The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  Despite the mounting anger in Britain at leaving Gordon, the Cabinet was paralysed for four months. Not until August was Sir Garnet Wolseley sent to the Sudan. And it was not until 28 January 1885 that his deputy Sir Herbert Stewart at last arrived to rescue Gordon, having fought his way up the Nile. But Khartoum had been taken by the mahdi two days before and Gordon himself executed.

  The few who survived told of how Gordon, though weak from disease and inanition because the town had run out of food (the soldiers were having to eat the horses and dogs), had impressed everyone by the way he nursed his dying men. Most were so weak that they could no longer stand upright at the palisades of the fort. But, on 26 January, the Nile waters, which had been so low that they impeded the British rescue mission coming upriver, finally receded so far that there was only a trickle of water dividing Khartoum from the mahdi. At twilight the mahdi and his hordes crossed.

  Gordon refused to wall himself up in the palace and insisted on dying alongside the inhabitants of the town. He had been killed as he was coming down the steps of the palace just before dawn when the slaughter began. It was there that Sir Herbert Stewart found his headless body. Beside it was Gordon’s diary: ‘If the expeditionary force, and I ask for no more than two hundred men, does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have done my best for the honour of our country. Good-bye.’ It was the general’s last entry, written six weeks before in December. Soon afterwards Gordon’s head was discovered in the mahdi’s camp across the river from Khartoum at Omdurman, his blue eyes still half open.

  When the news burst on Victorian England there was uproar. The queen herself sent three furious telegrams to the foreign secretary, the war secretary and Gladstone himself. They were deliberately written en clair, that is not in the usual governmental code, so that her views would be publicized as widely as possibly by being leaked to the newspapers. It was an extraordinary action. Accusing Gladstone of being directly responsible for Gordon’s death, she wrote: ‘These news from Khartoum are frightful, and to think that this all might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too frightful.’ The question now was whether to avenge Khartoum or abandon the Sudan to the mahdi. It was the news that Russia had taken the Afghan town of Penjdeh and was thus threatening India’s north-west frontier which made Gladstone issue the order to retreat. Fighting both Russia and the mahdi would have been too much for Britain’s never large military resources.

  Gladstone became immensely unpopular. His affectionate nickname the GOM, Grand Old Man, was replaced by MOG, Murderer of Gordon. He was booed when he went to the theatre. For Gordon had been exactly the sort of man that the Victorian English prided themselves on producing. Like that other Victorian hero, the African explorer and missionary Dr Livingstone, Gordon had been a good light in a naughty world, heroically spreading abroad the peculiar virtues of British civilization, godliness and dutifulness. To forsake such a man scandalized the British public and caused them to lose faith in the government.

  Meanwhile if Gladstone was despised by the public at large he was also embattled within the party. One of the reasons that he had failed to rescue Gordon was that his whole being was dedicated to solving the Irish problem. Not only had civil disorder reached an alarming pitch owing to an organization recently started up by Fenian revolutionaries called the Land League, which was persuading Irish tenant farmers to refuse to pay rent. Its president, Charles Stewart Parnell, had become leader in 1880 of the Irish MPs.

  The pale Anglo-Irish Parnell, a Protestant landowner from County Wicklow, was far more formidable and ruthless than Isaac Butt, the ineffectual former leader of the Irish MPs, who had also proposed self-government for the Irish within the Union. Brought up by a mother who hailed from an old American revolutionary family, he was full of visceral hatred for the English. He saw that the large number of Irish MPs the secret ballot had brought to Westminster could be used to obstruct Parliamentary business so thoroughly that Westminster might be forced to give Ireland her independence back. Meanwhile the Land League, by making Ireland ungovernable through a land war, would put pressure on Westminster to grant Parliamentary independence to Ireland.

