Bible and Sword (35 page)

The second step, the guarantee of Turkey-in-Asia under the Cyprus Convention, is less well known but of equal importance. It meant that Britain now recognized as paramount
her interests in the Palestine area; and it led eventually to her occupation of it, under a variety of mandates, after World War I. Guarantees mean a willingness to fight; in fact, they generally imply an assumption that a fight is looming. Witness Britain’s guarantee of Poland in 1939. Thus the Cyprus Convention marks the point at which Britain decided that the region including Palestine was worth a war if it should come to that. Actually the Cyprus Convention did not work out that way. Russia, the aggressor against whom it was aimed, was on the down grade and by the end of the nineteenth century had been superseded by Germany as Britain’s chief imperial rival. When it did come, the war whose outcome was to make Britain the inheritor of Turkey-in-Asia and the occupier of Palestine was fought, not against Russia in support of Turkey, but against Germany and Turkey itself.

But through the middle of the nineteenth century, between Napoleon at its beginning and the Kaiser at its end, Russia was the chief opponent, not so much of the British Isles as of the British Empire. It was Russia’s old restless hunger for the south that brought her into collision with Britain’s path of empire. It had gnawed at every Russian ruler since Catherine the Great. Pitt had risked war to keep Catherine from Odessa; Palmerston defeated Nicholas I’s grab at the Black Sea in the 1830’s. The Crimean War was fought over the same issue in the 1850’s, and Disraeli came to the very brink of war for the same cause in the 1870’s. The Russians never gave up. When Nicholas I visited England in 1844 he proposed to the foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen, a joint partitioning of the Turkish Empire, Russia to become protector of Turkey’s European possessions in the Balkans, England to have Egypt and Crete, and Constantinople to become a free city “temporarily occupied” by Russia. Nicholas, a simple autocrat, saw no harm in giving history a push, since everyone was momentarily expecting the breakup of the Turkish Empire anyway. But his delightful plan, appealing as it might be, was not possible
to England under parliamentary government. Despite a reputation for deep-laid scheming, England has always been under the necessity of composing a policy to fit events rather than vice versa, and she managed to conquer half the world in a series of haphazard fits and starts, if not altogether in that “fit of absence of mind” of Seeley’s ingenuous explanation.

Jerusalem itself provided the excuse for Russia’s next attempt to break into the Ottoman house. The quarrel over the Holy Places that brought on the Crimean War was one of the most ridiculous causes of a major war in all history. “Tout pour un few Grik priests,” shrugged Princess Lieven. Trivial as it was, it could never have burst into such a flame had not Nicholas I and Napoleon III both been breathing hard upon the coals. Russia had traditionally been protector of Greek Orthodox institutions in the Holy Land, France of the Latin or Roman Catholic. The various monastic orders, priests, and pilgrims of both rites were forever clashing over access to the Holy Places and shrines. France had secured dominant rights for the Latin clergy under capitulations originally granted to Francis I in 1535 by Suleiman, but had suffered them to decline during the anti-Christian policy of the French Revolution and Napoleon I. The Orthodox, purposefully supported by the Czar, had encroached more and more, and now Nicholas, using them as a wedge to penetrate the Ottoman empire, demanded that the Sultan confirm him as protector of the Holy Places and of all Orthodox Christians in Ottoman dominions.

But Europe’s newest imperial pretender, Napoleon III, wearing uneasily the crown that he had just taken out of storage to place on his own head, had Eastern longings no less than his uncle. He, too, was insecure, on his throne, in his person, and in the awful shadow of his namesake. He needed glory. A war, a victory, a gift to France of territory in the East, would settle him in the saddle and establish the Napoleonic dynasty at last. He pressed for the Latin rights to the Holy Places. The poor Sultan, caught
between the two emperors, offered a compromise solution that was satisfactory to neither. The Czar wanted a war with Turkey so that he could extract the Balkan provinces as the price of victory and stand at last on the mouth of the Danube. He issued an ultimatum. The Sultan turned to Britain for help. Britain, determined as ever to keep Russia from access to the Mediterranean and unwilling to let France win or lose alone, dispatched her fleet to the Dardanelles. The Czar, wrongly supposing that British public opinion would never support a war, moved his fleet from Sebastopol and slaughtered a Turkish squadron at Sinope, on the Asiatic shore of the Black Sea. The British public got wildly excited. Britain rang with Russophobia. Palmerston, chafing in the Home Office, to which he had been relegated by party politics, was asked by the Queen if he had any news of the strikes in the north of England. “No, Madam,” he replied in anguish, “but it seems certain the Turks have crossed the Danube.” The Crimean War, with Britain and France allied in support of Turkey against Russia, was soon in full swing.

