The Victorians
Page 50
Discarding (as she coquettishly allowed him to do) the convention by which the prime minister and his Sovereign conversed in the third person, Disraeli wrote to the Fairy (his special nickname for her), ‘It is just settled; you have it, Madam!’ To his friend Lady Bradford:
We have had all the gamblers, capitalists, financiers of the world organized and platooned in bands of plunderers, arrayed against us, and secret emissaries in every corner, and have baffled them all, and have never been suspected. The day before yesterday, Lesseps, whose company has the remaining shares, backed by the French whose agent he was, made a great offer. Had it succeeded, the whole of the Suez Canal would have belonged to France, and they might have shut it up … The Fairy is in ecstasies.15
Sir William Harcourt wrote in The Times, ‘there was something Asiatic in this mysterious melodrama. It was like “The Thousand and One Nights”, when, in the midst of the fumes of incense, a shadowy Genie astonished the bewildered spectators …’16
The next spectacle, which did not even require the painful expedient of putting up the income tax, was to make the diminutive, pudgy little Fairy into an empress. If Bismarck could become a prince, and the king of Prussia an emperor, why could not Victoria? Hers would be an Imperium to cock a snook at, if not to rival, the European Dreikaiserbund. She could scarcely be the empress of Britain, and although her government now had a toe-hold in most discovered corners of the planet, it would have been vainglorious to style herself empress of the world. Without so much as consulting the Liberals, let alone debating the matter in Parliament, Disraeli slipped into the Queen’s Speech in 1876 that the Prince and Princess of Wales would be visiting India – and by the way, from now on the Queen would be known as the Empress of India: Victoria R.I.17 At a time when the monarch had never exercised smaller actual power, she invested herself with a title which would have embarrassed her despotic predecessors. If, to some, the phrase ‘Empress of India’ was more suggestive of a pig or a railway engine than a constitutional monarch, it made her happy, and it helped to define her country’s self-image during that uncharacteristic period – again, lasting until the Second World War – when it thought of itself in terms of Imperial pomp. It was a very short period under the eye of eternity, and we may wonder in retrospect whether the Imperial mantle ever really suited the British.
How does one define an empire, or imperialism? Empires of the past – Persian, Roman, Byzantine – tended to be continuous land-masses, taking in differing lands, language and racial groups, all administered with some ultimate reference to a centralized autocracy. Clearly the ‘British Empire’ could not conform to this pattern, scattered as it was all over the globe. What astonishes posterity, considering the comparatively primitive state of communications in the nineteenth century, was how cohesive this ‘empire’ managed to be. Germany, France and Belgium continued in rivalry with the British to lay claim to various parts of Africa and Asia as part of their colonial dominion.
This is all rather different from the old empires which, like dozing dragons nested too close together, alarmingly gave off signals of discontent with one another throughout the period – namely the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman empires.
This is not the place to attempt a full analysis of the history or extent of the Ottoman Empire, but its decline – the decline of the power of Turkey – is the dominant political fact in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. We live today with its consequences. For Gladstone and the Liberals, it was axiomatic that rebellion against the Ottoman Empire was a legitimate ‘nationalist’ aspiration. They thought that any group that wanted to declare its ‘independence’ of the sultan was like the Irish Home Rulers, and should be supported. Disraeli and the Conservatives took a more cautious approach, but they – together with the senior statesmen and diplomats of Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary – saw it as their business to decide the future of the Ottoman Empire. They all accepted the Russian emperor’s contemptuous definition of Turkey as ‘the sick man of Europe’. They took it as axiomatic that the Ottoman Empire should be broken up, and if they did not have the Liberal belief in nationalism (for Bulgarians, Albanians, Bosnians, Egyptians et al.) they nonetheless believed that they could use the weakness of the Turks to seize these territories, or influence them.
Such instinctive territorial interference was not carefully considered. Opinions might differ about the quality of administrative efficiency, or its degree of justice, in those places administered by the Turks and their dependency. It is a different question, whether any plausible alternative, agreeable to all peoples in any given region, would provide the utilitarian ideal of the greater happiness to the greater number. Go to twenty-first-century Bosnia, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania, Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine. What you will find is warring peoples, often of wholly irreconcilable aspirations, being encouraged by the Western powers to believe in Gladstonian dreams of independence, national identity. The same powers, in the United Nations, are then obliged to behave as if they were sultans attempting to impose ideals of mutual tolerance on the warring parties.
Life in all these places was more poverty-stricken under the sultans; differing religions and racial traditions tended to live together more peaceably – faute de mieux – when Turkey was a Sick Man than when the Russians, the British and the Germans decided to effect a cure for the sickness. The ‘cure’ was administered from a position of complete ignorance of the actual conditions of life in the sultan’s dominions, and, it need hardly be said, without consulting either the Turkish authorities or their subjects. The individual outbursts of fighting and discontent were seen entirely against a background of rivalry and fear between Russia and Austria-Hungary, with Count Andrássy, the Hungarian prime minister and Austro-Hungarian foreign minister (from December 1871 onwards), looking to Britain as his ally to shore up the Ottoman Empire and prevent the Russians fulfilling their dream – the occupation of Constantinople, the annexation of the empire. Russia was not merely looking for advantage of this kind. It was gripped by a quasi-religious Pan-Slavic fervour, so that the plight of the Serbs harassed by their Muslim neighbours became a matter of anxiety for the Great Russian Soul.
