Chapter VII

. Garibaldi—Denmark. (1864)

There are in Europe two great questions: the question called social and the question of nationalities.... The map of Europe has to be re-made.... I affirm with profound conviction that this movement of nationalities has attained in Italy, in Hungary, in Vienna, in a great part of Germany, and in some of the Slavonian populations, a degree of importance that must at no distant period produce decisive results.... The first war-cry that arises will carry with it a whole zone of Europe.—MAZZINI (1852).

I

“My confidence in the Italian parliament and people,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lacaita at the end of 1862, “increases from day to day. Their self-command, moderation, patience, firmness, and forethought reaching far into the future, are really beyond all praise.” And a few days later, again to Lacaita—“Your letter proves that the king has not merely got the constitutional lesson by rote—though even this for an Italian king would be much; but that the doctrine has sunk into the marrow and the bone.” The cause was won, and the work of construction went forward, but not on such lines as Cavour’s master-hand was likely to have traced. Very early Mr. Gladstone began to be uneasy about Italian finance. “I am sure,” he wrote to Lacaita in April 1863, “that Italian freedom has no greater enemy in the Triple Crown or elsewhere, than large continuing deficits.”

As events marched forward, the French occupation of Rome became an ever greater scandal in Mr. Gladstone’s eyes. He writes to Panizzi (October 28, 1862):—

My course about the Emperor has been a very simple one. It is not for me to pass gratuitous opinions upon his character or that of French institutions, or on his dealings with them. I believe him to be firmly attached to the English alliance, and I think his course towards us has been, on almost every occasion, marked by a friendliness perhaps greater and more conspicuous than we have always deserved at his hands. It is most painful to me to witness his conduct with regard to Italy.... He conferred upon her in 1859 an immense, an inestimable boon. He marred this boon in a way which to me seemed little worthy of France by the paltry but unkind appropriation of Nice in particular. But in the matter of Rome he inflicts upon Italy a fearful injury. And I do not know by what law of ethics any one is entitled to plead the having conferred an unexpected boon, as giving a right to inflict a gross and enduring wrong.(78)

It was in 1862 that Mr. Gladstone made his greatest speech on Italian affairs.(79) “I am ashamed to say,” he told the House, “that for a long time, I, like many, withheld my assent and approval from Italian yearnings.” He amply atoned for his tardiness, and his exposure of Naples, where perjury was the tradition of its kings; of the government of the pope in the Romagna, where the common administration of law and justice was handed over to Austrian soldiery; of the stupid and execrable lawlessness of the Duke of Modena; of the attitude of Austria as a dominant and conquering nation over a subject and conquered race;—all this stamped a decisive impression on the minds of his hearers. Along with his speech on Reform in 1864, and that on the Irish church in the spring of 1865, it secured Mr. Gladstone’s hold upon all of the rising generation of liberals who cared for the influence and the good name of Great Britain in Europe, and who were capable of sympathising with, popular feeling and the claims of national justice.

II

(M31) The Italian sentiment of England reached its climax in the reception accorded to Garibaldi by the metropolis in April 1864. “I do not know what persons in office are to do with him,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Palmerston (March 26), “but you will lead, and we shall follow suit.” The populace took the thing into their own hands. London has seldom beheld a spectacle more extraordinary or more moving. The hero in the red shirt and blue-grey cloak long associated in the popular mind with so many thrilling stories of which they had been told, drove from the railway at Vauxhall to Stafford House, the noblest of the private palaces of the capital, amid vast continuous multitudes, blocking roadways, filling windows, lining every parapet and roof with eager gazers. For five hours Garibaldi passed on amid tumultuous waves of passionate curiosity, delight, enthusiasm. And this more than regal entry was the arrival not of some loved prince or triumphant captain of our own, but of a foreigner and the deliverer of a foreign people. Some were drawn by his daring as a fighter, and by the picturesque figure as of a hero of antique mould; many by sight of the sworn foe of Giant Pope; but what fired the hearts of most was the thought of him as the soldier who bore the sword for human freedom. The western world was in one of its generous moments. In those days there were idealists; democracy was conscious of common interests and common brotherhood; a liberal Europe was then a force and not a dream.

