Page:Life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (IA lifeofhermajesty01fawc).pdf/176

 rejoiced in his fall, which he attributed to the King's perfidy about the Spanish marriages. When the French King was fugitive in England, Palmerston had tried to prevent his receiving the shelter of Claremont, although the Government really had no business whatever to interfere, as Claremont had been settled for his life on Leopold, King of the Belgians, and if he chose to lend it to his father-in-law, no one else had any business in the matter. Louis Philippe died in 1850, and in 1851, although Palmerston said the Orleans Princes were plotting for a restoration, and if Louis Napoleon had not struck when he did, he would himself have been overthrown, the excuse was not a good one. Some contend that Palmerston was afraid of the red spectre in France, and thought Louis Napoleon the only man capable of laying it. But Palmerston was not afraid of the reds in any other European country. The real explanation of his conduct must be sought elsewhere. At the end of 1851, it required no superhuman power of prophecy, especially to one who surveyed Europe from the watchtower of the London Foreign Office, to foresee that the time was approaching when England would have to face the alternative of either relinquishing her traditional policy of maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, or fight Russia in order to sustain it. Palmerston, it need hardly be said, was all for fighting; but the question was whether England would face Russia alone, or whether Russia would restore the Holy Alliance, and thus lead a combination of European powers against England; or whether, as a third possibility, England could succeed in isolating Russia and in obtaining an ally for herself. It is not extravagant to suppose that it was to make this third possibility a probability that Palmerston hastened to make friends with a man whom he could not