Dreadnought
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At this point, Prince Bismarck stepped forward. The Chancellor cared very little about the fate of Turkey, but he cared very much that Germany not be compelled to take sides in a war between Austria and Russia. In a speech to the Reichstag, he suggested that Germany, placed as she was in the center of Europe and friendly to all the powers concerned, was admirably situated to play the role of “Honest Broker.” He proposed an international conference in Berlin. All accepted.
The Congress of Berlin convened all the concerned powers in a dangerous and complicated dispute and resolved the matter so that peace was secured for a generation. Unlike the Congress of Vienna sixty-three years earlier, or the Peace Conference at Versailles forty-one years later, this was not a gathering of victorious powers to divide the spoils. No war had yet been fought. Russia, which came to the conference a victor, was forced to give up some of her gains, but her defeat was not a humiliation. The Ottoman Empire, on the brink of death, gained another four decades of life.
At the Congress, Lord Salisbury remained in the shadow of his chief. Disraeli, now Earl of Beaconsfield, was admired by all; his progress across Germany had been slowed by curious and respectful crowds which packed the stations his train passed through. “Der alte Jude,24 das ist der Mann” was Bismarck’s accolade. Beaconsfield delighted in royal audiences, elaborate banquets, and colorful ceremonies, and Berlin smothered him with invitations. The Crown Princess and the Chancellor competed for his evenings. His first weekend was spent with the Crown Prince and his wife at Potsdam and he wrote home rapturously about the visit. Salisbury was invited too, but his reaction was different. “Six hours of my day25 have been taken away by that tiresome Princess asking me to lunch at Potsdam,” he complained to his wife. The Foreign Secretary also worried about his Premier. “He looks ill and sleeps badly,”26 Salisbury reported. “[He] did not sleep this morning till six.”
The Congress opened at two P.M. on June 13, 1878, with Bismarck in the President’s chair, and lasted exactly one month. Bismarck ran the meetings like a drill sergeant. No one was permitted superfluous oratory; all items scheduled for a particular day had to be completed on that day. Bismarck had private reasons for this pace: he was due to leave in July for his annual cure (“Prince Bismarck with one hand27 full of cherries and the other of shrimps, eaten alternately, complains he cannot sleep and must go to Kissingen,” Beaconsfield noted dryly). The Chancellor insisted that the language of the conference be French, although no Frenchmen were present and Beaconsfield did not speak French. Ignoring Bismarck, the Prime Minister spoke in English. As the Congress progressed, Beaconsfield’s health deteriorated. He suffered from Blight’s disease, asthma, bronchitis, and continuing insomnia. Before the end, he was near a state of collapse. Salisbury, working eighteen hours a day to make up for his countryman’s incapacity, confided to his wife: “What with deafness,28 ignorance of French, and Bismarck’s extraordinary mode of speech, Beaconsfield has the dimmest idea of what is going on—understands everything crossways—and imagines a perpetual conspiracy.”
Nevertheless, the old man could still deal with a crisis. The Russians at one point dug in their heels about the location of a Turkish garrison south of the Danube. Britain sided with Turkey, reminding Russia that if the conference broke up, war would be declared. Beaconsfield ordered that a special train be held in readiness to take the British delegation to Calais. Gorchakov packed his trunks. Then Bismarck hurried to Beaconsfield’s hotel and invited him to dine. During dinner, the Prime Minister later wrote in his diary, the Chancellor was “very agreeable indeed29... made no allusion to politics, though he ate and drank a great deal and talked more.” After dinner, the two retired to a private room. Bismarck had to discover whether the Prime Minister was bluffing. For an hour and a half, Beaconsfield insisted that he was not. “He smoked and I followed,” Beaconsfield continued. “I believe I gave the last blow to my shattered constitution but I felt it absolutely necessary.... He was convinced that the ultimatum was not a sham and be fore I went to bed I had the satisfaction of knowing that St. Peters burg had surrendered.”
