Pax Britannica

by Jan Morris

  Among the professionals of Empire, and among the governing classes in general, whatever their politics, this imperial duty became as self-evident as patriotism itself. The young Bertrand Russell was a self-confessed imperialist. H. G. Wells and Sidney Webb both declared imperialist sympathies.1 Arnold Wilson, recalling his apprenticeship in the imperial service, described himself and his colleagues as ‘acolytes of a cult—Pax Britannica—for which we worked happily and, if need be, died gladly. We read our Bibles, many of us, lived full lives, and loved and laughed much, but we knew, as we did so, that though for us all, the wise and the foolish, the slaves and the great, for emperor and for anarchist, there is one end, yet would our work live after us, and by our fruits we should be judged in the days to come.’1

  Not so long before, when men spoke of Empire they were thinking of Napoleon III, the Tsar, or lesser foreign despots. Now they thought only of Victoria, Regina et Imperatrix. The British Empire was reaching its full flush—it had, thought the Indian administrator Sir George Campbell, ‘pretty well reached the limits set by nature’.2 Within the past ten years it had acquired new territories fifty times as large as Britain itself. Light had burst upon the British people, said Sir West Ridgeway, the Governor of Ceylon, in his Jubilee speech that day. ‘It dispelled the darkness of ignorance, the scales fell from their eyes, the sordid mists which obscured their view were driven away, and they saw for the first time before them, the bright realm of a glorious Empire.’

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  Within two minutes, we are told, the Queen’s message had passed through Teheran on its way to the eastern dominions of the Crown. By the time her carriage was clattering down the Mall, bobbed about by cavalry, her thanks and blessings had reached Ottawa, the Cape, the colonies of West Africa, the strongholds of the Mediterranean and the sugar islands of the Caribbean. London was a self-consciously imperial city, symbolically central, with channels of authority reaching out east and west across the oceans. Punch celebrated the occasion with a cartoon of The Queen’s Messenger—a winged, long-haired and androgynous figure of love, holding a dove close to the chest, flying very low over the sea and flourishing a piece of paper inscribed Message V.R. There was not much else in sight—only a very subservient sea and a few hangdog islands—and the effect of the picture was one of effortless mastery, universal right of way. As never before, London seemed the heart of the world.

  Even the better-disposed foreigners generously recognized the fact. Animosities were suspended, and the London newspapers gratefully recorded the comments of their more flattering contemporaries abroad. Le Figaro roundly declared that Rome itself had been ‘equalled, if not surpassed, by the Power which in Canada, Australia, India, in the China Seas, in Egypt, Central and Southern Africa, in the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean rules the peoples and governs their interests’. The New York Times claimed: ‘We are a part, and a great part, of the Greater Britain which seems so plainly destined to dominate this planet.’ Even the Kreuz Zeitung in Berlin, the mouthpiece of the hostile Junkers, described the Empire as ‘practically unassailable’. Everywhere, in paying their respects to the Queen, the nations appeared to be paying homage to Britain. In Vienna the Emperor Franz Josef called at the British Embassy wearing the Garter and the uniform of his British regiment. In Gibraltar the Governor of Algeciras, swallowing two centuries of Spanish resentment, drove to the Rock for a parade of British troops. In Brooklyn the Women’s Health Protective Association sang God Save the Queen at a jubilee meeting, and in Philadelphia the poet Alfred Raleigh Goldsmith eulogized England in epic verse:

  Our father’s land! Our mother’s home!

  By freedom glorified!

  Her conquering sons the wide world roam

  And plant her flag in pride!

  For England’s fame, for thy lov’d name,

  Have bled, have won, have died.

  Victoria! Victoria! Long live our nation’s Queen.

  Victoria! Victoria! God bless Old England’s Queen.

