We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do,
We’ve got the men, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the money too,
We’ve fought the Bear before, and while Britons shall be true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople
–gave its name to the militaristic sentiment of jingoism. It was sung everywhere, and it was a sentiment that became stronger and stronger towards the end of the century. The tiny queen herself was threatening abdication if the British did not go and give ‘those Russians such a beating’.
On 28 January Disraeli, who had been made the Earl of Beaconsfield, obtained a £6 million grant from Parliament for war. The fleet was ordered to leave Besika Bay and move up to Constantinople. By 15 February it was in place. The Russian army was beginning to march down towards that city when the order was suddenly given to pull up. Before its eyes were the massive grey hulls of six British warships tethered like basking sharks off Prinkipo island in the Sea of Marmara, guarding the glistening minarets of Constantinople.
The Russians returned to Adrianople. Though the tsar wanted to speed on to Constantinople, his brother the Grand Duke Nicholas believed it would be madness to proceed. On 3 March, in order to consolidate their gains while still not technically at war with Britain despite those warships, Russia quickly signed a separate peace with Turkey by the Treaty of San Stefano. Disraeli’s action had stopped Russia from entering Constantinople and seizing the Straits, but for how long? For ten weeks England held her breath, believing that an Anglo-Russian war could break out at any moment.
Deeply suspicious of this peace treaty, Disraeli did not stop his preparations for war. When it transpired that the treaty provided for a rearrangement of the Balkan peninsula so that it would be dominated by a ‘Big Bulgaria’ whose Slav population would give the Russians the preponderant influence in the Balkans, the prime minister announced that he was calling up the reserves. Two weeks later he sent 7,000 Indian troops to Malta–a sign that India had been restored to the imperial bosom. These actions convinced the Russian ambassador to London, Count Shuvalov, that the tsar could not seize Constantinople with impunity. The Russian government conceded that the great powers would have to be consulted about these changes because they affected Europe. It was agreed to call a Congress of the great powers, to take place in Berlin, capital of the dominant power of Europe, Prussia.
The Congress was hailed as Disraeli’s triumph, as in many ways it was–when it was over he was offered a dukedom by Queen Victoria. Though he was so pale from the kidney disease which killed him three years later that he wore rouge to go out at night, his actions at the Congress kept the Russians up to the mark. When they tried to stop the Turks controlling the passes of Bulgaria south of the Balkans and claimed a larger area of Armenia, he revealed a secret agreement with the Sultan of Turkey: in return for guaranteeing Turkey in Asia, Britain had been allowed to occupy Cyprus. And Disraeli now gave orders for more of the fleet to move to that island. Faced with two British fleets the Russians agreed to everything.
Disraeli returned home to be acclaimed for having secured peace. By his superior poker-playing he had restored Britain to her old international position of honour: he had reduced Russian influence in the Balkans by preventing Big Bulgaria, he had secured better rights for the Christian subjects of the sultan, who were to be monitored by military consuls, he had kept the Russians out of Constantinople, and he had stopped them gaining too much of Armenia, which could have been the jumping-off ground for penetration into Asia Minor or the Persian Gulf. In any case that danger had been neutralized because Great Britain now had a base at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.
In fact the Congress was a piece of gifted stage-management, of smoke and mirrors. Most of the agreements about territory between the great powers which made the Congress go so smoothly had actually been arranged a month before. Alarmed by Disraeli’s continued threat of war the Russians had agreed to divide Big Bulgaria in two. Meanwhile Britain had made a gentleman’s agreement with Austria–Hungary to support her occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Despite the excitement with which it was hailed, there was nothing very lasting about the Congress of Berlin. For all Disraeli’s conviction of the need to keep the Turkish Empire as a bulwark against Russia, it had been partially dismembered and small nations put in its place. Fears of Bulgaria becoming a Russian satellite proved quite illusory. Though seven years later the two Bulgarias reunited, the new nation was resistant to Russian influence and jealous of her independence. Cyprus proved to be a deadweight round the British neck, as it was soon to be superseded as a base in the eastern Mediterranean by Egypt. Moreover Britain was embarrassed by being tied to Turkey, which never kept her promises of reform. Despite the military consuls, the rulers went from bad to worse in their abuse of human rights, the best known being the Armenian massacre of 1892. In fact the most striking effect of the Russo-Turkish War and the Congress of Berlin was that Serbia felt hard done by. Like Montenegro and Romania she had won her independence, but she had a considerable grievance because Austria–Hungary had been allowed to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose populations were mainly Serbian.
