1826-93
1826.     Born at Paris, March 31.
1832-9.     Childhood in Switzerland.
1839-44.     With private tutors.
1845-9.     Balliol College, Oxford.
1850.     Clerk in Education Office.
1853.     Attaché at Vienna Embassy.
1858.     Attaché at Berlin.
1861.     Marriage with Alice, daughter of General Jonathan Peel.
1865.     Commissioner at Vienna. Commercial Treaty. C.B. Chargé d’Affaires at Frankfort.
1866-71.     Chargé d’Affaires at Darmstadt.
1870.     Tour in Alsace to test national feeling.
1871.     Chargé d’Affaires at Stuttgart.
1872-6.     Chargé d’Affaires at Munich.
1875.     Danger of second Franco-German War.
1876.     Minister at Lisbon.
1881.     Minister at Madrid. 1882. K.C.B.
1884.     Bismarck vetoes Morier as Ambassador to Berlin.
1885-93.     Ambassador at St. Petersburg.
1886.     Bulgaria, Batum, and Black Sea troubles.
1887.     G.C.B. 1889. D.C.L., Oxford.
1891.     Appointed Ambassador at Rome: retained at St. Petersburg.
1893.     Death at Montreux. Funeral at Batchworth.
Robert Morier
Diplomatist

Diplomacy as a profession is a product of modern history. As Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the dividing walls between State and State were broken down, and Governments found it necessary to have trained agents resident at foreign courts to conduct the questions of growing importance which arose between them. Churchmen were at first best qualified to undertake such duties, and Nicholas Wotton, Dean of Canterbury, who enjoyed the confidence of four Tudor sovereigns, came to be as much at home in France or in the Netherlands as he was in his own Deanery. It was his great nephew Sir Henry (who began his days as a scholar at Winchester, and ended them as Provost at Eton) who did his profession a notable disservice by indulging his humour at Augsburg when acting as envoy for James I, defining the diplomatist as ‘one who was sent to lie abroad for his country’.42 Since then many a politician and writer has let fly his shafts at diplomacy, and fervent democrats have come to regard diplomats as veritable children of the devil. But this prejudice is chiefly due to ignorance, and can easily be cured by a patient study of history. In the nineteenth century, in particular, English diplomacy can point to a noble roll of ambassadors, who worked for European peace as well as for the triumph of liberal causes, and none has a higher claim to such praise than Sir Robert Morier, the subject of this sketch.

The traditions of his family marked out his path in life. We can trace their origin to connexions in the Consular service at Smyrna, where Isaac Morier met and married Clara van Lennep in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Swiss grandfather and Dutch grandmother became naturalized subjects of the British Crown and brought up four sons to win distinction in its service. Of these the third, David, married a daughter of Robert Burnet Jones — a descendant of the famous Bishop Burnet, and himself a servant of the Crown — and held important diplomatic appointments for over thirty years at Paris and Berne. So it was that his only son Robert David Burnet Morier was born in France, spent much of his childhood in Switzerland, and acquired early in life a remarkable facility in speaking foreign languages. To his schooling in England he seems to have owed little of positive value. His father and uncles had been sent to Harrow; but perhaps it was as well that the son did not, in this, follow in his father’s footsteps. However much he neglected his studies with two easy-going tutors, he preserved his freshness and originality and ran no danger of being drilled into a type. If he had as a boy undue self-confidence, no one was better fitted to correct it than his mother, a woman of wide sympathies and strong intellectual force. The letters which passed between them display, on his part, mature powers of expression at an early age, and show the generous, affectionate nature of both; and till her death in 1855 she remained his chief confidante and counsellor. In trying to matriculate at Balliol College he met with a momentary check, due to the casual nature of his education; but, after retrieving this, he rapidly made good his deficiency in Greek and Latin, and ended by taking a creditable degree. His time at Oxford, apart from reading, was well spent. He made special friends with two of the younger dons: Temple, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, and Jowett, the future Master of Balliol. The former was carried by rugged force and sheer ability to the highest position in the Church; the latter won a peculiar place, in Oxford and in the world outside, by his gifts of judging character and stimulating intellectual interest. Morier became his favourite pupil and lifelong friend. F. T. Palgrave, the friend of both, tells us how ‘Morier went up to Balliol a lax and imperfectly educated fellow; but Jowett, seeing his great natural capacity, took him in the Long Vacation of 1848 and practically “converted” him to the doctrine of work. This was the turning-point in Morier’s life.’ Together the two friends spent many a holiday in Germany, Scotland, and elsewhere, and must have presented a strange contrast to one another: Jowett, small, frail, quiet and precise in manner, Morier big in every way, exuberant and full of vitality. It was with Jowett and Stanley (afterwards Dean of Westminster) that Morier went to Paris in 1848, eager to study the Revolutionary spirit in its most lively manifestations. Stanley describes him as ‘a Balliol undergraduate of gigantic size, who speaks French better than English, is to wear a blouse, and to go about disguised to the clubs’.