“We who then saw Garibaldi for the first time,” Mr. Gladstone said nearly twenty years after, “can many of us never forget the marvellous effect produced upon all minds by the simple nobility of his demeanour, by his manners and his acts.... Besides his splendid integrity, and his wide and universal sympathies, besides that seductive simplicity of manner which never departed from him, and that inborn and native grace which seemed to attend all his actions, I would almost select from every other quality this, which was in apparent contrast but real harmony in Garibaldi—the union of the most profound and tender humanity with his fiery valour.”(80) He once described the Italian chief to me as “one of the finest combinations of profound and unalterable simplicity with self-consciousness and self-possession. I shall never forget an occasion at Chiswick; Palmerston, John Russell, and all the leaders were awaiting him on the _perron_; he advanced with perfect simplicity and naturalness, yet with perfect consciousness of his position; very striking and very fine.” Garibaldi dined with Mr. Gladstone, and they met elsewhere. At a dinner at Panizzi’s, they sat by one another. “I remember,” said Mr. Gladstone, “he told a story in these words: ‘When I was a boy,’ he said, ‘I was at school in Genoa. It was towards the close of the great French Revolution. Genoa was a great military post—a large garrison always in the town, constant parades and military display, with bands and flags that were beyond everything attractive to schoolboys. All my schoolfellows used to run here and there all over the town to see if they could get sight of one of these military parades and exhibitions. I never went to one. It struck me then as a matter of pain and horror, that it should be necessary that one portion of mankind should be set aside to have for their profession the business of destroying others.’ ”

Another side of Garibaldi was less congenial. A great lady wrote to Mr. Gladstone of a conversation with him. “I talked to Garibaldi with regret that Renan was so much read in Italy. He said ‘_Perche?_’ and showed that he did not dislike it, and that he has also in leaving Rome left very much else. I know that woman’s words are useless: the more men disbelieve, the more they think it well that women should be ‘superstitious.’ You are not likely to have _arguments_ with him, but I would give much that he should take away with him some few words that would bring home to him the fact that the statesman he cares for most would think life a miserable thing without faith in God our Saviour.” To another correspondent on this point Mr. Gladstone wrote:—

The honour paid him was I think his due as a most singularly simple, disinterested, and heroic character, who had achieved great things for Italy, for liberty well-understood, and even for mankind. His insurrection we knew and lamented, and treated as exceptional. No Mazzinian leanings of his were known. I read the speech at the luncheon with surprise and concern.(81) As to his attenuated belief, I view it with the deepest sorrow and concern, I need not repeat an opinion, always painful to me to pronounce, as to the principal causes to which it is referable, and as to the chief seat of the responsibility for it. As to his Goddess Reason, I understand by it simply an adoption of what are called on the continent the principles of the French Revolution. These we neither want nor warmly relish in England, but they are different from its excesses, and the words will bear an innocent and even in some respects a beneficial meaning.

The diary records:—

_April 12._—To Chiswick and met Garibaldi. We were quite satisfied with him. He did me much more than justice. 14.—Went by a desperate push to see Garibaldi welcomed at the opera. It was good, but not like the _people_. 17.—At Stafford House 5-1/4—6-½ and 9-1/4—12-½ on Garibaldi’s movements. In a conversation he agreed to give up the provincial tour. 20.—In the evening the great entertainment to Garibaldi came off. Before the door at night say a thousand people all in the best of humour, the hall and stair full before dinner. A hostile demonstration invaded us at ten, but we ejected them. I settled about to-morrow with Garibaldi, the Duke of Sutherland, Lord Palmerston, and Lord Shaftesbury. My nerves would not let me—hardened as I am—sleep till after five.

