ABSTRACT

For much of the later nineteenth-century Britain regarded Russia as its main international rival, particularly as regarded the security of its colonial possessions in India. The Foreign Office remembered Benckendorffs grief in 1905, at the news of Hardinge being replaced by Sir Arthur Nicolson at the Petersburg embassy: it had required a personal letter from Hardinge to reassure the ambassador that his transfer did not signal an about-face in the British political course. Iswolsky and Benckendorff tried to restrain their natural desire to dictate to their former subordinate, but both wanted to continue steering Russian foreign policy. Sazonovs letters to Benckendorff are curt, their content restricted to the current political matters directly related to Anglo-Russian relations. Iswolsky resigned on the eve of the Potsdam meeting of the Russian and German emperors in the autumn of 1910. The count pleaded the British case in a more circumlocutory way, appealing to Russia's interests rather than to her chivalrous obligations.