by Tim Jeal
Between mid-November 1 1868 and the following February, Henry made enquiries in flyblown Alexandria, and in Aden, and boarded every homeward-bound ship, but he could find out nothing about the doctor.'7 He wrote to Captain Francis Webb, the US consul in Zanzibar, enquiring in strictest confidence whether the rumours about Livingstone's imminent arrival at the coast were true.i8 Webb's reply did not reach him until r February, and it merely confirmed what Stanley had sensed by then, `that there was not the slightest chance of Livingstone coming via Zanzibar'. The unpalatable truth was that the missionary explorer might be almost anywhere in the interior, and impossible to find.i9
In Aden, Alexandria and Cairo, Henry ploughed his way through the Bombay and English papers, and started to convert his Abyssinian diary into a book.zo He tried and failed to give up cigarettes and cigars, and struggled to banish `vile thoughts that stained the mind'. These lustful desires might have been satisfied with perfect propriety if he had only married Virginia. Meanwhile, to make things worse, the English community in Alexandria gossiped incessantly about love and sex.Z" Henry's depression deepened when he overheard two upperclass Englishmen mocking him cruelly - thinking themselves safely out of hearing. He was suffering from fever at the time and knew he was about to be recalled, having learned not a single thing about Livingstone.
In London, Stanley was shocked to learn that Finley Anderson had been replaced by Douglas A. Levien, who now informed Stanley that he was to be sent to Spain at the same salary as before. Bennett's sacking of Anderson made Stanley fear for his own future. If the Livingstone adventure remained a non-starter, what then? This new source of insecurity made the still-wounded Henry surprisingly receptive when a new matrimonial proposition was put to him out of the blue.
When staying in Denbigh in January 11867, Stanley had been introduced by his mother to a young woman called Katie Gough Roberts. The next day, at the father's invitation, Stanley and his mother had called at the Roberts' respectable residence in Vale Street." Stanley recalled, two years later, that after this first meeting he had remem bered Katie as `good-looking ... with long fair hair down her back'.14 On 3 March 11869, Henry was staying at the Queen's Hotel near Trafalgar Square waiting to return to Spain for the New York Herald, when Katie and her father, Thomas Gough Roberts, turned up uninvited at the hotel. Thinking that Mr Roberts was `a well-to-do solicitor', Henry was flattered to find him `so frank & good-natured as to be oblivious of St Asaph [the workhouse]'. Yet Roberts's behaviour was exceedingly strange. It would have been unheard of at this date for a gentleman to bring his daughter to see a young man to whom she had never been remotely close, and had not seen for over a year, and then to `hint' - as Stanley recorded that Roberts did: `if I center [sic] my affection on the young lady, he would dower her with a thousand pounds'. Stanley noticed that Roberts was red-faced and `not strong on teetotalism'. This was a considerable understatement, since Roberts would drink himself to death within less than a year." At the time of this trip to London with Katie, his wife was mortally ill; and with his own health as precarious as his finances, he was desperate to find a husband for his oldest daughter.
Ironically, although Henry felt honoured to be pursued by this member of Denbigh's elite, Roberts's background was less `well-to-do' than he imagined. Though Stanley thought him a retired solicitor, Thomas Gough Roberts's name does not appear in any Law Lists of the period, or in any local trade directories of the r 8 5os and 118 6os. Nor was he listed as a barrister in the admission registers of any of the four Inns of Court.26 Roberts was the son of a small landowner from Llanrhaeadr near Denbigh, and had left Wadham College, Oxford, without taking a degree.17 A subsequent falling-out with his father may explain why, aged twenty-five, he was a publican in Denbigh, living in a poor part of town. In 118 59 he moved to Vale Street and began describing himself as a gentleman, thanks to a legacy from his grandmother rather than to professional earnings.28 Given this background, Mr Roberts's interest in a clever workhouse boy, with a regular income, is easier to understand. (He would leave £5,ooo in his will when he died in 11870 - not a large sum to be divided among seven children.) So Stanley seemed a more than satisfactory catch for a girl who would not have been considered by a prosperous solicitor from, say, Shrewsbury or Chester.
