Victor Buckley

Victor Buckley (1838-1882) was a British Foreign Office official, suspected of being an agent for the Confederate cause during the American Civil War. Family background He was born at Minstead Lodge in the New Forest on 28 April 1838 - the fifth and youngest son of Captain (later General) Edward Pery Buckley. The General, a Waterloo veteran, was for over twenty years an equerry to Queen Victoria, and appears in her early diary entries. The Queen was Buckley's godmother - the first child to receive this honour after her accession. His grandfather, Lord Radnor, had been a leader of the radical Whigs at the beginning of the century. Buckley was brought up at New Hall, Bodenham, Wiltshire, which his father inherited from a cousin a few years after he was born. Entry into the Foreign Office In December 1856, after leaving Eton, Buckley took the examination before the Civil Service Commissioners, and on 12 January 1857 was appointed Junior (4th Class) Clerk. He was the first of the clerks to be appointed under the new system whereby all prospective clerks were required to pass an examination. Buckley was assigned to the department that had responsibility for matters relating to the United States. The American Civil War broke out in the spring of 1861. The accusation In 1911, Henry Brooks Adams, one of Charles Francis Adams's sons, delivered a paper to the Massachusetts Historical Society, titled The Seizure of the Laird Rams. He had acted as his father's unofficial private secretary during his term as the North's minister in London in 1861–68. His father had struggled to get the British government, as a neutral state, to recognise that the building of ships in British dockyards that would be used against the North was against the spirit, if not the letter, of the existing law. In July 1862, his father finally persuaded Lord Russell, the Foreign Secretary, to order the seizure of CSS Alabama, the most powerful warship ever built in British dockyards. However, as the telegram ordering its seizure was on its way, the ship escaped. Adams suspected that its crew had been warned. The Alabama went on to inflict enormous damage on Northern merchant shipping.