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To the British and French public at large, the War seemed to be dragging on and getting nowhere. This was equally true of the so-called Peace Conference in Vienna; in fact it was doubtful if the Allied Powers really wanted the talks to succeed, as their barely hidden agenda was to bring Austria into the coalition.
The Conference had convened on 15th March 1855 with the Austrian Foreign Mimister Count Buol presiding. For Russia, Prince Alexander Mikhailovitch Gorchakov was the intellectual of that august family. That may not be saying a lot judged by the intelligence publicly displayed by his two army cousins, but he was a proven astute diplomat and a skillful, wrong-footing negotiator.
Lord John Russell headed the British delegation. He had been Prime Minister for the six years of Whig government from 1846-52, but had been put out to grass in Vienna by Palmerston - there was no love lost between the two. Russell had headed the stampede which brought down the Aberdeen government in January and subsequently failed to form a government himself. His specialised knowledge of foreign affairs was limited to two months as Foreign Secretary at the beginning of Aberdeen's administration. It was a position which he not taken too seriously; he had only accepted it on the understanding that Aberdeen would yield the premiership to him shortly after taking office - when Aberdeen professed to have no recollection of such an undertaking, Russell resigned tempestuously. So there was absolutely no guarantee that what Russell said or agreed at the conference table would receive the ongoing backing of the British government; in fact the most likely scenario was that they would stab him in the back given half a chance.
For the French, Baron Bourqueney the local ambassador might just as well have been a cardboard cutout at the table - he had no authority to say anything without it being triple-checked through channels; this meant that there had to be a recess every time anything new was said. This was equally true for Aarif Effendi, the local man for Turkey. In response to pressure from the other nations, Napoleon sent his Foreign Minister Drouyn de Lhuys and the Sultan sent the Reis Effendi Ali Pasha. But the changes produced no better movement towards agreement.
The main sticking point was the amount of access to the Black Sea to be permitted to the combattants navies after the War. This after all was what the War was all about. What reductions was Gorchakov prepared to suggest? But the Prince was far too wily to sip from that poisoned chalice. The wrangles started, bogged down with arguments about whether fleet controls should be based on 'limitation' - set numbers of vessels - or 'counterpoise' equal numbers of ships between nations. Although Tsar Alexander would have preferred peace in order to press on with modernising the economy, as the new boy he was not going to give the impression he was a weakling who had tamely surrendered to Allied demands; besides Russia was doing well enough in the War to expect peace on equal terms. So Gorchakov categorically refused any unilateral limitation on Russian Naval presence in the Black Sea and the conference effectively broke up on 16th April. As a final throw, Buol came up with a compromise proposal incorporating both principles which he put to De Lhuys and Russell. The Russian Black Sea fleet was to be limited to its pre- war level, which could be matched by total allied ships - thereafter, all increases on one side could be matched by equal increases on the other.
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