The Marriage of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, and Grand Duchess Maria, daughter of Emperor Alexander II of Russia, on January 23rd, 1874 (NS), as depicted by Nicholas Chevalier (1828-1902). The ceremony took place in the Imperial Chapel of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. John Bright was strongly pro-Russian, which put him at odds with much of the UK’s political establishment, especially in the civil service. Among the Royal Family, relations were much warmer and Edward VII (r. 1901-1910) was particularly keen to foster them. See The Peacemaker.
Part 1 of 2
NO nation, I believe, has been in disposition more friendly to this nation than Russia.* There is no nation on the Continent of Europe that is less able to do harm to England, and there is no nation on the Continent of Europe to whom we are less able to do harm than we are to Russia.
We have India, and men tell you that India is in jeopardy from Russia. You persuade the people of India by the writings of the press and the speeches of public men in this country, that we run great hazard from the advance of Russia, and if you have enemies in India of course you feed their enmity by this language, and you make them, if they wish to escape from the government of England, turn naturally and inevitably to Russia as the Power that can help them.* The interest of this country with regard to Russia in connection with India is an unbroken amity, and I am sure that that unbroken amity might be secured if we could get rid of the miserable jealousy that afflicts us.*
* Bright’s friend Richard Cobden was of the same opinion, and had expressed it more than twenty years earlier. See Misreading Russia.
* Journalist William Stead issued a very similar warning after the Viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, unwisely launched a crackdown on India’s vernacular press that year, 1878. See Press Agents.
* Bright was clear in his mind on where this jealousy came from, the ‘deep state’ traditions of the Foreign Office. “I once expressed — I was very irreverent towards such an ancient institution — the wish that the Foreign Office some day might be burned down” he admitted during this speech; “and at least, correcting myself, that if it should be burned down, that I hoped all its mad, and baneful, and wicked traditions would be burned with it.”
Précis
In 1878, Victorian statesman John Bright assured constituents in Birmingham that Russia was a country eager for friendship with Britain, and far less of a threat to us than our neighbours. He dismissed fears of Russian interference in India, arguing that the British media’s hysterical Russophobia encouraged our opponents in India to assume that Russia was their ally. (57 / 60 words)
Part Two
Emperor Alexander II of Russia in the 1860s, with his wife Empress Maria Alexandrovna and their three youngest children at the time, Sergei, Paul and (with a delightfully quizzical expression on her face) Maria. Maria married Prince Alfred, second son of Queen Victoria, in January 1874. Ten years later, Sergei married Elizabeth of Hesse, whose mother Alice was Alfred’s sister. These ties between the two royal families promised much but the Communist revolution in 1917 brought it all to a sudden and horrible end.
THE present Emperor of Russia is not the one with whom we made the war.* He is a man not given to military display. He is a man whose reign before this war* was signalised chiefly by the grand act of the liberation of twenty millions of his people.* He at least was willing to forget the unfortunate past. He consented that his only daughter, the loved child of his heart, should marry the son of the English Queen.* And I thought that this was a great sign of a permanent reconciliation, and a very blessed promise of a prolonged peace; and although that has not borne in this political respect all the fruit one could have wished for, still I am delighted to believe that there is a great change growing, and a change for the better, and a change which I believe will be accelerated by what will take place when this unfortunate war comes to an end.*
* ‘The war’ is The Crimean War of 1853-1856, about which Bright had been speaking at length earlier. It began when Emperor Nicholas I (r. 1825-1855) was on the Russian throne; the current Emperor was Alexander II of Russia (r. 1855-1881).
* ‘This war’ is the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. Bright delivered this speech on January 13th, 1878, towards the close of the war; Parliament was currently discussing whether to step in on Turkey’s side and Bright, of course, was wholly against it.
* The Emancipation of the Serfs was signed into law on February 19th OS (March 3rd NS), 1861, ending Russia’s centuries-old feudal society and granting to some twenty-three million agricultural labourers rights of property ownership, marriage and private enterprise they had long been denied. It was in essence that country’s abolition of slavery, thankfully achieved without the bloodshed seen in the American Civil War of 1861-1865. Much of the reform was reversed by the Communists after 1917, who sent the whole country back to the Middle Ages but without the consolation of religion.
* Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia married Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, on January 24th, 1874. Alfred’s sister Princess Alice was the mother of Empress Alexandra, consort of Emperor Nicholas II of Russia, and also of St Elizabeth the New Martyr.
* The Russo-Turkish war ended with the Treaty of Berlin on July 13, 1878. It was a victory for Russia, and for the Christian states in the Balkans that thereby gained independence from what had become a very unpleasant subservience to the Ottoman Empire.
Précis
In his speech on Russia, John Bright went on to talk about the current Emperor, Alexander II. Alexander was not the Emperor with whom we began the Crimean War. He was the man who ended it, who had liberated over twenty million serfs and whose daughter was married to Queen Victoria’s son; maybe better days beckoned for Anglo-Russian relations. (59 / 60 words)
