This was the unsavoury story of the Raid as it emerged from the trials and official enquiries. And absurd as were the illusions of the conspirators, the political effects were real enough, as Milner knew to his cost. The Raid had disastrously weakened the imperial position in South Africa. In 1898 Kruger was re-elected as the President of the Transvaal for a fourth term, routing his more progressive Boer opponents, and he was now the hero not only of the Boers in the Transvaal, but of their fellow Afrikaners at the Cape. The bonds of a new kind of Cape colonial nationalism, which Rhodes had inspired, were now broken, and the Cape Afrikaners were forced back into the laager mentality they had abandoned for a decade. Of course, this would not necessarily have been a bad thing for imperialists, if the Cape had not had self-government. But it had, and the Afrikaners remained in the majority.46
As for Rhodes, he was severely censured at both the Cape enquiry and the parliamentary enquiry in London. He had been forced to resign both as Chairman of the Chartered Company and as Cape Prime Minister. He then announced that he would abandon Cape politics and in future devote himself to the country that bore his name. It was about time. Rhodes’s gamble in sending off most of the Rhodesian police with Jameson had helped precipitate native risings by the Matabele and Mashona, which were only stamped out at heavy financial cost to the Chartered Company.47
When Milner had been sent to the Cape in 1897 it was his job to restore the world destroyed by Jameson. The first problem was how to deal with the ex-colossus and his partners, including Alfred Beit. As Governor and High Commissioner, it was Milner’s job to be on good terms with all the pro-British party, especially these ex-German, naturalized British millionaire ‘gold-bugs’ like Alfred Beit. And on good terms he was. Yet he could not conceal from his close friends his private feelings. Rhodes’s and Beit’s plan for invading the Transvaal had been not only ‘idiotic’; it was ‘unscrupulous’.48 He did not now trust Rhodes and his associates an inch. ‘They would give me away or anyone else for the least of their own ends,’ he declared in an outburst to Philip Gell. They were ‘money grubbers’ and ‘potential rebels’. Yet he could not help liking Rhodes. It needed a ‘moral and intellectual structure as complex’ as his own to realize that ‘Rhodes is thoroughly untrustworthy yet cordially to admire him’.49
This was, of course, for the ears of only his closest friends. Indeed, Milner once called the truth about Rhodes one of the ‘arcana imperii’ (imperial secrets) that could never be divulged except to the ‘fully initiated augur’. ‘For goodness sake,’ he added, ‘do not let Grey’ – Lord Grey was the new chairman of the Chartered Company – ‘ever know what I think … Grey, excellent, simple minded fellow, would not be one-tenth of the use he undoubtedly is, if he did not take Rhodes at his own valuation.’50 Milner had his own motives for telling this to Philip Gell. He wanted to install him, his most intimate and reliable friend, in a crucial position at ‘Headquarters’ – among the London gold-bugs. He hoped Gell could get a job at the London office of Wernher-Beit, the richest and most powerful of all the Rand mining houses.51 (The personal assets of Wernher and Beit were valued in 1895 at £17 million, compared with Rhodes’s £5 million.)52 ‘I had rather it were Wernher, Beit and Transvaal things’, he told Philip, explaining this scheme, ‘than Grey, Rhodes and Rhodesian things.’ In fact, Philip had to settle for a seat with Grey on the board of the Chartered Company. But as Beit, too, was a director of Chartered, it would serve as a useful link with the Rand. If Milner had his way, it was Wernher and Beit, richer and less erratic than Rhodes, who had the most important part to play in the ‘Great Game’ in South Africa.53
It was for this – to concert a long-term strategy to deal with the Boers – that Milner had now come to see Chamberlain.
He had no doubt of the lessons of the past. The Raid was Rhodes’s private attempt at a short cut to solve the Transvaal problem. It had failed as abjectly as the forward policy of the imperial government. But that did not prove that intervention was the wrong policy. If Milner was to intervene, his policy must be based on three principles: agreement with loyalists at the Cape, agreement with the Colonial Office at home, and the support of British public opinion on both sides of the political fence.