Since backgrounds came no humbler than his own, Henry never suspected Roberts's motives; and soon he was in the same state of rap ture he had experienced when imagining himself married to Virginia Ambella. `One of my secret aspirations has been to wed some fairhaired girl of discreet and amiable disposition whose affection for me would enable me to forget the ills of life & live up to that ideal [of] ... blessedness.' Yet at this point it did finally strike him that Roberts should not have pushed his daughter at him. Nevertheless, he decided, ,it may be that fate has chosen this singular way of conquering my reserve, for I know no man less forward than I in the presence of a woman'.' 9
Three days later, Stanley took his mother and half-sister, Emma, to Paris for a brief holiday. While walking in the Bois de Boulogne, Mrs Jones told her son that she wanted him to marry a Welsh girl and not `a vile foreigner'. Henry now suspected that she had encouraged Mr Roberts to bring his daughter to the Queen's Hotel. With Emma at present working as the Roberts's house maid, her involvement, and her mother's, seemed all but certain.
Back in England - although he did not record it in his diary - Stanley followed his relatives back to Wales, and stayed with his mother at the cramped Castle Arms tavern. From this improbable headquarters he conducted a whirlwind romance with Katie. The fact that his mother approved of Katie would probably have increased her appeal to him. In a letter to Katie's father, written a month later, Henry gave a thumbnail description of the week's momentous events.
During the middle of March, I revisited Denbigh ... Your daughter, Miss Katie M. Roberts, paid a visit to my mother, who keeps a little tavern. I was struck very much with Miss Roberts' appearance, her very ladylike deportment and her excessive amiability. I conversed with her and found her well educated ... I began to admire her but that admiration was quickly succeeded by love. I proposed to her, in a letter, and was accepted. From what Miss Katie has informed me, I find that Mrs Roberts does not object to me as a son-in-law.
He ended his letter by asking Mr Roberts whether he too consented to a future marriage.3°
Stanley's proposal of marriage is contained, rather obliquely, in a long autobiographical letter, which was written at the Queen's Hotel on zz March, the day he returned to London from Wales. In it, he told Katie: `I am an illegitimate child of Elizabeth Parry and John Rowlands ... I was a waif cast into the world ... Neither of my parents ever deigned to take the slightest notice of me ... it was decided that the waif should go to the workhouse - the Almshouse, the Poor House.' Along with these painful truths, Stanley included - as if to compensate - his invented acts of heroism in the American Civil War, and an exaggerated account of his wealth and income. But this bluster does not devalue the immense personal achievement of telling another human being the unvarnished truth about his origins and about his rejection by his entire family. `For nine years the waif lived within the workhouse, uncared for by all relations.' Given the gossip in Denbigh, he would have had no choice but to tell Katie some of these facts, but by no means all of them. Describing himself as the `workhouse brat', as well as `the waif', he wrote much of the letter in the third person, only able to describe the misery of his youth by distancing himself from it. After saying that `the waif' was `very ambitious', Stanley added: `He could do even better with a wife, not a pretty doll-faced wife, but a woman educated, possessed of energy.' Then suddenly he switched to the first person: `Along with her aid ... I would defy the world; I write to you, having seen such a one as I desire; I request you write to me as quickly as possible, as I am going to Spain next Wednesday. Couch it in plain terms, discard all ambiguity, as I have done ...' He signed off ,as one who loves you', and asked to be addressed as Henry.3'
None of Katie's replies have surv
ived, but in an undated and incomplete letter from Stanley (written in March or April), he implored her: `Write to me fully, declare once more your promise or withdraw it. Tell your love for me as often as your heart's dearest impulse will prompt you ... Send me also a lock of your hair, and I shall encase it in richest gold, I shall blush to tell you how often I should kiss it.'31 In mid-May Katie had apparently begged Stanley not to `forsake' her now that her mother had recently died. He replied: `Over the grave of your dead mother ... I repeat my vow to make you my wife.'33 So this was serious indeed.
Shortly before his wife's death, Thomas Gough Roberts gave his consent to the marriage - Stanley merely being asked to confirm whether or not he was a member of the Church of England.34 For a young man in a delicate position, he replied with commendable honesty: `Very little veneration do I have for any church ... People are too muffled up in the infallibility of their own sects ... Katie may profess what she pleases'.35 Roberts seemed content with this reply.
