The Victorians

by Jacob Rees-Mogg

  whether Christ came for such a wretched, weak sort of religion as that usually followed by the Christian world – a religion of grumpiness, spite, unhappiness, pharisaism, etc. I thought surely, if He did come and suffer, He came for a more effective religion than that; otherwise it must be confessed that as far as our life in this world is concerned, His mission failed in enabling His followers to overcome the world.

  From this distance it should be remembered that the England which provoked this reaction in Gordon was almost as alien to him as it is to the twenty-first century. This was a man who served far beyond her shores for nearly all his life, hardly unique in the age of Empire but Gordon’s reactions to contemporary British Christianity were filtered through his own experience of the great world. By this time, though only thirty-two, he had already seen a vast swathe of the world, in all its colour and diversity, so it is no surprise that he found standard models of British piety to be narrow and conventional in the extreme. It cannot be surprising, when seen in this light, that he should conceive of having his own personal and distinct hotline to God, one unencumbered by any institutional religion.

  This evolution of a private creed, however, was based firmly on biblical teaching. Dressing for dinner one evening, his eyes had fallen on his own Bible, lying open at the First Epistle of St John 4.15: ‘Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him, and he in God.’ This captured Gordon’s sense of God as essentially personal and interior and this understanding of the ‘indwellingness’ of God became the rock of Gordon’s faith and the foundation upon which all else came to be built. Later, such books as Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, with its essentially Catholic message of spirituality, sustained and developed his faith but the simplicity of the message, that anyone could come to and be with God through Christ, he never forgot.

  We can also argue that his faith, or this sense of a personal relationship with God, was essential to the coherence of Gordon’s life, enabling him to make sense of its travails. ‘Man’, he wrote to a friend, ‘is apt to rest on the Redemption, apart from the liberty which that Redemption gives. God did not redeem us to be feeble and weak but He redeemed us for His service, to joy in Him, to know Him in His thick darkness.’ As we shall see, Gordon was to know first-hand much of the ‘thick darkness’ that the Lord ordained for him.

  By the end of his life, his fullest exposition of Christian belief had become idiosyncratic, where, that is, it was not actually patently heretical. He came to believe in the pre-existence of the soul. The body was a ‘sheath’ in which the soul was placed at birth, to be awoken when union with Christ was achieved. This union could be effected in varied ways according to Gordon’s cosmology. Then, once this vision occurred, ‘the now raised and quickened soul will grope its way out of its shell’, Gordon declared, where ‘it will contend with the body, often being nearly extinguished but never quite, till the body gives up the struggle in natural death’ and the much longed-for homecoming is achieved. Gordon, as we shall see, almost met his own personal homecoming many times, before he finally achieved that which he greatly desired. There is a strong sense that much of his character was governed by his being so often and for so long denied this supreme goal of homecoming and union with God.

  From time to time, Gordon’s associates were taken aback or profoundly shocked by his suggestions on the nature of Christianity. Frederick Temple, future Archbishop of Canterbury, was Bishop of Exeter when he learned from Gordon that the progress of Christianity in Africa would be greatly facilitated if its representatives only had the wit to entertain some mild measure of polygamy there. More startling still, perhaps, to the ears of stolidly conventional Victorian Anglicans was the news that Catholics counted as Christians too. On the way to his own Calvary in the Sudan, Gordon repeated his message of Christian union to the men under him and the people he was protecting: ‘Catholics and Protestants are but soldiers in different regiments of Christ’s army, but it is the same army and we are all marching together.’

  Another crucial point to make is that Gordon, irrespective of the ‘heathen’ field in which he found himself, was never on a crusade. At least, not the sort of crusade which, in today’s conception of it, sought to pull down rather than shore up. As perhaps his surest biographer of recent times, John Pollock, recounts: ‘At one place [during his first stint as Governor-General of the Sudan] Gordon found a mosque had been turned into a powder magazine. “I had it cleared out and handed back with great ceremonies which have delighted the people: it is now endowed and in full swing.” Strong Christian though he was, he held that “the Mussulman worships God as well as I do, and is as acceptable, if sincere, as any Christian.” Man’s dominion was never the thing for Gordon and his mission was never merely his temporal masters.’