  The Land League had been set up to resist the mass evictions that the 1870s agricultural crisis was causing in Ireland. As the low prices farmers got for wheat were not enough to cover their rent, evictions spiralled into thousands every day. Once again the dreadful but commonplace Irish scenes of the old and sick lying in their beds at the roadside were to be found throughout the country. But this time there was a difference. The Land League organized mass meetings to get rents reduced to reflect the price of wheat.

  For with the best intentions Gladstone’s 1870 act had a fatal flaw. Although the landlord was supposed to pay compensation if he evicted a tenant, the statutory wording was that the compensation was payable only if the rent asked for was ‘exorbitant’. This was designed to protect the tenant farmer against unfair price hikes. However, that was not the issue in 1880. The rents demanded by the landlords were at the usual level. It was the farmers’ earnings from crops that had fallen.

  The Land League was a formidable success, but it was mainly run by ex-Fenians. They made it a brutal, lawless body founded on the belief that nothing was so efficacious as the threat of force. While by day the Land League was visibly organizing the orderly mass meetings for rent reductions, by night it was a different story. The League was running a land war. Anyone suspected of paying a rent which the League considered to be too high or who had taken over a plot from the evicted would be visited at dead of night by gangs of men. Shots would be fired through their windows, or open graves dug before their doors and signed ‘Captain Moonlight’ in the dirt. After a year of this treatment Ireland was at the mercy of the Land League. There were areas of the country which simply could not be controlled by the British government.

  The leadership of the Land League always distanced themselves officially from the violence, as did the League’s president Parnell himself in Parliament. The only course of action Parnell verbally encouraged was a ‘species of moral coventry’. A proclaimed enemy of the Land League should be treated ‘like a leper of old’ by being rigidly denied all social and commercial contact. The most celebrated victim of this treatment, Captain Boycott, was driven out of Ireland and gave his name to this activity in the word ‘boycott’. In actual fact, though, the high-sounding moral coventry was generally broken by a more practical follow-up visit from Captain Moonlight and his friends.

  Parnell, however, had a different agenda from most of the Land League and its Irish-American financial patrons. Most of the Americans believed with the Land League that only through violent revolution would Ireland win her independence. Parnell thought that change would come only through constitutional means. Nevertheless he could not afford to offend the League and its shadowy backers, since the whip hand he had over the British government substantially depended on being able to control them. The trouble was that the League began to believe that the chaos that it was creating was the prelude to independence. Thus when in 1881 Gladstone gave Ireland a Land Act which incorporated all the requisites long seen as the solution of the tenant farmers’ difficulties, the Land League in Ireland refused to accept it. The ‘Three Fs’–fixity of tenure, free sale by the tenant of his interest, and fair rents to be determined by land courts–granted by the act might kill off the desire for Home Rule. So the rural crimes did not cease; the violence continued.

  Parnell could not call a halt to the lawlessness without enraging or making suspicious the men of the hillsides, whether in America or Ireland, who were willing to go only so far with constitutional channels. But Parnell the consummate political operator, though he did not believe that the revolutionaries’ way could ultimately be successful, at the same time could not lose their support. He had to play both ends against the middle. He was forced to denounce Gladstone’s Land Act and the government. He thus greatly enhanced his credibility among the revolutionari
es who feared being sold out, especially when Gladstone sent him to jail for not halting the violence.

  But though Gladstone had exasperatedly said that the ‘resources of civilization were not yet exhausted’, when he clapped Parnell and his supporters into Kilmainham Jail, it seemed that they were. From prison Parnell issued a defiant statement that no rent was to be paid at all. Though the Land League was proscribed by the British government, matters had now reached stalemate. As Ireland descended into frightening chaos, the pragmatic Gladstone saw that the only way of controlling the violence was through Parnell–despite the scruples of members of his Cabinet about treating with a man like Parnell, who in their opinion had blood on his hands. To the distaste of the Irish secretary W. E. Forster in particular, Gladstone started to negotiate with Parnell in prison, promising to release him if he brought Ireland under control.