Between the spring and autumn of 11869, Stanley was sent back to Spain by Bennett to report on the spasmodic fighting between the Monarchists and the Republicans. Although he went on writing lov ingly to Katie, the man of action in his make-up was tugging him away from his yearning for marital security into an increasing fascination with danger. In September 11869, Stanley was ordered to Valencia to report on the stiffest street fighting in the war to date. Before leaving Madrid, he had met a young journalist of twenty-one working for the Boston Morning Journal. His name was Edward King, and he too was bound for Valencia where he soon described the fearless war correspondent at work.
When Stanley first breezed into the hotel where King was staying, the younger man was immediately struck by the extraordinary energy emanating from this `short, swart young man ... He accosted me in Castilian whereupon I shook my head. Then he burst into a gratified laugh and seized my hands.' Then, since their train did not leave for an hour, Henry jumped into a carriage to get a clean shirt from his hotel, returning in fifteen minutes. King thought him `the very perfection of activity'. He noticed that, though Henry often smiled, `his eyes seemed always to be looking far away at something to be reached and won'.
They arrived at Valencia, thanks to Stanley's decision to abandon the train and travel on from Alicante by ship. Outside the war-torn town, fleeing people were fighting for carts and horses. Henry scrambled onto a mound of luggage and appealed to anyone in the crowd who might be prepared to help them get into town. Nobody responded to this dangerous request, until at last a sixteen-year-old boy agreed to lead them through the back streets. In the central square 400 soldiers were drawn up with loaded rifles. An officer told Stanley and King that they could not reach their hotel because the insurrectos had barricaded the very street it was in, and were shooting anyone who stepped into the thoroughfare. Stanley smiled at King, and said that the royalist rebels were rotten shots. Then, with King's valise under his arm, he sprinted across the street as bullets whizzed past him. King and the boy followed suit. All three reached the hotel unscathed, and ate a huge breakfast on arrival. When Henry stepped onto the balcony outside their room, a bullet literally parted his hair. White with shock, `he sat down upon the sofa very quietly for a few minutes'. Although he blocked the windows with furniture, another bullet smashed through the glass and pinged into the room. That afternoon the barricade outside the hotel was stormed, costing the Republicans many lives. Afterwards Stanley interviewed generals and rebels `with the most careful fidelity and compared their statements'.
King learned a lot from Henry and remained a close friend until the late 188os - `friend of my soul', Stanley called him." Henry had warmed to him at once because, like himself, Edward King had suffered in childhood - his father having killed himself by jumping from a steamship on a voyage of recuperation. King had then left home at sixteen to become a reporter. His first book, a personal appreciation of Paris, had been published a year before he met Stanley.;7
But his love of dangerous work did not stop Henry longing for Katie. `My usual thoughts, ambitions, hopes, aspirations have utterly left me,' he confessed to her, `eclipsed by constant unrepressed thoughts of you ... The love I feel for you absorbs all - it is ardent, whole-souled.''8 Though he dreaded her abandoning him because of his origins, he loved her enough to write: `It would shock me greatly to receive a letter withdrawing your promise, but it would shock me still more to think you were suffering for my sake.' He explained that his time in America had enabled him to see Denbigh as it really was: `a small place with petty jealousies'. He hated to think of her exposed `from morning to night to scandalous gossip fouling everybody's character'. Stanley's mother, and his sister, Emma, were scandalmongers, and Emma even hinted to Katie that her half-brother was already married. Being jealous of Katie, she threw several of Henry's letters into a water butt to harm his chances. She knew that if Henry married Katie there would be no more lavish gifts for her, or trips to Paris.;' Yet Stanley forgave his sister, asking Katie to `think of both of us how we were brought up, and have mercy'. Henry was confused by his fiancee's closeness to members of his family. He vacillated between wishing Katie to cultivate his mother, and wanting her to condemn the woman.
'I do not believe she ever loved me. I do not believe she can love now ... When she tells me she loves me, I listen and appear gratified but I know better ...'
So what a change had been effected! Mrs Jones had actually told her `waif' that she loved him. Katie was an expert peacemaker, who persuaded Stanley to make up with his mother by writing `a penitent letter', having arranged for Mrs Jones to send Stanley a photograph of his youngest half-brother, James, with a loving note.4° But discord followed, and Stanley asked Katie to keep his mother at a distance. `When you marry me, you marry myself only, for I am isolated as I have been from the age of five.'