  What sort of man did this sure faith in God create? The one brought before King John IV of Ethiopia on 27 October 1879, following a month’s journey on a mule through the mountains to John’s capital at Debre Tabor. ‘“Do you know,” remarked John, eyeing Gordon, “[that] I could kill you on the spot if I liked?” “I am perfectly well aware of it,” Gordon replied, “Do so at once if it is your royal pleasure. I am ready.” “What, ready to be killed!” “Certainly”, Gordon had himself say in reply, “I am always ready to die, and so far from fearing you putting me to death, you would confer a favour on me by so doing, for you would be doing for me that which I am precluded by my religious scruples from doing for myself.”’

  Little wonder that W. T. Stead, the famed Victorian journalist, would write to Augusta of her brother’s death that it ‘had done more to make Christ real to people than if he had civilized a hundred Congos and smashed a thousand Mahdis’. He wished to set an example, in life and in death, and this is what he achieved. To understand who Gordon served and how and to remember how very differently he viewed his life and his mission it is necessary to examine his service to foreign empires which allows a fuller view of the nature of the Victorian imperialism he largely forswore.

  *

  The Crimean War consisted of rather more than the Charge of the Light Brigade and Florence Nightingale. It was part of a Great Game of politics playing out in the arenas of eastern Europe and the Mediterranean and Black seas, a game of strategy that pitted Russia against Britain and France, with a eddying host of allies on either side. It was the first war of its kind, one waged with such technological innovations as shells, fast rail transport and rapid telegraph-based communications. It was also a war darkened by military mismanagement and it sharpened the call in Britain itself for the professionalisation of the nation’s armed forces. A call that would be answered in part in the course of William Gladstone’s first administration.

  Charles Gordon arrived in the Crimea early in 1855 and his skills in reconnaissance and cartography saw him pressed into service at Balaklava, as part of the brutal siege of the great Russian naval base at Sebastopol. Here, British and French troops had become locked into a bitter, trench-bound war of attrition, this mere months after disaster had befallen the Light Brigade in the same place. Elizabeth Thompson’s painting The Roll Call captures the horror of Sebastopol and it caused a sensation in Britain. It portrays a muster of exhausted soldiers after a skirmish in the snow, the names of the living and the dead ticked off one by one.

  Gordon experienced his share of such military horror. His tasks were by their nature perilous. He was all too frequently under direct enemy fire from the walls of the fortress and he was wounded by sniper fire. In the summer of that year, he was in the front line of a great Anglo-French assault intended to take the city and end the siege and he found himself covered head to toe in mud and the blood of his companions. His reputation for courage under fire was forged at Sebastopol and as a result of his experiences there, he was honoured by both the British and French governments. He followed his experiences in the Crimea with quieter though at times tense service delineating the Russian–Ottoman border in Romania, helping to establish a Commiss
ion to manage the economically vital navigation of the Danube and later assisting in the demarcation of the Russian–Ottoman border in Armenia. Here, he embraced for the first time the then new medium of the camera. His evocative and atmospheric photographs of Armenian landscapes and people received much attention and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

  From late 1858, a spell of home service followed but this was never going to excite such a man. He begged for another foreign posting and as a result came his first visit to China, at first in the Queen’s service.

  *

  The First and Second Opium Wars have been mentioned en passant. They were Palmerston’s brainchild, even though he had left office by the time the first of these conflicts was concluded in 1842. Palmerston had returned to Downing Street in 1859 thus he was again in charge for a portion at least of the Second Opium War, which had broken out in the previous year. The years between the wars witnessed a rapid expansion of European economic activity in a China revealed now as militarily weak and politically divided but this activity, though profitable in itself, also had the effect of further heightening tension in the region.

