Captain Rowan Hamilton was an ebullient Irishman in command of the British frigate Cambrian. He was in Greek waters for most of the war, and his friendship for the Greeks stretched British official neutrality to the limits. In the summer of 1825, as Ibrahim’s invasion pursued its destructive way, he gave the Greek government some advice: ‘While there is a spark of hope, fight on! And when all is desperate, then think of foreign assistance.’1 Hamilton did not believe that this desperate moment had yet arrived, but the Greeks did. In September of that year a Greek delegation to London presented to the British foreign secretary Canning an Act of Submission that went much further than just a plea for help. This Act of Submission was the only political move during the Greek war which was backed by virtually all the leading figures, and had an unusual origin. It was drawn up by a committee of Greeks on Zákinthos, which circulated separate copies for signature to the Peloponnese, the islands, Athens and Mesolongi, and the document was finally endorsed by the Senate in August 1825. The document could therefore with justice claim to speak for the Greek nation, not just the Greek government. The Act, after a long and wordy preamble about Greece’s struggle and her prospects, made one simple statement: ‘In virtue of the present act, the Greek nation [éthnos] places the sacred deposit of its liberty, independence, and political existence under the absolute protection of Great Britain.’2
Here was a diplomatic initiative to accompany the Greek military and naval efforts against Ibrahim. It too failed in its immediate purpose. Canning rejected the proposal as inconsistent with Britain’s neutrality, though he offered to promote any compromise between Greece and Turkey and added encouragingly that if the Greeks could win independence by their own efforts ‘it was well, and it was their affair’.3 The offer of submission to another power was a bitter pill for the Greeks to swallow. They had from the beginning hoped for aid from abroad in their fight for independence, but had feared that intervention by a foreign power might, as Koraís had warned, lead simply to a new form of dependence. The powers too, and especially Russia and Britain, had shifted to positions very different from those at the start of the war.
It was Russia which dominated the changes of attitude of the other powers to the Greek question: Russia’s actions, Russia’s open intentions, suspicions of what Russia’s intentions might be, fears that Russia might encroach southward at Turkey’s expense, or even bring about the collapse of the Ottoman empire. Russian foreign policy was very largely Tsar Alexander’s personal instrument, and in deciding it he was subject to conflicting influences: his desire for stability and peace in Europe, which meant upholding the Sultan’s authority; his Christian principles, which meant sympathy if not support for the Greeks; and Russia’s territorial and commercial interests, which required a strengthening of Russia’s position in the Balkan states and unhindered access through the Dardanelles to the Mediterranean for Russia’s navy and her merchant ships. Alexander resolved this clash of motives into two fairly clear lines of policy in relation to Turkey and the Greeks: he would not be drawn into war with Turkey simply to support the Greeks, as his denunciation of Alexander Ipsilántis had shown; but in pursuit of Russia’s interests he would apply pressure on Turkey, though stopping short of war unless supported by the other European powers.
Russia’s main instrument for bringing pressure on Turkey was the treaty which ended the war of the early 1770s between Turkey and Catherine the Great’s Russia: the 1774 Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji, a village just south of the Danube in today’s Bulgaria. This treaty, the most humiliating that Turkey ever signed, involved Turkish concessions to Russia in three major areas: territory, navigation and religion. The territories of Moldavia and Wallachia were to have a form of independence under ultimate Turkish sovereignty, and Russia was to have a say in the appointment and dismissal of the local governors. At sea the vessels of both countries would have free access to the Black Sea, the Dardanelles and the Mediterranean. Finally, on religion Article 7 stated: ‘The Sublime Porte promises to protect firmly both the Christian religion and its churches; and also permits the Minister of the Imperial Court of Russia to make on all occasions representations in favour of the new Church in Constantinople, and of those who carry on its services.’4
The first part of this article might be seen as a fairly innocuous statement of good intent by Turkey, and the second part as giving Russia a very limited right of interference in the affairs of only one particular church. But Russia interpreted the article as giving her the right to intervene in any conflict between the Ottoman empire and its Christian population. Technically, if Turkey harassed or even failed to protect a single one of her Christian subjects, she was in breach of the treaty and Russia was justified in taking action against her. The Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji, and particularly Article 7, was the spoon which Russia could use to stir the pot of relations with Turkey whenever it suited her.
