Dreadnought

by Robert K. Massie

  Of greater political significance than the guilt of Jameson was the extent of the involvement of Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary. These questions were the subject of a five-month inquiry by a Select Committee of the House of Commons in the spring of 1897. The raiders had been captured carrying copies of cipher telegrams which proved Rhodes’ complicity in the proposed Uitlander uprising and the preparations for the raid. He had not authorized Jameson’s decision to proceed; indeed, he had sent a cable halfheartedly telling him not to go. When Jameson went anyway, Rhodes acted as if he were horrified. “Old Jameson65 has upset my applecart,” he said. “Twenty years we have been friends and now he goes and ruins me.” Rhodes immediately resigned as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony and Managing Director of the Consolidated Gold Fields Company. In London, he appeared for six days before the Select Committee. He shouldered all the blame for the planning of the raid; when the Committee asked whether it was as Prime Minister or Managing Director that he had organized the incursion, Rhodes replied, “Neither.”66 He had done it solely “in my capacity as myself.”

  The Committee found it impossible to establish that Chamberlain had prior knowledge of the raid. In the Colonial Secretary’s favor was his immediate condemnation of the raid once he learned it was under way. While Rhodes was censured, Chamberlain and all other members of the Cape and British governments were exonerated. A few days after the inquiry ended, the House of Commons was shocked to find the Colonial Secretary rising to offer Cecil Rhodes a public testimonial. “As to one thing,67 I am perfectly convinced,” Chamberlain said. “That while the fault of Mr. Rhodes is about as great a fault as a politician or a statesman can commit, there has been nothing proved—and in my opinion there exists nothing—which affects Mr. Rhodes’s personal position as a man of honor.” (Cynics suggested that Rhodes had wrung these words from Chamberlain by threatening to disclose hitherto unseen documents.)

  Rhodes lived only six years after the raid. He suffered from cardiovascular disease, which he helped along by eating huge slabs of meat, drinking throughout the day, and smoking incessantly. His body near the end was bloated, his cheeks blotched and flabby, his eyes watery. His high-pitched voice became almost shrill; his handshake, offered with only two fingers of the hand extended, was weak; his letters, which had always ignored punctuation, left out words to the point of incoherence. He spent most of his time in his spacious Dutch farmhouse mansion, called Groote Schuur, at the foot of Table Mountain outside Cape Town. The rooms were beamed and paneled in dark teak and hung with African shields and spears. His vast bathroom of green and white marble boasted an eight-foot tub carved from solid granite. On his bookshelves he had placed the works of all the classical authors mentioned by Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Rhodes had ordered these authors translated for himself at a cost of £8,000. On his bedroom wall, Rhodes had hung a portrait of Bismarck.

  In 1896, when Groote Schuur was gutted by fire, Rhodes was told that there was bad news. He knew that Jameson was ill; now, his face white, he said, “Do not tell me68 that Jameson is dead.” When he heard about the fire, he flushed in relief. “Thank goodness,”69 he said. “If Dr. Jim had died, I should never have got over it.” Jameson was at Rhodes’ side in March 1902 when the Colossus, at forty-eight, met his own death. His last words were “So little done,70 so much to do.”

  Tension between the British and German governments ebbed quickly, although Lord Salisbury comprehended the potential danger that had been implicit in the situation. “The Jameson Raid71 was certainly a foolish business,” he said to Eckardstein. “But an even sillier business... was the Kruger Telegram.... War would have been inevitable from the moment that the first German soldier set foot on Transvaal soil. No government in England could have withstood the pressure of public opinion; and if it had come to a war between us, then a general European war must have developed.” As it was, the raid and the telegram altered the relationship between Great Britain and Imperial Germany. In the popular view of Englishmen, the raid was a daring effort to protect legitimate British interests. The Kaiser’s action had taken the British people entirely by surprise. Until publication of the telegram, Britons had traditionally looked upon France as the potential antagonist. The German Empire, ruled by the Queen’s grandson, was assumed to be England’s friend. The telegram indicated an unsuspected animosity. Feelings softened as time passed, but a residue of suspicion remained. The Princess of Wales declared to a friend that “in his telegram to Kruger,72 my nephew Willy has shown us that he is inwardly our enemy, even if he surpasses himself every time he meets us in flatteries, compliments, and assurances of his love and affection.” In Rome, Sir Francis Clare Ford, the British Ambassador, warned his German colleague Bernhard von Bülow that “England will not forget73 this box on the ear your Kaiser has given her.” When Bülow spoke of the many ties between the two countries, Ford explained that it was “just because of these many and intimate ties that the English people will not forgive your Kaiser this affront. The Englishman feels as a gentleman at a club might feel if another member—say his cousin with whom he played whist and drunk brandy and soda for many years—suddenly slapped his face.”

