3
The Russian Menace
The Dutch steamer pulled into the docks at Woolwich late on a Saturday evening, 1 June 1844. Its only passengers were ‘Count Orlov’ – the pseudonym of Tsar Nicholas – and his entourage of courtiers who had travelled incognito from St Petersburg. Ever since Russia’s brutal suppression of the Polish insurrection in 1831, Nicholas had lived in fear of assassination by Polish nationalists opposed to Russian rule in their homeland, so it was his custom to travel in disguise. London had a large community of Polish exiles, and there were concerns for the Tsar’s safety from the moment the trip had been discussed with the British government in January. To increase his personal security, Nicholas had told no one of his travel plans. Stopping only briefly in Berlin, the Tsar’s coaches sped across the Continent, without anyone in Britain even knowing of his imminent arrival until he had boarded the steamer in Hamburg on 30 May, less than two days before his landing at Woolwich.
Even Baron Brunov, the Russian ambassador in London, was not told the precise details of the Tsar’s itinerary. Not knowing when his steamer would arrive, Brunov had spent the whole of Saturday at the Woolwich docks. Finally, at ten o’clock in the evening, the steamer pulled in. The Tsar disembarked – barely recognizable in a grey cloak he had worn during the Turkish campaign of 1828 – and hurried off with Brunov to the Russian embassy at Ashburnham House in Westminster. Despite the late hour, he sent a note to the Prince Consort requesting a meeting with the Queen at her earliest convenience. Accustomed as he was to summoning his ministers at all hours of the day and night, it had not occurred to him that it might be rude to wake Prince Albert in the early hours of the morning.1
This was not the Tsar’s first trip to London. He had fond memories of his previous visit, in 1816, when as a 20-year-old and still a Grand Duke, he had been a great success with the female half of the English aristocracy. Lady Charlotte Campbell, a famous beauty and lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales, had declared of him: ‘What an amiable creature! He is devilish handsome! He will be the handsomest man in Europe.’ From that trip, Nicholas had gained the impression that he had an ally in the English monarchy and aristocracy. As the despotic ruler of the world’s greatest state, Nicholas had little sense of the limitations on a constitutional monarchy. He presumed that he could come to Britain and decide matters of foreign policy directly with the Queen and her most senior ministers. It was ‘an excellent thing’, he told Victoria at their first meeting, ‘to see now and then with one’s own eyes, as it did not do always to trust to diplomatists only’. Such meetings created ‘a feeling of friendship and interest’ between reigning sovereigns, and more could be achieved ‘in a single conversation to explain one’s feelings, views and motives than in a host of messages and letters’. The Tsar thought that he could strike a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ with Britain about how to deal with the Ottoman Empire in the event of its collapse.2
Nor was this the first attempt that Nicholas had made to enlist the support of another power in his partition plans for the Ottoman Empire. In 1829 he had suggested to the Austrians a bilateral division of its European territories to forestall the chaos which he feared would follow its collapse, but they had turned him down to preserve the Concert of Europe. Then, in the autumn of 1843 he again approached the Austrians, resurrecting the idea of a Greek empire backed by Russia, Austria and Prussia (the Triple Alliance of 1815) to prevent the British and the French from dividing the spoils of the crumbling Ottoman Empire between themselves. Insisting that Russia did not want to expand into the Balkans, Nicholas proposed that the Austrians should be given all the Turkish lands between the Danube and the Adriatic, and that Constantinople should become a free city under Austrian guardianship. But nothing he said had been able to dispel Vienna’s deep mistrust of Russia’s ambitions. The Austrian ambassador in St Petersburg believed that the Tsar was trying to engineer a situation where Russia could use the excuse of defending Turkey to intervene in its affairs and impose its own partition plans by military force. What the Tsar really wanted, the ambassador maintained, was not a Greek empire backed by the three powers but a ‘state tied to Russia by interests, principles and religion, and governed by a Russian prince … . Russia can never lose sight of this aim. It is a necessary condition for the fulfilment of her destiny … Present-day Greece would be swallowed up in the new state.’3 Deeply suspicious, the Austrians would have nothing to do with the Tsar’s partition plans without the agreement of the British and the French. So Nicholas now came to London in the hope of winning over Britain to his point of view.
On the face of it, there was not much to suggest that Nicholas could forge a new alliance with Britain. The British were committed to their liberal reform plans to save the Ottoman Empire, and saw the ambitions of the Russians as a major threat. But the Tsar was encouraged by the diplomatic rapprochement between Russia and Britain during recent years, prompted by their shared alarm at France’s growing involvement in the Middle East.
In 1839 the French had given their support to a second insurrection by the Egyptian ruler Mehmet Ali against the Sultan’s rule in Syria. With French backing, the Egyptians defeated the Ottoman army, raising renewed fears that they would march against the Turkish capital, as they had done six years before. The young Sultan Abdülmecid appeared too weak to resist Mehmet Ali’s renewed demands for a hereditary dynasty in Egypt and Syria, especially after the Ottoman navy defected to the Egyptians at Alexandria, and once again the Porte was forced to ask for foreign help. In 1833 the Russians had intervened on their own to rescue the Ottoman Empire, but in this second crisis they looked to work with Britain for the restoration of the Sultan’s rule – their aim being to come between the British and the French.
Like the Russians, the British were alarmed by the growing French involvement in Egypt. This was where Napoleon had threatened to bring down the British Empire in 1798. France had invested heavily in the booming cotton cash crop and industrial economy of Egypt during the 1830s. It had sent advisers to help train the Egyptian army and navy. With French support, the Egyptians were not only a major threat to Turkish rule. As head of a powerful Islamic revival movement against the intervention of the Christian nations in the Ottoman Empire, Mehmet Ali was also an inspiration to the Muslim rebels against tsarist rule in the Caucasus.
Consequently, Russia and Britain with Austria and Prussia urged Mehmet Ali to withdraw from Syria and accept their terms for a settlement with the Sultan. These terms, set down in the London Convention of 1840 and ratified by the four powers with the Ottoman Empire, allowed Mehmet Ali to establish a hereditary dynasty in Egypt. To ensure his withdrawal, a British fleet sailed to Alexandria, and an Anglo-Austrian force was sent to Palestine. For a while the Egyptian leader held out, in the expectation of French support; there were scares of a war in Europe when the French government rejected the peace terms proposed by the four powers and pledged to help Ali. But at the final moment the French, unwilling to be drawn into war, backed down and Mehmet Ali withdrew from Syria. By the terms of a subsequent London Convention of 1841, which the French signed reluctantly, Mehmet Ali was recognized as the hereditary ruler of Egypt in exchange for his recognition of the Sultan’s sovereignty in the rest of the Ottoman Empire.