by Jan Morris
We are told that he accepted it all sceptically. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ somebody said to him after his return to the House. ‘Yes wonderful,’ he replied, ‘but how much more pleased they would have been if the forgery had proved genuine!’ But he attached the greatest importance to his alliance with Gladstone, and as the 1880s passed, and the Liberals regained their strength in opposition, so it seemed that these two extraordinary men, backed by the combined energies of English liberalism and Irish patriotism, would in the end achieve the autonomy of Ireland. ‘Think not for the moment’, Gladstone had told the House when he presented his Home Rule Bill, ‘but for the years that are to come’: an election was due in 1892, and this time, it seemed, Home Rule for Ireland was almost a certainty.
But now the last catastrophe occurred. In the culminating irony of Parnell’s ironic life, at the threshold of his greatest triumph, he was ruined. He had never married, but for years he had enjoyed a mistress, Katherine O’Shea, who was the wife of one of Parnell’s own followers, Captain William O’Shea, MP for Galway. O’Shea was a feckless adventurer, formerly of the 18th Hussars, who had survived phases of bankruptcy, been a mine manager in Spain and a stud farmer in Hertfordshire, and had virtually forced his Parliamentary nomination out of Parnell’s gift, in return for Kitty’s favours. Throughout the dramatic fluctuations of Parnell’s political fortune, this poignant affair had nagged at his emotions. Mrs O’Shea was his only lover, and he was faithful to her for life. He had loved her at first sight: a rose she accidentally dropped in 1880 was found among his papers when he died, and was placed over his heart in his coffin. He called her ‘Queenie’ or ‘Wifie’, and she bore him at least two children. If he was away from her for more than two days, he sent her two telegrams daily, and one letter.
Yet this child-like love affair was, by the conventions of the time, wrapped up in squalor. Many people knew about it, perhaps including Gladstone himself, yet it was made sordid with furtive deceit. For Parnell it became a crippling obsession, more important even than the future of Ireland, so that his friends accused him of neglect, and his enemies of hypocrisy. In December 1889, Captain O’Shea treacherously brought it into the open by suing for divorce, and instantly Parnell’s career was shattered. Gladstone himself, obeying the nonconformist conscience of his party, demanded Parnell’s immediate resignation from the leadership of the Irish Nationalists, and the whole tentative structure of Irish emancipation evolved so painstakingly out of the Kilmainham Treaty, was ignominiously demolished. Some say O’Shea sued for divorce at the instigation of Chamberlain, who foresaw in the affair the defeat of Home Rule and the end of the Liberal Party. Certainly Gladstone had little choice but to disown Parnell, for the news of the divorce horrified most of his own supporters, and he threatened to resign himself from the leadership of the Liberals if the Irish Nationalists would not renounce Parnell.
For a week, in December 1890, the Irish members debated the issue in Committee Room 15 at Westminster. The debate, even the number of the room, has gone into Irish history. If the party had unanimously decided to keep Parnell as its leader, Ireland would have followed a very different path to freedom, and the whole course of Empire might have been altered: if it had unanimously asked Parnell to resign, Home Rule might have come thirty years earlier than it did. Parnell presided over the meeting himself, and used all his well-tried tactics of obstruction to delay a conclusion. But the magic had gone. Dazed perhaps by the suddenness of events, uncertain of loyalties and resentful of betrayals, quibbled at by party factions, excoriated by rivals, unsure even of the support of the Irish people, to whom the idea of divorce, and divorce of a prince at that, was still anathema—deprived of his own sure touch, he seemed bewildered, perhaps even a little mad. His fascination remained, but it had become a more peculiar allure, haggard and bizarre—he was like a poet, one of his colleagues wrote, ‘plunged in some divine anguish, or a mad scientist mourning over the fate of some forlorn invention’. After days of sad acrimony, the debate came to a ragged conclusion when forty-six members of the party left Room 15 in silence, thereby renouncing Parnell’s leadership, to leave only twenty-seven at his side.
