It almost seemed as if the old man would be prime minister forever, but at last in 1865 he died. Room for many new ideas and new men was made. Some ten years later the author of Tancred succeeded to the premiership. “Mr. Disraeli,” the Queen discovered with pleasure, “has very large ideas and very lofty views of the position this country should hold.” Mr. Disraeli saw the Canal as an imperial pathway to the East, and he resolved that it should be controlled by Britain. In a stroke so bold, so individual that one can conceive of no other statesman of the time who could have done it, he bought the Canal for Britain on barely a few days’ notice.
“Zeal for the greatness of England,” said Lord Salisbury on Disraeli’s death, “was the passion of his life.” As Alroy had been his ideal ambition, England was his ideal Israel. Odd that, by acquiring the Suez Canal for England, he should have started the Intermediary Power on the path that was to reopen Palestine to the real Israel.
The circumstances were sudden. The Khedive Ismail, Mehemet’s grandson, was bankrupt. Agents rumored that his shares in the Canal might be offered for sale and that the French were negotiating. A telegram to the Foreign Office confirmed that the Khedive would sell; the price was £4,000,000. Disraeli dined with Rothschild. Then he called the Cabinet. His private secretary, Montagu Corry, was waiting outside the room for a prearranged signal. When Disraeli put his head outside the door and said “Yes” Corry went off to New Court to tell Rothschild that the Prime Minister wanted £4,000,000 “tomorrow.”
Rothschild paused, so runs Corry’s account, ate a grape, and asked: “What is your security?”
“The British Government.”
“You shall have it.”
Next day Disraeli had a letter confirming the loan, £1,000,000 down on December 1, less than a week off, and the remainder during December and January, the banker to receive 2½ per cent commission and 5 per cent interest until the advance was repaid. The Queen was in “ecstasies,” the Times was “staggered,” the country on the whole, except for Mr. Gladstone, enthusiastic. The Queen’s “Uncle Leopold,” king of the Belgians, felicitated Victoria on “the greatest event of modern politics,” and her daughter, the Crown Princess of Germany, wrote enclosing a letter from the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, then sixteen:
“Dear Mama: I must write you a line because I know you will be so delighted that England has bought the Suez Canal. How jolly! Willy.”
Parliament met and, after hearing Disraeli defend his purchase of the Canal as a vital link in the chain of fortresses along the road to India, voted the £4,000,000 without a division. Thereafter the hinterland of the Canal, “from the Nile to the Euphrates,” was to be an area of acute sensitivity to Britain. To hold the Ottoman gates against any rival intruders was now more than ever essential, unless Britain were prepared to take over the Nile-to-the-Euphrates region herself. For fear of offending France, in view of French interests in Syria and Egypt, and in view of the anti-imperialism of the Liberals at home, this was not yet feasible. The only possibility was to keep the Sick Man on his feet and sufficiently upright to keep Russia off his back.
But already there were rumbles from the North. A Bulgarian revolt in 1875 against the Turkish despotism acted on Russia like that ringing of the bell that makes the dog’s mouth salivate. It has set “everything again in flame,” wrote Disraeli, “and I really believe the Eastern Question that has haunted Europe for a century … will fall to my lot to encounter—dare I say to settle?” The “peace with honour” that he brought back with such renown from the Congress of Berlin was the result of this encounter. But to “settle” the Eastern Question was beyond even Disraeli’s power—beyond, it seems, any human power, for it still haunts the world today. However, one result of Disraeli’s efforts was the acquisition of Cyprus, 150 miles off the coast of Palestine, as quid pro quo for the British guarantee of Turkey’s dominions in Asia. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877 provided the opportunity, but, on the useful principle of sidestepping all Balkan wars whenever possible, let us hasten to its conclusion. Turkey was beaten, Russia occupied her European provinces, and the powers called a Congress to limit Russia’s gains.
Why did not Britain fight in support of Turkey, this time as before? For one thing, she nearly did. Russophobia reached the wildest extremes. The Queen, at the prospect of Russian entry into Constantinople, described herself as “feeling quite ill with anxiety” and expressed her “great astonishment and her extreme vexation and alarm at this, and must solemnly repeat, that if we allow this, England would no longer exist as a great power!!”
