Burton joined the diplomatic corps. He was dispatched to be the British representative at Fernando Po—an assignment that brought no prestige but a high risk of deadly fevers. Burton felt ill-used; all the more so after John Company’s9 army was absorbed into the British army and Burton lost his commission. “They want me to die, but I intend to live, to spite the devils.”10 He prudently left Isabel behind in England.
He hated the Africans, whom he regarded as bloodthirsty, cruel, and uppity; but he had kind words for the Muslims whose religion he continued to admire even if he flouted its prohibition on alcohol. In Africa he drank heavily to protect himself from the innumerable tropical diseases, just as in America liquor was a useful precaution against snake bite. Burton didn’t need an excuse, but it was nice to have one. He also consoled himself with travel to the West African coast where there were mountains to be climbed and named, gorillas to be sought after (for scientific purposes), as well as the usual research into circumcision and polygamy, in addition to West African cannibalism and Amazons (who were, as a rule, large and ugly). He also wrote nine books and became the British ambassador to Dahomey where his principal duties were to discourage slavery and human sacrifice (the sacrifices being made from criminals or captured enemies); the Dahomey king toasted Burton drinking from a cup made from a human skull.
Burton the Patriot on the Amazons of Dahomey
“They were mostly elderly and all of them hideous. The officers were decidedly chosen for the size of their bottoms.... They manoeuvre with the precision of a flock of sheep.... An equal number of British charwomen, armed with the British broomstick would . . . clear them off in a very few hours.”
Quoted in Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West (Scribners, 1990), p. 378
Through Isabel’s machinations Burton was transferred to where she thought she could join him, Brazil (1864), though it proved less salubrious than she imagined. She was ravaged by tropical fevers and disease. When she became delirious, Burton used hypnosis to cure her; when she wasn’t bedridden, she tried converting black slaves to Catholicism (though Burton told her not to bother); and often when she needed him Burton had gone galumphing off on another adventure (including a search for a sea serpent). Burton almost died from tropical disease and misadventures and was gratified to be granted medical leave in 1869. Isabel sailed for England; Burton deferred his departure to investigate Paraguay and Argentina and drink himself well. As Wilfred Blunt wrote of this low point in Burton’s life, he looked like “a released convict” or a “black leopard, caged but unforgiving” and would talk of “all things in Heaven and on Earth . . . till he grew dangerous in his cups, and revolver in hand would stagger home to bed.”11
Isabel saved Burton. She won him the job he had coveted, British Consul in Damascus. The Foreign Office warned Burton to be on his best behavior—and he was, relishing the opportunity. He had his moments, staring down rock-throwing Greek Orthodox Christians; criticizing Jewish moneylenders (which aroused accusations of anti-Semitism); and trying to help a sect of Muslims who wanted to convert to Catholicism (though apostasy and conversion were capital offenses to the Islamic authorities). This last act ended Burton’s diplomatic career in the Middle East, though after his departure he was celebrated as someone who had opposed Ottoman oppression and defended honesty and fair play; Muslims in particular prayed that he would be sent back.
As a sop, he was offered the position of British consul in Trieste. This, surely, was a post that would keep him out of trouble, though it was here that he wrote his translation of the Kama Sutra, which would only add to his notoriety. Burton still had his adventures—always titillated by stories of lost fortunes and mining millions to be made, he plunged into the Arabian desert searching for the riches of Solomon—but age was beginning to tell, and he increasingly devoted his hours to his scholarly pursuits, including an unexpurgated translation of the Arabian Nights.
In 1886, Burton was stunned to discover that he had been knighted—he was now Sir Richard Francis Burton, and though he never knew it, the honor was the result of Isabel’s incessant lobbying on his behalf. Burton died in October 1890 and even his death was controversial. Isabel insisted her husband was a Catholic and browbeat a priest to give the already dead Burton the last rites. Many of Burton’s friends and relations scoffed at this, though Isabel had in her possession a signed letter from Burton, dating from the last year of his life, affirming his adherence to the Catholic Church. To her critics, Isabel compounded her sins by burning vast quantities of Burton’s papers—presumably those she thought would do his reputation harm, though the harm fell chiefly on her reputation. Still, she did, as she always had done, what she thought was best for him. They are buried together (Isabel died in 1896) in Mortlake Catholic Cemetery, London, in a tomb fashioned in the shape of an Arabian tent with a crucifix atop its faux entry.