He took his degree in November 1849, and a month later he was visiting Dresden and Berlin, making German friends and initiating himself in German politics and German ways of thought. Though his British patriotism was fervid and sustained, he was capable of understanding men of other nations and recognizing their merits; and in knowledge of Germany he acquired a position among Englishmen of his day rivalled only by Odo Russell, afterwards Ambassador at Berlin. Morier’s father had for many years represented Great Britain in Switzerland and could guide him both by precept and by example. Free intercourse with the most liberal minds in Oxford had developed the lessons which he had learnt at home. But his own energy and application effected more than anything. He was not satisfied till he had mastered a problem; and books, places, and people were laid under contribution unsparingly. He started on his tour carrying letters of introduction to some of the famous men in Germany, including the great traveller and scientist, Alexander von Humboldt. Of a younger generation was the philologist Max Müller, who was a frequent companion of Morier in Berlin, and gave up his time to nursing him back to health when he was taken ill with quinsy. He found friends in all professions, but chiefly among politicians. A typical instance is von Roggenbach, who rose to be Premier of Baden in the years 1861 to 1865, when the destinies of Germany were in the melting-pot. Baden was in some ways the leading state in South Germany at that time, combining liberal ideals with a fervent advocacy of national union, and the views of Roggenbach on political questions attracted Morier’s warmest sympathy. Another state in which Morier felt genuinely at home was the Duchy of Coburg, from which Prince Albert had come to wed our own Queen Victoria. The Prince’s brother, the reigning Duke, treated Morier as a personal friend; and here, too, he found Baron Stockmar, a Nestor among German Liberals, who had spent his political life in trying to promote goodwill between England and Germany. He received Morier into his family circle and adopted him as the heir to his policy. This intimacy led to further results; and, thanks in part to Morier’s subsequent friendship with the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, generous ideals and a liberal spirit were to be found surviving in a few places even after 1870, though Bismarck had poisoned the minds of a whole generation by the material successes which he achieved.

In 1849 the doors of the Foreign Office were closed to Morier. The Secretary of State, Lord Palmerston, had treated his father unfairly, as he thought, some years before, and Morier would ask no favours of him. He continued his education, keeping in close touch with Jowett and Temple, and, when he saw a chance of studying politics at first hand, he eagerly availed himself of it. The troubles of Schleswig-Holstein, too intricate to be explained briefly, had been brewing for some time. In 1850, the dispute, to which Prussia, Denmark, and the German Diet were all parties, came to a head. The Duchies were overrun by Prussian troops, while the Danish Navy held the sea. Morier rushed off to see for himself what was happening, and spent some interesting days at Kiel, talking to those who could instruct him, and forming his own judgement. This was adverse to the wisdom of the Copenhagen Radicals, who were trying to assert by force their supremacy over a German population. In the circumstances, as Prussia gave way to the wishes of other powers, no satisfactory decision could be reached; but ten years later the issue was in the ruthless hands of Bismarck, and was settled by ‘blood and iron’.

