The Palmerstonian Age

THE PALMERSTONIAN AGE, 1852-65 When Lord Palmerston, grudgingly supported by his colleagues, had won his strange personal triumph in the Don Pacifico debate of 185o, the Palmerstonian age had begun. Its hero was already 65 and could look back on an official career which began in 1809; but fifteen years of life remained to him, during which he nated politics and gave a character all his own to our history. It was a curious interlude in the Victorian Age, a time of steady prosperity and domestic quietude, when John Bull took his ease, and enjoyed (or criticized) the adventures of a statesman who, whatever his faults, was proud of his country and determined that she should play a great and worthy part in the affairs of the world. That is not, of course, the whole story of these fifteen years, but it is the main story. The first two years of it have been included in the previous section.

Aberdeen's coalition (Whig and Peelite) government had Glad stone as its chancellor of the exchequer, and the first of his long series of Budgets (1853) carried on Peel's financial policy. The income-tax was extended and more import duties abolished; the tax on spirits was increased and that on tea reduced. This promoted temperance, and another virtue reputed even nearer to godliness was promoted by the abolition of the tax on soap. But Gladstone budgeted for peace while his colleagues were "drifting" (to use Aberdeen's subsequent admission) into war.

The Crimean War.

The Crimean War (1854-56 q.v.) had both general and special causes. The general cause was the ag gressive power of Russian despotism. Its south-eastern exten sion threatened Afghanistan, and its championship of Christian peoples in the Turkish Empire was considered a mere cloak to cover its lust for Constantinople ; it was a bugbear to imperialists and an abomination to Liberals. Of the special causes, the chief was Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, British ambassador at Constanti nople, who so manipulated controversies between Russia and Turkey as to provoke a Russo-Turkish war and to bring Great Britain into it on the Turkish side. Napoleon III., since 1852 emperor of the French, brought his reluctant country into the war in alliance with Great Britain. Aberdeen's government `failed to control Lord Stratford, and Palmerston (imperfectly muz zled at the Home Office) had no desire that they should do so. The war proved, like other wars before and since, that bravery is much commoner than brains. It was the first war to be fully described in the daily press, and the revelations of Russell in the Times not only sent Florence Nightingale (q.v.) to Scutari, but also brought down the Aberdeen government ; so Palmerston became prime minister (Jan. 1855) . The British troops had greatly distinguished themselves at the Alma, Balaklava, and Inkerman in the autumn preceding the Crimean winter, but the capture of Sevastopol in Sept. 1855 was mainly the work of the French, whose forces by that time greatly outnumbered our own. The Treaty of Paris, which concluded the war, opened the Black Sea (q.v.) to the commerce of the world and closed it to vessels of war, forbidding the establishment of arsenals on its shores. For 15 years Russia accepted the neutralization of the Black Sea. In 1871, when France was at the feet of Bismarck, Gladstone's government was compelled to surrender the principal Crimean trophy, and Sevastopol rose again from its ruins.

In 1857 Palmerston allowed the British minister in China to involve Great Britain in a war over a petty dispute, and he was defeated on a vote of censure in the House of Commons, but he at once appealed to the constituencies and won the general elec tion on this issue. Canton had already been bombarded; subse quently Lord Elgin occupied Pekin. But these events were quite overshadowed by the Mutiny of the Indian Sepoy regiments. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1857 all attention was concentrated upon the siege of Delhi, the tragedy of Cawnpore, and the defence and relief of Lucknow; and new names were added to the long roll of the heroes of the British army. (See