1

Gladstone wrote the pamphlet in three days while in bed with lumbago. The sensation was tremendous: 40,000 copies were sold in a week, 200,000 by the end of the month. His arguments have often been summarized and his famous peroration often quoted; though, in fact, by giving the impression that Gladstone wanted the whole Turkish population, not simply the apparatus of government, to be evicted from Europe his grand finale spoiled his own case.

Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible way, namely by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbachis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned … There is not a criminal in an European gaol, there is not a cannibal in the South Sea Islands whose indignation would not arise and overboil at the recital of that which has been done … If it be allowable that the executive power of Turkey should renew at this great crisis, by permission or authority of Europe, the charter of its existence in Bulgaria, then there is not on record since the beginnings of political society a protest that man has lodged against intolerable misgovernment or a stroke that he has dealt at loathsome tyranny, that ought not henceforth to be branded as a crime

Why did Gladstone intervene at this particular moment? The suggestion that he acted prematurely and should have awaited the appearance of Baring’s full report has no justification. On August 29 the Daily News published a preliminary report by the American Consul General Schuyler, which, coming from a source of unimpeachable detachment, gave Gladstone ample evidence on which to base his pamphlet. Nor was it a case of political opportunism in any ordinary sense of the word. His action did, it is true, bring about by a series of almost inevitable steps his resumption in 1880 of the leadership of the Liberal party. Hartington’s mistress, the German-born Duchess of Manchester, anxious for her lover’s prospect of the Premiership, told Disraeli some weeks earlier at the end of the session: ‘That gentleman is only waiting to come to the fore with all his hypocritical retirement.’1 And it is certainly true that for a man who had resigned as leader in 1875 because he ‘deeply desired an interval between Parliament and the grave’, Gladstone had been surprisingly active. But, although his latest move only confirmed the Duchess, along with most of the upper class, in their belief, Gladstone was not a hypocrite. He certainly had no intention of ousting Granville and Hartington, even if he was not very considerate in his treatment of them. Nor can the timing of his intervention be explained by the imminence of a by-election for the Buckinghamshire county seat made vacant by Disraeli’s peerage. The home counties were the least ‘atrocitarian’ constituencies in the country, and the Rothschilds, hitherto pillars of Buckinghamshire Liberalism, seceded, approving, like most of English Jewry, of the Government’s Turkish policy.

The truth is that Gladstone was swept into the main current belatedly, reluctantly and scarcely knowing where he was going. The idea that he had long been watching for the appropriate occasion and that his action was a superb example of ‘right timing’ has been effectively demolished; likewise Buckle’s picture of him stalking Disraeli, like an ‘old hunter, once more sniffing the scent’ and seizing his opportunity.2 On the contrary Gladstone was slow to act, and his pamphlet came out long after the agitation had been gaining momentum. As the leading authority puts it, the episode was ‘less a case of Gladstone exciting popular passion than of popular passion exciting Gladstone’.3 Gladstone had retired from the leadership of the Liberal party because the defeat of 1874 seemed to him a clear sign that he had lost that understanding with the virtuous masses, which since the ’sixties had been the inspiration of his political life. Suddenly, and surprisingly late in the day, he saw that the atrocity agitation might recover it for him. This was what he meant when he wrote that ‘the game was afoot and the question still alive’ – words which Morley omitted4 – or even more significantly on August 29 to Granville: ‘Good ends can rarely be attained in politics without passion: and there is now, the first time for a good many years, a virtuous passion.’5 For Gladstone politics was a moral crusade based on the highest instincts of British democracy; or it was nothing. In the sense that he saw an opportunity of taking part in just such a moral crusade, he might be described as an opportunist, but not in any other sense.

Gladstone wholly lacked Disraeli’s acute, though sporadic, comprehension of the material needs of the working class. Bread and butter politics were of no interest to him, and the intervals between his crusades – Ireland, Bulgaria, Ireland again – were devoted, if in opposition, to theology, if in office, to Scrooge-like exercises in Treasury economy. But this ignorance of the masses did not preclude an extraordinary faith in their inherent goodness, in their capacity for righteous wrath, which he contrasted with the selfishness of the classes. And it really was true that at this era of their history, the British masses were susceptible to gusts of outward-looking moral indignation unparalleled before or since, or in any other country. Victorian religious and ethical sensitivity was at its apogee. That Disraeli of all people should have been Prime Minister at this particular moment seems indeed an irony of history.

It is hard to believe that Gladstone’s intervention, reluctant and belated as it was, did not owe something to this very fact. He had been greatly disconcerted by his defeat in 1874 at the hands of a man who might well have been dismissed as a spent force in politics, although Gladstone himself never made that error. Disraeli’s rise to power had come late in the day, but it was all the more spectacular when it did occur. That Gladstone distrusted, indeed, despite protestations, detested his rival is obvious enough. It is less obvious but no less true that he genuinely dreaded what Disraeli might do in an hour of triumph. He had never forgotten the ‘diabolical cleverness’ with which he had been outmanoeuvred in the session of 1867, when commanding ostensibly a majority of seventy. Disraeli, he once wrote ‘is a man who is never beaten. Every reverse, every defeat is to him only an admonition to wait and catch his opportunity of retrieving and more than retrieving his position.’6 Some of Gladstone’s suspicions were absurd; that Disraeli was mainly influenced by Judaic sympathies; that what he hated was Christian liberty; that he intended to seize Egypt ‘so he may become Duke of Memphis yet’. But it is true that strange ideas were revolving in Disraeli’s head; dreams perhaps, but then who has ever had more extraordinary skill, or luck, in turning dreams into the semblance of reality?

Later in the year, at the instigation of the Duke of Argyll, Gladstone read Tancred for the first time. Was the Royal Titles Bill some shadowy realization of Fakredeen’s advice to Tancred to persuade the Queen ‘to collect a great fleet … stow away all her treasure, bullion and gold plate … and transfer the seat of her empire to Delhi’? … Perhaps the novel suggested even more alarming possibilities. Gladstone was aware that Disraeli flattered Queen Victoria and encouraged her to hold ideas of questionable constitutional propriety. Now he read how Tancred was urged to ‘magnetise the Queen’; how he could not help succeeding, ‘especially if you talk to her as you talk to me, and say such fine things in such a beautiful voice’. Could Disraeli be doing just this? If Gladstone had seen even a fraction of the correspondence between the Prime Minister and his Sovereign he would have been alarmed indeed.

Whatever Gladstone’s conscious and unconscious motives may have been for intervention, it inevitably brought out all the pride and obstinacy of which Disraeli was capable. It is hard to avoid the impression that even before this his scepticism about the atrocities was partly conditioned by dislike of those who made a fuss about them, ‘this Hudibrastic crew of High Ritualists, Dissenting ministers, and “the great Liberal party”’, as he described them to Derby.7 He was determined not to seem to yield to popular pressure. It was for this reason that he refused to accept even the Queen’s advice to make some concession to the humanitarians by condemning the atrocities in public. He considered that he had done enough in Parliament, and after the end of the session he remained silent, apart from a letter to The Times on September 7 repudiating the idea that he had intended to jest when he had referred to massacre rather than torture as being the custom of an Oriental people. ‘I hope the misplaced laughter of another is no proof of the levity of your humble servant.’

His obduracy was now intensified. It was galling enough to be told by anyone that the British nation ‘must teach its Government almost as it would a lisping child what to say’. But to be told so by Gladstone was more than he could bear. He regarded the pamphlet with contempt. ‘Vindictive and ill-written – that of course. Indeed in that respect of all the Bulgarian horrors perhaps the greatest.’8  Gladstone followed up with a passionate oration delivered in pouring rain to a vast audience at Blackheath. Disraeli decided to strike back in an eve-of-poll speech to his late constituents at Aylesbury on September 20.

