Heaven’s Command

by Jan Morris

  Sea-power was the basis of Empire, but Empire, it now appeared, was essential to sea-power. It was an imperialist circle. By the 1870s the system was almost complete. The Mediterranean was policed and serviced from Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus, the Atlantic from Halifax and Bermuda, the Indian Ocean from Bombay and Trincomalee, the Pacific from Hong Kong and Esquimault, the Red Sea from Aden. And linking all these scattered dockyards, deposited everywhere along the shipping routes, the imperial coaling stations offered their mountains of best Welsh steam coal, and their sweating and blackened armies of coolies. Some of these bases and stations were new, but some were very old, and seemed in their Britishness part of some natural sea-order. It seemed organically rather than historically ordained that the Union Jack should fly over the watchposts and cross-roads of the sea. Foreigners for the most part accepted it as a fact of life, and the British scarcely thought about it.

  Take for instance the naval base of Simonstown in South Africa. The Cape of Good Hope, the southernmost tip of the African land mass, was one of the most spectacular of the world’s headlands: a wild and glorious place, rocky, wind-scoured, where baboons and antelopes roamed the moorland, stormy seabirds of the south whirled in the wind, and below the precipitous cliffs one could see the waters of the Atlantic and Indian oceans mingling in currents of blue and green. Sheltering in the lee of this prodigy was Simonstown. It was one of the snuggest and prettiest places imaginable, and unchangingly British. Trimly around a sheltered inlet clustered its demure villas, its cottages, its sailors’ barracks, its steepled church and its esplanade of shops, the whole nicely washed and painted, and built to a happily domestic scale. The dockyard, its gates superbly surmounted by the royal cipher, was embedded so neatly between town and sea that the whole had a family unity, and everything in the place was comfortably Navy: the church memorials to Esteemed Shipmates and Ever-Regretted captains’ ladies—the shops selling naval gear, tobacco, homely souvenirs, needles, boot-leathers—the taverns, the smell of rum, the cab-driver’s transplanted Portsmouth’s slang—or the pleasant Admiral’s House at the water’s edge, whose gardens were fragrant with trellissed roses, and at the foot of whose private jetty, like a skiff on the Thames, the squadron flagship habitually lay. Simonstown looked as though it had been there for ever, and for ever there would stay—like the great Cape above, or the Royal Navy itself, without which Victoria’s world seemed inconceivable.1

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  But there was a weak link in this network of strength. Most of the imperial bases were concerned au fond with India, the greatest and richest of the British possessions, but in 1869 the position of India in the world was shifted by the opening of the Suez Canal. This was a notably un-British event. The French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps had built the canal, French capital had largely financed it, the French Empress Eugénie had sailed to Egypt in her royal yacht to open it. At first the British unaccountably failed to grasp its significance. They had always thought a railway across the Isthmus a better proposition, and argued for years that a canal was scientifically unfeasible, if only because the Mediterranean and the Red Sea lay at different levels. When de Lesseps built one anyway, they doubted its effect—most traffic, they thought, would continue to sail around the Cape. Altering as it did the familiar shape of the world, the canal seemed unreal to them, even unnatural, especially as it was not British-made, and they appeared to think that if they scoffed at it for long enough it would dry up again.

  Presently, though, they were obliged to take it more seriously, for their attention was repeatedly focussed upon Egypt by the Eastern Question. Disturbed always by the presence of the rival Russian Empire beyond the Hindu Kush, the British were perennially afraid that the western flank of India might be turned. They had fought the disastrous Afghan War of 1839 on this issue, and they went back again to Afghanistan in 1878, when another presumptuous Amir embarked upon a flirtation with the Russians, another British Resident was murdered, another British Army was defeated, and another punitive force stormed back to Kabul in revenge. They fought a war against the Persians in 1845, they could be roused to Jingoism by any threat to the Dardanelles, and in 1875 Pendeh, a place in Persia whose existence nobody in Britain had hitherto suspected, became for a month or two a household name, as a near-miss casus belli with the Russian Empire.

