The Voice of England in the East

Stratford Canning and Diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire

Steven Richmond

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857733870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the age of the Great Powers, with Russia and France at war, and the Ottoman Empire at the height of its influence and majesty, the British diplomat Stratford Canning arrived in Constantinople. The cousin of George Canning, he would be Britain's representative in the power politics of the Middle East for almost two decades, and was instrumental in the events which led up to the Crimean War and the events surrounding the 'eastern question' of the nineteenth century. In The Voice of England in the East, Steven Richmond reconstructs the diplomatic priorities of the period through the private papers and letters of a key British statesman, comparing them with Ottoman accounts written in the Sultan's court for the first time. The result is a new analytical history of the late Ottoman Empire, British diplomacy in the era of Palmerston and the reality of politics in the 'great game' of the nineteenth century

PART I

BRITISH-OTTOMAN PEACE,
1808–10

CHAPTER 1

APPRENTICESHIP IN DIPLOMACY

1

The land route was impossible as Napoleon held the continent. The sea route stretched more than 3,000 miles from Portsmouth and Spithead, through Gibraltar and across the Mediterranean to the Dardanelles, the Bosphorus and Constantinople. The young man expected to be away for just a few months and then return to his studies at Cambridge. He was not at all happy about undertaking the voyage. ‘I almost envy you for being in England at such a moment as this…’ he wrote home to a friend. ‘I never before felt so deeply the misery of my insignificance.’¹ The 22-year-old was convinced he was being sent into obscurity. He had no idea that he was headed directly into the centre of European diplomacy, at Constantinople and across Europe, now and for half a century.

Stratford Canning had been drafted for a diplomatic mission to the Ottoman capital by his older first cousin. George Canning had become foreign secretary in March 1807 and had advocated engaging the Ottoman Empire as far back as 1798 when Napoleon invaded Egypt. The Turk should not be shunned just ‘because he wears a long beard and a long gown,’ George Canning had argued.² Now in June 1808 George was sending young Stratford as an assistant on a critical mission to reestablish diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire.

In February 1807 the British had dispatched a large squadron under the command of Vice-Admiral John Duckworth to attack the Dardanelles. As with the Gallipoli expedition of 1915, the mission was extremely complicated and hastily planned. Duckworth’s squadron managed to breach the Dardanelles and to take up position at the Ottoman capital. Even though this was an unprecedented naval feat, the goals of the mission still remained unfeasible and the squadron was in effect caught at Constantinople. After a few weeks of skirmishes and negotiations, they made a dramatic and costly retreat back through the Dardanelles, which had in the interval been reinforced by the Ottomans with French assistance. Diplomatically the expedition was a complete failure, only weakening Britain’s international position and breaking her diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire for the first and only time before World War I. It also seriously destabilised the political situation at Constantinople: the sight of foreign warships in the Bosphorus was a great shock to the Ottomans and sparked fierce uprisings by the elite palace guards, the Janissaries, lasting two years and destroying several Ottoman sultans and statesmen.

Shortly after the British expedition to the Dardanelles, the Grenville government broke up and George Canning became foreign secretary in the new cabinet. Within a few weeks he sent a diplomatic mission to the Ottomans for the purpose of reestablishing relations with them.³ His instructions to the envoy, Sir Arthur Paget, dated 16 May 1807, were to make peace with the Ottoman government, to promote peace between the Ottomans and Russians, and to counteract French interests in the region.⁴

This mission, however, amounted to nothing as the Ottomans were preoccupied with palace revolutions at Constantinople, a war with the Russians in the Danubian Principalities that began in 1806, suspicions about British designs, and diplomatic tensions with the French. Stalling for time, the Ottomans would not open negotiations with the British and kept them at bay and Paget was never even able to alight from his ship. After three months of delays at the Dardanelles, he finally headed home.⁵ ‘Nothing can be compared to the hatred and contempt borne by the Turks toward the Russians,’ Paget had written to George Canning.⁶ His immediate predecessor at Constantinople, Charles Arbuthnot, reached a similar conclusion: ‘the Russians will always continue to be the abhorred enemies of the Turks.’⁷

When the French and Russians suddenly allied in July 1807 according to the Treaty of Tilsit,⁸ the British found themselves in the impossible situation of being in a state of war simultaneously with the French, Russians and Ottomans. And the Ottomans now found themselves in a state of war with the British and Russians and facing a real possibility of war with the French.