Nevertheless most of Britain, with the vehement exception of Gladstone, believed that it was Disraeli’s finest hour. He turned down the dukedom but accepted the Garter on condition that Salisbury, the foreign secretary, was awarded it too. Disraeli’s ‘forward’ policy of expanding British territories in South Africa and India was far less successful, however. Although in west Africa, where Britain had had trading settlements since the eighteenth century, she had defeated the warlike Ashanti tribes on the Gold Coast in 1873, the Zulu War of 1878–9 was a public relations disaster. The Zulus, the most fearsome tribe in southern Africa, had been driven by drought into looking for other lands on which to graze their cattle. By 1877 the bankrupt Transvaal Republic had agreed to be annexed by the British in order to obtain their protection against the Zulus.
The formidable Zulu chief Cetewayo had revived the organization of the tribe on the old military basis. All the young unmarried men had to belong to regiments; removed from their families at puberty to live in barracks beside the royal kraal or palace, they were not allowed to marry until they had wet their spears with blood. When the British demanded an end to Zulu mobilization, the Zulu War began–and, despite the obvious advantages of guns over spears, at Isandhlwana a camp of British soldiers was wiped out by an impi, or Zulu army, of 20,000 men. The Zulus used the land so skilfully, moved so fast and secretly, that no one had the least idea that they were in the vicinity, until they suddenly rose out of the dust in their feathered headdresses to wreak havoc among the British. The war continued badly: Napoleon’s III’s son, the Prince Imperial, who had volunteered for the British army to gain experience, was killed in an ambush. Abandoned by his commanding officer, he was found dead in a pool of his own blood–though Queen Victoria, who liked the Zulus (they were brave and ‘cleanly’, she thought), was impressed by the way the Zulus had been so scientific in severing his arteries that he died without pain.
At Rorke’s Drift, where a handful of British soldiers held out against the entire Zulu army, British honour was to some extent redeemed, and at the Battle of Ulundi the power of the Zulus was broken for many years to come. But the war had made Disraeli unpopular. It had been conducted so badly that it would have been almost comic had the thought of men being pointlessly slaughtered not also made the electorate angry; it was their sons and brothers whose lives were being thrown away so cavalierly.
Afghanistan was another scene of humiliation. Though India herself remained quiet, Russian movements in Asia took on new significance in the summer of 1878 when tension between Britain and Russia was at its height. Fears that the tsar would steal a march in Afghanistan, where the Russian ambassador was received but not the British, instigated an invasion of the country by three British armies. The amir fled, and his son Yakub Khan signed a treaty which appeared to make Afgha
nistan a British protectorate. But the British resident Sir Louis Cavagnari and his entire staff at the British embassy were murdered in September 1879, and the new Amir was forced to seek refuge in the British camp. A second punitive invasion of Afghanistan followed under the masterly soldier Sir Frederick Roberts, who had won the Victoria Cross for gallantry during the Indian Mutiny.
Though Roberts took Kabul successfully, deposed Yakub Khan and made an extraordinary march from Kabul to Kandahar, the murder of a British consul and of Foreign and Colonial Office personnel and the strikingly incompetent campaign in South Africa combined to wipe the shine off Disraeli’s record popularity as a general election approached in 1880. On top of that, a severe agricultural depression struck in the late 1870s. Though this was not the Conservatives’ fault, it gave the impression of a government which had lost its grip.
For in 1876 the extraordinary economic boom which the British people had enjoyed since the 1840s came to a halt. Other European countries like Germany and France which had industrialized later were now drawing level with Britain. There was a slump and a flurry of bankruptcies in 1879. At the same time British grain prices collapsed. This was the result of successive bad harvests in 1875–80 which made it impossible to do without importing cheap grain, combined with the cheapness of that foreign grain suddenly available from Canada and the Midwest of America.