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  More gratifying still was the tribute of the Empire itself. It is true that somebody had stolen the £300,000 diamond intended by the Nizam of Hyderabad as a present for the Queen, and the suggestion that every one of her 372 million subjects should send her a congratulatory telegram was fortunately not pursued: but everywhere in the Empire that day statues were being unveiled, garrisons were being inspected, thanksgiving services were being held in thatch-roofed outposts of the Anglican communion, ships were dressed overall and commemorative horses’ drinking troughs were unveiled. Even President Kruger of the Transvaal, the Queen’s most difficult tributary, obligingly released two obdurate Englishmen held in Pretoria gaol since the Jameson Raid, and in Hyderabad every tenth convict was set free (asked why, one of them said he understood Her Majesty had at last given birth to a son and heir). At Alligator Pond in Jamaica a week’s free food was distributed to poor families. In Baroda there was free travel on the State Railways for twenty-four hours. In Aden the ‘poorer natives’ were feasted at the expense of the British community. There was a grand ball at Rangoon, a dinner at the Sultan’s palace in Zanzibar, a salute of gunboats in Table Bay, a ‘monster Sunday-school treat’ at Freetown, a performance of the Hallelujah Chorus in Happy Valley at Hong Kong.

  And into London there poured, to the amazement and delight of all, the gilded emissaries of Empire. As the poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, wrote:

  From Afric’s Cape, where loyal watchdogs bark,

  And Britain’s Sceptre ne’er shall be withdrawn,

  And that young Continent that greets the dark

  When we the dawn;

  From steel-capped promontories stern and strong.

  And lone isles mounting guard upon the main,

  Hither her subjects wend to hail her long

  Resplendent Reign.

  The Colonial contingents for the Jubilee procession were mostly encamped at Chelsea, where curious crowds had been wandering among their tents for days. The Premiers of the eleven self-governing colonies, with their ladies, were put up at the Cecil, the largest hotel in Europe: they were often to be seen driving here and there to official functions, choosing gloves at Dents’ or silk hats in St James’s Street, or alighting at great town houses to take tea with duchesses. Wilfrid Laurier, the Prime Minister of Canada, was knighted on Jubilee morning, and the newspapers recorded approvingly that the Premier of Tasmania, Sir Edward Braddon, was the author of a book about big-game hunting in India—just the speciality the British public expected of a proper Empire-builder.

  At the Grosvenor Hotel, the gossip columns reported, was staying ‘Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeeboy, an eminent Parsee’—in whose employment, as principal of a private art school in Bombay, Rudyard Kipling’s father Lockwood had first gone to India. Another eminent guest was James Tyson, who had made a fortune supplying food to the gold-diggers in Australia, and was now reputed to be worth more than £5 million. There was an Imperial Fête in Regent’s Park, and an Imperial Ballet at Her Majesty’s Theatre, the Australian prima donna Nellie Melba was singing at the Opera, and all the visiting colonial and Indian officers had been taken by special train to a demonstration in Kent of the new Maxim-Nordenfeldt gun. In the parks, cafés and music-halls of the capital were to be seen princes and sultans, Sikhs and Chinese, exquisite Malay ladies, and West African policemen clumping uncomfortably about in boots, the first they had ever worn.

  The British were still astonishingly ignorant about their possessions, and they viewed all this with genial if rather patronizing innocence. Contemporary accounts of the event are full of wonder, precariously avoiding prejudice: were it not for the British uniforms and the Union Jacks, one feels, the responses to these colourful visitors might have been different. As it was, all those strange figures of Jubilee were brothers-in-Empire, and a writer in the women’s page of the Illustrated London News even suggested that the British male might learn a thing or two from their uninhibited fineries. The British saw the whole celebration as a kind of famil
y reunion, however vague they were as to the exact origins of the Hausa constables, the jurisdiction of the Privy Council over the protected persons of Basutoland, or even the constitutional status of Western Australia. It was not a sophisticated occasion, the Diamond Jubilee. It was full of sentiment and extravagance, indulgent tears and thumping brass bands, strung about with flags and lavishly illuminated. ‘It may safely be said,’ one commentator wildly claimed, ‘that the Jubilee will be the costliest event in the world’s history.’

