Dreadnought, Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War

by Robert K. Massie

  Balfour was in his uncle's house on this June day as ambassador. The foreign power to whom he would represent Lord Salisbury, the majority of the new Cabinet, and the Conservative Party was the fourth man present, Joseph Chamberlain. Lord Salisbury in 1895 may have been the most eminent statesman in England, but he was not the most popular. This description fitted Chamberlain. Had he not broken with Gladstone over Home Rule, Chamberlain would have succeeded to leadership of the Liberal Party and, eventually, to the premiership. This office was now gone forever. Still, as leader of the Liberal Unionists in the House of Commons and the country, he possessed the power to make or break the Unionist coalition. The alliance, at best, would be uncomfortable. Two political figures more unlike; in background, character, and temperament than Lord Salisbury and Chamberlain could scarcely be found. For this reason, every bit of Balfour's canny, diplomatic charm was expected to be needed.

  Joseph Chamberlain was fifty-nine in 1895. He had not attended Oxford or Cambridge or a public school. He had gone to work at sixteen and had made enough money to retire from business at thirty-four and go into politics as a Radical Liberal. Four years after entering Parliament, he sat in Gladstone's second Cabinet. In the House, he made a cool and elegant figure, with his black hair brushed carefully back over his small head. In Parliament and on podiums around the country, he was the voice of the shopkeeper, the middle class, and the Nonconformist. He sat with a marquess, a duke, and Arthur Balfour because his passion and eloquence had won him the allegiance of dozens of members of Parliament and hundreds of thousands of British voters. Salisbury had no choice but to invite Chamberlain into his Cabinet-the Liberal Unionists would be the margin of his majority over the Liberals and the Irish -but all four men were keenly aware of the differences that separated them. Chamberlain was the future; they were the past. He was energy and thrust; they stood for imperturbability, equanimity, sobriety, and caution. Chamberlain took risks, broke molds, was eager to build a new society and a new form of empire. By challenging Gladstone on Home Rule, he had splintered and broken one of England's two great political parties. Later, on the issue of free trade, he would bring down the other.

  Salisbury opened the Arlington Street discussion by saying that, beyond the premiership and leadership of the House of Commons, all Cabinet offices were open. He offered Devonshire the Foreign Office. The Duke declined and became Lord President of the Council. Salisbury took the Foreign Office as well as the Premiership, a dual role he had performed in his first two Cabinets. He asked Chamberlain's wishes. Chamberlain said that he wanted the Colonial Office. Salisbury, surprised, suggested one of the more prestigious seats, the Chancellorship of the Exchequer or the Home Office. Chamberlain repeated that he would prefer to be Colonial Secretary. It was agreed. The other places were allotted. Another Liberal Unionist, the Marquess of Lansdowne, became War Secretary. The veteran George Goschen was offered the Exchequer but took the Admiralty. Sir Michael Hicks-Beach became Chancellor. In the end, Lord Salisbury formed one of the strongest Cabinets ever to hold office in the United Kingdom. Four members of the Cabinet besides the Prime Minister, declared the Spectator, were fitted to become Prime Minister: Devonshire, Chamberlain, Balfour, and Goschen. Overall, in the opinion of H. H. Asquith, who had been Home Secretary in the Liberal Rosebery Cabinet, Lord Salisbury's new administration displayed "an almost embarrassing wealth of talent and capacity."

  Once installed, the new Prime Minister called a general election. The result was a sweeping Unionist victory: 340 Conservatives and 71 Liberal Unionists were elected along with 177 Liberals and 82 Irish members. Salisbury's Unionist majority was 152. This was the government which ruled Great Britain for ten and a half years. With the passage of time, there would be shifts in office and personnel. After seven years, Lord Salisbury, his health irreparable, resigned, to be succeeded by Arthur Balfour. The Duke of Devonshire remained, as before, impressive even in lassitude. Chamberlain's power expanded until he became almost coequal in power to the Prime Minister when the premier was Salisbury, and greater than the Prime Minister when the office was held by Balfour. Eventually, both Chamberlain and Devonshire resigned over free trade, and Balfour, still deft, still charming, went on alone. In the meantime, a decade of English history passed: the Jameson Raid, the Kruger Telegram, Chamberlain's attempt to create an Anglo-German alliance, the Boer War, the Boxer Rebellion, the rise of the German Navy, the Anglo-French Entente, the first Morocco Crisis, and the laying of the keel of H.M.S. Dreadnought.