The tide turned against the Conservatives as thousands of farmers went to the wall. For the cheap foreign corn continued to come into the country, unhampered by protection. And Disraeli, who had pronounced protection ‘dead and damned’, could not bring it back. Though other European countries turned to tariffs to protect their infant industries, free trade was still an article of British nineteenth-century faith. The result was a massive flight from the land. Between 1860 and 1901, some 40 per cent of male labourers went to live in towns or emigrated, and by the beginning of the twentieth century 95 per cent of British food was imported, as it still is. The invention of refrigeration and canning processes at the end of the nineteenth century meant that cheap meat could be bought from the Argentine, where costs were lower.
Disraeli’s government had also failed to manage the House of Commons. A new generation of more militant Irish Nationalist MPs who called themselves Home Rulers was obstructing business at Westminster. The bad harvests, which were even more disastrous for Ireland’s rural economy than for England’s, and the fact that the 1870 Land Act was only partially successful, made them determined to have a Dublin Parliament again.
There was a lot of material for Gladstone to build on and, being a virtuoso orator, he triumphed in his whirlwind Midlothian campaign across Scotland. Disraeli’s foreign policy was made to look perilous and morally wrong as Gladstone denounced any alliance with the Ottomans in energetic and novel stump oratory. He took his views to the people, giving speeches that lasted for several hours, day in, day out, wherever a railway line could be found–a new form of electioneering with whistle-stop train tours across the country. Gladstone had formulated a style to appeal to the massively increased electorate. Instead of voicing the considered views of the sophisticated Victorian gentleman, Gladstone had his eye on greater popular participation and a more emotional, simplistic approach to the issues.
The campaign was enormously successful, and the election brought the Liberals in on a huge majority in 1881–349 Liberals were returned against 243 Conservatives. It elevated the Grand Old Man, as Gladstone was known, to a sort of superstar status. However, thanks to the secret ballot, sixty Irishmen were elected on the Home Rule ticket. That was where the future battleground lay. Meanwhile as Gladstone started to undo most of Disraeli’s imperial policies, withdrawing from Afghanistan, granting independence to the Transvaal, the great man himself was dying. Queen Victoria asked if she might visit Disraeli on his sickbed, but he refused, quipping to intimates that she would only ask him to carry a message to Albert. By April 1881 he was dead. Victoria was so upset that she personally wrote out the announcement of his death in the Court Circular. Though protocol forbade the sovereign from attending a funeral (a custom Queen Elizabeth, her great-great-granddaughter, broke when she attended the funeral of Winston Churchill), Victoria sent a wreath of primroses from Osborne, with a note saying they were Disraeli’s favourite flowers.
The new Liberal Parliament looked destined for even greater success than its radical predecessor of 1868. But instead of further reforms Gladstone’s second government found itself bogged down by Ireland, whose Home Rulers were now headed by a ruthless master of tactics in Charles Stewart Parnell. Much of Gladstone’s time was taken up in dealing with him and his terrorist allies in Ireland, while a series of untoward events in the empire lost him a great deal of popularity. Gladstone’s foreign policy was coloured by his determination to destroy what he contemptuously described as ‘the castle of Beaconsfieldism’–Disraeli’s grandiose imperial projects. He felt strongly that the British Empire could not continue to grow nor to administer such vast swathes of the world’s population and that Britain’s interests were often best served by encouraging self-determination and what he called ‘the healthy growth of local liberty’.
At the Battle of Majuba Hill in 1881 the First Boer War ended in the crushing defeat of the British, and Gladstone granted the Transvaal her independence once more. Now that the Zulu threat had been removed the Boers had no reason to be federated with the British. In Britain the battle was seen as a mortifying failure for the British army and for Gladstone, who, many federationists considered, should have continued to fight to keep the Transvaal within Cape Colony. In 1880 Britain withdrew from Afghanistan. British forces had helped establish Abdur Rahman on the throne in the hope that the widespread support for him would make Afghanistan a firm barrier between India and the Russians. When in 1885 Russian forces occupied Penjdeh within Afghanistan’s borders it seemed as though Britain might be forced into war with Russia. But by submitting the problem to international arbitration–the King of Denmark ruled in favour of giving Penjdeh to Russia–war between the two powers over what had become known as the Great Game was narrowly avoided.