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  The procession itself was a superb display of braggadocio. With its 50,000 troops, it was thought to constitute the largest military force ever assembled in London, and as it marched in two separate columns through the streets of the capital, to converge upon St Paul’s for the thanksgiving service, even the exuberant reporters of the nineties sometimes found themselves beggared of hyperbole. ‘How many millions of years has the sun stood in heaven?’ inquired the Daily Mail. ‘But the sun never looked down until yesterday upon the embodiment of so much energy and power.’ It was, wrote G. W. Steevens, ‘a pageant which for splendour of appearance and especially for splendour of suggestion has never been paralleled in the history of the world’.1 ‘History may be searched,’ thought The Times, ‘and searched in vain, to discover so wonderful an exhibition of allegiance and brotherhood amongst so many myriads of men…. The mightiest and most beneficial Empire ever known in the annals of mankind.’

  One half of the procession was led by Captain Ames of the Horse Guards, at six foot eight inches the tallest man in the British Army, and looking more stupendous still wearing his high plumed helmet, swelled out with breastplate and cuirass, and astride his tall charger. The other half was led by Field-Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar, the most beloved of imperial generals, riding the grey Arab, Vonolel, which had conveyed him from Kabul to Kandahar in his victorious march of 1880.1 Not far behind Lieutenant Festing rode the Sudanese horse which had taken him to the capture of Bida in West Africa, and cheers of sympathy greeted the empty sleeve of the Honourable Maurice Gifford, wounded during a recent skirmish with the Matabele.

  Before, behind and among these champions marched a weirdly imperial force of arms. There were cavalrymen from New South Wales—gigantic soldiers, the papers reported, with an average height of five feet ten and a half inches and an average chest of thirty-eight inches. There were Hussars from Canada and Carabiniers from Natal, camel troops from Bikaner and Dyak head-hunters from North Borneo, wearing bright red pillbox hats and commanded by Captain W. Raffles Flint. The seventeen officers of the Indian Imperial Service troops were all princes, and the Hong Kong Chinese Police wore conical coolie hats. There were Malays, and Sinhalese, and Hausas from the Niger and the Gold Coast, Jamaicans in white gaiters and ornately embroidered jackets, British Guiana police in caps like French gendarmes, Cypriot Zaptiehs whose fezzes struck so jarring a chord that some of the crowd hissed them, supposing them to be Turks, and a jangling squadron of Indian lancers led by a British officer in a white spiked helmet. London had never seen such a spectacle. One of the Maoris weighed twenty-eight stone. One of the Dyaks had taken thirteen human heads. It was a properly Roman sight, a pageant of citizens and barbarians too, summoned from the frontiers to that grey eternal city. The British-bred colonials, said the Golden Issue of the Daily Mail‚ printed throughout in gold ink and sometimes breaking into exultant cross-heads, were ‘all so smart and straight and strong, every man such a splendid specimen and testimony to the

  GREATNESS OF THE BRITISH RACE

  that there was not an Imperialist in the crowd who did not from the sight of them gain a new view of the glory of the British Empire’.

  Through welcoming banners and fluttering handkerchiefs this allegorical pageant passed, with Soldiers of the Queen up the Strand and ‘Three Cheers for India’ at the end of Fleet Street, with applause for the dazzlingly ostentatious uniform of Sir Partab Singh, and a rippling of black and white from the massed clergy outside St Paul’s—through the massed hierarchy of Civil Servants on Constitution Hill, past the survivors of Balaclava assembled at a window on Ludgate Hill—with cheers rolling across London, with the thump of drums and the singing of patriotic songs along the route, with an empress, a crown prince, twenty-three princesses, a grand duke, three grand duchesses, four duchesses, forty Indian potentates riding three abreast and gorgeously decorated, with guns booming and bells chiming, beneath a banner in St James’s proclaiming in English and Hindustani that Victoria was alone the Queen of Earthly Queens, with the Papal Nuncio sharing a carriage with the representative of the Emperor of China, and the Princess of Wales in mauve spangle-trimmed satin, with rajahs glittering in diamonds and their ladies all in gold, and tens of thousands of Union Jacks, flying from towers, draped from windows, merry in the hands of school-children or haughty above the bearskins of colour sergeants. The Queen wore a bonnet with ostrich feathers in it, beneath a white silk parasol, and she was greeted at St Paul’s by her son the Prince of Wales, who was on horseback in a plumed hat, and received her with knightly courtesy.1