  Robert Cecil, Third Marquess of Salisbury, four times Foreign Secretary and three times Prime Minister of Great Britain, grew up in privileged but unhappy circumstances. His mother died before he was ten and his father, a great Tory landowner and member of two Conservative Cabinets, had little time for his numerous offspring. Young Robert was miserable in every school he attended; he later referred to those years as "an existence among devils." At Eton, he was tormented. "I am bullied from morning to night," he wrote to his father. "I am obliged to hide myself all evening in some corner… I am obnoxious to all of them because I can do verses, but will not do them for the others." In London, during the holidays, he lived in such dread of meeting his schoolmates that he avoided major streets. Eventually, Robert was withdrawn from Eton and brought home.

  The Second Marquess was annoyed with this second son. Having ten children somehow to raise, he had little taste for complaints which, he thought, tended toward malingering and hypochondria. The misunderstanding between the two was lifelong. "Never were two men of the same blood more hopelessly antagonistic in all their tastes; and interests," Lord Salisbury's daughter was to write of her father and grandfather.

  Hatfield, the Cecil family estate in Hertfordshire, twenty miles north of London, plays a role commensurate with the importance of its owners, the Cecil family, in English history. When the estate belonged to the Crown, the young King Edward VI lived for a while at Hatfield; his half-sister Princess Elizabeth waited there in semi-exile while the Catholic Queen Mary Tudor attempted to re-impose her religion on the island. Portraits of English and European monarchs, mingled with those of earlier Cecils, to whom the estate was given, hang on the walls of drawing rooms and corridors, and of the library into which Robert Cecil retreated. He became interested in botany and roamed the countryside collecting plants and flowers. Fluent in French, he eagerly obeyed his father's command that all family correspondence be conducted in that language. In 1847, he matriculated at Christ Church, where, because of the unusual brilliance of his essays, his fellow undergraduates predicted that he would one day be Prime Minister. Two years later, just after taking a degree, he suffered a nervous collapse. Throughout Lord Salisbury's life, accumulation of worry and physical exhaustion brought on severe migraines, which he called "nerve storms." The symptoms included black depression, digestive upheaval, crippling lassitude, and, at the peak of the crisis, an acute sensitivity to light, sound, or touch: the slightest increase in brightness or noise, or any physical contact, became excruciating. "It is the peculiarity of my complaint that it lays me up and makes me incapable, sometimes for days, without any warning," he explained to his father. "And I know by sad experience that unless I obey when it does attack me, the incapacity of a day may be turned into one of a week."

  A worried doctor at Oxford convinced Lord Robert's father that only a long sea voyage would restore the young man's health, and he embarked for South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. When he returned two years later at twenty-three, the Second Marquess, not knowing what else to do with his son, arranged for him to be elected to a safe Conservative seat in the House of Commons.

  Lord Robert's early years in Parliament were undistinguished. His health and spirits were low and neither was improved by the late-night sittings common in the Lower House. His speeches were rebellious and cantankerous, as if all authority existed only to be insulted. A letter to his father from this period bordered on insolence: "Your prohibition gave me a stomach ache all morning… I do not know whe
ther I have sufficiently recovered my equanimity to write intelligibly but I will try."

  Lord Robert defied his father in choosing a wife. He was, as a young man, tall, thin, stooped, awkward, short-sighted, shy, incapable of small talk, and atrociously dressed. Yet he was courteous, sensitive, and obviously brilliant, and when he proposed to Miss Georgina Alderson, she accepted. The Second Marquess thought that Miss Alderson's family connections made it an inferior match and declared that Lord Robert could expect no enhancement of his limited income. The result, the older man warned, would be "privations" and loss of social standing. Lord Robert replied that he was immune from worry on either count: "That which is my main expense-traveling-is almost always undertaken under pressure, either from you or others, which will cease on my marriage. [And] the persons who will cut me because I marry Miss Alderson are precisely the persons of whose society I am so anxious to be quit." The marriage went forward and the losses were minor, although one dowager did refuse to call at the young couple's first address, declaring that she "never left cards north of Oxford Street."

