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Disraeli, Gladstone, and the Eastern Question PDF

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DISRAELI, GLADSTONE AND THE EASTERN QUESTION DISRAELI, GLADSTONE AND THE EASTERN QUESTION A STUDY IN DIPLOMACY AND PARTY POLITICS BY R. W. SETON-WATSON I~ ~~o~!~~n~R~up LONDON AND NEW YORK First published by Macmillan and Co. Ltd This Edition published by Routledge and Co. Ltd 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OXl4 4RN ISBN 0 7146 1513 7 First Edition 1935 Reprinted 1962 New Impression 1971 Transferred to Digital Printing 2006 Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent TO BERNARD PARES PREFACE THE present volume forms a sequel to a book (still unpublished) entitled Britain in Europe, in which I attempt to give a connected survey of British foreign policy in the nineteenth century: and the germ of both is to be found in a course of lectures delivered at the University of London, King's College, in 1927 and again in 1930. When I reached the year 1874, a double motive led me to adopt new methods and an altogether larger scale. In the first place, the Eastern crisis of the seventies, to an even greater degree than the Crimean War, illustrates the essential interaction of home and foreign policy, the bearings of remote happenings in eastern Europe upon British party government, and the resultant dangers for the peace of the nation and the world: and yet its history has remained unwritten for over fifty years. In the second place, a happy chance enabled me to obtain access to a mass of unpublished Russian correspondence and thus to study those innermost secrets of the Tsar, his Chancellor and his Ambassadors, which were denied to contemporary English men. The Disraeli and Salisbury Papers have already been made accessible, but in each case the aim was to interpret the standpoint of a single man and a single country, rather than to correlate or com pare that standpoint with foreign sources. And yet it may reasonably be claimed that if Lords Beaconsfield, Salisbury and Derby could in 1875-8 have seen into the cards which I am now placing upon the table for the first time, their outlook towards Russia, and so towards the Eastern Question, would have been radically different. I was thus led by gradual stages to attempt to construct a narra tive in which not only the statesmen in whose hands British policy lay, but also their political opponents, the diplomatists with whom they had to deal and the foreign statesmen whose policies they sought to counter or whose alliance they courted, would all figure, and their relative importance at each stage of the crisis would be revealed, so far as possible from their own words or from the comments of their contemporaries. The major parts in the drama belong as of right to Disraeli and Gladstone, to Derby, Salisbury and Queen Victoria, but the key to the plot will often be found to lie with Shuvalov and Gorchakov, with Bismarck and AndrAssy, with Elliot and Layard. vii viii PREFACE with Hartington and Granville, with Northcote and Hardy, while many minor characters provide an occasional spice. The execution of my plan has involved close attention on the one hand to diplomatic sources, on the other to the columns of Hansard, to the outpourings of the press and to masses of ephemeral literature, often of a most violent and partisan character. Whether I have avoided the twin dangers of overloading the text with quotations and of tipping the scales by tendencious selection, is for the reader to judge. On the whole, I have preferred what may be called the cumulative method, which has obvious drawbacks, but seems to me both safer and fairer than any known alternative. I can at least claim never to have consciously suppressed any material facts or arguments: and if my own very definite views occasionally intrude, the reader is always free to discard them if he is not convinced. Indeed it has always seemed to me far more honest for an author to reveal his considered opinions on the subject of which he is treating, rather than to aHect an entirely non-committal attitude which can hardly represent his real views if he has fully mastered the facts. This is the point at which to express my very special debt to Mr. Buckle's masterly Life of Disraeli. It is, however, based mainly upon the Disraeli Papers, to the virtual exclusion of Continental sQurces: and I have therefore endeavoured to provide a new perspec tive by interweaving the letters of Disraeli, Salisbury and the Queen with much hitherto unknown material from other sources, alike British, Russian, German and Austrian. Mr. Buckle regards Disraeli's "management of the Eastern Question" as "the most outstanding feature of his great Administration": but to me, on the basis of this mass of new evidence (which I trust the reader will regard as con clusive), the only fitting word is "mismanagement". Disraeli as a master of foreign policy belongs to the myths of history. It is none the less necessary to enter a special caveat with regard both to Disraeli and the Queen, as two of the central figures in the drama. I can honestly affirm that my study of British foreign policy has led me to an almost UDStinted admiration of Queen Victoria: and this will be apparent in my forthcoming book on foreign policy from 1815 to 1874, of which the present volume is really a sequel, written on an extended scale. The Queen's attitude towards the Eastern crisis of the seventies is to be regarded as a mere passing aberration, in striking contrast to her wise and balanced judgment in the earlier period. In a somewhat difierent way my criticism of Disraeli's foreign PREFACE ix policy must not be construed as a root-and-branch condemnation of that statesman. The whole subsequent history of the Near East bears witness to the prophetic vision of Gladstone, and no less prophetic and enduring was his famous Midlothian statement of the principles of foreign policy. The greatness of Disraeli is to be sought in the sphere of Imperial politics, and it ought to be possible at this distance of time to feel appreciation for both the great rivals, whatever may be our political, religious or social preferences. In my interpretation Salisbury provides the synthesis between Disraeli and Gladstone; while Derby (to change the metaphor) is the brake on every wheel. In this volume two currents meet from two very ditlerent fields which have always fascinated me. The study of the Eastern Question in its various phases, historical and political, has occupied me ever since I first visited the Near East in 1900. On the other hand, the rivalry of those political titans DisraeJi and Gladstone was an intense and living memory to those from whom I learnt the political alphabet, and still makes an extraordinarily vivid appeal. I grew up in a house hold where the portraits of Disraeli, Gladstone and Bright hung side by side upon the wall. One member of it was an ardent Tory and carried his admiration of Disraeli to the length of appearing on Mid lothian Tory platforms to the detriment of his own official career: while the other, a no less ardent Gladstonian, retained a certain hero worship for the old chief, even though he followed Chamberlain in 1886. Many a crude, contemporary gibe against the rival statesmen came my way and still lingers shamefacedly in my memory, with the result that in the decade before the War the animosities that centred round Limehouse sounded like mere harmless squibs after the infernal machines of the Victorian era. If these early memories have served me at all, it has been in the sense of a warning not to treat this great controversy on party Jines, but rather to judge it in its European aspects and in the light of subsequent events. It may be claimed that the new material provided throws an entirely new light upon British policy in the seventies-in particular, upon the two secret overtures made by Disraeli to Russia in June 1876 and March 1877; upon Salisbury's relations with Ignatyev dur ing and after his Constantinople mission; upon Disraeli's relations with Layard behind the back of Derby; upon the secret Austro Russian convention and the various British overtures to Vienna; upon the relations of Shuvalov with Derby on the one hand and with the Liberal Opposition on the other; upon Layard's c]ose relations

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