Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War.

by Gerry Docherty

  Basking in the success of his sterling work with King Edward in preparing the grounds for an alliance, the Russian diplomat Alexander Isvolsky was promoted in 1906 from a relatively unimportant post at Copenhagen to minister of foreign affairs in St Petersburg. This was a spectacular promotion and one that could not have taken place without support and influence. He was clearly a man who had proved his worth to the Secret Elite in the days and months after Björkö, and their financial rewards guaranteed his compliance. He was a bought man. Prior to this point, he had been bankrupt and had no personal wealth with which to promote his own career. Once linked directly by the king to Sir Arthur Nicolson,52 who had been moved from Spain to be the British ambassador to St Petersburg, Isvolsky enjoyed a patronage whose source he would never fully comprehend.53 He was, thereafter, a man of means with access to Secret Elite funds that promoted their ambitions as well as his own. In addition to the benefits of old-fashioned bribery, the new alliance gelled naturally because Isvolsky’s aims harmonised with the London policy of encircling Germany.54

  As this history unfolds, others will emerge whose services were bought and loyalty secured.

  As was often the case in foreign affairs, the signing of the Anglo-Russian Convention was kept secret until Parliament had risen for the summer break, so denying the ‘screamers’ an opportunity to express their objections. The official terms of the convention were not made known until 25 September, leaving sufficient time for those journalists in the know to determine that such a diplomatic agreement with Russia was clearly to the benefit of the British Empire. And it was.

  The central feature was a partition of Persia by which Britain gained a clear sphere of interest around Basra and the Gulf. These desert lands were to prove far from barren when the oil-rich fields were opened some six years later. British interests in the Gulf were deeply enmeshed with commerce, oil, the Suez Canal, the route to India, and the exclusion of Russia from a warm-water port. Foreign Office negotiators gained every advantage possible and in exchange gave promises that would never be kept. No mention was made of closing the net on Germany. Had she not been ruined by war with Japan, in desperate need of inward investment and incapable of pursuing the dream of a warm-water port by any other means, Russia might well have walked away from the convention. But she was exactly in the position that the Secret Elite had intended: on her knees. They raised her to her feet in the guise of the Good Samaritan.

  An alliance with Russia, no matter how vague, was deeply unpopular with many sections of society, but Lord Curzon, from the inner circle of the Elite, defended the Liberal government in the House of Lords55 and boldly announced that, in his view, it was all very natural. His claims were ridiculous and self-serving: ‘I think there is no agreement that would generally be more acceptable to this House, or to the country, than one with Russia’.56 Only a member of the aristocracy or the Secret Elite could have made such an outrageously untruthful statement. The czar and his brutal regime were totally anathema to fair-minded people everywhere.

  SUMMARY: CHAPTER 5 – TAMING THE BEAR

  The major powers were astonished in 1902 when Britain formed an alliance with Japan.

  Britain supported her new ally by building a modern fleet for the Imperial Japanese Navy and providing huge loans for Japan’s industrial development.

  In order to protect both British and Japanese interests in the Far East, the Secret Elite encouraged Japan to attack Russia.

  In a brutal war from 1904 to 1905, Japan decimated Russian forces in the East.

  An unfortunate incident with a British fishing fleet at Dogger Bank caused such public outrage against Russia that the Secret Elite had to calm the press.

  Although the British wanted Russia out of the Far East and away from India, their long-term aim was to draw her into an alliance against Germany.

  Kaiser Wilhelm virtually pre-empted this in July 1905 by signing a secret agreement with the czar at Björkö that would have blown apart the Secret Elite’s grand plan.

  The Secret Elite in turn used all of their diplomatic, economic and political clout to negate the proposed Russo-German alliance before it could be made public and ratified.

  A second Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1905 offered direct Japanese protection of India.

  As Kaiser Wilhelm correctly stated, Britain had used Japan to remove the Russian threat in the East and her intention was to similarly use France against Germany in Europe.

