Lord Derby, who so far had gone unwillingly with his chief in his new policy of imperial adventure, now would go no further with him and left the Foreign Office, and, as we have seen, was replaced by Lord Salisbury. It was the signal of a general diplomatic advance, not unaccompanied with menace. The British fleet was brought through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmora, the Russian army was overawed and prevented from entering Stamboul, and under pressure of the English demonstration a treaty of peace was hurriedly drawn up between the Czar and the Sultan, the treaty of San Stefano.
On the side of Egypt, at the same time, an official Commission of Inquiry was appointed, which, though nominally international, was intended at the Foreign Office to be mainly an English one, my friend Sir Rivers Wilson being chosen as English commissioner. His appointment was, I believe, almost the first Lord Salisbury signed on taking the command in Downing Street.
It will also be remembered that two months later a secret convention was negotiated at Constantinople by our then Ambassador, Sir Henry Layard, a man of great ability and knowledge of the East, who had acquired the personal confidence of the still youthful Sultan, Abdul Hamid, in accordance with which the island of Cyprus was leased to England and a guarantee given to the Sultan of the integrity of all his Asiatic provinces in lieu of promises of reform to be enforced by the presence in Asia Minor of certain ambulant English consuls, military men, who were to give advice and report grievances.
The idea of the Cyprus Convention, certainly in the minds of Disraeli and Salisbury who signed it and of Layard its true author, was to establish informally but none the less effectually an English protectorate over Asiatic Turkey. The acquisition of Cyprus was in their view to be the smallest part of the bargain. The island was really of very little value to England as a *place