  Fortunately for Gladstone Parnell was ready to negotiate. In April 1882 the two reached an understanding via intermediaries which is known as the Kilmainham Treaty. Only a month later an event occurred which smashed Gladstone’s policy to ruins and made most of the Liberals want as little to do with Parnell as possible. Forster had already resigned from the Cabinet in disgust, and his place as Irish secretary taken by the Whig Liberal Lord Frederick Cavendish, who was married to one of Mrs Gladstone’s nieces. But his tenure was to be brief. A few days after arriving in Dublin, as he and his under-secretary Thomas Burke walked in Phoenix Park, they were attacked and hacked to death by a splinter group of Parnell’s allies, the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

  The Phoenix Park murders shattered the unofficial alliance between Parnell and the Liberals in favour of Home Rule. Any further concessions to Ireland were stymied; the murdered Cavendish had been the younger brother of Lord Hartington, who was the leader of the Whig section of the Liberal party. For fear of splitting the party, Gladstone now had to take a very hard line indeed towards Ireland. For a large number of Liberal MPs, dislike of Parnell, who made no secret of his hatred of the English, hardened into enmity, along with the most vehement conviction that Ireland should never be ruled by such a man. To the further outrage of the Liberals Parnell threw in his lot with the Conservatives by voting against Gladstone.

  He caused the government to fall in June 1885 and a minority Conservative government took over under Lord Salisbury, Disraeli’s foreign secretary, until an election should be held in November. Parnell, who held the same sort of secret meetings in London with the Conservatives he had had with the Liberals, believed that Salisbury if returned to office would bring in Home Rule. He therefore primed his troops on the British mainland to vote Conservative in the November election to add to the Conservative vote, while his own Irish MPs would ally themselves with Salisbury.

  Meanwhile the Liberals themselves were in disarray–Gladstone’s relations with his own party were fraying. The old anti-imperialist Liberals of his own generation had turned against him over Egypt. His hesitancy over further franchise reform had angered the new generation of Radicals led by the former mayor of Birmingham, the screw manufacturer Joe Chamberlain. The Radicals nevertheless pushed the 1884 Third Reform Bill through, which brought the farm worker within the franchise. When the Conservative Lords headed by Salisbury resisted the bill, to Gladstone’s alarm Chamberlain responded with a campaign to discredit a class of whose power he violently disapproved. To him, a self-made man (his father had been a cobbler), the Tory Lords sitting on their ancestral acres, ‘who toil not neither do they spin’, had no right to interfere with a proposal to give the vote to decent working people. A series of strikingly phrased speeches calling to the country to ‘Mend Them or End Them’ proposed doing away with the House of Lords if it did not pass the bill. It passed, however, adding two million to the electorate of Great Britain. Its impact was magnified by a separate Redistribution of Seats Act in 1885.

  At a personal level Gladstone never got on with Chamberlain. Though Gladstone himself hailed from a commercial family, his classical education put him in a different league from Chamberlain. Chamberlain, on the other hand, was angered by the way his leader played his cards so close to his chest. There were also philosophical differences. Unlike the penny-pinching Gladstone, Chamberlain and his friends saw state interference as a positive good and believed that there was great untapped potential in the colonies and the empire. But despite his ability and his influence in the country at large, Chamberlain was only president of the Board of Trade.

  By the 1885 autumn election campaign, relations between Chamberlain and Gladstone were so poor that Radical Joe went out on the stump with his own ‘unauthorized programme’ (so called because Gladstone had not approved it) for social and agrarian reform. Each worker should have three acres and a cow. Chamberlain was a thrilling speaker and developed an immense following, particularly in the midlands. The success that the Liberals had at the polls was due to him. But the Third Reform Act had the most dramatic effect in Ireland. At the November election Parnell came back with twenty-five more Home Rulers than before. His 86 Nationalist MPs added to the 249 Conservatives gave Salisbury the majority he needed to continue in power, though the Liberals themselves had 335 members. Thanks to Parnell, Salisbury remained prime minister. But the strange alliance rapidly unravelled.