  The Secret Elite understood Russia’s historic mission to gain an ice-free port and dangled the carrot of Constantinople and the Straits to entice her. The Anglo-Russian Convention was allegedly about Persia, but in reality it paved the way towards an Anglo-French-Russian alliance against Germany.

  Having assisted King Edward and the Secret Elite to destroy the kaiser’s Björkö agreement, Alexander Isvolsky was subsequently promoted to minister of foreign affairs at St Petersburg.

  Previously bankrupt, Isvolsky was bankrolled by the Secret Elite through the British diplomatic service.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Changing of the Guard

  WHILE KING EDWARD AND THE Secret Elite were busy abroad building strategic alliances, it had been Arthur Balfour’s misfortune to take over as prime minister in the wake of the unpopular South African War. His administration remained true to Secret Elite foreign policy but was split on tariff reform and various domestic issues. The Conservatives suffered regular by-election defeats to a very vocal and confident Liberal opposition waiting impatiently for office.

  British democracy, with regular elections and changes of government, was portrayed as a reliable safety net against despotic rule. It has never been this. Although the 1884 Reform Act increased male voting rights to include adult householders and men who rented unfurnished lodgings to the value of £10 a year, an estimated 40 per cent still did not have the right to vote as a result of their status within society.1 Women did not have the right to vote at all, while some men could vote twice, both at their place of business or university and at their home address. The ruling class held every advantage, and their contempt for the poor was undisguised. As Liberal MP Francis Neilson observed:

  At the end of 1905, it would have been difficult for Diogenes to find a country under the sun where there was so deep a contempt for the poor and the meek held by the ruling class … Labourers in agriculture at any wage from twelve to sixteen shillings a week; miners living in hovels.2

  Apart from a small number of socialists funded by the trade unions, Members of Parliament were restricted to the well-to-do by the expense of office and by the fact that they were unpaid, a state of affairs that remained in place until 1911. A prohibitive deposit of £150 was required for any parliamentary candidate, a sum greater than the total annual income of most British families. Indeed, it equated to twice the annual wage of a policeman.3

  Both the Conservative and Liberal parties had been controlled since 1866 by the same small clique that consisted of no more than half a dozen chief families, their relatives and allies, reinforced by an occasional incomer with the ‘proper’ credentials.4 These incomers were generally recruited from society’s select educational system, most prominently from Balliol or New College, Oxford, or Trinity College, Cambridge. If he proved valuable to the inner clique, the talented newcomer generally ended up married into one of the dominant families.5 The Secret Elite made an art form out of identifying potential talent, putting promising young men into positions that would serve their future ambitions and slowly wrapping them in the warmth of Establishment approval and ultimate personal success.

  Faced with the demise of the Conservative government in 1905, the Secret Elite had already selected their natural successors in the Liberal Party: reliable and trusted men immersed in their imperial values. Herbert Henry Asquith, Richard Burdon Haldane and Sir Edward Grey were Milner’s chosen men and ‘objects of his special attention’.6 He wrote regularly from South Africa, met with them in secret when on leave in 1901 and actively instructed them on
his policies.7 Though they were groomed as a team, Haldane was his most frequent correspondent and, like many others, very much under his spell. He wrote to Milner during the Boer War: ‘Just tell me how you wish us to act … and I will set about seeing what can be done. I have every confidence in your judgement.’8 There was never any doubt about who was in charge.

  Their remit was to ensure that the Liberals maintained a seamless foreign policy that served the grand plan: war with Germany. These three had more in common and mixed more readily with their Conservative opponents than with most of their own parliamentary colleagues.9 Their Secret Elite connections were impeccable. Together with their good friend Arthur Balfour they shared similar university backgrounds and were intimately involved with the inner circles of the Secret Elite. They were also members of the exclusive dining clubs at Grillion’s and The Club, which played a very significant role in developing the network that promoted British supremacy.

  Herbert Asquith went to Balliol College, Oxford, and was a protégé of Lord Rosebery, under whose influence and patronage he blossomed. Elected to Parliament in 1886, he served as home secretary under Gladstone and later Rosebery from 1892 until the Liberals lost power in 1895.

