by A. N. Wilson
Violent in his temper, and with a bee in his bonnet about homosexuality, he felt immediate resentment at his son being given a peerage; and his crude mind assumed that the title of Kelhead was given as a reward for sexual favours. Rosebery had definitely passed through a homosexual phase at Eton, where his tutor, William Johnson Cory, a fine poet and translator who expounded the virtues of Greek love, had been asked to leave because of his over-effusiveness to the boys. (He does not seem to have indulged in any impropriety more intimate than sending them love letters and rubbing his whiskers against their cheeks while they recited Anacreontics.)
Rosebery was a devoted husband to Hannah de Rothschild, and had, in adult life, shown a keen appreciation of women’s beauty; but a whiff of his adolescent self hung about him, and although he was hetereosexual in practice, there were rumours. He had that habit of witty speech, brilliant off-the-cuff jokes and a very faint air of camp which can be wrongly mistaken for homosexuality. Queensberry bombarded Rosebery with highly abusive letters, addressing one such missive to ‘The Jew Pimp’. When Rosebery escaped to Bad Homburg in Austria, Queensberry pursued him, chasing him through the town, and informing ‘everyone, even ladies, of the direful things he was going to do to that boy pimp and boy lover Rosebery’.43 For so shy and inward a man as Rosebery to quote this fact does suggest that he was completely innocent of the charges made by Queensberry. At the same time, the marquess was persecuting Oscar Wilde, who was in love with Drumlanrig’s brother Lord Alfred Douglas, and accusing Wilde of being ‘a damned cur and coward of the Rosebery type’ – a phrase which was read out in court in Wilde’s defence when the poet-playwright’s sordid pursuit of under-age working-class male prostitutes was read out in court. Though Wilde’s defence counsel intended to demonstrate the marquess’s lack of reason, it was a phrase which did not do Rosebery any good.
Drummy got engaged to Alix Ellis, daughter of one of the Prince of Wales’s equerries. Loulou Harcourt maliciously said this ‘makes the institution of marriage ridiculous!’ 44 In October 1894, during a shooting party in the Quantocks, he was found dead. He was killed with a single bullet which passed through the mouth and shattered the skull. To do this, Drummy would have had to be holding the loaded gun pointing upwards, a strange thing to do unless he intended suicide.45
There was never any evidence of a homosexual relationship between Drummy and Rosebery, and if there had been, Loulou and the other malice-merchants in the Liberal Party, all of whom had come to hate Rosebery, would not have held back from supplying it. But in the climate of that particular year or two, in which Wilde’s fate was sealed, it did not help the Prime Minister’s standing, and probably contributed to the sleepless nights which, in the end, exhausted him to the point of collapse.
Victoria was appalled by the implication, made by the coroner in his inquest, that Drumlanrig’s death might not have been accidental.46 In her surviving journals, transcribed by Princess Beatrice, the Queen merely says how ‘dreadfully shocked’ she was to hear ‘that that charming Lord Drumlanrig whom we all liked so much was accidentally killed’47. Admittedly, the month of October 1894 was dominated, for the Queen, by anxiety about the last weeks of the Emperor of Russia, but she was an obsessive gossip and took a keen interest in the private lives of her small Court. Silence on the subject of the inquest into Lord Drumlanrig’s sad death, and the lack of speculation about the death of her lord-in-waiting suggests that, when she came to ‘transcribe’ Queen Victoria’s journals, Princess Beatrice might have, as so often, omitted potentially interesting material.
In the event, the Rosebery Government fell on a parliamentary technicality. The War Minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, had not ordered enough cordite, the new smokeless propellant used in all the new guns being manufactured for the armed forces, and the Commons gave a vote of censure for his inefficiency. But the real reason for the routing of Rosebery was Ireland.
In the House of Lords in March, Salisbury, with a Cecil deviousness of which his old ancestor Lord Burghley would have been proud, remarked, almost casually, that since the question of Home Rule now appeared to be in suspense, there should be a General Election on the issue, since it could not be passed into law until the wishes of the English, as well as of the Irish, people be tested. Salisbury was not usually noted for his enthusiasm for democracy, but he knew very well, not only that the majority of the British public were against Home Rule for Ireland, but so was Rosebery, and so were all the Liberal Unionists.
