The Crimean War

several steamers from the British fleet at Beykoz to the centre of the capital, and went to the Sultan to demand firm measures against the potential insurrectionaries. The next day, 160 religious students were arrested by the police and brought before the Grand Council. Asked to account for their insurrection, their leaders replied ‘that the conditions prescribed by the Koran for peace after war had been disregarded’ by the Grand Council. After it was explained that the Porte had not made peace, only set the conditions for negotiations, the students were asked whether they would like to go to the battlefront, if they wanted war so much, but they replied that their duty was to preach and not to fight. They were sent into exile in Crete instead.²⁶

News of Sinope reached London on 11 December. The destruction of the Turkish fleet was a justified action by the Russians, who were after all at war with Turkey, but the British press immediately declared it a ‘violent outrage’ and a ‘massacre’, and made wildly exaggerated claims of 4,000 civilians killed by the Russians. ‘Sinope’, declared The Times, ‘dispels the hopes we have been led to entertain of pacification … We have thought it our duty to uphold and defend the cause of peace as long as peace was compatible with the honour and dignity of our country … but the Emperor of Russia has thrown down the gauntlet to the maritime Powers … and now war has begun in earnest.’ The Chronicle declared: ‘We shall draw the sword, if draw it we must, not only to preserve the independence of an ally, but to humble the ambitions and thwart the machinations of a despot whose intolerable pretensions have made him the enemy of all civilized nations.’ The provincial press followed the bellicose and Russophobic line of Fleet Street. ‘Mere talking to the Tsar will do nothing,’ argued an editorial in the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent. ‘The time appears to be at hand when we must act so as to dissipate the evil designs and efforts of Russia.’ In London, Manchester, Rochdale, Sheffield, Newcastle and many other towns, there were public meetings in defence of Turkey. In Paisley, the anti-Russian propagandist David Urquhart addressed a crowd for two hours, ending with a plea to ‘the people of England … to call on their Sovereign to require that either war shall be proclaimed against Russia, or the British squadron withdrawn from the Turkish waters’. Newspapers published petitions to the Queen demanding a more active stand against Russia.²⁷

The position of the British government – a fragile coalition of Liberals and free-trade Conservatives weakly held together by Lord Aberdeen – was dramatically altered by the public reaction to Sinope. At first the government reacted calmly to the news. Most of the cabinet took the view of the Prime Minister that more time should be given to the peace initiatives promoted by the Austrians. It was agreed that the British and French fleets would have to make their presence felt in the Black Sea, but that this show of naval strength should be used to force the Russians to accept peace talks rather than provoke a war. There was a general feeling that Britain should not be dragged into a war by the Turks, who had brought the disaster on themselves. As Queen Victoria herself had warned:

we have taken on ourselves in conjunction with France all the risks of a European war without having bound Turkey to any conditions with respect to provoking it. The hundred and twenty fanatical Turks constituting the Divan at Constantinople are left sole judges of the line of policy to be pursued, and made cognisant at the same time of the fact that England and France have bound themselves to defend the Turkish territory! This is entrusting them with a power which Parliament has been jealous to confide even to the hands of the British Crown.²⁸

At this stage the Queen agreed with Aberdeen that the invasion of the principalities should not be taken as a cause of war against Russia. Like him, she was still inclined to trust the Tsar, whom she had met and come to like ten years before, and thought that his aggressive actions might be curbed. Her private views were anti-Turk, which also had a bearing on her attitude to the Russian invasion. Before Sinope, Victoria had written in her journal that it ‘would be in the interest of peace, and a great advantage generally, were the Turks to be well beaten’. Afterwards she took a different view of the invasion, hoping that a Russian beating of the Turks would make both sides more amenable to European peace initiatives. ‘A decided victory of the Russians by land, may, and I trust will have a pacifying effect by rendering the Emperor magnanimous and the Turks amenable to reason,’ she noted in her journal on 15 December.²⁹

