The Letters of Queen Victoria/Volume 3/Chapter 23/To Earl Clarendon 9 January 1854

by Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria to the Earl of Clarendon.

WINDSOR CASTLE, 9th January 1854. The Queen thanks Lord Clarendon for his letter just received with the enclosures.

As the proposed answer to the Emperor contains perhaps necessarily only a repetition of what the Queen wrote in her former letter,^[1] she inclines to the opinion that it will be best to defer any answer for the present—the more so, as a moment might possibly arrive when it would be of advantage to be able to write and to refer to the Emperor’s last letter.

With respect to the Persian Expedition^[2] the Queen will not object to it—as the Cabinet appears to have fully considered the matter, but she must say that she does not much like it in a moral point of view. We are just putting the Emperor of Russia under the ban for trying “to bring the Sultan to his senses” by the occupation of part of his territory after a diplomatic rupture, and are now going to do exactly the same thing to the Shah of Persia!

1. See ante, vol. ii, pp. 459, 461, 464.
2. Under the belief that Persia had declared war against Turkey, and that diplomatic relations between England and Persia were suspended, the Cabinet had agreed upon the occupation of the Island of Karak by a British force.