  Despite Salisbury’s courting of Parnell and the Irish Nationalist vote to achieve power, it went too much against the grain for the Tories to give the Irish Home Rule. There were rumours that they were about to abandon it. Meanwhile, unknown to all, by mid-December Gladstone had finally come to the decision that it was imperative that Home Rule be achieved. The strength of the Home Rule vote in Ireland in the election caused him to fear Irish secession and the possible reconquest of Ireland if a Home Rule Bill was not put through fast. Now he had heard that if the Conservatives would not do so, the Liberals must. Unfortunately Gladstone did not reveal to his shadow Cabinet his decision to throw himself behind a self-governing status for Ireland. Leaked to the newspapers on 17 December 1885 by his son Herbert Gladstone, it incensed the two key players in the power structure of the Liberal party: Joe Chamberlain was affronted at once again being kept in the dark, while Lord Hartington was incensed at the idea of giving in to terrorism.

  The leak put an end to the brief Conservative government. When Salisbury announced that the Tories would not pass Home Rule, Parnell moved back into alliance with Gladstone, the minority Tory government fell and Gladstone was back in office by February 1886, having pledged to put through a Home Rule Bill for Ireland. But by the spring both Chamberlain and Hartington had not only resigned, they had crossed the floor to defeat the Home Rule Bill and their former leader from the Conservative benches. Home Rule had split the Liberal party.

  With Chamberlain (denounced as ‘Judas’ by one Liberal MP) on his side, Salisbury defeated Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill. Ninety-three Liberals, who called themselves Liberal Unionists, joined the Conservatives. They feared that Gladstone’s bill, which proposed an Irish Parliament to govern all domestic Irish affairs, would be the first step towards the break-up of the Union, because Irish MPs would no longer be represented at Westminster, which henceforth would deal with external affairs. Chamberlain in particular refused to believe that the Home Rulers really meant it when they said that Home Rule would not mean independence for Ireland.

  The heated atmosphere in Parliament was added to by a member of the Conservative so-called ‘ginger group’, Lord Randolph Churchill, the younger son of the Duke of Marlborough. He stirred up the longstanding insecurity of the Presbyterian Ulstermen, who ever since they had been planted in Catholic Ulster in the seventeenth century had felt beleaguered. Mischievously Churchill told them they would be badly disadvantaged by a largely Catholic Dublin government. Ulstermen should do everything in their power to stop Home Rule. The slogan ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’ was first heard in 1886.

  In June the Conservative party’s ninety-three new allies stopped the bill from passing by thirty votes, and Glad
stone resigned. The election of July 1886 gave the allied Liberal Unionist and Conservative parties a huge majority over the followers of Gladstone and Parnell. Their prime minister was Salisbury, whose great expertise was in the field of foreign affairs. With their Liberal Unionist allies the Tories would remain in power for most of the next twenty years.

  Those twenty years were the heyday of the empire, especially in Africa where diamonds had been discovered in the 1860s and gold in the 1880s. The British presence in Africa grew so rapidly that the adventurer Cecil Rhodes dreamed of a railway on British territory between the Cape and Cairo. The two million new voters were fascinated by flamboyant figures like Rhodes, who dominated the period. Their curiosity was fed by sensationalist newspapers like George Newnes’s Titbits, begun in 1880, the Pall Mall Gazette and the first mass-circulation paper, the Daily Mail, which went on sale in 1896.

  Though the British might have obtained some of their empire in a fit of absence of mind, as was claimed a little disingenuously, for a brief period until the end of the century they suddenly exulted in it. The dedication to the cause of the empire known as imperialism was only a little short of religious fervour. It even infected the Liberals: ‘The greatest secular agency for good now known to the world’, Gladstone’s colleague the future prime minister Lord Rosebery called it.