  The Second Opium War was known at the time as the Arrow War, Arrow being the name of a British-registered but Chinese-crewed ship, which had under its previous master engaged in piracy. The seizure of her crew by the Chinese authorities at Canton in October 1856 was taken as a great insult by the British, especially given the fact that the Chinese had hauled down and damaged the ship’s British flag. Although the sailors were eventually released, no apology was forthcoming and the incident became a British pretext for war. The real goal was to entrench in fact the hitherto paper concessions Peking had made under the Treaty of Nanking which concluded the First Opium War. A war duly began, with the British bombarding Canton and destroying Chinese ships lying in the city’s harbour.

  The rising tensions at Canton, however, had not come at an especially opportune moment for the British. The unstable Whig-led government voted down a proposal to take the capture of the Arrow as grounds for war and, in the resulting General Election, Palmerston returned to office but in May 1857 the Indian Mutiny caused consternation in London. Troops bound for China were hastily redirected to India and it took a French intervention to bring the European war effort back onto an even keel.

  The war was bitter but in spite of various missteps and the lingering effects of the Mutiny, the Europeans always had the upper hand. By the time Gordon arrived at the new British territory of Hong Kong in 1860, the fighting was approaching its end. He was in time, however, to observe one of most notorious incidents in the war, albeit the one which may well have impelled the Chinese authorities to end their resistance. This was the burning of the Summer Palace near Peking in 1860. The Palace is generally considered to have been a wonder of Chinese architecture and garden design. It consisted of buildings and landscapes covering close to a thousand acres and was filled with Chinese art treasures. In September 1860, as an Anglo-French military force approached Peking, emissaries were sent ahead to negotiate the terms of a surrender. These emissaries were instead imprisoned, tortured and killed, so in October Lord Elgin, then the British representative in China, ordered the destruction of the Summer Palace as retaliation. The complex took three days to destroy and some three hundred members of the imperial staff were killed.

  Gordon was present as a Royal Engineers commander. He watched the French loot indiscriminately and in an undisciplined manner, the British destroy coolly and systematically. His account was stark and troubled:

  We went out, and after pillaging it, burned the whole place, destroying in a vandal-like manner most valuable property which [could] not be replaced for four millions. We got upwards of £48 apiece prize money … I have done well. The [local] people are very civil, but I think the grandees hate us, as they must after what we did to the Palace. You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one’s heart sore to burn them; in fact, these places were so large and we were so pressed for time, that we could not plunder them carefully. Quantities of gold ornaments were burnt, considered as brass. It was wretchedly demoralising work for an army.

  This is valuable testimony because his words cast a useful light on Gordon’s views of the entire event. He is a participant and he profits but it is difficult to argue that he takes part eagerly. He is not only aware of the destruction but aware too of the loss of patrimony and the needless violence. Most interestingly of all, he is aware of the Chinese themselves and of the differences between them. This is no slipshod account, but nuanced history.

  The destruction of the Summer Palace left its mark on the man, of this there can be no doubt, for Gordon never allowed troops under his command to loot in any of his subsequent campaigns. Upon the war’s close, Gordon organised a poor-relief fund for the local Chinese, much to the irritation of the resident mandarins. It was at this time too that Gordon mounted the pedestal from which no amount of envious slander from Strachey or anyone else has ever been able to dislodge him. For in short and providential order Gordon was to become commander of the ‘Ever Victorious Army’, in the service of the despotic Manchu regime and against, of all things, a species of evangelical Christianity in the shape of the Taiping. History is never anything other than curious in its ends and instruments.

  *

  By the time of Gordon’s arrival in China, the ferocious and unremittingly savage Taiping Rebellion was in its eleventh year. An odd amalgam of Christianity and local religions, the Taiping had various origins, not least zealous American Methodist missionaries who had laced the Gospel with a species of anti-British propaganda. Its leader, a farmer’s son named Hong Xiuquan, had taken to thinking of himself as being the younger brother of Christ. His followers rejoiced in the chance to revolt against the Qing dynasty which had ruled China since the seventeenth century but which now was staggering under the assault of wars, internal rebellion, famine and flood, not to mention an inadequate administration run by the regime itself.

