‘The main and real object of the war’, Palmerston admitted in 1855, ‘was to curb the aggressive ambition of Russia. We went to war not so much to keep the Sultan and the Muslims in Turkey as to keep the Russians out of it.’ Palmerston envisaged the attack on the Crimea as the first stage of a long-term crusade against tsarist power in the Black Sea region and the Caucasus, Poland and the Baltic, in line with his memorandum to the cabinet on 19 March, in which he had outlined his ambitious plan for the dismemberment of the Russian Empire. By the end of August he had won considerable support within the cabinet for this enlarged war. He also had an unofficial agreement with Drouyn de Lhuys, the French Foreign Minister, that ‘small results’ would not be enough to compensate for the inevitable human losses of the war, and that only ‘great territorial changes’ in the Danube region, the Caucasus, Poland and the Baltic could justify a campaign in the Crimea.44
But as long as Aberdeen was Prime Minister it was impossible for Palmerston to get such plans accepted as allied policy. The Four Points agreed by the Western powers with the Austrians after several months of negotiation on 8 August laid out more limited objectives. Peace could not be agreed between Russia and the allied powers unless:
1. Russia renounced any special rights in Serbia and the Danubian principalities, whose protection would be guaranteed by the European powers with the Porte;
2. the navigation of the Danube was free to all commerce;
3. the Straits Convention of 1841 was revised ‘in the interests of the Balance of Power in Europe’ (ending Russian naval domination of the Black Sea);
4. the Russians abandoned their claim to a protectorate over the Christian subjects of Turkey, whose security would be guaranteed by the five great powers (Austria, Britain, France, Prussia and Russia) in agreement with the Turkish government.
The Four Points were conservative in character (nothing else would satisfy the Austrians) but vague enough to allow the British (who wanted to reduce the power of Russia but had no real idea how to translate this into concrete policies) to add more conditions as the war went on. Indeed, unknown to the Austrians, there was a secret fifth point agreed between the British and the French allowing them to raise further demands depending on the outcome of the war. For Palmerston, the Four Points were a way of binding Austria and France to a grand European alliance for the pursuit of an open-ended war against Russia, a war that could be expanded even after the conquest of the Crimea had been achieved.45
Palmerston even went so far as to articulate a broad long-term plan for the Crimea. He proposed turning the area over to the Turks, and linking it to new Turkish territories captured from the Russians around the Sea of Azov, Circassia, Georgia and the Danube delta. But few others were prepared to think in such ambitious terms. Napoleon largely wanted to capture Sevastopol as a symbol of the ‘glorious victory’ he desired and as a means of punishing the Russians for their aggression in the principalities. And most of the British cabinet felt the same way. It was generally assumed that the fall of Sevastopol would bring Russia to its knees, allowing the Western powers to claim victory and impose their conditions on the Russians. But this did not make much sense. Compared to Kronstadt and the other Baltic fortresses defending the Russian capital, Sevastopol was a relatively distant outpost in the Tsar’s Empire, and there was no logical reason to suppose that its capture by the allies would force him to submit. The consequence of this unquestioned assumption was that during 1855, when the fall of Sevastopol did not happen quickly, the allies went on battering the town in what was at that time the longest and most costly siege in military history to date rather than develop other strategies to weaken Russia’s land armies, which rather than her Black Sea Fleet were after all the real key to her power over Turkey.46