The pot almost boiled over into war in the early months of the Greek rising, with the Tsar’s ultimatum of July 1821 that unless Turkey acceded to Russia’s demands Russia would support the Greeks ‘jointly with the whole of Christendom’. But Russia did not have the support of any other power, let alone the whole of Christendom; the threat of war faded, and the points of difference between Russia and Turkey were slowly resolved, largely thanks to the good offices of Britain’s ambassador to Constantinople, Viscount Strangford.
Alexander’s next Greek initiative came in January 1824, when he issued a mémoire inviting the other Quintuple Alliance powers to a conference which would jointly force the Turks to accept a settlement of the Greek question. The settlement he proposed was that Greece should be divided into three semi-autonomous principalities but under ultimate Turkish sovereignty as in Moldavia and Wallachia. The three territories were to be the Peloponnese, perhaps with the addition of Crete, and the eastern and western parts of Greece north of the Gulf of Corinth. The backing of the other powers for Alexander’s scheme would have given him the reality of the support of the whole of Christendom which he had previously falsely claimed. However, the other powers, especially Britain, were becoming increasingly suspicious of conferences and congresses, and the joint action into which such meetings might draw them. Also the plan for Greece was seen as a power ploy by the Tsar; with Russia already having influence in Moldavia and Wallachia as well as Serbia, and likely to attain it in the three new Greek principalities, Russia would have six satellites between the Adriatic and the Aegean which revolved round the Russian planet.
If the Tsar’s scheme was to work it would need months of confidential negotiation between the powers and with the Turks and Greeks, but the opportunity for this was blown away when at the end of May 1824 the Tsar’s mémoire was published in a Paris newspaper, possibly leaked by Metternich or by Canning as a way of quashing the proposal. This it certainly did. Even though the plan would have given the Greeks a territory larger than they achieved for nearly a century, they rejected it out of hand as unjust and cruel in settling Greece’s fate by the decision of a foreign power. The Turks, even though acceptance would have ended a war in which after three years they had still failed to crush Greek resistance, dismissed the proposal with indignation; the Turkish foreign minister the Reis Effendi was reported, after one of his outbursts against it, as having to stop ‘from perfect exhaustion’.
Once Britain’s foreign secretary Canning knew that both Turks and Greeks had rejected the mémoire he refused to attend a conference to discuss it, and the Tsar blamed Canning for frustrating his plan. On 30 December 1824 Canning received this curt message from the Tsar: ‘The Cabinet of London will easily understand that His Imperial Majesty on his side regards all further deliberation between Russia and England on the relations with Turkey and on the pacification of Greece as definitely closed.’5 The Tsar, said Canning, ‘was damned if he would talk Greek to us’, and it seemed as if the possibility of intervention in Greece, certainly of intervention by Russia and Britain together, was firmly closed off.
Britain’s policy which had brought her to this impasse had in part been driven by fear of Russian encroachment, but there were two other major factors. One was Britain’s position as the protecting power, in effect the governing power, in the Ionian islands. The other was her extreme wariness of being dragged into action by her membership of the Quintuple Alliance, and distrust of its congresses.
It was Castlereagh, foreign secretary until his death in August 1822, who had set out the basis of this distrust. In 1818 he rejected the idea that the Alliance should interfere to support established authority ‘without any consideration of the extent to which it was abused’. In 1820 he stated that to impose such interference as an obligation on the members of the Alliance was ‘utterly impracticable and objectionable’. Canning, succeeding Castlereagh as foreign secretary, was wholly in accord with these views, though he was a great deal more flexible than his predecessor in his implementation of policy and very different in character. Canning was popular with fellow politicians, men of letters and the country at large, whereas Castlereagh, though respected, was seen as remote and austere: a contemporary wrote that Castlereagh ‘like Mont Blanc continues to gather all the sunshine upon his icy head …. It is a splendid summit of bright and polished frost which, like the travellers in Switzerland, we all admire; but which no one can hope, and few would wish, to reach.’6 Castlereagh was also unfortunate in attracting odium which was not wholly deserved. As chief secretary for Ireland in 1798 he was blamed for the brutal suppression of the Irish rebellion of that year. ‘A high gallows and a windy day,’ went the popular song, ‘For Billy Pitt and Castlereagh.’ As Leader of the House of Commons (as well as foreign secretary) in 1819 he was blamed for the deaths at the Peterloo demonstration. ‘I met Murder on the way,’ wrote Shelley, ‘He had a mask like Castlereagh.’ Furthermore, whereas Canning was a masterly communicator with a gift for a pithy phrase, Castlereagh was the opposite; for a statesman of his experience he was an extraordinarily incoherent speaker, and what Byron in Don Juan called his ‘odd string of words, all in a row, which none divine and everyone obeys’ provoked bursts of laughter in the House of Commons.
