The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston by Karl Marx

5

The contents of the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi were published in the Morning
Herald of August 21, 1833 On August 24, Sir Robert Inglis asked Lord
Palmerston, in the House of Commons,

“whether there really had been concluded a treaty,
offensive and defensive, between Russia and Turkey? He hoped that the noble
lord would be prepared before the prorogation of Parliament, to lay before the
House, not only the treaties that had been made, but all communications
connected with the formation of those treaties between Turkey and
Russia.” Lord Palmerston answered that “ when they
were sure that such a treaty as that alluded to really did exist, and
when they were in possession of that treaty, it would then be for them
to determine what was the course of policy they ought to pursue. ... It could
be no blame to him if the newspapers were sometimes beforehand with the
Government.” —(House of Commons, August 24, 1833)

Seven months afterwards, he assures the House that

“it was perfectly impossible that the treaty of Unkiar
Skelessi, not to be ratified at Constantinople until the month of September,
should have been officially known to him in August.” —(House of
Commons, March 17, 1834.)

He did know of the treaty, in August, but not officially.

“The British Government was surprised to find that
when the Russian troops quitted the Bosphorus, they carried that treaty with
them.” —(Lord Palmerston, House of Commons, March
1, 1848.)

Yes, the noble lord was in possession of the treaty before it had been
concluded.

“No sooner had the Porte received it (namely, the
draft of the treaty of Unkiar Skelessi), than the treaty was communicated by
them to the British Embassy at Constantinople, with the prayer for our
protection against Ibrahim Pasha and against Nicholas. The application was
rejected—but that was not all. With an atrocious perfidiousness, the fact
was made known to the Russian Minister. Next day, the very copy of the treaty
which the Porte had lodged with the British Embassy, was returned to the Porte
by the Russian Ambassador, who ironically advised the Porte—‘ to
choose better another time its confidants.’” —(Mr.
Anstey, House of Commons, February 8, 1848.)

But the noble viscount had obtained all he cared for. He was interrogated
with respect to the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, of whose existence he was not
sure, on August 24, 1833. On August 29, Parliament was prorogued,
receiving from the throne the consolatory assurance &ldquo;that the
hostilities which had disturbed the peace of Turkey had been terminated, and
they might be assured that the King's attention would be carefully directed to
any events which might affect the present state or the future independence of
that Empire. ”

Here, then, we have the key to the famous Russian Treaties of July. In July
they are concluded; in August something about them is transpiring through the
public press. Lord Palmerston is interrogated in the Commons. He, of course, is
aware of nothing. Parliament is prorogued,—and, when it reassembles, the
treaty has grown old, or, as in 1841, has already been executed, in spite of
public opinion.

Parliament was prorogued on August 29, 1833, and it reassembled on February
5, 1834. The interval between the prorogation and its reassembling was marked
by two incidents intimately interwoven with each other. On the one hand, the
united French and English fleets proceeded to the Dardanelles, displayed there
the tricolour and the Union Jack, sailed on their way to Smyrna, and returned
from thence to Malta. On the other hand, a new treaty was concluded between the
Porte and Russia on January 29, 1834,—the Treaty of St. Petersburg. This
treaty was hardly signed when the united fleet was withdrawn.

This combined manoeuvre was intended to stultify the British people and
Europe into the belief that the hostile demonstration on the Turkish seas and
coasts, directed against the Porte, for having concluded the Treaty of Unkiar
Skelessi, had enforced upon Russia the new Treaty of St. Petersburg. This
treaty, by promising the evacuation of the Principalities, and reducing the
Turkish payments to one-third of the stipulated amount, apparently relieved the
Porte from some engagements enforced on it by the Treaty of Adrianople. In all
other instances it was a simple ratification of the Treaty of Adrianople, not
at all relating to the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, nor dropping a single word
about the passage of the Dardanelles. On the contrary, the small alleviations
it granted to Turkey were the purchase money for the exclusion of Europe, by
the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, from the Dardanelles.