Perhaps if the Powers had not persisted in believing that there was an ‘Eastern Question’, a phrase which suggests that there might have been an Eastern answer, the consequences of collective failure would not have been so catastrophic. Count Andrássy, prime minister of Hungary, was right to foresee that ‘if Bosnia-Hercegovina should go to Serbia or Montenegro, or if a new state should be formed that we [i.e. Austria-Hungary] cannot prevent, then we should be ruined and should ourselves assume the role of the “Sick Man”’. The Magyar determination for separate nation states for Hungary would follow, and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. No one can forget that the participants in these international discussions would all be plunged into world war by the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a Serbian terrorist in 1914, a conflagration which would destroy in turn the aspirations of Bismarck, the House of Hohenzollern, the Romanov dynasty in Russia and with it all that the Russian emperors believed by civilization and religion. Hindsight can sometimes provide historians with a parlour-game: in this case it is difficult to see what could have turned the tides, given the ambitions and composition of the countries and statesmen concerned. We can see clearly enough what went wrong: but what might have prevented the disaster?
Money might be one answer. Probably there would have been no ‘Eastern Question’ had Turkey in the 1870s not been financially ruined, actually bankrupt. Foreign trade had suffered badly since the Crimean War. Turkey was largely non-industrialized. Eighteen and a half million people in the Ottoman Empire were employed during the 1870s in manufacturing cotton textiles, and their incomes gradually declined in competition with the industrialized nations.18 Agriculture, though, fared better. Between 1840 and 1913, despite substantial declines in population and losses of land, exports increased fivefold.19
When the Balkan crisis – which we are about to describe – arose, Abd-ul-Aziz faced a profound discontent at home, demonstrations in the mosques and squares of Istanbul, and eventually deposition by a military coup. The army appointed Murat V as sultan. Abd-ul-Aziz, under house arrest in the Feriye Palace, was found dead on Sunday 4 June 1876 with his veins cut and one artery slashed, having committed suicide with a pair of nail-scissors.
The reign of Sultan Murat V lasted only a few months. His early manhood had been marked by intelligence and political acumen. He was seen as a potentially enlightened reformer, but the situation was such that he suffered an emotional collapse. It was given out that he was dead, though he actually lived until 29 August 1904, making several attempts to regain his throne.
The Cabinet next appointed Abd-ul-Hamit II, a thirty-four-year-old destined to be sultan for the next thirty-three years, until 1909.23 He it was who had to face, in the first few years of his reign, the formidable task of coping with a war with Russia, a collapsed economy, unrest all over the Balkans, and international outrage in consequence of the Turkish treatment of these uprisings.
In the summer of 1875 a revolt by a few peasants in several small villages in Hercegovina began one of those waves of violence which have periodically disrupted the Balkans for the last thousand years. The cause of the riots was economic. The peasants had set upon collectors who demanded full payment of a sheep tax in spite of a failed harvest the previous year. The military were brought in. The deaths of Muslim peasants were ignored; those of the Christians were trumpeted as religious martyrdoms.24
Refugees started to flood into Serbia, Montenegro and Austria, many with exaggerated stories to tell, and the Porte was issued with an ultimatum from Count Andrássy – broadly supported by Britain: namely that tax-farming would be suppressed, and religious liberty guaranteed by the setting-up of a special commission composed of equal numbers of Christians and Muslims. This was followed by the Berlin Memorandum of the Dreikaiserbund, insisting on the inflammatory condition that Christian subjects of the sultan should be allowed to bear arms.
In July 1876 Montenegro – under the leadership of the swashbuckling adventurer Prince Nicholas – joined Serbia in declaring war on the Turks. (Sultan Murat with his incipient nervous breakdown had just been installed.) The Ottoman government, and the world, knew what this meant. Serbia was seen by the Russians, and by many Slavs in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as the plucky little Christian country standing up against the infidel tyrant. As General Fadeyev, a leading pan-Slavic Russian propagandist, encapsulated the matter in his Opinion on the Eastern Question of 1876:
The liberated East of Europe, if it be liberated at all, will require: a durable bond of union, a common head with a common council, the transaction of international affairs and the military command in the hands of that head, the Tsar of Russia, the natural chief of all the Slavs and Orthodox … Every Russian, as well as every Slav and every Orthodox Christian, should desire to see chiefly the Russian reigning House cover the liberated soil of Eastern Europe with its branches, under the supremacy and lead of the Tsar of Russia, long recognized, in the expectation of the people, as the direct heir of Constantine the Great.25
Disraeli’s position, as British premier, differed from that of his foreign secretary Lord Derby and, to a lesser extent, that of his secretary for India, the increasingly influential Lord Salisbury. ‘If the Russians had Constantinople’ – this is Disraeli’s view – ‘they could at any time march their Army through Syria to the mouth of the Nile, and then what would be the use of our holding Egypt. Not even the command of the sea could help us under such circumstances … Our strength is on the sea. Constantinople is the Key of India, and not Egypt and the Suez Canal.’