  After his marriage, Lord Robert promptly got to work supplementing his small income by writing articles for the Quarterly Review and other journals. Here, in a clear, incisive style, he set forth his political philosophy. He believed in preserving traditional English views and institutions. He considered it the near-sacred duty of the Conservative Party to defend the hereditary rights and privileges of the propertied class. Democracy was a virus threatening to infect and strike down England. The votes of the working class were informed by a mingling of passion and greed which left no room for the patient, reasonable calculations required to guide the nation as a whole. Expecting government by numbers to produce government by the best was illogical, he said. "First rate men will not canvass mobs, and if they did, the mobs would not elect the first rate men." True to his principles, he vigorously opposed the reform-minded Tory; democracy advanced by his own party leaders, Lord Derby and Benjamin Disraeli. In 1867, he resigned as Secretary of State for India; rather than support the government-sponsored Second Reform Bill, which doubled the electorate by extending suffrage to town workingmen.

  A year later, when his father followed his elder brother to the grave, Lord Robert Cecil left the House of Commons and entered the House of Lords as Third Marquess of Salisbury. In the Upper House, his star ascended rapidly. Soon, he was the dominant figure on the Conservative Front Bench. He spoke precisely and pungently, without notes, piling fact upon fact, adding epigram and irony sometimes flinging little personal jibes-what one admiring opponent called "blazing indiscretions." His timing was theatrical. Often, he would pause before a critical passage, seeming to grope for the exact word required, sweeping up his audience in a compelling blend of suspense, recognition, and, ultimately, full-throated approval and applause. For all his success, Lord Salisbury disdained oratory as a lesser form of persuasion. Having given a speech, he never wanted to read it again. Being forced to do so for purposes of correction in Hansard was, he said, like "returning to the cold and greasy remains of yesterday's dinner."

  For years, Salisbury's relations with Disraeli were crusty. Salisbury was scandalized that a Tory could also be a radical; he put it down to cunning and opportunism, declaring flat out, "I dislike and despise the man." For a while, he tried to deal with Disraeli by attacking him in Parliament and not speaking to him anywhere else. Disraeli, bold, imaginative, and incurably romantic, refused to accept the hostility of the intelligent, morose, standoffish younger man. Finding Salisbury at a garden party, Disraeli advanced rapidly, hand outstretched, and exclaimed, "Ah, Robert, Robert, how glad I am to see you!"

  In 1874, as Disraeli was forming his second government, Salisbury was asked to resume the office of Secretary of State for India. He hesitated: "My impression is that D. [Disraeli] does not want to have me but is pressed by others. I am in precisely the same position." This was shadowboxing; Salisbury's entrance into the Cabinet was inevitable. No Conservative government could have been formed without including the most effective voice in the House of Lords. Before this government fell six years later, Lord Salisbury's situation had been transformed: he was Foreign Secretary of Great Britain and the Prime Minister's most effective and trusted lieutenant. In addition, he had become-with Prince Bismarck, Prince Gorchakov of Russia, and Austria's Count Andrassy-one of the handful of statesmen who determined the fate of Europe.

  In 1876, Great Britain became embroiled in what was known in Europe as the Eastern Question, the array of diplomatic problems arising from the decay and impending disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. The powers principally concerned-other than the Turks themselves-were Russia, Austria, and Great Britain. In St. Petersburg, a strong pan-Slav party saw the Ottoman collapse as a glittering opportunity to realize a dream of four centuries: to restore the Cross to Hagia Sophia and seize control of the Straits. To Vienna, any retreat by the Sultan from his vast, ill-governed Balkan provinces was an automatic signal for Hapsburg aggrandizement. As for London, it was a long-established British policy to prop up the Sultan and resist any move to break up the Ottoman Empire. At stake was Britain's India lifeline, which ran through the Sultan's domains. Especially the capital, Constantinople, must not be allowed to come under the influence of another Great Power.

