amiable creature! He is devilish handsome! He will be the handsomest man in Europe.’ From that trip, Nicholas had gained the impression that he had an ally in the English monarchy and aristocracy. As the despotic ruler of the world’s greatest state, Nicholas had little sense of the limitations on a constitutional monarchy. He presumed that he could come to Britain and decide matters of foreign policy directly with the Queen and her most senior ministers. It was ‘an excellent thing’, he told Victoria at their first meeting, ‘to see now and then with one’s own eyes, as it did not do always to trust to diplomatists only’. Such meetings created ‘a feeling of friendship and interest’ between reigning sovereigns, and more could be achieved ‘in a single conversation to explain one’s feelings, views and motives than in a host of messages and letters’. The Tsar thought that he could strike a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ with Britain about how to deal with the Ottoman Empire in the event of its collapse.2
Nor was this the first attempt that Nicholas had made to enlist the support of another power in his partition plans for the Ottoman Empire. In 1829 he had suggested to the Austrians a bilateral division of its European territories to forestall the chaos which he feared would follow its collapse, but they had turned him down to preserve the Concert of Europe. Then, in the autumn of 1843 he again approached the Austrians, resurrecting the idea of a Greek empire backed by Russia, Austria and Prussia (the Triple Alliance of 1815) to prevent the British and the French from dividing the spoils of the crumbling Ottoman Empire between themselves. Insisting that Russia did not want to expand into the Balkans, Nicholas proposed that the Austrians should be given all the Turkish lands between the Danube and the Adriatic, and that Constantinople should become a free city under Austrian guardianship. But nothing he said had been able to dispel Vienna’s deep mistrust of Russia’s ambitions. The Austrian ambassador in St Petersburg believed that the Tsar was trying to engineer a situation where Russia could use the excuse of defending Turkey to intervene in its affairs and impose its own partition plans by military force. What the Tsar really wanted, the ambassador maintained, was not a Greek empire backed by the three powers but a ‘state tied to Russia by interests, principles and religion, and governed by a Russian prince … . Russia can never lose sight of this aim. It is a necessary condition for the fulfilment of her destiny … Present-day Greece would be swallowed up in the new state.’3 Deeply suspicious, the Austrians would have nothing to do with the Tsar’s partition plans without the agreement of the British and the French. So Nicholas now came to London in the hope of winning over Britain to his point of view.
On the face of it, there was not much to suggest that Nicholas could forge a new alliance with Britain. The British were committed to their liberal reform plans to save the Ottoman Empire, and saw the ambitions of the Russians as a major threat. But the Tsar was encouraged by the diplomatic rapprochement between Russia and Britain during recent years, prompted by their shared alarm at France’s growing involvement in the Middle East.
In 1839 the French had given their support to a second insurrection by the Egyptian ruler Mehmet Ali against the Sultan’s rule in Syria. With French backing, the Egyptians defeated the Ottoman army, raising renewed fears that they would march against the Turkish capital, as they had done six years before. The young Sultan Abdulmecid appeared too weak to resist Mehmet Ali’s renewed demands for a hereditary dynasty in Egypt and Syria, especially after the Ottoman navy defected to the Egyptians at Alexandria, and once again the Porte was forced to ask for foreign help. In 1833 the Russians had intervened on their own to rescue the Ottoman Empire, but in this second crisis they looked to work with Britain for the restoration of the Sultan’s rule – their aim being to come between the British and the French.
Like the Russians, the British were alarmed by the growing French involvement in Egypt. This was where Napoleon had threatened to bring down the British Empire in 1798. France had invested heavily in the booming cotton cash crop and industrial economy of Egypt during the 1830s. It had sent advisers to help train the Egyptian army and navy. With French support, the Egyptians were not only a major threat to Turkish rule. As head of a powerful Islamic revival movement against the intervention of the Christian nations in the Ottoman Empire, Mehmet Ali was also an inspiration to the Muslim rebels against tsarist rule in the Caucasus.
