; and (2), because rumours were spread abroad by Lord Palmerston’s agents that they were about to coalesce with Mr. Gladstone, who represented the principles of “the traitor Peel.” Lord Palmerston triumphed (1), because his only Liberal rival, Lord John Russell, had alienated the country by his tortuous disloyalty to two Ministries, and incurred the hatred of the Dissenters by his defence of Church Rates; (2), because his personal popularity, after bringing the wars with Russia and Persia to an end, was unbounded; and (3), because he and his satellites poured forth speeches, inflated with cheap and vulgar “patriotic” claptrap, to such an extent that even Mr. Greville says in his “Memoirs” that he was “disgusted at the enormous and shameful lying with which the country is deluged.”[312] England, moreover, was involved in a war with China, and after all Palmerston was the only political leader who had proved that he could carry on a war with least discredit to the country.[313] The election was, therefore, a personal one. Constituents did not scrutinise closely the principles or capacity of candidates, so long as they promised to support Lord Palmerston,[314] and so numbers of Parliamentary Reformers crept unnoticed into the House. But in such cases the loyalty of a majority lasts no longer than the popularity of the leader. Let him make one false step that forfeits popularity, and then his supporters desert him, disinterring what they call their “principles” from buried election addresses to justify their “new departure.”
It was unfortunate that neither the Queen nor Prince Albert recognised this fact, and that they both imagined that Palmerston’s principles—which, in domestic policy, were reactionary and illiberal—were as popular as Palmerston himself. The only true and just criticism of this historic Election, which sent 189 new Members to the House of Commons, and for a time broke the old parties to pieces, was passed by the Duke of Newcastle. Writing to Mr. Hayward on the 10th of April, he says:—“I come to the conclusion that Palmerston will be disappointed with his new Parliament. The gain to Liberal opinion is very great, and the Derby party is for the present smashed; but in these gains are to be found Palmerston’s disadvantages. Nobody can fear the alternative of a Derby Ministry, and if Palmerston rises to the occasion he will soon find his popularity gone and his Government in danger. It is all nonsense to suppose that the China vote has really influenced the decision of the country; but there is a question which alone Palmerston cares about (and that in an adverse sense), which has gained ground everywhere, and is now established as the question of the day—Reform of Parliament; and I have no belief in a good measure coming from unwilling men; and how unwilling are the influential men in the present Cabinet my former association with them pretty well informs me.”[315]
From this Election the history of the Queen’s reign enters on a fresh phase. Underlying every party intrigue and combination there is henceforth to be detected an irrepressible though concealed antagonism between the Parliamentary Reformers and their opponents. In England, it is a curious fact that political parties always exhaust their ingenuity in veiling the real issue between them. When a Government is punished by dismissal, it is not dismissed for the blunder it has committed, but because it has done, or refused to do, something else, which is hardly hinted at in public, but which has offended a powerful body of its supporters. Palmerston was a Minister whose ardent, impetuous temperament, and confidence in his own dexterity, rendered him prone to commit blunders. A Minister of that type can go on blundering with impunity so long as he is supposed to be trustworthy on the one great question which lies closest to the hearts of that section of his supporters, who are prepared to sacrifice him for their cause. But whenever they discover that he is not to be trusted, they take advantage of his first mistake to combine with his enemies and overthrow him. In the new Parliament of 1857, it was therefore clear that Palmerston’s personal ascendency would last till the party of Parliamentary Reform discovered that they had absolutely nothing to expect from him, save open or concealed hostility. It was because the Queen did not grasp this fact that she was startled to find, a few months after Parliament met, how rapidly Palmerston’s popularity was waning. Prince Albert also, strangely enough, mistook the verdict of the country in 1857, as being one cast solely against “the peace-at-any-price people.”[316]
On the 7th of May the House of Commons began the business of the new Session. On that day the Lord Chancellor read the Queen’s Speech, which, contrary to general expectation, did not contain any reference to Parliamentary Reform. It was, says Lord Malmesbury, “the lamest production, even for a Queen’s Speech, I ever read.”[317] However, it gave a soothing account of foreign affairs, and intimated not only that the main stipulations of the Treaty of Paris had been carried out, and that the Neufchâtel difficulty was in a fair way of being settled, but it announced the signature of a Treaty of Peace with Persia. The only subject for regret in our foreign relations was, of course, the war with China. The legislative programme was meagre in the extreme, for the only important Bills promised were, one relating to the jurisdiction of the Ecclesiastical Courts over wills and divorce, and another to check fraudulent breaches of trust. The Address was carried with very little debate, the Radicals being satisfied to let the question of Parliamentary Reform sleep, because Lord Palmerston promised that during the recess the Cabinet would give the subject serious consideration. It was, in truth, a dull and uneventful Session.
