tion of the Italian duchies to the kingdom of Italy, was generally felt not only to be inconsistent with the declaration made by the emperor when commencing the late war, but as probably only a preliminary to further attempts on the part of France to extend her frontiers, and thereby endanger the peace of Europe. These views were forcibly placed by Cowley before the emperor in an interview on 9 Feb. 1860 (Lord Cowley to Lord Russell, 10 Feb. 1860, Martin, v. 31). In the course of this conversation he succeeded in extracting from the emperor an acknowledgment that he considered he had obtained from Count Cavour before the war a consent to the surrender of Savoy and Nice, if the result of the war should be to create an Italian state of ten or twelve millions of inhabitants. But this admission did not tend to conciliate those who criticised the imperial policy for want of straightforwardness. Cowley at this time was also occupied as joint-plenipotentiary in assisting Cobden in the negotiations for the treaty of commerce between Great Britain and France (Martin, v. 34, 350), the success of which, as likely to cement a good understanding between the two countries on the solid basis of material interest, was an object he had greatly at heart. The treaty was signed on 23 Jan. 1860. A letter which the emperor wrote conveying his congratulations on the success of these negotiations well illustrates the difficulties with which at this period the British ambassador in Paris had to contend. ‘It is my profound conviction,’ the emperor wrote to Cowley, ‘that the harmonious action of the two nations is indispensable for the good of civilisation, and that their antagonism would be a calamity to all. While saying this, I would ask you, my dear Lord Cowley, to forgive me if occasionally I give too warm an expression to the pain I feel at seeing the animosities and prejudices of another age spring up afresh in England.’ The allusion was to some observations which a few days before had been addressed by him to the British ambassador at a concert at the Tuileries. These observations were not only unusual in their vivacity, but still more unusual from being made in the presence of the Russian ambassador, General Kisseleff. ‘Lord Cowley had at once to check the further progress of remarks in a direction already sufficiently dangerous, by saying that he considered himself justified in calling the emperor's attention to the unusual course he had adopted in indulging, in the presence of the Russian ambassador, in animadversion on the conduct of England;’ and ‘he appealed to him to consider whether he had been properly dealt with, remembering the personal regard and the anxiety to smooth over difficulties between the two governments which in his official capacity he had always shown, even at the risk of exposing himself to be suspected of being more French than he ought to be.’ Cowley then proceeded to justify the distrust occasioned in England by the contradictory language of the emperor in having stated that he meditated no special advantages for France, and in afterwards having to acknowledge that overtures had positively been made by him to Sardinia before the war for the eventual cession of Savoy; and he dwelt on the anxiety occasioned by his having reopened the question of what were the ‘natural frontiers’ of France.
The emperor was not able to question the wisdom or deny the good will of the speaker; neither, as the biographer of the prince consort observes, ‘was it in the emperor's character, in which candour to an adversary formed a large element, to resent them.’ And thus this strange incident terminated, which at one moment, as Lord Russell wrote to the queen, threatened to bear ‘a disagreeable resemblance to other scenes already famous in the history of Napoleon I and Napoleon III’ (the Queen to Lord Russell, 10 March 1860). Cowley received a special despatch approving his conduct in the difficult circumstances in which he had been placed (Martin, Life of the Prince Consort, v. 37–43).
The records of ‘la diplomatie intime’ are always among the most laborious for the biographer to investigate, especially in regard to the history of comparatively recent events, and the materials are as yet not fully accessible for ascertaining ‘the extent of Lord Cowley's direct and personal influence in shaping the history of his time’ (Times, July 1884) after 1861, when he was occupied even more constantly than before in smoothing down the international dangers caused by the hesitating temperament of the French emperor, anxious at one moment to justify the phrase, ‘l'Empire c'est la paix,’ and at another to vindicate the Napoleonic traditions as to the natural frontiers of France; and wishing to satisfy at one and the same time both his own genuine goodwill for the cause of Italian unity and also the clerical passions of the influential section at his court, which was determined to maintain the temporal sovereignty of the pope over what remained of the states of the church. The abortive proposals for a European congress which the emperor renewed in 1863, the desire of Italy to annex Venice and to