  The explosion of British anger, thoroughly reported in the German press, created its own backlash in Germany. One beneficiary was Tirpitz, who had opposed the sending of the telegram as unrealistic in view of Germany’s impotence at sea. What could Germany have done, he asked, if Hatzfeldt had taken back his passport? What could fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand German marines or soldiers do in Africa as long as Britain controlled the sea? Mahan’s thesis, that world power requires sea power, was glaringly displayed. “The incident may have its good side,”74 Tirpitz wrote to General von Stosch, his former superior as Navy Minister, “and I think a much bigger row would actually have been useful to us... to arouse our nation to build a fleet.” Years later, in his memoirs, the Grand Admiral concluded that “the outbreak of hatred,75 envy, and rage which the Kruger Telegram let loose in England against Germany contributed more than anything else to open the eyes of large sections of the German people to our economic position and the necessity for a fleet.”

  fn1 Today, Northern and Southern Rhodesia have become, respectively, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

  fn2 The commanders of the allied British and Prussian armies at Waterloo.

  Chapter 12

  “Joe”

  Lord Salisbury and Joseph Chamberlain worked together during the crisis of the Jameson Raid and Kruger Telegram, but the relationship between the two men had not always been amiable. As a young man, Chamberlain had flirted with republicanism. “The Republic must come1 and at the rate we are moving, it will come in our generation! I do not feel any great horror at the idea,” he had said. As a junior minister in Gladstone’s third government, Chamberlain had attacked the House of Lords. “The Divine Right of Kings—that2 was a dangerous delusion,” Chamberlain had declared, “but the divine right of peers is a ridiculous figment. We will never be the only race in the civilized world subservient to the insolent pretensions of an hereditary caste.” Chamberlain made his attack personal: “Lord Salisbury constitutes himself3 the spokesman... of the class to which he himself belongs, who toil not, neither do they spin, whose great fortunes, as in his case, have originated by grants made in times gone by for the services which courtiers rendered kings.”

  “Who toil not, neither do they spin”—the phrase rang through the nation. Lord Salisbury described the young Radical Liberal from Birmingham as “a Sicilian bandit.”4 When Chamberlain threatened a march on London by tens of thousands of his Birmingham constituents to protest the power of the House of Lords, Lord Salisbury suggested that Mr. Chamberlain himself should march in the van. “My impression,”5 Salisbury declared grimly, “is that those who will have to receive him will be able to give a very good account... and that Mr. Chamberlain will return from his adventure with a broken head if nothing worse.” Chamberlain accepted the challenge and p
roposed that Lord Salisbury lead the Tory combatants. “In that case6 if my head is broken, it will be broken in very good company.” He flung out another dare: “I would advise him7 [Lord Salisbury] to try another experiment.... He has had picnics at Hatfield... and picnics at half the noblemen’s seats in the country. Now let him try to picnic in Hyde Park. I will promise him that he will have a larger meeting than he ever addressed and that it will be quite unnecessary for him to go to the expense of any fireworks.”

  This firebrand now sat with Salisbury at the Cabinet table. Joseph Chamberlain was born on July 8, 1836, into a middle-class family south of the Thames in London. In school, he took prizes in mathematics and French, but when he was sixteen his father insisted that he end his formal education and enter the family business, making fine Spanish leather boots and shoes. Two years later, Joseph, again at his father’s request, went to live in Birmingham to help in a new metal-screw factory jointly owned by his father and uncle. For eighteen years, Chamberlain made screws; when he retired in 1872, his factory produced two thirds of all the metal screws manufactured in England. At thirty-six, a wealthy man, Joseph Chamberlain was able to concentrate on other things.