“At the very time at which the demonstration (of the
British fleet) was being made, an assurance was given by the noble lord to the
Russian Ambassador at this court, that this combined movement of the squadrons
was not intended in any sense hostile to Russia, nor to be taken as a hostile
demonstration against her; but that, in fact, it meant nothing at all. I say
this on the authority of Lord Ponsonby, the noble lord's own colleague, the
Ambassador at Constantinople.”—(Mr. Anstey, House of Commons,
February 23, 1848.)

After the Treaty of St. Petersburg had been ratified, the noble lord
expressed his satisfaction with the moderation of the terms imposed by
Russia.

When Parliament had reassembled, there appeared in the Globe, the
organ of the Foreign Office, a paragraph stating that

“the Treaty of St. Petersburg was a proof either of
the moderation or good sense of Russia, or of the influence which the union of
England and France, and the firm and concerted language of those two powers,
had acquired in the councils of St. Petersburg.”—(Globe,
February 24, 1835)

Thus, on the one hand, the Treaty of Adrianople, protested against by Lord
Aberdeen and the Duke of Wellington, was surreptitiously to be recognised on
the part of England by Lord Palmerston officially expressing his satisfaction
with the Treaty of St. Petersburg, which was but a ratification of that treaty;
on the other hand, public attention was to be diverted from the Treaty of
Unkiar Skelessi, and the animosity it had aroused in Europe against Russia was
to be soothed down.

Artful as the dodging was, it would not do. On March 17, 1834, Mr. Sheil
brought in a motion for “the copies of any treaties between Turkey and
Russia, and of any correspondence between the English, Russian, and Turkish
Governments, respecting those treaties, to be laid before the House.”

The noble lord resisted this resolution to his utmost, and succeeded in
baffling it by assuring the House that “peace could be preserved only by
the House reposing confidence in the Government,” and refusing to accede
to the motion. So grossly contradictory were the reasons which he stated
prevented him from producing the papers, that Sir Robert Peel called him, in
his parliamentary language, “a very inconclusive reasoner”, and his
own Colonel Evans could not help exclaiming:—“The speech of the
noble lord appeared to him the most unsatisfactory he had ever heard from
him.”

Lord Palmerston strove to convince the House that, according to the
assurances of Russia, the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi was to be looked
upon “as one of reciprocity,” that reciprocity being, that if the
Dardanelles should be closed against England in the event of war, they should
be closed against Russia also. The statement was altogether false, but if true,
this certainly would have been Irish reciprocity, for it was all on one side.
To cross the Dardanelles is for Russia not the means to get at the Black Sea,
but, on the contrary, to leave it.

So far from refuting Mr. Sheil's statement that “the consequence [of
the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi] was precisely the same as if the Porte
surrendered to Russia the possession of the Dardanelles,” Lord Palmerston
owned “that the treaty closed the Dardanelles to British men-of-war,...
and that under its provision even merchant vessels might,... in
effect, be practically excluded from the Black Sea,” in the case of a war
between England and Russia. But if the Government acted “with
temper,” if it “showed no unnecessary distrust,“ that is to
say, if it quietly submitted to all further encroachments of Russia, he was
“inclined to think that the case might not arise in which that treaty
would be called into operation; and that, therefore, it would in practice
remain a dead letter.“—(House of Commons, March
17, 1834.)

Besides, “the assurances and explanations” which the British
Government had received from the contracting parties to that treaty greatly
tended to remove its objections to it. Thus, then it was not the articles of
the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, but the assurances Russia gave with respect to
them, not the acts of Russia, but her language, he had, in his opinion, to look
upon. Yet, as on the same day his attention was called to the protest of the
French Charge d'Affaires, M. Le Grenee, against the Treaty of Unkiar
Skelessi, and the offensive and contumelious language of Count Nesselrode,
answering in the St. Petersburg Gazette, that “the Emperor of
Russia would act as if the declaration contained in the note of Le Grenee had
no existence”—the noble lord, eating his own words, propounded the
opposite doctrine that “it was on all occasions the duty of the English
Government to look to the acts of a foreign Power, rather than to the language
which the Power might hold, on any particular subject or occasion.”