Consequently, Russia and Britain with Austria and Prussia urged Mehmet Ali to withdraw from Syria and accept their terms for a settlement with the Sultan. These terms, set down in the London Convention of 1840 and ratified by the four powers with the Ottoman Empire, allowed Mehmet Ali to establish a hereditary dynasty in Egypt. To ensure his withdrawal, a British fleet sailed to Alexandria, and an Anglo-Austrian force was sent to Palestine. For a while the Egyptian leader held out, in the expectation of French support; there were scares of a war in Europe when the French government rejected the peace terms proposed by the four powers and pledged to help Ali. But at the final moment the French, unwilling to be drawn into war, backed down and Mehmet Ali withdrew from Syria. By the terms of a subsequent London Convention of 1841, which the French signed reluctantly, Mehmet Ali was recognized as the hereditary ruler of Egypt in exchange for his recognition of the Sultan’s sovereignty in the rest of the Ottoman Empire.
The importance of the 1841 Convention extended beyond securing Mehmet Ali’s surrender. Agreement had also been reached to close the Turkish Straits to all warships except those of the Sultan’s allies during wartime – a very big concession by the Russians because potentially it allowed the British navy into the Black Sea, where it could attack their vulnerable southern frontiers. By signing the convention, the Russians had given up their privileged position in the Ottoman Empire and their control of the Straits, all in the hope of improving relations with Britain and isolating France.
From the Tsar’s point of view, propping up the Sultan’s power could only be a temporary measure. With the French weakened by their support for this insurrection, and Russia having reached what Nicholas believed was a new understanding with the British in the Middle East, he concluded that the London Convention opened the possibility of a more formal alliance between Russia and Britain. The election of a Conservative government headed by Sir Robert Peel in 1841 gave the Tsar some added grounds to be hopeful on this score, for the Tories were less hostile to the Russians than the previous Whig administration of Lord Melbourne (1835–41). The Tsar was convinced that the Tory government would listen favourably to his suggestion that Russia and Britain should take the lead in Europe and decide the future of the Ottoman Empire. In 1844, confident that he could bring the British round to his partition plans, the Tsar departed for London.
The suddenness of his June arrival took everybody by surprise. There had been vague talk of his visit since the spring. Peel had welcomed the idea at a banquet for the Russian Trading Company in the London Tavern on 2 March, and three days later Lord Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary, had sent a formal invitation via Baron Brunov, reassuring the Tsar that his presence would ‘dispel any Polish prejudices’ against Russia in Britain. ‘For such a reserved and nervous man as Aberdeen to speak so confidently on this matter is significant,’ Brunov wrote to Nesselrode. As for the Queen, at first she was reluctant to receive the Tsar, on the grounds of his long-standing conflict with her uncle Leopold, king of the newly independent Belgium, who had attracted many Polish exiles to his army during the 1830s. Determined to uphold the legitimist principles of the Holy Alliance, Nicholas had wanted to restore the monarchies deposed by the French and Belgian revolutions of 1830, and had been prevented only by the outbreak of the Polish uprising in Warsaw in November of that year. His threats of intervention had earned him the mistrust of West European liberals, who labelled him the ‘gendarme of Europe’, while the Polish rebels who fled abroad after the suppression of their uprising had found a welcome refuge in Paris, Brussels and London. These were the developments that worried Queen Victoria, but eventually she was persuaded by her husband, Prince Albert (who was also a nephew of King Leopold), that a visit by the Tsar would help to mend relations between the ruling houses on the Continent. In her invitation to the Tsar, Victoria had said that she would welcome him in late May or early June, but no date had been set. In mid-May it was still not clear if Nicholas would come. In the end, the Queen learned of his arrival a few hours before his steamer landed at Woolwich. Her staff were thrown into a panic, not least because they were expecting a visit from the King of Saxony on the same day, and hasty preparations to receive the Tsar needed to be improvised.4
The Tsar’s impromptu visit was one of many signs of a growing rashness in his behaviour. After eighteen years
