This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  1886–1901

  Britain had an empire, dominions and colonial dominions. Thus foreign policy occupied nearly as much Cabinet time as did domestic policy. Now, the Cabinet concentrated on the Middle East. Britain and France had joint rule in Egypt that produced an uneasy Franco–British alliance, which reflected a century of competition between the two in the territory that we would in the twenty-first century distinguish as Egypt and Sudan. In the 1880s an uprising led by Colonel Arabi Pasha (1839–1911) warned there was every possibility of a nationalist rebellion in Egypt. Arabi Pasha was an officer promoted from the ranks and came to local prominence during Egypt’s war against Ethiopia in 1875. Turkey ‘owned’ Egypt at this time; it was part of the famous and, for the Egyptians, unpopular Ottoman Empire. Arabi Pasha led, in 1891, a rebellion against the Turkish governor in Cairo. Alarms bells rang in Paris and London and they were forced to respond when the Turks asked for help in defending the governor’s position against the rebels. Arabi Pasha was defeated at Tel el-Kebir by Sir Garnet Wolseley (1833–1913), captured and exiled to what was then Ceylon, later Sri Lanka. Rebellion was not confined to Arabi Pasha’s ambition. There was also a fanatic of sorts, Muhammad Ahmad, known as the Mahdi, or ‘the guided one’. Very quickly the Mahdi had control of most of the Sudan. Gladstone saw the Sudanese rebellion as a ‘struggle for freedom’. He decided that it was only right to leave the country, and the Egyptians were forced to agree with him.

  To make the decision was easier than to execute it. But on 14 January 1884, General Charles Gordon (1833–85), who had achieved fame in the Chinese Wars of 1859–1860 and 1863–4 when he commanded the Chinese army against the Taipings, left London charged by the Cabinet with the task of evacuation. He arrived in Khartoum in February, and once there he judged that it would be wrong to withdraw the garrisons and abandon the country to the mercy of the Mahdi’s Dervishes. He accordingly asked for reinforcements and put forward plans for counter-attack. He was resolved to remain in Khartoum until his self-imposed mission was accomplished. By May of that year, 1884, Gordon was trapped in Khartoum. Public opinion demanded that he should be rescued. The government, with other matters on its mind and obviously dithering, did nothing until it was too late. At last, Gordon’s dilemma became a Cabinet crisis. Gladstone gave in and General Wolseley was ordered to Cairo. He did not arrive in time. When reinforcements and rescue squadrons arrived in Khartoum on 28 October, Gordon was dead and soon would be a martyr.

  That was in 1885. In the twelve months between June 1885 and June 1886, Britain had four General Elections. The obvious reason was Ireland, but there was also a lack of cohesion in Gladstone’s Liberal Party; the unpopularity of his handling of the crisis in Sudan which led to the death of General Gordon; and the emergence of another generation of political thinkers in the Commons – among them the thirty-six-year-old Lord Randolph Churchill, the leader of the younger Conservatives, and, on the other side of the House, the Liberal rebel, Joseph Chamberlain. Salisbury was Conservative leader in the Lords, and was the man who became Prime Minister. But he was wise enough to understand that the chances of remaining in office were slim. He was right. By January 1886 Gladstone was back in power, armed with his now public crusade for Irish Home Rule. But he needed support and too many in the Liberal Party refused to support him.

  Gladstone wanted an Irish Parliament in Dublin. An Irish governing executive was to have control over internal affairs leaving, among other things, foreign policy, defence and custom duties to London. Ireland would keep the vast majority of her own revenues, would have her own judges and a loan fund was to be set up to buy out the landlords. When the Bill was sent to the House, Joseph Chamberlain attacked it, inflicting mortal wounds on Gladstone’s Parliamentary draughtsmanship. The Bill was thrown out by thirty votes and Gladstone failed. And when the General Election came, the people voted against him.

