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Home Great Britain and Europe, 1815-78 British Diplomacy and the Period of Warfare, 1857-71 |
British Diplomacy and the Period of Warfare, 1857-71The Crimean War proved but the prelude to a series of wars all over the world. No sooner was it over than Great Britain had to fight against Persia and China, and to struggle for her power in India, where the Mutiny broke out in 1857. Moreover, her relations with France caused her no little uneasiness, especially in 1858. "We are riding a runaway horse, "Palmerston had said of his alliance with Napoleon III, "and must always be on our guard;" and Napoleon III was suspected of designing an invasion of Great Britain and of avenging his uncle's defeats at Trafalgar and Waterloo.Then in 1859 British diplomacy was occupied with the War of Italian Liberation. Since the fall of Napoleon, Italy had been, as during past centuries, merely n "geographical expression". The King of Sardinia and the Kmpeior of Austria occupied the north; the Pope, the Duke of Tuscany, and three other dukes shared the centre; the King of Naples governed, or rather misgoverned, the south and Sicily. In 1859 the movement for uniting it into a single nation under Victor Emmanuel, who ruled Piedmont, and was King of Sardinia, could no longer be repressed. But the difficulties were immense: eight states had to be united; the Austrians had to be expelled; and the existence of the Papacy in Italy made the problem of unity a most comÂplex one. The Italian patriots, however, were fortunate in their leaders. The discretion of Victor Emmanuel, the brain of Cavour, his chief minister, and the sword of the hero Garibaldi accomplished a United Italy. But, nevertheless, without the assistance of France and Great Britain the movement might not have been successful. Napoleon III with a French army drove the Austrian forces from Lombardy In 1859, though later he forsook the Italian cause, and supported the Pope; whilst the British Government, with Lord Palmerston as prime minister and Lord John Russell as foreign secretary, gave the Italians its moral support, and prevented European intervention when Garibaldi with his thousand " Red - Shirts" conquered first Sicily and then Naples in i860 (Armed with muskets "fit for the scrap heap", Garibaldi and the thousand took, with the aid of the Sicilian populace, the capital of Sicily from twenty-four thousand regular troops armed with rifles). As a consequence, all Italy was united save Venice and the city of Rome; and these were finally added, the one in 1866, when Austria's energies were occupied in a war with Prussia, and the other in 1870, during the war between France and Germany, when the French troops who had been guarding Rome were withdrawn. The American Civil War (1861-5) followed close on the War of Italian Liberation. This was a war fought between the Northern and Southern States: first, as to the right of the Southern States to secede from the Union; and secondly, as to the continuance of slavery, which was still the basis of all labour in the South. The war was fought with great determination on both sides for four years before the North was finally successful (The war is reckoned, through battle and disease, to have killed or crippled a million men). The earlier stages of the war were fought on the question of secession rather than on that of slavery, and the sympathy of the governing classes in Great Britain was inclined to the South, partly because it was the weaker side and partly because of the magnificent fighting powers which it exhibited. The Northern States, moreover, by blockading the Southern ports prevented the export of cotton, which led to terrible distress in Lancashire. |
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