It was perhaps not one of his more statesman-like performances. He declared that there was a danger lest the noble sentiments of the British people might be exploited by ‘designing politicians … for the furtherance of sinister ends’. Such conduct ‘in the general havoc and ruin which it may bring about … may, I think, be fairly described as worse than any of those Bulgarian atrocities which now occupy attention’. After this hit at Gladstone he went on to one of his favourite themes and proceeded to talk what can only be described as nonsense about ‘secret societies’. Peace would have been restored in the Balkans but for Serbia. ‘Serbia declared war on Turkey, that is to say the secret societies of Europe declared war on Turkey.’9 Presumably Disraeli believed in this farrago, but it can only be regarded by the historian as a sign of his complete failure to understand the realities of Slav nationalism and Turkish misrule.

The by-election was widely regarded as a test case for the Government. To lose a seat vacated by the Prime Minister would have been a disaster indeed. In the event all was well. T. F. Fremantle, the Conservative candidate, beat the Liberal, a brother of Lord Carrington, by 200 votes. ‘The election,’ Disraeli told the Queen, ‘was too close, but considering all things was a great victory – a defeat would have been a serious blow. The struggle has been most costly, the contest having lasted a month; and Lord Carrington’s command to win being carte-blanche.’10 In fact, the Conservatives were fairly safe in a home-county election. Granville lamented to Gladstone ‘the complete absence of country gentlemen on C’s side’,11 and Disraeli’s agent eleven days before the poll reckoned that victory was certain.12

Gladstone’s decision to lead the atrocity campaign injected a bitterness into British politics unequalled since the Corn Law debates. The uncertain floating elements in public opinion crystallized at once around the two old rivals. Henceforth it became almost impossible for even intelligent men to consider the Eastern question rationally or disinterestedly. The country was divided into ‘Turks’ and ‘Russians’, like the Blues and the Greens of Byzantium. Reason vanished and passion prevailed. Oddly enough there was something very un-English about both the leaders; Gladstone with his torrential flood of earnest moral indignation, and Disraeli with his elaborately phrased sarcasm. Behind the scenes on both sides there were English voices of moderation, Derby, Salisbury, Hartington, Granville; but they had little effect for the moment.

Generalizations about the social and religious forces supporting the two rivals are subject to many exceptions and should be made with caution.13 Broadly speaking the strength of the atrocitarians lay in the north of England, in the south-west and in Wales. They were relatively weak in Scotland and counted for nothing in Ireland. This geographical distribution was obviously connected with nonconformity which saw an analogue of its own grievances. As Palmerston once said of the Christian subjects of the Sultan, they were the ‘nonconformists of Turkey’, and throughout the agitation leading nonconformists were among its most prominent figures. Irish silence can be explained by the silence of the Vatican, a result of the traditional Papal antagonism to the Greek Orthodox Church. The few English Catholics who protested were, as one would expect, ‘old Catholics’ mostly from grand families, unfriendly towards Manning and ultramontanism. In Scotland liberalism was already so deeply entrenched as to be the current orthodoxy. There was nothing much to protest about. Bulgaria rang no bell.

The Church of England was in general anti-atrocitarian. The exception, though not monopolizing that position, was the High Church party, enemies of the Establishment from within even as the nonconformists were from without. The evangelicals were strongly pro-Disraeli, and they constituted the great majority of the inferior clergy. On the episcopal bench the division followed lines of patronage. The ‘Derby-Dizzy’ bishops supported the Government, Gladstone’s appointees were inclined to the other side. Tait, though no lover of Disraeli, supported his policy on general Erastian principles and anxiety to preserve the unity of the Church. Magee, Bishop of Peterborough, doubted on September 18 whether the whole history of democracy, ‘rife as it is with instances of passionate injustice supplies a grosser one than the cry against the Ministry of the last three weeks’.14

The intelligentsia were too readily dismissed by Disraeli as enemies. The older generation undoubtedly opposed him, but the younger intellectuals, the supporters of empire, efficiency and no nonsense were on his side. Already liberal imperialism was casting its shadow before it. Whereas Carlyle, Ruskin, Freeman, Froude, Browning, Trollope, Darwin, Spencer – an incongruous mixture, no doubt – supported the agitation, Fitzjames Stephen, Jowett, Hyndman, Matthew Arnold, regarded it as a tiresome irrelevance. So, for somewhat different reasons, did Karl Marx.

The struggle between the ‘Bulgarians’ and the ‘Turks’ is often presented as one between the metropolis and the provinces. This is an oversimplification. There was plenty of atrocitarianism in London, and large areas of the provinces were pro-Government. But it is true that London society, ‘the upper ten thousand’, condemned by Gladstone, was overwhelmingly behind Disraeli. Of course, there were exceptions and – what particularly annoyed him – Conservative exceptions; like Lord Bath, or worse still Lord Bute, Disraeli’s own Lothair, who as a Tory and a Catholic convert ought on any count to have been sound. But, in general, clubland, the aristocracy, the gentry and the City were on his side. So, too, was the rough world of what would once have been called the London mob. The London Press was on the whole favourable to the Government. Apart from the Daily News, Disraeli’s consistent foe, the morning papers either vacillated or came down in his favour. A notable capture was the Daily Telegraph, owned by the Jewish family of Levy-Lawson. English Jewry tended to be pro-Turk for obvious reasons. Disraeli’s enemies often attributed his own attitude to his ancestry, and an unpleasant streak of anti-Semitism colours many of the religious and radical writers who attacked him. Freeman was the worst. T. P. O’Connor, Froude and Goldwin Smith contributed their share, and the Church Times described him as the ‘Jew Premier’.15

Last but not least in an era when royalty still counted for something in politics, the Court was emphatically anti-atrocitarian. The known views of the Queen affected the whole outlook of London society. Queen Victoria’s attitude, shared by all her family except the unpopular Duke of Edinburgh who had married a Russian princess, was unequivocally pro-Turk. The Queen had only recently become converted to this view. She had queried the wisdom of rejecting the Berlin Memorandum, and she had expressed genuine indignation at the Bulgarian atrocities, constantly prodding Derby on the subject. But Gladstone’s activities appear to have aroused such indignation in her that, by a process of reaction illogical but not unnatural, she supported the Turks if only because Gladstone denounced them. Disraeli behaved in much the same way. What infuriated the Queen and the Prime Minister was Gladstone’s claim that realpolitik should give way to a moral crusade and that the higher interests of humanity should prevail over ‘the permanent and important interests of England’, as Disraeli termed them in his speech at Aylesbury.

The almost pathological animus of the Queen against Gladstone, which lasted until his dying day, dates from this period. She had indeed never liked him. He was ‘tiresome’, ‘obstinate’, ‘tyrannical’ and ‘tactless’. These are unflattering adjectives, but they are nothing compared with the language she now began to use in her letters to her favourite child the Crown Princess of Prussia, which are perhaps the best evidence of her spontaneous reaction to events. On September 19 she describes his behaviour as ‘most reprehensible and mischievous … shameful and unjustifiable’.16 A week later she refers to ‘the disgraceful conduct of that mischief maker and firebrand, Mr. Gladstone’.17 By February 1877 he has become ‘that half madman’, and henceforth she evidently regarded insanity as the only explanation of Gladstone’s policy.

It has sometimes been suggested that Disraeli stimulated the Queen’s hostility to Gladstone. He certainly had no reason to discourage it, but a close examination of his letters to her reveals only two mild instances of even an innuendo against his rival. He could not resist a slightly malicious hint in 1874, apropos of Lord Ripon’s conversion to Rome, that it had been caused by reading articles in the Contemporary Review, ‘a new periodical under the influence and patronage of Mr. Gladstone’.18 And in 1878, referring to something Gladstone had published in the North American Review, he wrote: ‘Lord Palmerston’s “dangerous man” has at length verified that statesman’s prophecy of his ultimate insanity.’19 Disraeli may have said things in audience, which he never committed to paper. But it seems unlikely. The truth was that he had no need to do so.