Chapter 21
T. E. LAWRENCE (1888–1935)
“Is this man God, to know everything?”
—Abdullah ibn Hussein, future king of Jordan, after his first meeting with T. E. Lawrence in October 19161
T. E. Lawrence was a crusader. As a boy he aspired to chivalric ideals (he later confessed that since boyhood he had always wanted to be a hero); at Oxford his thesis was on crusader castles; as an officer he tried to lead Arabs (of all people) on a crusade against the Ottoman Empire; and he is perhaps the only crusader after whom Arabs still name their sons (Aurens). After World War I, he immured himself, under an assumed name, in the ranks of the RAF, which was, for him, the rough equivalent of a monastic life: if lacking prayer (save for church parades), it provided anonymity, a sort of poverty, work (he was mechanically minded), and time for literary pursuits (including translating The Odyssey). Modern views of Lawrence are colored by the myth that he was an Arab nationalist, but he was in fact a British imperialist; Winston Churchill was his political patron.
* * *
Did you know?
Lawrence was an archaeologist and a spy
He was a British imperialist whose political patron was Winston Churchill
King Abdullah II of Jordan is on the throne today because of Lawrence of Arabia
* * *
His father was an Anglo-Irish gentleman, Sir Thomas Chapman. But after having sired four daughters with his wife, Chapman ran away with the nursemaid and had five sons (Lawrence was the second), adopting the nursemaid’s last name as his own but never marrying her. He also never divorced his first wife, who became Lady Chapman when he inherited the baronetcy. Lawrence knew nothing of this until he was a teenager; before that, he grew up in an apparently conventional, even pious, Protestant Christian household of evangelical stripe.2 His father, far from being a rogue, appeared a mild-mannered man dominated by his wife.
“Ned” (as the young T. E. Lawrence was known) was simultaneously practical (he liked knowing how things worked), literary (especially in an historical and aesthetic way), and imaginative (including embellishing the truth to make a better story—such as claiming Napoleon’s birthday as his own, though he was born a day earlier). With his schoolmates he was cheerfully aloof. He relished friendship, but only on terms where he felt he could maintain his independence and integrity. He was impudent and flippant, but sensitive to his own amour-propre. Though not a sportsman, he developed a wiry, muscular physique. He consciously trained himself to be capable of performing knightly deeds, in part by pushing his body to its limits with marathon bike rides, often taken to visit castles or churches (to make brass rubbings). He was thoroughly immersed in medieval tales of chivalry and martial valor. A tad rebellious, Lawrence ran away at age seventeen and enlisted in the Royal Artillery before his father found him and got him out. A life in the ranks was no life for the son of Sir Thomas Chapman; he must go to Oxford.
So he did, but he was no collegiate roisterer. He lived alone in a cottage in his parents’
garden; he neither drank nor smoked; he ate sparingly and was, as he was to remain, chaste.3 He studied medieval armaments and fortifications and chivalric literature; he joined the Oxford University Officer Training Corps as well as a rifle club and became an expert marksman with a pistol; he also became a protégé of the archaeologist (and future intelligence officer) David Hogarth, who was himself a dedicated British imperialist. Hogarth encouraged Lawrence to read books on modern military strategy and study Arabia, and helped him arrange a trip to Syria, which Lawrence undertook for his thesis on crusader castles.
Wild Nights, Wild Knights
“He came one evening into my rooms . . . and began to fire a revolver, blank cartridges fortunately, out of the windows . . . one glance at his eyes left no doubt at all that he told the truth when he said he had been working for forty-five hours at a stretch without food, to test his powers of endurance.”