He flatly refused to resign and let the furore die—‘Resign—Marry—Return’, as Cecil Rhodes the imperialist financier succinctly advised by cable from South Africa. Instead he issued a manifesto to the Irish people, denouncing Gladstone’s conception of Home Rule as a feeble half-measure, and thus ending his alliance with the Liberals on a note of sour desperation. ‘Blot out his name!’ wrote Mary Gladstone now, and the Queen was appalled. ‘Not only a man of very bad character,’ she wrote, ‘but a liar and devoid of all sense of honour or any sort of principle.’ The Home Rule cause was discredited. When Gladstone in due time returned to power, and introduced his second Home Rule Bill in 1893, it scraped through the Commons but was contemptuously rejected by the Lords. Gladstone, old, deaf, half-blind and discouraged, retired from public life, offering a despondent valediction to the perennial Irish debate: ‘There can be no more melancholy, nor in the last result, no more degrading spectacle on earth than the spectacle of oppression, or of wrong in whatever form, inflicted by the deliberate act of a nation upon another nation, especially by the deliberate act of such a country as Great Britain upon such a country as Ireland’.
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As for Parnell, desolately he wandered Ireland looking for friends. He was the lost leader. He married his Kitty, but this only did him harm—‘the climax of brazened horrors’, declared the Bishop of Raphoe. Rejected by the Liberals, disowned by most of his own party, in Ireland he was abused for immorality or scorned by those who thought of mere Home Rule as supine surrender. The virtue had left him. ‘Our general has betrayed us’, wrote Archbishop Croke. ‘For his own miserable gratification he has sold the pass, preferring an ignoble and licentious life in London to the liberation and advancement of his too confiding countrymen.’ Even the poor people, who had worshipped him, now refused to listen. In Kilkenny they pelted him with mud, and jeered at his passing. At Mallow they ripped the doors off his carriage, while a priest cried ‘Down with libertinism!’ Though Parnell still regularly took his seat in Parliament, and campaigned tirelessly throughout Ireland, still he was broken, and in his unlucky month of October, 1891, 45 years old, he died at Katherine’s side in their house at Brighton.
His memory was to remain ambivalent. Was he true or false, a patriot or an opportunist? Was he ever playing fair with Gladstone, or would he have denounced home rule as soon as he had achieved it? The English generally thought the worst of him, agreeing with Queen Victoria. The Irish, however harshly they treated him in his last years, knew him at least for a genius, as Gladstone did, and never forgot his charisma. When his funeral procession drove up Sackville Street towards Glasnevin cemetery, past the pillar with Nelson on the top, immense silent crowds of Irishmen watched it pass. The air was charged with a special quality of Ireland, familiar to Parnell all his life—a mingled quality of bitterness, sorrow, conspiracy and pride, British soldiers marched with the procession, and among the onlookers was the imperial commander-in-chief in Ireland, Garnet Wolseley. It was, he later wrote, the only crowd he was ever afraid of.
1 When Elizabeth Butler exhibited a sad painting of an Irish eviction at the Royal Academy, Lord Salisbury, who lived in the ancestral palace of the Cecils at Hatfield, said in his speech at the opening banquet that the scene looked so bright and breezy that he almost wished he could take part in an eviction himself.
1 It is now a State forestry school, but has not much changed since Parnell’s day. ‘I sometimes see him walking out‚’ a man once told me there, ‘but it’s only an illusion.’
1 ‘The occupancy of an exalted, though fictitious, social position,’ the future Lord Crewe satirically described the job, when appointed to it in 1892, ‘with a purpose of rendering everybody within reach (including the occupant) as grotesque as possible.’
1 Castletownshend remains, I think, the most telling single mo
nument to the Anglo-Irish way of life. Townshends and Somervilles still dominated the village when I visited it in 1970, a Mrs Saker-Townshend occupied the castle, and I actually heard a Townshend hail a Somerville in the village street with the Cranfordian greeting ‘Morning, Cousin Robert!’ It was in his house at Castletownshend that Admiral Boyle Somerville, Royal Navy, was murdered, apparently for political reasons, in 1936: and Edith Somerville of the literary partnership Somerville and Ross, though born as we know in Corfu, spent much of her life in the village.