  Many an obscure and dusty fortress, Herat to Kandahar, briefly achieved the eponym ‘Key to India’, but the master-key was now unquestionably Egypt. Napoleon had recognized this long before, when he called Egypt ‘the most important country’, and seized it as the principal staging-post of his advance to the east. Now the British belatedly recognized it too, and the future of Egypt became crucial to the Eastern Question. The Khedive of Egypt was theoretically a satrap of the Sultan of Turkey, so that whoever controlled the Dardanelles had a hypothetical control of the Suez isthmus too: when the British armies fought in the Crimea, when the music-hall audiences sang the Jingo song, when the statesmen met at Berlin to hammer out the future of the Balkans, Egypt was always in the wings.

  By 1875 even the British had to admit the importance of the Suez Canal, and very galling it was. In the person of Lieutenant Waghorn they themselves had pioneered the Egyptian route to India, and though the Canal Company was a French concern, with the Khedive holding a 40 per cent minority interest, by 1875 more than three-fifths of its traffic flew the British flag, and nearly half the ships that sailed from Britain to India took the Suez route. The P and O company rebuilt its entire fleet in order to operate through the canal, besides abandoning its vast investment in the overland route and in the docks and shipyards that serviced its vessels around the Cape. Via Suez armies could now sail from Europe to India in a month, altering the whole pattern of imperial defence. The canal had become, in effect, an extension of India; for the rest of the century the British would think of Suez and India in the same breath, as part of the same preoccupation, and Suez replaced the Cape of Good Hope as a synonym for the beginning of the east.

  Disraeli, who became Prime Minister for the second time in 1874, viewed with concern the spectacle of this organically imperial waterway in alien hands. He liked to say winsomely that the real key to India was London, a conceit he had filched from the Russian Ambassador, but more than any other British statesman he was fascinated by the Eastern Question. The east suited him; the concerns of oriental empire gilded his public image, and enhanced his aura of subtle glitter. Besides, his novelist’s imagination made him see the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, with its attendant Khedive, as an interloper astride a highway of Empire. Palmerston, it is true, had defined Egypt as no more than an inn on the road to India—all that Britain needed was a well-kept establishment, ‘always accessible’, and well-supplied with ‘mutton chops and post-houses’. To Disraeli, though, foreign control of the canal meant that at any time the inn might be barred and shuttered against British clients, a threat from which the Empire must be released.

  In 1875 a promising prospect was reported to him. The profligate Khedive was bankrupt, the interest on his foreign debts being about equal to the national income of his country, and almost his only remaining assets were his shares in the canal. Finding himself in even more appalling straits than usual, he was now disposing of them, and already two French banking groups were in pursuit, one group wanting to buy, one offering a mortgage. Disraeli heard of it all in a characteristically Disraelian way—from his millionaire Foreign Secretary, Lord Derby, who had heard it from the proprietor of the Pall Mall Gazette, who had heard it from Henry Oppenheimer the French Jewish banker at a private dinner party.

  The Prime Minister’s fancy was fired. He instructed the British Consul-General in Cairo to investigate the reports, and to tell the Khedive that ‘Her Majesty’s Government are disposed to purchase if terms can be arranged’. He told the Queen in his best conspiratorial style: ‘’Tis an affair of millions, about four at least; but it could give the possessor an immense, not to say preponderating, influence in the mana
gement of the Canal’. He threw himself with enthusiasm, if at long range, into the veiled negotiations in Cairo, the comings and going of emissaries, the half-truths and the secret commitments, the proposals and counter-proposals of Nubar Pasha, Sherif Pasha, and many another tasselled eminence of the Egyptian scene. He warned off the French Government with a stiff statement by Lord Derby. And when the Consul-General in Egypt reported that de Lesseps himself had offered 1oo million francs for the Khedive’s shares, but that the Khedive would prefer to sell them to the British Government, Disraeli instantly agreed. ‘The Viceroy’s offer is accepted. Her Majesty’s Government agree to purchase the 177,646 shares of the Viceroy for four million pounds sterling.’ ‘It is settled,’ the Prime Minister told the Queen. ‘You have it, Madam.’