E. F. Hall writing of his experience of Lawrence at Jesus College, Oxford University, quoted in Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T. E. Lawrence (Atheneum, 1990), p. 44
Lawrence graduated with a first-class degree in 1910. Hogarth then hired him for an archeological dig in Carchemish, Syria, which had a military intelligence purpose: to observe progress on the construction of a German-Ottoman (Berlin to Baghdad) railway. Lawrence worked on the site until the First World War.4 During this time he perfected his knowledge of Arabic, learned to pass for an Arab (dressing as one when he went exploring), and was regarded as a good manager of the Arab workmen. These talents came in handy when, in 1914, he became a British intelligence officer, an enthusiastic player of “the Great Game”—albeit in a different theatre from the Northwest Frontier, and with a different enemy.
Revolt in the Desert
It was a game of jihads. Through its Turkish ally, Germany tried to instigate a jihad against the British Empire, which counted millions of Muslim subjects. The British, however, had already made diplomatic overtures to Ibn Ali Hussein, the Sherif of Mecca, who not only refused to announce a jihad against the British, but was eager to gain their support for an Arab revolt against the Turks.
He had an ally in T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence’s aim, at least initially, was not to serve Arab nationalism (which didn’t exist outside the minds of theoreticians) but to bring the Arabs under British influence. If in doing so he betrayed the interests of the Arabs he helped lead, Lawrence replied, “I risked the fraud, on the conviction that Arab help was necessary to our cheap and speedy victory in the East, and that better we break our word and win than lose.”5
In 1916, Lawrence was sent briefly to Mesopotamia, where, among other tasks, he was charged with assessing the prospects of an Iraqi Arab revolt against the Turks. The Indian Foreign Office thought Mesopotamia did not have the makings of an independent state. Lawrence was inclined to agree: “I have been looking... for Pan-Arab party at Basra. It is about 12 strong,” he reported.6 He was glad to return to Cairo because for him the real action was in the Hejaz, the coastal strip of Arabia that faces the Red Sea and encloses Mecca and Medina. This was the base of Sherif Hussein, who by June 1916 was in open rebellion against the Turks.
Divide et Impera
“The Arabs are even less stable than the Turks. If properly handled they would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of small jealous principalities, incapable of cohesion and yet always ready to combine against an outside force. The alternative to this seems to be the control and colonization by a European power other than ourselves, which would inevitably come into conflict with the interests we already possess in the Near East.... If we can only arrange that this political change shall be a violent one, we will have abolished the threat of Islam, by dividing it against itself, in its very heart. There will then be a Khalifa in Turkey and a Khalifa in Arabia, in theological warfare, and Islam will be as little formidable as the Papacy when Popes lived in Avignon.”
Intelligence report from Lieutenant T. E. Lawrence on “The Politics of Mecca,” quoted in Michael Yardley, T. E. Lawrence: A Biography (Stein and Day, 1987), p. 72
Lawrence of Arabia
In October 1916, the bumptious but brilliant Captain Lawrence—who could both charm and appall with his flippancy, his sense of superiority, and his disdain for military protocol and uniform (he was invariably dressed in the wrong kit, even before he took on Arabian robes)—left for the Hejaz. Abdullah ibn Hussein, one of Sherif Hussein’s sons, was taken by the elfin Englishman. Lawrence was less impressed, thinking Abdullah too fleshy and lazy and untrustworthy, and too eager to rely on British troops, to be the hero he wanted to lead the Arab revolt. He met two other sons of Sherif Hussein, Ali (the eldest, dismissed by Lawrence as a physically feeble religious fanatic) and Zeid (the youngest: callow, unsuitable, raised in a Turkish harem), before he met Feisal whom he knew “at first glance . . . was the man I had come to Arabia to seek—the leader who would bring the Arab revolt to full glory.”7 Feisal also had the advantage of knowing English, though he was not fluent; and Feisal’s family, the Hashemites, had the advantage of descent from Mohammed. Lawrence became the British liaison officer to Feisal.