(M32) Suddenly one morning the country was surprised to learn that Garibaldi was at once departing. Dark suspicions rose instantly in the minds of his more democratic friends. It had always been rather bitter to them that he should be the guest of a duke. They now insisted that the whig aristocrats were in a panic lest he should compromise himself with the radicals, and that he was being hustled out of the country against his will. This suspicion next grew into something blacker still. A story spread that the Emperor of the French had taken umbrage, and signified to the government that the reception of Garibaldi was distasteful to France. Lord Clarendon promptly denied the fable. He told the House of Lords that the Emperor (of whom he had recently had an audience) had even expressed his admiration for the feeling of which the reception was a sign. Lord Palmerston in the other House explained that Garibaldi was going away earlier than had been expected, because at home he went to bed at eight and rose at five, and to a person of these habits to dine at half past eight and to remain in a throng of admirers until midnight must necessarily be injurious. Still the fog hung heavy on the public mind. A rider was now added to the tale, that it was the chancellor of the exchequer who out of deference to the Emperor, or to please the whigs, or out of complaisance to the court, had induced the hero to take his hurried leave. Mr. Gladstone was forced to explain to the House of Commons, seldom reluctant to lighten its graver deliberations with a personal incident, that the Duke of Sutherland had carried him to Stafford House; there he found that Garibaldi had accepted invitations to thirty provincial towns and that the list was growing longer every day; the doctors declared that the general’s strength would never stand the exhaustion of a progress on such a scale; and the friends there present begged him to express his own opinion to Garibaldi. This Mr. Gladstone accordingly did, to the effect that the hero’s life and health were objects of value to the whole world, and that even apart from health the repetition all over England of the national reception in London would do something to impair a unique historical event.(82) The general was taken to show excellent sense by accepting advice not to allow himself to be killed by kindness. At any rate he firmly declared that if he could not go to all the places that invited him, it was impossible for him to draw a line of preference, and therefore he would go to none. His radical friends, however, seem to have instilled some of their own suspicions into his mind, for two days later (April 23) Mr. Gladstone writes to Lord Clarendon: “I am to see Garibaldi at Cliveden this evening, and it is possible that some occasion may offer there for obtaining from him a further declaration. But since I received your note the following circumstance has occurred. Clarence Paget has been to me, and reports that Mrs. ——, a well-known and zealous but anti-Mazzinian liberal in Italian matters, who is also a friend of Garibaldi’s, has acquainted him that Garibaldi himself has made known to her that according to his own painful impression the English government do consider the prolongation of his stay in England very embarrassing, and are very anxious that he should go. What a pity, if this be so, that this simple and heroic man could not speak his mind plainly out to me, but wrapped himself in the depths of diplomatic reserve, instead of acting like Lord Aberdeen, who used to say, ‘I have a habit of believing people.’ ”(83) After three or four days at Cliveden the general still held to his purpose. “_April 24._—Cliveden. Conversation with Garibaldi. The utmost I could get from him was that it would be sad if the Italian people should lose its faith.” So Garibaldi forthwith sailed away from our shores.(84)

When all was over, an Italian statesman wrote to Panizzi that though he thought Garibaldi one of the choicest natures ever created,—enterprising, humane, disinterested, eminent in national service, yet neither he nor any other citizen was entitled to set himself above the laws of his country, and that such a man should be officially received by the heir to the throne and by secretaries of state, was a thing to be bitterly deplored by every sensible man.(85) Still history can afford to agree with Mr. Gladstone when he said of Garibaldi—“His name is indeed illustrious, it remains inseparably connected with the not less illustrious name of the great Cavour, and these two names are again associated with the name of Victor Emmanuel. These three together form for Italians a tricolour as brilliant, as ever fresh, and I hope as enduring for many and many generations, as the national flag that now waves over united Italy.”

III

The tide of vast events in this momentous period now rolled heavily away from the Danube and the Bosphorus, from Tiber and Po and Adriatic sea, to the shores of the Baltic and the mouths of the Elbe. None of the fascination of old-world history lends its magic to the new chapter that opened in 1863. Cavour had gone. Bismarck with sterner genius, fiercer purpose, more implacable designs, and with a hand as of hammered iron, strode into the field. The Italian statesman was the author of a singular prediction. In 1861 when Cavour was deprecating angry protests from the European powers against his invasion of the Marches, he used words of extraordinary foresight to the representative of Prussia. “I am sorry,” he said, “that the cabinet of Berlin judges so severely the conduct of the King of Italy and his government. I console myself by thinking that on this occasion I am setting an example that probably in no long time, Prussia will be very glad to imitate.”(86) So the world speedily found out.

(M33) The torch of nationality reached material for a flame long smouldering in two duchies of the remote north, that had been incorporated in Denmark by solemn European engagements in 1852, but were inhabited by a population, one of them wholly and the other mainly, not Scandinavian but German. Thus the same question of race, history, language, sentiment, that had worked in Italy, Poland, the Balkan states, rose up in this miniature case. The circumstances that brought that case into such fatal prominence do not concern us here. The alleged wrongs of her brethren in Schleswig-Holstein unchained such a tempest of excitement in central Germany, that the German courts could hardly have resisted if they would. Just as powerless was the Danish government in face of the Scandinavian sentiment of its subjects and their neighbours of the race. Even the liberals, then a power in Germany and Bismarck’s bitter foes, were vehemently on the national side against the Danish claim; and one of the most striking of all Bismarck’s feats was the skill with which he now used his domestic enemies to further his own designs of national aggrandisement. How war broke out between the small power and the two great powers of Austria and Prussia, and how the small power was ruthlessly crushed; by what infinite and complex machinations the diplomacy of Europe found itself paralysed; how Prussia audaciously possessed herself of territory that would give her a deep-water port, and the head of a channel that would unite two great seas; how all this ended in Prussia, “the Piedmont of the north,” doing what Cavour in his Piedmont of the south had foretold that she would be glad to do; how at Sadowa (July 3, 1866) Austria was driven out of her long hegemony, and Hanover incorporated; and to what a train of amazing conflicts in western Europe, to what unexpected victories, territorial change, dynastic ruin, this so resistlessly led up—here is a narrative that belongs to the province of history. Yet it has a place in any political biography of the Palmerston administration.