Even when Katie's involvement with his family upset him, Henry told her tenderly that he read her letters several times, `until I hear a sweet voice that seems to knock at the gate of my heart ... thrilling in its deliciousness and sweetness, and I listen and listen until a dreamy exquisite feeling of domesticity begins to creep over me such as I never experienced before'.4' At times, seeking to impress, he was unintentionally comical.
Today I wear underclothes of silk ... and a white linen suit ... The pantaloons are what are called `peg tops' ... The coat is loose, braided around with silk cord. Hat is of white silk with black riband & black binding; shoes brown French gaiters, gloves fawn color [sic] ... There you have a perfect picture of me. Am I not daintyj41
Only the final, rhetorical question saves him from absurdity. He could seem frighteningly certain of his destiny. Yet given what Stanley would achieve in Africa, at immense cost to his health, his self-dramatizing bravado seems eerily prescient.
So long as my health lasts I feel myself so much a master of my own fortunes that I can well understand Caesar's saying to the sailors, `Nay be not afraid for you carry Caesar and his fortunes.' I could say the same, `My body carries Stanley and his fortunes.'43
But Henry's glorious future meant little to Katie when her present worries became pressing. Her father was a drunkard, and was not expected to live long. So, after her mother's unexpected death in May, she knew that unless she married soon she would become, as the eldest daughter, responsible for the care of her younger brothers and sisters. She begged Henry, for her sake, to avoid the fighting and come home soon and marry her. His reply was not reassuring.
You know that I am not master of my own actions, I am at the beck and call of a Chief whose will is imperious law ... The slightest forgetfulness of duty, the slightest laggardness is punished severely ... I do not mean to be discharged from my splendid position ... My great love for you cannot blind me, it cannot lead me astray from the path I have chalked out ... And yet my whole future is risked each time you ask me to name the day I come to England. Know once for all, I cannot come to England without permission unless I throw up my position.
The best she could hope
for, he explained, would be to see him after he had reported on the opening of the Suez Canal early in November.
How are we to be married you ask? If you cannot come to London with your father to be married to me by licence, you don't deserve to be married. My dear girl, can you not understand ... it is only by railway celerity that I can live. Even when I come to Denbigh I feel out of the world, my conscience accuses me of forgetting duty, of wasting time ... I cannot help that feeling. It makes me feel as if the world was sliding from under my feet.44
In this remarkable letter, Henry confessed to Katie that work, above all else, was his essential way of blotting out unhappiness. `It is only by railway celerity that I can live' is a most revealing statement. And now at last he acknowledged that his need to live at a hectic pace could pose a problem in relation to marriage. With all this travelling, how could a shared life be possible? But perhaps they could travel together, like Samuel Baker and his wife, Florence? This, however, would be expensive, so Stanley reminded Katie that her father had once offered a dowry of £r,ooo. Even £50o would cover her accommodation and trousseau for the foreseeable future. Yet given the true state of Mr Roberts's finances, Henry's request alarmed father and daughter enough to damage his chances of marrying her. Katie knew only too well that her father had dangled a generous dowry as a lure, but had hoped to slip out of paying once Henry was properly infatuated. Stanley seemed completely unaware that Thomas Gough Roberts's aim in marrying off his daughters had always been to spare himself expense rather than to incur it.45
By the autumn of 11869 Katie's letters were starting to dry up, but at this critical time Stanley was summoned from Spain by James Gordon Bennett Jr to meet him in Paris. He now also arranged to meet Katie and her father on a lightning visit to London. As Henry's private life reached its defining moment, so too, unfortunately, did the great news story that had tantalized him for years. In Paris, at the Grand Hotel, on z8 October, Bennett announced that the moment had finally arrived to resume the search for Dr Livingstone. This would not have been a complete surprise to Stanley, since, back in June Douglas Levien, the Herald's London agent, had written hinting that he was actively trying to revive Bennett's interest in the great explorer.46 Bennett now told Stanley what he planned for him. First, he was to travel for a few months in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, the Crimea, Persia, and finally India; and only after that should he sail from Bombay to Zanzibar to start his long-deferred attempt to find Livingstone. Some sixth sense was apparently telling Bennett that this lengthy prelude to the task in Africa would make ultimate success more likely, though Henry feared the delay would give Livingstone time to reach the coast, or even die, before he could reach him.47