by A. N. Wilson
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, which they have not
as Hilaire Belloc bitterly wrote in ‘The Modern Traveller’. One of the British cavalrymen, riding with the 21st Lancers, was Lord Randolph Churchill’s son Winston Spencer Churchill, who was reminded, when he saw the enemy, of a twelfth-century crusader army. The death toll among the askaris was 11,000, with 16,000 wounded. The British casualties were 47 killed, 382 wounded. Churchill himself, who took part in a cavalry charge, was disgusted, as was most civilized opinion. It had been a massacre, more than a battle. Churchill was especially revolted by the fact that the wounded askaris were simply left on the battlefield to die. Kitchener’s troops moved the short distance into the middle of Khartoum, where the looting was led by Kitchener himself. Many of the Khalifah’s followers were shot without trial or even inquiry. Sir John Maxwell, the major who was largely responsible for these shootings, commented that he regarded ‘a dead fanatic as the only one to extend any sympathy to’.2
Kitchener came home to Britain covered in glory, and was rewarded by a peerage. This time, he was a great social success at Balmoral, dining with the Queen and Arthur Balfour. Kitchener told them about the battle, and amused the company by saying that at the end of the battle he had ‘two thousand women on his hands’ – presumably because their husbands had been shot. Asked what the women were like, he replied, ‘Very much like all women, they talked a great deal.’3 Queen Victoria, as if to prove the point, monopolized the conversation, and replayed the humiliations of ’82 and the Death of Gordon at Khartoum. She recalled how furious Gladstone had been that she sent him the telegram of rebuke en clair; but she had sent it deliberately, so that everyone should know what she thought of him.
The next day, Kitchener said he would not go out after luncheon because he had to write a speech for the Guildhall, and he was no public speaker. Balfour said there would be no difficulty about this, and that he would be more than happy to write Kitchener’s speech for him. Fritz Ponsonby took the general the finished speech, which was received with great mirth. ‘Why, the whole place would scream with laughter at such beautiful language coming from me.’ But he was grateful, nevertheless, and translated Balfour’s delicate phrases into his own round unvarnished idiom.4 Kitchener’s visit had brought out a somewhat Boadicean side of the Queen’s character, which she perhaps needed; for, the last years of her life were to be dominated by a war.
Successful Britain may have been in managing to subdue the religious enthusiasts who followed the Sudanese successor to the Mahdi. The Dutch Calvinists of the Transvaal would prove a tougher nut to crack. The obsession with General Gordon, displayed by the Queen when she conversed with Kitchener, was shared by the population of Britain at large. Dr Watson, when he shared rooms with Sherlock Holmes, put up a newly framed picture of Gordon in 1893 (in the story entitled ‘The Cardboard Box’). George William Joy’s 1885 painting Gordon’s Last Stand (currently in Leeds City Art Gallery) was an icon reproduced in countless schoolrooms and homes throughout the British Empire. Victoria’s determination was that such a martyrdom should never happen again. Although Salisbury was a man who was reluctant to intervene in any international affairs, and a natural pessimist hesitant to go to war, he nevertheless deplored Gladstone’s policy of making peaceful negotiation instead of war – he called it ‘the Quakerization of Mankind’.5
Alfred Milner, who had become the Governor of the Cape Colony in 1897, was in many ways a walking parable of what had happened to Britain during the last decades of Victoria’s reign. A Liberal, Balliol graduate and pupil of Benjamin Jowett, Milner had worked on the Pall Mall Gazette as a journalist under John Morley and W. T. Stead. As a politician, he had been a safe pair of hands as Chairman of the Board of the Inland Revenue. Then his old radical partner in politics, Chamberlain, sent him to South Africa to be Governor of the Cape Colony. The fervour of his imperialism outstripped that of Chamberlain. From the start, Milner was in favour of teaching the Boers a lesson, subduing them, making them accept British suzerainty over the Transvaal.
