reject accommodation with Russia, and promising him the armed assistance of England, John Bright stated that all this was done without instructions from the home government. Lord Clarendon wrote: "He is bent on war and on playing the first part in settling the great Eastern question." When the war came on, Lord Granville wrote: "We have generals whom we do not trust, and whom we do not know how to replace. We have an Ambassador at Constantinople, an able man, a cat whom no one cares to bell, whom some think a principal cause of the war, others the cause of some of the calamities which have attended the conduct of the war; and whom we know to have thwarted or neglected many of the objects of his Government."
Labouchere, who served under Lord Stratford in 1862, wrote afterwards that the despatches of Stratford during the Crimean war could not be recognized as the originals from which Mr. Kinglake drew his material for a narrative of the ambassador's career.[1] He thought that Stratford's great power at Constantinople was due to his long
- ↑ Labouchere wrote: "Lord Stratford was one of the most detestable of the human race. He was arrogant, resentful and spiteful. He hated the Emperor Nicholas because he had declined to accept him as Ambassador to Russia, and the Crimean war was his revenge. In every way he endeavored to envenom the quarrel and to make war certain."
