The Crimean War

cabinet rejected the Tsar’s notion that an Ottoman collapse was imminent and agreed not to plan ahead for hypothetical contingencies – a course of action likely in itself to hasten the demise of the Ottoman Empire by provoking Christian uprisings and inspiring repressions by the Turks. Indeed, the Tsar’s insistence on an imminent collapse raised suspicions in Westminster that he was plotting and precipitating it by his actions. As Seymour noted of his conversation with the Tsar on 21 February, ‘it can hardly be otherwise but that the Sovereign who insists with such pertinacity upon the impending fate of a neighbouring state must have settled in his own mind that the hour of its dissolution is at hand’.⁹

In his later conversations with Seymour, Nicholas became more confident and even more revealing about his partition plans. He talked of reducing Turkey to a vassal state, as he had done with Poland, and of giving independence to the Danubian principalities, Serbia and Bulgaria, under Russian protection; and he claimed that he had the support of Austria. ‘You must understand,’ he told Seymour, ‘that when I speak of Russia, I speak of Austria as well. What suits the one, suits the other, our interests as regards Turkey are perfectly identical.’ Seymour for his part was increasingly put off by the Tsar’s ‘rash and reckless’ plans – he seemed prepared to gamble everything on a war against Turkey – and put them down to the arrogance of autocratic power accumulated over nearly thirty years.¹⁰

The Tsar’s confidence was surely also based on his misapprehension that he enjoyed the support of the British government; he felt that he had formed a bond with Lord Aberdeen in 1844, when Aberdeen, now Prime Minister and the most pro-Russian of all the British leaders, was Foreign Secretary. Nicholas assumed that Aberdeen’s backing for Russia’s position in the Holy Lands dispute implied British agreement with his partition plans. In a dispatch from London in early February, the Russian ambassador Baron Brunov informed the Tsar that Aberdeen had remarked off the cuff that the Ottoman government was the worst in the world and that the British had little inclination to support it any longer. The report encouraged Nicholas to speak more freely to Seymour and (in the belief that an Anglo-French alliance was no longer to be feared) to take a more aggressive line against the French and the Turks in the spring of 1853.¹¹ He had no idea of the growing isolation of Aberdeen within his own cabinet on the Eastern Question; no appreciation of the general drift in British policy against Russia.

To force the Sultan to restore Russia’s rights in the Holy Places, the Tsar dispatched his own envoy to Constantinople in February 1853. The choice of envoy was deliberate and itself a sign of his militant intentions for the mission. Instead of choosing a seasoned diplomat who might have furthered peace, Nicholas decided on a military man with a fearful reputation. Prince Alexander Menshikov was 65 years old, a veteran of the wars against the French in 1812, and an admiral in the war against the Turks in 1828–9, when he was castrated by a cannonball. He had experience as a naval minister involved in plans to seize the Turkish Straits, as governor-general of occupied Finland in 1831 and as a negotiator with Persia. Menshikov was a ‘remarkably well informed man’, in Seymour’s estimation, ‘with more independence of character than perhaps belongs to any of the Emperor’s associates, his peculiar turn of thought constantly showing itself by sarcastic observations which make him a little dreaded in St Petersburg’. But he lacked the necessary tact and patience to act as an appeaser with the Turks, which, as Seymour wrote, was noteworthy.

If it were necessary to send a military man to Constantinople the Emperor could hardly have made a better selection … than he has done; it is however impossible not to reflect that the choice of a soldier has in itself a certain significance, and that should a negotiation … prove ineffectual, the negotiator may readily become the commander who has authority to call in 100,000 soldiers and to place himself at their head.¹²

Menshikov’s mission was to demand from the Sultan the nullification of the November ruling in favour of the Catholics, the restoration of Greek privileges in the Holy Sepulchre, and reparation in the form of a formal convention or sened that would guarantee the treaty rights of Russia (supposedly dating back to the 1774 Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji) to represent the Orthodox not just in the Holy Lands but throughout the Ottoman Empire. If the French resisted Greek control of the Holy Sepulchre, Menshikov was to propose a secret defensive alliance in which Russia would put a fleet and 400,000 Russian troops at the Sultan’s disposal, should he ever need them against a Western power, on condition that he exercised his sovereignty in favour of the Orthodox. According to his diary, Menshikov was given the command of the army and the fleet ‘and the post of envoy-plenipotentiary of peace or war’. His instructions were to combine persuasion with military threats. The Tsar had already approved plans to occupy the Danubian principalities and grant them independence if the Turks rejected Menshikov’s demands. He had ordered the advance of 140,000 soldiers to the frontiers of the principalities, and was prepared to use these troops with the Black Sea Fleet to seize Constantinople if that should be needed to force the Sultan into submission. There was a flamboyant review of the fleet at Sevastopol to coincide with Menshikov’s departure for the Turkish capital, where he arrived on the aptly named steam frigate Thunderer on 28 February. Cheered by a huge crowd of Greeks who had gathered at the port to welcome him, Menshikov was accompanied by a large suite of military and naval officers, including General Nepokoichitsky, chief of staff of the 4th Army Corps, and Vice-Admiral Vladimir Kornilov, chief of staff of the Black Sea Fleet, whose mission was to spy on the defences of the Bosporus and Constantinople in preparation for a lightning attack.¹³

Menshikov’s demands stood little chance of being met in their original form. The fact that the Tsar had even thought they might succeed suggests how far removed he was from political reality. The draft of the sened prepared by Nesselrode went well beyond the dispute in the Holy Lands. In effect, Russia was demanding a new treaty that would reassert its rights of protection of the Greek Church throughout the Ottoman Empire and (in so far as the Orthodox patriarchs were to be appointed for life) without any control by the Porte. European Turkey would become a Russian protectorate, and the Ottoman Empire would in practical terms become a dependency of Russia, always threatened by her military might.

But whatever chances of diplomatic success the admiral might have had, they were ruined by the way Menshikov behaved in the Turkish capital. Two days after he arrived he broke with diplomatic precedent and insulted the Turks by appearing in civilian clothes and an overcoat instead of full uniform for his ceremonial welcome by the Porte. Meeting the Grand Vizier Mehmet Ali, Menshikov immediately demanded the dismissal of Fuad Efendi, the Foreign Minister, who had caved in to the French in November, and refused to begin negotiations until a new Foreign Minister, more amenable to Russia’s interests, had been appointed. In a calculated affront to Fuad, Menshikov refused to speak with him, in full view of a large crowd; it was an act to demonstrate that a minister hostile to Russia ‘would be humiliated and punished even in the midst of the sultan’s court’.¹⁴

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 charges 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