The whole situation was complicated by the huge wealth of the gold and diamond mines around Johannesburg, and by the fact that the Uitlanders, ‘the foreigners’ who had been drawn to all this wealth, had not come from one place but from Britain and from various countries of Central Europe. Half the Jews who gravitated to Johannesburg were from Germany or German-speaking Central Europe. Since many of them did not have the vote in their own country, they were not especially bothered by the lack of franchise for Uitlanders in the Transvaal, and they were refreshed by the Boers’ lack of anti-Semitism, compared with the attitudes with which they had grown up in Europe.6 The Jews tended to distance themselves from the complaints and grievances of the British Uitlanders. In many respects they were better off under Boer rule.
Behind the quarrels of Uitlanders and the Boers was the bigger question of whether Britain ruled the whole of South Africa. And behind the quarrel between Britain and the Boers lay the bigger question of Britain and the rest of the world. The German Emperor’s telegram to Kruger, congratulating him on scotching the Jameson Raid, made that clear enough, even though Wilhelm was a divided self, part hating his English mother and her nation, part aspiring to be closer to Queen Victoria than any of her grandchildren. Another grandchild, Prince Leopold’s daughter Alice, recalled having breakfast at Windsor after hostilities had broken out in South Africa, when the Queen ‘received a letter from William telling her how she should ruin the Boer War! She had been enraged at the Kruger Telegram, but this piece of presumption aroused her most violent indignation.’7
The war was not inevitable. In the end, it boiled down to the question of whether the British Government could live with the fact that there were two Boer republics in South Africa, with very different laws and ways of life from those obtaining in the British colonies. In the end, the British desire to dominate the whole of Southern Africa was what drove Salisbury on to prosecute the war. In the Victorian heyday, the electorate had boxed and coxed between two tempting alternatives: the Liberal programme of extending the franchise and making Government accountable to the electorate – this was what made people vote for Gladstone; and the Tory jingoism of Disraeli, which cheered the Queen into believing she was the Empress of India, and the voters into thinking that they ruled the waves. In the latter days of the Queen’s reign, Joseph Chamberlain combined both these British ideals. He was a jingoistic democrat. The public enthusiasm for the war was not universal, but it was immense.
On 18 December 1898, a burly, drunken Englishman called Tom Edgar got into a fight with another Englishman in Johannesburg. The police arrived and Edgar ran for home. He was pursued and the Boer police got into a scuffle. Edgar was shot dead. As Major General Butler – Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in South Africa – said, ‘Had this drunken brawl occurred in any city in the world out of the Transvaal it would have occasioned no excitement outside of the people immediately concerned in it.’8 When he came to London to explain the situation, Butler reminded the British politicians that Johannesburg was ‘the most corrupt, immoral and untruthful assemblage of beings at present in the world’.9
As far as Chamberlain was concerned, however, that was not the point. The Boer policeman who shot the British man received no reprimand or discipline. A petition demanding justice was signed by 21,684 Uitlanders. They delivered it, not to Paul Kruger, but to Queen Victoria.
It came at a time of yet another family crisis for her. 22 January 1899 was scheduled as a day of celebration in Coburg: the silver wedding of the duke, Alfred, and his wife Marie of Russia. Their son Alfred (‘Young Affie’), born at Buckingham Palace in 1874, had been an officer in the Guards. After his father succeeded to the dukedom of Coburg, he had followed his parents to Germany. When he was less than twenty, the Court Circular had announced, on 28 January 1895, that he was betrothed to the Duchess Elsa Matilda Marie, elder twin daughter of Duke Will
iam Eugene of Württemberg. This marriage never took place. Young Affie’s life remains something of a mystery. Some have asserted that he contracted a secret marriage with Mabel Fitzgerald, the granddaughter of the Duke of Leinster. It seems certain that he was suffering from syphilis, contracted while a Guards officer, and that by the time of his parent’s silver wedding party, Young Affie was suffering from general paresis of the insane. As the family gathered at Coburg, Affie shot himself with a revolver, but failed to kill himself. He was moved to the Martinsbrunn Sanatorium in Gratsch, near Meran (Merano) in the South Tyrol, where he died on 6 February, aged twenty-four. His father, who went to see the corpse – what Victoria called ‘the dear remains’ – was shocked by the sight, but the next day, he wrote to his mother, ‘I have returned from praying near my dear boy who looks so peaceful. I am broken-hearted, but we start tonight with the remains for Gotha.’10
The Queen in middle age would have been prostrated by such an event occurring in her family. In old age, Victoria was buoyant. Despite missing the Munshi (who was on a year’s leave of absence in India), she consoled herself by continuing with the annual visit to Cimiez and a few weeks in the luxury of the Excelsior Regina Hotel. By the time she returned, South Africa was closer than ever to war.