On July 13, the conference concluded its work and Beaconsfield signed a treaty containing sixty-four articles. War had been averted. The Russian advance on the Straits had been rolled back as the new Bulgaria was drastically shrunk in size. Austria accepted payment for her support of Turkey in the form of a protectorate over the Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Britain’s fee was the cession of Cyprus. Together, Beaconsfield and Salisbury returned to London in triumph. The Queen conferred the Garter on the Prime Minister, who accepted only on condition that Salisbury, whom he called his “laboring oar”30 in Berlin, accept one too.fn2
Once the conference ended, Beaconsfield had fewer than two years remaining in office and only three to live. In that time, he visited often at Hatfield, and recognized the Foreign Secretary as his political heir. In Europe, the Foreign Secretary’s circular dispatch and his performance at the Congress had made him a commanding reputation. In the company of the most powerful and celebrated statesmen and diplomats of Europe, the new British Foreign Secretary displayed a clarity and quickness of apprehension, a grasp of detail, a style of speaking and writing, and a dedication to his country’s interests which were to give him a reputation for statesmanship second only to that of the Chancellor of the German Empire.
In the Conservative Party, once Beaconsfield was gone, Salisbury had no rival. In 1885, when the Tories returned to power, Lord Salisbury became both Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary.fn3 The senior office was not one he cared about, although he held it three times for a total of thirteen and a half years. He disliked party and parliamentary politics and sponsored not a single measure of domestic legislation. He accepted the Premiership only because, by then, there was no one in the party to challenge his authority; a Cabinet including Lord Salisbury but with another at the top would have seemed ludicrously unbalanced. Lord Salisbury never flatly refused the Premiership, but several times tried to foist it off on others. Twice, he offered to relinquish it to his new Liberal Unionist ally, Lord Hartington, but ambition sat even more lightly on Hartington’s shoulders than on Salisbury’s and twice the future Duke of Devonshire refused.
As leader of the government, Salisbury differed in his conduct of the office from the two other great prime ministers of the age, Gladstone and Disraeli. Both of these were party men who kept their Cabinet colleagues on a short leash. Lord Salisbury, liking to run the Foreign Office without interruption, assumed that his colleagues would feel the same about their ministries, and he left them alone. The Prime Minister, he believed, was primus inter pares; ministers were members of a Cabinet, not henchmen of the Prime Minister. At the Foreign Office Salisbury’s power was well-nigh absolute. Combining the positions of Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, only vaguely responsible to his colleagues in the Cabinet, he was able for many years to conduct the foreign policy of England by himself. This policy, as he saw and conducted it, was simple and clearly defined. “France,” he said in 1888, “is, and must always remain, England’s greatest danger.”32 The Germans he thought of as a race with whom “by sympathy, by interest, by descent,”33 Britons ought always to be friends. He wished an alliance with neither power, telling the German Ambassador “Nous sommes des poissons”34 (We are fish) and that “the sea and her chalk cliffs35 were England’s best allies.” He understood both the advantages and weaknesses of sea power and once reminded Queen Victoria (who wanted him to do something about Turkish atrocities in Armenia): “England’s strength36 lies in her ships, and ships can only operate on the seashore or the sea. England alone can do nothing to remedy an inland tyranny.” He described his policy as “Splendid Isolation”37 and “the supremacy of the interests of England.”38 With characteristic diffidence, he made light of his task—“British foreign policy,”39 he once said, “is to drift lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a boathook to avoid a collision”—but in fact he served with a dedication rarely seen at the
Foreign Office.
Not that the Foreign Secretary was himself regularly seen at the Foreign Office. Lord Salisbury refused to adjust his patterns of life to the conventions of office. As Prime Minister, he refused to live at 10 Downing Street and made only occasional use of his rooms in the Foreign Office across the street. He preferred to work in his own London house in Arlington Street or, better yet, at Hatfield, where he worked, for the most part, completely alone. His room was equipped with double doors so thick and so far apart that when both were shut, no amount of knocking or rattling at the outer portal could disturb the solitary man within. He wrote many government papers and much Foreign Office correspondence himself; he explained that if he had had more time, he might have delegated the work, but as he was pressed, he had to do it himself. He did not correct assistants’ errors; the next time, he simply did the work himself. He answered all mail addressed to him from even the humblest correspondent. Hour after hour, late into the night, he would produce long, handwritten pages on a bewildering variety of subjects. “A great sleeper,”40 his daughter called him, “finding eight hours necessary and being happier if he could get nine.”
