Foreign Policy (183o–185o)

During these years, Great Britain, chiefly by means of diplomacy, played an important part in foreign affairs, her purpose being to preserve the peace of Europe, which had lasted since 1815. With the other powers, she aided in settling dynastic difficulties in Spain and Portugal, and in compelling a revolting Egyptian pasha, Mehemet Ali, to withdraw from an attempt to break up the Ottoman empire.. On two occasions she avoided difficulties with France, which, for a time, seemed to threaten their peaceful relations. She made two boundary treaties with the United States, one settling the Maine boundary in 1842, the other the northwestern or Oregon frontier in 1846 ; and, in 1850, signed a treaty, known as the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, dealing with the construction of a ship canal across Central America.

In the year 1848, a new revolution broke out in France, which ended in the abdication of Louis Philippe and the establishment of the second French republic. The success of this revolution roused the people of Italy, Austria, Prussia, and the lesser German states to make one more effort to win constitutions, and to obtain for themselves a share in government. Great Britain was not seriously affected by this widespread and at first largely successful movement. Only the Chartists and the Irish renewed their agitations. After the revolution of 1848-1849 had been suppressed by force of arms, Great Britain took part in certain of the diplomatic conferences that followed. One notable outcome of these negotiations was the arrangement made in London, in 1850 and 1852, whereby Great Britain, France, and Russia guaranteed the integrity, and settled the royal succession, of Denmark, which had been threatened by the revolt of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein.

Great Britain in 1851

The year 1851 seemed to usher in a golden age of peace. Free trade had been extended by the repeal of the navigation acts in 1849; material prosperity had been promoted by a rapid increase in commerce; pauperism had been checked by the new poor laws ; drunkenness had been diminished perceptibly by the efforts of the total abstinence societies, the sanitary condition of the towns improved by a series of public health measures, and crime lessened by the establishment of a police system and by the decrease of pauperism and drunkenness. A spiritual awakening had followed a series of new religious movements, of which the Tractarian, or Oxford movement, was the most important. Literature took a practical turn: Macaulay defended the rule of the middle-class Whigs, in his History of England (1848); Grote glorified the cause of democracy, in his History of Greece (1846-1856); Dickens, in Pickwick Papers (1837), and Thackeray, in Vanity Fair (1847-1848), breaking away from the romanticism of Scott, portrayed vividly the life of the upper and lower classes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; while Carlyle, in Sartor Resartus (1833-1834), and Tennyson, in In Memoriam ( 1850), struck a new note of sincerity and duty. A great industrial exhibition promoted by the Prince Consort in 1851 seemed to inaugurate an era of peaceful commercial intercourse with all the world.

But the era of peace had not yet come. Great issues had yet to be settled, both in Europe and America, before this happy result could be attained. Italy, Germany, and the United States were to engage in wars, in behalf of their national unity, before they could enter on their career as peaceful commercial and industrial states. With these wars Great Britain had but little to do. She was involved in no struggle of her own in behalf of national unity and constitutional government; for she had already solved those problems peacefully for herself. Her concern was rather with commerce, trade routes, and her territory in India; and before Italy, America, and Germany began their struggles for consolidation and unity, Great Britain had been drawn into wars and disasters that were largely the outcome of her commercial expansion.

The Crimean War

In 1850 a small event in Palestine opened the whole Eastern question, that is, the question of the relations between Russia and Turkey. Greek and Roman monks quarrelled over the control of certain sacred places in the Holy Land. The Czar, who was the head of the Greek church, took up the cause of the Greek Christians, and Louis Napoleon, who had been elected president of the French Republic in 1848, championed the cause of the Roman Catholics. The difficulty was insignificant in itself, but became serious when the Czar demanded of the Sultan the right to act as the protector of all the Greek Christians in the Ottoman empire. Great Britain suspected that the Czar's purpose was to bring about the partition of Turkey among the powers, in order that he himself might seize Constantinople. Such an act would have been contrary to British policy, which demanded that the Ottoman Empire remain as it was. When, therefore, in 1853, Czar Nicholas declared war against Turkey, sent troops into her territory, and destroyed a Turkish fleet at Sinope in the Black Sea (November 4), the British people rose in wrath and indignation and demanded of the Aberdeen ministry war for the punishment of the Russian despot.

There were two reasons for this demand : in the first place, statesmen and people alike believed that if Russia seized Constantinople, the British route to India would be cut off, and their possessions in India threatened with attack; in the second place, the British people looked on the Czar Nicholas as a despot, and deemed him responsible for the failure of the Hungarian struggle for independence and the revolution of 1848-1849 in general. They desired not only to weaken his power, but actually to humiliate him. Louis Napoleon, crowned Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, in 1852, also wanted war to render his throne secure at home and to win glory abroad. British suspicion and hatred of Russia forced Aberdeen, against his will, to join with Napoleon in a declaration of war, March, 1854. Troops were despatched to the Dardanelles; but before any actual fighting took place, the Czar, at the request of Austria, whom he wished to keep neutral, withdrew his troops from Turkish territory. This act did not, however, satisfy the British people. They desired that the Czar should be humbled and that Russia should suffer as she had made others suffer. Therefore an attack on the great fortress of Sebastopol in the Crimea was planned; and in September, 1854, the Crimean war was begun.

This great duel, between Russia on one side, and England, France, Turkey, and eventually Sardinia on the other, lasted for a year. Meanwhile a congress of diplomats at Vienna tried to settle matters peacefully, but without the slightest success. At the battle of the Alma, September 30, 1854, the allies won a bloody victory ; and in November, the battles of Balaklaval and Inkerman were fought. These engagements were indecisive, and the allies in December settled down to a regular siege. The winter of 1854 and 1855 was a time of misery, suffering, and death for British and French soldiers alike, due to insufficient food, bad housing, epidemics, and poor hospital service. In England popular wrath at the inefficiency of the government drove Aberdeen from the ministry (1855). His successor, Palmerston, pushed the war with vigor, and finally, after careful preparations and many assaults, Sebastopol was taken, on September 5, 1855. The death of Nicholas I, the February before, made easier the attainment of peace. Palmerston and the British people, having made their preparations for a continuation of the war, were loath to bring the struggle to a close; but the other powers were tired of the useless conflict and believed that Russia had suffered enough. In January, 1856, peace was agreed upon ; and in April, at the Congress of Paris, the final treaty was signed.

Great Britain gained little from the Crimean war except experience; but she had the satisfaction of seeing the diplomats at Paris declare the Ottoman empire a European power in good standing, and pledge themselves to maintain its integrity. In failing to reserve the right to interfere for the purpose of compelling the Sultan to carry out his promises, the powers committed one of the greatest diplomatic blunders in history. The battles of the war form a brilliant page in Great Britain's military annals ; but the negotiations that followed were not creditable to her diplomats. After 1856, Great Britain lost influence in the councils of Europe and withdrew more and more from Continental affairs.