It ended in a defeat of Russia’s aims, ratified by the Treaty of Paris in 1856, which bound all signatories to respect the independence and territorial integrity of Turkey and admitted Turkey to the concert of European powers in return for equal rights for Christian subjects of the Porte and the usual solemn promises of reform. The treaty was supposed to usher in a rejuvenation of Turkey, but the “Sick Man” continued to deserve the contemptuous phrase that Czar Nicholas had coined for him. The government of the Porte remained as despotic, as corrupt, as unreformed as ever. And the eagles continued to hover in hopes of a corpse. In fact, the Treaty of Paris not only changed nothing, but also provided a spark for the next crisis.

Moslem indignation at the granting of equal rights to Christians reached a pitch among the bellicose Druses of Lebanon and exploded in 1860 in a three-day massacre of the Maronites, a Christian sect that had been under the
special protection of France since the crusade of St. Louis. Here was another opportunity for Napoleon III, who immediately offered to send troops to restore order, as the Turks showed no interest in doing. Palmerston and Russell, deeply suspicious of Napoleon’s eagerness to protect the Maronites, yet unable to say No when Christians were being massacred, reluctantly agreed to an international convention authorizing French troops to occupy Lebanon for six months for pacification purposes. Mutual mistrust breathed in every line of the protocol in which the powers proclaimed their “perfect disinterestedness” and declared that they did “not intend to seek for and will not seek for any territorial advantages, any exclusive influence or any concession with regard to the commerce of their subjects.…” Napoleon secured an extension of another four months, which only deepened English suspicions. “We do not want to create a new Papal state in the East and to give France a new pretext for indefinite occupation,” wrote the foreign secretary, Lord John Russell. He could not rest till he got the French out of Syria, and for putting British interests above the safety of Christian lives he has earned a posthumous scolding from the
Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy
. But he had his way. By forcing the Porte to grant semiautonomy to Lebanon under a Turkish Christian governor nominated by the Powers, he removed the basis for the French occupation.

Napoleon withdrew his troops in 1861, but the prestige that France had gained by coming to the rescue of the Christian community gave the French a foothold in Syria that lasted down to the French mandates of our own time. Meantime Napoleon had not given up his dream. He commissioned Gifford Palgrave, the English Jesuit missionary and explorer, who had settled in Syria and brought out firsthand reports of the Damascus massacres, to travel through Arabia in 1862–63 to report on the Arabs’ attitude toward France. Nothing came of this. But meanwhile he pursued another and older dream of his predecessors. In
1866 he secured the Sultan’s consent to cut a canal connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. By 1869 de Lesseps had triumphed. The Suez Canal was a reality. On November 17, 1869 the Imperial yacht, with the Empress Eugénie on board, led the opening procession through the locks. It was the Second Empire’s last hour of glory. Within eight months came the Franco-Prussian War; Napoleon was broken by Bismarck, a new conqueror emerged on the Continent, a new era of German expansion had begun.

Meanwhile the Canal was an accomplished fact. Britain had long dreaded it and long opposed it. It had always been the symbol of France’s Eastern ambitions from Louis XIV to Napoleon, and again when France tried to realize them through Mehemet Ali as her protégé. The Pasha had hoped to build up a Suez route to the Red Sea by connecting railway and canal lines. Viewing this project as a blind for the occupation of Egypt by France, Britain had attempted to build up an alternative route to the Red Sea by the Euphrates and connecting railways. Despite repeated experiments, this never proved practical. But anything rather than the Canal was Palmerston’s settled conviction; he feared that the Canal would create a new source of rivalry in the Middle East and make the Eastern Question more insoluble than ever. “I must tell you frankly,” he said to de Lesseps, “that what we are afraid of losing is our commercial and maritime pre-eminence, for this Canal will put other nations on an equal footing with us.”