Canning was temperamentally inclined to be flexible, and he had the skills needed to justify his policy shifts or to convince opponents that they were not shifts at all. He was still proclaiming strict British neutrality when in March 1823 the problem of how the Ionian islands’ authorities should treat Greek ships led him to recognise the Greeks as belligerents, to Metternich’s fury. The only alternative, Canning explained, was to treat them as pirates, which would lead to endless difficulties. On the other hand he took steps to enforce the Foreign Enlistment Act which barred serving British officers from enlisting in the Greek forces. In March 1824 he did not explicitly support the first London loan to Greece, but he did attend the banquet that launched it. The trend of Canning’s policy was on balance helpful to the Greeks, but he had no high opinion of them. ‘There is no denying,’ he wrote, ‘they are the most rascally set.’7
At the end of 1824, the Greeks sent Canning a written protest against the Russian mémoire that proposed three semi-autonomous provinces, and appealed for Britain’s help. Canning replied explaining his position to them. As both Greeks and Turks had rejected the mémoire, he wrote, any hope of successful intervention at present was ‘utterly vain’. Britain was linked to Turkey by long-standing treaties, and if she took part on the Greeks’ side against Turkey she would ‘engage in unprovoked hostilities against that Power in a quarrel not her own’. Nevertheless, Britain would not be a party to forcing a settlement on the Greeks against their wishes; and if both Greece and Turkey accepted mediation she would do her best ‘to carry it into effect, conjointly with other Powers’.8 So Canning made clear that he was not as yet prepared to consider force, but was prepared to mediate.
Mediation ‘conjointly with other Powers’ was a very different matter from being dragged into intervention by decisions of a congress of the Alliance. Canning was consistently opposed to such congresses, and illustrated his opposition with a tale from the Arabian Nights. In this story a young man, to oblige a miller, gets into his mill wheel and agrees to turn it for half an hour, ‘but being once in, is whipped on, every time that he attempts to pause; the miller, in the meantime, turning his thoughts to his other business’.9 The young man was Britain, the mill was the congress system, and the miller was the power that was using the congress system for its own ends. In 1824 that power in Canning’s view was Russia, and the British and Russian policy differences led almost inevitably to the Tsar’s rejection, in the last days of the year, of any further discussion of the Greek situation between Russia and Britain.
Canning calculated that Britain’s rift with Russia could not last because Russia would fall out with the other members of the Alliance, and he was soon proved right. The congress to discuss the Tsar’s mémoire met in St Petersburg in early 1825, though of course without Britain. The Tsar wanted a mandate to use force to impose his settlement, but neither France nor Austria would agree. Metternich’s opposition particularly infuriated the Tsar, who in August instructed all his diplomats that he would no longer work with Metternich, since he, the Tsar, was not receiving ‘that reciprocity of services which he had a right to expect’.10 Russia was now isolated since the Tsar was at odds with all three of his major allies: with Britain for not joining his conference, with Austria and France for attending it but rejecting his proposals. The mill wheel of Canning’s analogy had stopped turning.
As the months of 1825 passed Canning began to take steps to repair relations with Russia, and get the Tsar to ‘talk Greek’ again. Canning cultivated the long-serving Russian ambassador to London, Prince de Lieven, and was anxious that he should not be replaced by some ‘great, rough, staring owski’ who might easily, as Canning put it, snap the thread of Anglo-Russian relations ‘which is quite strong enough to hold if it is not strained too hard, and may hereafter be twisted into strength again’.11 In September 1825 Canning rejected the Greek Act of Submission to Britain since, apart from anything else, acceptance would have made future co-operation with Russia impossible.
