The Crimean War полностью

News of Sinope reached London on 11 December. The destruction of the Turkish fleet was a justified action by the Russians, who were after all at war with Turkey, but the British press immediately declared it a ‘violent outrage’ and a ‘massacre’, and made wildly exaggerated claims of 4,000 civilians killed by the Russians. ‘Sinope’, declared The Times, ‘dispels the hopes we have been led to entertain of pacification … We have thought it our duty to uphold and defend the cause of peace as long as peace was compatible with the honour and dignity of our country … but the Emperor of Russia has thrown down the gauntlet to the maritime Powers … and now war has begun in earnest.’ The Chronicle declared: ‘We shall draw the sword, if draw it we must, not only to preserve the independence of an ally, but to humble the ambitions and thwart the machinations of a despot whose intolerable pretensions have made him the enemy of all civilized nations.’ The provincial press followed the bellicose and Russophobic line of Fleet Street. ‘Mere talking to the Tsar will do nothing,’ argued an editorial in the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent. ‘The time appears to be at hand when we must act so as to dissipate the evil designs and efforts of Russia.’ In London, Manchester, Rochdale, Sheffield, Newcastle and many other towns, there were public meetings in defence of Turkey. In Paisley, the anti-Russian propagandist David Urquhart addressed a crowd for two hours, ending with a plea to ‘the people of England … to call on their Sovereign to require that either war shall be proclaimed against Russia, or the British squadron withdrawn from the Turkish waters’. Newspapers published petitions to the Queen demanding a more active stand against Russia.²⁷

The position of the British government – a fragile coalition of Liberals and free-trade Conservatives weakly held together by Lord Aberdeen – was dramatically altered by the public reaction to Sinope. At first the government reacted calmly to the news. Most of the cabinet took the view of the Prime Minister that more time should be given to the peace initiatives promoted by the Austrians. It was agreed that the British and French fleets would have to make their presence felt in the Black Sea, but that this show of naval strength should be used to force the Russians to accept peace talks rather than provoke a war. There was a general feeling that Britain should not be dragged into a war by the Turks, who had brought the disaster on themselves. As Queen Victoria herself had warned:

we have taken on ourselves in conjunction with France all the risks of a European war without having bound Turkey to any conditions with respect to provoking it. The hundred and twenty fanatical Turks constituting the Divan at Constantinople are left sole judges of the line of policy to be pursued, and made cognisant at the same time of the fact that England and France have bound themselves to defend the Turkish territory! This is entrusting them with a power which Parliament has been jealous to confide even to the hands of the British Crown.²⁸

At this stage the Queen agreed with Aberdeen that the invasion of the principalities should not be taken as a cause of war against Russia. Like him, she was still inclined to trust the Tsar, whom she had met and come to like ten years before, and thought that his aggressive actions might be curbed. Her private views were anti-Turk, which also had a bearing on her attitude to the Russian invasion. Before Sinope, Victoria had written in her journal that it ‘would be in the interest of peace, and a great advantage generally, were the Turks to be well beaten’. Afterwards she took a different view of the invasion, hoping that a Russian beating of the Turks would make both sides more amenable to European peace initiatives. ‘A decided victory of the Russians by land, may, and I trust will have a pacifying effect by rendering the Emperor magnanimous and the Turks amenable to reason,’ she noted in her journal on 15 December.²⁹