f our enemy.' Behind the decorous curtain of European
concert Napoleon III. was busily weaving scheme after scheme of his own
to fix his unsteady diadem upon his brow, to plant his dynasty among the
great thrones of western Europe, and to pay off some old scores of
personal indignity put upon him by the Czar.

The Czar fell into all the mistakes that a man could. Emperor by divine
right, he had done his best to sting the self-esteem of the
revolutionary emperor in Paris. By his language to the British
ambassador about dividing the inheritance of the sick man, he had
quickened the suspicions of the English cabinet. It is true the sick man
will die, said Lord John Russell, but it may not be for twenty, fifty,
or a hundred years to come; when William III. and Louis XIV. signed
their treaty for the partition of the Spanish monarchy, they first made
sure that the death of the king was close at hand. Then the choice as
agent at Constantinople of the arrogant and unskilful Menschikoff proved
a dire misfortune. Finally, the Czar was fatally misled by his own
ambassador in London. Brunnow reported that all the English liberals and
economists were convinced that the notion of Turkish reform was absurd;
that Aberdeen had told him in accents of contempt and anger, 'I hate the
Turks'; and that English views generally as to Russian aggression and
Turkish interests had been sensibly modified. All this was not untrue,
but it was not true enough to bear the inference that was drawn from it
at St. Petersburg. The deception was disastrous, and Brunnow was never
forgiven for it.[302]

LORD STRATFORD DE REDCLIFFE

Another obstacle to a pacific solution, perhaps most formidable of them
all, was Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the British ambassador at
Constantinople. Animated by a vehement antipathy to Russia, possessing
almost sovereign ascendency at the Porte, believing that the Turk might
never meet a happier chance of having the battle out with his adversary
once for all, and justly confident that a policy of war would find
hearty backers in the London cabinet--in him the government had an
agent who while seeming to follow instructions in the narrow letter
baffled them in their spirit. In the autumn of 1853 Lord Aberdeen wrote
to Graham, 'I fear I must renounce the sanguine view I have hitherto
taken of the Eastern question; for nothing can be more alarming than the
present prospect. I thought that we should have been