power and encroachments of Russia must be resisted. He could not see this, and thought it was a ‘bugbear’ – that the only Power to be feared was France! – that the 3 Northern Powers ought to keep together, though he could not say on what basis. Of course we were unable to agree with him, and spoke of the state Germany had been placed in by the Empr Nicholas & the impossibility of looking upon the present times as the former ones. Everything has changed. Ld Aberdeen did not like to agree in this, saying that no doubt in a short time this country would have changed its feelings regarding the war, and would be all for Peace.49
What she meant by ‘everything has changed’ is not entirely clear. Perhaps she was thinking of the fact that France had joined in Britain’s ultimatum to the Russians and that the first British and French troops had already set sail for Turkey. Or perhaps, like Albert, she thought the time had come to involve the German states in a European war against Russia, whose invasion of the principalities represented a new and present danger to the Continent. But it is also possible that she had in mind the xenophobic press campaign against the Prince Consort – a constant worry in her journal in these months – and had come to realize that a short victorious war would secure public support for the monarchy.
That evening the Queen gave a small family ball to celebrate the birthday of her cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, who was shortly to depart for Constantinople to take up the command of the British 1st Division. Count Vitzthum von Eckstadt, Saxon Minister to London, was invited to the ball:
The Queen took an active part in the dances, including a Scotch reel with the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Elgin, both of whom wore the national dress. As I had given up waltzing, the Queen danced a quadrille with me, and spoke to me with the most amiable unconstraint of the events of the day, telling me she would be compelled the next morning, to her great regret, to declare war against Russia.
The following morning – a day before the French made their own declaration of war on Russia – the Queen’s declaration was read out by Clarendon in Parliament. As the great historian of the Crimean War Alexander Kinglake wrote (and his words could be applied to any war):
The labour of putting into writing the grounds for a momentous course of action is a wholesome discipline for statesmen; and it would be well for mankind if, at a time when the question were really in suspense, the friends of a policy leading towards war were obliged to come out of the mist of oral intercourse and private notes, and to put their view into a firm piece of writing.
If such a document had been recorded by those responsible for the Crimean War, it would have disclosed that their real aim was to reduce the size and power of Russia for the benefit of ‘Europe’ and the Western powers in particular, but this could not be said in the Queen’s message, which spoke instead in the vaguest terms of defending Turkey, without any selfish interests, ‘for the cause of right against injustice’.50
As soon as the declaration became public, Church leaders seized upon the war as a righteous struggle and crusade. On Sunday, 2 April pro-war sermons were preached from pulpits up and down the land. Many of them were published in pamphlet form, some even selling tens of thousands of copies, for this was an age when preachers had the status of celebrities in both the Anglican and Nonconformist Church.51 In Trinity Chapel in Conduit Street, Mayfair, in London, the Reverend Henry Beamish told his congregation that it was a ‘Christian duty’ for England
to interpose her power to maintain the independence of a weak ally against the unjustifiable aggression of an ambitious and perfidious despot, and to punish with the arm of her power an act of selfish and barbarous oppression – an oppression the more hateful and destructive, because it is attempted to be justified on the plea of promoting the cause of religious liberty and the highest interests of Christ’s kingdom.
On Wednesday, 26 April, a fast-day set aside for ‘national humiliation and prayer on the declaration of war’, the Reverend T. D. Harford Battersby preached a sermon in St John’s Church, Keswick, in which he declared that
the conduct of our ambassadors and statesmen has been so honourable and straightforward, so forbearing and moderate in the transactions which have led to this war that there is no cause for humiliation at this time, but rather of strengthening ourselves in our righteousness, and that we should rather present ourselves before God with words of self congratulation and say, ‘We thank thee, O God, that we are not as other nations are: unjust, covetous, oppressive, cruel; we are a religious people, we are a Bible- reading, church-going people, we send missionaries into all the earth.’
In Brunswick Chapel, Leeds, on the same day, the Reverend John James said that Russia’s offensive against Turkey was an attack ‘on the most sacred rights of our common humanity; an outrage standing in the same category as the slave trade, and scarcely inferior to it in crime’. The Balkan Christians, James maintained, had more religious freedom under the Sultan than they would ever have under the Tsar:
Leave Turkey to the Sultan and, aided by the good offices of France and England, these humble Christians will, by God’s blessing, enjoy perfect liberty of conscience … . Hand it over to Russia and their establishments will be broken up; the school-houses closed; and their places of prayer either demolished, or converted into temples of a faith as impure, demoralizing, and intolerant, as Popery itself. What British Christian can hesitate as to the course proper for such a country as ours, in such a case as this? … It is a Godly war to drive back at any hazard the hordes of the modern Attila, who threatens the liberty and Christianity, not of Turkey only, but of the civilized world.52
To mark the embarkation of Britain’s ‘Christian soldiers’ for the East, the Reverend George Croly preached a sermon in St Stephen’s Church, Walbrook, in London, in which he maintained that England was engaging in a war for ‘the defence of mankind’ against the Russians, a ‘hopeless and degenerate people’ bent upon the conquest of the world. This was a ‘religious war’ for the defence of the true Western religion against the Greek faith; the ‘first Eastern war since the Crusades’. ‘If England in the last war [against Napoleon] was the refuge of the principles of freedom, in the next she may be appointed for the refuge of the principles of Religion. May it not be the Divine will that England, after having triumphed as the champion, shall be called to the still loftier distinction of the teacher of mankind?’ England’s destiny in the East, the Reverend Croly argued, might be advanced by the coming war: it was nothing less than to convert the Turks to Christianity: ‘The great work may be slow, difficult, and interrupted by the casualties of kingdoms, or the passions of men – but it will prosper. Why should not the Church of England aid this work? Why not offer up solemn and public prayer at once for the success of our righteous warfare, the return of peace, and the conversion of the infidel?’53
To varying degrees, the major parties to the Crimean War – Russia, Turkey, France and Britain – all called religion to the battlefield. Yet by the time the war began, its origins in the Holy Lands had been forgotten and subsumed by the European war against Russia. The Easter celebrations in the Holy Sepulchre ‘passed off very quietly’ in 1854, according to James Finn, the British consul in Jerusalem. There were few Russian pilgrims because of the outbreak of the war and the Greek services were tightly managed by the Ottoman authorities to prevent a recurrence of the religious fighting that had become common in recent years. Within a few months, the world’s attention would be turned to the battlefields of the Crimea, and Jerusalem would disappear from Europe’s view, but from the Holy Lands these distant events appeared in a different light. As the British consul in Palestine put it:
In Jerusalem it was otherwise. These important transactions seemed but superstructures upon the original foundation; for although in diplomacy the matter (the Eastern question) had nominally shifted into a question of religious protection … still it had become a settled creed among us that the kernel of it all lay with us in the Holy Places; that the pretensions of St Petersburg to an ecclesiastical protection by virtue of treaty aimed still, as at the very first, at an actual possession of the sanctuaries at the local well-spring of Christianity – that these sanctuaries were in very truth the meed contended for by gigantic athletes at a distance.54
6
First Blood to the Turks
In March 1854 a young artillery officer by the name of Leo Tolstoy arrived at the headquarters of General Mikhail Gorchakov. He had joined the army in 1852, the year he had first come to the attention of the literary world with the publication of his memoir