A rapprochement between Britain and Russia was finally arranged in an extremely unorthodox way. Princess de Lieven, wife of the Russian ambassador to London, visited St Petersburg in the summer of 1825. She was as politically sophisticated, and some thought as politically influential, as her husband, and on this visit had several meetings with the Tsar and with his foreign minister Nesselrode. Late in the evening of the day before her departure for London she received an urgent message asking her to see Nesselrode next morning before she left. At this meeting the foreign minister told her, in the strictest confidence, that the Tsar was ready to abandon the Alliance and co-operate separately with Britain over Greece; and that, while his curt note of December 1824 prevented him approaching Britain, he would be receptive if Britain approached him. Princess de Lieven was asked to convey this to Canning as a ‘living despatch’, and in total secrecy. Her meeting with Nesselrode was no doubt fixed for the last hours of her stay to minimise the chances of her leaking the information in St Petersburg. The Princess was amazed at Nesselrode’s words: ‘Here was the most cautious and discreet of ministers,’ she wrote, ‘compelled to entrust the most confidential, the most intimate, and most bold political projects to a woman.’ Nesselrode explained: ‘A woman knows how to make people speak, and that is precisely why the Emperor considers you have a unique opportunity.’12
Princess de Lieven returned to England, and she and her husband visited Canning while he was staying near Brighton at the end of October 1825. It was probably there, at an informal meeting away from London, that the Lievens told Canning the secret of the Tsar’s willingness to co-operate again with Britain over Greece. At the same meeting Lieven showed Canning, in ‘entire personal confidence’ and ‘without the orders of his Court’, the Russian despatch which revealed Ibrahim’s barbarisation project. The despatch said:
The Court of Russia has positive information that before Ibrahim Pasha’s army was put in motion, an agreement was entered into by the Porte with the Pasha of Egypt, that whatever part of Greece Ibrahim Pasha might conquer should be at his disposal; and that his plan of disposing of his conquest is (and was stated to the Porte to be and has been approved by the Porte) to remove the whole Greek population, carrying them off into slavery in Egypt or elsewhere, and to re-people the country with Egyptians and others of the Mohammedan religion.13
Canning now had both an offer of co-operation from the Tsar and a justification for action, not solely on humanitarian grounds. The barbarisation plan made Russia’s intervention almost inevitable – there could hardly be a more flagrant breach of the Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji – and Britain did not want Russia to intervene alone. We cannot be certain that the plan was in fact adopted by Ibrahim, or that the Porte approved it. By the summer of the following year both Ibrahim and the Porte had issued denials, though they would not put the denials in writing. But whether true or not, this report of Ibrahim’s intentions was a crucial factor in bringing nearer intervention by the powers. Up to this point Canning had consistently opposed the use of force over Greece. Now he stated explicitly that Britain intended ‘to prevent, if necessary by force, the accomplishment of the plan imputed to Ibrahim Pasha’.14
Then an event occurred which threatened once again to snap the thread of Anglo-Russian understanding. In September Tsar Alexander travelled from St Petersburg to Taganrog on the Sea of Azov which flows into the Black Sea. As he made exhausting journeys round his southern domains, his symptoms of what was known as Crimean fever intensified, and on 1 December 1825 he died at the age of forty-seven. Utter confusion followed. Alexander’s natural successor was Constantine, the eldest of his brothers, but by a secret agreement Constantine had renounced the throne in favour of the next brother, Nicholas. On Alexander’s death Constantine, now in Warsaw as commander of Russia’s military commission in Poland, followed the agreement and swore allegiance to Nicholas. Nicholas in St Petersburg, ignoring the agreement, swore allegiance to Constantine. Thus as the London Times put it, ‘The Empire is in the strange position of having two self-denying Emperors and no active ruler.’15
The revolutionary group who became known as the Decembrists now seized their opportunity. This group, mainly from the aristocratic intelligentsia and with backing from some army units, had been building support since the end of the Napoleonic wars. Its aim was the abolition of the Tsar’s autocratic powers, the emancipation of the serfs and the adoption of a liberal constitution, or at least, in the present power vacuum, the enthronement of the supposedly more enlightened Constantine. Nicholas learnt of the Decembrists’ plans to act, and accepted the tsardom. On the morning of 26 December the pro-Constantine troops of the Moscow regiment and their officers moved into the Senate Square in St Petersburg, a century later renamed the Decembrists’ Square, and there they refused to take the oath of allegiance to Nicholas. Seven hours later the mutinous soldiers had been dispersed by cannon firing grapeshot, and hundreds of Decembrist supporters were later imprisoned and interrogated. Of those found guilty after a mockery of a trial most were sent to penal servitude in Siberia, and five were hanged, still defiantly cheerful on the scaffold and turning back to back so as to shake each other’s bound hands for the last time. Nicholas was now firmly established as tsar. But would he follow his predecessor’s secretly agreed line over relations with Britain and cooperation on the question of Greece?
