The Victorians
Page 51
John Murray ordered a print-run of 2,000 copies of the pamphlet, and increased that to 24,000 by 7 September. By the end of September 200,000 copies of Murray’s printing had been sold, with innumerable pirated and cut versions in the newspapers. Anthony Trollope read it aloud to his family.29 The pamphlet caught that mood of public indignation to which Disraeli in his cynicism had been deaf. Lord Lytton, viceroy of India, could dismiss such feelings as ‘an outbreak of pseudo-Christian John Bullism, about the Bulgarians and other people utterly unknown to us, who have been or are being murdered and ravished by the Turks; not by any means without having murdered and ravished more or less on their own account’.30 But the incident had all the ingredients of a story calculated to thrill and excite the British. ‘If you want to drive John Bull mad,’ said Fitzjames Stephen, replying to Lytton, ‘the plan is to tickle (rather delicately – yet not too delicately) his prurience with good circumstantial accounts of “insults worse than death” inflicted on women, then throw in a good dose of Cross and Crescent, plus Civilization v Barbarism, plus a little “Civil and Religious liberty all over the world”, & then you have him, as the Yankees say, “raging around like a bob-tailed bull in fly-time”.’31
On the Saturday after his pamphlet appeared Gladstone spoke for an hour at Blackheath to a crowd of 10,000 people. ‘When have I seen so strongly the relation between my public duties and the primary purposes for which God made and Christ redeemed the world?’ he asked his diary. It was undoubtedly the religious inspiration of Gladstone’s feelings which urged him on and which gave such electrifying power to his moral message. He spoke, and not just to the Nonconformists who formed a natural constituency of radical Liberalism, where the established Church was silent. Canon Liddon, rigid High Churchman par excellence (still smarting, admittedly, from Disraeli’s attempt to ‘put down Ritualism’ by the clumsy Public Worship Regulation Act), made the point trenchantly:
I may do him an injustice; but I have a shrewd suspicion that Archbishop Tait sees in the Ottoman Porte the Judicial Committee – in the Bulgarians and Serbians, the refractory Ritualists – and in the Circassians and Bashi-Bazouks the wholesome and regenerative influences of Lord Penzance [i.e. the judge appointed by the 1874 Act to deal with the ritualists].32
The historian E.A. Freeman saw Gladstone as the voice of truth and righteousness, worthy of Isaiah castigating the corrupt ministers of Hezekiah, or Demosthenes denouncing the hirelings of Philip.
Even Gladstone himself, however, could not have known quite how successful he was going to become as an orator and a populist. As he went round the country, speaking to huge crowds, the Queen could dismiss ‘that half madman’ as ‘most reprehensible and mischievous … shameful …’ Meanwhile, events in the Balkans moved on.
The Sick Man of Europe was not so sick after all. The Bulgarian agitation was put down. The Montenegrin ‘war’ against the Turks resulted in defeat. The new young sultan might be short of cash, but he still administered a potentially powerful government and he had well-trained armies at his disposal. The British had been happy to believe this during the Crimean War. The Russians reawakened memories of that era by declaring war on Turkey on 24 April 1877. Cossack troops were soon visiting on Muslim villagers reprisals no less horrible than the massacre of Christians by Turkish irregulars the previous year. No English newspaper bothered to mention these new ‘Bulgarian atrocities’,33 and the ‘barbarity’ of these Orthodox Christian soldiers did not prevent Gladstone escorting Madame Novikov from the platform at an anti-Turkish rally.
Disraeli’s attitude to the Russian war was that, by showing military strength at once, Britain could force Russia into peace and hold her back from occupation of Constantinople. He sent Lord Salisbury – increasingly, his closest ally in the Cabinet – on a tour of European capitals to ensure support for the armed resistance to Russia if she could not be brought to the conference table. In November he addressed the Lord Mayor’s banquet and said that Britain’s resources for a righteous war were ‘inexhaustible’ – ‘She is not a country that when she enters into a campaign has to ask herself whether she can support a second or third campaign. She enters into a campaign which she will not terminate till right is done.’