In 1850 Morier accepted a clerkship in the Education Office at ￡120 a year. The work was not to his taste, but at least it was public service, and he saw no hope of employment in the Foreign Office. He found some distractions in London society. He kept up relations with his old friends, and he took a leading part in establishing the Cosmopolitan Club, which later met in Watts’s studio, but began its existence in Morier’s own rooms. He enjoyed greatly a meeting with Tennyson and Browning, and wrote with enthusiasm of the former to his father, as ‘one who gave men an insight into the real Hero-world, as one from whom he could catch reflected something of the Divine’. But Morier’s spirits were mercurial, and between moments of elation he was apt to fall into fits of melancholy, when he could find no outlet for his energies. Waiting for his true profession tried him sorely, and he was even resigning himself to the prospect of a visit to Australia as a professional journalist, when fortune at last smiled upon him. Palmerston retired from the Foreign Office, and when Clarendon succeeded him, Morier’s name was placed on the list of candidates for an attachéship. At Easter 1853 he started for another visit to the Continent, full of hope and more than ever determined to qualify himself for the profession which he loved.

He was rewarded for his zeal a few weeks later, when he paid a visit to Vienna, won the favour of the Ambassador, Lord Westmorland, and was commended to the Foreign Office. At the age of twenty-seven he was appointed to serve Her Majesty as unpaid attaché, having already acquired a knowledge of European politics which many men of sixty would have envied. In figure he was tall, with a tendency already manifested to put on flesh, good-looking, genial and sympathetic in manner, a bon vivant, passionately fond of dancing and society, an excellent talker or listener as the occasion demanded. His intelligence was quick, his powers of handling details and of grasping broad principles were alike remarkable. He wrote with ease, clearness, and precision; he knew what hard work meant and revelled in it. Unfortunately he was subject already to rheumatic gout, which was to make him acquainted with many watering-places, and was to handicap him gravely in later life. But at present nothing could check his ardour in his profession, and during his five years at Vienna he took every chance of studying foreign lands and of making acquaintance with the chief figures in the diplomatic world. He enjoyed talks with Baron Jella?i?, who had saved the monarchy in 1848, and with Prince Metternich, whose political career ended in that year of revolutions and who was now only a figure in society. After the Crimean War Morier obtained permission to make a tour through South-east Hungary and to study for himself the mixture of Slavonic, Magyar, and Teutonic races inhabiting that district. He followed this up by another tour of three months, which carried him from Agram southwards into Bosnia and Herzegovina, having prepared for it by working ten to twelve hours a day for some weeks at the language of the southern Slavs. Incidentally he enjoyed some hunting expeditions with Turkish pashas, and obtained some insight into the weakness of the British consular system. All his life he believed strongly in the value of such tours to obtain first-hand information; and thirty years later, as Ambassador, he encouraged his secretaries to familiarize themselves with the outlying districts of the Russian empire.

In 1858, at the age of thirty-two, Morier passed from Vienna to Berlin. It was the year in which the Princess Royal, the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, married the Crown Prince of Prussia.43 Her father, the Prince Consort, was very anxious that Morier should be at hand to advise the young couple, and the appointment to Berlin was his work. Then it was that Morier became involved in the struggle between Bismarck and the Liberal influences in Germany, which had no stronger rallying-point than the Coburg Court. This conflict only showed itself later, and at first the young English attaché must have seemed a sufficiently unimportant person; but before 1862 Bismarck, coming home to Berlin from the St. Petersburg Embassy, and discerning the nature of Morier’s character, had declared that it was desirable to remove such an influence from the path of his party, who were determined to bring Liberal Germany under the yoke of a Prussia which had no sympathy for democratic ideals.