One wonders if Rosebery was committing political suicide or simply being extraordinarily careless when he replied that, ‘The noble marquess made one remark on Irish Home Rule with which I confess myself in entire accord. He said that before Irish Home Rule is concluded by the Imperial Parliament, England as the predominant member of the partnership of the three kingdoms will have to be convinced of its justice and equity.’48
More than seventy of Rosebery’s Liberal MPs, especially those on the Celtic fringes, were ardent supporters of the Home Rule measure. His airy agreement with the Leader of the Tories in this manner merely broadened what was to become an unbridgeable abyss between the Liberal Unionists and the rest. Salisbury spent the next few months sounding out Liberal Unionists and five of them agreed to serve in his Cabinet, if Rosebery’s Government collapsed: the Duke of Devonshire (Harty Tarty), Hicks Beach, Joseph Chamberlain, Goschen and Henry James (not the American novelist but Lord James of Hereford, serving as Salisbury’s Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster). In the election which followed Campbell-Bannerman’s Commons censure, there was a Tory landslide, with such figures as Harcourt, Asquith and Morley losing their seats. One ominous result of all this was that Joseph Chamberlain, dynamic Birmingham radical, but fervent imperialist, chose the Cabinet post of Colonial Secretary. Salisbury was surprised; he had offered Chamberlain any job he liked, and had assumed that the businessman would have wanted to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. With wild miscalculation, Salisbury believed Chamberlain’s interest in the colonies to be ‘entirely theoretic’.49
All the pieces and players were now in place for the final act of the Victorian drama, and for a calamitous imperialist war.
Meanwhile at Court, focus was, as so often, not pointing, as Chamberlain was, towards Africa, but towards India. At Christmas 1894, the new viceroy, Lord Elgin (grandson of the purchaser of the Parthenon Marbles), was what the Queen would call ‘surprised’ to receive a card inscribed with an appalling poem: ‘With hearts of gold/And a breath of May,/And a wish from my heart/To yours Today’. The poem was by Ellis Walton (not, surely, a candidate for the still vacant Poet Laureateship), and the card was signed: ‘To Wish You a Happy Christmas from M. H. Abdul Karim, Windsor Castle’.50
Lord Elgin did not acknowledge this extraordinary communication, and the Queen was soon asking him why not. He resolutely refused to do so. His aide de camp had been Fritz Ponsonby, the twenty-seven-year-old son of Sir Henry, who came back to England in January. Sir Henry had attended his royal mistress at Osborne for the last time. The story went round that he looked at her intently, and remarked, ‘What a funny little woman you are.’ The Queen was supposed to have answered, ‘Sir Henry, you cannot be well,’ and rang the bell.51
Back in Osborne Cottage with his wife Mary, Sir Henry suffered a paralytic stroke. For a while, he was completely unconscious. When he came to himself, his right arm and leg were paralysed, his speech was incoherent, and it was clear that he would never be well again. He led an invalid existence for most of that eventful year.
Fritz, however, who now took up the post of a junior equerry, had news for the other courtiers. While he had been in India, the Queen had asked him to visit the Munshi’s father, the ‘surgeon general’ in Agra whom she had insisted upon giving an honour – Khan Bahadur – in the recent New Year Honours. Fritz had been interested to discover that the surgeon general was not in fact a doctor at all, but the apothecary in the jail.
When told of the fact
, the Queen hotly denied it, and informed Fritz that he must have seen the wrong man. Fritz was banished from her dinner table for a year. He was, meanwhile, told to write to Lord Elgin and discover the reason for his failure to acknowledge the dear Munshi’s Christmas card. He received a reply via the viceroy’s secretary pointing out how ‘impossible it would be for an Indian Viceroy to enter into correspondence of this kind’.
The Household, meanwhile, noted that Rafiuddin Ahmed, a radical Muslim Indian lawyer and journalist with links to Afghanistan, had befriended the Munshi. They feared that the Queen was showing secret Indian papers to the Munshi and that these were in turn being ‘leaked’ to radical groups in Afghanistan.
