Turks and the execution of the Treaty of London. But from 1830 the defence of the Ottoman Empire became one of the cardinal objects of his policy. He believed in the regeneration of Turkey. “All that we hear,” he wrote to Bulwer (Lord Dalling), “about the decay of the Turkish Empire, and its being a dead body or a sapless trunk, and so forth, is pure unadulterated nonsense.” The two great aims he had in view were to prevent the establishment of Russia on the Bosporus and of France on the Nile, and he regarded the maintenance of the authority of the Porte as the chief barrier against both these aggressions. Against Russia he had long maintained a suspicious and hostile attitude. He was a party to the publication of the “Portfolio” in 1834, and to the mission of the “Vixen” to force the blockade of Circassia about the same time. He regarded the treaty of Unkiar Skelessi which Russia extorted from the Porte in 1832, when she came to the relief of the sultan after the battle of Konieh, with great jealousy; and, when the power of Mehemet Ali in Egypt appeared to threaten the existence of the Ottoman dynasty, he succeeded in effecting a combination of all the powers,who signed the celebrated collective note of the 27th of July 1839, pledging them to maintain the independence and integrity of the Turkish Empire as a security for the peace of Europe. On two former occasions, in 1833 and in 1835, the policy of Lord Palmerston, who proposed to afford material aid to the Porte against the pasha of Egypt, was overruled by the cabinet; and again, in 1839, when Baron Brunnow first proposed the active interference of Russia and England, the offer was rejected. But in 1840 Lord Palmerston returned to the charge and prevailed. The moment was critical, for Mehemet Ali had occupied Syria and won the battle of Nezib against the Turkish forces, and on the 1st of July 1839 the sultan Mohammed expired. The Egyptian forces occupied Syria, and threatened Turkey; and Lord Ponsonby, then British ambassador at Constantinople, vehemently urged the necessity of crushing so formidable a rebellion against the Ottoman power. But France, though her ambassador had signed the collective note in the previous year, declined to be a party to measures of coercion against the pasha of Egypt. Palmerston, irritated at her Egyptian policy, flung himself into the arms of the northern powers, and the treaty of the 15th of July 1840 was signed in London without the knowledge or concurrence of France. This measure was not taken without great hesitation, and strong opposition on the part of several members of the British cabinet. Lord Palmerston himself declared in a letter to Lord Melbourne that he should quit the ministry if his policy was not adopted; and he carried his point. The bombardment of Beirūt, the fall of Acre, and the total collapse of the boasted power of Mehemet Ali followed in rapid succession, and before the close of the year Lord Palmerston’s policy, which had convulsed and terrified Europe, was triumphant, and the author of it was regarded as one of the most powerful statesmen of the age. At the same time, though acting with Russia in the Levant, the British government engaged in the affairs of Afghanistan to defeat her intrigues in Central Asia, and a contest with China was terminated by the conquest of Chusan, afterwards exchanged for the island of Hong-Kong.
Within a few months Lord Melbourne’s administration came to an end (1841), and Lord Palmerston remained for five years out of office. The crisis was past, but the change which took place by the substitution of M. Guizot for M. Thiers in France, and of Lord Aberdeen for Lord Palmerston in England, was a fortunate event for the peace of the world. Lord Palmerston had adopted the opinion that peace with France was not to be relied on, and indeed that war between the two countries was sooner or later inevitable. Lord Aberdeen and M. Guizot inaugurated a different policy; by mutual confidence and friendly offices they entirely succeeded in restoring the most cordial understanding between the two governments, and the irritation which Lord Palmerston had inflamed gradually subsided. During the administration of Sir Robert Peel, Lord Palmerston led a retired life, but he attacked with characteristic bitterness the Ashburton treaty with the United States, which closed successfully some other questions he had long kept open. In all these transactions, whilst full justice must be done to the force and patriotic vigour which Lord Palmerston brought to bear on the questions he took in hand, it was but too apparent that he imported into them an amount of passion, of personal animosity, and imperious language which rendered him in the eyes of the queen and of his colleagues a dangerous minister. On this ground, when Lord John Russell attempted, in December 1845, to form a ministry, the combination failed because Lord Grey refused to join a government in which Lord Palmerston should resume the direction of foreign affairs. A few months later, however, this difficulty was surmounted; the Whigs returned to power, and Palmerston to the foreign office (July 1846), with a strong assurance that Lord John Russell should exercise a strict control over his proceedings. A few days sufficed to show how vain was this expectation. The French government regarded the appointment of Palmerston as a certain sign of renewed hostilities, and they availed themselves of a despatch in which Palmerston had put forward the name of a Coburg prince as a candidate for the hand of the young queen of Spain, as a justification for a departure from the engagements entered into between M. Guizot and Lord Aberdeen. However little the conduct of the French government in this transaction of the Spanish marriages can be vindicated, it is certain that it originated in the belief that in Palmerston France had a restless and subtle enemy. The efforts of the British minister to defeat the French marriages of the Spanish princesses, by an appeal to the treaty of Utrecht and the other powers of Europe, were wholly unsuccessful; France won the game, though with no small loss of honourable reputation.
The revolution of 1848 spread like a conflagration through Europe, and shook every throne on the Continent except those of Russia, Spain, and Belgium. Palmerston sympathized, or was supposed to sympathize, openly with the revolutionary party abroad. No state was regarded by him with more aversion than Austria. Yet his opposition to Austria was chiefly based upon her occupation of great part of Italy and her Italian policy, for Palmerston maintained that the existence of Austria as a great power north of the Alps was an essential element in the system of Europe. Antipathies and sympathies had a large share in the political views of Lord Palmerston, and his sympathies had ever been passionately awakened by the cause of Italian independence. He supported the Sicilians against the king of Naples, and even allowed arms to be sent them from the arsenal at Woolwich; and, although he had endeavoured to restrain the king of Sardinia from his rash attack on the superior forces of Austria, he obtained for him a reduction of the penalty of defeat. Austria, weakened by the revolution, sent an envoy to London to request the mediation of England, based on a large cession of Italian territory; Lord Palmerston rejected the terms he might have obtained for Piedmont. Ere long the reaction came; this straw-fire of revolution burnt itself out in a couple of years. In Hungary the civil war, which had thundered at the gates of Vienna, was brought to a close by Russian intervention. Prince Schwarzenberg assumed the government of the empire with dictatorial power; and, in spite of what Palmerston termed his “judicious bottle-holding,” the movement he had encouraged and applauded, but to which he could give no material aid, was everywhere subdued. The British government, or at least Palmerston as its representative, was regarded with suspicion and resentment by every power in Europe, except the French republic; and even that was shortly afterwards to be alienated by Palmerston’s attack on Greece.
This state of things was regarded with the utmost annoyance by the British court and by most of the British ministers. Palmerston had on many occasions taken important steps without their knowledge, which they disapproved. Over the Foreign Office he asserted and exercised an arbitrary dominion, which the feeble efforts of the premier could not control. The queen and the prince consort (see Victoria, Queen) did not conceal their indignation at the position in which he had placed them with all the other courts of Europe. When Kossuth, the