For the moment the ship of State was hanging in the wind; light currents of air were perceptible; sails were filling in one parliamentary boat or another; but the chief movement was to be seen not in parliamentary circles but in the excellent civil service, which preserved that honesty and efficiency which it had acquired in the days of Stein. There were marked tendencies towards Liberalism and towards unification in different parts of Germany; and, if the Liberal party could have produced one man of firmness and decision, these forces might have triumphed over the reactionary Prussian clique. In this conflict Morier was bound to be a passionate sympathiser with the parties which included so many of his personal friends and which advocated principles so dear to his heart. With the triumph of his friends, too, were associated the prospects of a good understanding between England and Germany, for which Morier himself was labouring; and he was accused of having meddled indiscreetly with local politics. When King William broke with the Liberals over the Army Bill, caution was doubly necessary. Bismarck became Minister in 1862, and, great man though he was, he was capable of any pettiness when he had once declared war on an opponent. From that time the policy of working for an Anglo-Prussian entente was a losing game, not only because Bismarck detested the parliamentarism which he associated with England, but also because, on our side too, extremists were stirring up ill-feeling. In his letters Morier makes frequent reference to the ‘John Bullishness’ of The Times. When this journal, to which European importance attached during the editorship of Delane, was not openly flouting Prussia, it was displaying reckless ignorance of a people who were making the most solid contributions to learning and raising themselves by steady industry from the losses due to centuries of Continental warfare.

From time to time he paid visits to friends at Dresden, at Baden, and elsewhere. One year he was sent to Naples on a special mission, another year he was summoned to attend on Queen Victoria, who was visiting Coburg. In 1859 he is lamenting the monotony of existence at Berlin, which he calls ‘a Dutch mud canal of a life, without even the tulip beds on the banks’. But when later in that year Lord John Russell, who knew and appreciated his talents, became Foreign Secretary and called on him for frequent reports on important subjects, Morier found solace in work. He was only too willing to put his wide knowledge of the country in which he was serving at the disposal of his superiors at home. He wrote with equal ability on political, agrarian, and financial subjects. That he could take into account the personal factor is shown by the long letter which he wrote in 1861 to Sir Henry Layard, then Political Under-Secretary of State.44 It contained a masterly analysis of the character and upbringing of King William, showing how his intellectual narrowness had hampered Liberal Governments, while his professional training in the army had made him a most efficient instrument in promoting the aims of Junker politicians and ministers of war.

On Schleswig-Holstein, above all, Morier exerted himself to convey a right view of the question to those who guided opinion in London, whether newspaper editors or responsible ministers. He appealed to the same principle which had won support for the Lombards against Austria. The inhabitants of the disputed Duchies were for the most part Germans, and the Danish Government had done violence to their national sentiment. If England could have extended its sympathy to its northern kinsmen in time, the question might have been settled peacefully before 1862, and Bismarck could never have availed himself of such a lever to overthrow his Liberal opponents. As it was, Prussia ignored the Danish sympathies displayed abroad, especially in the English press, went her own way and invaded the Duchies, dragging in her train Austria, her confederate and her dupe. Palmerston, who controlled our foreign policy at the time, waited till the last moment, blustered, found himself impotent to move without French support, and left Denmark smarting with a sense of betrayal which lasted till 1914. By such bungling Morier knew that we were incurring enmity on both sides and lowering our reputation for courage as well as for statesmanship.

In 1865 he was chosen as one of the Special Commissioners to negotiate a treaty of commerce between Great Britain and Austria. He had always been a Free-trader, and he was convinced that such economic agreements could do much to improve the world and to strengthen the bonds of peace. So he was ready and willing to do hard work in this sphere, and finding a congenial colleague in Sir Louis Mallet, one of the best economists of the day, he spent some months at Vienna in fruitful activity and won the good opinion of all associated with him. For his services he received the C.B. and high commendation from London.

