The government’s prevarications on Ireland had already sapped its support among both Radicals and Liberals. It could not afford to be called unpatriotic by ignoring Baker, losing Gordon to the Belgians, and abandoning the Sudanese garrisons. Once again, Granville fell back on Gordon as a talisman. “If Gordon says he believes he could by his personal influence excite the tribes to escort the Khartoum garrison and inhabitants to Suakin, a little pressure on Baring might be advisable.”36
Granville cabled Cairo, suggesting Gordon for the third time. Only the previous day, Baring had pleaded again for the dispatch of a British officer with full powers. Regardless of his reservations about Gordon, Baring judged that the government would give him no alternative, so he conceded.
“Gordon would be the best man,” Baring replied, “if he will pledge himself to carry out a policy of withdrawal from Sudan as soon as possible, consistently with saving life.” Baring still did not trust Gordon. “He must also fully understand that he must take his instructions from the British Representative in Egypt, and report to him.”
Gladstone agreed, and added a further condition: “While his opinion on the Sudan may be of great value, must we not be very careful in any instruction we give, that he does not shift the center of gravity as to political and military responsibility for that country? In brief, if he reports what should be done, he should not be the judge who should do it, nor ought he to commit us on that point by advice officially given.”37
The government had taken seven weeks to make up its mind. Meanwhile Gordon was at Brussels, and the Times had announced that he was about to become a Belgian mercenary.
“Come to London,” Wolseley cabled.
At dawn the next morning, Gordon stepped off a Channel ferry. After taking a nap at the Knightsbridge barracks, he reported to the War Office. Wolseley asked him to return that afternoon to meet with cabinet ministers. It being Friday, Gladstone and most of his ministers had already left London for the weekend. Apart from Granville and Hartington, the only other available ministers were Lord Northbrook, who was Baring’s cousin, and the Radical M.P. Sir Charles Dilke, president of the Local Government Board and erstwhile undersecretary for foreign affairs. No secretaries could be found to assist them in clarifying a policy. As no cabinet secretary was available, and as ministers were forbidden to make their own notes, there would be no minutes of the meeting. When Hartington suggested they wait until the next cabinet, scheduled for the following Tuesday, Granville overruled him. Apart from securing Gordon’s services before the Belgians did, Granville wanted to avoid splitting the cabinet.
Waiting in an anteroom, Gordon watched a solitary clerk at his desk, and asked him, “Do you ever tell a lie?” Before Gordon could explain whether he was referring to his own experience as an aide or his strategy for the imminent meeting, Wolseley appeared. The ministers had sent him out to secure Gordon’s consent for a principle on which, they said, the whole cabinet agreed.38
“Her Majesty’s Government want you to understand this Government are determined to evacuate the Sudan, for they will not guarantee future government,” said Wolseley, “Will you go and do it?”
“Yes.”
“Go in.”
By Gordon’s account, the meeting was brief. One of the ministers, presumably Lord Hartington, began, “Did Wolseley tell you our ideas?”
“Yes. He said you will not guarantee future government of Sudan, and you wish me to go and evacuate it?”
“Yes.”39
The ministers’ accounts suggest a longer encounter, and that the cabinet dispatched Gordon without abandoning its constructive ambiguity over the aims of his mission.
The next day, Lord Northbrook would cable Gordon’s assessment to Baring: “Does not believe in the great power of the Mahdi. Does not think the tribes will go much beyond their own confines, and does not see why the garrisons should not get off. He did not seem at all anxious to retain the Sudan; and agreed heartily to accept the policy of withdrawal.”
“The upshot of the meeting,” Northbrook told Baring, “was that he leaves by tonight’s mail for Suakin to report on the best way of withdrawing the garrisons, settling the country, and to perform such other duties as may be entrusted to him by the khedive’s government through you.” Northbrook did not clarify what those “other duties” might be.40
Lord Granville’s telegraph to Baring began with the same impression, and ended with similar ambiguity: Gordon had been engaged in an advisory role, but might carry out unspecified executive actions. As an adviser, Gordon was to “report on the military situation”; “consider the best mode of evacuating the interior of the Sudan, and of securing the safety and good administration by the Egyptian Government of the ports of the Red Sea”; and make recommendations for counteracting “the possible stimulus to the slave trade which may be given by the revolution which has taken place.” Like Northbrook, Granville went on to imply the executive role for Gordon that Baring and the War Office had requested. “Gordon will be under the orders of H.M.’s Minister at Cairo, and will report through him to H.M.’s Government, and perform such other duties as may be entrusted to him by the Egyptian Government through Sir Evelyn Baring.”