Undoubtedly this bullish stance was popular with a large proportion of the British populace. If one section enjoyed working themselves into a frenzy about the Bulgarian horrors, another derived equal pleasure from the prospect of a war. Many, of course, would have enjoyed both prospects. Mass hysteria does not always follow logic. The term ‘jingoism’ was coined, based on ‘The Great Macdermott’s song’:
We don’t want to fight, but, by Jingo if we do
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.
We’ve fought the Bear before, and while Britons shall be true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.34 fn1
Both Disraeli and Macdermott were wrong, as it happened. Britain didn’t have ‘the men’ to mount an all-out war against Russia. Immediately after the speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, Disraeli tried to extract from the War Office the numbers needed to hold Gallipoli and the lines north of Constantinople. Having said 46,000 they upped their estimate to 75,000 men. ‘The Intelligence Dept. must change its name,’ wrote Disraeli to Monty Corry. ‘It is the Department of Ignorance.’35 It was just as well that the Russians were not as belligerent as Disraeli supposed. After the treaty of San Stefano, signed with the Turks in a small village near Constantinople on 3 March 1878, ratified and emended at the Congress of Berlin in the summer, peace was secured: for a while.
Disraeli, however, had identified himself and his party with the policy of jingoism. Lord Derby, for thirty years his friend and colleague, resigned as foreign secretary when Disraeli insisted on the British fleet sailing through the Dardanelles. Indian troops were dispatched to occupy Cyprus, since it was deemed necessary for Britain to have a Mediterranean base to strengthen her negotiating position with Russia. By the time the sepoys had warmed up their first billycan of curry on Cypriot soil, the Russo-Turkish crisis was over. Rather than withdraw from the island Britain held on to Cyprus – a real rod for its own back in the twentieth century. This was Salisbury’s acquisition, but Gladstone did nothing to hand it back to Turkey when the obvious chance presented itself in his later premiership, at the time of his withdrawing the military consuls from Asia Minor. The partition of the island between Greek- and Turkish-speakers and the farcical humiliations of the British at the hands of a buccaneer archbishop in the 1950s were all the consequence of Salisbury’s nifty (as it must have seemed at the time) annexation of territory which was, for all its difficulties, much better off under the loose suzerainty of Constantinople than under the Union Jack.
If the prospect of Indian troops occupying Turkish Cyprus to show what Britain thought of Russia seems bizarre to our perspective, the agitation of the Second Afghan War seems little more than a footnote to the proceedings in Turkey. Lord Lytton, the erratic viceroy of India, decided that the Russian approaches to Afghanistan represented a threat to British interests. This would probably have been true if, by the time he decided on this show of strength, Salisbury and Disraeli had not been cosying up to the Russians in Berlin.36 The invasion of Afghanistan was temporarily successful. Thanks to the diplomatic interventions of Sir Louis Cavagnari, a good old English name, an Afghan band was playing its own extraordinary rendition of ‘God Save the Queen’ in Kabul on 24 July 1879. The line, for the time being, had been held.
But jingoistic imperialism was not without cost, either in human life or in the self-disgust which from its beginning it was likely to engender. While the Russo-Turkish War was being fought, ended and negotiated, and while the Afghans under Ayub Khan were engaging disastrously with the forces of Roberts – an immensely skilful general – a very different story was being played out in Southern Africa. Sir Bartle Frere, a convinced imperialist who had lately been appointed high commissioner at the Cape, decided that the power o
f the Zulu people must be broken. He had not reckoned on the courage and military skill of Chief Cetewayo, one of the most charismatic and ruthless of nineteenth-century Africans. Not only did he enjoy keeping Europeans on their toes by periodic massacre of missionaries, but he also had a way with prime ministers which would on occasion have been the envy of Queen Victoria: having murdered Masipula, his father’s prime minister, he exclaimed to Sir Theophilus Shepstone (secretary for Native Affairs in Natal), ‘Did I ever tell Mr Shepstone I would not kill? I do kill!’37
On 20 January 1879, four invading columns of African troops, led by British officers, entered Zululand. One, under Lt Col. Durnford, encamped at Rorke’s Drift ready to act in concert with General Lord Chelmsford. They marched ten miles and camped under the southern face of a steep hill called Isandhlwana, ‘The Little Hand’.