He knew what they would reply at the Colonial Office. Why attempt a forward policy at all? Time was on their side: only be patient and the Transvaal would fall into their lap. But time, Milner was sure, was not on their side, now that the Raid had strengthened Kruger’s grip on his own people. So they simply could not afford to go on ‘muddling through’ and letting the Boers ‘stew in their own juice’.54 In fact, earlier that year, Milner had written to London to ask for permission to ‘work up to crisis’, to force a show-down with Kruger. Not to put too fine a point on it, he wanted to pick a quarrel over some issue or issues, and then let events force the crisis.55
At the time Chamberlain (embarrassed by the enquiry into the Raid) had told a friend that he wished ‘everyone would forget the existence of the place [South Africa] for the next year or two’.56 To Milner he had replied, politely but firmly, ‘For the present at any rate our greatest interest in South Africa is peace … all our policy must be directed to this object.’57 This had been the position in early 1898, when Britain had her hands full in dealing with French claims to the Upper Nile. What was Chamberlain’s policy in December – after the British triumph in expelling the French from Fashoda?
Milner now had a doubly delicate diplomatic mission during his working holiday in England. First, he must expose the ‘rose-coloured illusions’ of Chamberlain and the Colonial Office: time, he would prove to them, was not on their side. Second, he must soften up the Press and politicians in general. He had no wish to end up, like Sir Bartle Frere, sacrificed on the altar of public opinion.58 This in its turn involved attendance at the dinner tables and country house parties of the great political hostesses of the day – a task not uncongenial to Milner.
High society provided an emollient conspicuously lacking in his official life as an administrator. Eight years before, as a thirty-seven-year-old financial secretary in Egypt, he had fallen in love for the first time. The girl was Margot Tennant and Milner asked her to marry him.59 She had chosen his Balliol friend instead – Henry Asquith, the future Prime Minister. Milner had tried to shrug off the unrequited affair. ‘Dear Blessed Old Boy,’ he had told Philip, ‘Don’t “take on” about it. There are no bones broken. I have not been eaten by an ogress …’60 But the rebuff intensified the struggle against the romantic yearnings of his father’s temperament. Where could he now give them a better (and safer) outlet than in the towered and castellated homes of the great hostesses, in bicycling with Lady Alice Portal and punting with Ettie Grenfell? And even if he was hopeless at bridge, his welcome was assured. Alfred not only talked brilliantly about his imperial mission. He was a brilliant listener.61
That evening, 18 November, at eight, the special saloon coach carrying Milner steamed into Vauxhall Station. He took a cab to his bachelor chambers at 47 Duke Street. He had his ‘old cave’: the big red room on the ground floor. He was too tired to dine at Brooks’. A stack of letters awaited him, a deluge of invitations. Everyone wanted to hear about South Africa.62
Four days later Milner crossed the palatial courtyard of the Colonial Office in Whitehall on his way to see Chamberlain. He had every reason to feel depressed. It was not only that row of deceased proconsuls sculpted on the east façade, whose numbers included (like a kind of Bluebeard’s gallery) the heads of D’Urban, Smith and Frere. He had also just heard the news from some friends in the CO: the Master – Chamberlain – was sticking to the ‘no-war policy’.63
His own mind was made up. There were only two ways out of the abyss in South Africa. Either Kruger must make political reforms in his ramshackle republic or there must be a ‘row’. To put it bluntly, the choice was between reform or war. And of the two, he believed ‘war was more likely’.64
CHAPTER 2
Nods and Winks
&n
bsp; London,
22 November – December 1898
‘A war in South Africa would be one of the most serious wars that could possibly be waged. It would be in the nature of a Civil War. It would be a long war, a bitter war and a costly war … it would leave behind it the embers of a strife which I believe generations would hardly be long enough to extinguish … to go to war with President Kruger, to force upon him reforms in the internal affairs of his state, with which [we] have repudiated all right of interference – that would have been a course of action as immoral as it would have been unwise.’