To his friends Disraeli expressed himself without inhibition. He detested Gladstone at this time. He wrote to Derby in words often quoted:

Posterity will do justice to that unprincipled maniac Gladstone – extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy, and superstition; and with one commanding characteristic – whether Prime Minister, or Leader of Opposition, whether preaching, praying, speechifying or scribbling – never a gentleman!20

The word ‘Tartuffe’ appears frequently in his letters to Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield, Mrs Gladstone even figuring on occasion as ‘Mrs. T’. At times Disraeli followed the Queen’s lead in describing Gladstone as insane, but the verdict which most probably represents his true opinion is to be found in a letter to Lady Bradford on October 3, a year later.

What you say about Gladstone is most just. What restlessness! What vanity! And what unhappiness must be his! Easy to say he is mad. It looks like it. My theory about him is unchanged: a ceaseless Tartuffe from the beginning. That sort of man does not get mad at 70.21

Gladstone always denied that he actually hated Disraeli and added that he did not believe Disraeli hated him. He was wrong in the latter belief, although it is to his credit. Moreover, it is hard to believe that he was correct about his own feelings. Sir Philip Magnus writes in his brilliant biography: ‘… those who knew him best were agreed that at that time his sentiment towards his rival became that of black hatred.’22 Disraeli, Gladstone told Hartington, ‘has never wanted courage but his daring is elastic and capable of any extension with the servility of the times’. Lord Acton, who knew Gladstone well, endeavoured to remonstrate with him five years later for proposing a public monument to a man whom, he said, Gladstone had regarded as ‘the worst and most immoral Minister since Castlereagh’. Nearly twenty years later Gladstone delivered to his close friend Lord Rendel what was perhaps his final judgement on his long-deceased rival: ‘In past times the Tory party had principles by which it would and did stand for bad and for good. All this Dizzy destroyed.’23

If the two rivals felt like this about each other, it is easy to imagine how violent were the passions of their supporters then and later. Perhaps the nadir of bad taste was achieved by the historian Edward Freeman, who after Disraeli’s Guildhall speech in November referred in print to ‘the Jew in his drunken insolence’, and a year later, when the Queen lunched at Hughenden, described her as ‘going ostentatiously to eat with Disraeli in his ghetto’. But professors did not have the monopoly of offensiveness. Dukes could be as bad, and one of them, the Duke of Sutherland, in January 1878, publicly stated that ‘Russia’s principal agents were Mr. Gladstone and General Ignatyev’. Few political issues have raised such venomous feelings. Munich and Suez are the nearest equivalents in recent times, but on neither occasion did even the most vehement partisans use language like this in public.

2

Disraeli’s attitude to the Eastern question had been erratic and changeable for the past eighteen months. It is hard to discern any consistent thread other than a general determination to assert Britain’s prestige and to disrupt the Dreikaiserbund. But from October 1876 onwards his opinions hardened. The more Turcophobe Gladstone became, the more Russophobe was Disraeli. Whereas at one time he talked of partition as the solution, and indeed was to consider it again for a moment after the collapse of the Constantinople Conference, his normal attitude henceforth was to support the independence and territorial integrity of Turkey, in fact the old Crimean policy. It was in October 1876 that he had the conversation with Lord Barrington mentioned earlier, in which he declared that Constantinople, not Egypt, was the key to India.

If we accept this thesis – and a very big ‘if’ is needed – then Disraeli’s policy had a certain logic, given two premises. The first was that Russia aimed at the destruction of Turkey and the seizure of the Straits, the second that she would only be deterred if convinced that Britain, as in 1854, would fight rather than allow it. The Crimean war was the great bugbear of official diplomatic thinking at this time. Over the past twenty years its causes had been endlessly discussed. The widely accepted opinion was that if only Aberdeen had proclaimed from the outset Britain’s readiness to go to war rather than give way, then the Tsar would never have taken the steps which made war inevitable. In other words, the preservation not only of Britain’s interests but of peace itself depended on the credibility of the British threat to intervene on the side of Turkey.

The maddening feature of the atrocity agitation from Disraeli’s point of view was that it undermined that credibility at the very moment when the collapse of Serbia and the appalling abuses of Turkish rule were providing Russia with ample excuse for invading Turkey under the cover of a crusade on behalf of the oppressed Slav Christians. Both Disraeli and the Queen were convinced that such an invasion would end in a Russian occupation of Constantinople, but it was very doubtful whether British public opinion would now permit any intervention on the side of Turkey. More important, it was certain that the Russian Government would never believe in the possibility of such intervention as long as the atrocity campaign raged in Britain.

In his great work, Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question, Professor R. W. Seton-Watson made some cogent criticisms of Disraeli’s attitude. Many of them are justified, but he was less than fair to the Prime Minister when he suggested that Disraeli wanted war and positively sought to pick a quarrel with Russia.24 Disraeli was no warmonger, any more than Churchill was in the nineteen-thirties, but he was determined not to go down to history as a second Aberdeen. He believed that in the circumstances peace could be preserved only by the threat of war, and, after hostilities had broken out between Russia and Turkey in May 1877, that Britain’s vital interests could be maintained only by a similar threat. A threat unbacked by real force is useless, and naturally he discussed in much detail, though sometimes with wild eccentricity, the actual military and naval steps that might be taken. He certainly felt no moral objection to an alliance with Turkey – and here he differed not only from Gladstone but from at least half of his own Cabinet – but he did not want war for its own sake.

It is impossible to pass judgement on Disraeli’s policy without deciding how accurately he estimated Russian intentions. In other words, were his premises correct? Did Russia really aim at the conquest of Constantinople? The answer depends in its turn on what one means by ‘Russia’. Professor Seton-Watson, who secured the secret correspondence25 between Tsar Alexander II, his Chancellor, Prince Gorchakov, and his Ambassador in London, Count Shuvalov, makes a strong case for the basically pacific and limited objectives of Russian foreign policy throughout the crisis. ‘We are now looking into the Tsar’s own cards,’ he writes on one occasion, ‘and it is difficult to believe that even the most confirmed Russophobe in the British cabinet of those days could have failed to be reassured if it had been possible for him to do the same.’26 But, of course, it was not possible, and in any case, however pacific the advice given by Gorchakov and Shuvalov, there was another Russia besides the cosmopolitan French-speaking officialdom of St Petersburg – a Russia which had vaster aims, more sweeping ambitions, and was not without influence in the highest quarters; the Russia of Moscow and the Panslavs.

The Tsar usually listened to Gorchakov while in St Petersburg, but he often vacillated, taking colour from his surroundings. For example, in Livadia – a sort of inverted Balmoral on the Black Sea – where he was surrounded by Panslav influences, he tended to become altogether more expansionist and nationalistic in outlook. In the Russian foreign service Panslavism27 was represented by General Ignatyev, who occupied the key position of the Constantinople Embassy. He frankly aimed at the overthrow of Turkish power in the Balkans and at Russian seizure of the Straits. He was clever, unscrupulous, amusing, ingratiating and dangerous. Years of intrigue in Constantinople had made him almost more Oriental than the Turks whom he outmanoeuvred, and his nickname among the diplomatic corps in the city was ‘Menteur Pasha’. One of his most intimate friends was Fadeyev, a soldier and adventurer who in 1875 accepted an invitation from the Khedive to reconstruct the Egyptian Army. His purpose, but not the Khedive’s, was to use it against the Sultan in conjunction with a Slav uprising in the Balkans. As author of Opinion on the Eastern Question he was one of the best-known exponents of extreme Turcophobe Panslavism.

These manifestations did not escape the attention of the anti-Russian party in Britain, and even if the assurances of Gorchakov and Shuvalov were regarded as genuine, which, as we can now see, in fact, they were, there was no certainty that their advice would prevail with the Tsar; nor even if it did was there any guarantee that the Tsar himself would not be committed by semi-mutinous Panslav proconsuls into actions far beyond his original intentions. The classic instance of this, fresh in men’s minds, was the annexation of Khiva in 1873 by Kaufmann, the Governor-General of Turkestan, despite categorical promises conveyed via Shuvalov to the British Government. It was followed by the massacre of the Yomud Turcomans – an atrocity so frequently cited by the Russophobes during 1876 that Gladstone, in conjunction with his ally, Mme Novikov, endeavoured not very successfully to refute it in the November number of the Contemporary Review. It was, therefore, by no means unreasonable for Disraeli to feel hesitation in trusting the effectiveness of Shuvalov’s promises, whether or not he considered that the Ambassador was personally honest, and whether or not he believed that he correctly conveyed the sentiments of the Chancellor and the Tsar.