To Granville, Gordon’s mission for the British government would be simultaneously a mission for the Egyptian government, with Sir Evelyn Baring as the link. This partitioning of Gordon’s duties observed Gladstone’s policy of nonintervention in the Sudan, while placating the interventionists at the War Office, and the mixed corps of imperialists and humanitarians in the press. Granville saw no potential for conflict in Gordon’s simultaneous engagement as a British adviser and an Egyptian executive. After all, Evelyn Baring had shown how well such an arrangement could work.41
As war minister, Lord Hartington reported the decision to Gladstone. He did not mention the key elements of Gordon’s orders, calming the revolt and extracting the garrisons. Nor did he mention that Gordon would be under the command of both Britain and Egypt, via the person of Evelyn Baring. He told Gladstone only that Gordon had been sent to report and make recommendations. Either Hartington had failed to follow the conversation, or he had chosen not to report it. Granville supported him in this omission, telling Gladstone, “Northbrook, Hartington, Dilke and I took a good deal of responsibility on ourselves, but I think we have acted within the limits of your views.” Gordon, he added, had been “very pleasing and childlike.”42
The ministers had engaged a zealot, but they hid their work in ambiguity and denial. Hartington assured Gladstone that they had followed his policy. Unaware that his ministers had misled him, the prime minister passed a pleasant weekend at Hawarden Castle. Attending church twice on Sunday, he read Wright’s Confessions of an Almsgiver in the library that he called his “Temple of Peace.”
Wilfrid Blunt would claim to detect a conspiracy in this: The War Office had manipulated the press, and a cabal of ministers had subverted official policy, forcing a deep intervention in the Islamic world. Certainly, Wolseley and the generals in Egypt agreed that the garrisons could not be withdrawn without military cover. Further, the four ministers who dispatched Gordon had all pressed Gladstone to launch the bombardment of Alexandria. But Hartington had attempted to delay the decision until a formal cabinet, hardly the act of a conspirator subverting his government. There was no conspiracy, only individual ministers sensitive to “sensation” and rivalry. Gordon’s confused orders expressed the divisions and discomforts of a cabinet whose members, like Gladstone, recognized the need for action but did not want to take responsibility for ordering it.43
By the time Gladstone read his ministers’ reports, they had hustled Gordon out of the country. As if to confirm that they did not expect Gordon to merely report and recommend, they appended to him the stabilizing influence of Lieutenant Colonel John Donald Stewart, an intelligence officer with Sudanese experience. From the War Office, Gordon went to the Chelsea house of Reginald Tilney, a friend from the Royal Engineers. When a cab arrived to take Gordon
to Charing Cross Station, Tilney found him in the nursery, in his muffler and overcoat, cradling Tilney’s infant son.
The ministers were waiting for him at Charing Cross. Lord Granville bought his ticket, Sir Garnet Wolseley carried his bag, and the duke of Cambridge opened the carriage door for him. When the grandest Englishman now alive realized he had forgotten his wallet, Wolseley turned out his pockets and, finding only small change, gave Gordon his gold watch and chain. At eight on a winter night, the train pulled out for Dover.