Four days later two men, speechless with panic, exhaustion and hunger, staggered to Sir Bartle Frere’s bedside at Pietermaritzburg with the news that 800 white and 500 native soldiers had been killed, their camp routed. Meanwhile 3,000 to 4,000 Zulus led by Cetewayo’s brother had marched on Rorke’s Drift and been beaten off by a much smaller force of British. The defence of Rorke’s Drift by the British inflicted heavy casualties on the Zulus and they lost over 3,000 of their bravest warriors.
Chiefly for reasons of honour, Cetewayo now held back from further killing. Partly persuaded by Bishop Colenso of Natal (who had been tried in London for heresy by his fellow ecclesiastics for doubting the literal truth of the Pentateuch), Cetewayo believed the British were his friends. His was the morality of Achilles or Beowulf; Lord Chelmsford seized the advantage. After his defeat at Ulundi (4 July 1879) Cetewayo was captured and the Zulus defeated. They had given the British a run for their money, and in the course of the fighting Prince Louis Napoleon, only child of Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie, educated at Woolwich, was killed. ‘A very remarkable people the Zulus,’ observed Disraeli, ‘they defeat our generals; they convert our bishops; they have settled the fate of a great European dynasty.’38
In fact, the Zulu War was a calamitous mistake. Disraeli did not really approve of Frere’s disastrous policy, and by alienating the great Zulu people he had merely lost valuable potential allies against the Boers.
Disraeli had always been brilliant at seizing political advantage from a situation – improvising opinions and positions, and then, in the aftermath of triumph, consolidating his position and making something of it which was truly statesmanlike. He had used the Corn Laws – about which he did not care very passionately – as an occasion to ridicule Peel and destroy him. He had subsequently rebuilt the Conservative Party over long painstaking years and become the effectual architect of modern Conservatism. In the international crises of the late 1870s he had taken a bold Russophobic view and beaten the patriotic drum. It brought him momentary popularity in the country – though not enough to win him another election – and it crowned his career with a place of apparent importance at the Congress of Berlin, summoned in the summer of 1878.
At home, the opposition which Gladstone was preparing against Disraeli was fuelled by an unedifying arsenal of anti-semitism, a flaw which has historically been more a feature of the Left and Centre-Left in England than it has of the Right. When Gladstone was roundly beaten in the 1868 election, his wife took it not only as an almost personal affront, but as a defeat for the Church by unbelieving Jewry – even though Disraeli was as much a baptized member of the Established Church as herself. ‘Is it not disgusting after all Papa’s labour and patriotism and years of work to think of handing over his nest-egg to that Jew?’39 Gladstone himself, after the success of the prime minister’s Guildhall speech – the Jingo one – threatened to obscure his own rabble-rousing, blood-curdling evocations of massacres in Bulgaria, mused, ‘the provocation offered by Disraeli is almost incredible. Some new lights about his Judaic feeling in which he is both consistent and conscientious have come in upon me.’40 The historian E.A. Freeman referred in print41 to ‘the Jew in his drunken insolence’ as his measured view of Disraeli’s Guildhall speech; and when the Queen lunched at Hughenden he described her as ‘going ostentatiously to eat with Disraeli in his ghetto’.
Such anti-semitism would become more general in the coming decades after the huge influx to London of poor Russian Jews during the 1880s.42 Of course they all lived in the innocent pre-Nazi years when the human imagination could not conceive of what the anti-semitic mania might ultimately be capable. They therefore spoke more freely and allowed themselves jokes and levels of mild verbal anti-semitism which would seem distasteful in the post-1945 era. But Freeman’s views would have seemed ridiculous in many of his English contemporaries of whatever class, and Gladstone, who felt real hatred of Disraeli, knew his decent-hearted if erratic public well enough not to air his rather creepy views of Disraeli’s ‘Judaic feeling’. Not, of course, that Disraeli would appear to have felt remotely prickly about anti-semitic attitudes. He was gifted with a superiority complex in relation to the rest of the world and would seem genuinely to have believed the fantasies of his earlier fictions – that the Jews are natural aristocrats. Perhaps if your mind is the mind of Disraeli, and the Jews you meet inhabit the Rothschild palaces at Waddesdon and Mentmore, this is an easy enough belief to maintain.