  Disraeli raised the purchase price from his friends the Rothschilds. His private secretary, Montague Corry, loved to tell how the Prime Minister had sent him to the office of Baron Lionel de Rothschild to ask for a loan of four million pounds.

  Rothschild: When?

  Carry: Tomorrow.

  Rothschild (pausing to eat a muscatel grape and spit out the skin): What is your security?

  Corry: The British Government.

  Rothschild: You shall have it.

  When the shares were counted they proved to be forty short, and the price was accordingly amended to £3,976,582—doubtless pleasing the thrifty Mr Gladstone, who thought the whole transaction deplorable. The documents were packed in seven zinc boxes, and the troopship Malabar, en route to England from Bombay, was ordered to call at Alexandria to ‘receive certain cases’. A special train took the cases from Cairo to the coast; an armed guard waited at Portsmouth to receive them; on December 1, 1875, they were deposited in the vaults of the Bank of England.1

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  The British were delighted at this coup. Commercially their control of the company remained vestigial, British Government directors still constituting only one eighth of the Board, and for the rest of the century the conduct of the canal remained a frustration to British shipowners and strategists alike. But the shares did give Britain a permanent and powerful stake in Suez, and to the world at large it seemed, in a vague but suggestive way, to give them possession—Bismarck called the canal the Empire’s ‘spinal cord’. Disraeli’s acquisition of the shares, transmuted into legend over the years, entered the national myth as the acquisition of the canal itself, and in the end that is what it became. Out of a two-fifths commercial share, itself a highly profitable investment, the British evolved complete military control of the canal, so that before long the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime, still preponderantly French in ownership and altogether French in management, was operating under the protection and patronage of the British Empire.

  So the seal was set upon British command of the oceans, and thus of the Empire. It was now absolute, and any merchant ship captain sailing the imperial routes in the last decades of the Victorian century found himself moving in effect from one British bastion to another. For two decades after the acquisition of the canal shares, British military supremacy was scarcely tested, and the Royal Navy sailed the world, convoying its expeditionary forces, showing the Queen’s flag, as though its admirals owned the oceans. The public responded with growing pride, and for the first and probably the last time in their history, the British people acquired a taste for drums, guns and glory.

  1 And lived happily ever after at his family seat, near Booterstown in County Dublin.

  1 Like old Sir James Scarlett, who, finding the ‘enemy’ forces, commanded by a junior general, impertinently winning a battle against him, angrily ordered them to retreat.

  1 Victorian Aldershot has almost vanished—even the Royal Pavilion was demolished in 1961—but one can still see the great gate of the original cavalry barracks, the garrison church has survived the abolition of compulsory church parades, the officers’ library thrives, and the Duke of Wellington, his surroundings sadly unkempt when I was last there, still looks imperiously across the nations.

  1 ‘Thou hast girded me with strength unto the battle’, says his memorial limply in the crypt of St Paul’s, giving full details of this exhausting career.

  2 The first man ashore, through the mud of the Peiho River, was an elderly brigadier in a white helmet, whose shirt-tail flapped beneath his red-serge jacket, and who carried his trousers, socks and boots slung over his sword on his shoulder. At the end of the war the commanding general and his staff hired a P and O steamer, and went over to Japan for a short holiday.

  1 An attitude which was long to linger, by the way. ‘The highest ideals of grace and power,’ wrote an officer of the battlecruiser Tiger, completed in 1914, ‘had taken form at the bidding of the artist’s brain of her designer. No man who ever served in her fails to recall her beauty with pride and thankfulness.’ ‘It is a thousand pities,’ wrote Sir Oscar Parkes of her in 1956, ‘that a shifting of her topmast … was made necessary—it changed her in the same way that twisted eyebrows would spoil classic beauty.’

  1 The only other one, a turret battleship launched in 1890, sank in a collision with the battleship Camper down off the Syrian coast in 1893, with the loss of 359 officers and men. The Navy has never used the name since.