  The final figures show that the Conservatives had 316 MPs, Gladstone’s Liberals had 191, and Parnell 85 Irish MPs. But there were also 78 Liberal Unionists; they were Liberals who stood for the continuation of the Union with Ireland and who had pulled away from Gladstone over this single issue. What had happened was this: led by Chamberlain, the Liberal Unionists, who might well have attracted votes from the growing working-class movement, instead started aligning themselves with the Conservatives. The result was that the working-class vote had no natural home, and this meant there was a very real electoral opportunity for a third British political party. It would be called the Labour Party.

  But if Gladstone had little to celebrate, the nation had. It was 1887, a year of great celebration: Victoria had been on the throne for fifty years. The editor of The Times, writing on the morning after the anniversary celebrations, was quite overwhelmed:

  No scene was ever depicted on canvas, narrated by historian, or conjured up by a poet’s fancy, more pathetic, or more august than the spectacle of Victoria, Queen and Empress, kneeling yesterday at the foot of her throne to thank Heaven for her reign, with all its joys and all its griefs, of fifty marvellous years. The eye wandered over groups of statesmen, writers, orators, famous soldiers and sailors, ermine-clad judges, divines in rarely worn vestments, Asiatic princes gleaming with jewels, forms and faces as fair as they were royal and noble, a bench crowded with Kings and the heirs of Kings. The centre to which the gaze constantly returned as the reason and interpretation of the whole was the figure seated, solitarily [still dressed in mourning] in all that sunshine of splendour, on her chair of state. On her account alone, the rest were there, whatever their degree. They were met together to attest the judgment of Great Britain and the world that Queen Victoria had redeemed the pledge she accepted on that throne, beside the altar, half a century ago.

  The party over, the business of government and the closing century beckoned. And Ireland nagged at every political manifesto, partly because positions on Ireland could decide real political support in the House. Salisbury’s government, for example, depended on Liberal Unionists who didn’t support Home Rule and had broken from Gladstone to say so. And Salisbury’s Cabinet was hardly a place of calm and cheerfulness. One of the sources of anguish was Lord Randolph Churchill, the father of the twentieth-century Prime Minister. He was just thirty-seven and was the youngest Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House since William Pitt. He had been one of the founders, and then the leader, of the radical Conservative group of younger MPs known as the Fourth Party. It talked about Tory Democracy. This was a programme of party reform. Churchill stirred the fears of the Tory managers.

  In December 1886, he presented his Budget to Cabinet. He wanted to reduce taxation but said death duties would rise, and so would estate duties on private houses; and £8 million would come out of the army and navy budget. Unsurprisingly, the War Minister refused to accept the cuts. Salisbury didn’t want either to leave, but wouldn’t go so far as to overrule his War Minister. Churchill threatened to resign. Salisbury, perhaps to Churchill’s surprise, said so be it.

  The passing of the old political order at this time was coincidental with the extraordinary shift in social and political movements. The Chartists had heralded social disquiet but had achieved little. Marxism, set to text in London, had never worried the ruling classes for long. But Radicalism now took a new regard. Keir Hardie, a Scot, came to the fore. At the age of ten, he had become a coal miner in Lanarkshire. He stayed in the pits for twelve years until he was sacked. He was an agitator they said, and so he was. By 1886 he had become the secretary of the Scottish Miners’ Federation. That was the year that Gladstone was defeated and the Liberal Unionists broke away to side with the Conservatives. Working-class voters saw the popular Liberal Radicals, like Joseph Chamberlain, even though they sat on the Liberal side of the House, as Conservatives. Thus, Keir Hardie had much support when he encouraged the idea of creating a third political party, the Labour Party, instead of relying on the Liberals. And in 1892, Hardie was elected Independent Labour MP for
West Ham in London and arrived to take his seat wearing a cap and supported by a brass band. The political face of Britain was indeed changing.

  When the final decade of the nineteenth century opened, the Conservative Leader, Lord Salisbury, had been in power for more than four years. His government lacked the sparkle of the Disraeli and Gladstone Parliaments, yet there were achievements including the Local Government Act and the Factory Act. And because the Conservatives thought that some future Liberal administration would make all schooling free, thus destroying the position of the Church schools, they introduced a Bill to make all elementary schooling free. Some Conservative backbenchers denounced that Bill as a ‘surrender of Conservative principles’. Yet 83 per cent of schoolchildren would now get free education, paid for by the people, the taxpayers.