The glue that held the Arab revolt together was English bribery. Some, like Feisal, were devoted; the British officers were dutiful; but many of the Arabs came for English gold and fought for no cause more elevated than pleasure and plunder. Their morale was boosted by the Royal Navy, which could support them from the Red Sea, and when the Arabs were on the march, Lawrence recorded, it “was rather splendid and barbaric.”8 Lawrence was, by now—and at Feisal’s request—dressed in Arabian clothes, and it is easy to imagine how this medievalist “romantic Tory” (as one of his biographers described him)9 could feel he had drawn the “tides of men into my hands / and wrote my will across the sky in stars / To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house.”10
Dear Mum
“The revolt of the Sherif of Mecca I hope interested you. It has taken a year and a half to do, but now is going very well. It is so good to have helped a bit in making a new nation—and I hate the Turks so much that to see their own people turning on them is very grateful.”
T. E. Lawrence to his mother, 1 July 1916, quoted in John E. Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence (Little, Brown and Company, 1976), p. 140
Maker of the Middle East
Cardinal Newman described Toryism as loyalty to individuals and institutions—and that was the defining drama of Lawrence’s life as an officer. He was loyal to his country and its empire, but he was also Feisal’s political and military adviser. Feisal recognized Lawrence’s devotion to him and his cause, admiring “his patience, discretion, zeal and his putting the common good before his own personal interest.” “Such honesty, such faithfulness,” thought Feisal, “are found in but few individuals.”11 Lawrence did not see an inherent conflict between British and Arabian interests, and neither did Feisal, who believed in British protection. Both were resolute against French ambitions in Syria and Lebanon12—yet the indulgence of such ambitions was precisely what had been secretly agreed to in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. When Lawrence became aware of Sykes-Picot is uncertain; what is certain is that it put him in a difficult position with Feisal. He was not, however, alone in his opposition to Sykes-Picot. Lord Curzon, for one, became an open opponent of the agreement after it was revealed by the Bolsheviks; and whether and how it might be fulfilled would become a matter of contention at the postwar peace conference at Versailles, where Lawrence continued to act as Feisal’s adviser and advocate.
Of course, the war had to be won first, and it was the forces of the British Empire (Australians in the forefront) led by British General Edmund Allenby, a Lawrence ally, who routed the Ottoman Turks. The British, however, were eager, for political reasons, to give much of the credit to the Arabs, among whom Lawrence had become renowned for his wisdom, courage, and skill at train-wrecking (it helped his reputation that the Turks put a pretty price on his head). It was Lawrence a
nd Allenby who kept the Arab revolt together when it looked as though it might collapse in 1918 because of a contretemps between Feisal and his father.
Indeed, putting aside Sykes-Picot, the British had every imperial interest to advance the Arab cause on Lawrence’s well-founded grounds that the Arabs preferred British oversight to French colonial control. In June 1918, the British government made this manifest, announcing that His Majesty’s Government would recognize the independence of all areas “liberated from Turkish rule by the Arabs themselves.”13 Lawrence pretended the Arabs had liberated Damascus when in fact it had been done by Australian General Sir Henry Chauvel; the pretence was politically expedient because it put the French on the diplomatic defensive against Hashemite claims on Syria.
When the war ended, Lawrence lobbied for scrapping Sykes-Picot. In its place he proposed his own plan, which limited French claims to Lebanon, carved out a larger sphere for the British, and gave Syria to Feisal and Mesopotamia to Abdullah and Zeid under British protection. In Palestine, Lawrence believed there was no inevitable conflict between Zionist and Arab aspirations—indeed, he supported both—and he won Feisal’s support for the Balfour Declaration. Feisal agreed to Jewish emigration into Palestine provided that Palestine remain under British control and that the Zionists offer financial support to his Arab state in Syria.
Lawrence turned down decorations from King George V, because of what he felt Britain owed the Arabs. The Arabs, however, were less certain of this than Lawrence was, because there was no unified Arab front; in fact, the Hashemites were fighting the forces of Ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, another Arab loyal to Britain, and one with his own extraordinary British adviser, Harry St. John Philby. Philby and the British India Office believed Ibn Saud was the great power on the Arabian Peninsula, not the Hashemites—and in due course they would be proved right.
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire Page 26