  Asquith’s personal life provides a perfect example of how the Secret Elite inter-married, associated with one another and maintained their dominance over British foreign policy. If the first generation with whom Rhodes was directly associated belonged to the nineteenth century, dominated by Lords Salisbury and Rosebery, the next generation that assumed power in the early twentieth century included many names already identified in this book as agents or members of the Secret Elite. Asquith attended Balliol with Alfred Milner, and they were in constant contact for many years. They ate their meals together at the scholarship table virtually every day for four years and as young lawyers had Sunday dinner together throughout the 1880s.10

  Asquith’s first wife died of typhoid fever in 1891, leaving him with five young children. In 1894, he married Margot Tennant, the free-spirited daughter of Sir Charles Tennant, director of the Nobel-Dynamite Trust Company, which by 1909 boasted the largest explosives manufacturing site in the world at Ardeer on the west coast of Scotland. Arthur Balfour was one of his closest friends and the best man at his marriage to Margot. Even when they were leaders of supposedly diametrically opposed parties, Balfour regularly dined with the Asquiths. He frequently joked that he had champagne dinners at Asquith’s before going on to the House of Commons to verbally attack his host.11 Ludicrous as this was, it served to highlight the hypocrisy of their public altercations in Parliament, where in matters relating to Secret Elite policy they supped from the same bowl.

  Margot Tennant claimed in her autobiography to have written to Balfour from Egypt, where she had a brief affair with Alfred Milner before marrying Asquith, requesting that Milner be posted back to Britain and promoted to the Board of the Inland Revenue. She belonged to the country-house set known sarcastically as ‘the Souls’, essentially upper-class socialites, many of whom were directly associated with the Secret Elite, including George Curzon, St John Brodrick, Alfred Lyttelton and Asquith, and consequently she shared a number of friends with Milner. They were notorious for ‘flitting about from one great country house to another or one spectacular social event to another at the town house of one of their elders’.12

  Asquith, Haldane and Grey were close to Milner politically, intellectually and socially,13 and even when the Conservatives were out of government from 1905 to (effectively) 1915, Milner continued to orchestrate Foreign Office decisions. It mattered not who was in power. The Secret Elite interacted ‘just as if they were in office’.14

  Edward Grey, also a Balliol man, had served as under-secretary in 1892 when Rosebery was at the Foreign Office. Grey’s late father had been a royal equerry and regularly travelled abroad with Edward when he was Prince of Wales. This meant that Grey, who was King Edward’s godson, had, through his father, strong ties to the royal family.

  Asquith and Grey were trusted men and close to the king. They had colluded with Lord Rosebery as far back as 1890 in a long-term proposal to take over the Liberal Party leadership on behalf of what was termed the Liberal Imperialist Group.15 Their induction into the orbit of the Secret Elite came through the classic route of patronage and proven association. They were loyal men, loyal to Rosebery and the monarchy, loyal to the Empire.

  Richard Haldane’s rise to political office followed a different route and provides a fascinating insight into how the Secret Elite groomed able politicians for future use. R.B. Haldane came from the minor Scottish landed gentry of Cloan near Gleneagles. He gained a first-class honours degree at Edinburgh University, having spent a period in Göttingen studying German philosophy and learning to speak fluent German. This language skill was to prove an essential asset in a career that began unobtrusively when he was called to the Bar in London in 1879. There he met and was befriended by another talented lawyer, Herbert Asquith, and doors opened in front of him that might have otherwise remained closed. Haldane stood for Parliament as a Liberal in East Lothian and was duly elected. Talented, intellectual and affable, he became close friends with two rising young stars in Rosebery’s government: Asquith and the more reserved Edward Grey. This was to become the triumvirate that ultimately enabled the Secret Elite drive to war with Germany.