  It would, in the wording of the Act, be ‘a grant in aid of the cost of elementary education in England and Wales at the rate of ten shillings a year for each child of the number of children over three and under fifteen years of age’. Yet Britain was falling behind other nations, and its own ambitions, by not providing a comprehensive secondary education. True, there had been improvements, of sorts. During the previous quarter of a century there were more schools. But there wasn’t a central government watchdog and certainly no yardstick for standards. And the new free elementary education was really concerned with overcoming illiteracy, and it wasn’t until progress had been made here that secondary education became more imaginative. By 1889, the new County Councils were told to provide technical education. This meant new colleges and they became grant maintained from central government. However, the Royal Commission report stated that the ‘educational opportunities offered . . . to boys and girls who . . . leave school . . . are still far behind the requirements of our times’.

  The importance of this Royal Commission report is not that it directly achieved a great deal, but that it led to later reform. This was because one of the Commissioners, Robert Morant, was the draughtsman of the great Education Act of 1902. He made sure that many of the Commission’s recommendations appeared in that legislation, the architecture of which survived until the Butler Education Act forty years later. And so, at the beginning of the decade, the Conservatives had introduced worthy but uninspiring legislative programmes. The party managers had wanted trusty Conservative, not Radical Conservative, government and that was what they got.

  Gladstone’s party seemed full of ideas, but little cohesion. So there was not much of a choice for the British people at the election of 1892, in spite of the Liberal’s list of policies published the previous year after the party’s conference in Newcastle. It promised Home Rule for Ireland (Gladstone’s last ambition), rural government, Parliaments every three years and industrial accident compensation for workers. It was enough, but only just, for a new Gladstone ad ministration and one determined to push through its new Local Government Act that, although partially wrecked in the Lords, would lead to the creation of urban and district councils, and elections to parish councils. Gladstone could never be content with what had happened to such important legislative ambition. On 1 March 1892, Gladstone rose in the House to make a speech which, in effect, marked the end for him as a Parliamentarian. His speech accepted the Lords’ amendments to the new Local Government Act, but it gave him the opportunity to wonder at the differences between the centuries-old question of balance between Lords and Commoners.

  The question is whether the world of the House of Lords is not merely to modify, but to annihilate the work of the whole House of Commons, work which has been performed at an amount of sacrifice – of time, of labour, of convenience, and perhaps of health – but at any rate an amount of sacrifice totally unknown to the House of Lords? Well Sir, we have not been anxious – I believe I speak for my colleagues, I know I speak my own convictions – we . . . have been desirous to save something from the wreck of the Session’s work. We feel that this Bill is a Bill of such value that, upon the whole, great as we admit the objections to be to the acceptance of these amendments, the objections are still greater and weightier to a course which would lead to the rejection of the Bill. We are compelled to accompany that acceptance with the sorrowful declaration that the differences, not of a temporary or casual nature merely, but differences of conviction, differences of prepossession, differences of mental habit, and differences of fundamental tendency, between the House of Lords and the House of Commons, appear to have reached a development in the present year such as to create a state of things of which we are compelled to say that, in our judgment, it cannot continue.

  It wasn’t until the Parliament Act of 1911 that any government had the courage to deal with that issue, and curb the wrecking powers of their unelected lordships.

  Gladstone had already decided to resign before he made that speech. It wasn’t the issue of local government that made him go. He was perhaps angrier with his Cabinet’s determination to support a building programme for new battleships. Gladstone the Radical, in old age, hard of hearing and short of sight, retreated to his Liberal instincts that money to be spent on weapons was better spent elsewhere.

  But Gladstone was a totally committed European. His was the template for modern Liberal European commitment, and perhaps because of this vision, he never fully believed that the Bismarckian policy of armed peace could usurp the greater ambition of a united Continent of Europe of which, he believed, Britain had to be part.

  On 3 March 1894, two days after that speech, he went to see the Queen and resigned. She cared little for him, and was not much bothered. Four years later, William Ewart Gladstone, ‘the greatest popular leader of his age’, was dead.

