The Crimean War Read Online Free PDF

Crimean War:
    1. Cut off trade to Russia so that the nobles would lose their profits and turn against the tsarist government.
    2. Destroy the naval depots at Kronstadt, Sevastopol, etc.
    3. Launch a series of ‘predatory and properly supported incursions along her maritime frontiers, especially in the Black Sea, within the shores of which, and even in the rear of her line of military posts, she has a host of unsubdued, armed, indomitable mountaineer enemies …’.
    4. Help the Persians to reclaim the Caucasus.
    5. Send a large corps of troops and a fleet to the Gulf of Finland ‘to menace the flanks and reserve of the Russian armies of Poland and Finland’.
    6. Finance revolutionaries to ‘create insurrections and a serf war’.
    7. Bombard St Petersburg, ‘if that be practicable’.
    8. Send arms to Poland and Finland ‘for their liberation from Russia’. 17
     
    David Urquhart, the famous Turcophile, also advocated a preventive war against Russia. No writer did more to prepare the British public for the Crimean War. A Scotsman educated at Oxford in Classics, Urquhart first encountered the Eastern Question in 1827, when, at the age of 22, he enrolled in a group of volunteers to fight for the Greek cause. He travelled widely in European Turkey, became enamoured of the virtues of the Turks, learned Turkish and modern Greek, adopted Turkish dress, and quickly gained a reputation as something of an expert on Turkey through his reports on that country which were published in the Morning Courier during 1831. Making use of a family friendship with Sir Herbert Taylor, private secretary to King William IV, Urquhart got himself attached to Stratford Canning’s mission to Constantinople to negotiate a final settlement of the Greek boundary in November 1831. During his time there he became convinced of the threat posed by Russian intervention in Turkey. Encouraged by his patrons at the court, he wrote Turkey and Its Resources (1833), in which he denied that the Ottoman Empire was about to collapse and highlighted the commercial opportunities awaiting Britain if it gave aid to Turkey and protected it from Russian aggression. The success of the book earned Urquhart the favour of Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary in Lord Grey’s government (1830–34), and a new appointment to the Turkish capital as part of a secret mission to examine the possibilities for British trade in the Balkans, Turkey, Persia, southern Russia and Afghanistan.
    In Constantinople, Urquhart became a close political ally of the British ambassador, Lord John Ponsonby, an ardent Russophobe who was unshakeable in his conviction that Russia’s aim was the subjugation of Turkey. Ponsonby urged the British government to send warships into the Black Sea and to aid the Muslim tribes of the Caucasus in their fight against Russia (in 1834 he even won from Palmerston a ‘discretionary order’ granting him authority to summon British warships into the Black Sea if he deemed it necessary but this was soon cancelled by the Duke of Wellington, who thought better of giving so much power to make war to such a notorious Russophobe). Under the influence of Ponsonby, Urquhart became increasingly political in his activities. He did not stop at writing but actually did things to make war against the Russians more likely. In 1834 he visited the Circassian tribes, pledging British support for their war against the Russian occupation, an act of provocation against Russia that obliged Palmerston to recall him to London.
    There, Urquhart stepped up his campaign for British military intervention against Russia in Turkey. A pamphlet he had written with Ponsonby, England, France, Russia and Turkey , was published in December 1834. It went through five editions within a year and received very positive reviews. Encouraged by this success, in November 1835 Urquhart launched a periodical, The Portfolio , in which he aired his Russophobic views, of which the following is typical: ‘The