For the moment it was clearly useless to threaten British intervention on the Turkish side. Derby, therefore, worked with much energy towards securing a Turkish-Serbian armistice. Protracted manoeuvring ensued, but was brought to an abrupt end by an ultimatum from the Tsar on October 31, which the Sultan had no option but to accept. Derby now proposed a conference of the six great powers to consider the future of Turkey. This was to be held at Constantinople in the second half of December, each country having two representatives. The bases for discussion were the territorial integrity of Turkey; local or administrative autonomy for Bosnia, Herzegovina and Bulgaria; status quo for Serbia and Montenegro; and no special concessions to any of the great powers. For a fleeting moment Disraeli contemplated going himself, but he soon saw that this would not be appropriate, and readily fell in with Derby’s suggestion that Salisbury should be the man.

No better choice could have been made. Salisbury was anything but ‘Turkish’. Gladstone told Mme Novikov that it was ‘the best thing the Government has yet done in the Eastern Question’ and that Salisbury ‘has no Disraelite prejudices, keeps a conscience and has plenty of manhood and character’. At the same time, as Secretary for India he was not likely to be ‘Russian’ either. His appointment was welcomed by all shades of opinion. Salisbury, who anticipated correctly ‘seasickness, much French and failure’, accepted with reluctance; but the experience was to be a turning-point in his own career. The Prince of Wales sensibly advised him to meet the principal statesmen of Europe on his way out. Lord Tenterden, the permanent head of the Foreign Office, a true bureaucrat, advised him not to. Disraeli was emphatically on the Prince’s side. He told Salisbury, ‘You should personally know the men who are governing the world … don’t concede your own convictions on the subject to Tenterdenism – which is a dusty affair and not suited to the times and things we have to grapple with.’28 It must be admitted that Disraeli was himself singularly ignorant of the characters of most European statesmen, but his advice, which Salisbury accepted, was excellent.

Salisbury was due to leave for his tour of the European capitals on November 20. Meanwhile events occurred which seemed to bring war appreciably nearer. Lord Augustus Loftus reported from Livadia that the Tsar, though ridiculing any idea of Russian ambitions towards Constantinople, let alone India, was emphatic that Russia would not put up with further Turkish procrastination. If necessary she would act alone to enforce reforms. Disraeli decided to reply at the Lord Mayor’s banquet. Accordingly on November 9, ‘in a heated hall full of gas and aldermen and trumpeters and after sitting for hours talking slip slop to a defunct Lady Mayoress’,29 he made a speech on the Eastern question. He declared that the object of the conference was to combine real reforms with the territorial integrity of Turkey and he went out of his way to be polite to Russia, but he ended on a note of defiance, describing as ‘inexhaustible’ Britain’s resources for a righteous war. ‘She is not a country that when she enters into a campaign has to ask herself whether she can support a second or third campaign. She enters into a campaign which she will not terminate till right is done.’30

‘The provocation offered by Disraeli’, wrote Gladstone rather extravagantly, ‘is almost incredible’, adding: ‘Some new lights about his Judaic feeling in which he is both consistent and conscientious have come in upon me.’ Two days later what seemed like a reply came from the Tsar, who normally never uttered in public on political matters. Breaking his journey from Livadia to St Petersburg at Moscow, he made a speech in which he expanded his earlier words to Loftus. If the conference failed he would act alone to enforce reform on Turkey, and he ended to the delight of the Panslavs, ‘May God help us to fulfil our sacred mission.’ In fact, his intervention was a coincidence. There had been no time for the Guildhall speech to reach him, but naturally to the whole of Europe it seemed as if war was becoming imminent. It seemed even more imminent when on November 14 the mobilization of six army corps was announced from St Petersburg.

The practical steps which Britain might take in the event of a Russo-Turkish war had been in Disraeli’s mind for some time, and his papers in the autumn of 1876 are full of military plans. The first appreciation which he had from the War Office calculated that an expeditionary force of 46,000 was enough to hold Gallipoli and the lines north of Constantinople.31 If the Turks were induced to appeal to Britain for such aid, Disraeli believed that it could be sent without declaring war on Russia, and that preparations need not attract undue public attention. At the same time his mind was moving towards more grandiose plans. He feared, he told Salisbury, that if Russia was not checked, ‘the Holy Alliance will be revived in aggravated form and force. Germany will have Holland; and France, Belgium, and England will be in a position I trust I shall never live to witness.’ But if Britain acted as he suggested and furthermore occupied some Black Sea equivalent of Malta or Gibraltar – Varna, Batoum or Sinope were possibilities – the situation might yet be saved.32 This latter proposal was grotesquely impracticable as it stood, but it was probably the origin of the Cyprus Convention which was certainly intended to give Britain what Disraeli called a place d’armes, though not in the Black Sea, from which to resist Russian designs on Turkey.

Disraeli’s military plans were speedily torpedoed by a fresh appreciation from the War Office. ‘The “Intelligence Dept.” must change its name’, he wrote crossly to Corry. ‘It is the department of Ignorance.’ The War Office now put its minimum claim up from 46,000 to 75,000 men. It also demanded more and heavier guns and ‘a railway for stores and telegraph lines from Malta to Crete etc.; in short a very big business in which the present state of affairs hardly justifies us in embarking’.33 In the end all that he could do was to send out Colonel Home of the Sappers to report on the situation, and as a precaution to suspend temporarily with the full consent of the makers the dispatch of eight huge guns weighing 100 tons each, ordered by the Italian Government from Armstrong and Company. ‘There is no gun in existence that can stand against them,’ Derby minuted to Salisbury, ‘and none can be made under two years.’34

Meanwhile the anti-Turk party was far from idle. On December 8 a ‘National Convention on the Eastern Question’ opened at the S James’s Hall, Piccadilly, with a double meeting under the chairmanship of the Duke of Westminster and Lord Shaftesbury. ‘This intolerable assembly’, as Disraeli called it, was attended by Gladstone, who made a special journey from Hawarden to address it. His own speech was comparatively moderate, but other orators uttered very extreme sentiments. Freeman referred to ‘the brag’ which went forth ‘from amid the clatter of wine cups’ at the Guildhall, and asked whether the Government would ‘fight to uphold the integrity and independence of Sodom’.35 The Queen was horrified at these remarks and, so Disraeli told Lady Bradford, thought ‘the Attorney-General should be set at these men; it can’t be constitutional’.36 At the end of the meeting Gladstone conspicuously escorted Madame Novikov from the platform, an episode which caused a storm of controversy. That evening, according to a story which reached Lord Cairns, he dined with Mrs Thistlethwayte, a high-class courtesan whom he had rescued. Among those present was Shuvalov, who congratulated him on his ‘grand triumph’. ‘Could not the World or some such paper,’ asked the Lord Chancellor, ‘be got to publish this?’37

The detailed history of the Conference of Constantinople belongs to the life of Salisbury. The biographer of Disraeli needs to decide only one point. Was he responsible for its failure? That failure was immediately caused by the refusal of the Turkish Government to accept even the watered-down programme of reforms which were finally agreed by the representatives of the six powers. The charge levelled against Disraeli is that he allowed or encouraged the Turks to believe that the Turcophil Elliot was a truer spokesman of the Cabinet than Salisbury, and hence to believe that in the last resort they could rely on British military assistance if their obduracy provoked a Russian declaration of war. It is not, of course, claimed that Disraeli made any categorical promise. It is rather a matter of the general atmosphere created by his attitude.