The music halls resounded with the chorus:
We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do—
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the guns,
we’ve got the money too—
Russia shall not have Con-stan-ti-nople!
The “Jingoists” were all for war. But the Cabinet was split, and so was the country, for by this time Turkophobia was raging too. Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria had so inflamed public opinion, at least that part of it represented by the Liberals, that to make a public ally of Turkey was impossible. Who could withstand the crashing chords of Mr. Gladstone in that most intoxicated of all his perorations, the pamphlet on the Bulgarian Horrors? The Turk, he roared, was “the one great anti-human specimen of humanity,” who had blackened Europe with his “fell Satanic orgies, his ferocious passions, his daily gross and incurable misgovernment.” The government’s policy of preserving Turkish rule simply meant “immunity for her unbounded savagery, her unbridled and bestial lust,” a continuation of “fiendish misuse” of power, of “loathsome tyranny” of men “incorrigible in sin.” Let it be over. Let them clear out of Europe with “their Bimbashis and their Yuzbashis, their Kaimakanis and their pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, from the province they have desolated and profaned.” There was not a criminal in a European gaol, not a cannibal in the South Sea islands, whose indignation would not rise at a recital of Turkish crimes. The Turks must be driven from the soil they have left “soaked and reeking with blood,” for nothing less can bring relief “to the overcharged emotion of a shuddering world.”
Obviously this specter at whom cannibals shuddered was far from a suitable ally; nevertheless when the Russian fleet approached Constantinople Disraeli managed to overcome Cabinet opposition sufficiently to send the British fleet into the Bosporus, bring up Indian reinforcements as far as Malta, and call out the reserves. Punch portrayed him standing with Britannia at the edge of a precipice labeled “War” and asking her to move “just a leetle nearer.” Lord Derby agreed with Punch and resigned, allowing Disraeli, at last, to appoint a foreign secretary in his own image: his future successor as prime minister, Lord Salisbury.
Lord Salisbury was the architect of the secret treaty by which Cyprus was acquired and Turkey’s dominions in Asia guaranteed. Even before he assumed office Disraeli and Layard, the Mesopotamian archaeologist, now ambassador to Constantinople, had been privately searching for “some territorial station conducive to British interests” which the Sultan in his extremity could be induced to assign to England. Many years before, during the Eastern crisis of 1840, the Times had carried public correspondence on the suggestion that Britain should annex Cyprus and Acre in compensation for the aid then rendered the Sultan in recovering Syria from Mehemet Ali. History was now offering a second chance under very similar circumstances, and Disraeli was not the man to hesitate. “These are times for action,” he says in a private letter. “We must control and even create events.”
Cyprus was a small place, and it was never developed into a military base as Disraeli and Salisbury had intended. Its importance is rather in having carried Britain a long step forward toward Palestine. A distinguished diplomatic historian* believes it to be a “reasonable assumption that in securing Cyprus for Britain, Disraeli felt that sooner or later the step would bring Palestine and Syria within the orbit of British control.”
The reasoning behind the step is stated with stern precision
by Salisbury.
In a letter to Layard he warned that Turkey ruled over places vital to British security, including the neighborhood of the Suez Canal; that the Turkish government was now almost entirely subject to Russia; that the Sultan’s only chance to maintain himself in Asia was to secure the alliance of England; and that if England hoped to keep Russia off the road to India she must make such an alliance with Turkey.
“We shall have to choose between allowing Russia to dominate over Syria and Mesopotamia or taking the country for ourselves, and either alternative is formidable.”
I have inserted the italics to mark a moment in history when a decision was being made, a return to the goal from which Richard I, hiding his eyes from Jerusalem, had turned back. Alone at his Foreign Office desk, the black-bearded, frock-coated Salisbury writes it down, his pen scratching in the silence of the room. This alternative, though not then acted on, became inevitable from then on.
