Queen Victoria Lytton Strachey (a book to read .txt) 📖

alliance of Lord John, then the suppression or the removal of Lord Palmerston would be almost certain to follow. He set about the business with all the pertinacity of his nature. Both he and the Queen put every kind of pressure upon the Prime Minister. They wrote, they harangued, they relapsed into awful silence. It occurred to them that Lord Clarendon, an important member of the Cabinet, would be a useful channel for their griefs. They commanded him to dine at the Palace, and, directly the meal was over, “the Queen,” as he described it afterwards, “exploded, and went with the utmost vehemence and bitterness into the whole of Palmerston’s conduct, all the effects produced all over the world, and all her own feelings and sentiments about it.” When she had finished, the Prince took up the tale, with less excitement, but with equal force. Lord Clarendon found himself in an awkward situation; he disliked Palmerston’s policy, but he was his colleague, and he disapproved of the attitude of his royal hosts. In his opinion, they were “wrong in wishing that courtiers rather than Ministers should conduct the affairs of the country,” and he thought that they “laboured under the curious mistake that the Foreign Office was their peculiar department, and that they had the right to control, if not to direct, the foreign policy of England.” He, therefore, with extreme politeness, gave it to be understood that he would not commit himself in any way.240 But Lord John, in reality, needed no pressure. Attacked by his Sovereign, ignored by his Foreign Secretary, he led a miserable life.241 With the advent of the dreadful Schleswig-Holstein question⁠—the most complex in the whole diplomatic history of Europe⁠—his position, crushed between the upper and the nether millstones, grew positively unbearable. He became anxious above all things to get Palmerston out of the Foreign Office. But then⁠—supposing Palmerston refused to go?

In a memorandum made by the Prince, at about this time, of an interview between himself, the Queen, and the Prime Minister, we catch a curious glimpse of the states of mind of those three high personages⁠—the anxiety and irritation of Lord John, the vehement acrimony of Victoria, and the reasonable animosity of Albert⁠—drawn together, as it were, under the shadow of an unseen Presence, the cause of that celestial anger⁠—the gay, portentous Palmerston. At one point in the conversation Lord John observed that he believed the Foreign Secretary would consent to a change of offices; Lord Palmerston, he said, realised that he had lost the Queen’s confidence⁠—though only on public, and not on personal, grounds. But on that, the Prince noted, “the Queen interrupted Lord John by remarking that she distrusted him on personal grounds also, but I remarked that Lord Palmerston had so far at least seen rightly; that he had become disagreeable to the Queen, not on account of his person, but of his political doings⁠—to which the Queen assented.” Then the Prince suggested that there was a danger of the Cabinet breaking up, and of Lord Palmerston returning to office as Prime Minister. But on that point Lord John was reassuring: he “thought Lord Palmerston too old to do much in the future (having passed his sixty-fifth year).” Eventually it was decided that nothing could be done for the present, but that the utmost secrecy must be observed; and so the conclave ended.242

At last, in 1850, deliverance seemed to be at hand. There were signs that the public were growing weary of the alarums and excursions of Palmerston’s diplomacy; and when his support of Don Pacifico, a British subject, in a quarrel with the Greek Government, seemed to be upon the point of involving the country in a war not only with Greece but also with France, and possibly with Russia into the bargain, a heavy cloud of distrust and displeasure appeared to be gathering and about to burst over his head. A motion directed against him in the House of Lords was passed by a substantial majority. The question was next to be discussed in the House of Commons, where another adverse vote was not improbable, and would seal the doom of the Minister. Palmerston received the attack with complete nonchalance, and then, at the last possible moment, he struck. In a speech of over four hours, in which exposition, invective, argument, declamation, plain talk and resounding eloquence were mingled together with consummate art and extraordinary felicity, he annihilated his enemies. The hostile motion was defeated, and Palmerston was once more the hero of the hour. Simultaneously, Atropos herself conspired to favour him. Sir Robert Peel was thrown from his horse and killed. By this tragic chance, Palmerston saw the one rival great enough to cope with him removed from his path. He judged⁠—and judged rightly⁠—that he was the most popular man in England; and when Lord John revived the project of his exchanging the Foreign Office for some other position in the Cabinet, he absolutely refused to stir.243

Great was the disappointment of Albert; great was the indignation of Victoria. “The House of Commons,” she wrote, “is becoming very unmanageable and troublesome.” The Prince, perceiving that Palmerston was more firmly fixed in the saddle than ever, decided that something drastic must be done. Five months before, the prescient Baron had drawn up, in case of emergency, a memorandum, which had been carefully docketed, and placed in a pigeonhole ready to hand. The emergency had now arisen, and the memorandum must be used. The Queen copied out the words of Stockmar, and sent them to the Prime Minister, requesting him to show her letter to Palmerston. “She thinks it right,” she wrote, “in order to prevent any mistake for the future, shortly to explain what it is she expects from her foreign secretary. She requires: (1) That he will distinctly state what he proposes in a given case, in order that the Queen may know as distinctly