Bismarck, who disliked Gladstone as cordially as did Queen Victoria and Disraeli,43 got the measure of the man at the Congress of Berlin, at which the Great Powers, France, Austria-Hungary, Britain and Russia, gathered in the Prussian capital to discuss the future of the Ottoman Empire, and to unpick the somewhat draconian Russian conditions of the treaty of San Stefano. It is characteristic of the way diplomacy was conducted in those days that no representative of the Porte, no ambassador from the sultan, not a single Turk, was invited to Berlin.
Disraeli, in poor health, attended in the company of Salisbury. He was the ‘lion of the Congress’44 and his incisiveness, intransigence and charm all deeply impressed Prince Bismarck. Britain deprived Russia of almost all the Turkish territories seized in the war and returned them to the Ottomans. The sultan retained military rights in southern Bulgaria. Disraeli had indeed won ‘peace with honour’.
Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann! (The old Jew, he’s the man!) Bismarck’s judgement is that of posterity. When Disraeli came back to London, the Queen offered him a dukedom. He turned down all the honours she wished to shower upon him, except the Garter, which he accepted only on the condition that it was also given to Salisbury. ‘High and low are delighted,’ crowed the Fairy, ‘excepting Mr Gladstone, who is frantic.’45
She had created Disraeli Earl of Beaconsfield in the very summer of the Bulgarian atrocities. When he made his final speech in the House of Commons in August 1876 he let on to no one that it was his last appearance on that stage where he had been such a scintillating presence for forty years. Someone noticed – that was all – that there were tears in his eyes that night.46
As the time approached for a general election, Disraeli badly miscalculated the Conservative Party’s chances. He hoped that the diplomatic triumphs of the Congress of Berlin would give him another victory. Two by-elections, one in Liverpool, another in Southwark, were won by Conservatives where the Liberals might have been expected to win. So he asked the Queen for an early election, and Parliament was dissolved on 24 March 1880. Disraeli retreated to Hatfield as the guest of Lord Salisbury to imbibe copious quantities of Grand Château Margaux 1870 and wait for voting to start on 31 March. He had ignored all manner of factors which would have been apparent to a more humdrum politician. Harvests had been bad for two years running and the rural economy had collapsed. The Conservatives lost 27 county seats. A slump in trade and the continuation of the hated income tax led to catastrophic results for them in the boroughs. In fact they did badly everywhere. The seats in the Commons when counted were as follows, with the figures at the dissolution in brackets: Liberals 353 (250), Conservatives 238 (351), Home Rulers 61 (51). ‘The downfall of Beaconsfie
ldism,’ wrote Gladstone gleefully, ‘is like the vanishing of some vast magnificent castle in an Italian Romance.’47
Gladstone himself had spent the previous two years campaigning, not for an English seat – though he was offered, and won, the seat for Leedsfn2 – but for Midlothian, or Edinburghshire as it was sometimes called in Scotland. It was a comparatively unpopulous seat to win – only 3,260 registered electors, as against the 49,000 in Leeds – but since he won both it would not be fair to say he feared failure in either. Perhaps he liked the notion of returning to his Scottish roots for this remarkable transformation of himself in his late sixties into a modern-style campaigning politician.
The campaign-manager, Lord Rosebery, had attended Democratic rallies in the United States and modelled the meetings partly on American political conventions, partly on the evangelical rallies of Moody and Sankey. Of the thousands who attended, very few were eligible to vote in an election and over half were women. Proceedings began with a selection of Liberal songs, set to familiar hymn-tunes, to ‘warm up’ the audience. Then the Grand Old Man would arrive, often in a carriage pulled by cheering Liberals. Then the speechifying would start – often with a theatrical admission that he had mislaid his eyeglass. The old Pro was capable of speaking for hours and hours and hours on any of his pet subjects, and he and his team could build up a formidable list of the crimes and blunders of the Conservative government. The purchase of the shares in the Suez Canal could be seen as a profligate waste of taxpayers’ money; the acquisition of Cyprus as a major blunder. (Once in office the Liberals would not reverse either.) The bloodshed of the Zulu and Afghan wars could be represented both as a shaming loss of British dignity and as an immoral exploitation of a people weaker than the Europeans. He insisted that we should ever ‘remember the rights of the savage, as we call him’. There would follow the set pieces which were soon to be famous – ‘Remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own. Remember that He who has united you as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound you by the law of mutual love …’48