But a slight fillip of interest was imparted to it by the revival of the old controversy as to the admission of Jews to Parliament. The election of Baron Rothschild as one of the Members for the City of London compelled the Government to deal with the matter, and Lord Palmerston brought forward a Bill, on the 15th of May, to alter the law relating to Parliamentary Oaths, and remove from the statute book one of the last relics of mediæval bigotry. Although it was bitterly opposed by many Tories, such as Sir F. Thesiger and Mr. Whiteside, the Bill passed the House of Commons, but only to be thrown out by the House of Lords. Lord John Russell then tried to solve the problem by bringing in a Bill to extend the operation of the Act, 1 and 2 Vict. cap. 106, giving a discretion as to the forms on which certain oaths are administered. But while this Bill was in progress it was proposed to free the Jews from their Parliamentary disabilities by applying to their case the provisions of the Act 5 and 6 William IV. cap. 62. This Act was passed to enable a solemn declaration to be substituted for an oath in certain instances. The only question was whether the Act could be stretched so as to include the oath imposed on Members of Parliament. On Lord John Russell’s motion a Select Committee was appointed to inquire if the Act applied to Parliamentary Oaths, but in due time they reported that it did not. This virtually ended the controversy for the Session, and Lord John Russell could only give notice that he would renew the agitation next year.
Undoubtedly the legal and social reforms proposed by the Government in 1857 were those which created most excitement in the country. The Ecclesiastical Courts had been long threatened with extinction, and at last the Government dealt them a fatal blow. Bills were introduced in May transferring to purely secular tribunals their Testamentary Jurisdiction and the greater part of their control over the Marriage Laws, and though the establishment of the new Court of Probate was not much opposed, the Divorce Bill was fiercely debated. Members who were under sacerdotal influence attacked this measure with
the utmost ferocity. Indeed, it was not opposed, but factiously obstructed, clause by clause and line by line, Mr. Gladstone being the most energetic of its opponents.[318] It was, however, passed, and undoubtedly the Government won some credit in the country by the pertinacity with which they piloted this embarrassing measure through both Houses of Parliament. “I am very glad,” writes Lord Campbell, in his Journal, “that the Divorce Bill finally passed the Commons framed almost exactly according to the recommendations of the commission over which I had the honour to preside, preserving the law as it has practically subsisted for two hundred years: that a husband who has conducted himself properly may obtain a dissolution of the marriage for the adultery of the wife, and that a wife may obtain a dissolution of the marriage for the adultery of the husband, attended by incest, or any aggravation which renders it impossible for the connubial union to continue; the
law being now to be administered by a regular judicial tribunal, instead of the injured parties being obliged to petition the Legislature for private Acts of Parliament to dissolve the marriage. We are assailed on the one hand by those who hold that, according to divine law, marriage cannot be dissolved even for adultery, and on the other by those who think that for this purpose no distinction should be made between the sexes,[319] and that in all cases the wife should be entitled to a divorce on proof of any breach of the marriage vow by the husband. But I think the true principle is, that the marriage ought only to be dissolved when it is impossible for the injured party to condone, and that Divine Providence has constituted an essential difference in this respect between the adultery of the husband and the adultery of the wife. I would rather run the risk of cases of great hardship occurring, when it would seem desirable that women should be released from the tyranny of profligate and brutal husbands, than give too great a facility to divorce, which has a tendency most demoralising.”[320]
Another measure of sound reform, with which Lord Campbell honourably associated his name, gave rise to a curious incident, towards the end of the Session, in the House of Commons. “Since I returned from circuit,” says Lord Campbell, in his Diary, “my chief business has been to watch the progress through the House of Commons of my Bill for checking the trade in obscene publications by allowing them to be seized in the depôts of the dealers. Brougham had hardly ventured to oppose the Bill as it passed through the Lords, but afterwards he wrote a violent article against it in the Law Magazine, and he put up Roebuck to assail it in the House of Commons. The Bill, being in Committee yesterday (July 12th), I showed myself in the Peers’ Gallery to watch its fate, and that I might be consulted, if necessary, during the debate. Roebuck contented himself with reading a letter which he had received from Brougham, pointing out the danger of country justices perverting the Bill for the punishment of poachers; and it went through the Committee with the amendments which I had suggested and assented to. The Speaker then sent me a message by the Chancellor of the Exchequer complaining that I had appeared in the House to overawe their deliberations, like Cardinal Wolsey and Charles I., and that it would become his duty to protest against such an unconstitutional proceeding.”[321]
Brief mention must also be made of the Fraudulent Trusts Bill, as one of the Ministerial achievements during the Session of 1857. Several glaring cases of embezzlement on the part of trustees had recently occurred, and yet it was found that the existing criminal law could not reach the guilty parties. Sir Alexander Cockburn, before his elevation to the Bench, had promised to deal with this scandal, and now his successor, Sir Richard Bethell, afterwards Lord Westbury, fulfilled that promise. The object of his Bill was simply to make trustees of settlements, directors of companies, and other persons invested with a fiduciary character, criminally responsible for frauds, or for the misappropriation of the funds entrusted to their care. The Bill passed both Houses. The only serious opposition it met with was from Lord St. Leonards, who dreaded lest its severity might deter honest and substantial men from serving as trustees.
