3. Launch a series of ‘predatory and properly supported incursions along her maritime frontiers, especially in the Black Sea, within the shores of which, and even in the rear of her line of military posts, she has a host of unsubdued, armed, indomitable mountaineer enemies …’.
4. Help the Persians to reclaim the Caucasus.
5. Send a large corps of troops and a fleet to the Gulf of Finland ‘to menace the flanks and reserve of the Russian armies of Poland and Finland’.
6. Finance revolutionaries to ‘create insurrections and a serf war’.
7. Bombard St Petersburg, ‘if that be practicable’.
8. Send arms to Poland and Finland ‘for their liberation from Russia’.17
David Urquhart, the famous Turcophile, also advocated a preventive war against Russia. No writer did more to prepare the British public for the Crimean War. A Scotsman educated at Oxford in Classics, Urquhart first encountered the Eastern Question in 1827, when, at the age of 22, he enrolled in a group of volunteers to fight for the Greek cause. He travelled widely in European Turkey, became enamoured of the virtues of the Turks, learned Turkish and modern Greek, adopted Turkish dress, and quickly gained a reputation as something of an expert on Turkey through his reports on that country which were published in the Morning Courier during 1831. Making use of a family friendship with Sir Herbert Taylor, private secretary to King William IV, Urquhart got himself attached to Stratford Canning’s mission to Constantinople to negotiate a final settlement of the Greek boundary in November 1831. During his time there he became convinced of the threat posed by Russian intervention in Turkey. Encouraged by his patrons at the court, he wrote Turkey and Its Resources (1833), in which he denied that the Ottoman Empire was about to collapse and highlighted the commercial opportunities awaiting Britain if it gave aid to Turkey and protected it from Russian aggression. The success of the book earned Urquhart the favour of Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary in Lord Grey’s government (1830–34), and a new appointment to the Turkish capital as part of a secret mission to examine the possibilities for British trade in the Balkans, Turkey, Persia, southern Russia and Afghanistan.
In Constantinople, Urquhart became a close political ally of the British ambassador, Lord John Ponsonby, an ardent Russophobe who was unshakeable in his conviction that Russia’s aim was the subjugation of Turkey. Ponsonby urged the British government to send warships into the Black Sea and to aid the Muslim tribes of the Caucasus in their fight against Russia (in 1834 he even won from Palmerston a ‘discretionary order’ granting him authority to summon British warships into the Black Sea if he deemed it necessary but this was soon cancelled by the Duke of Wellington, who thought better of giving so much power to make war to such a notorious Russophobe). Under the influence of Ponsonby, Urquhart became increasingly political in his activities. He did not stop at writing but actually did things to make war against the Russians more likely. In 1834 he visited the Circassian tribes, pledging British support for their war against the Russian occupation, an act of provocation against Russia that obliged Palmerston to recall him to London.
There, Urquhart stepped up his campaign for British military intervention against Russia in Turkey. A pamphlet he had written with Ponsonby, England, France, Russia and Turkey, was published in December 1834. It went through five editions within a year and received very positive reviews. Encouraged by this success, in November 1835 Urquhart launched a periodical, The Portfolio, in which he aired his Russophobic views, of which the following is typical: ‘The ignorance of the Russian people separates them from all community with the feelings of other nations, and prepares them to regard every denunciation of the injustice of their rulers as an attack upon themselves, and the Government has already announced by its Acts a determination to submit to no moral influences which may reach it from without.’18
In another act of provocation Urquhart published in The Portfolio what purported to be copies of Russian diplomatic documents captured from the palace of Grand Duke Constantine, the governor of Poland, during the Warsaw insurrection in November 1830 and passed on by Polish emigres to Palmerston. Most, if not all, of these documents were fabricated by Urquhart, including a ‘suppressed passage of a speech’ in which Tsar Nicholas was said to have declared that Russia would not stop its repressive measures until it had achieved the complete subjugation of Poland, and a ‘Declaration of Independence’ supposedly proclaimed by the Circassian tribes. But such was the climate of Russophobia that they were widely accepted as authentic documents by the British press.19
In 1836 Urquhart returned to Constantinople as secretary of the embassy. His growing fame and influence in British diplomatic and political circles had forced Palmerston to bring him back into office, although his role in the Turkish capital was rather limited. Once again, Urquhart took up the Circassian cause and attempted to stir up a conflict between Russia and Britain. In his most brazen act yet, Urquhart conspired to send a British schooner, the Vixen, to Circassia in deliberate contravention of the Russian embargo against foreign shipping on the eastern Black Sea coast imposed as part of the Treaty of Adrianople. The Vixen belonged to a shipping company, George and James Bell of Glasgow and London, that had already clashed with the Russians over their obstructive quarantine regulations on the Danube. Officially, the Vixen was transporting salt, but in fact it was loaded with a large supply of weapons for the Circassians. Ponsonby in Constantinople had been informed of the ship’s intended journey and did nothing to discourage it; nor did he reply to the Bells’ enquiries about whether the Foreign Office recognized the embargo and whether Britain would defend their shipping rights, as Urquhart had assured them that it would. The Russians were aware of Urquhart’s plans: in the summer of 1836 the Tsar had already complained to the British ambassador in St Petersburg after one of Urquhart’s followers had travelled to Circassia and promised British support for their war against Russia. The Vixen sailed in October. As Urquhart had anticipated, a Russian warship seized the Vixen on the Caucasian coast, at Soujouk Kale, prompting loud denunciations of the Russian action and calls for war in The Times and other newspapers. Ponsonby urged Palmerston to send a fleet into the Black Sea. Although he was reluctant to recognize Russia’s embargo or its claims to Circassia, Palmerston was nevertheless not ready to be pushed into a war by Urquhart, Ponsonby and the British press. He acknowledged that the Vixen had contravened Russian regulations, which Britain recognized, but only in so far as these related to Soujouk Kale, not to the whole Caucasian coastline.
Recalled once again from Constantinople, Urquhart was dismissed from the foreign service and charged with a breach of official secrecy by Palmerston in 1837. Urquhart always claimed that Palmerston had known about the Vixen plan. For years he harboured a deep grudge against the Foreign Secretary for supposedly betraying him. As Britain moved towards entente with Russia, Urquhart became increasingly frustrated and extreme in his Russophobia, calling for an even stronger anti-Russian line – not discounting war – to defend Britain’s trade and its interests in India. He even accused Palmerston of being in the pay of the Russian government, a charge taken up by his supporters in the press, including in The Times, a major influence on middle-class opinion, which joined the Urquhart camp in opposition to the ‘pro-Russian’ foreign policy of Palmerston. In 1839 a long series of letters to The Times by ‘Anglicus’ – a pseudonym of Henry Parish, one of Urquhart’s acolytes – almost took on the status of editorials, warning of the dangers of any compromise with an empire bent on the domination of Europe and Asia.
Urquhart continued his attacks on Russia in the House of Commons, to which he was elected in 1847 as an independent candidate (taking as his colours the green and yellow of Circassia). By this time Palmerston was the Foreign Secretary in Lord John Russell’s Whig administration, which took office in 1846, following the split of the
