Copyright   
Home
 Great Britain and Europe, 1815-78
  The Crimean War, 1854-6

The Crimean War, 1854-6

In 1854, Eastern complications, so prolific of crises throughout the nineteenth century, prod nerd the only great European war in which Great Britain has been directly engaged since the great campaigns against Napoleon. In order to understand the causes of this war - the Crimean War as it is called we must try to appreciate the positions of the chief Christian powers engaged in it First, let us take Russia. The czar, NicholasI/, was firmly persuaded of the impending dissolution of the Turkish Empire. He was anxious to come to some arrangement with Great Britain before that event took place, and with that object spoke to our ambassador at St. Petersburg. "We have on our hands a sick man, a very sick man", he said in reference to Turkey; "we ought to agree about the funeral, " and he suggested that Great Britain might have Egypt and Crete as her share of tin inheritance.

Secondly, there was Great Britain. Its Government denied that Turkey was mortally ill, and regarded the czar, not as the friendly undertaker, but as a person meditating an act of robbery, accompanied by violence, and if necessary by murder. But the British cabinet at that time was the result of a coalition between Whigs and Peelites (see p. 625). The views of its members were not harmonious, Lord Aberdeen, the prime minister, leading a pacific section, and Lord Palmerston, who was home secretary^ a warlike one. As a result its policy was indecisive, vacillating, and indefinite. Moreover, in the crisis of the negotiations pre­ceding the war, both Russia and Great Britain had bellicose agents at Constantinople. Prince Mentchikoff, the Russian agent, was determined to promote and extend Russian interests, and Lord Stratford de Reddiffe, the British ambassador, apprehensive and suspicious of Russian designs, was in favour of what he called a " comprehensive war", if necessary, in order to thwart them.

Thirdly, there was France, under its new ruler, the Emperor Napoleon III, who had succeeded to supreme power in France as a result of the Revolution of 1848 and of his own coup d'etat three years later. Both as the nephew of Napoleon, and in order to divert the attention of the French from home affairs, he was anxious to achieve military glory, and to make himself the arbiter of Europe. In the troubled Eastern waters he saw his chance, and seized it.

The Holy Land belonged to the Turkish Empire. A trumpery dispute between the monks of the Roman and Greek Churches about the guardianship "of a key and a star", the key of the holy places at Jerusalem and the star over the altar at Bethlehem, led to the monks being championed respectively by France and Russia, the one regarding itself as protector of the Roman and the other of the Greek Church. The matter was eventually settled, but the Russians, in the course of the negotiations, revived an old claim to the protectorship of the Christian sul» jects of the sultan. Mentchikoff continued to press this claim, but the sultan, on Lord Stratford de Redcliffe's advice, rejected it, as it might have given the czar a large control over the whole of the Turkish territories in Europe. Complex negotiations followed, but unfortunately the British cabinet never made its position clear to Russia, and consequently the czar never realized that persistence in his claims was likely to lead to war. Eventually the Russians, in order to coerce Turkey, occupied the Turkish principalities that bordered the Danube, and subsequently destroyed a Turkish squadron at Sinope (Nov. , 1853). Feeling in Great Britain was aroused, Louis Napoleon was anxious for war, and eventually the British cabinet drifted into it; an ultimatum was sent to Russia, and on its rejection war was declared (March, 1854). Great Britain, France, and Turkey, joined in the following year by the ruler of Piedmont, the King of Sardinia, were opposed to Russia; Prussia and Austria, after some hesitation, remained neutral.

Chronology
copyright by uuo-ununoctium.info