For the moment Salisbury proposed, instead of either alternative, a defensive alliance with Turkey, “but for that purpose it is absolutely and indispensably necessary that she [England] should be nearer at hand than Malta.” Four days’ sail from Malta to the Syrian coast makes “utterly impossible efficient and prompt military action.” The Turks must cede Cyprus as the price of an alliance. However unpalatable, an alliance is necessary, for any lesser promise that would not bind the Liberals would allow the Middle East to slip away. An alliance “will pledge the national honour of England” so that “when the moment of decision comes” no peace-at-any-price party can urge the government of the day not to act; a “direct national promise” will have to be honored.
On June 4, 1878 the Cyprus Convention was signed, pledging Britain to defend “by force of arms” any attempt by Russia “at any future time to take possession of any further territories of H.I.M. the Sultan in Asia”—and engaging the Sultan to cede Cyprus “to be occupied and administered by England.”
With this document safely in their pockets Disraeli and Salisbury went off to Berlin to join the other European powers in tightening an international noose that forced Russia to disgorge the gains ill gotten from defeated Turkey. “Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann,” said Bismarck in reluctant admiration. Disraeli, for his part, found the German Chancellor with “one hand full of cherries and the other full of shrimps, eaten alternatively, complaining he cannot sleep and must go to Kissingen.” When all delicate issues of the Congress were finally wrapped up in treaties, Disraeli revealed to a stunned but generally appreciative Europe the existence of the Cyprus Convention.* It was hard not to applaud this one more daring stroke of the old master that so largely restored British prestige in the East. It “made a great impression on the world and greatly rejoiced the friends of England,” wrote the invaluable King Leopold to Victoria. The Queen was so delighted that she offered Disraeli a dukedom.
There were exceptions. Prince Gortchakoff of Russia went away “deeply disappointed and dejected.” At home, a friend reported to Disraeli, the Liberals “have been raving about the awful crime you have committed,” calling it unconstitutional and threatening a dissolution. Gladstone fumed, protesting that no despot would have dared do what Disraeli had done, that he had overstepped the ministerial prerogative, that the secret negotiations were “an act of duplicity,” and that by so far extending Britain’s responsibilities he had committed her to an “insane covenant.”
Disraeli was stung to the memorable retort that if it were a question of insanity, the more likely candidate was a “sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.” As to the wisdom of the guarantee of Turkey-in-Asia, he replied that it was better to warn aggressors in advance at what line Britain would stand firm and say “Thus far and no farther.” That was what the Cyprus Convention had done; it was well done, and he would stand by it. He was upheld by Parliament, which, despite a further heavy dose of Gladstonian oratory, endorsed the treaty. And it had the desired effect. Russia was stopped from attempting any further advances through European Turkey toward the Mediterranean or through Asia Minor toward Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Persian Gulf. It would be pleasant to be able to say with Mr. Buckle, Disraeli’s biographer, writing in 1920, that these movements were “definitely stopped and have never been renewed by arms,” but, as of 1955, one wonders.
As far as the nineteenth century was concerned, Russia was soon to be finished as a serious threat to the British Empire. Gladstone himself opened the way for Germany to take its place. His horror of imperial commitments led him to try vainly to abrogate the Cyprus Convention as soon as he came to office in 1880. Frustrated in this by Parliament, he could at least, in his detestation of everything Turkish, sever all British contact with the horrid Turk. He recalled Layard from Constantinople, allowed British influence at the Porte to lapse altogether, and alienated Turkey into the waiting arms of the Kaiser, whose glittering gaze was already fixed on a Berlin-to-Bagdad path of empire of his own.
Disraeli was dead by this time. But Palestine was within the British orbit.
*Sir James Headlam-Morley, C.B.E., Historical Adviser to the Foreign Office, in his Studies in Diplomatic History.