Standing up to the Turkish war mood was one thing; it was quite another to resist the war cries of the British press, especially when Palmerston, who had resigned from the cabinet on 14 December, ostensibly over parliamentary reform, was adding his own voice to the chorus of demands for military action – his aim being to challenge the peace-loving Aberdeen from outside the government by rallying public opinion behind his own campaign for a more aggressive foreign policy. Palmerston maintained that the action at Sinope was an indirect attack upon the Western powers, which had sent their warships into the Bosporus as a warning to Russia. ‘The sultan’s squadron was destroyed in a Turkish harbour where the English and French fleets, if they had been present, would have protected it,’ he explained to Seymour. Sinope was proof of Russian aggression – it was the moral pretext Britain needed (and Palmerston had been looking for) to destroy the Russian menace in the East – and continuing with the peace talks in Vienna would only make it harder for the Western powers to fight this ‘just and necessary war’. In the cabinet, Palmerston was supported by Russell, the Leader of the Commons, and crucially by Clarendon, the Foreign Secretary, who swung round to Palmerston’s position when he sensed the public reaction to the destruction of the Turkish fleet (the Queen noted in her journal on 15 December that he had become ‘more warlike than he was, from fear of the newspapers’). ‘You think I care too much for public opinion,’ he wrote to Aberdeen on 18 December, ‘but really when the frightful carnage at Sinope comes to be known we shall be utterly disgraced if upon the mere score of humanity we don’t take active measures to prevent any more such outrages.’³⁰

With Palmerston out of the cabinet, it fell to Clarendon to make the running for the war party. Sinope had demonstrated that the Russians had ‘no real intention of making peace even if the Turks propose reasonable terms’, Clarendon told Aberdeen, so there was no point in talking to them any more. He urged the Prime Minister to use Sinope as a ‘moral argument’ to reject the Austrian peace initiative and take strong measures against Russia. Determined to undermine the peace negotiations, he told Stratford to instruct the Turks to toughen their position, and warned Buol that Austria was too soft on Russia. It was too late for talks, he told Lord Cowley, the British ambassador in Paris; the time had come for the Western powers to ‘finish up Russia as a naval power in the East’.³¹

French support was crucial to Palmerston and the war party in the British cabinet. Napoleon was determined to use Sinope as a pretext to take strong action against Russia, partly from the calculation that it was an opportunity to cement an alliance with Britain, and partly from the belief that an emperor of France should not tolerate the humiliation of his fleet, should the Russian action go unpunished. On 19 December Napoleon proposed that the French and British fleets should enter the Black Sea and force all Russian warships to return to Sevastopol. He even threatened that the French would act alone, if Britain refused. This was enough to make Aberdeen reluctantly capitulate: fear of a resurgent France, if not fear of Russia, had forced his hand. On 22 December it was agreed that a combined fleet would protect Turkish shipping in the Black Sea. Palmerston returned to the cabinet, the undisputed leader of the war party, on Christmas Eve.³²

But the origins of the Crimean War cannot be understood by studying only the motives of statesmen and diplomats. This was a war – the first war in history – to be brought about by the pressure of the press and by public opinion. With the development of the railways enabling the emergence of a national press in the 1840s and 1850s, public opinion became a potent force in British politics, arguably overshadowing the influence of Parliament and the cabinet itself. The Times, the country’s leading newspaper, had long been closely associated with the Conservative Party; but increasingly it acted and perceived itself as nothing less than a national institution, a ‘Fourth Estate’, in the words of Henry Reeve, its chief for foreign affairs, who wrote of his profession in 1855: ‘Journalism is not the instrument by which the various divisions of the ruling class express themselves: it is rather the instrument by means of which the aggregate intelligence of the nation criticizes and controls them all. It is indeed the “Fourth Estate” of the Realm: not merely the written counterpart and voice of the speaking Third.’ The government had little choice but to recognize this new reality. ‘An English Minister must please the newspapers,’ lamented Aberdeen, a Conservative of the old school who moved between the palace and his Pall Mall club. ‘The newspapers are always bawling for interference. They are bullies, and they make the Government a bully.’³³

Palmerston