  2 In the event she never saw action, but she is afloat to this day as a hulk at Pembroke Dock in Wales.

  1 Now Place Jacques Cartier. The statue is still in good condition after 160 years of the Quebec climate, having been made in London of a secretly-formulated substance called Coade Stone—‘impervious to FROSTS and DAMPS’.

  2 Despite a lasting reputation for dockyard idleness and thievery. ‘Everything gets stolen here’, a watchman told me when I visited the old naval installations in 1970, ‘except the lavatory seats and the storehouse clock—someone’s always sitting on the lavatory, and everybody keeps an eye on the clock.’

  1 The Royal Navy still uses Simonstown, and has rights still at many another old imperial dockyard, Gibraltar to Hong Kong: its dependence upon bases became so ingrained, even after the evolution of fast tankers and supply ships, that in the second world war the Pacific Fleet found itself without a fleet train, and thus hard put to keep up with the United States Navy.

  1 Where they remained until, in 1964, they were burnt in the Bank’s printing works: by then they had increased to some 300,000, occupied nine cupboards and weighed about four tons. They had been exchanged anyway in 1958 for shares in the new Compagnie Financiere de Suez, successor to the nationalized Canal Company, which is actively involved in the Channel Tunnel project, which has interests in numerous banks, insurance companies, property firms and industrial groups, and in which the British Government is a 10% shareholder to this day.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  South of the Zambesi

  YET there were forebodings. To many the Empire seemed too diffuse an organism, set against taut new Powers like Germany or the United States, and throughout the 1870s and 1880s there were repeated attempts to give it logic The sloppiness jarred, and imperialist intellectuals applied themselves to the task of binding the Empire more closely, and sharing its responsibilities more rationally among its members. It took some mental readjustment, to think of all the scattered millions of Victoria’s subjects, Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists and pagans, black, brown, yellow or white, Sioux or Burmese, Chinese or Ashanti, as fellow-citizens of a single immense super-State: but in the new vision of Empire, often figuratively interpreted in mosaics and bas-reliefs, they stood there shoulder to shoulder in comradely profile, backed by scenes of pastoral prosperity or victorious pride, and gazing trustfully upwards, as often as not, towards the bulk of Her Imperial Majesty. The vaguely formulated ideology of British Imperialism had something in common with Soviet Communism half a century later: an innocent optimism, a facile disregard of unwelcome truths, an instinct to simplify and categorize, and a dreadful taste in propaganda.

  How could one rationalize the Empire, which was stuck together more by habit than design, ha
d been acquired piecemeal over the centuries, and was held together by force? Some kind of federalism was the fashionable answer, most forcibly expressed by the historians Sir John Seeley and J. A. Froude, and an eager proponent of this solution was Lord Carnarvon, ‘Twitters’, Disraeli’s Colonial Secretary, Carnarvon thought the first step towards a super-Power should be a grouping of the Empire into larger sub-units, starting with the white self-governing colonies. Canada seemed to offer a successful precedent, and Carnarvon prided himself on having fathered Canadian Confederation in Parliament. Australia, where there were five separate colonies, would doubtless soon be federated too—perhaps with New Zealand, a country which, though separated from Australia by a thousand miles of ocean, seemed to many Whitehall theorists more or less the same place. And the third constituent federacy, Lord Carnarvon thought, to form another pillar of the grander imperial structure, should be established in South Africa, which undeniably needed order or collectivism, and was also very expensive to rule.

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  The South African scene had changed, in the forty odd years since the Great Trek, but had changed predictably. There were now two British colonies, Cape Colony and Natal, and two independent Boer Republics. The Orange Free State, with its capital at Bloemfontein beyond the Orange River, was generally moderate and on friendly terms with the British. The Transvaal republic, called the South African Republic, was the high retreat of everything most doggedly Boer, and was not generally on friendly terms with anyone. Around these four white settlements swirled the black peoples in their diverse tribes, outnumbering the Europeans by twenty to one, generically known to the whites as Kaffirs or Bantus, but possessing ancient tribal loyalties of their own, to the chiefs of Bechuana or Basuto, to the misty divinities of the bushmen or the tremendous feathered kings of Zululand.