  In April 1877, soon after Europe learned that twelve thousand Bulgarian Christians, including women and children, had been massacred by Turkish troops, Russia declared war. The Tsar's army advanced through the Balkans and by January 1878 stood in the suburbs of Constantinople. In England, apprehension gave way to hysteria. The Queen, passionately anti-Russian, raged at Gladstone for his condemnation of the Turks, referring to her former and future Prime Minister as "that half-madman." (The Duke of Sutherland went further and declared that Gladstone was "a Russian agent.") She was almost as displeased with her Conservative Foreign Secretary, the younger Lord Derby, a prudent, phlegmatic man, strongly opposed to war. "Oh!" Victoria wrote to Disraeli, "if the Queen were a man, she would like to go and give those horrid Russians, whose word one cannot believe, such a beating!" She threatened abdication. Disraeli did what he could to placate the Queen, hold back the Russians, and persuade Derby not to resign. The Cabinet was in chaos. Lord Derby, whose private meetings with the Russian ambassador in search of peace leaked out, began to despair, drink heavily, and neglect his work. Salisbury, from the India Office, began to perform many of the functions of Foreign Secretary.

  Lord Salisbury did not entirely share the conviction that Constantinople was the key to India. Constantinople, after all, was eight hundred miles from Suez and Lord Salisbury had already observed that ''much of the trouble came from British statesmen using maps on too small a scale." Nevertheless, he strongly believed that declared British interests should be firmly defended. Now, with Russian troops under the city's walls, Salisbury urged the Cabinet to send the Mediterranean Fleet through the Dardanelles to give visible strength to British warnings. Lord Derby resisted; the Cabinet wavered. Twice the fleet was ready; twice it was held back. Emboldened, the Russian Commander-in-Chief warned that if British warships appeared in the Bosphorus, his troops would occupy the city. Salisbury insisted that the fleet go forward. Eventually, on February 15, Admiral Hornby's ironclads splashed their anchors off the Goldei Horn. The Grand Duke's army did not move. But for six months, British naval guns and Russian artillery lay within range of each other while the helpless capital of the Ottoman Empire stood between.

  While the Cross was not yet on the Hagia Sophia and the Straits remained in Turkish hands, Russia had achieved much. The Tsar had forced the Sultan to sign the Treaty of San Stefano, in which Lost of the conquered Turkish Balkan territory reappeared as the new, Russian-sponsored state of Bulgaria. Great Britain, unwilling to accept these new arrangements, which so powerfully increased* Russian influence in Constantinople, signed a defensive alliance with Turkey and began to mobilize reserves. Austria, also unhappy about the new "Big Bulgaria," followed suit. Suddenly, the
prospect of renewed fighting seemed less appealing in St. Petersburg. Picking the bones of the dying Turk was one thing; fighting a war with Britain, Austria, and Turkey was quite another.

  The prospect of war was also too much for Lord Derby, who resigned the Foreign Secretaryship. Indeed, Derby, a lifelong Tory, the son of a man who three times had been Conservative Prime Minister, was so upset that he deserted the party and joined Gladstone and the Liberals.* Salisbury succeeded Derby and the British Cabinet stood united for the first time during the crisis on a policy of strength. Salisbury took office on March 28. That day and the next, he concluded his business at the India Office. On the night of the twenty-ninth, he dined out, but excused himself after dinner to return to his house in Arlington Street. There, he locked himself in his study, and from eleven p.m. to three o'clock the next morning, without the help of assistants or memoranda, wrote a diplomatic note which affected the history of Europe. In polite but cogent language, he explained why the Treaty of San Stefano must not be allowed to stand. In effect, the note was an ultimatum to Russia: Britain would not submit to Russian dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Either the Treaty of San Stefano would be submitted to the judgment of a European conference or Britain and Russia must go to war. The Cabinet agreed to Salisbury's note without modification and forwarded it to the major powers.