Читать книгу The Life of Florence Nightingale - Edward Tyas Cook - Страница 35

Public affairs in Greece interested her also. She had arrived in Greek waters at the height of the “Pacifico crisis.” There had been a rupture between England and Greece, which threatened also the relations between England and France, and which convulsed political parties at Westminster, over the claims of Mr. Finlay, the historian of modern Greece, and Don Pacifico, a native of Gibraltar. Lord Palmerston had ordered the Mediterranean Fleet to the Peiraeus to enforce the British claims, and Miss Nightingale was sitting beside Mr. Wyse, the British Minister at Athens, at dinner on board H.M.S. Howe, when the submission of the Greek Government was brought to him. Her home letters throw much light on the ins and outs of this affair, which, however, is now only remembered as the occasion of Lord Palmerston's vindication in the House of Commons with its famous peroration about Civis Romanus sum. Miss Nightingale now, as earlier, was a strong Palmerstonian. “The friends of Broadlands,” she wrote to her parents, “need never have been less uneasy for his reputation”; and if parliamentary success be a sufficient test, she was entirely right. She found herself again in the thick of political discussion on leaving Greek waters. Her party sailed from Athens on June 17, and went to Trieste by Corfu—“that fairy island,” she wrote, “where every flower grows twice as big as it does anywhere else, and where no frost can touch the olive and the pomegranate.” She and her parents were acquainted with Sir Henry Ward, then Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands. Sir Henry, who had been an active Liberal at home, had felt himself obliged to adopt sternly repressive measures in the islands. Miss Nightingale was opposed to his policy, as also to the British occupation. He invited her and her friends to the Palace. She went to proffer excuses. “He came out, said that I had often called him ‘Tyrant,’ and took me in his arms like a father, and stood over me in the character of Tyrant (he said) till I had written a letter compelling them all to come, which he then sealed and I sent. So the whole posse comitatus of us spent the day there, they sending the carriage for us, and I am really glad to have seen what is my idea of Eastern luxury.” The tyrant placed his accuser next to him at dinner, deplored his “false position,” and so forth, and they made some sort of peace; though not perhaps till Miss Nightingale had sought to bring him to a conviction of sin for his executions and arbitrary arrests, for she was armed, as her letters show, now as ever, with all the facts and figures marshalled in Blue-book precision.