The original instructions given by the Cabinet to Salisbury on November 20 excluded any coercive or enforcing action against the Porte, but on November 27 these were modified in the sense that a temporary occupation of Turkey was not ruled out if the Porte rejected all proposals for reform.38 This new version in its turn seems to have been amended by a private letter on December 1 from Disraeli to Salisbury,39 which evidently did not have the authority of the Cabinet. Disraeli put an important gloss on the instructions of November 27. Salisbury was to say that England would not exclude occupation, but only on condition that Turkey acquiesced; if so, Russia and Austria-Hungary were to be kept out and he was to manoeuvre the Porte into asking for an English occupation. This was a drastic modification and in the course of the next three weeks Disraeli went even further. He decided that there should be no occupation by anyone, even England. His notes for the Cabinet meeting on December 22 which confirmed his decision contain the words:

Disraeli often harked back to Canning. His argument here presumably was that Canning’s policy of joint Anglo-Russian pressure on Turkey to make concessions on the Greek question had after Canning’s death led indirectly to the crushing defeat of the Turks by Nicholas I and the Treaty of Adrianople in which Britain had no say whatever and which vastly increased Russian influence all over the Near East. It was a doubtful parallel to the situation prevailing in 1876.

Two other considerations seem to have influenced him. First there was the National Convention with its almost hysterical attacks on Elliot and its plea for active intervention on behalf of the Bulgars. Nothing was better calculated to make Disraeli back Elliot and refuse to coerce Turkey. Opposition leaders who really want to influence the Government should think twice whether their tirades may not produce the exact contrary of the effect intended. Under a parliamentary system the Government has its majority and excessive protest may merely harden its determination to go its own way. This was the second occasion on which Gladstone unconsciously drove his enemy in the very direction that the Liberals most deplored. Disraeli was quite determined not to give the slightest appearance of trimming his sails to the Gladstonian hurricane.

The other element in his mind was an increasing uneasiness about Salisbury. It is difficult to avoid the impression that in agreeing to Derby’s choice of a representative Disraeli did not fully appreciate the extent to which Salisbury’s views – and Derby’s, too – differed from his own. Both were much more shocked than he had been by the atrocities. Both, though from standpoints far apart, were determined not to get pulled into fighting for Turkey against Russia. Salisbury earlier had made plain to the Prime Minister his dissent from ‘the pure Palmerston tradition’,41 but perhaps the fact had not fully impinged. Now that he read Salisbury’s reports from the scene of action he saw how wide the gulf was. Disraeli’s new opinion appears in a letter to Derby written later. ‘Sal. seems most prejudiced and not to be aware that his principal object in being sent to Const. is to keep the Russians out of Turkey, not to create an ideal existence for Turkish Xtians. He is more Russian than Ignatyev: plus Arabe que l’Arabie!’42

Salisbury did indeed get on surprisingly well with Ignatyev, who amused him and who was unlike anyone he had ever met before. He savoured with the relish of a connoisseur both Ignatyev’s duplicity and his aplomb when found out. But Ignatyev did not influence his judgement to any substantial degree. Salisbury shrewdly perceived from the start that if the Turks assented to any reforms they would only do so under duress. He saw, too, that as long as Elliot was there he could never convince them that he, Salisbury, spoke for the British Government. His task was made even more difficult by various unofficial Turcophils present in Constantinople, the worst being H. A. Butler-Johnstone, MP for Canterbury, who claimed, with no justification, as far as can be seen, that he was Disraeli’s secret emissary. And apart from all these difficulties how could Salisbury hope to convince the Turks of Britain’s determination to abandon them if they refused to reform, when all the while Colonel Home and other officers were busy surveying the country for a suitable landing-place for a British expeditionary force? Salisbury did his best. He tried to have Elliot sent home. Disraeli checkmated him neatly, if somewhat disingenuously, by telegraphing that Ignatyev had pressed Shuvalov to urge the same course on Derby. ‘If this gets out – and everything does get out at Constantinople – and Elliot withdraws, we shall be turned out the first day of the session by our own men.’ In fact, all Ignatyev had done was to inform Shuvalov that Elliot undermined Salisbury with the Turks. This perfectly true statement fell a good deal short of advice to remove Elliot. When he later learned from Lady Derby of the use made of it by Disraeli Shuvalov was most indignant.43

No doubt Disraeli ought to have removed Elliot. Nevertheless it is probable – and Salisbury himself came to believe so – that nothing would have made any difference. Contemporary diplomats and subsequent historians are too inclined to treat the Turks as passive figures capable of being manipulated in any direction if only the correct method was adopted. In fact, they were seething with rage, intensely hostile to the conference, and from the start determined to refuse all concession. The fury of the mob in Constantinople would probably have caused the fall of any government which surrendered to the Christian powers. The atmosphere of religious fanaticism and outraged nationalism prevailing in the capital at the time should not be discounted.

3

The conference broke up on January 20, and to mark their displeasure the six powers agreed to withdraw all their delegates from Constantinople, including the ambassadors. The problem of what to do next was by no means clear. The Turks had engaged in their usual practice of proclaiming a constitution, this time on the day the conference opened. There was, therefore, an excuse for doing nothing and giving the new régime ‘a chance’. No one who knew Turkey believed that anything would come of this, and the Turcophils received a disagreeable setback when Midhat Pasha, the liberal Grand Vizier, was kidnapped by the Sultan and deported to Brindisi, his place being taken by a ferocious reactionary, Edem Pasha. In Russia a strong party regarded war as now inevitable. The Tsar still hesitated. He decided that it was essential to do a deal with Austria-Hungary in order to assure the latter’s neutrality if war came. The negotiations were tough and were not brought to a successful conclusion until March 18. Meanwhile Ignatyev, who had returned to St Petersburg, persuaded the Tsar to authorize a draft protocol for signature by the six powers embodying the minimum requirements to be demanded from the Porte.

Disraeli, who was ill off and on for most of the year, seems to have pursued no very clear policy during the months which passed between the collapse of the conference and the outbreak of war. He suggested an overture to Vienna, but received an evasive answer. Andrassy’s negotiations with Russia were a closely guarded secret not revealed until 1919, and Disraeli often during the next year placed false hopes upon a rapprochement with Austria-Hungary, the Continental power which in some respects seemed to have the greatest interest in checking Russia and preserving Turkey. In view of this extreme secrecy – Andrassy concealed the agreement even from his own Ambassador in London – Disraeli cannot perhaps be blamed, but it is interesting to notice that at an early stage Salisbury guessed that Russia had ‘squared Vienna’.44 In the House of Lords, Disraeli vigorously and effectively defended the Government’s line at the Conference. He was polite to Russia. There were two policies open to Europe; the Russian, ‘deserving of all respect’, involved the setting up of autonomous tributary states, but, on the historical analogy of the similar states which existed in the centuries before 1453, was there not a danger that Constantinople would in the end fall? Then there was the British policy which favoured territorial integrity, but ‘administrative autonomy’, ie ‘institutions which would secure to the Christian subjects of the Porte some control over their local affairs and some security against the excesses of arbitrary power’. Russia had given up her policy and accepted that of Britain ‘very cordially’. Only Serbia had prevented peace.

The Turcophobes were beginning to lose some ground at this time even in the Liberal party. Granville and Hartington were frankly uneasy at Gladstone’s extreme views, and Hartington was strongly against the publication of Lessons in Massacre, Gladstone’s second pamphlet on Bulgarian horrors. His opposition did not stop Gladstone, but the pamphlet, compared with its predecessor, can only be described as a flop. It sold a mere 7,000 copies. Disraeli’s pro-Turk sentiment often waxed and waned with the rising or falling success of Gladstone’s agitation. At the end of February he made an overture to Shuvalov of a surprisingly conciliatory nature.45 He was worried at the time lest Germany might attack France, reduce her to a second-class power and so leave England isolated. He assured Shuvalov that he had no hostile feelings towards Russia, but one must not precipitate the fall of ‘the Ottoman Empire whose days are numbered’. A chance must be given for reform. He intended a reply to the Russian protocol such as would be not merely ‘a golden bridge … but a bridge of diamonds and rubies’. When Shuvalov urged that Turkey would only reform under coercion, and that unless Britain agreed to this, she would have to allow isolated action by Russia [ie war], Disraeli to his surprise did not protest, but sympathized with the Russian difficulties. ‘I want peace and hope we shall soon drink a glass of wine to celebrate its conclusion. But when all is over we shall have to agree upon a pacific solution for the moment of the sick man’s death.’ Like Shuvalov, the historian can but be puzzled at this curious conversation so different from Disraeli’s usual attitude.

