The issue of defending the Muslim Turks against the Christian Russians represented a major obstacle for Anglican Conservatives like Aberdeen and Gladstone and indeed the Queen, whose religious sympathies made her hostile to the Turks (privately, she wanted the establishment of a ‘Greek empire’ to replace the Ottomans in Europe and hoped the Turks in time ‘would all become Christians’).35 The obstacle was brushed aside by Evangelical radicals who pointed to the Tanzimat reforms as evidence of Turkish liberalism and religious tolerance. Some Church leaders even argued that the Turks had contributed to the spread of Protestantism in the Near East – an idea largely based on the missionary work of the Protestants in the Ottoman Empire. Forbidden by the Porte to convert Muslims, Anglican missionaries had concentrated instead on the Orthodox and Catholics, and every convert came with tales of the evil conduct of their priests. The issue was addressed by Lord Shaftesbury in a debate in the House of Lords on the Ottoman suppression of the Greek revolts in Thessaly and Epirus. In a speech inspired by Evangelical missionary zeal, Shaftesbury argued that the Balkan Christians were as much the victims of the Greek Orthodox priesthood and their Russian backers as they were of the Turkish authorities. From the viewpoint of converting Christians to the Protestant religion, Shaftesbury concluded, Turkish rule was preferable to the increased influence of the Tsar, who did not even allow the circulation of the Bible in Russian in his own lands.p Should the Russians conquer the Balkans, the same darkness would descend and all hopes for the Protestant religion would be lost in the region. The Porte, by contrast, Shaftesbury maintained, was not hostile to the missionary work of the Anglicans: it had intervened to protect Protestant converts from persecution by other Christians, and had even granted millet status to the Protestant religion in 1850 (he failed to mention that converts from Islam were put to death under Ottoman law). Like many Anglicans, Shaftesbury drew a sympathetic picture of Islam, whose quiet rituals seemed more in keeping with their own forms of contemplative prayer than the loud and semi-pagan rituals of the Orthodox. Such ideas were commonplace in the Evangelical community. At a public meeting to discuss the Russo-Turkish conflict in December, for example, one speaker insisted that ‘The Turk was not infidel. He was Unitarian.’ ‘As to the Russian Greeks or Greek Christians,’ it was reported by the Newcastle Guardian, ‘he said nothing against their creed, but they were a besotted, dancing, fiddling race. He spoke from personal observation.’36
The mere mention of the Sultan’s name was enough to evoke tumultuous applause. At one meeting in a theatre in Chester, for example, two thousand people passed by acclamation a resolution calling on the government to assist the Sultan ‘by the strongest warlike measures’, on the grounds that
there is no sovereign in Europe who has higher claims than the Sultan to the support of this country: no sovereign who has done more for religious toleration; for he has established religious equality in his dominions. It would be no dishonour to Englishmen if they were to rank him with the Alfreds and Edwards; and if properly supported at the present crisis by the nations of West Europe, he will make his dominions happy and prosperous and establish commercial relations of mutual advantage between them and Great Britain.
When The Times suggested that the Balkan Christians might prefer the protection of the Tsar to the continued rule of the Sultan, it was rounded on with vehement nationalistic overtones by the Morning Herald and the Morning Advertiser, which accused it of being un-English: ‘It is printed in the English language, but that is the only thing English about it. It is, where Russia is concerned, Russian all over.’37
In France, too, the press was an active influence on Napoleon’s foreign policy. The greatest pressure came from the Catholic provincial press, which had been calling for war against Russia since the beginning of the Holy Lands dispute. Their calls became ever louder after the news of Sinope. ‘A war with Russia is regrettable but necessary and unavoidable,’ argued an editorial in the Union franc-comtoise on 1 January 1854, because ‘if France and Britain fail to stop the Russian menace in Turkey, they too will be enslaved to the Russians like the Turks’.
