u/jckgct provided a related response that pointed out that the English government basically supported the confederates. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kjvyf/how_did_the_rest_of_the_world_react_to_the/cbpq0xj/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

In summary, both the English and the French Governments spent years deliberating on whether to recognise the Confederacy. They wanted the South to split off to make America weak and their own powers stronger. It required a lot of diplomatic effort from both sides to try to force a decision. Ultimately they decided to wait until the Confederacy won independence as a permanent settlement rather than intervene and side with a losing party.

In the beginning of the war, the South thought they had England in their pocket because “Cotton is King”. But the working class English didn’t like slavery and didn’t want to see England fight to help slavery survive. So the British government didn’t want to directly intervene by sending troops to fight on behalf of a slave nation. More importantly, the Union army ultimately won on the battlefields thus preventing Europeans from recognising Confederate independence.

England sold an immense amount of armaments to the Confederacy. Roughly a million rifles. Plus many other weapons and wartime supplies. So, they certainly were no neutral bystander nor any friend to the federal government.

John Hay and John Nicolay were Lincoln’s personal secretaries and they wrote a massive biography of Lincoln after the war. They spent a lot of time covering this topic as it consumed the Lincoln administration with many difficulties. The name of that book is Lincoln: A History.