THE FOREIGN POLICY OF QUEEN VICTORIA.

Otago Witness, Issue 2817, 11 March 1908, Page 80

THE FOREIGN POLICY OF QUEEN VICTORIA.

(London Nation.) Every student of the life and reign <•! . Queen Victoria will, we are sure, be grateful to the editors of the letters which I she wrote during her early and middle j reign for their entirely frank revelation lof her character and mental habit. They j show, first of all, what it means to a I country to be governed not only by a t woman, but by one of the most "womanly" j of women who ever lived, and secondly, j how large is the share of a British constitutional monarch, close -sheltered from all personal responsibility both for words and for acts, in shaping the foreign policy of her people. These letters, many of which are in style and thought immeasurI ably superior to the Tather vapid domesti- . city of the Highland journals, exhibit the Queen in every variety of human relationship, as daughter, niece, lover, wife, mother, friend, woman of feeling, and woman of the world. There are periods i during which this inexperienced girl, rich in character, though not in intellect, and linked by many ties to the rulers and ruling families of her time, strikes us a-s much the most potent personality in the state system of Europe in the middle of j last century. i Not that it is possible to say with precision where the Queen's policy, and tendencies of policy, were her own. With all her strong woman's will and tenacity of purpose, she was — Easily Influenced. — , From the first hour of her reign her oldest counsellor, her uncle, the King of the Belgians, an astute, not ill-meaning, but ' certainly selfish, man, hemmed heT in with counsellors. It was he who gave her her real' secretary, Baron Stockmar. 1 It wa6 he who promoted the eventful | marriage with Prince Albert. It was he who urged, almost commanded, her to retain Melbourne^ and it was he who used all his influence, and sometimes used it in vain, to maintain the close relationship with the Orleans dynasty which Louis Philippe's duplicity in the matteT of the Spanish marriages destroyed. Later on, the pupil superseded the master. It is clear that many of the ablest Stawi papers and memoranda which appear in these volumes under her -name were written* not by her, but by the Prince Consort. Stockmar himself dictated almost the words of the famous memorandum on foreign policy which helped destroy Palmerston, just as Melbourne, though no longer a Minister, most im- | properly suggested the decisive sentences in which she declared her will on the yppointment of the ladies of the bed chamber. Her devotion io Prussia and Austria, her hatred of the Italian movement of liberty, sprang from her family relationships, and Palmerston had reason for his complaint that they " poisoned " her mind against him. Had she had a thorough conception of British constitutionalism she could not have carried on the private correspondence with Melbourne which Stockmar, greatly to his credit, endeavoured to breaß in a stern, almost impassioned, interview with that charming and not too precise or conscientious personality ; nor could she hn\e pursued the embittered warfare with Palmerston and Lord John Russell which the astounding correspondence of 1848-9 and 1859-60 discloses. Ihe Queen was brave almost to rashness, and she was a singularly true, honest, and outspoken woman. Moreover, in the matter of the Crimean war and the dispute with the United iStatt>6, she arfd Prince Albert rendered the country the service of clear-sighted and truth-loving natures. But her attempts to assert the power of the Crown above that of her constitutional Ministers did, in the nature of things, touch the point of intrigue. It is not pleasant, for example, to find Lord Granvilfe, a Cabinet Minister, writing to Prince Albert in 1860 and describing the doings of the cabinet , in a sense derogatory both to the policy and the personality of his chief. Still worse was Lord Melbourne's advice to the Queen on appointments made by his successor and rival, Peel, and hie confession to Stockmar that he was prepared, if necessary, to resist and thwart Peel's policy by means of his underground communications with the Queen. Nor can it be claimed that, with all the Queen's singular and rare gifts of character, her mind was free from — Impulsive Ansjudgment and Caprice. — S<he leant on Melbourne with almostpassionate insistence ; she thought him es "perfect" as she afterwards thought Prince Albert. Barely a day could pass without his seeing her and dining with i her. There was more excuse for her | reliance on this charming and gracious, thought faulty, man than for the faecina- i tion exercised by two rulers of undeniably sinister character, Nicholas I and Napoleon 111. The visit from Nicholas she thought to be a "great event" — almost a condescension, indeed, from a man whom she describes, in her italicised German style, as "the greatest of all earthly potentates." Her feeling for Napoleon went still further. One visit waa enough to convince her that this arch-adventurer, his hands still wet with the blood which he shed in the coup d'etat, was calm, gentle, straightforward, charming, sincere. She was confident of her power to "keep him in the right course." And yet, four years later, she sook« of the orobabilitv of a

