Table Of ContentDISRAELI, 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THE present volume forms a sequel to a book (still unpublished)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me to obtain access to a mass of unpublished Russian correspondence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