These were among the chief results of the brief but useful Session of 1857, which was prorogued on the 28th of August. Up to midsummer the House of Commons dozed through halcyon days, only too well pleased to do the bidding of its master. Lord John Russell was meek, Mr. Gladstone was an absentee, the Tories were discouraged, and the Radicals were docile. To go to a division at this time on any question was to rush to ignominious defeat. But about the middle of July the House began to show signs of a quickened life. The debates on the Persian War roused the combatant spirit of the Opposition; Mr. Gladstone reappeared, as Ministers knew to their cost when the Divorce Bill was obstructed; and it was remarked that even Palmerston’s most subservient followers no longer hesitated to cheer Mr. Roebuck or Mr. Disraeli, when they made an exceptionally clever attack on the Ministry. In August the shadow of the Indian Mutiny darkened the prospects of the Government, and when Parliament was prorogued there was some ill-concealed grumbling among the captious critics of the Court, because the Queen went to Scotland at a time when the British Empire in India was in dire peril. But on the whole, Palmerston’s prestige was not materially impaired. His domestic programme, modest as it was, had been successfully carried out. Moreover, for the first time in his career, his relations with the Court had been put on a satisfactory footing. On this point Mr. Greville records an interesting conversation with Lord Clarendon, who told him that the Queen had treated Palmerston during the Session with unreserved confidence. Palmerston, on the other hand, found it expedient to treat the Queen with a deference and attention which had produced a favourable change in her sentiments towards him. Mr. Greville says, “Clarendon told me that Palmerston had lately been ailing in a way to cause some uneasiness.... Clarendon talked one day to the Queen about Palmerston’s health, concerning which she expressed her anxiety, when Clarendon said she might indeed be anxious, for it was of the greatest importance to her, and if anything happened to him he did not know where she could look for a successor to him, that she had often expressed her great desire to have a strong Government, and that she had now got one, Palmerston being a strong Minister. She admitted the truth of it. Clarendon said he was always very earnest with her to bestow her whole confidence on Palmerston, and not even to talk to others on any subjects which properly belonged to him, and he had more than once (when, according to her custom, she began to talk to him on certain things), said to her, ‘Madam, that concerns Lord Palmerston, and I think your Majesty had better reserve it for your communications with him.’ He referred to the wonderful change in his own relations to Palmerston, that seven or eight years ago Palmerston was full of hatred and suspicion of him, and now they were the best of friends, with mutual confidence and goodwill, and lately, when he was talking to Palmerston of the satisfactory state of his relations to the Queen, and of the utility it was to his government that it should be so, Palmerston said, ‘And it is likewise a very good thing that she has such boundless confidence in her Secretary for Foreign Affairs, when after all there is nothing she cares about so much.’”[322]
And yet it cannot be said that in foreign affairs Lord Palmerston had won any conspicuous triumph for British diplomacy. The dispute with Persia did not end gloriously for England. It is true that the controversy over Neufchâtel, in which the Queen, owing to her close relations with the Royal Family of Prussia, was deeply interested, terminated happily.[323] But on the other hand, the vexed question of the Danubian Principalities was still open, and it was almost certain that it would lead to the diplomatic humiliation of England.
The future government of the two Principalities was left by the Congress of Paris to be settled by the Treaty Powers. Russia desired their union under a Native prince. France and Sardinia desired their union under a foreign prince, fearing that a Native ruler would soon become a mere satrap of the Czar. Turkey and Austria desired to keep the Principalities separate, and this view was warmly supported by Lord Palmerston and Lord Clarendon. At the Congress of Paris, France had insidiously suggested to Austria that she should take the Principalities, the object being to justify new territorial arrangements on the Rhine in French interests. After that proposal was rejected, the French Emperor drew closer and closer to Russia; but when the General Election gave Palmerston a solid majority, Russia became effusively civil to England. When, however, England persisted in acting with Austria and the Porte, thereby resisting territorial changes, which could only be made
at the expense of Austrian and Turkish interests,[324] the French Emperor took umbrage at our diplomacy. But Persigny’s influence was successfully exerted to hold him true to the Anglo-French alliance, Persigny’s chief argument being that a war with England would so convulse France that, in the general confusion, the Bonapartist dynasty might disappear. Napoleon III., therefore, determined to pay the Queen a private visit, and, though her Majesty was not anxious to receive him, she consented to do so, in the hope and belief that personal communications between the two sovereigns might serve some useful purpose.