The Queen at this date still refused to wear spectacles and had taken to complaining that modern ink was very faint, so it would have been possible for an unscrupulous person to read her private documents without her being especially aware of the fact. She certainly needed someone to read her papers for her.
During the annual visit to the Riviera, one of the local newspapers had described the Munshi as a servant. A correction had to be printed, dictated by the man himself, which stated that ‘The Munshi, as a learned man and the Queen’s Indian Secretary, and preceptor in Hindustani, is one of the most important personages “auprès de la Reine”, having several men under him, and being often privileged to dine with his Royal Mistress and pupil.’ The Household were incensed, and Fritz Ponsonby sent the cutting to Lord Elgin. When the party moved on to Darmstadt, the Queen gave instructions to the Empress Frederick that she should show the Munshi round the Schloss – ‘kindly remember that he is my Indian Secretary and considered as a gentleman in my suite . . . He can take no meat and only a little milk and fruit cld. be offered him . . . I hope I am not being troublesome.’52
It was sad that Sir Henry Ponsonby could not enjoy these stages of the Munshi comedy, for he had always, very typically, showered the Munshi with half-ironical courtesy and he loved it when the Queen behaved unreasonably. Sir Arthur Bigge, though a good private secretary to her majesty, did not quite possess Ponsonby’s lightness of touch.
Henry Ponsonby had become Victoria’s private secretary during the first premiership of Gladstone, and he had seen her through a period of momentous political change. No one could gag Queen Victoria, exactly, but Ponsonby’s wit and common sense had saved her from many a mishap; and, particularly when the Liberals were in office, he was able to calm down politicians whose feelings were wounded by royal rebuke. He was also a superb go-between within the Royal Family itself, and, together with Knollys, a defuser of rows, a muffler of scandal, above all a patently good-hearted man whose laughter could often persuade wounded parties not to nurse self-important grievances. He understood the Queen, and although he must indeed have thought her a funny little woman, his amusement at her antics was nearly always contained within the carapace of loyalty, and she could have had no wiser or firmer ally. With a weaker, or stupider, private secretary, the Queen could have got herself, and the monarchy, into grave trouble, particularly since the second Disraeli Government when she made no secret of her capricious Toryism.
He was just short of seventy when he had his stroke. Probably the strain of Gladstone’s resignation, and the resulting political excitations, had added work and stress to Ponsonby’s weakened constitution. One of his simplest and most vital political assets was that he wrote with a clear hand – unlike Queen Victoria, many of whose scribbled instructions and comments to her ministers were not just difficult to read, but totally illegible. Without Ponsonby’s accompanying letters, it would have been impossible to understand, much of the time, what the monarch was saying. The Queen had noticed a change, for the last six months, in his normally clear handwriting; and she had been disturbed by lapses in his memory.53
For the whole of 1895, he was an invalid, and at eight in the morning on 21 November, in his bed at Osborne Cottage, he died. Rather bluntly, the Queen remarked, ‘He was dead to me ten months ago.’54
TWENTY FIVE
DIAMOND JUBILEE
ONE OF THE many delusional quirks of the German Emperor was his belief that he still enjoyed a cordial relationship with his grandmother Queen Victoria. In fact, by the mid-1890s, her patience with Willy had worn very thin, her hostility towards his militaristic postures matching the ominous swell of anti-Germanism in British public opinion. The growing hostility between the two cousin-nations was thrown into painful relief by events in Africa.
British troops had occupied the Cape in 1795, and by 1814, through conquest and purchase (£6 million), the British had ousted the former European settlers there, who were overseen by the Dutch East India Company. Between 1836 and 1840 7,000 Dutch settlers (the Boers) had made the Great Trek, emigrating from Cape Colony into the great plains beyond the Orange River, and across them into Natal, and up into the Zoutpansberg and the northern part of the Transvaal. They wanted freedom from the British; they wanted to practise their austere form of Protestantism; and they wanted to be allowed to enforce a very different attitude to the indigenous African population. The British white settlers were scarcely, by twenty-first-century standards, egalitarian in their attitudes to the Africans, but for the Boers, the superiority of the whites to the blacks was a matter of doctrine, and they wished to be able to maintain a system of slavery.
