The Life and Times of Queen Victoria; vol. 2 of 4Wilson, Robert
History
The Life and Times of Queen Victoria; vol. 2 of 4
Wilson, Robert
Great Britain -- History -- Victoria, 1837-1901; Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, 1819-1901
On the 22nd of March Lord Aberdeen headed another abortive attack on the
Foreign Policy of the Government. He complained that whereas Lord
Palmerston had been active in menacing Austria if she meddled with
Sardinia, he had spoken smooth things to Sardinia--never going further
than warning her that if she broke existing treaties, she would be doing
a dangerous thing. Aberdeen’s attack was regarded as a semi-official
expression of the ideas of the Sovereign on Lord Palmerston’s policy;
and it came to this, that Palmerston had made England an object of
aversion in every capital in Europe, by interfering between Governments
and their subjects, in a manner which brought on him the animosity of
both. He had been arrogant to the despots, and, whilst he had encouraged
the rebels, he had tamely abandoned them, whenever it became irksome to
defend them. In this debate the Foreign Office was convicted of having
suppressed an important despatch relating to Austro-Sardinian affairs in
the papers laid before Parliament. The truth is that the Cabinet did not
know what was and what was not included in the papers that Lord
Palmerston chose to publish; and Lord Palmerston sometimes did not even
give his colleagues enough information to enable them to answer
questions. One example of this is worth recording, because it directly
affected the Queen. In May, Lord Lansdowne, in reply to a question of
Lord Beaumont, told the House of Lords that “no communication whatever
had been made by the Austrian Government to ours relative to their
intervention in Italy.” But Collosedo, the Austrian Minister, had five
days before that gone to Lord Palmerston and communicated to him, by
order of the Austrian Government, their objects in interfering in Italy.
Palmerston kept his colleagues in utter ignorance of this interview; and
when the truth leaked out, Lord Lansdowne had to set himself right the
best way he could. As for Palmerston, when he was challenged with
deceiving his colleagues, and suppressing the fact that this Austrian
communication had been made to him, he replied impudently that “he had
quite forgotten it.” His needlessly violent anti-Austrian policy,
coupled with delinquencies of this kind, was intensely annoying to the
Queen. Writing under the date of June 3rd, Mr. Greville, in his Journal,
says, “The Duke of Bedford told me a few days ago that the Queen had
been again remonstrating about Palmerston more strongly than ever. This
was in reference to the suppressed Austrian despatch which made such a
noise. She then sent for Lord John Russell, and told him she could not
stand it any longer, and he must make some arrangements to get rid of
Lord Palmerston. This communication was just as fruitless as all her
preceding ones. I don’t know what Lord John said--he certainly did not
pacify her; but, as usual, there it ended. But the consequences of her
not being able to get any satisfaction from her Minister have been that
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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