In the morning, after a cold bath, Lord Salisbury continued his paperwork. When he did go to the Foreign Office, he arrived after luncheon, and devoted his afternoons to interviews with foreign ambassadors, many of whom came only to gather crumbs to include in their weekly reports. “One subject only41 now occupies my thoughts,” he wrote to a friend in 1887. “It is how shall I contrive to sit through my interviews with ambassadors without falling asleep?” His solution was to conceal a sharp-edged wooden paper knife in his hand beneath the table. When conversation grew arid and his eyelids heavy, he prodded the knife point into his thigh.
At the Foreign Office, Lord Salisbury practiced the same detached administrative style employed with his fellows in the Cabinet. He chose ambassadors carefully and then treated them as colleagues, not subordinates. Correspondence between the Foreign Secretary and the Queen’s ambassadors had the nature of crisp intellectual dialogue and mutual search for effective policy; there was none of the tone of hectoring command which characterized Holstein’s instructions sent out from the Wilhelmstrasse. Senior or junior, British diplomats were expected to cope. When a young consular agent in Zanzibar, facing a palace revolution, mobs in the street, and an endangered white colony, telegraphed home for instructions, Salisbury cabled back: “Do whatever you think best.42 Whatever you do will be approved—but be careful not to undertake anything which you cannot carry through.” British subjects, roaming the bush in search of profit, were permitted to fend for themselves. One aggressive trader, having embroiled himself in a dispute with a local potentate, demanded that the Foreign Office intervene and punish the offending native. In the red ink reserved for the Foreign Secretary’s comment, Salisbury minuted dryly on this paper: “Buccaneers43 must expect to rough it.”
When Lord Salisbury was in residence at Hatfield, his work and interviews at the Foreign Office had necessarily to be concluded so that he could catch a regular seven o’clock train from King’s Cross Station. His daily departure from the Foreign Office had the efficiency of a fireman sliding down a pole: one footman stood outside his door holding his overcoat, another waited at the foot of the stairs, ready to throw open the door of a one-horse brougham held in readiness. From Downing Street to King’s Cross—up Whitehall, across Trafalgar Square, along Charing Cross, through Bloomsbury—took exactly seventeen minutes, timed on his lordship’s watch. Boarding the train, he sank into a private compartment and invariably fell asleep for the whole of the journey.
Preferring privacy and shunning security, the Prime Minister seemed to his friends excessively vulnerable. Once a genteel lunatic did indeed enter his compartment. Lord Salisbury’s vague concern before nodding off was to try to recall the name of this agreeable but unrecognized fellow traveler. When, at Hatfield station, his new companion also got off, and then climbed into Lord Salisbury’s small carriage, the owner’s worry increased: somehow he must not only have forgotten the name, but also an invitation obviously issued. It was while jogging along that Lord Salisbury discovered the truth: the man was both unbalanced and harmless. Arriving home with no one about, the host excused himself and went off to work. Some time later, when a footman found the Prime Minister bent over his papers, Lord Salisbury glanced up and remarked that “he had left a madman44 in the front hall.”
No one was ever sure whether Lord Salisbury’s famous inability to identify friends and colleagues—even, one day, his own son walking in Hatfield Park—was due to towering absentmindedness or flawed vision. Once, at a breakfast party, he leaned over and asked in an undertone the name of the gentleman seated on the other side of his host. The stranger, he learned, was W. H. Smith, who had been Lord Salisbury’s friend for many years and was, at that moment, his Chancellor of the Exchequer. Lord Salisbury’s explanation for this curious blunder was that, in Cabinet meetings, Smith always sat across from him and that therefore he had never before observed Mr. Smith in profile. His forgetfulness made him useless as a gossip. To the despair of his wife and daughters, he would return from London to Hatfield and say, “I was told45 to be sure to tell you...” and then stop, having forgotten who was marrying, who was divorcing, and who was bankrupt.