In such an era of general confusion, the English cabinet found no powerful or noble part to play. Still they went far—almost too far to recede—towards embarking in a continental war on behalf of Denmark, that would have been full of mischief to herself, of little profit to her client, and could hardly have ended otherwise than in widespread disaster. Here is one of the very few instances in which the public opinion of the country at the eleventh hour reined back a warlike minister. Lord Palmerston told the House of Commons in the summer of 1863 that, if any violent attempt were made to overthrow the rights of Denmark or to interfere with its independence and integrity, he was convinced that those who made the attempt would find in the result that “it would not be Denmark alone with which they would have to contend.”(87) This did indeed sound like a compromising declaration of quite sufficient emphasis.

It seems, says Mr. Gladstone,(88) that this statement was generally and not unnaturally interpreted as a promise of support from England. Lord Palmerston does not seem to have added any condition or reservation. Strange as it may appear, he had spoken entirely of his own motion and without the authority or knowledge of his cabinet, in which indeed, so far as my memory serves, nothing had happened to render likely any declaration of any kind on the subject. I have no means of knowing whether he spoke in concert with the foreign secretary, Earl Russell, with whom his communications, agreeably to policy and to established usage, were, I believe, large and constant. When the question was eventually disposed of by the war which Prussia and Austria waged against Denmark, there was much indignation felt against England for the breach of her engagement to give support in the case of war, to the small power so egregiously in need of it. And there was no one to raise a voice in our favour.

As the year advanced (1863) and the prospect of war came nearer, the subject was very properly brought before the cabinet. I believe that at the time I was not even aware of Lord Palmerston’s declaration, which, owing to the exhausted period of the session, had I believe attracted no great amount of attention in England. Whether my colleagues generally were as little aware of what happened as myself I do not know, but unquestionably we could not all have missed learning it. However we did not as a body recognise in any way the title of the prime minister to bind us to go to war. We were, however, indignant at the conduct of the German powers who, as we thought, were scheming piracy under cover of pacific correspondence. And we agreed upon a very important measure, in which Lord Palmerston acquiesced, when he had failed, if I remember right, in inducing the cabinet to go farther. We knew that France took the same view of the question as we did, and we framed a communication to her to the following effect. We were jointly to insist that the claim of the Duke of Augustenburg should be peacefully settled on juridical grounds; and to announce to Prussia and Austria that if they proceeded to prosecute it by the use of force against Denmark, we would jointly resist them with all our might.(89)

This communication was accordingly made to Louis Napoleon. He declined the proposal. He said that the question was one of immense importance to us, who had such vast interests involved, and that the plan was reasonable from our point of view; but that the matter was one of small moment for France, whom accordingly we could not ask to join in it. The explanation of this answer, so foolish in its terms, and so pregnant with consequences in this matter, was, I believe, to be found in the pique of Louis Napoleon at a reply we had then recently given to a proposal of his for an European conference or congress.(90) We all thought that his plan was wholly needless and would in all likelihood lead to mischief. So we declined it in perfect good faith and without implying by our refusal any difference of policy in the particular matter.

Throughout the session of 1864 the attention of the country was fixed upon this question whether England should or should not take part in the war between Germany and Denmark. The week before the time arrived for the minister to announce the decision of the cabinet, it became clear that public opinion in the great English centres would run decisively for non-intervention. Some of the steadiest supporters of government in parliament boldly told the party whips that if war against Germany were proposed, they would vote against it. The cabinet met. Palmerston and Lord Russell were for war, even though it would be war single-handed. Little support came to them. The Queen was strongly against them. They bemoaned to one another the timidity of their colleagues, and half-mournfully contrasted the convenient ciphers that filled the cabinets of Pitt and Peel, with the number of able men with independent opinions in their own administration. The prime minister, as I have heard from one who was present, held his head down while the talk proceeded, and then at last looking up said in a neutral voice, “I think the cabinet is against war.” Here is Mr. Gladstone’s record:—

_May 7, ’64._—Cabinet. The war “party” as it might be called—Lord Palmerston, Lord Russell, Lord Stanley of Alderley, and the chancellor (Lord Westbury). All went well. _June 11._—Cabinet. Very stiff on the Danish question, but went well. _June 24._—Cabinet. A grave issue well discussed. _June 25._—Cabinet. We divided, and came to a tolerable, not the best, conclusion.

