Back in London, the British cabinet also felt that forcing Russia out of the Danube area was not enough to justify the sacrifices made so far. Palmerston and his ‘war party’ were not prepared to negotiate a peace when the Russian armed forces remained intact. They wanted to inflict serious damage on Russia, to destroy her military capacity in the Black Sea, not just to secure Turkey but to end the Russian threat to British interests in the Near East. As the Duke of Newcastle, the gung-ho Secretary of State for War, had put it back in April, expelling the Russians from the principalities ‘without crippling their future means of aggression upon Turkey is not now an object worthy of the great efforts of England and France’.40
But what would inflict serious damage? The cabinet had considered various options. They saw little point in pursuing the Russians into Bessarabia, where the allied troops would be exposed to the cholera, while the French proposal of a Continental war for the liberation of Poland was bound to be obstructed by the Austrians, even if (and it was a big ‘if’) the conservative members of the British cabinet could be persuaded of the virtues of a revolutionary war. Nor were they convinced that the naval campaign in the Baltic would bring Russia to its knees. Soon after the beginning of the campaign in the spring, Sir Charles Napier, the admiral in charge of the allied Baltic fleet, had come to the conclusion that it would be practically impossible to overcome the almost impregnable Russian defences at Kronstadt, the fortress naval base guarding St Petersburg, or even the weaker fortress at Sveaborg, just outside the harbour of Helsingfors (Helsinki), without new gunboats and mortar vessels capable of navigating the shallow reefs around these fortresses.v For a while there was talk of mounting an attack against Russia in the Caucasus. A delegation of Circassian rebels visited the allies in Varna and promised to raise a Muslim war against Russia throughout the Caucasus if the allies sent their armies and their fleets. Omer Pasha supported this idea.41 But none of these plans were deemed as damaging to Russia as the loss of Sevastopol and its Black Sea Fleet would be. By the time the Russians had retreated from the principalities, the British cabinet had settled on the view that an invasion of the Crimea was the only obvious way to strike a decisive blow against Russia.
The Crimean plan had originally been advanced in December 1853, when, in reaction to Sinope, Graham had devised a naval strategy to knock out Sevastopol in one swift blow. ‘On this my heart is set,’ the First Lord of the Admiralty wrote; ‘the eye tooth of the Bear must be drawn: and ’til his fleet and naval arsenal in the Black Sea are destroyed there is no safety for Constantinople, no security for the peace of Europe.’42 Graham’s plan was never formally placed before the cabinet, but it was accepted as the basis of its strategy. And on 29 June the Duke of Newcastle transmitted to Raglan the cabinet instructions for an invasion of the Crimea. His dispatch was emphatic: the expedition was to start as soon as possible and ‘nothing but insuperable impediments’ should delay the siege of Sevastopol and the destruction of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, although some secondary attacks against the Russians in the Caucasus might also be necessary. The language of the dispatch left Raglan with the impression that there was no disagreement in the cabinet, and no alternative to an invasion of the Crimea.43 But in fact there were conflicting views on the practicality of the Crimean plan, and its acceptance was a compromise between those in the cabinet, like Aberdeen, who wanted a more limited campaign to restore Turkish sovereignty and those, like Palmerston, who saw the expedition to the Crimea as an opportunity to launch a broader war against Russia. By this time, the British press was piling pressure on the cabinet to strike a mortal blow against Russia, and the destruction of the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol had become the symbolic victory that the warlike public sought. The idea of desisting from the invasion of the Crimea merely on the grounds that, with the retreat of the Russians from the Danube, it had become unnecessary was practically unthinkable.