  Lord Rosebery – mostly remembered as a successful racehorse owner who twice won the Derby during his sixteen months at Number 10 – was reluctant to be Prime Minister. He didn’t really believe a Liberal could lead the country from the Lords but the Queen thought this was nonsense. She liked him, perhaps because he was instrumental in the creation of the Scottish Office (of which she much approved), but more probably because he was very careful to take her advice and explain everything to her. Her reign and so an astonishing era in British life was drawing to a close. Yet there was always room for one more war.

  By 1896, Horatio Kitchener (1850–1916), the British Commander in Egypt, had set about the reconquest of Sudan and, at the same time, the campaign to avenge the death of Gordon. But hardly were the victory bells silent when bells of quite another calling rang out. For Britain was again at war with the Boers. It was one of those conflicts of which most have heard, yet can’t quite place in the historical calendar and most certainly cannot remember why British troops were fighting in Africa. Yet a half-a-million men fought in the Boer War. One in ten were killed or wounded. Most died from disease rather than at a conventional enemy’s hand. It was also the war in which the British started concentration camps – a tragedy that was not lost on Germans when a few decades later they were accused of unspeakable war crimes in similar camps. This Boer War was the second war between the British and the Afrikaners, or Boers. Boer is the Dutch word for farmer and the Afrikaners were farmers of Dutch origin.

  There are three particular characters in the story of Africa, Britain and the Boer War: Cecil Rhodes, Paul Kruger and Dr Leander Starr Jameson. Cecil Rhodes was the man who founded the De Beers diamond company and after whom Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was named. He was a parson’s son who, as a child, was ill and so sent to South Africa because it had a healthier climate. He made his money out of diamond mining and, in 1889, set up the British South Africa Company to develop the northern neighbouring territories of the Transvaal – which became Rhodesia. Paul Kruger was an Afrikaner. He was the President of the Transvaal. His battle wasn’t directly with the British government, but the so-called Uitlanders (outlanders or foreigners), the non-Dutch Afrikaner settlers. They had grievances which he refused to acknowledge. Jameson is perhaps the least known of the three. He was Cecil Rhodes’s friend and the colonial administrator. He succeede
d Rhodes as leader of his Progressive Party and, in 1904, became Prime Minister of the Cape Colony.

  In summary, Jameson, on behalf of Cecil Rhodes, led a raid on the Transvaal in an attempt to overthrow the President, Paul Kruger. This invasion failed, but it worsened relations between Britain and the Afrikaners and the eventual result was the Boer War. Jameson had taken 500 men when he invaded the Transvaal, but the uprising had been postponed although Jameson didn’t know that until too late. He and his men were captured by the Boer army, and Rhodes was forced to resign as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony.

  The Boers had believed, rightly, that their whole way of life was threatened by Britain and, under Kruger, they began to arm themselves for war. But it didn’t come immediately. In London, Chamberlain believed war could be avoided in spite of the best advice he was getting from South Africa. The weakness in Chamberlain’s and, to some extent, Rhodes’s reading of the situation was that they both failed to understand the determination and grit of Kruger and the Boers. But in autumn 1899, all negotiations were meaningless. Furthermore, both sides had so armed themselves that the threat of war had a momentum of its own. For three years, there were sporadic talks between the British and the Boers and a gradual realization that the outcome of the failure of these discussions would be military confrontation. By the autumn of 1899, the British had reinforced their Natal garrisons to such an extent that Boer intelligence had presented to Kruger a reasonable report of the British military capabilities along the border. It was up to Kruger and his commanders to make the best judgement of the British intentions rather than just their capabilities. It was a classic example of military and political stalemate. Kruger knew what military force was facing him. He now had to decide what the British intended to do with it and how best he should respond with his own resources. Kruger brought his troops up to battle readiness and made sure that the Orange Free State would be allied to the cause. By the beginning of October 1899, he was as ready as he would ever be. On 9 October, Kruger gave the British forty-eight hours to stand down their forces. If they did not, then it would be war. The British did not.