By May 1899, Milner – in a communiqué which became known as the Helot Dispatch – compared the plight of the Uitlanders with that of slaves in Ancient Greece. Kruger and Milner met for talks in June, but the Bloemfontein Conference broke up in failure. By June, the Prime Minister was being shown a copy of the Daily Telegraph demanding war. Salisbury knew that this demand, apparently written by a journalist, had in fact been drafted by Chamberlain himself.11
It was a bad time for Salisbury. His wife suffered a stroke on 6 July. (She would die on 20 November 1899.) Though most of the Cabinet wanted to move cautiously with regard to the Transvaal, the war momentum was strong. Salisbury wanted negotiations with Kruger to last long enough to allow troop ships to reach the South African ports. Dining at Osborne in late August, Salisbury told the table that he thought Kruger ‘will go on for his own people pretending not to give in but will not go to war as it would put an end to himself’.12
So confident were the British of victory in the event of war, that there were only 12,000 British troops in South Africa when the Boers eventually attacked, and started their War of Independence on 11 October. There were 38,000 Transvaalers and Free Staters in the field, ready to fight. The first engagement happened when a small force led by Koos de la Rey moved across the Transvaal border and captured an armoured train bringing arms to Mafeking.
Meanwhile, troops were being mustered from all over the Empire – from India, from Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Eventually 365,693 imperial troops were assembled to fight 82,242 South Africans.
Among the British troops were Prince Christian Victor, the thirty-two-year-old son of Lenchen and Christian of Schleswig-Holstein. He had been an officer in the 60th King’s Royal Rifles since 1888. As a staff officer under Kitchener, he had been at the Battle of Omdurman – ‘the grandest sight I have ever witnessed’.13 Now he was off to South Africa. On the night before he sailed, his parents and sisters took him to Her Majesty’s Theatre to see Shakespeare’s King John. He told his mother how much he had been impressed by the lines
This England never did, nor never shall
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror . . . 14
A little over a year later, he died of malaria and was buried at Pretoria – the first British royal personage to be buried in Africa.
The Duchess of York’s brother Alexander (Alge, later Earl of Athlone) also served in the Boer War with the Inniskilling Dragoons (though his own regiment was the 7th Hussars). He was mentioned in dispatches (as he had been in the Matabele War of ’96), and was eventually awarded the Distinguished Service Order.15 So, like most army families, the Queen was deeply and personally involved with the war, following it on a daily, and sometimes an hourly, basis.
Sir Redvers Buller arrived at Cape Town with a huge army in December 1899. He had told the Queen before he left England that he did not think there would be much hard fighting. He divided the forces into three: General Sir William Gatacre was to defend the Cape Colony; Field Marshal Paul Methuen was to relieve Kimberley; and Buller himself was to march on Ladysmith.