  To many Chinese citizens, the Taiping could hardly have brought about an outcome worse than the one to which they had become miserably accustomed. To Taiping supporters outside China, not least among Britons ardent for Christian expansion, there was much to admire in them too. There was some Confucianism and Buddhism for devout Victorian Christians to overlook but there was also a Sabbath kept, hymns sung, idols smashed, the Commandments learned and prayers said. In reality, the scant information which made it back to London illuminated few facts about the Taiping and nothing at all about the inherent savagery of their methods. In taking Nanking in March 1853, to give just one horrifying example, its soldiers had slaughtered some 30,000 of the people of the city and they did not discriminate as to age or sex in the gruesome manner of murder.

  In May of that year, the Taiping had come close to seizing Peking itself. In the aftermath of this encounter, its army turned its attentions east and south and by 1861 the Taiping was approaching Shanghai. This thriving port city was home to the greatest concentration of British and foreign residents and businesses in China and now, in alarm and with haste, the merchants of the great entrepôt raised, with the blessing of Emperor Xianfeng, a militia-like army to defend their commercial interests. This militia they named the ‘Disciplined Chinese’ but the Chinese themselves soon renamed it the ‘Ever Victorious Army’. Palmerston had initially insisted that serving British officers not involve themselves in this enterprise and its first two commanders were dissolute Americans.

  Eventually, the disparate interests of the imperial Chinese, the British and the merchants of Shanghai coalesced so it was realised that the Ever Victorious Army, if it were to live up to its name, was in need of a professional military commander. One British administrator summed up the situation neatly. What was required was ‘a man of good temper, of clean hands, and a steady economist’. The hour and the man came together. Even at this perilous moment, elements within Whitehall grumbled as to the wisdom of Br
itish officers taking up roles within a Chinese fighting force, so much so that a directive countering Gordon’s appointment was sent from London but the vessel carrying the message was shipwrecked en route. Gordon had meanwhile seized the opportunity offered by providence.

  In his very first engagement, Gordon signalled his intent to be victorious. The scent of righteousness was in his nostrils and he won his first victory over the Taiping against a backdrop of the putrefying bodies of earlier, crucified Taiping victims, who had been all too evidently tortured with fire before their deaths. Gor-don became Ko-teng, ko translating as ‘offensive weapons’ and teng ‘to rise’, as appropriate a name for a commander of sappers as has ever been devised. Immediately, Gordon displayed all the traits which would mark his commands thereafter. He ensured that his men were paid, he banned liquor, he forbade looting and he refused for himself the imperial bounty which was the overwhelming reason why Westerners came to China in the first place.

  His experience with the Ever Victorious Army would establish Gordon’s reputation among his peers as an individual who could work with the indigenous population and work miracles. As Gordon himself remarked years later to his friend and fellow Strachey target Florence Nightingale, ‘I gained the hearts of my soldiers (who would do anything for me) not by justice etc. but by looking after them when sick, or wounded, and by continually visiting the hospital.’ This was extremely unusual at the time. Contemporary Western generals struggled to develop a habit of collegiality and empathy even with their ‘own’ men, to say nothing of local or ‘native’ troops. In Gordon’s expansive heart, however, there really was no conception of division between East and West.

  At every stage his humanity shone through. A British deserter from the Ever Victorious Army was ordered to be taken away and shot, ostensibly to prevent his sometime comrades from doing so on the spot. In truth, Gordon had the man shipped away to safety. In the Army’s assault on Quinsai, a strategically vital municipality perilously close to Shanghai itself, Gordon rescued a naked infant, who then clung to him for much of the battle. In due course, Gordon sent the child to be fostered at Shanghai and paid for his education.fn1