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  Everybody agreed it was a great success. As an affirmation of national pride it justly expressed the mood of the people, and gave an explicit warning to foreigners that Britain had not lost the taste for greatness. As a tribute to Victoria it was a moving reminder of all that had happened to the British since she had come to the throne, so long ago that most of the spectators could hardly imagine a Britain without her. As Mark Twain wrote, the Queen herself was the real procession—‘all the rest was embroidery’. Victoria returned to her palace in the evening, exhausted but marvellously pleased, through the blackened buildings of her ancient capital, whose smoke swirled and hovered over the grey river, and whose gas-lamps flickered into tribute with the dusk. At home she found that most of the colonies had already replied to her Jubilee message: their answers were being prepared for presentation to Her Majesty, and for later publication as a Blue Book.

  1 Gladstone, whose family fortunes were founded on the Indian and Caribbean trades, remained vehemently anti-Imperialist, and at 87 took no part in the Jubilee events—he thought the Queen ought to celebrate the occasion by abdicating. He died in the following year.

  2 The British, who theoretically ruled the Sudan in the name of Egypt, had decided in 1883 to withdraw the Egyptian garrisons from the country in the face of a rebellion led by a Muslim prophet known as the Mahdi. For this task they chose Charles Gordon, then 50 years old and already a national hero, who had made his name in China and had served in the Sudan before. Having successfully organized the withdrawal of the garrisons, Gordon himself held on in Khartoum, against orders, until in 1885 the city fell and he was killed. A British relief expedition reached the city too late, and Gordon was virtually canonized in England as the archetypical Christian soldier. Kitchener’s expedition to reconquer the Sudan had started south from Egypt in 1896.

  1 The Boer Republic of the Transvaal in South Africa was only theoretically subject to British suzerainty, but its gold reefs on the Rand were being exploited by a predominantly British community—whose members, known as Uitlanders, were allowed no political rights. In 1896 Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony and a diamond millionaire, had given his sanction to a plot designed to seize the Transvaal for the Empire. His lieutenant, Leander Starr Jameson, led a raid into the Republic intended to coincide with a rising of Uitlanders in Johannesburg, but the rising did not take place and Jameson’s posse was ignominiously captured by the Boers, the Kaiser sending a congratulatory telegram to President Kruger of the Transvaal. In the summer of 1897 a Select Committee of the House of Commons was inquiring into the circumstances of the raid.

  2The Mutiny (1857–8) was a rising by Indian sepoys of the Bengal Army which became a popular insurrection in some provinces of central India. It was caused by Indian resentment at certain British reforms, fear of compulsory Christianization, and the issue of cartridges greased with animal fats that were offensive to Hindu
and Muslim soldiers.

  1 Russell did not keep it up for long: by 1901, when he was 27, he was a pro-Boer and a pacifist, and abandoned the Empire for ever—much regretting, he says in his autobiography, the imperialist letters of his youth. Wells (1866–1946) was already a Socialist, and his imperialist ideas presumably blossomed into the World State conception of his later years. Webb (1859–1947) had long been a Socialist, too, but had previously been a clerk in the Colonial Office, and was to become, as Lord Passfield, Colonial Secretary in the Labour Government of 1929.

  1 The cult predeceased the acolyte. Pilot Officer Sir Arnold Wilson, having been British High Commissioner in Iraq, a Member of Parliament, an admirer of Adolf Hitler and a visionary prophet of social security in Britain, was killed when his Blenheim bomber was shot down near Dunkirk in 1940. He was 55.