To discover the answer to this question the Duke of Wellington, now a member of the cabinet, was sent as a special envoy to St Petersburg. The ostensible purpose of the Duke’s visit was to congratulate Nicholas on his enthronement, but the political objective was for him to make clear Britain’s position on Greece and Turkey: that Britain was prepared to mediate alone, or in conjunction with Russia, and that if mediation failed Britain was prepared to use force to stop Ibrahim’s barbarisation project but in no other circumstances.
However, when Wellington reached St Petersburg on 2 March 1826 he found the new Tsar apparently indifferent to the Greeks and concerned only with forcing concessions from Turkey over the principalities and Serbia. Lord Strangford, now Britain’s ambassador to St Petersburg, thought that the Tsar would ignore the Greeks indefinitely, writing that ‘the young Emperor Nick does not care a straw for the virtuous and suffering Greeks. He considers armed intervention or indeed any intervention at all as little better than an invitation to his own subjects to rebel.’16 But the Tsar dealt rapidly with the principalities question by an ultimatum to Turkey, and a few days later Prince de Lieven, summoned from London by the Tsar, arrived in St Petersburg. The Greek question was now actively revived, the diplomatic logjam at last broke, and events moved very quickly. On 4 April, only a fortnight after Lieven’s arrival, the Protocol of St Petersburg, a statement of common objectives on Greece, was signed by Nesselrode and Lieven for Russia and by Wellington for Britain. The text of the protocol in French stated that, as the Greeks (by their Act of Submission) had invited Britain’s mediation, and as both Britain and Russia wished to mediate jointly, the following arrangement was proposed:
–Greece would become a dependency of Turkey, paying an agreed annual tribute.
–The Greeks would choose their own governing authorities, but in this choice Turkey would have ‘une certaine part’.
–Greece would have complete freedom of conscience, of trade and of internal administration.
–To separate Greeks from Turks, the Greeks would acquire (the protocol did not say how) all Turkish property in Greece.
–If mediation was rejected by Turkey, these proposals would form the basis of intervention by Russia and Britain either jointly or separately.
–The future extent of Greece would be settled later.
–Neither Britain nor Russia would seek for herself territorial gains, exclusive influence or commercial advantage.
–Austria, France and Prussia would be invited confidentially to guarantee, with Russia, the final arrangement, but Britain would not be a party to this guarantee.17
Such were the terms of the protocol, which offered something to everyone. The Greeks would achieve a limited independence, and the Turks would retain a limited sovereignty. For Russia, the proposals of a single semi-autonomous state for Greece was not unlike the three such Greek states proposed by Tsar Alexander in his mémoire of 1824. Both Russia and Britain retained the right to intervene alone as well as together. A guarantee from the other three powers was invited, no more, and Britain would not join the guarantee: that is, the powers of the now defunct Alliance might join the action or not, and Britain in refusing to give a guarantee for the future was emphasising her determination not to step back on to the Alliance treadmill.
The protocol did no more than state the shared aims of the parties, and it would have to be converted into a treaty if obligations were to be imposed on the signatories. Which of the other three powers, Austria, Prussia and France, would sign such a treaty? There was no chance of gaining Austrian support. The protocol effectively marked the end of the Alliance and its unconditional support for authority, which Metternich had in the past been able to dominate. Suppose, he suggested scornfully, that the Irish, in revolt against the British, invited the French to mediate. ‘Is England then ready to regard as a Power equal in rights to that of the [British] King the first Irish Club which declares itself the Insurgent Government of Ireland? To regard as justified the French Power which would accept the office of mediator, by reason of the sole fact that the invitation had been addressed to it by the Irish Government? … Whither does this absurdity not lead us?’18 Prussia, the power furthest from the scene of conflict and without the trade or territorial interests of the others, offered vague support but would not sign a treaty without Austria. That left France. After a year of patient diplomacy by Canning France did in fact sign the successor to the protocol, the Treaty of London of July 1827. But that is to take the story beyond April 1826, which brought, besides the signing of the St Petersburg Protocol, another crucial event for the Greeks: the fall after a year-long siege of Mesolongi.