  Wistful about his own truncated training, he had a lifelong interest in education. When John Morley took him to visit Oxford and they had gone “round the garden walks,8 antique gates and ‘massy piles of old munificence,’” Chamberlain turned to Morley and said, “‘Ah, how I wish that I could have had a training in this place.’ Yet [Morley said] he came to be more widely read... than most men in public life.” Chamberlain’s concern was for children’s education. In 1870, 2 million of 4.3 million school-age children never attended school, and another million attended on a haphazard, intermittent basis. In Birmingham, children ran ragged, barefoot, and wild through the streets. Chamberlain became an advocate of compulsory, free education. While still making screws, he had been elected President of the Birmingham Board of Education. In 1870, as a private businessman, he had visited No. 10 Downing Street, where he had acted as spokesman for a delegation from the National Education League.

  Within a year of retirement from manufacturing, Joseph Chamberlain was Mayor of Birmingham. Although he held office only three years, he developed an absolute political control over the city which he maintained for the rest of his life. This gave him an advantage over other national politicians; their followings were scattered throughout Britain while Chamberlain’s was solidly concentrated in the middle class and urban proletariat of Birmingham and the Midlands. Here, his leadership was never challenged; where he led from one issue to another—even from one party to another—his followers marched behind.

  Chamberlain commanded this allegiance even though he scarcely looked like a social reformer or a friend of the workingman. Of medium height, with a pale, clean-shaven face, Chamberlain was a self-creation sartorially as well as politically. He wore elegant cutaways and topcoats, a red cravat drawn through a gold ring, and a fresh orchid pinned daily in his buttonhole. A gold-rimmed monocle attached to a black ribbon popped in and out of his right eye. Once in Birmingham, he appeared at a municipal meeting wearing a tailored sealskin topcoat. His fellow citizens admiringly called him a “swell”;9 in the city and in wider circles too, he was known as “the King of Birmingham.” In 1874, Mayor Chamberlain welcomed the Prince and Princess of Wales as visitors to Birmingham. Despite speculation in the Conservative press that the “Radical demagogue” who advocated a republic would show disrespect to the Heir to the Throne, Chamberlain ushered the royal couple through a parade, a reception, and a lunch at the Town Hall. Rising to toast the Prince, the Mayor declared, “Here in England10 the throne is recognized and respected as the symbol of all constituted authority and settled government.” Not long after, Chamberlain was invited to dine at Marlborough House.

  Chamberlain’s life, blessed by early business and political success, was marred by personal tragedy. He had married at twenty-five and again at thirty. Both of his young wives—who were themselves first cousins—had died in childbirth while producing sons.fn1 These shocks had left Chamberlain feeling that “it seems almost impossible11 to live.” Soon after his second wife died, a report went around Birmingham that he had been killed in a carriage accident. “Unfortunately,” he noted, “it wasn’t true12 and the friends who came to look at my remains, found me presiding over a Gas committee.”

  In the summer of 1876, at forty, Chamberlain was elected unopposed to Parliament. During the campaign, in a vituperative moment, he hurled abuse at the Conservative Prime Minister, Lord Beaconsfield. Beaconsfield, Chamberlain said, was “a man who never told the truth13 except by accident; a man who went down to the House of Commons and flung at the British Parliament the first lie that entered his head.” Subsequently, Chamberlain apologized in writing. Entering the Commons as a Radical member of the Liberal Party, Chamberlain, unlike most M.P.’s, had had experience administering the affairs of a large city. He understood the problems of housing, education, and sanitation as they affected the lives of the urban poor, and he aired these problems in Parliament. His audience, expecting a fiery Radical demagogue,14 were surprised by his incisive style. Chamberlain’s beliefs were passionate, but his speeches never passed the boundaries of logic. “His strength in debate,”15 reported a journalist, “was that he always attacked and never bothered to defend himself.” Observers “watched him and wondered16 what answer he would give to this or that seemingly unanswerable point made by an opponent. In nine cases out of ten, he made no answer, but by the time he sat down, he had changed the entire issue and now the question was what answer the next man was going to make to him.” When he was challenged, Chamberlain’s figure stiffened and a cool smile fixed itself on his face. The impresssion was of “a man of obvious mystery17 with rather frightening qualities held in leash... his voice was fascinating, but it had a dangerous quality to it, and a sentence begun in a low tone, would come to a trenchant conclusion with something like a hiss.”