1 He never did say it, either, as Gladstone later confirmed.
2 And to many others too—boicottare, boicotear, boycotter, boikittirovat in Basque, bojkot in Croatian, boykot in Turkish, boicotio in Welsh.
1 Robert Blake (Disraeli, London 1966) sees it rivalled only by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and Munich in 1938 as the bitterest issue in British political history.
1 A sixth man, having turned Queen’s Evidence, was smuggled out of the country to South Africa, but was himself murdered at sea on board the Kinross Castle: a grateful memorial to his assassin stands in Glaslevin cemetery, Dublin, paid for by a ladies’ committee in New York.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Martyr of Empire
WE are approaching the imperial climax. Now the great searchlight of the imperial mission seemed to sweep the world incessantly, here playing upon an Irish funeral, there peering into kraal or heathen temple. The horizons of the British marvellously widened, as the scope of their power and responsibilities dawned upon them, and for the first time ordinary people, as Disraeli had foreseen, began to take a pride in the British Empire. How glorious it was, when one thought about it, to see so much of the map painted the imperial red! What giants there were about! How majestic, Britain’s providential stance at the summit of the world!
In fact Britain’s comparative status, financial and military, was weakening still: but this was not yet apparent to the public, least of all to that newly coherent public, literate for the first time, enfranchised for the first time, and given a window on the world by the new penny Press, which was to provide the chorus of fin de siècle imperialism. To its members Britain was never so unchallengeable; and to more educated Britons too the nation’s right to exert its power in the world, and extend its beneficent sway over less fortunate peoples, admitted of no doubt.
It was a destiny passionately accepted, for good reasons as for bad, watered by tears as it was emblazoned by triumph, noble as well as squalid: and the more fragile the British supremacy became in reality, the more emotional became the idea of Empire. The Raj was growing plumper now, full-blown almost, and since the British themselves habitually saw their Empire in anthropomorphic terms, Britannia with her sceptre or full-whiskered redcoats in sentinel poses, we too may legitimately imagine it a little maudlin in its developing prime, coarsened rather, bosomy. This was an age of hero-worship, and the Empire idolized its own, showering its protagonists with medals, ribbons and indulgence.
In 1885 all this heightening of emotions, this port-and-ginger sentiment, this beat of drum and heaving of corsage, reached a supreme expression in the death of General Charles Gordon, Commander of the Bath, Royal Engineers, whom Queen Victoria herself described as ‘dear, heroic, noble’, and for whom Lord Tennyson wrote the nation’s epitaph:
Warrior of God, man’s friend, and tyrant’s foe
Now somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan,
Thou livest in all hearts, for all men know
This earth has never borne a nobler man.
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Gordon, than whom in feet the earth has seldom borne a more complicated man, entered the saga of Empire obliquely, at a tangent on the River Nile. Since the geography of that river had been elucidated in the 1860s, the British had felt a possessive interest in it. For one thing they realized that control of the terrible African slave trade, still an issue close to their hearts, lay in the control of the Nile’s headwaters. For another they hazily conceived that the security of India was dependent upon command of the Nile: the Nile governed Egypt, it was reasoned, Egypt contained the Suez Canal, the Suez Canal was the spine of Empire.1
The British repeatedly claimed that they had no designs on Egypt, but nobody believed them for long. Once Disraeli had acquired the Suez Canal shares, Britain’s physical presence on the Nile seemed only a matter of time. The Egyptian State was still in theory a dependency of the Ottoman Empire, with the Khedive as the Sultan’s Viceroy, and its financial condition was so chaotic and corrupt that the Western Powers had already intervened to control its economy and protect their own interests. When in 1882 an idealist Egyptian Army officer, Arabi Pasha, launched an insurrection to rid the country of all such foreign interference, the moment had come for an imperial occupation. Unsuccessfully inviting the French and the Italians to join them in the enterprise, the British sent an invasion army to Port Said under General Sir Garnet Wolseley, G.C.M.G.—who, swiftly defeating Arabi at the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, and displaying his organizational talents at their most brilliant, in two days occupied Cairo and ran up the Union Jack above Saladin’s citadel.1 This was not, the British declared, an annexation. It was merely a temporary occupation, intended to restore order and stability to Egypt.
