General López returned to Paraguay with his new steamship and a pregnant Eliza Lynch, who was determined to bring the razzmatazz of Second Empire Paris to his minuscule country, where she gave birth to the first of five children. Meanwhile her lover was promoted to war minister and vice-president. If the Paraguayans were fascinated by Eliza, whom they called La Lynch, the López family were horrified by
Just after Napoleon’s marriage to Eugénie, a vicious skirmish with daggers and pistols broke out between Catholic and Orthodox monks in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The coenobite brawl ignited a European war that gave Napoleon the chance to ally with the only country liberal enough to associate with the parvenu emperor: Britain. Nicholas and Napoleon competed to bully the Ottoman sultan Abdülmecid into conceding their protection of Christians and influence. Napoleon sent a gunboat to assert French ‘sovereign authority’ over the Holy Places. Abdülmecid accepted that authority until Tsar Nicholas threatened war, at which the Ottoman agreed the Romanov was the protector of Orthodox Christians.
The tsar then invaded Ottoman Moldavia and Wallachia, hoping to advance further south to seize Istanbul; as Europe’s chief exporter of grain from Odessa, he aspired to control the Straits. He called for a Balkan Slav revolt, influenced by a new ideology of pan-Slavism, through which Slavs under Russian leadership would defy the hatred and hypocrisy of the democratic west. But Nicholas, spoilt by success, rigid and ailing, miscalculated. He counted on Habsburg support and western divisions. Instead Franz Josef betrayed him. And then there was Palmerston’s loathing for Nicholas’s expansionist autocracy. Pam was a reforming liberal home secretary, a scourge of global slavery, reducer of child labour, protector of women by creating civil divorces and pioneer of the state role in fighting pandemics by making the vaccination of children against smallpox compulsory.* Now he rushed to Paris to coordinate with Napoleon.
On 27 February 1854, when Nicholas would not retreat, Pam guided Britain and France into a joint war against Russia. In September, 30,000 French and 26,000 British troops, aided by the Italians of Piedmont and the Ottomans, landed in Crimea to seize Potemkin’s naval base Sebastopol and destroy Russian power in the Black Sea. It was the first of the mid-century wars in which the chivalry and ineptitude of aristocratic commanders clashed with the murderous efficiency of modern weaponry. Both sides were blunderingly incompetent, using cavalry charges against massed artillery and exposed infantry against fortified positions; both were commanded by negligent, arrogant martinets.
Palmerston suggested that Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert, the quintessence of a new bourgeois prudishness, should do the unthinkable: invite Napoleon, heir to the ancestral enemy and notorious emperor of the fleshpots of the new Babylon, to visit Windsor. Palmerston had welcomed Napoleon’s coup, his enthusiasm outraging Albert, whose complaints forced Pam’s resignation as foreign secretary. The royal couple disapproved of Palmerston, but Napoleon was beyond the pale.
The British queen had succeeded to the throne in 1837 when she was an untried and nervous teenager. The monarchy was no longer powerful, but Victoria, pale, blonde, dumpy with a round face and blue eyes, behaved as if she was the ruler, deploying her influence and prestige with obstinate grandiloquence unencumbered by self-doubt. Her sturdy grandeur provided a reassuring figurehead for her brash, ambitious and prosperous people; her sanctimonious virtue dovetailed with the values of Britain’s self-righteous middle classes. But it was Palmerston and a cast of aristocrats and oligarchs who actually led Britain to world power.
