the conduct of our ambassadors and statesmen has been so honourable and straightforward, so forbearing and moderate in the transactions which have led to this war that there is no cause for humiliation at this time, but rather of strengthening ourselves in our righteousness, and that we should rather present ourselves before God with words of self congratulation and say, ‘We thank thee, O God, that we are not as other nations are: unjust, covetous, oppressive, cruel; we are a religious people, we are a Bible-reading, church-going people, we send missionaries into all the earth.’
In Brunswick Chapel, Leeds, on the same day, the Reverend John James said that Russia’s offensive against Turkey was an attack ‘on the most sacred rights of our common humanity; an outrage standing in the same category as the slave trade, and scarcely inferior to it in crime’. The Balkan Christians, James maintained, had more religious freedom under the Sultan than they would ever have under the Tsar:
Leave Turkey to the Sultan and, aided by the good offices of France and England, these humble Christians will, by God’s blessing, enjoy perfect liberty of conscience … . Hand it over to Russia and their establishments will be broken up; the school-houses closed; and their places of prayer either demolished, or converted into temples of a faith as impure, demoralizing, and intolerant, as Popery itself. What British Christian can hesitate as to the course proper for such a country as ours, in such a case as this? … It is a Godly war to drive back at any hazard the hordes of the modern Attila, who threatens the liberty and Christianity, not of Turkey only, but of the civilized world.52
To mark the embarkation of Britain’s ‘Christian soldiers’ for the East, the Reverend George Croly preached a sermon in St Stephen’s Church, Walbrook, in London, in which he maintained that England was engaging in a war for ‘the defence of mankind’ against the Russians, a ‘hopeless and degenerate people’ bent upon the conquest of the world. This was a ‘religious war’ for the defence of the true Western religion against the Greek faith; the ‘first Eastern war since the Crusades’. ‘If England in the last war [against Napoleon] was the refuge of the principles of freedom, in the next she may be appointed for the refuge of the principles of Religion. May it not be the Divine will that England, after having triumphed as the champion, shall be called to the still loftier distinction of the teacher of mankind?’ England’s destiny in the East, the Reverend Croly argued, might be advanced by the coming war: it was nothing less than to convert the Turks to Christianity: ‘The great work may be slow, difficult, and interrupted by the casualties of kingdoms, or the passions of men – but it will prosper. Why should not the Church of England aid this work? Why not offer up solemn and public prayer at once for the success of our righteous warfare, the return of peace, and the conversion of the infidel?’53
To varying degrees, the major parties to the Crimean War – Russia, Turkey, France and Britain – all called religion to the battlefield. Yet by the time the war began, its origins in the Holy Lands had been forgotten and subsumed by the European war against Russia. The Easter celebrations in the Holy Sepulchre ‘passed off very quietly’ in 1854, according to James Finn, the British consul in Jerusalem. There were few Russian pilgrims because of the outbreak of the war and the Greek services were tightly managed by the Ottoman authorities to prevent a recurrence of the religious fighting that had become common in recent years. Within a few months, the world’s attention would be turned to the battlefields of the Crimea, and Jerusalem would disappear from Europe’s view, but from the Holy Lands these distant events appeared in a different light. As the British consul in Palestine put it:
In Jerusalem it was otherwise. These important transactions seemed but superstructures upon the original foundation; for although in diplomacy the matter (the Eastern question) had nominally shifted into a question of religious protection … still it had become a settled creed among us that the kernel of it all lay with us in the Holy Places; that the pretensions of St Petersburg to an ecclesiastical protection by virtue of treaty aimed still, as at the very first, at an actual possession of the sanctuaries at the local well-spring of Christianity – that these sanctuaries were in very truth the meed contended for by gigantic athletes at a distance.54
6
First Blood to the Turks
