The Crimean War

The Turks were appalled by Menshikov’s behaviour, but the build-up of Russian troops in Bessarabia was worrying enough to make them acquiesce to his demands. Swallowing their pride, they even allowed the Russian dragoman to interview Fuad’s successor, Rifaat Pasha, on behalf of Menshikov before appointing him as Foreign Minister. But Menshikov’s continued bullying, his threats to break off relations with the Porte unless it satisfied his demands at once, also alienated the Turkish ministers and made them more inclined to resist his pressure by turning to the British and the French for help. It was a question of defending Turkey’s sovereignty.

By the end of the first week of Menshikov’s mission, the gist of his instructions had been leaked or sold by Turkish officials to all the Western embassies, and a nervous Mehmet Ali had consulted with the French and British chargés d’affaires, secretly requesting them to call up their fleets to the Aegean in case they were needed to defend the Turkish capital against an attack by the Russians. Colonel Rose was particularly alarmed at Menshikov’s actions. He feared that the Russians were about to impose on the Turks a new Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi, ‘or something worse’, by the occupation of the Dardanelles (a clear abrogation of the 1841 Straits Convention). He believed he had to act, without waiting until the return of Stratford Canning, who had resigned the ambassadorship in January but had been reappointed by the Aberdeen government in February. On 8 March Rose sent a message by fast steamer to Vice-Admiral Sir James Dundas in Malta calling on him to bring up his squadron to Urla near Izmir. Dundas refused to obey the order without confirmation from the government in London, where a group of ministers, who were later to become the ‘inner cabinet’ of the Crimean War,ⁱ met to discuss Rose’s appeal on 20 March. The ministers were concerned by the Russian military build-up in Bessarabia, by the ‘vast naval preparations at Sevastopol’, and the ‘hostile language’ used by Menshikov towards the Porte. Convinced that the Russians were preparing to destroy Turkey, Russell was inclined to let their fleets advance into the Bosporus and seize the Turkish capital so that Britain and France could use the defence of the Straits Convention as a reason to launch a full-out naval war against Russia in the Black Sea and the Baltic. Supported by Palmerston, Russell would have had the majority of the British public on his side. But the other ministers were more cautious. They were wary of the French, whom they still regarded as a military threat, and disagreed with Russell that an Anglo-French alliance would counteract the challenge of the French steam fleet to British maritime power. They took the view that the French had provoked the Russians, who deserved a concession in the Holy Lands, and trusted the assurances of Baron Brunov (‘as a gentleman’) that the Tsar’s intentions remained peaceful. On this basis they rejected Rose’s request for a squadron. It was not up to chargés d’affaires, it seemed to them, to call up fleets or decide matters of war and peace; and Rose had allowed himself to be swayed by ‘the alarm of the Turkish government … and the rumours that obtained general credit at Constantinople of the advancing army and fleet of Russia’. The ministers decided that they would wait for Stratford Canning to return to the Turkish capital and sort out a peaceful settlement.¹⁵

News of Rose’s summons to Dundas arrived in Paris on 16 March.

In a cabinet meeting to discuss the situation three days later, Drouyn de Lhuys, the Foreign Minister, painted a picture of imminent catastrophe: ‘The last hour of Turkey has been tolled, and we must expect to see the double-headed eagle [of the Romanovs] planted on the towers of St Sophia.’ Drouyn rejected the idea of sending in a fleet, at least not until the British did, in case they should be isolated in Europe, which feared the reassertion of Napoleonic France. This was also the position of the other ministers, except Persigny, who claimed that Britain ‘would rejoice and join our side’ if France took a stand ‘to stop the march of Russia towards Constantinople’. For Persigny it was a question of national honour. The army that had carried out the coup d’état of 2 December was an ‘army of praetorians’ with a heritage of glory to defend. He warned Napoleon that if he temporized, as his ministers advised, ‘the first time you pass before your troops, you will see their faces saddened, the ranks silenced, and you will feel the ground shake beneath your feet. So, as you well know, to win back the army you must take some risks; and you, Messieurs, who would have peace at any price, you will be thrown into a terrible conflagration.’ At this point the Emperor, who had been wavering over what to do, succumbed to the argument of Persigny and ordered the advance of the French fleet, not as far as the Dardanelles, but to Salamis, in Greek waters, as a warning to the Russians that ‘France was not disinterested in what took place in Constantinople’.¹⁶

There were three main reasons behind his decision to mobilize the fleet. First, as Persigny had intimated, there were rumours of a plot against Napoleon in the army, and a show of force was a good way to nip this in the bud. ‘I must tell you’, Napoleon wrote to Empress Eugénie in the winter of 1852, ‘that serious plots are afoot in the army. I am keeping my eye on all this, and I reckon that by one means or another, I can prevent any outbreak: perhaps by means of a war.’ Secondly, Napoleon was anxious to restore France as a naval power in the Mediterranean – for everybody knew, in the words of Horace de Viel-Castel, the director of the Louvre, that ‘the day when the Mediterranean is partitioned between Russia and England, France will no longer be counted among the great powers’. In a conversation with Stratford Canning, who passed through Paris on his way from London to Constantinople, Napoleon was concerned to highlight France’s interests in the Mediterranean. Stratford wrote this memorandum of their conversation on 10 March:

He said that he had no wish to make the Mediterranean a French lake – to use a well-known expression – but that he should like to see it made a European one. He did not explain the meaning of this phrase. If he meant that the shores of the Mediterranean should be exclusively in the hands of Christendom, the dream is rather colossal … . The impression left upon my mind … is that Louis Napoleon, meaning to be well with us, at least for the present, is ready to act politically in concert with England at Constantinople; but it remains to be seen whether he looks to the restoration of Turkish power, or merely to the consequences of its decay, preparing to avail himself of them hereafter in the interests of France.

But above all, it was Napoleon’s desire to ‘act … in concert with England’ and establish an Anglo-French alliance that led him to mobilize the fleet. ‘Persigny is right,’ he told his ministers on 19 March. ‘If we send our fleet to Salamis, England will be forced to do as much, and the union of the two fleets will lead to the union of the two nations against Russia.’ According to Persigny, the Emperor reasoned that the dispatch of the fleet would appeal to British Russophobia, win support from the bourgeois press and force the hand of the more cautious Aberdeen government to join France.¹⁷

In fact, the British fleet remained at Malta while the French sailed from Toulon on 22 March. The British were furious with the French for escalating the crisis, and urged them not to advance beyond Naples, giving Stratford time to get to Constantinople and arrange a settlement, before moving their gunboats into the Aegean Sea. Stratford arrived in the Turkish capital on 5 April. He found the Turks already in a mood to stand up to Menshikov – nationalist and religious emotions had become highly charged – although there were divisions about how far they should go and how long they should wait for the military backing of the West. These arguments became entangled in the long-standing personal rivalry between the Grand Vizier Mehmet Ali and Reshid, Stratford’s old ally, who was then out of power. Hearing that Mehmet Ali was about to make a compromise with Menshikov, Stratford urged him to stand firm against the Russians, assuring him (on his own authority) that the British fleet would back him if need be. The key thing, he advised, was to separate the conflict in the Holy Lands (where Russia had a legitimate claim for the restoration of its treaty rights) and the broader demands of the draft sened that had to be rejected to maintain Turkish sovereignty. It was vital for the Sultan to grant religious rights by direct sovereign authority rather than by any mechanism dictated by Russia. In Stratford’s view, the Tsar’s real intention was to use his protection of the Greek Church as a Trojan horse for the penetration and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.¹⁸