This same year brought promotion in rank, though for long it was uncertain where he would go. In August he accepted the offer of First Secretary to the Legation in Japan, most reluctantly, because he saw his peculiar knowledge of Germany would be wasted there. Ten days later this offer was changed for a similar position at the Court of Greece, which was equally uncongenial; but at the end of the year the Foreign Office decided that he would be most useful in the field which he had chosen for himself, and after a few months at Frankfort he was sent in the year 1866 as chargé d’affaires to the Grand Ducal Court of Hesse-Darmstadt.

From these posts he was destined to be a spectator of the two great conflicts by which Bismarck established the union of North Germany and its primacy in Europe. Morier detested the means by which this end was achieved, but he had consistently maintained that this union ought to be, and could only be, achieved by Prussia, and he remained true to his beliefs. It is a great tribute to his intellectual force that he was able to control his personal sympathies and antipathies, and to judge passing events with reference to the past and the future. He had liked the statesmen whom he had met at Vienna, and he recognized their good faith in the difficult negotiations of 1865. But for the good of Europe, he thought the Austrian Government should now look eastwards. It could not do double work at Vienna and at Frankfort. The impotence of the Frankfort Diet could be cured only by the North Germans, and the aspirations of good patriots, from Baden to the Baltic, had been for long directed towards Prussia. But it was no easy task to make people in England realize the justice of this view or the certainty that Prussia was strong enough to carry through the work. Led by The Times, the British Press had grown accustomed to use a contemptuous tone towards Prussia; and when in the decisive hour this could no longer be maintained, and British sentiment, as is its nature, declared for Austria as the beaten side, this sentiment was attributed at Berlin to the basest envy. Relations between the two peoples steadily grew worse during these years, despite the efforts of Morier and other friends of peace.

The Franco-German war brought even greater bitterness between Prussia and Great Britain. The neutrality, which the latter power observed, was misunderstood in both camps; and the position of a British diplomat abroad became really unpleasant. Morier in particular, as a marked man, knew that he was subject to spying and misrepresentation, but this did not deter him from doing his duty and more than his duty. He took measures to safeguard those dependent on him, in case Hesse came into the theatre of war. He organized medical aid for the wounded on both sides. He took a journey in September into Alsace and Lorraine to ascertain the feeling of the inhabitants, that he might give the best possible advice to his Government if the cession of these districts became a European question. He came to the conclusion that Alsace was not a homogeneous unit — that language, religion, and sentiment varied in different districts, and that it was desirable to work for a compromise. But Bismarck was determined in 1870, as in 1866, that the settlement should remain in his own hands and that no European congress should spoil his plans. Morier found that he was being talked of at Berlin as ‘the enemy of Prussia’, and atrocious calumnies were circulated. One of these was revived some years later when Bismarck wished to discredit him, and Bismarckian journals accused him of having betrayed to Marshal Bazaine military secrets which he discovered in Hesse. Morier obtained from the Marshal a letter which clearly refuted the charge, and he gave it the widest publicity. The plot recoiled on its author, and Morier was spoken of in France as ‘le grand ambassadeur qui a roulé Bismarck’. Yet all the while, with his wife a strong partisan of France, with six cousins fighting in the French Army, with his friends in England only too ready to quarrel with him for his supposed pro-German sentiments, he was appealing for fair judgement, for reason, for a wise policy which should soften the bitterness of the settlement between victors and vanquished. Facts must be recognized, he pleaded, and the French claim for peculiar consideration and their traditional amour propre must not be allowed to prolong the miseries of war. At the same time Morier did not close his eyes to the danger arising from the overwhelming victories of the German armies. No one saw more clearly the deterioration which was taking place in German character, or depicted it in more trenchant terms. But it was his business to work for the future and not to let sentiment bring fresh disasters upon Europe.