It prompted the Tsar and Gorchakov to take the unwise step of sending Ignatyev with his draft protocol on a personal visit to the European capitals including London. Shuvalov was horrified and warned Gorchakov that it would be like Elliot visiting Russia, but the Chancellor pooh-poohed these objections. Shuvalov and Ignatyev were notorious enemies and represented extreme opposite views on Russian policy. Ignatyev, taking advantage of a rash invitation from Salisbury, stayed at Hatfield. He made the worst impression on almost everyone, trying to intrigue at Salisbury’s own dinner-table with Hartington and Forster, who promptly told their host. He was nothing if not outspoken. When Lady John Manners asked him whether he felt well after his journey he replied: ‘I always feel well. My conscience is clear because I defend the Christians and so my wife and I are always gay.’46 He and his wife dined with Disraeli, whose account of the occasion dwells on diamonds rather than diplomacy. Mme Ignatyev’s ‘paled’ before those of Lady Londonderry, who ‘staggered under the jewels of the 3 united families of Stewart Vane and Londonderry’.47 After dinner they all attended a concert at Lady Dudley’s house. Gladstone was there and was introduced to Ignatyev, who talked so much that even Gladstone could not get a word in. At last the Russian ceased, but was called away by Mme Ignatyev just as Gladstone was about to speak. ‘His glance was demoniacal,’ Disraeli gleefully told Ponsonby for the benefit of the Queen.48

Ignatyev’s visit did nothing to improve the situation, and Shuvalov had to pick up the pieces after he had gone. But after much discussion the Cabinet decided, largely at Salisbury’s insistence, to sign the London Protocol, as the document came to be called. It seemed scarcely credible that the Turks would reject what was now a most conciliatory and innocuous agreement which would probably have been quite ineffective. Once again everyone reckoned without the Turks. Their armies were much stronger after a six-month armistice, and they may have thought that Russia’s finances, which were chaotic, and her military organization, which was deplorable, would cause her to withdraw. Another factor probably played its part. The same Cabinet meeting which decided to accept the London Protocol also agreed on the nomination of A. H. Layard, famous for his excavations at Nineveh thirty years before, as Elliot’s successor at Constantinople. He was a most forceful personality, a keen Turcophile, and incidentally the nephew of Disraeli’s former patroness, Mrs Austen.

That Elliot should need replacement had been a matter of sharp controversy. Disraeli and Derby had intended to keep him and had decided to do so without reference to the Cabinet, as indeed was their right.49 But a hostile motion was put down in the House by W. E. Forster and the Cabinet could no longer be kept out of the business. Salisbury raised a heated protest against the continuation of Elliot. The Queen, on the other hand, urged Disraeli to stick to his guns ‘or we shall never be able to do what we think right as regards foreign missions & Parlt. & not the Sovereign will be their Masters!!’50 Salisbury was backed by most of the Cabinet, influenced by the Chief Whip, who declared that ‘we could not rely on our own men’ if the appointment was not countermanded. Three months earlier the Government was alleged to be in danger if Elliot was removed from his Embassy. Now it appeared to be no less in jeopardy if he was not. Derby caused consternation by declaring that, since he had already given a promise to the Ambassador, he would have to resign if overruled. But Disraeli got round this difficulty by personally explaining the situation to Elliot. The latter, for all his defects, was a man of honour and saved the faces of those concerned by formally requesting a different embassy.

The new Ambassador was not only a violent pro-Turk but well known to be such. It is a reasonable assumption that this was Disraeli’s chief reason for choosing him, for if his previous judgement on Layard was anything more than an expression of bad temper he had no high opinion of his conduct as a diplomatist at Madrid. The choice effectively neutralized the British signature of the London Protocol. On April 9 the Turkish Government formally rejected it. On April 24 Russia declared war on Turkey.

The Russians claimed from the outset that they were fighting solely to enforce the London Protocol. They had no mandate from the other signatories to do so, but it was not possible for Disraeli, however suspicious of Russia’s ulterior motives, to go to war against the enforcement of a document which his own Government had signed. Nor would public opinion have tolerated such action. The Cabinet was therefore united on a policy of neutrality for the time being, and there was general support for Derby’s note to Russia of May 6 defining the British position. It possibly fell short of what Disraeli wanted, but he was taken ill at the relevant Cabinet meeting on May 1 and had to leave before the final decision. Derby’s note warned Russia that Britain would regard her vital interests as jeopardized by military action which threatened any of the following areas: the Persian Gulf, Egypt, the Suez Canal, Constantinople or the Straits. The plan which Disraeli had been pressing at earlier meetings for a British occupation of the Dardanelles was shelved. The Derby note, despite the vicissitudes of war, the complicated divisions in the Cabinet, and the shifts in public opinion remained, as Disraeli called it, ‘the diapaison of our diplomacy’51 for the next nine months.

The parliamentary opposition was for the moment in disarray. Hartington, more perturbed than ever at Gladstone’s excitability, tried to steer a middle course. He feared that his old leader’s policy would divide the Liberal party, many of whom felt that, however deplorable Disraeli’s Turcophilism might be, Gladstone was in danger of appearing as an uncritical supporter of Russia, and this very fact would play into Disraeli’s hands. Gladstone put down five formidable anti-Government resolutions to be debated in the House on May 7, but Granville and Hartington threatened to ‘move the previous question’, and Gladstone decided to propose only the first two which were the least controversial. He made a speech described later by Balfour as ‘unequalled’, but he was defeated by 354 to 223, a good deal more than the Government’s normal majority.

The division in the Opposition was thus plain for all to see. Far less obvious but no less sharp were the divisions which had already begun to plague the Cabinet. From an early stage Carnarvon had been profoundly suspicious of Disraeli; even more so than his closest friend Salisbury. ‘I see pretty plainly … that Lord B. contemplates & as far as it depends on him, intends us to take part in the war and on behalf of Turkey’, he wrote to Salisbury, then in Constantinople, on Christmas Day, 1876.52 ‘… I may do him wrong but his mind is full of strange projects and I feel uneasy as to what he intends and what he may be able to do before there is time or knowledge enough to stop him.’ He went on to say: ‘I hardly understand Derby’s mental position. I think he is uneasy and so far as he is concerned inclined to wait upon events … My impression is that he is entirely in Disraeli’s hands.’ Carnarvon, as we shall see, was quite wrong on this point. At the end of March his anxiety about Disraeli’s plans was increased by a visit to Windsor. He wrote an alarmed, indeed alarmist, letter to Salisbury, anticipating that Disraeli would try to dismiss them both.53 ‘The ground has been completely undermined here … She is ready for war – says that rather than submit to Russian insult she would lay down her crown … Unlike Derby he [Disraeli] has plenty of courage and I am not sure that it is not all things considered the best game for him to play.’ And Carnarvon sadly ended: ‘It is strange to go through the same suspicions, intrigues, open struggle as we did ten years ago: and together.’ Their experience of the Reform struggle in 1867 strongly influenced the two men – and very naturally. Salisbury was, however, the cooler and more cautious. He wrote back at length pointing out the unlikelihood of Carnarvon’s fears being realized; and indeed there is nothing to suggest that either Disraeli or the Queen contemplated dismissing the two peers.

