ABSTRACT
Palmerston had finally come to realise that the potential risk of disaster more than outweighed the immediate political or distant strategic benefits of a strictly naval strike against the core of Russia’s hardened defences with the full might of the Royal Navy. Whatever Palmerston in his jaunty mood may say, reflected the British Foreign Secretary in 1856, British could not have made war alone, for it should have had all Europe against us at once and the United States would soon have followed in the train. The difficulty was applying force to suppress national movements from the springtime revolutions of 1848 to the Indian mutiny to the American Civil War. The Great Armament proved that looks could be deceiving, and that Victorian Britain’s technological leaps forward and industrial superiority did not necessarily translate into quick, much less total, victory, before, during or after the Crimean War the so-called Cherbourg Strategy extrapolated for the benefit of modern audiences today.
