Discussing British Foreign Secretaries across 150 years, Douglas Hurd guarantees his readers excitement. Foreign affairs are exciting. George Canning on July 21 1807 hears from a secret agent, the Count d’Antraigues, about a meeting on a raft in the Niemen between Tsar Alexander and Napoleon. There are plans for “a maritime league of this country [Russia] against England and the unification of Russian squadrons with those of Sweden and Denmark [as well as] the forces of Spain and Portugal in order to attack England at close quarters”. Napoleon, having lately conquered the Austrians at Friedland, is conspiring with Russia to replace the ships lost at Trafalgar with new navies and menace England.
Canning’s response was quick and, for an Irishman, laconic: “If this be true, then our fleet in the Baltic may have more business than we expected.” It did. A few days of trying to argue the Danes into surrendering their ships was followed by three days’ bombardment of Copenhagen from the sea, unrelenting cannon fire on the city and its population. Thousands died and the Danish fleet was taken away. To induce surrender of Portuguese ships, the example would, of course, suffice.
In a study of foreign relations and the specialists conducting them, violence is exceptional, but the prospect hovers. This first rate, deeply considered and elegantly composed account concentrates upon personality precisely because Foreign Ministers must contemplate bloody occasions when foreign relations break down. At which point, their reactions will be those of variable human beings. Here are six long essays and a dozen statesmen, among them, Canning, Castlereagh, the Earl of Derby, Sir Edward Grey, Anthony Eden and Ernest Bevin.
This writer identifies, as will Tribune readers, with George Gordon, Earl of Aberdeen. As a young man, he had witnessed the Battle of Leipzig in 1813: “For three or four miles, the ground is covered with the bodies of men and horses – many not dead – wretches, wounded, unable to crawl, crying for water amidst heaps of putrefying bodies – their screams we heard at an immense distance and still ring in my ears…” Leipzig had finished Napoleon as conqueror of Europe, something Aberdeen wanted. But he knew the price: “Our victory is most complete…but it must be owned that a victory is a fine thing, but one should be at a distance.”
Aberdeen was of too fine a clay for making war a necessary adjunct of international politics. His own life was milestoned with personal griefs – his adored first wife, then one by one, the daughters of two marriages – dying from inherited tuberculosis. He was a scholar, with religious feelings, high intelligence and higher sensibility. And it fell to him to handle the events leading to the Crimean War with its new piles of bodies, dead or just living and untended. He is linked here with Lord Palmerston, uninhibited employer of every move required for an assertive, interventionist foreign policy.
The contrast is vivid. Palmerston, though not a brute, did not, like Aberdeen, see the battlefield dead and dying in the night. He was up for war if he thought it necessary, up for threatening it all the time. As a disciple of Canning, he was a Whiggified Tory. He had defected from the Duke of Wellington’s immobiliste government and, still pretty Tory, served as minimalist reformer in Grey’s 1830-34 cabinet. He was a long term Foreign Office junior, an unostentatious late worker, hot on detail. Also, being strapped for cash, he was a professional politician before the letter. Palmerston was brisk and something of a freelance, characteristics combining to make him a populist, sometimes to admirable ends, as when he pointed the Royal Navy at slaving ships. A detailed study has shown that a business, actually growing after 1815, fell back after his directions, as naval operations limited supply and drove up costs.
But Palmerston had a central obsession which would spill across the century. What should be done about Turkey? Corrupt, reliably sadistic, especially to Christians, Turkey weighed with statesmen more Christian than Palmerston. Against sympathy, lay Russia. Turkey was an invitation to the natural protector of the Sultan’s Orthodox subjects in Bulgaria, Bosnia and the Peloponese. Piety ran delightfully with self-interest in St Petersburg, afflicting British ministers with a suppositious threat to “our route to India”. Hurd quotes an observation that British thinking needed a more accurate map if it thought the Bosphorus was handily close to India. Similar incoherence would operate in 1956, over Egypt, where Eden got silly over the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company. Suez represented the late fluttering of a preoccupying fallacy.
Palmerston famously said that England – nobody said Britain or the UK in those days – had “no friends, only interests”. This made him invincibly pro-Turk, massacres of Christians notwithstanding. In which, rather more intelligently, he anticipated the Americans who, in Turkey “a bastion against communism”, championed a military dictatorship employing torture. That regime – and a procession of Trujillos, Kys, Galtieris, Pinochets and unpleasantness in Gaza – flow serenely from a debased Palmerstonism.
However, the immediate heir to such realism was Benjamin Disraeli who receives here a reception which would have brought a compressed smile to the lips of William Gladstone: “The theatre of Parliament and Cabinet, the almost daily dealings, half comical, half chivalrous, with the Queen, the delights of political manoeuvre, the pleasures of patronage lay at the heart of Disraeli’s ambition. For Disraeli, foreign policy was real politics; it was played out on the real stage, with a huge audience for the talented performer.”
One might add that, having defined priorities like that, Disraeli actually enjoyed politics, not the case with the suffering Aberdeen or Dizzy’s own Foreign Secretary, Derby, son of his old patron, three times Prime Minister in a flippant sort of way. The account here of the son is joyful: “The 14th Earl had been an aristocrat in the high style, devoted to translating classical literature and training racehorses.” The new Earl “sold the racehorses to reduce expenditure. He worried about money, of which he had plenty, and about his health which was generally good. He worried about the Conservative Party and about the future of Britain. On these wider matters, after worrying, he usually concluded that there was not much to be done, at least by sensible people such as himself.”
Derby, though not instructed, like Aberdeen, by seeing the deaths of other men, was a long way on the grown up side of Disraeli. Beyond which, agnostic and socially progressive, he was war-averse, not that far from Richard Cobden and John Bright, who abominated it. Lord Salisbury replaced him, also realist but able, at the Berlin Congress, to make the threats work. Edward Grey was not. He practised secret diplomacy, commitments secret from the Cabinet and threats not, at the key moment, shining clear to the Germans. In 1914 the Gates of Hell were flung open.
Disraeli v Derby; Aberdeen v Palmerston: at all times this study has counterpoised activism against restraint, intervention (idealistic or simulated idealistic) against sitting tight. Then follows idealistic intervention in our own times, in Iraq. Hurd has on occasion a deadly lucidity; and Tony Blair gets it. There had been a sensible speech, (Chicago 1999), stressing the preconditions for any intervention: clear facts, failure of peaceful measures, international approval, likely success. “Unfortunately, when it came to the point in 2003, Blair flung the argument for humanitarian intervention into the pile of words used to justify the Anglo-American attack on Iraq once his original pretext about weapons of mass destruction began to collapse…The result has been, on the one hand, the death of 150,000 Iraqis and four million refugees, on the other, the discrediting through misuse of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention”.