Carnarvon, who was very High Church, was probably the most Turcophobe of the Conservative ministers. His ultimate resignation suggests that he regarded war against Russia on the Turkish side as inadmissible under any circumstances. He was a clever man, as even the Queen conceded, but he had the angularity which sometimes accompanies a clever independent mind. He was small in stature and his nickname ‘Twitters’ suggests a certain lack of impressiveness in his demeanour. He never carried the weight in council of his friend Salisbury. Disraeli was irritated by him, especially when he declared that ‘for his part the amelioration of the Xtian subjects of the Porte is the chief object that he presents to himself’.54 ‘This is disgraceful’, the Queen minuted to Ponsonby.55 Salisbury, too, was deeply suspicious of Disraeli, but unlike Carnarvon he could envisage a situation in which war or the threat of war against Russia was the lesser of two evils. Perhaps in the last resort he attributed more importance than Carnarvon to holding the party together. Hence their ultimate divergence when the crisis came in January 1878. But in May, Salisbury was far from thinking that the threat of war was necessary. His advice throughout the next few months was on the side of moderation.

The opposition group in the Cabinet came to be known as ‘the three Lords’. The third was Derby, who, in spite of Carnarvon’s opinion, was very far from being ‘in Disraeli’s hands’. Derby’s role in the Eastern question is one of much controversy and its final elucidation must await the day when a biography of him comes to be written. But the facts that have been published by Professor Seton-Watson from Shuvalov’s papers, together with those that appear here for the first time from the Royal Archives and from Disraeli’s letters, are enough to reveal a situation of the most extraordinary nature.

Derby surely must be the only Foreign Secretary in British history to reveal the innermost secrets of the Cabinet to the ambassador of a foreign power in order to frustrate the presumed intentions of his own Prime Minister. The strong criticisms made by the Queen, Disraeli and Salisbury against Derby’s ‘indiscretion’, as they called it, were suppressed by both Buckle and Lady Gwendolen Cecil. Neither biographer was aware that Derby and Lady Derby communicated the secrets of the Cabinet to Shuvalov not from carelessness but in the deliberate hope of preserving the peace. The Queen and Disraeli, too, had no idea of this explanation, which indeed only saw the light of day with the publication of the Shuvalov correspondence in 1924. To them the leakage of secrets could be explained only by indiscretion and Derby’s obstructionism by the oddities of his personal character. Derby was an odd character, odder than is generally realized, if some of the rumours about him are true, but it is clear that his obstructionism was not mere apathy and that his indiscretion was deliberate. No one could have been more un-English than Shuvalov or more English than Derby, but a certain aristocratic freemasonry still existed in Europe. This was probably the last occasion in the age of nationalism when two grandees, each equally contemptuous of the chauvinism in their respective countries, could co-operate so closely in trying to preserve peace.

Shuvalov was a strong opponent of Panslavism and of all popular movements. He was anxious to avert a war, above all because of the radical and revolutionary currents which war would set flowing in Russia. In character he was about as unlike the phlegmatic somewhat bovine Derby as any man could be. He was vivacious, entertaining, universally liked, an agreeable rattle at every party. He was fond of wine, perhaps too fond. Disraeli, for example, saw cause for comment when at dinner he found him ‘calm and not at all claret-y’.56 He was also fond of women and had the reputation of being a notable amorist. Everyone knew what was meant if they called in the afternoon and were told ‘Count Shuvalov is out driving in his carriage’. Yet in spite of these frivolities he was one of the most capable ambassadors ever sent by Russia to the Court of S James’s. He sized up the unfamiliar and complicated politics of London with extraordinary speed. So deeply absorbed did he become that he ended by deploring in a letter, to be seen by the Tsar of all people, the unconstitutional behaviour of the Queen and the Royal Princes in meddling with affairs of state.

It took Disraeli a long time to realize how far removed Derby was from his own point of view. The first sign of dissatisfaction comes in a letter to the Queen on April 17. ‘So much timidity, so much false religionism that [Lord Beaconsfield] has the utmost difficult task to achieve that ever fell to his lot … This morning a torturing hour with Lord Derby who was for doing nothing and this afternoon with Lord Salisbury who evidently is thinking more of raising the Cross on the cupola of St. Sophia than of the power of England.’57

The procrastination and sloth of which the Queen and the Prime Minister so regularly complained were not caused solely by temperament. They were also part of Derby’s defence mechanism against a policy of which he disapproved. His standpoint differed from that of the other two ‘lords’. The religious sympathies which operated with Carnarvon and to some extent, though not as much as Disraeli claimed, with Salisbury, had no effect on him. He told Disraeli that he had no objection to an alliance with Turkey if it promoted British interests.58 Nor does he appear to have doubted, as Salisbury did, the ultimate British interest in preserving the Straits and Constantinople from Russia. The principal spring of action, or rather inaction, seems in his case to have been a firm conviction that intervention was unnecessary, because the Russian Government meant what it said, viz. that the object of the war was to secure the necessary reforms for the Christians, not the total disruption of the Turkish empire. It followed that the real danger of war lay in bellicose pronouncements by the British Government likely to provoke the Tsar into doing the very things which Britain least wanted him to do. And it followed further that, the more the Tsar and his advisers were aware of the divisions in the Cabinet and the lack of support for Disraeli, the better the chances of peace. Of course, to Disraeli and the Queen, who were convinced that only a tough ultimatum could stop the Tsar from seizing Constantinople, the precise opposite seemed true. To them Derby’s conduct appeared baffling, sluggish and incompetent.

During the first three months of the war Russian arms carried all before them, and the alarm of the English Russophobes, headed by the Queen, became little short of hysterical. Shuvalov, who was in St Petersburg for most of May, brought back a conciliatory, though not unambiguous, answer to the Derby note. But the good effect of this was neutralized by the Tsar, who had gone to his military headquarters and, chameleonlike as ever, took colour from his Panslav entourage. He promptly reversed a promise which he had made not to insist on autonomy for southern as well as northern Bulgaria, thus supplying the Russophobes in Britain with another instance of Russian shiftiness.59

The breach between Disraeli and Derby now began to widen, although Disraeli did all he could to bridge it. The Cabinet was in a state of chaos and it would be an interminable task to analyse the shades of opinion varying as they did almost from day to day. Derby put his foot down against all action that implied war. The Queen’s indignation knew no bounds. When she reminded him of the Crimean War he replied: ‘In this country feeling is much divided; but Lord Derby believes that a war not forced upon us by necessity and self defence would be unpopular even now, and far more so when once entered upon. Lord Derby well remembers the Crimean War; and has never seen so near an approach to a really revolutionary condition of public feeling as after the first failures and disasters of that struggle.’60 The Queen passed the letter to Disraeli, who ‘returns Lord Derby’s deplorable epistle’.61 But on June 17 Disraeli made a last effort to enlist Derby’s aid. He referred to ‘the sacerdotal convictions’ of Lord Salisbury, who was evidently ‘acting as he has done throughout under the influence and counsel of Lyddon’ [sic].62 Would Derby at least support a vote of credit for the armed forces? Derby’s answer was cool and unhelpful. The Queen commented, ‘Warning after warning arrives and he seems to take it all without saying a word!! Such a Foreign Minister the Queen really never remembers!’63 She suggested that Lord Lyons would be a suitable replacement. This was not possible, and anyway two months later Lord Lyons proved himself just as bad. His opinion ‘astonishes the Queen, as he was all for England’s maintaining her position and not falling into a miserable cotton-spinning milk and water, peace-at-any-price policy which the Queen will not submit to’.64

Disraeli did not see the problem in such black-and-white terms as these, and for reasons of personal affection and party management he was very reluctant to get rid of Derby. But he was, as we saw, suspicious of Russian intentions and, although he did not seek war, he believed that the British Government must be in a position to threaten war. Yet the Queen’s language was so extreme as to be embarrassing. He had to remind her that he was not her Grand Vizier and that for the time being the Cabinet was committed to neutrality, however lamentable this might be. It was impossible in such circumstances for Britain to prevent the Russians from capturing Constantinople. The most we could do was to occupy the Dardanelles ‘as a material guarantee’.65 Even that step could be taken only if the Sultan consented, and he would not do so unless England became his ally – an impossible condition given the state of English opinion. When the Queen, now at her most excitable, seemed to imply that Disraeli was going back on promises that he had made to her, he riposted with a hint that he ‘errs perhaps in being too communicative to your Majesty in often imparting plans to your Majesty which are in embryo … but it relieves his mind, and often assists his judgement to converse and confer with your Majesty without the slightest reserve …’66 The Queen at once surrendered. She was ‘greatly grieved that he thinks she meant him by what is said. How could he think so? She meant his Colleagues …’67

Nor was there any doubt which of those colleagues she chiefly meant. On August 1 her suspicions of Derby and Lady Derby came into the open. Disraeli had induced the Cabinet on July 21 to agree that Britain would declare war if Russia occupied Constantinople without promising an early withdrawal. The Queen thought that Layard should be informed and was indignant at Derby sending a telegram to the Ambassador re-emphasizing British neutrality. She asked for ‘some secret information as to what has led to all this’. Had the situation even been made clear to the Tsar?