*Evidence that Disraeli intended to bring the question of Palestine, together with a plan for restoring the Jews, before the Congress has recently been brought forward. Its authenticity is dubious. On the basis of newly found memoirs of the period a claim is made that Disraeli was the author of an anonymous German pamphlet published in Vienna in 1877 under the title Die jüdische Frage in der orientalischen Frage (The Jewish Question within the Eastern Question) which proposed that in any reapportionment of the Turkish territories following a collapse of the Ottoman Empire Palestine should be given to the Jews, and further that Disraeli proposed to put such a plan on the Agenda of the Congress but was dissuaded by Bismarck. The evidence has been published by Dr. N. W. Gelber in a Hebrew brochure, subsequently translated by T. H. Gaster as Lord Beaconsfield’s Plan for a Jewish State, New York, 1947. But Mr. Cecil Roth, a leading English authority on Jewish history, in his life of Disraeli (1951) pokes several large holes in its credibility. He finds the anonymity, the appearance in German, the withdrawal at Bismarck’s request, all unlikely and the lack of any mention in the Beaconsfield papers or the papers relating to the Congress inexplicable if the authorship were in reality Disraeli’s. Certainly if Disraeli had elected at the height of his power to put the theme of Alroy into practical politics he would not have gone about it anonymously, secretly, and in a foreign language.
CHAPTER XV
THE EAGLES GATHER:
The Sultan’s Dilemma
The intrusion of Germany among the contenders for the Turkish inheritance, the growth of England as a power in the Moslem world, and the first appearance of Jewish colonizers infiltrating Palestine, all combined to exacerbate the Sultan’s nerves. His problem was to hold on to his slipping dominions. He needed support. But whom could he invite in who would not settle down as a permanent resident and take over the house? He was frightened of England, he considered the Jews; in the end he plumped for Germany.
“Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together.” When Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia, the future emperor of Germany, turned up in Jerusalem it was a feather in the wind that promised the arrival of a new eagle to join the group hovering over the Turkish body. Unser Fritz visited Jerusalem in 1869, shortly after the visit of his brother-in-law the Prince of Wales. Some thirty years later his son, Kaiser Wilhelm II, came on a much more imposing visit, a royal progress through Palestine culminating in the Sultan’s gift to him of lands at Jerusalem. The gift was symbolic. By this time the Kaiser was the new kingpin on the Continent. The Sultan had made his choice and doomed his empire.
Imperial Turkey went down with Imperial Germany in the defeat of 1918. Sultan Abdul Hamid’s shift away from Britain in favor of what seemed a more promising protector in Germany at last accomplished the crash that Europe had been awaiting for a hundr
ed years. The crash freed Palestine from centuries of Moslem neglect and opened a new era in its history. Britain, as the conqueror on the spot, became, at least temporarily, the inheritor of Turkey-in-Asia. But if the Turks had not gone in on the wrong side, this might never have happened. And logically, if England’s consistent policy from Pitt down to the eve of 1914 had any logic, Turkey should have been allied with England on the winning side. If she had been, what, one wonders, would have been the modern fate of Palestine?
Fortunately British diplomacy failed; Turkey chose the loser; and at last the Ottoman Empire, which for nearly five hundred years had, first in strength and then in senility, harassed the West, was destroyed. The result was of lasting benefit to everyone concerned, not the least to the Turkish people themselves. Once rid of a corrupt autocracy, they were able to prove themselves in the remarkable rejuvenation of their country, the most virile and capable nation of the Middle East.
The roots of Imperial Turkey’s wrong choice, which was so vitally to affect the fate of Palestine, go back to the Congress of Berlin. Abdul Hamid was hardly happy in having to accept British protection under the conditions of the Cyprus Convention. He began to feel that he could improve upon the Porte’s traditional policy of accepting a British embrace in order to avoid a Russian rape. He was impressed by the choice of Berlin as the seat of the Congress and by the prestige that accrued to Prince Bismarck as its presiding officer. Here was a new rising power on the Continent and one that had so far no history of Eastern ambitions. The fact that Germany up to 1880 had shown no Eastern longings should not have deceived the Sultan as to the future. As soon as Prussia reached the position of a great power at the head of a federated Germany she became afflicted with the Eastern disease as chronically as Russia, France, or England. In 1888 Willy, who had thought it so “jolly” that England had bought the Suez Canal, came to the throne as the Emperor Wilhelm II. He soon had a no less jolly Eastern dream of his own: the Berlin-to-Bagdad railway. Though coming late on the scene of imperial expansion eastward, he made up for it in pushfulness.
Bible and Sword: England and Palestine From the Bronze Age to Balfour Page 28