Karl Marx

A New Revelation in England

Written about September 8, 1855.

From the English.

["New-York Daily Tribune" No. 4502, September 24, 1855]

Since the publication of the posthumous papers of Sir A[lexander] Burnes, which his father published in order to clear the son's memory of the false accusation raised by Lord Palmerston that he had been the initiator of the unfortunate and disgraceful Afghan war, and to furnish irrefutable proof that the so-called despatches of Sir A. Burnes, as Palmerston laid them before Parliament, were not only mutilated to the point of complete distortion of their original meaning but were actually, and through interpolations, forged, fabricated specifically for the purpose of misleading public opinion – since that publication there has perhaps never appeared a series of documents more damaging to the reputation of the British government and the caste that enjoys the hereditary possession of the offices of this country than the correspondence between Sir James Graham and Sir Charles Napier, which the old admiral is publishing just now with the intention of defending his good name.

In this controversy Sir James Graham has a great advantage over his opponent – no revelation of any kind is likely to lower his character in the judgement of the world. The man who boasted aloud of having been an accomplice in the murder of the two Bandiera brothers; who has been convicted of regularly opening and misusing private letters at the London Post Office solely to serve the Holy Alliance; who like a fawning dog licked the hands of the Emperor Nicholas when the latter landed on the coast of England; who even aggravated the abominable cruelty of the new English Poor Laws by his peculiar way of applying them; and who a few months ago vainly attempted, before the full House, to shift onto Mr. Layard the odium of the insults he himself had heaped upon the unfortunate Captain Christie – such a man can truly be regarded as a character whom no one can harm. His political career has something mysterious about it. He possesses neither Palmerston’s uncommon talents, which allow the latter to belong to no party at all, nor Russell’s inherited influence upon a party, which allows him to dispense with uncommon talents, and yet he has managed to play a prominent part among British statesmen. The key to this riddle we find not in the annals of world history, but in those of Punch. Year after year there appears in this instructive periodical a portrait drawn from life, with the laconic inscription: “Sir Robert Peel’s dirty boy.” Sir Robert Peel was an honourable, if not a great, man; above all, he was a British statesman, a party leader, who, precisely because of the requirements of his position, was forced to do much dirty work that he found quite repugnant. There Sir James proved a veritable godsend, and so it came about that Sir James became an indispensable man and thereby a great man as well.

Sir Charles Napier belongs to a family distinguished as much by its talent as by its eccentricities. Amidst the present-day peaceful humanity, the Napiers give the impression of some primitive tribe that possesses indeed the natural gift of appropriating the achievements of civilisation, but which will not bow to its conventionalities, respect its etiquette, or submit to its discipline. While the Napiers have always rendered good services to the English people, they have also constantly quarrelled with their government and rebelled against it. And if they possess the self-confidence of the Homeric heroes, they also have something of their boastful manner.

The late General Charles Napier, for example – unquestionably the most gifted soldier England has possessed since the days of Marlborough – was no less known for his conquest of Sind than for his feuds with the East India Company, which his family carried on even beyond the grave. Or General Sir W[illiam] Napier, known as the best military writer of England, but no less well known for his perpetual disputes with the British War Office, who so little shrank from the narrow-minded prejudices of his countrymen that the British book reviews first unanimously designated his famous History of the War on the Pyrenean Peninsula “the best French depiction that has ever appeared of this war.” And the opponent of Sir James Graham, the old Admiral Napier, has also made a name for himself by thwarting the orders of his superiors. This last vigorous scion of the Napiers Sir James Graham now believed he had pressed tight in the iron grip of a boa constrictor, but in the end it turns out to be nothing but a conventional spider’s web.

Sir James Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty, dismissed Charles Napier from his command upon his return to England; in the House of Commons he pointed to him as the responsible author of the Baltic failure and, as proof, quoted several passages from Napier’s private letters; he accused him of not having had the courage to carry out the bold orders of the Admiralty; he expressed the hope that in future no Lord of the Admiralty would ever be so incautious as to hoist Sir Charles Napier’s flag; and in the newspapers at his disposal he ridiculed him, calling him “Fighting Charly,” who, like the mythological king of France, “marched his twenty thousand men up the hill and then down again.” Sir Charles Napier – we quote his own words –

“demanded an inquiry into his conduct; it was refused him; he appealed to the Cabinet, but received no answer; finally he addressed himself to the House of Commons. The papers were refused him under the pretext that Her Majesty’s service would be injured thereby.”

After the bombardment of Sweaborg, this pretext naturally collapsed.