  When the Liberals returned to power in 1880, Gladstone discovered that Chamberlain, an M.P. for only four years, expected to be in the Cabinet. After negotiations which included a threat from Chamberlain to lead a Radical splinter party if he was not included, Gladstone made him President of the Board of Trade. The government was Liberal, but the member from Birmingham found himself sitting at a Cabinet table with men quite different from himself. Half his colleagues were peers; three fourths were hostile to his proposals for social reform. Nevertheless, the arrangement succeeded. When Chamberlain struck too harsh a note or advanced farther on a path than his colleagues would follow, the Prime Minister wrote him a fatherly note, stressing the need in politics for moderation and compromise.

  In 1886, Gladstone decided to crown his long public career by giving Home Rule to Ireland. A separate and independent parliament was to sit in Dublin with full powers of taxation and appointment of magistrates and other officials. The British Parliament in London, stripped of Irish members, would retain control of defense and foreign affairs. Chamberlain, hearing Gladstone’s proposal, was dismayed. In his view, “the Irish people are entitled18 to the largest measure of self-government consistent with the continued integrity of the Empire.” But Gladstone, he thought, had gone too far. “It was mischievous or worse,”19 Chamberlain said, “to talk of maintaining the unity of the Empire while granting Home Rule.” He cited the precedent of the American Civil War: “To preserve the Union,20 the Northern States of America poured out their blood and treasure like water.... If Englishmen still possess the courage... we shall maintain unimpaired the effective Union of the three kingdoms that owe allegiance to the British Crown.” As Gladstone plowed ahead, Chamberlain argued, again using the American example. Perhaps Britain, like America, should adopt a system of federalism: England, Scotland, and Ireland could each have its own parliament with certain powers, as the American state legislatures did. But it would not do for one nation, Ireland, to become almost independent, while the other two were not. Compro
mise became impossible. On March 26, 1886, Chamberlain resigned from the government and when the House voted, June 8, on Home Rule, Chamberlain led forty-six Liberal Imperialists into the lobby against the government. The bill failed, the government fell, and the Liberal party was split.

  Chamberlain’s action had dire consequences for himself as well as for his party. He was, after Gladstone, the most popular Liberal politician in Britain. Had he supported Gladstone on Home Rule, he would have succeeded to the leadership of the party and, one day, to the Premiership. As leader of a splinter faction, siding often with the Conservatives, he threw that chance away. Chamberlain never tried to reinstate himself. On the contrary, to the amazement and outrage of his former friends, he turned all his oratorical artillery against Gladstone and the Liberals. “It was unthinkable,”21 wrote the journalist J. L. Garvin, describing the Liberal view of this apostasy. “Weapons made in their own arsenal, talents so obviously designed for the destruction of their opponents, a disposition so obviously Radical, a habit of speech so clearly intended for the chastening of dukes and Tories; that all this should be taken and placed at the disposition of the Tory Party was unheard of, impossible.” He was accused of betraying the cause of the people for the society of duchesses. He was compared, unfavorably, to Judas: “Judas, after betraying his Master,22 did not attend public meetings; he did not revile his associates... he did not go swaggering about Judea saying he had now joined the gentlement of Jerusalem. No, Judas was contrite; he was ashamed; he went out and hanged himself.” Irish members of the Commons stared at his infuriating monocle and orchid and screamed “Traitor!”23 and “Judas!” whenever he rose to speak. Once, when Chamberlain was firing directly at Gladstone, a mass of enraged Irishmen charged him from their benches. Fists flew, hats toppled, and Chamberlain was quite unmoved. To him, politics was a kind of warfare; beliefs must always be passionate; there must be “no fraternizing24 in the trenches and no wandering about in no-man’s land.”