Only three weeks after the death of Lady Salisbury, there began what came to be known as Black Week. First, General Gatacre’s men were ambushed at Stormberg and surrendered to the Boers. Then Lord Methuen’s 1st Division was defeated by Piet Kronje at Magersfontein, and failed to relieve Kimberley. On 15 December, Buller’s army was roundly defeated by Louis Botha at the Battle of Colenso. Balfour went to Windsor at the end of that week to explain the defeats to the Queen. It was traditionally her own ‘Black Week’, containing as it did the fateful 14 December on which she had lost a husband and a daughter. Balfour, however, found Victoria indomitable. ‘Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house; we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.’16
Salisbury promptly sacked Buller, leaving him in charge of the army in Natal, and placed the campaign under the charge of Field Marshal Roberts – ‘Bobs’ – which as the Queen rightly pointed out, had been her wish all along. Bobs’s son had just been killed at Colenso. (‘Our loss is grievous,’ he told the Queen, ‘but our boy died the death he would have chosen.’17)
Although there would continue to be opposition to the war, and pro-Boer factions among a liberal-minded, or perverse, minority, Black Week united the great majority of British people. Tens of thousands of men besieged the recruiting depots. The Lord Mayor of London formed the City of London Imperial Volunteers. It soon comprised a battery of artillery, a battalion of infantry and two companies of mounted infantry – 1,500 men in all. It contained nine barristers, seven architects, two bankers, thirty civil servants. This was the first time in British history that social classes other than the very highest and the very lowest formed part of the fighting force.18
Another consequence of Black Week was that it was decided to arm native Africans to fight the Boers. The socialist leader Keir Hardie made a speech in which he said, ‘We are breaking faith with every nation in Europe in arming the blacks to fight against white men.’19 The Queen would not have agreed. She never felt more imperialist than in her last years; never more certain that her dominion embraced all the peoples where the British flag had been planted.
TWENTY SEVEN
‘VALE DESIDERATISSIME!’
DURING 1900, THE fortunes of war turned, largely through the skill of General Roberts. In January, the Boers, with inadequate forces, tried to storm Ladysmith. They were driven back and a month later their unsuccessful siege was relieved by Roberts. Thereafter, the Boers were on the run. Roberts marched into Bloemfontein and took charge of the vitally important railway. By the end of May he had entered Johannesburg. Mafeking was relieved on 17 May, to huge rejoicing: it ‘filled the whole country with wild delight’, said the Queen.1 By September, Kruger had fled South Africa for Portuguese territory. The war would not end before the Queen’s death. Roberts had achieved the victory, however, and the ‘mopping up’ was left to Kitchener. Three hundred thousand more troops were sent out to South Africa to help him defeat the last remnant of guerrilla forces. It was during this phase of the war that the British earned international hatred, not least for their invention of the concentration camp, as a means of containing the half- – sometimes completely – starved women and children of the Boer farmers.
Roberts, his return delayed by a broken arm, began the journey home.
The war took its toll on the Queen, as did the relentless succession of family illnesses and bereavements. Vicky had been plagued by what she believed to be lumbago, ever since falling from a horse in 1898. In 1899, she was too ill to attend Queen Victoria’s eightieth birthday celebrations. It was cancer of the spine. Soon, she needed
to be carried everywhere, and as she admitted, ‘every movement is painful’.2
At the end of July, news came from Coburg that her brother Alfred had died of cancer of the larynx. ‘What a mercy darling Alfred did not know the nature of his illness and the utter hopelessness of it,’ Vicky wrote to her mother. ‘Dear Alfred was spared mental pain and anxiety and like Fritz he was convinced he would improve! This is a mercy, though in my own case, I prefer to know exactly how the matter stands.’3
It was a hard thing for an old mother to bear – Alice dead, Leopold dead, Affie dead, and Vicky dying. Affie’s only son Alfred had died aged twenty-four in 1899. The dukedom of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which had been renounced by Arthur, Duke of Connaught, therefore passed to the heir of the next brother, Leopold: to Charles Edward, then a schoolboy. Coburg, that nest of European kings and queens, was now searching on the playing fields of Eton for a duke.
The enfeebled Queen managed to inspect some of the returning troops from South Africa. She sat in a carriage on 29 Novermber, in an archway of Windsor Castle, and for the last time, her beautifully clear, bell-like voice was heard in public. ‘Alas!’ she told them, ‘the joy at your safe return is clouded over by the memory of sad losses of many a valuable life which I, in common with you all, have to deplore.’ Next day, also seated in a carriage, she watched a march-past of 240 Canadian troops. The Canadian officers dined with her afterwards.4 She waited in Windsor until the sacred 14 December. When she crossed the Solent for her usual Osborne Christmas, her lady-in-waiting Lady Churchill remarked to her maid that the Queen appeared to be ‘a dying woman’.5