This is the first sign that the ‘indiscretions’ of Lord and Lady Derby had become known in the highest quarters. As the war tension increased the alliance between the Derbys and Shuvalov became closer, and Disraeli’s relations with his old friend and protégé grew more and more remote. As early as June he had established a private link with Layard unknown to the Foreign Secretary. For the moment the whole diplomatic situation became less tense because of the unexpected resistance put up by Osman Pasha, the Turkish Commander at Plevna. The Russian forces were halted in two battles on July 20 and 30, and early in September a third defeat seemed to endanger the communications of all the troops that had crossed the Danube. The Turcophils were cock-a-hoop. The threat to Constantinople suddenly receded. It looked as if the war would come to the halt conventionally imposed by winter, and would be renewed in a second campaigning season in the following spring.

Disraeli pressed the Cabinet on August 15 just before the recess to inform Russia that England would not remain neutral in the event of a second campaign. No decision was reached, as so often; but this did not inhibit Disraeli from sending in strictest secrecy an emissary to the Tsar to inform him that the Cabinet was absolutely united in its determination to go to war if there was a second campaign. Colonel Wellesley, the British military attaché in Russia since 1871 and son-in-law of Disraeli’s bête noire Lord Augustus Loftus, was selected for this delicate task. Only the Queen knew about it. The rest of the Cabinet, including Derby, from whom Wellesley conveyed a formal official message, were kept entirely in the dark. This surprising transaction is no less strange than Derby’s dealings with Shuvalov. Mistrust between colleagues could scarcely go further. The Tsar received Wellesley, who was a personal friend, with civility. He must have been aware from Shuvalov that there was another side to the boasted unity of the Cabinet, but if he took the threat seriously it probably had the opposite effect to what Disraeli desired: it gave him every inducement to finish the war as soon as he could without the need for a second campaign.

1 M. & B., vi, 60.

2 R. T. Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, 1876 (1963), 110–12. The book is a brilliant and illuminating analysis of the whole subject.

3 loc. cit.

4 ibid., 100.

5 Agatha Ramm, The Political Correspondence of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville, 1876–86 (2 vols, 1962), i, 3.

6 G. W. E. Russell, Malcolm MacColl, Memoirs and Correspondence (1914), 248, quoting Gladstone to MacColl, August 11, 1877.

7 M. & B., vi, 53, September 6, 1876.

8 ibid., 60, to Derby, September 8. Oddly enough, he expressed a modified view to Lady Bradford, the next day (Zetland, ii, 73), ‘apparently not so ill-written as is his custom’.

9 Baring’s full report, though reluctantly corroborating the atrocities, on a superficial reading gave a certain colour to this conspiratorial theory. Disraeli’s decision to delay publication till the day before his speech was not accidental. Shannon, 129.

10 Royal Archives, H.9.150, September 23, 1876. To Lady Chesterfield a fortnight earlier Disraeli complained that the Carringtons were ‘introducing bribery into County Elections – a thing quite unheard of here!’ Zetland, ii, 72.

11 Ramm, op. cit., i, 2, August 26, 1876.

12 Hanham, Elections and Party Management, 17, quoting Hughenden Papers, J. K. Fowler to Disraeli, September 10, 1876.

13 Shannon, op. cit., 147–238, is the best modern account.

14 J. C. Macdonell, The Life and Correspondence of William Connor Magee (2 vols, 1896), ii, 49.

15 Shannon, 201.

16 Kronberg Letters, September 19, 1876.

17 ibid., September 26.

18 Royal Archives, D.5.61, September 19, 1874.

19 ibid., B.58.63, September 19, 1878.

20 M. & B., vi, 67.

21 ibid., 181.

22 Magnus, Gladstone, 244.

23 Lord Rendel, Personal Papers (1931), 100.

24 p. 563. It was first published in 1935, reprinted 1962. This book and B. H. Sumner’s authoritative study of the Eastern question as seen from the Russian standpoint, Russia and the Balkans, 1870–1880 (1937), have to be studied as well as Buckle’s chapters in order to obtain a balanced picture of Disraeli’s role. It is fair to remember, when reading Professor Seton-Watson’s highly critical account, that he was a Scottish Gladstonian Liberal, and a passionate believer in Balkan nationalism.

25 These documents covering the period 1875 to January 1878 were published in the Slavonic Review (8 vols, 1924), iii–vi. Professor Seton-Watson’s transcripts covering January to May 1878 are in the British Museum. None of this very important material was available to Buckle.

26 Seton-Watson, 127, referring to Gorchakov’s instructions to Ignatyev in November 1876.

27 For an authoritative analysis of Panslavism see Sumner, 56–80. It is perhaps significant by contrast that Panslavism only rates a single reference in Seton-Watson’s index.

28 Cecil, Salisbury, ii, 95.

29 M. & B., vi, 90, to Lady Bradford, November 8.

30 ibid., 92.

31 ibid., 103–6, for Disraeli to Salisbury, November 29, December 1.

32 loc. cit.

33 ibid., 106, Disraeli to Corry, December 13.

34 Hughenden Papers, Box 113, B/XX/S/1191a, and ibid., c, for Disraeli’s memorandum, December 3, 1876.

35 See Seton-Watson, 112–13, for further specimens.

36 M. & B., vi, 107, December 16.

37 Hughenden Papers, Box 113, B/XX/Ca/198, Cairns to Disraeli, December 16.

38 Summer, 239.

39 M. & B., vi, 104–6.

40 ibid., 109.

41 ibid., 71, Salisbury to Disraeli, September 23, 1876.

42 ibid., 111, December 28, 1876.

43 Seton-Watson, 132–3.

44 Cecil, Salisbury, ii, 131, March 12.

45 Seton-Watson, 159–60.

46 Hughenden Papers, Box 106, B/XX/M/211, Lady John Manners to Disraeli, n.d.

47 Zetland, ii, 109–10.

48 Royal Archives, H.12.197, March 22, Ponsonby to the Queen.

49 ibid., H.12.209, March 31, Disraeli to the Queen. This gives a full account on which the rest of this paragraph is based. M. & B., vi, 135, misleads in saying without qualification, ‘Beaconsfield insisted that Elliot could not go back.’ He certainly did not do so at first.

50 ibid., H.12.207, March 29.

51 M. & B., vi, 135.

52 Salisbury Papers.

53 ibid., March 25.

54 Royal Archives, Dr.H.12.192, Disraeli to the Queen, March 21, 1876.

55 ibid., H.12.193, n.d.

56 M. & B., vi, 34, Disraeli to Derby, June 24, 1876.

57 Royal Archives, H.13.24.

58 M. & B., vi, 152, Disraeli to the Queen, July 12, 1877.

59 Sumner, 316.

60 The Letters of Queen Victoria, 2nd Series, June 11, 1877.

61 Royal Archives, H.14.83, June 14, 1877.

62 M. & B., vi, 145, Canon Liddon of St Paul’s.

63 ibid., 147, June 25, 1877.

64 Royal Archives, B.53.2. September 22, the Queen to Disraeli.

65 M. & B., vi, 152, Disraeli to the Queen, July 16, 1877.

66 ibid., 154, July 22.

67 Royal Archives, B.52.12, July 23.

68 ibid., B.52.17, August 1, 1877.