Apart from this critical period, life at Darmstadt bored him considerably. His presence there was valued highly by Queen Victoria, one of whose daughters had married the Grand Duke; but Morier felt himself to be in a backwater, far from the main stream of European politics, and society there was dull. So he welcomed in 1871 his transference first to Stuttgart, and a few months later to Munich, the capital of the second state in the new Empire and a great centre of literary culture. Here lived Dr. D?llinger, historian and divine, a man suspected at Rome for his liberal Catholicism even before his definite severance from the Roman Church, but honoured everywhere else for the width and depth of his knowledge. With him Morier enjoyed many conversations on Church councils and other subjects which interested them both; and in 1874, lured by the prospect of such society, Gladstone paid him a visit of ten days. Morier did not admire Gladstone’s conduct of foreign policy, but he was open-minded enough to recognize his great gifts and to enjoy his company, and he writes home with enthusiasm about his conversational powers. A still more welcome visitor in 1873 was Jowett, his old Oxford friend, who never lost his place in Morier’s affections.

Among these delights he retained his vigilance in political matters, and there was often need for it, since the German Government was now developing that habit of ‘rattling its sword’, and threatening its neighbours with war, which disquieted Europe for another forty years. The worst crisis came in 1875, when Morier heard on good authority that the military clique at Berlin were gaining ground, and seemed likely to persuade the Emperor William to force on a second war, expressly to prevent France recovering its strength. In general the credit for checking this sinister move is given to the Tsar; but English influences played a large part in the matter. Morier managed to catch the Crown Prince on his way south to Italy and had a long talk with him in the railway train. The Crown Prince was known to be a true lover of peace, but capable of being hoodwinked by Bismarck; once convinced that the danger was real (and he trusted Morier as he trusted no German in his entourage), he returned to Berlin and threw all his weight into the scale of peace. Queen Victoria also wrote from London; and, in face of a possible coalition against them, the Germans decided that it was wisest to abstain from all aggression.

A new period opened in his life when he left German courts, never to return officially, and became the responsible head of Her Majesty’s Legation at the Portuguese Court. His five years spent at Lisbon cannot be counted as one of his most fruitful periods, despite ‘the large settlement of African affairs’, which Lord Granville tells us that Morier had suggested to his predecessors in Whitehall. For the big schemes which he planned he could get no continuous backing at home, either in political or commercial circles. For the petty routine England hardly needed a man of such outstanding ability. Of necessity his work consisted often in tedious investigation of claims advanced by individual Englishmen, whether they were suffering from money losses or from summary procedure at the hands of the Portuguese police. Of the diplomatic questions which arose many proved to be shadowy and unreal. Something could be done, even in remote Portugal, to improve Anglo-Russian relations by a minister who had friends in so many European capitals. The politics of Pio Nono and the Papal Curia often find an echo in his correspondence. Here, too, as elsewhere, the intrigues of Germany had to be watched, though Morier was sensible enough to discriminate between the deliberate policy of Bismarck and the man?uvres of those whom he ‘allowed to do what they liked and say what they liked — or rather to do what they thought he would like done, and say what they thought he would like said — and then suddenly sent them about their business to ponder in poverty and disgrace on the mutability of human affairs’. In a passage like this Morier’s letters show that he could distinguish between a lion and his jackals, between ‘policy’ and ‘intrigue’.

Had it not been for Germany and German suggestions, Portuguese politicians would perhaps have been free from the fears which loomed darkest on their horizon — the fears of an ‘Iberian policy’ which Spain was supposed to be pursuing. In reality the leading men at Madrid knew that they had little to gain by letting loose the superior Spanish army against Portugal and trying to form the whole peninsula into a single state. Morier, at any rate, made it clear that England would throw the whole weight of her power against such treatment of her oldest ally. But alarmist politicians were perpetually harping on this string, and Morier, in a letter written in 1876, compares them to ‘children telling ghost-stories to one another who have got frightened at the sound of their own voices, and mistake the rattling of a mouse behind the wainscot for the tramping of legions on the march’.

To Morier it seemed that the important part of his work concerned South Africa, in which, at the time, Portugal and Great Britain were the European powers most interested. It was in 1877 t............