It seems almost incredible that a cabinet of rational men could have debated for ten minutes the question of going to war with Prussia and Austria, when they knew that twenty thousand men were the largest force that we could have put into the field when war began, though moderate additions might have been made as time went on—not, however, without hazardous denudation of India, where the memories of the mutiny were still fresh. The Emperor of the French in fact had good reason for fearing that he would be left in the lurch again, as he thought that he had been left before in his attempts for Poland. Your intervention, he said to England, will be naval; but we may have to fight a people of forty millions on land, and we will not intervene unless you engage to send troops.(91) The dismemberment of Denmark was thought an odious feat, but the localisation of the war was at least a restriction of the evils attending it.

(M34) A high parliamentary debate followed (July 4) on a motion made by Mr. Disraeli, “to express to Her Majesty our great regret that while the course pursued by the government had failed to maintain their avowed policy of upholding the independence and integrity of Denmark, it has lowered the just influence of this country in the councils of Europe, and thereby diminished the securities for peace.”(92) Cobden taunted both front benches pretty impartially with the equivocal and most dishonourable position into which their policy had brought the country, by encouraging a small power to fight two great ones and then straightway leaving her to get out as best she might. The government was only saved by Palmerston’s appeal to its financial triumphs—the very triumphs that he had himself made most difficult to achieve. The appeal was irrelevant, but it was decisive, and ministers escaped a condemnation by no means unmerited on the special issue, by a majority of eighteen. The Manchester men agreed to help in the result, because in Cobden’s words they were convinced that a revolution had been at last wrought in the mischievous policy of incessant intervention. Mr. Disraeli’s case was easy, but to propound an easy case when its exposition demands much selection from voluminous blue-books is often hard, and the orator was long and over-elaborate. The excitement of an audience, aware all the time that actual danger hovered over the ministry, revived afresh when Disraeli sat down and Gladstone rose. The personal emulation of powerful rivals lends dramatic elements to disputation. Lord Palmerston had written to Mr. Gladstone beforehand—“We shall want a great gun to follow Disraeli. Would you be ready to follow him?”

_July 3._—I was happy enough, aided by force of habit, to drive bodily out of my head for the whole day everything Dano-German. But not out of my nerves. I delivered during the night a speech in parliament on the Roman question.

_July 4._—H. of C. Replied to Disraeli. It took an hour and thirty-five minutes. I threw overboard all my heavy armament and fought light.

Nobody who is not historian or biographer is likely to read this speech of Mr. Gladstone’s to-day, but we may believe contemporary witnesses who record that the orator’s weight of fact, his force of argument, his sarcastic play of personal impulse and motive, his bold and energetic refutation of hostile criticism, his defiant statement of the ministerial case, so impressed even a sceptical and doubting House that, though his string of special pleas did not amount to a justification, “they almost reached the height of an excuse,” and they crushed the debate. The basis was the familiar refrain upon Mr. Gladstone’s lips,—“The steps taken by the government, what were they but endeavours to bind together the powers of Europe for fulfilment and maintenance of an important European engagement?” Still history, even of that sane and tempered school that is content to take politics as often an affair of second-best, will probably judge that Mr. Disraeli was not wrong when he said of the policy of this era that, whether we looked to Russia, to Greece, to France, there had been exhibited by ministers a confusion, an inconsistency of conduct, a contrariety of courses with regard to the same powers and a total want of system in their diplomacy.(93) It is true, however, that just the same confusion, inconsistency, and contrariety marked Russia, France, and Austria themselves. Another speaker of the same party, as mordant as Disraeli, and destined like him to rise to the chief place in the councils of the nation, went further, and said, in following Cobden in the debate, “If Mr. Cobden had been foreign secretary, instead of Lord Russell, I fully believe this country would occupy a position proud and noble compared to that which she occupies at this moment. She would at least have been entitled to the credit of holding out in the name of England no hopes which she did not intend to fulfil, of entering into no engagements from which she was ready to recede.”(94) Well might Mr. Gladstone enter in his diary:—

_July 8._—This debate ought to be an epoch in foreign policy. We have all much to learn. Lord Palmerston’s speech was unequivocally weak in the mental and the bodily sense. I think it was to-day that the Prince of Wales rode with Granville and me; he showed a little Danism.

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