Even on Sundays, Lord Salisbury buried himself in work, regarding a day free from interviews as an opportunity to catch up on his paperwork. He had no interest in any of the sports that preoccupied most of the country gentlemen of England; riding, shooting, yachting, and the racetrack. His Liberal Unionist ally, Lord Hartington, had opposite tastes and could not be found in London when important races were running at Newmarket. “Our political arrangements46 are necessarily hung up till some particular quadruped had run for something,” Lord Salisbury huffed to his wife about Hartington. For a while, as a younger man, he attempted tennis, but his eyesight left him near defenseless. He read a great deal. He knew Jane Austen’s six novels almost by heart. He disliked realism, rejected Balzac, and would put down any book which he found “left a nasty taste.”47 He possessed small, portable volumes of Shakespeare, Virgil, Horace, and Euripides, and during railway journeys, long boat rides, or dry spells during a picnic, these little books would pop from his pocket and soon seal him off from his surroundings.
His real recreation lay in science. He remained an amateur botanist and, during his years of vacationing along the Channel coast of France, put aside his cares by collecting and analyzing seaweed. He was an early home photographer, packing heavy cameras, tripods, trays, bottles, red lamps, and black velvet cloths into his holiday luggage. In time, as the photographer metamorphosed into a chemist, the darkrooms installed in his houses were expanded into laboratories. One day, the new chemist staggered from his laboratory and collapsed, deathly pale, at the feet of his wife. Revived, he triumphantly proclaimed that he had succeeded in creating—and then unfortunately had inhaled—chlorine gas. Another time, the house was shaken by an explosion, and his horrified wife and family witnessed a figure, its face and hands dripping with blood, emerging from his laboratory door. An experiment with sodium, he said sadly, would need repeating.
Hatfield was one of the first private houses in England to be equipped with a telephone and electric lights, both installations being improvised by the owner. Soon after the first telephone appeared, Lord Salisbury spread wires over the floors at Hatfield, often tripping unwary guests. Voice reproduction was imperfect and only simple, recognizable phrases could be understood. The most common, booming out from various rooms in the master’s unmistakable tones, was “Hey, diddle diddle,48 the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon.” Hatfield’s electrification began with a primitive arc light glaring down from the middle of the dining-room ceiling. This was superseded by the new incandescent Edison light, which provided less glare but little increase in reliability. Power was drawn from a riverbank sawmill which still cut wood by day and now, brightly or dully—depending on the
level of the river—illuminated the mansion by night. Electricity flowed on wires strung a mile and a half through the park and was subject to interruption when trees and branches bent with the wind. There were no fuses and the problem of surging had not yet been solved. “There were evenings,”49 a member of the clan recalled, “when the household had to grope about in semi-darkness, illuminated only by a dim red glow such as comes from a half extinct fire; there were others when a perilous brilliancy culminated in miniature storms of lightning, ending in complete collapse. One group of lamps after another would blaze and expire in rapid succession, like stars in conflagration, till the rooms were left in pitchy blackness.”
Lord Salisbury was the father of ten. He treated his children like small foreign powers: not often noticed, but when recognized, regarded with unfailing politeness. “My father always treats me50 as if I were an ambassador,” reported one adolescent, “and I do like it.” Classroom hours for small children were reduced by decree from five hours a day to four on the grounds that the shorter span would, paradoxically, produce more intellectual fruit. Lord Salisbury’s basic educational philosophy was that higher authority could, at best, have only a marginal effect; real desire to learn had to come from within. “N. has been very hard put to it51 for something to do,” he wrote of a son who had been left alone with him for a few days at Hatfield. “Having tried all the weapons in the gun-cupboard in succession—some in the riding room and some, he tells me, in his own room—and having failed to blow his fingers off, he has been driven to reading Sydney Smith’s Essays and studying Hogarth’s pictures.” Lady Salisbury did not share her husband’s detached approach. “He may be able52 to govern the country,” she said, “but he is quite unfit to be left in charge of his children.”