On the 1 8th April a Council of War met in the Emperor's rooms at Windsor, at which were present the Prince, Lord Palmerston, Lord Panmure, Lord Hardinge (Commander-in-Chief), Lord Cowley (Ambassador to France), Sir Charles Wood, Sir John Burgoyne, Count Walewski, and the French War Minister, Marshal Vaillant. " All present," says the Prince's report of it, " declared themselves unanimously against the Emperor's scheme of going himself to the Crimea, but without obtaining from him the admission that he was shaken in his resolution."
But on his return to Paris the Emperor found that, while the visit to his ally had greatly increased his popularity at -home, the failure of the negotiations at Vienna had gravely added to the difficulties of the situation, and, on the 25th April, in a letter to the Queen, he announced that his intention to go to the Crimea must be abandoned. But his scheme for the conduct of the war was all the same persisted in.
The Austrian proposal, though of course completely unacceptable to our Government, had been sufficiently plausible to gain the approval both of the French plenipotentiary and of Lord John Russell, a circumstance which proved very embarrassing to Lord Palmerston and his colleagues. For the leading members of the late Government, which had sanctioned the expedition to the Crimea, were about to support a' motion for an unsatisfactory peace. The Government had to meet, on one
English Advocates of Russian Interests. 225
hand, the attacks of those represented by Mr Disraeli, who, desiring the prosecution of the war, denounced the conduct of our plenipotentiary; and on the other, of those who always embarrass a Government in war by insisting on the necessity of making peace. " Mr Gladstone," says Sir Theodore Martin, in his life of the Prince Consort, " developed the views of the members of the Aberdeen Cabinet who had seceded from Lord Palmerston's Government. The burden of his speech was to urge peace on the terms offered by Russia.. He acknowledged that he had approved the demand by his colleagues, under Lord Aberdeen, for a limitation of the Russian Fleet; but contended that Russia, having abandoned the pretensions which originally led to the war, to continue it was no longer justifiable. What we now asked for in the way of limitation was, he argued, an indignity to Russia. All the terms which we had originally demanded had been substantially conceded, and if we fought, not for terms, but for military success, let the House look at this sentiment with the eye of reason, and it would appear immoral, inhuman, unchristian." But the people held fast to the facts; they recognised that Russia could have no other reason for maintaining a fleet in the Black Sea than to employ it against Turkey, and that the Russian pretension must not be tolerated; and they upheld Palmerston.
The design of the Emperor may perhaps be considered to have borne only its natural fruit in the irresolution of Canrobert, notably when he refused to attempt the gain of a substantial result from the late
226 First Embarkation for Kertch .