THE GREAT AMBASSADOR A Study of the Diplomatic Career of the Right Hon­ ourable Stratford Canning, K.G., G.C.B., Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe, and the Epoch during Which He Served as the British Ambassador to the Sub1' Porte of the Ottoman Sultan era^ $6.25 W THE GREAT AMBASSADOR By Leo Gerald Byrne For a substantial part of the first half of the nineteenth century, the Right Honourable Stratford Canning served as Her Brittanic Majesty's Ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Sultan. In this role, he played a significant part in a drama of high-level diplomacy and exercised a singular influence on the history of Europe and the Near East. He had, according to Sir Winston Churchill, "a wider knowledge of Turkey than any other Englishman of his day," and he was hailed by Tennyson as "the voice of England in the East." To the Turks, he was Buyuk Elchi— "the Great Ambassador." From this full-scale study of Sir Stratford's diplomatic career emerges a portrait of a skilled diplomat who was closely involved in a chain of ideas and events that have had a permanent bearing on human history. Leo Gerald Byrne is associated with Harper and Row, Publishers. THE GREAT AMBASSADOR THE GREAT AMBASSADOR A Study of the Diplomatic Career of the Right Honourable Stratford Canning, K.G., G.C.B., Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe, and the Epoch during Which He Served as the British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Sultan By Leo Gerald Byrne Ohio State University Press Copyright © 1964 by the Ohio State University Press All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 64-22404 PREFACE SOME years ago I chanced upon the record of Stratford Canning. The discovery was made during the process of gathering material for a novel on the period of the Crimean War. The more I read of this man and his work the further I was led in my search, and so great did my fascination become that I felt impelled, eventually, to share with others what I had learned about him. For a substantial part of the first half of the nineteenth century Stratford Canning was Her Brittannic Majesty's Ambassador to the Ottoman Sultan. In this role he played a significant part in the drama of high-level diplomacy and exercised a singular influence on the intertwined history of Europe and the Near East. He had, according to Winston Churchill, 'a wider knowledge of Turkey than any other Englishman of his day,' and he was hailed by Tennyson as "the voice of England in the East." To the Turks he was Buyuk Elchi—the Great Ambassador. PREFACE vi In spite of these accolades he is today virtually unknown to otherwise well-informed laymen. When one considers, hy way of contrast, the notoriety accorded many far less influen­ tial personages of the Victorian era, his disappearance from history, so to speak, assumes almost the proportion of a mystery. If for no other reason than to do him justice it seemed worthwhile to me to attempt this book. My motives go beyond that simple goal, however, for I consider it nearly impossible to achieve a good understanding of nineteenth- century European history and its relevance for our own day without specific reference to Stratford Canning, his ideas and his work. I have written this study primarily for the intelligent layman who likes to be informed as much as is reasonably possible. The sweep of history encompassed by the terminal points of Stratford Canning's career is so vast that I have elected to offer a substantive account of his work rather than to construct a formal and detailed personal biography. With that end in view I have tried to avoid, without sacrificing historical authenticity, the obscurantism and picayune con­ cerns one sometimes finds in the professional monograph. The bones of historical evidence in this area have already been cleanly picked, but much of the intellectual nutrients are stored in warehouses not readily accessible to the layman. I have tried to present a fare chosen from among the products of recognized scholarship. Where there are sufficient variants of opinion I have tried to justify in my notes the particular flavor I have chosen. PREFACE Beyond the particulars of Stratford Canning's life but through the medium of his career I hope to reveal a chain of ideas and events which have had a permanent bearing on human history. In that process I hope, also, to indicate the role of skilled diplomacy in human affairs; especially do I wish to demonstrate the necessity of what is often suspiciously referred to as 'secret" diplomacy. There is no argument over the fundamental premise that in a democratic society the people as a whole must exercise ultimate control over foreign policy, even if only through a parliamentary medium. There are, nevertheless, a host of intermediate prudential decisions which should be left to competent statesmen to work out, and these workings should be free from the glare of journalistic or parliamentary publicity, no matter how well-intentioned such publicity might be. Failure to observe this rule of practical wisdom has more than once involved humanity in great tragedy. Tentative opinions openly reported too easily become irretraceable postures of national pride. When this occurs reason seldom holds her sway among the nations. In preparing this study I have depended heavily on certain sources which deserve special mention. Chief among these is the monumental biography of Stratford Canning written by one of the great archivists of the nineteenth century, Stanley Lane-Poole, in 1888. This work, printed in two volumes totaling nearly one thousand tightly packed pages, is a major source for the history of Stratford Canning and his times chiefly because Lane-Poole had access to the unpublished manuscript memoirs written by Canning after his retirement PREFACE viii from public life. From these manuscript memoirs Lane-Poole excerpted hundreds of lengthy citations, and, in addition, he copied a host of private letters from Canning to his mother, sister, brothers, and friends. By 1930, when E. E. Malcolm- Smith began to restudy the life of Stratford Canning, she found that the complete manuscript memoirs as well as many of the private letters had disappeared. By diligent cross­ checking, however, with private papers of other individuals and the official archives of the British Museum, the Public Record Office, and the British Foreign Office as well as with official archives in Vienna, Paris, and elsewhere, she con­ cluded that Lane-Poole had copied faithfully and well. Hence, all references in this study to the memoirs are to the manuscript memoirs of Canning as recorded in Lane-Poole's Life of the Right Honourable Stratford Canning. In 1933 Miss Malcolm-Smith published her Life of Stratford Canning, which was shorter but had the benefit of more research into documents made public long after Lane-Poole's work. Both of these biographies are long out of print, however, and each of them labors under the burden of having been written for English readers and presumes a familiarity on the part of the audience with details of English domestic politics as well as with usages and mores which may be unclear to the modern American student. On the political background of the Crimean War, Professor Harold Temperley's Britain and the Near East: The Crimea has achieved an aura of almost scriptural authority, but even this work is now past the ix PREFACE quarter-century mark and was written before the staggering events of the Second World War, to say nothing of the cold war of the fifties and sixties. With the help of all this scholar­ ship I have attempted to look back at Stratford Canning's world from a perspective that is now longer and wider. I am indebted to many people for whatever degree of success I have achieved. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Adeline Corrigan of the Cleveland Public Library for the initial encouragement to pursue this goal and for the acquisi­ tion of my first research material. I am also obligated to Sydney N. Fisher, Professor of History at the Ohio State University, for professional encouragement and advice and for his efforts in interesting the Ohio State University Press in my work. James Hafer, of the Newark, Ohio, Public Library was always at my command in procuring material from the Library of Congress and elsewhere, as was Mrs. John Gibney, of the staff of the Denison University Library in Granville, Ohio. T. Edwyn Dickerson, of Newark, Ohio, deserves special mention for his invaluable help in checking not only literary error but unwarranted deductions from historical evidence at hand. The officers of the Ohio State University Press have exhibited unusual patience and understanding, and I trust that these virtues will be duly rewarded. More than anyone else, of course, my wife, Antoinette, is responsible for the completion of this work. Without her complete and unselfish co-operation it could never have come PREFACE into being. Only those who have been through similar experiences will know the full extent of this debt. Finally, all shortcomings in this book are matters of personal responsibility alone. LEO GERALD BYRNE THE GREAT AMBASSADOR I STRATFORD CANNING belongs to the group of indi­ viduals who might properly be described as catalysts of history. These are persons who, though they did not rule nations nor lead mighty armies nor crystallize in their own being the evo­ lution of epochal social or religious movements, just as surely helped to shape their own times and influence the future.