The Making of a Russophobe: David Urquhart - The Formative Years, 1825–1835

Abstract

'the policy of Russia has long been impregnated with the spirit of deadly hostility to England' asserted the leader writer in the Morning Herald in October 1838.1 Similar comments about Russia were a regular feature of the editorials of almost all of the major daily and periodical publications in England at that time. From small indications of suspicion and antipathy in the 1 820s, a nearly universally expressed fear and hatred of Russia had emerged ten years later. So intense was this feeling that less convinced contemporaries, recognizing that it was much more than the usual dislike of all that was strange and foreign, referred to it as Russophobia.2 Historians have studied this phenomenon in various ways. They have sought to investigate its effect upon the formulation of British foreign policy; they have tried to explain its origins and what fed and stimulated it during the 1830s and at subsequent periods during the nineteenth century. Some have put great emphasis upon the conflicting economic policies of the two states, others on the growing rivalry in the Near East and Central Asia, and others on the different internal political systems.3 On one point, however, there has been widespread agreement, that in the 1830s one man and his collaborators were largely responsible for the initial surge of Russophobia. That man was David Urquhart. One of the few contemporaries who tried to stem the tide of Urquhart's influence, Richard Cobden, wrote in 1836: 'One active mind [i.e.