When this visit was paid, in August, the controversy over the Principalities had become very serious. The Moldavian elections had returned a majority of Separatists, and the French complained that this result was due to the influence of English agents over the constituencies. France, Russia, and Sardinia, in fact, threatened to suspend diplomatic relations with Turkey unless the elections were annulled. The Eastern Question, in short, had once more been re-opened, and Europe was thus brought to the brink of war. The French Emperor, the Queen, and Prince Albert freely interchanged their ideas on the question at Osborne, whilst at the same time the French and English Ministers—namely, Persigny, Walewski, Palmerston, and Clarendon—carried on a series of conferences. The grievance of the Emperor was that, though Turkey had promised France to annul the elections, at the last moment she had, at the instigation of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, broken her promise. The Porte had admitted that they were thus in the wrong, but had excused their conduct by saying that they acted under pressure from England and the English Ambassador. The annulment of the elections was now with France a point of honour; and as Persigny had failed to bring Palmerston and Clarendon to reason on the point, his Majesty had resolved to appeal to the Queen. The Queen and her husband seem to have met the Emperor’s arguments with Lord Stratford’s counter-statement, but in vain. The end of their conference was a victory for France on the main point at issue. Lord Stratford was to be ordered to reverse his course, and to call on the Porte to annul the elections. “Lord Palmerston,” writes Lord Malmesbury on the 14th of August, “has given way on the question of the Principalities, so the Emperor has gained his point by his visit to Osborne. The dispute arose on the question of the union of the Principalities, which France, Russia, Prussia, and Sardinia supported. England, Austria, and Turkey opposed the union; and the elections in Moldavia having been in favour of England, the French, Russians, &c., accused the English Government of having influenced them unfairly, and demanded that they should be annulled. The Porte refused this, upon which the Ambassadors of France, Prussia, and Sardinia struck their flags. The Emperor Napoleon, instead of wasting time in useless correspondence, came over himself, and the question was settled at once. I do not pretend to judge whether Palmerston was right or wrong, but his defeat must have cost him a bitter pang. Louis Napoleon’s Ministers have been completely won over by the Russians, especially Walewski.”[325] The Queen was certainly of a different opinion. She thought that Palmerston had succeeded in effecting a compromise, and not a capitulation. Prince Albert was also distinctly under the impression that whilst England surrendered on the question of the elections, France had surrendered on the question of uniting the Principalities. A Memorandum was drawn up on 9th of August, embodying some arrangement of this sort, but Walewski refused to sign it, upon the ground, says Sir T. Martin, “that the Emperor’s Government desired to keep the satisfaction to be obtained from the Porte and the arrangement subsequently to be made respecting the Principalities distinct from each other, and, also because, were he to sign the Memorandum, it would appear that France had made a concession on the latter point for the purpose of inducing the Sultan to agree on the former.” He also appears to have stated that it was not necessary to sign the document, because “amongst men of honour writing was unnecessary.” In May, 1858, at the second Congress of Paris, it was discovered that writing in this case was extremely necessary. When the British Plenipotentiaries contended that the French Emperor had yielded on the point of the union of the Principalities, His Majesty denied that he had done anything of the sort. The only concession he ever made, according to his account, was that he would not insist on their being ruled over by a foreign prince—a detail of secondary consequence. It seems also to have been admitted on our side that we had agreed to recognise the administrative union of the provinces, so that the misunderstanding may have arisen out of a quibble over the terms “administrative” and “political” union.
During this visit, Lord Malmesbury tells us that extraordinary precautions were taken by the Queen for the Emperor’s protection. “Eighty detectives were sent down from London, besides French police. The strictest guard was kept round the Palace and over the island. Besides this, a number of men-of-war’s boats guarded the shore, and did not allow a single boat to approach.”[326] From a memorandum of their conversations which Prince Albert drew up, it is obvious that the settlement of the question of the Principalities was not the sole object of Napoleon’s journey to Osborne. He broached a great many insidious proposals for a redistribution of European territory, also for a revision of the Treaties of 1815, but they were all coldly and sceptically received. He even suggested a wild scheme for converting the Mediterranean into an European lake. “Spain might have Morocco, Sardinia a part of Tripoli, England Egypt, Austria a part of Syria—et que sais je,” writes Prince Albert, in describing this suggestion;[327] the first step being a friendly understanding with England on the subject. As his Majesty had told the Prince he was soon to have an interview with the Russian Czar, it need hardly be said that no encouragement was given by the Queen to these extraordinary projects. In truth, neither the Queen nor her Ministers were at this moment in a mood for entering on an adventurous foreign policy. The Indian Empire had been shaken to its centre by the revolt of the Bengal Army, a revolt known in history as the great Indian Mutiny, and the causes of which must now be traced.