  As a backbencher, Haldane proved a poor orator. He was not included in Gladstone’s government, though both Grey and Asquith were. Around this time, his circle of political friends and acquaintances expanded to include the purveyors of Secret Elite power in the Conservative Party: Arthur Balfour, Lord Curzon, George Wyndham and Alfred Lyttelton.16 The Secret Elite drew him closer and closer into their confidence, and he was eventually introduced to the Prince of Wales in 1894. The two men developed a bond of trust and loyalty that strengthened in the first decade of the twentieth century when they regularly dined together. He was ever the king’s loyal servant.

  Haldane’s long-term friendship with the Rothschild families was a mark, too, of their trust and confidence in him as ‘one of them’. He considered himself ‘very intimate’ with both Lord and Lady Rothschild, and had a room at Tring reserved permanently for his weekend sojourns.17 The close bond between Haldane and the extended House of Rothschild was marked by his frequent visits to the Paris branch of the family to spend time with Lady Rothschild’s sisters and enjoy their sumptuous hospitality.

  In the last years of the nineteenth century, the Liberal Party had almost rent itself asunder in a civil war between the aggressive ‘Imperialists’ led by Asquith, Grey and Haldane and the anti-war Liberals who always remained in the majority at grass-roots levels. The leadership was undermined and resigned in protest, claiming that the party ‘was being infected by dangerous doctrines in foreign policy’.18 It was, but no one realised how deep or how dangerous the infection would prove. Despite Haldane’s repeated efforts to encourage Lord Rosebery to return to front-line politics, the Liberal Party elected Henry Campbell-Bannerman as their anti-war leader. Haldane’s opposition to him never wavered. When Campbell-Bannerman placed the blame for the Boer War squarely on the shoulders of Joseph Chamberlain and Alfred Milner, he could not fathom the support that Milner was always guaranteed from Asquith, Grey and Haldane. He put it down to a ‘perverse Balliol solidarity’. His bitter observation was that any criticism or doubt of Milner’s policies was ‘the unpardonable sin’ and that the ‘arch offender’ in the Boer War scenario was Milner, ‘but we can’t get at him’.19 The Secret Elite always threw a protective arm around its own, no matter the party in power. Campbell-Bannerman was right: Milner was an untouchable.

  Why then did Richard Haldane, disillusioned as he was by Campbell-Bannerman and the Liberal Party, and a man whose political sympathies appeared to lie with the Conservatives, not cross the floor of the House of Commons and join them? The answer lay in the fact that the Secret Elite’s greater purpose was served by his remaining a Liberal. Haldane’s roots had taken ins
ide the Secret Elite councils and he was judged to be a highly valuable asset. Alfred Milner considered him for the high commissioner’s post in South Africa, but he was placed instead on a government committee on armaments.

  Public concern about the state of the British Army was widely voiced in the press, and by 1902 it was accepted that defects in military organisation had to be tackled. Observers were surprised that the most serious contributions were coming from Haldane, a member of the anti-war Liberal party.20 Placing Haldane in the War Office before the Liberals came to power was a very shrewd move by the Secret Elite. He was able to familiarise himself with the workings of the ministry and build positive relationships with senior British military personnel, who regarded him highly.

  The king made Haldane a privy counsellor in August 1902,21 an exceptional move because he was a backbench MP who had never held office.22 But he, like Lord Esher, was the king’s man. In January 1905, almost one calendar year before the Liberal Party entered government, King Edward invited Haldane to stay at Windsor Castle to discuss future plans for foreign policy and army reconstruction. The king and the opposition backbencher! How strange.

  Haldane’s relationship with Alfred Milner, Lord Esher and King Edward was exceptionally close.23 The Secret Elite’s other key political agents, Balfour, Lansdowne, Asquith and Grey, shared the innermost secrets of their respective parties with one another and with the king. There was always collusion on matters of foreign policy and the grand plan. This was where their allegiance lay, not to their specific party. Their duty was to the king, the Empire, to Milner’s dream, to Rhodes’ legacy. They confronted the same problems, analysed the same alternatives and agreed the same solution: Germany had to go.