One moment he appealed from the acts of Russia to her language, and the
other from her language to her acts.

In 1837 he still assured the House that the “Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi
was a treaty between two independent Powers.” —(House of
Commons, December 14, 1837)

Ten years later, the treaty having long since lapsed, and the noble lord
being just about to act the play of the truly English minister, and the
“civis Romanus sum,” he told the House plainly, “the
Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi was no doubt to a certain degree forced upon Turkey
by Count Orloff the Russian envoy, under circumstances [created by the
noble lord himself] which rendered it difficult for Turkey to refuse acceding
to it.... It gave practically to the Russian Government a power of interference
and dictation in Turkey, not consistent with the independence of that
state.“—(House of Commons, March 1, 1848.)

During the whole course of the debates about the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi,
the noble lord, like the clown in the comedy, had an answer of most monstrous
size, that must fit all demands and serve all questions—the Anglo-French
Alliance. When his connivance with Russia was pointed at in sneers, he gravely
retorted:

“If the present relations established between this
country and France were pointed at in these sneers, he would only say, that he
should look with feelings of pride and satisfaction at the part he had acted in
bringing about that good understanding.“—(House of Commons,
July 11, 1833)

When the production of the papers relating to the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi
was demanded, he answered that “England and France had now cemented a
friendship which had only grown stronger.”—(House of Commons,
March 17, 1834)

“He could but remark,” exclaimed Sir Robert
Peel, “that whenever the noble lord was thrown into a difficulty as to
any part of our European policy, he at once found a ready means of escape, by
congratulating the House upon the close alliance between this country and
France.”

Simultaneously the noble lord took good care not to quench the suspicions of
his Tory opponents, that he had “been compelled to connive at the
aggression upon Turkey by Mehemet Ali,” because France had directly
encouraged it.

At that time, then, the ostensible entente with France was to cover the
secret infeoffment to Russia, as in 1840 the clamorous rupture with France was
to cover the official alliance with Russia.

While the noble lord fatigued the world with ponderous folios of printed
negotiations on the affairs of the constitutional kingdom of Belgium and with
ample explanations, verbal and documentary, with regard to the
“substantive power” of Portugal, to this moment it has proved quite
impossible to wrest out of him any document whatever relating to the first
Syrio-Turkish War, and to the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi. When the production of
the papers was first demanded, on July 11, 1833, “the motion was
premature,... the transactions incomplete,...and the results not yet
known.”

On August 24, 1833, “the treaty was not officially signed, and he was
not in possession of it.” On March 17, 1834, “communications were
still carrying on ... the discussions, if he might so call them, were not yet
completed.“ Still in 1848, when Mr. Anstey told him that in asking for
papers he did not ask for the proof of the noble lord’s collusion with
the Czar, the chivalrous minister preferred killing time by a five hours’
speech, to killing suspicion by self-speaking documents. Notwithstanding all
this, he had the cynical impudence to assure Mr. T. Attwood, on December 14,
1837, that t“he papers connected with that treaty [viz., the Treaty of
Unkiar Skelessi] were laid before the House three years ago,” that is to
say in 1834, when “peace could be preserved only” by withholding
them from the House. In 1834, he enjoined the House not to press him, as
“peace could be preserved only by the House reposing confidence
in the Government,” which, if left alone, would certainly protect the
interests of England from encroachment. Now in 1837, in a thin House, composed
almost entirely of his retainers, he told Mr. Attwood, that it had never been
“the intention of the Government to have recourse to hostile
measures to compel Russia and Turkey, two independent Powers, to cancel
the treaty made between them.”

On the same day, he told Mr. Attwood that “this treaty was a matter
which had gone by, it was entered into for a, limited period,... and that
period having expired, its introduction by the honourable member....was wholly
unnecessary and uncalled for.”

According to the original stipulation, the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi was to
expire on July 8, 1841 Lord Palmerston tells Mr. Attwood that it had already
expired on December 14, 1837.

“What trick, what device, what starting hole, canst thou now find to
hide thee from this open and apparent shame? Come, let's hear, Jack—what
trick hast thou now?”[32]