A few months after Paget’s departure, the Ottoman government sent word to the British that they wished to reestablish relations. In a letter dated 13 February 1808, they expressed a desire for peace and seemed to imply that Paget had quit the Dardanelles impatiently.⁹ This communication reached George Canning in London only in late April 1808. A few weeks later he organised a diplomatic mission to the Ottoman Empire to negotiate peace and reestablish diplomatic relations. He offered its lead to Robert Adair, an experienced diplomat who had recently concluded a term as ambassador in Vienna.¹⁰

George included his cousin Stratford, who was younger by 16 years, on the mission as an assistant to Adair. Part of his purpose in doing so may have been ‘to keep a constant eye’ on Adair, as Stratford himself understood.¹¹ He was also under the impression that the mission would last only a few months.¹² At this point George did not tell Stratford that he had made a deal with Adair whereby the ambassador could leave Constantinople upon negotiating a peace with the Ottomans.

2

George was like a father to Stratford. Both had lost their own fathers as infants. ‘Raised by his own Merits’ reads the epitaph on George’s statue in Westminster Abbey. In fact he was rescued from real poverty by his uncle and aunt, Stratford’s parents. They steered him toward Eton, where he blossomed, founding a student journal, The Microcosm, which was so witty that it was read by the King and Queen. At Christ Church, Oxford he took a prize for Latin verse. Torn between a feel for the dramatic and a sense of the practical, George had difficulty choosing a career. He wrote to a friend at Oxford that he thought he had ‘to aim at the House of Commons, as the only path to the only desirable thing in this world, the gratification of ambition; while at the same time every tie of common sense, of fortune, of duty, draws me to the study of a profession.’¹³

George chose ‘ambition’ over ‘common sense’, becoming the disciple of Pitt and entering Parliament by age 23. His rise and career were brilliant. ‘Canning is a genius, almost a universal one; an orator, a poet, and a statesman,’ Byron himself said in 1823.¹⁴ And in his long verse of the same year, The Age of Bronze, canto XIII, Byron lauded Canning as ‘Our last, our best, our only orator’.¹⁵ But George suffered in real ways from the unsettled life of a politician. Cabinet intrigue drove him into a duel with his colleague, Castlereagh, on 21 September 1809. On the eve of this George wrote to his wife that he hoped his son would not become a politician because ‘He would feel, & fret, & lament, & hate, & despise, as much as his father.’¹⁶ George seems to have wished the same for his surrogate son, Stratford, and thus had he planned out for him a practical existence.

George shaped Stratford’s education, career and whole life. He secured a place for the nine-year-old ‘Stratty’ in the lower school of Eton on the suggestion of Harry Canning, the boy’s oldest brother. ‘I do think the plan a very good one,’ George recorded in his letter-journal on 15 February 1795, ‘for if he turns out a clever boy, as he promises to do, it opens to him a field for a very distinguished exercise of his talents, in the course of his education there; and if he should be fortunate enough to go to King’s Coll., Cambridge (as from his age he has a fair chance of doing) there is the further prospect of an establishment for life, sufficient if not for his whole support – at least whereon to build his fortune.’¹⁷ George also provided funding for the boy’s education either out of his own pocket or from a relative.¹⁸

Stratford would fulfill George’s plan well, becoming captain at Eton and securing his school’s place at King’s College, Cambridge in 1806. In March 1807 George became foreign secretary. He took Stratford into his home to live and hired him as a précis writer at the Foreign Office. The position, which Stratford managed by shuttling back and forth between London and Cambridge, ‘… consisted principally in making summaries of the official correspondence carried on between the secretary of state and the diplomatic agents employed under his direction abroad,’ as Stratford noted in his memoir. ‘I had also to assist occasionally in writing out fair the drafts of instructions from the same source.’

The work gave Stratford an excellent training in diplomatic communication and procedure. It also exposed him to the characters and colour of diplomacy. ‘Having a room in his house and a place at his table whenever he dined at home,’ Stratford wrote of George, ‘I saw him in the free play of his genius and in the full enjoyment of his success …. At dinner I sat at the foot of the table opposite to him, and my curiosity was not a little excited when I looked around the company and wondered which of the guests was the Austrian ambassador, or which the representative of some other Great Power.’¹⁹ George’s course for Stratford also included field work: he sent him as an assistant on a critical diplomatic mission to Copenhagen in autumn 1807, before the dramatic British seizure of the Danish fleet.