Nevertheless even Gladstone could not completely resist Britain’s tendency to expand into new territories to protect her existing empire. Ironically it was he himself who shifted the axis of Britain’s interests into the Near East when he occupied Egypt in 1882 to prevent a rebel officer from closing the Suez Canal. For the Canal had utterly changed Britain’s priorities–her foreign policy had had to swing round to protect Egypt against all comers. By occupying Egypt, Gladstone set up the base camp for the creation in Africa of an extraordinary forward expansion of the British Empire, what is known as the ‘new colonialism’.
As Turkey continued to disintegrate, Egypt, which was still technically part of the Ottoman Empire under a Turkish governor, had become almost entirely self-reliant. She also became increasingly important as a major part of the world’s shipping now passed through the Suez Canal. But being exposed to the huge amount of new capital that flooded in destabilized her economy. In 1879, when the state was bankrupted under the rule of the unbusinesslike and extravagant khedive, Disraeli joined France in setting up a system of dual control in Egypt. This effectively put the government of the country, which was soon largely financed by British and French shareholders, into the hands of the two western powers.
In 1882 an Arab nationalist revolt broke out under an Egyptian army officer named Arabi Pasha, who seized the crucial harbour and forts of Alexandria and threatened to close the Suez Canal. With Alexandria swept by rioting, against his deepest principles Gladstone was forced to send a British army under Sir Garnet Wolseley to occupy Egypt on behalf of the Canal’s creditors. The khedive and his viceroy Tewfik were reinstated. Britain was alone in this adventure as France refused to help, still exhausted by the devastation of the Franco-Prussian War and the ruinous reparations. The mighty British fleet which had ruled the waves for three-quarters of a century was sent to pound Alexandria until it capi
tulated. Gladstone believed that there was nothing else he could have done, but he offended all his venerable old Radical colleagues like the Quaker John Bright, who resigned from the government.
As a result of the French no-show, dual control ended. Though the khedive had been reinstated, the real rulers of Egypt were the British army and Sir Evelyn Baring, a practical and efficient financial administrator, sent out by Gladstone to supervise the way Egypt was run and return her chaotic finances to solvency. The British thus found themselves controlling Egypt almost by accident. Only Gladstone’s conscience stopped outright annexation. Although the occupation was never official, in effect Egypt became part of the empire. The British army put into Egypt by Gladstone, friend of small nations struggling for birth, would remain there until 1954.
By the time Baring retired as the first Earl of Cromer in 1907, after almost forty years of his reforming activities Egypt was prosperous and thriving. But once Britain had become embroiled there other problems surfaced. At the beginning of 1880 a fanatical religious leader called the mahdi raised a revolt in the south of the country, in the Egyptian-occupied Sudan, and soon most of the area was under his sway. An English officer, Hicks Pasha, sent south with an Egyptian army to capture the mahdi, was massacred by the rebel leader and his followers, to the outrage of the London papers. This reverse was so conclusive that the government abandoned its attempt to hold the Sudan and decided to evacuate the few Egyptian garrisons that were left round Khartoum in the middle of the country.
The engineer officer chosen to evacuate the Sudan, General Gordon, was a legendary figure to the English public. Nicknamed ‘Chinese’ Gordon for his thirty-three victories in the service of the Chinese, as the khedive’s administrator he had zealously suppressed the slave trade in the Sudan during the 1870s. In 1883, with immense pomp Cabinet ministers and the Duke of Cambridge, the commander-in-chief of the army, saw off Gordon at Charing Cross station, but once the general got to the Sudan the government refused, on grounds of cost, to give him the further troops he needed for a successful expedition. As a result Gordon became marooned in Khartoum, cut off from his headquarters in Egypt. From late March 1884 onwards, Sir Evelyn Baring begged the Cabinet to send an expeditionary force to relieve Khartoum, but ministers could not agree despite a vociferous campaign in the newspapers and in the nation at large in favour of rescuing General Gordon. Gladstone in particular worried about being dug deeper into the African continent. He was unwilling to face the fact that by occupying Egypt he had done exactly that, irreversibly.
The Story of Britain Page 73