Salisbury as the younger man felt Disraeli was fighting old battles and imagining, twenty years after the event, a re-enactment of the Crimean War. Derby – described by A.J.P. Taylor as ‘the most isolationist Foreign Secretary that Great Britain has known’,26 wanted non-involvement at any cost. Events were to spiral, however, in such a way that British isolationism was no longer really possible.
The nationalist mood in the Balkans had spread across the Maritsa to Mount Rhodope, where the Christians fought against the Pomaks or Muslim Bulgars, fanatical devotees of Turkish rule. The village of Batak on the northern spurs of Rhodope was preparing to join forces against the Muslims when a force of Bashi-Bazouks (tribal irregulars) arrived there under the command of Achmet Aga of Dospat and his colleague Mohammed Aga of Dorkoro. In the course of the summer of 1876, the Christians had probably killed some 4,000 Muslims. Achmet Aga’s forces of volunteers undoubtedly visited a merciless reprisal on the Christian villagers of Batak, though whether it was ‘the most heinous crime that has stained the history of the present century’ (the words of the British commissioner) will probably depend on what you think of the massacres of tens of thousands in Napoleonic battles such as Austerlitz or Borodino; the deaths of 1 million Irish in the famine; the reprisals against ‘innocent’ Indians after the troubles of 1857–8 or the murder of thousands of Muslims in the previous years of Balkan conflict. A thousand Christians perished in the village church at Batak, the Bashi-Bazouks first firing through the windows, then tearing off the roof tiles and setting fire to the building with burning rags dipped in petroleum. Possibly 4,000 Bulgarian Christians died that summer, though the figure was soon multiplied to 15,000, 30,000 or even 100,000.27
This was one of those instances where British political life was fanned into a state of frenzy by a newspaper article: in this case in the Daily News, which first told an excited but morally disgusted British public of the ‘Bulgarian atrocities’. In British political terms, there were two immediate consequences, one of tangential import to the surviving Bulgarian hill-villagers, the other a more purely British and local drama. First, then, it became all but impossible for Disraeli to maintain an openly Turcophile foreign policy without appearing to side with the rapists and pillagers in Achmet Aga’s brutal army. Second, the arrival of the Daily News in the Temple of Peace at Hawarden convinced Gladstone that he must lay aside his theological researches into ‘Future Retribution’ – the uplifting task he had set himself in his retirement – and re-enter the political fray. Dizzy, after two years as a giant facing comparative pygmies in the Opposition, was once more to confront his old sparring partner: but a new Gladstone, a Gladstone even by the milder standards of later years transformed into something between an old-fashioned revivalist preacher and an entirely modern campaigning politician, taking the issue of the Bulgarian Atrocities to the people, and reaping mighty political advantage.
Disraeli dismissed the stories of ‘The Bulgarian Atrocities’ as ‘to a large extent inventions’, a ‘coffee house bubble’. It is an interesting reflection of the comparatively relaxed political atmosphere of the times that in early September 1876, after a summer in which newspapers and journalistic circles had been buzzing with the Eastern crisis, the prime minister found time to attend a farce at the Haymarket Theatre – The Heir-at-Law. He noticed that three seats were empty in front of him in the stalls. ‘Into one of the stalls came Ld. Granville; then, in a little time, Gladstone; then, at last Harty-Tarty!’ That is, Lord Harrington, the lea
der of the Opposition. We owe the ridiculous vignette to a friend of Disraeli’s who added, ‘Gladstone laughed very much at the performance; H-T never even smiled.’28 There is something truly absurd about the scene: the solemn, boring, forty-year-old Harty-Tarty must until that evening have imagined that as (somewhat reluctant) leader of the Liberal Party he would eventually become the prime minister. Of Gladstone’s two companions, however, it was Harty-Tarty’s cousin Lord Granville who was the angrier. The Grand Old Man had, they imagined, retired to Hawarden, leaving the Liberal Party in the hands of the old Whigs. But the Bulgarian news had come to him as a call from God to return to public life. He had been seized with one of his periodic fits of manic energy combined with psychosomatic illness. During his frenzy over the Vatican Decrees in 1874 he had suffered from diarrhoea. Now it was lumbago which afflicted him; but like other ‘driven’ persons, William Ewart Gladstone used periods of physical illness as a time of preparation for immense outpourings of energy. As soon as back-pain allowed, the old man – sixty-six – made his way to the Reading Room of the British Museum (did his eyes meet those of Karl Marx, engaged on the second volume of Das Kapital?) to check references and quotations. His spell of lumbago the previous week, which he had spent in bed at Hawarden, had been passed scribbling his pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. On his completion of this inflammatory text he had shown it to Granville and Harrington. Though Granville persuaded him to delete some of the wilder passages, both he and Harrington must have realized that Gladstone was back in the political fray, intent – though out of Parliament and with no seat in the Commons – on seizing back the leadership and taking the party in the direction of radicalism, demagoguery and something akin to, if not actually related to, religious revivalism.