Sir James believed his case all the more certain as he had taken the precaution of designating as “private” all those letters that were calculated to expose him and to justify his chosen victim. As for the meaning of the sacramental word “private,” Sir James himself remarked, when making his statement before the Sebastopol Committee: a British First Lord of the Admiralty is accustomed to designate public instructions as “private” when he has his good reasons for withholding them not only from the public, but even from Parliament. A man like Sir James, who believes himself entitled to turn private letters into public ones, finds it quite natural to declare public documents to be private property. But this time he has reckoned without his host. Sir Charles

Napier, by boldly breaking the shackles of “private instruction,” has perhaps exposed himself to the danger of being struck from the list of the English navy, and has probably waived the right ever again to hoist his flag; at the same time, however, he has not only barricaded the way into the Admiralty for Sir James, but also shown the English people that its fleet is as corrupt as its army. When the campaign in the Crimea stripped the British army of its age-hallowed glory, the defenders of the ancien régime pleaded not guilty with the plausible argument that England had never claimed to be a first-class military power. That Great Britain has not claimed to be the first naval power in the world, however, they dare not assert. That is the uplifting side of war: it puts a nation to the test. As mummies instantly crumble on exposure to the atmosphere, so war pronounces its death sentence upon all social institutions that no longer possess any vital force.

The correspondence between Sir James Graham and Admiral Napier, which falls into the period from February 24 to November 6, 1854, and which, owing to its great length, cannot be reproduced in full in the columns of our paper, may be summarised very briefly. Until the end of August, when – as is generally known – the navigation season in the Baltic is drawing to a close, everything went quite smoothly – even though Sir Charles Napier, right at the beginning of the expedition, had told Sir James his opinion that

“the means provided by the Admiralty for the equipping and manning of the North Sea fleet were inadequate for the occasion and would not allow the Russians to be confronted on acceptable terms.”

During this whole period, Sir James had nothing but a friendly smile in his letters for his “dear Sir Charles.” On March 12, he “congratulates” him on the fleet’s having left the English coast in such fine “order”; on April 5, he is “satisfied with its forward movement”; on April 10, he is “perfectly satisfied with his proceedings”; on June 20, he calls him a “consummate commander-in-chief”; on July 4, he is “sure that Sir Charles will do whatever a man can do”; on August 22, he “sincerely” congratulates him “on the success of his operations before Bomarsund”; and on August 25, he is even seized with a kind of poetic effusion and exclaims:

“I am more than satisfied with your proceedings, I am enthusiastic at the prudence and common sense you have displayed.”

During the whole time, Sir James is only anxious that Sir Charles

“in the eager desire to perform a great feat of arms and to satisfy the impetuous demands of an impatient multitude, might perhaps follow a rash impulse and neglect the highest duty, that is, the moral courage to do what one thinks right, even at the risk of being reproached with having acted wrongly.”

As late as May 1, 1854, he says to Sir Charles:

“I believe that both Sweaborg and Cronstadt can scarcely be taken from the sea, especially Sweaborg, and only a very large army could operate successfully by land in the face of such a force as Russia could easily concentrate at the immediate approaches to its capital.”

When Sir Charles tells him on June 12

“that, supported by Admiral Chads, he had come to the conclusion, after mature consideration, that the only successful way to attack Sweaborg would be to equip a large number of gunboats,”

Sir James answers him on July 11:

“With 50,000 men and 200 gunboats you could yet accomplish something great and decisive before the end of September.”

But no sooner had winter set in, no sooner had the French army and fleet departed, no sooner had the heavy equinoctial storms begun to churn up the waves of the Baltic, and no sooner had Sir Charles reported:

“The anchor cables of our ships have already begun to part; the Dragon has only one anchor left; the Impérieuse and the Basilisk each lost an anchor last night; the Magicienne was forced to come to anchor in the fog, and having weighed at night off Nargen, had to anchor again off the Rönnskär lighthouse, having drifted among the rocks; and the Euryalus struck rocks, and it is a true miracle that she is not lost” –

when Sir James quite suddenly discovered, “one does not wage war without risk and danger” and that Sweaborg must therefore be taken without a single soldier, a single gun- or mortar-boat. In fact, we can only repeat the words of the old admiral: “If the Emperor of Russia were First Lord of the Admiralty, he too would have written no other letters!”

In the Admiralty, therefore, as is evident from this correspondence, the same anarchy reigns as in the War Ministry. Sir James approves of Napier’s operations within the Belt, while the Admiralty rejected them. In August Sir James writes to him to prepare for an early withdrawal from the Baltic, while the Admiralty sends him telegrams of the opposite tenor. Sir James derives this view from General Niel’s report, the Admiralty the opposite one. The most interesting thing about this correspondence, however, is perhaps the new light it sheds on the Anglo-French alliance. The French admiral showed Sir Charles his recall order on 13 August. The French army sailed on 4 September and the remainder of the French fleet departed on 19 September; yet Sir James Graham informs Sir Charles that he learned of this withdrawal only on 25 September. Sir James therefore mistakenly assumed “that the decisions were made on the spot with Napier’s consent”, but, as he emphatically adds, “without having been submitted in any way to the English government”. On the other hand, it appears as though Niel, the French general of engineers and Louis Bonaparte’s intimate, gave the advice to “destroy Sweaborg in two hours by means of ships of the line”. From this it seems clear that he wanted to push the English fleet into a desperate attack, in which the English would have uselessly dashed their heads against the blind skerries and against the forts of the Russian defence.