In fact everything about it was anomalous. It never became explicit. The Khedive remained Khedive, the Sultan far away remained the theoretical head of State, in whose name firmans were issued and dignitaries elevated. The British did not provide a Government exactly, they merely supplied compulsory advisers: though their soldiers controlled Egypt, and their officials soon came to run the country, they did not appoint a Governor or even a Resident, their senior representative holding the innocuous rank of Agent-General.
What was more, it was never made clear whether the British, in assuming responsibility for Egypt, also took on the burden of the Sudan, the next territory to the south, which had been for 60 years a dependency of Cairo. A million square miles of desert, its African inhabitants Islamicized and half Arabized, this forbidding country meant nothing whatever to the British public, and not much more to the British authorities in Cairo, but the imperial expansionists were already arguing that without its possession slavery would never be ended and Suez would never be safe. Unfortunately it was in a state of endemic rebellion; its inhabitants, under a magnetic and mysterious Muslim holy man called simply the Mahdi—the Leader—had risen in arms against the inefficient and impious Egyptian Government. The British thus had a Sudanese problem on their hands almost before they knew where the Sudan was. Should they, as the new suzerains of Egypt, intervene to put the rebellion down? Gladstone, having astonishingly committed the British Empire to the invasion of Eygpt itself, vehemently thought not. There was still an Egyptian Government, he argued, and an Egyptian army in the Sudan. The British were not the rulers of Egypt, only the temporary occupiers, and the Sudan was none of their business. So an Egyptian force it was, though under a British mercenary commander, Colonel Hicks, which marched off in the summer of 1883 to put down the revolt in the name of the Khedive.
The expedition, 10,000 strong, was fallen upon by 50,000 Sudanese in the desert near El Obeid, and annihilated. Hicks and his British staff were never seen again, and only a few hundred Egyptians straggled away from the battlefield. The Mahdi thus became supreme in the southern Sudan, only a few isolated Egyptian garrisons remained in the country, and the scene was set for the appearance on the imperial stage of General Gordon.
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The Egyptians had ruled the Sudan with the help of free-lance employees from Europe, men of several nationalities and disparate styles, who frequently rose abruptly from obscurity to be the Governors of vast remote provinces. The most remarkable of them had been Gordon. After a varied career in or around the British Army, including an adventurous rime in China which earned him the life-long sobriquet ‘Chinese’ Gordon, in 1874 he had accepted an Egyptian invitation to be Governor of Equatoria, the southernmost province of the Sudan, in succession to
Sir Samuel Baker the explorer. He had seen the task as a Christian call. The Sudan was in the grip of the slave traders, often in corrupt alliance with Egyptian administrators, and for five years Gordon strenuously fought them, making enemies and admirers in equal numbers, upsetting the conventions of generations, prodding his Egyptian masters into action and opening the country to trade and government almost to the Great Lakes themselves. His work had been much publicized at home as an example of the muscular Christianity then in vogue, and Gordon had persuaded himself that he had achieved some arcane ascendancy over the tribespeople, but his success had really been limited. The Egyptian administrators remained irreformably corrupt, the Egyptian soldiers were cruel racialists, the Khedive himself, though publicly committed to the abolition of the slave trade, could do little about it because several of his most powerful subjects were engaged in it. If Gordon did bring a momentary degree of order to the Sudan, the country soon relapsed into its habitual misery. Gordon resigned once, in 1876, but was persuaded back as Governor-General in Khartoum: in 1879 he resigned again, and this time it seemed he would never return to the Nile.
His Chinese and African adventures, his lofty Christian ideals, had made him a legend in England already, but he loitered the years away. Once he accepted the job of private secretary to the Viceroy of India, only to change his mind before his ship reached Bombay. Once he went to China again, to persuade the Chinese against war with Russia. He was in Ireland for a time, briefly commanded the Royal Engineers in Mauritius, went to South Africa as commandant of the colonial forces in the Cape, spent a year in Palestine investigating the sites of the Holy Places, and was about to resign his commission and take employment with the King of the Belgians when, in January 1884, he was summoned to London by telegram for an interview with Mr Gladstone’s Cabinet.