George thus provided Stratford with a comprehensive apprenticeship in diplomacy in the days when no formal instruction of it existed. This deficiency was likely one of the things that Stratford had in mind when he noted in retirement, ‘the diplomatic service, when I went into it, was no profession at all.’²⁰ British ambassadors learnt on the job what diplomacy was and how to carry it out after having established themselves in completely different fields. But Stratford learnt the practice of diplomacy and developed a feel for its meaning – first under George at the head of the Foreign Office and then under Robert Adair on the mission at Constantinople – all in his formative years and during the height of the Napoleonic Wars. This unique diplomatic education was the foundation for his extraordinary diplomatic skills and career. An obituary published upon his death in August 1880 noted that he had been ‘trained to diplomacy from his youth…’²¹

But at age 21 Stratford was not interested in having a career in diplomacy or probably in any profession. He was too young to appreciate the practical value of the opportunity and training that George had provided him, and he was still dreaming of becoming a statesman in Parliament like his cousin and benefactor. So when George decided to attach him to Adair’s mission to Constantinople in the summer of 1808, it was about the last thing Stratford wanted to do. He went on the mission out of devotion to George. The bond between them was essential: Stratford’s father had been the surrogate father to George, and George in turn had become the same to Stratford.

3

George Canning and Robert Adair, the mission leader, were from different ends of the political spectrum in London and they were not friends. Adair was a close associate of Fox, who, while foreign secretary, had sent him as ambassador to Vienna in 1806.²² Adair was widely known as a drinker and, as the Earl of Malmesbury formulated rather harshly, ‘such a dupe to women, that no secret was safe with him.’²³ The unfortunate tendency was described more kindly by Adair’s grand-nephew and close friend, the Earl of Albemarle: ‘Throughout life my kinsman was an enthusiastic admirer of the fair sex, which he generally “loved not wisely but too well”.’ Adair’s appearance and demeanor were somewhat sorry and invited teasing even among relatives. ‘His name calls up the image of a tall, thin man,’ the Earl of Albemarle noted, ‘with a sallow complexion and a melancholy cast of features, who was known in the family as the “knight of the woeful countenance”.’ Adair had specialised in writing ‘probationary odes’ for satirical Whig publications, including the Rolliad, and was ‘a great buff and blue squib maker’.²⁴

All of these factors combined to project Robert Adair as a permanent lightning-rod for Tory satire. George Canning himself was the chief protagonist and it would be noted in Adair’s obituary in 1855 that, ‘For several years Canning had made Adair the butt of his piercing wit.’²⁵ Adair was skewered relentlessly in Canning’s wild satirical journal, The Anti-Jacobin (1797–98), including most famously ‘BOBBA-DARA-ADUL-PHOOLA’²⁶ (a lyricisation of ‘Bob Adair is a dull fellow’).

Despite these shortcomings, Adair was endowed with unusual diplomatic experience and skills, and he was a pleasant character and genuine raconteur. All these assets were appreciated by George Canning. Adair himself knew that ‘I had no right to count upon his partiality towards one so openly opposed as I was to the Government of which he made a part. But Mr. Canning had many generous qualities …. He saw that, with all my defects, I had served England faithfully and zealously, and all party differences were forgotten the moment he saw me.’²⁷ Another factor may have been the connection through Fox, who before his death in 1806 had been the mentor to Adair and also a close friend of the Canning family.²⁸

Adair was eager to take on the critical peace mission to the Ottoman Empire. But he did not desire to reside at Constantinople, which among European diplomats was still considered very much a hardship posting. This was doubtless due in large part to the fact that the Ottomans had never renounced their ancient practice of imprisoning foreign representatives upon a declaration of war with their country. Adair therefore made a special deal with Canning. ‘I accepted the mission under an express agreement that after having made the peace,’ Adair recorded, ‘I should be at liberty to return home, and resume my seat on the Opposition benches of the House of Commons.’²⁹

As with the previous mission that George Canning had sent to the Ottoman Empire under Paget, Adair was instructed to make peace with the Ottomans and to promote peace between them and the Russians. The British were greatly concerned about French plans to disrupt their route to India. ‘I cannot too strongly recommend to your attention,’ George Canning wrote in his official instructions to Adair, dated 26 June 1808, ‘the necessity of endeavouring to counter-act the Project entertained by the French Government to procure the permission of the Porte for marching an Army through a part of the Ottoman Territories for the purpose of penetrating to the British Possessions in India.’ Canning further instructed Adair that he was not to proceed past Palermo until he had contacted the Ottomans and they had reconfirmed their desire to negotiate the peace, as well as named a plenipotentiary and place for the purpose.³⁰ These latter provisions were no doubt inspired by the frustrations Paget had experienced in the previous year.

4

The sea journey to Constantinople was long and slow but not without some drama and even pleasures. The embassy depar...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Maps
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction ‘The Stratford Legend’
• Part I: British-Ottoman Peace, 1808–10
• Part II: Russian-Ottoman Peace, 1810–12
• Part III: Greek-Ottoman Peace, 1824–32
• Part IV: Ottoman Reform. The Apostasy Controversy, 1843–44
• Part V: The Crimean War, 1853–56
• Epilogue
• Note on the Text
• Glossary of Diplomatic Terms
• Glossary of Ottoman Terms and Names
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back cover