“IT IS NOT my finding out, it is G-d’s revelation.” Gordon had tried to escape his destiny, but the Lord had summoned him to the Sudan. That night, as his express train hurtled across Europe to Marseilles, his mind spun with schemes. The next morning, when Lord Granville rose for breakfast in his Mayfair mansion, he found eight telegrams from Gordon waiting for him. Two called on the tribes of eastern Sudan to meet him at Berber to negotiate a withdrawal. Two announced him as governor-general, with powers to evacuate the Sudan. One restored the Sultanate of Darfur as a buffer between British Egypt and the abandoned Sudan, and another ordered the recruitment of Sudanese troops into the Egyptian army. Even before he had reached Cairo, Gordon was making policy in the field. And if the ministers did not grasp the implications of their orders to Gordon, W.T. Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette did.44
“At Last!” cried the Gazette. “The whole Egyptian question has been revolutionized in one hour. At yesterday’s informal meeting of the Ministers at the War office there was taken one of those decisive steps that make or mar the destinies of Empires. Henceforth, we have full and undivided responsibility for affairs in the Sudan.” And that meant Egypt, too. “Whether the public realises it or not, the dispatch of General Gordon to the Sudan, exercising practically unlimited powers not as Governor-General of the khedive, but as the accredited representative of the British Government, must entail, as a natural and inevitable corollary, the assumption sooner or later of a similar responsibility, as direct and as unlimited, for the affairs of Egypt.”45
Alarmed, Granville asked Hartington, “We were very proud of ourselves yesterday. Are you sure we did not commit a gigantic folly?” If the garrisons really were a British responsibility, the only way to save them would be to send troops to Berber, not Gordon to Khartoum. If the garrisons were not a British responsibility, and the aim was to negotiate with the Mahdi, then the best emissary would have been a Turkish or Egyptian Muslim, not a Christian from Britain, whose actions carried an inevitable whiff of annexation. And if a reconnaissance was required, then the reliable Stewart, who had recently toured northern Sudan, would have been a better choice.
Gordon was a cult figure, his name a panacea for the government’s problems. At the next cabinet, Gladstone and his ministers unanimously endorsed his dispatch. “Gordon’s mission—a mission to report,” Gladstone noted in his diary.46
Now on the Mediterranean aboard the SS Tanjore, Gordon shot off another memo. He would “restore” Sudanese independence by dividing the country among local “sultans,” letting them decide for themselves whether to ally with the Mahdi or remain independent. To make this rule by division workable, the cunning slaver Zubair Rahmat must be kept out of the Sudan, preferably at Cyprus, or he “would in no time eat up all the petty Sultans and consolidate a vast state.” Gordon was reheating old ideas: Both Colonel Stewart and Abd el-Qadir Pasha had suggested reviving the Sultanate of Darfur as a counterweight to the Mahdi, while both Urabi and Sharif Pasha had considered throwing western Sudan to the Mahdi as the price of keeping the Nile Valley. But though times had changed, Gordon had not. He still could not imagine that the Mahdi was more than “a mere figurehead,” that his prophetic stance was more than an opportunist posture, or that the impetus and passion of his revolution would allow him to form a coalition and advance “beyond the frontiers of the tribes who were immediately under him” to Khartoum.47
While Gordon risked his life, Evelyn Baring risked his career. He had asked for a steady hand, and had received Gordon instead. But Baring, coveting Egypt as his destiny, did not argue with Lord Granville. He accepted Gordon, and tried to contain his willfulness. When Gordon attempted to bypass sinful Cairo and head straight for Khartoum via the Suez Canal and Suakin, Baring ordered him back. He forced Gordon to observe the elementary politeness of meeting his nominal commander Khedive Tawfik. He told Gordon bluntly that he was not to attempt to hold Khartoum, as he had advised in the Gazette interview. To Baring, Gordon had been sent to Khartoum in order to abandon it. His job was to help create a defensible Egyptian border, and not to make “trouble.”48
Gordon complied meekly. Reporting to Cairo, he apologized to Tawfik for his past rudeness. Immediately afterward, he and Stewart conferred with Baring, Wood, and Nubar Pasha at Baring’s villa. Gordon received a budget of £1 million and two firmans. One, to be announced immediately, made him governor-general of the Sudan. The other, to be kept secret and revealed at a suitably stable moment, announced the evacuation of Khartoum.
“What a curious creature he is!” Baring wondered to Granville. “He is certainly half-cracked, but it is impossible not to be charmed by the honesty and simplicity of his character.”
Gordon agreed with everything Baring said, and emphasized his assent to the withdrawal policy. But Baring still worried that Gordon was “terribly flighty,” and capable of alarming reversals of opinion. So he drafted a set of orders, expanding upon the final clause of Gordon’s orders from London and clarifying his duties for the Egyptian government. In these, Baring accepted Gordon’s opinion that withdrawal might take “a few months”; that the territory should be handed over to a “confederation” of “the different petty Sultans who existed at the time of Mehmet Ali’s conquest”; and that the Egyptian government should assent to surrendering its empire. To accomplish this, the Egyptian government gave Gordon “full discretionary powers” to retain the Egyptian garrisons, but only to accomplish the withdrawal “with the least possible risk to life and property,” and not to underpin the power of the confederacy of sultans. The implicit gap between Gordon’s advisory and executive powers now became clear: He advised for London, but governed for Cairo.49
Gordon’s first executive action widened the gap. “I wish Zubair to come to the Sudan with me,” he announced.