The initial reaction of Britain had been that the Boers were breaking a firm agreement, for which money had exchanged hands, and that they were liable to the jurisdiction of British courts. Little by little, however, the Boers established a republic at Pietermaritzburg. Natal was eventually annexed to Britain, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, the independence of the Transvaal had been recognized. In 1854, at the Treaty of Bloemfontein, Britain recognized the existence of the Orange Free State. South Africa was now made up of five states – the Cape, Natal and British Kaffira being British; the Transvaal and Orange Free State being Boer.
The next major development was the occupation by Europeans of Bechuanaland – what was later to be Botswana. Cecil Rhodes now rose to pre-eminence: a completely new figure in history, though one perhaps intuited, in his quest for power-through-gold, and domination-through-mines, in the more lurid music-dramas of Richard Wagner: a businessman-of-war, inspired by a crazed belief in Social Darwinism, and a belief that the Anglo-Saxon race would civilize the world while making themselves prodigiously rich. During Gladstone’s Government, he had got permission from Westminster to annex Bechuanaland and establish British sovereignty there against the claims of the Boer incursions and the Germans. When Wilhelm II complained to Rhodes that Germany had entered the Scramble for Africa too late, and that, if Britain took Bechuanaland as well as South Africa, there would be nothing left, Rhodes replied, ‘Yes, there is, Your Majesty – Asia Minor and Mesopotamia.’ He ignored the fact that these territories were in the Ottoman Empire.1
Of course, what had quickened the excitement of the Scramble was the lust for gold, added to which was the discovery, from 1870 onwards, of the Kimberley Diamond Fields. Johannesburg, built on the southern slopes of the Witwatersrand, was founded in 1886, with a population of 3,000. Within a decade, the population had swollen to over 50,000 whites, with a virtual slave population of Africans to work the mines, and 7,000 British Indians working in various menial capacities. Gold mines created an unsightly greedy sprawl for fifty miles around the centre of the city. Here was a parable, an emblem upon African soil, of nineteenth-century European greed and Mammon worship.
The non-Boers living in this republic founded on the principle of raping the earth, accumulating riches and exploiting their fellow men were only there to make money. These Uitlanders or foreigners felt that they had a raw deal from the Boers, whose nationalist leader was Paul Kruger. They had no votes, but they were taxed, and the Uitlander mine owners had to pay enormous duties to the Kruger Government. It was still worth their while, however, as fortunes were being made overnight. What had begun, at the time o
f the Great Trek, as a stout-hearted republic formed for agriculturalists had become the richest spot on earth.
Cecil Rhodes, who thought that everything by right should belong to the British Empire, managed to create in his mind the notion that the mine owners of Johannesburg were being ‘exploited’ by the Boers. He now had a champion in the heart of the British Government: Joseph Chamberlain, the sixty-year-old Birmingham businessman and radical. Salisbury soon changed his view that Chamberlain’s interest in the colonies was purely ‘theoretic’; Rhodes had always recognized the truth about Chamberlain. A petition was got up, signed by 35,000 Uitlanders, outlining their grievances. They wanted Westminster to intervene on their behalf with Paul Kruger. There was a genuine fear of an Uitlander uprising in Johannesburg. Both sides in South Africa had been piling up arms for some years; and the Boers were armed to the teeth with Mauser rifles and Krupp artillery purchased from Germany.
A crazy scheme now formed in the mind of Rhodes, and of the Chartered Company which was administering Bechuanaland, and of which Rhodes was the leading light. The company’s administrator was Dr Leander Starr Jameson, an Edinburgh-trained medical man. It was proposed that Jameson would lead a small private army, assembled by Rhodes, from Pitsani, 180 miles from Johannesburg; 470 mounted men, 120 Bechuanaland police, 8 machine guns and 3 pieces of artillery was all they had. Naturally, if they had been successful, and had they captured Johannesburg for the British, it is highly probable that Jameson and Rhodes would have been welcomed to London as heroes by Chamberlain and Salisbury. But it was a botched plan from the start. Jameson’s army was halted on the fourth day of their ride at Krugersdorp by a deadly artillery barrage from the Boers. On 2 January, they were manoeuvred into a trap at Doornkop and they laid down their arms.
