The Greville Memoirs, Part 3 (of 3), Volume 1 (of 2): A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1852 to 1860Greville, Charles
History
The Greville Memoirs, Part 3 (of 3), Volume 1 (of 2): A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1852 to 1860
Greville, Charles
Great Britain -- History -- Victoria, 1837-1901
The prevailing feeling against England which Flahault found at Paris has
been proved on innumerable occasions. Clarendon is well aware of it, and
does his best, but with very little success, to bring the foreign
Ministers and others to reason. Madame de Lieven writes to me in this
strain, and even liberal and intelligent foreigners like Alfred Potocki,
who has been accused of being a rebel in Austria, writes that we ought
to expel the refugees. At Vienna the people are persuaded that there is
some indirect and undefinable participation on the part of the British
Government in the insurrectionary and homicidal acts of Milan and
Vienna, and they have got a story that the assassin Libeny had a letter
of Palmerston's in his shoe. Unreasonable as all this is, we ought to
make great allowance for their excited feelings, for they have a case
against us of a cumulative character. It goes back a long way, and
embraces many objects and details, and is principally attributable to
Palmerston, partly to his doings, and perhaps more to his sayings. They
cannot forget that he has long been the implacable enemy of Austria,
that he advised her renunciation of her Italian dominions, and that he
and his agents have always sympathised with, and sometimes aided and
abetted most of the revolutionary movements that have taken place. Then
there was the Haynau affair, and the lukewarmness and indifference
which the Government of that day, and Palmerston particularly, exhibited
about it; then the reception of Kossuth, the public meetings and his
speeches, together with the speeches at them of Cobden and others of
which no notice was ever taken, and finally the transaction about
Palmerston's receiving Kossuth and his famous answer to the addresses
presented to him from Finsbury and Islington. All these things satisfy
the foreign Governments that we are not only politically but nationally
their enemies, and that we harbour their rebellious subjects out of
hatred to them, and that we regard with sympathy and a secret
satisfaction the plots which they concoct in safety here and go forth to
execute abroad. And when they are told that our laws afford these people
an asylum, which no Government has the power to deny them, and that
Parliament and public opinion will not consent to arm the Government
with the powers of restraint or coercion they do not possess, they only
explode the more loudly in denunciations against that free and
constitutional system which is not only a perpetual reproach, but, as
they think, a source of continual danger to their own. So much for
foreign affairs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account