It almost seemed as if the old man would be prime minister forever, but at last in 1865 he died. Room for many new ideas and new men was made. Some ten years later the author of
Tancred
succeeded to the premiership. “Mr. Disraeli,” the Queen discovered with pleasure, “has
very large ideas
and
very lofty views
of the position this country should hold.” Mr. Disraeli saw the Canal as an imperial pathway to the East, and he resolved that it should be controlled by Britain. In a stroke so bold, so individual that one can conceive of no other statesman of the time who
could have done it, he bought the Canal for Britain on barely a few days’ notice.

“Zeal for the greatness of England,” said Lord Salisbury on Disraeli’s death, “was the passion of his life.” As
Alroy
had been his ideal ambition, England was his ideal Israel. Odd that, by acquiring the Suez Canal for England, he should have started the Intermediary Power on the path that was to reopen Palestine to the real Israel.

The circumstances were sudden. The Khedive Ismail, Mehemet’s grandson, was bankrupt. Agents rumored that his shares in the Canal might be offered for sale and that the French were negotiating. A telegram to the Foreign Office confirmed that the Khedive would sell; the price was £4,000,000. Disraeli dined with Rothschild. Then he called the Cabinet. His private secretary, Montagu Corry, was waiting outside the room for a prearranged signal. When Disraeli put his head outside the door and said “Yes” Corry went off to New Court to tell Rothschild that the Prime Minister wanted £4,000,000 “tomorrow.”

Rothschild paused, so runs Corry’s account, ate a grape, and asked: “What is your security?”

“The British Government.”

“You shall have it.”

Next day Disraeli had a letter confirming the loan, £1,000,000 down on December 1, less than a week off, and the remainder during December and January, the banker to receive 2½ per cent commission and 5 per cent interest until the advance was repaid. The Queen was in “ecstasies,” the
Times
was “staggered,” the country on the whole, except for Mr. Gladstone, enthusiastic. The Queen’s “Uncle Leopold,” king of the Belgians, felicitated Victoria on “the greatest event of modern politics,” and her daughter, the Crown Princess of Germany, wrote enclosing a letter from the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, then sixteen:

Parliament met and, after hearing Disraeli defend his purchase of the Canal as a vital link in the chain of fortresses along the road to India, voted the £4,000,000 without a division. Thereafter the hinterland of the Canal, “from the Nile to the Euphrates,” was to be an area of acute sensitivity to Britain. To hold the Ottoman gates against any rival intruders was now more than ever essential, unless Britain were prepared to take over the Nile-to-the-Euphrates region herself. For fear of offending France, in view of French interests in Syria and Egypt, and in view of the anti-imperialism of the Liberals at home, this was not yet feasible. The only possibility was to keep the Sick Man on his feet and sufficiently upright to keep Russia off his back.

But already there were rumbles from the North. A Bulgarian revolt in 1875 against the Turkish despotism acted on Russia like that ringing of the bell that makes the dog’s mouth salivate. It has set “everything again in flame,” wrote Disraeli, “and I really believe the Eastern Question that has haunted Europe for a century … will fall to my lot to encounter—dare I say to settle?” The “peace with honour” that he brought back with such renown from the Congress of Berlin was the result of this encounter. But to “settle” the Eastern Question was beyond even Disraeli’s power—beyond, it seems, any human power, for it still haunts the world today. However, one result of Disraeli’s efforts was the acquisition of Cyprus, 150 miles off the coast of Palestine, as
quid pro quo
for the British guarantee of Turkey’s dominions in Asia. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877 provided the opportunity, but, on the useful principle of sidestepping all Balkan wars whenever possible, let us hasten to its conclusion. Turkey was beaten, Russia occupied her European provinces, and the powers called a Congress to limit Russia’s gains.

Why did not Britain fight in support of Turkey, this time as before? For one thing, she nearly did. Russophobia reached the wildest extremes. The Queen, at the prospect
of Russian entry into Constantinople, described herself as “feeling quite ill with anxiety” and expressed her “
great astonishment
and her extreme
vexation and alarm
at this, and must solemnly repeat, that if we allow
this, England would no longer exist as a great power!!”