A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [239]
Lord Lyons was never given the opportunity to watch Booth play Hamlet; a careless clerk in the Foreign Office had forwarded the legation’s correspondence to the printers of the parliamentary “Blue Book” without first removing the censored passages. Its arrival in mid-April caused such controversy that Lyons suffered the same hideous embarrassment that had ruined Charles Francis Adams’s Christmas. “The goodwill to me personally, which miraculously survived so long, seems at last to have sunk altogether,” wrote Lyons. The political damage was also considerable. The Blue Book had offended or alienated both supporters and enemies alike: “Unluckily the book contains just the passages in my dispatches which are most irritating to each of the parties, and which it is most inconvenient to them to have published.”12 Lyons was especially worried about how the Blue Book would affect his relationship with Seward. He had heard that the secretary was annoyed and feared that it made him appear weak in his dealings with the diplomatic corps.
Lyons also braced himself for a difficult time over the Peterhoff affair, with Seward making public threats and statements about what the United States would and would not stand for, similar to his recent grandstanding about letters of marque. But Seward surprised him; rather than allowing the controversy to take on a life of its own, he courageously defied the objections of the abinet and returned the Peterhoff’s captured mailbag to Lyons. He even prevailed upon his rival Gideon Welles to transfer Admiral Wilkes to the Pacific Ocean, where there were fewer opportunities to cause trouble. The U.S. navy secretary grudgingly gave the order, but in secret Welles fantasized about the dire retribution awaiting Britain—“years of desolation, of dissolution, of suffering and blood.”13 Welles’s supporters started a whispering campaign against Lyons. “Among other devices,” wrote Lyons, “is that of representing me as having made the most violent and arrogant demands about the Peterhoff.” This led to an unpleasant encounter with Charles Sumner at a dinner party. The senator dragged Lyons into a corner and proceeded to rail at him for overstepping his prerogative. Lyons was dumbfounded at first, then swore he had never made anything resembling a demand. He finally offered to show Sumner copies of his correspondence with Seward.14
Lyons wondered whether he was wasting his efforts to bolster good relations between the two countries. “One hardly knows whether to wish the North success or failure in the field,” he had written to Russell during the Peterhoff affair.15 Yet the Confederacy was equally bitter against England, Lyons learned from the diplomatic bags that occasionally made it out of the South.19.2 “It ought to have been known here from the first, but was not, that England could be no friend to the Confederacy or its cause,” declared the Richmond Enquirer, for example. “We have been long in finding out the truth and, before we would admit it, have endured some humiliations and insolent airs on the part of that Power, which surprised us very much, but ought not to have done so. At last the thing has become too clear.”17
Southern rage against Britain placed Francis Lawley in a difficult position. He had completed his tour of the Confederacy and returned to Richmond at the end of March, but his report for The Times was taking longer than usual to compose. Anything less than unqualified praise, Lawley had discovered, was not tolerated by his hosts. He confided his exasperation to William Gregory. “I cannot impress upon you the difficulty which I find in the discharge of my present office, in avoiding topics which will be calculated