"regular frufade" against him, ;us "th 4 universal disturber of the world." She began by hating Peel, and ended with a, warm and well-de? erveel regard for that admirable though difficult nature. She treated Disraeli's earlier communications to her with the gord-natured contempt which their pompous insincerity deserveif; yet she lived to fall completely "under "his influence. .She was open to argument; she was, indeed, essentially a candid and Mncere soul. But she made' grave errors, On the whole, it was, we think, fortunatethat the foreign policy of England in the middle period of last century was directed by Palmereton and Russell to ends far different from those which she and - the Leopold-Stockmar-Coburg combination imagined and devised. But what were the main characteristic* of the foreign policy of Queen Victoria so far as these letters reveal it? They! were twofold. The Queen was not onlyno democrat : she was an anti-democrat, and she accepted the corstitutional theory of the responsibility of Ministers to Parliament and to the people with reluctance, and with a woman's instinctive rebellion against an idea that she did not fully understand and a practice that -was irksome and restraining to her and to her husband. On the latter point she went very far. Her warfare with — Palmereton — was sustained week after week, month after month, year after year, and her eager woman's nature overtopped Prince Albert's cool phrases and measured argumentsJ The Minister himself was far from blameless. He had a reckless, cynical tongue, he was careless of forms, and often loose in written statement ; he more than once treated his sensitive andl quick-tempered mistress with real disrespect. Both he and Lord John Russell had selfish and, in comparison with the Queen, rather devious characters. But both of them possessed a true feeling for human liberty, and an inherited hatredJ of oppression. Both knew the British Constitution, and had occasion sharply to> remind their Sovereign that" there was such a date in English history as 1688. And both of them cleanly divined the meaning of the movement foT Italian liberty, and were determined to aid its development as a source of strength to liberal Europe, and as a human protest against the secular and spiritual tyrannyi which it defied. Throughout their ablest and most determined opponent was the Queen. She fought them both and on the same grounds. Her personal sympathies were first Prussian, and secondly, Austrian, and her intimate advisers were of German stock. But, above all, she resented tlie idea of the right of a nationality to throw off a yoke imposed upon it from without and fixed by European consent, ynd to assert its will by such means as the plebiscite, the proud record of which adorns many a wall in many a famous town of Italy. For her "the people" had no existence apart from the ruling house. Opinion in the country was strongly pro-Italian ; the Queen ignored it. Her letters lump together "Chartists," "rebels," "demagogues," and "agitators." She was horrified at the idea that Cobden should step straight from a public meeting to the Cabinet. Moreover, she wanted a formal revision of the lines of our foreign policy in the light of the lessons taught by the risings of 1848. "It will," she said -to John John Russell in that year, "be a calamity for ages to come if this principle is to become part of the international law: — viz., that a people can at any time transfer their allegiance from the Sovereign of one State to that of another by universal suffrage (under momentary excit-ement)." She denounced the " principle " of Lord Palmerston's policy — that of ''Italian Nationality and Independence from a foreign yoke and tyranny." If we maintained such a principle in Lombardy or in Central Italy, how, she asked bluntly, could we meet ciitios of our Irish policy? "Really," she wrote to her uncle, "it is quite immoral with Ireland ' quivering in our grasp ... to force Austria to give up tier lawful possessions." She complained that in place of neutrality, Lord Palmer6ton had " gone a long way in taking up the side of democracy in the fight." • She wrote condoling warmly with Pio Nono on his expulsion from Rome, quite ignoring the abuses of government in the Papal States. She bitterly resented Palmerston's proposed to see Kossuth, and stopped the plans for a private interview at his house. The mobbing of the unspeakable Haynau by the draymen of Barclay and Perkins seemed to her a " brutal attack and wanton outrage by a ferocious mob on a distinguished foreigner," and Palmerston's cool reply that the people of England looked on Haynau as "a great moral criminal," and compared him with Mrs Manning, the murderess, stung her to a vehement retort. Watching for a lapse of etiquette and propriety on the part of the most careless of men. she succeeded at last on. a 6erious question of policy, and used Lord John Russell to procure Palmerston's downfall. Ten years later she worked with equal persistence against Lord John Russell, and was ea.ger and insistent that the peace of Villafranca should not be used to advance the growing Italian kingdom. The Italian disaster at Novara was to her a source of unmixed joy. " I could work myself up to a great excitement about these exploits,'*she writes to the King of the Belgians, " for there is nothing I admire more than great military exploits and daring." She said nothing' warmer of the battle of tiia Alma. — A Failure. — On the whole, the Queen's policy failed — indeed, it was well for her that it did. For in what position would she have been placed if, on the Italian question, Palmerston and Russell had resigned oa the ground that the Queen, though entirely irresponsible, had insisted thafe British policy should maintain a strong pro- Austrian bias? Considering the fth*i.

♦ered position of the crown, the Queen went far. She,/ herself hardly pretended to impartiality of view. Starting with a traditional hatred of the Tory party, 6he was, in effect, and during the greater part of heT ije?if n > the- .exponent and defender of Tory, d,£, at legist,' reactionary, views- inforeign affairs,, and her position was most boldly a'dyanced at the period when the cause of ,; European liberty hung most doubtfully in~ the. balance. , Lord Beaconsfield was .probably the only Minister .with whose foreign policy she was thoroughly in sympathy. . SKeJiad great moral qualities ; a noble candour and, deep affectlonateness flvstiniuished her .from the more 6hallow and insincere natures that surrounded her. She did not press her views to an, extremity j they were, on notable occasions/ rifeht ancL wise. But it is idle to pretend fi&at as a, whole, they were in harmony with the, more "generous and enngtenecT't nought and the bolder statesmanship of her age.