Only a day earlier, Gordon had identified Zubair as the greatest threat to his mission. Now Gordon had a “mystic feeling” that Zubair was his ideal partner. In the absence of British troops, Zubair was Gordon’s best hope. Zubair was a skillful, violent politician. He was a direct descendant of the Prophet. He was a leader of the Jaalayin tribes who had turned to the Mahdi. “The Mahdi’s chiefs are ex-chiefs of Zubeir,” reasoned Gordon. “All the followers of the Mahdi would, I believe, leave the Mahdi on Zubair’s approach.”50
He was also under a death sentence for slaving and treason, and had sworn to kill Gordon for executing his slaver son Suleiman on the Gazelle River. Baring excluded “mystic feelings” from his calculations, but Zubair had pragmatic appeal, and with Osman Digna threatening the Red Sea ports, Baring had to do something. So he arranged a melodramatic reconciliation at which Zubair, reverting to professional habit, declared himself Gordon’s “slave for life.” Gordon prepared to leave for Khartoum, with Zubair to follow when Baring had secured permission from London.51
“Zubair’s appointment was received here with astonishment,” reported Frank Power, the Times’ man at Khartoum. “It will nullify Gordon and Baker’s work.”52
The hero of the abolitionists was about to pass Sudan to the king of the slavers. Though Gordon misunderstood the Mahdi, he grasped fully the implications of his orders from London. Abandoning the garrisons meant surrendering to slavery. The Anti-Slavery Society had already warned Lord Granville that Britain was about to shame its record as humanitarian enforcer. Hiding behind the pretense that Egypt still ruled the Sudan, Granville had replied that the government did not consider it “desirable to interfere with the measures which the Egyptian Go
vernment may be disposed to adopt.” The Gladstone government needed stability in Egypt more than liberty in the Sudan. As Baring’s friend Moberley Bell of the Times put it, at least Zubair would be a British client; when the crisis had passed, he would be “more amenable to humanitarian influence.” This did not mollify the Anti-Slavery Society and its supporters on the Liberal benches. While Gordon packed his dress uniform at Cairo, confident that Baring would arrange for Zubair to join him, a humanitarian revolt against the Liberal government stirred in London.53
On the evening of January 28, 1884, Gordon and Baring rode through the Cairo streets to Ismail’s magnificent railway station. On the platform behind him, Abdel Shakur, the new sultan of Darfur, levered onto the train twenty-three of his wives, sixty servants, and a mass of baggage. Gordon and Baring shook hands, both believing that Zubair Pasha would soon follow. Then Gordon bravely endured the embrace of Nubar Pasha, and boarded the train with General Graham and Colonel Stewart.
“I leave for Sudan tonight,” he wrote to Augusta. “I feel quite happy, for I say, if God is with me, who can or will be hurtful to me? May he be glorified, the world and people of the Sudan be blessed, and may I be the dust under His feet.”54
He had a year to live.
AT ASYUT they boarded a Thomas Cook steamer for the south. Thrilled by power and the proximity of the telegraph key, Gordon bombarded Baring with messages. Gordon’s ideas rested on three contradictory assumptions. The first was that the Mahdi would not dare to leave Kordofan and attack Khartoum. The second was that if he did, then Britain would be compelled to fight back. As Gordon confided to the archaeologist A. H. Sayce when his steamer stopped for coal at Luxor, whatever happened, he expected to be “supported by troops.” An Egyptian withdrawal from Sudan was bound to endanger British control of Egypt, so reinforcements seemed inevitable. This was the soldier’s perception, shared by Gordon with Wolseley, Wood, and Graham. It was also the perspective of “forward” politicians like Baring, Northbrook, Hartington, and Dilke. Unspoken in the attempts to create a Darfur buffer state, or carve off Khartoum and the Nile Valley from western Sudan, was the expectation that Britain would maintain indirect control over the Sudan via Egyptian agency. “I have always contemplated making some arrangements for the future government of the Sudan,” admitted Baring, as he implemented a policy intended for the opposite effect.55
Three Empires on the Nile Page 21