Joseph Chamberlain, speaking as Colonial Secretary in the House of Commons, May 1896
Earlier that day, 22 November, the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, had briefed himself for Milner’s visit. He worked, we are told, smoothly and efficiently in his office like an imperious machine.
His biographer has described with awe the Chamberlain of this period. Every day he arrived by cab from his home in Princes Gardens. In the Private Secretary’s room – a sort of ante-chamber between the main corridor and the blue baize door of Chamberlain’s room – three or four distinguished-looking men in frock-coats are awaiting his arrival. These are the hierarchy, the high priests of the Colonial Office. They warm their hands at the coal fire; one of them goes to the brass rack on the mahogany table and picks up a file; it is tied up in the proverbial red-tape, and the spidery sequence of minutes culminates in the welcome initials, ‘J.C.’. Now there is the ring of the table bell and the blue baize door opens. The Master has arrived. ‘The machine is ready to take some more,’ he says to the Private Secretary, who shuffles in with the files. He is only half in jest. ‘The sleeping city wakened at his touch,’ as one of his admirers put it.1
From his desk Chamberlain eyed the world through his eye-glass, and it was no wonder if the world trembled. Queen Victoria was the symbol of the mother country, the Empire made flesh; Chamberlain seemed to epitomize its other side, the dreadnought spirit. There he sat, the self-made man from Birmingham, with a home-grown orchid in his button-hole and a diamond pin in his stock, his face as cool and handsome as a piece of his own Birmingham steel. His right hand rested on the huge brown globe, traced with the spider’s web of cable routes and steamer lanes. It was this strong right hand that would pull the Empire together.2
Such was the impression Chamberlain liked, no doubt, to convey, and he conveyed it brilliantly. Yet there was another Joe Chamberlain, better known to his political colleagues than to his office staff or the public: emotional and impulsive, moody and sometimes despondent. For the frustrations of the last two and a half years at the CO had left their inner mark on him, not to speak of the wrangles in the Cabinet – and, of course, the searing experience of the Raid.
Yet the central trauma of Chamberlain’s life was none of these. It had occurred twelve years earlier, and it haunted him still.
In 1886 Chamberlain was President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone’s cabinet, and his prospects were dazzling. He had risen from the bed-rock of the British middle-class by way of a successful industrial career to the commanding heights of politics.3 Head and shoulders above his fellow radicals, he could expect, when Gladstone retired, to be the next Liberal Prime Minister: perhaps one of the greatest of Britain’s Prime Ministers. Then, in 1886, the Irish Home Rule ulcer burst and engulfed the Liberal Party, and he discovered he was that strange hybrid, both a radical and an imperialist. With Lord Hartington (later Duke of Devonshire), he founded the Liberal Unionists, and for nine long years he was in the wilderness.4
To Chamberlain the sacrifice seemed devastating. As he later blurted out to Lord Selborne, the son-in-law of Lord Salisbury, the ‘dream of his life’ had been to be Prime Minister; for the sake of principle he had sacrificed ‘all his ambitions, all his hopes, all his dreams … they had gone for ever into limbo’. Now he was exposed to the attacks of both parties, there were ‘venomous and malignant attacks’ from the right of the Tory party, while from his old friends among the radicals he had been abused as ‘no public man before him ever had been’.
In April 1895 he had seriously considered resigning from politics. In the event, of course, he thought better of it; he had been impulsive; besides, the Tories were anxious to smooth his ruffled feathers.5 A couple of months later the working agreement between Liberal Unionists and Conservatives took shape as a formal coalition. And one afternoon in June, the Parliamentary majority of the Liberal rump, now led by Lord Rosebery, vanished in a puff of smoke (it was actually during a debate on the supply of cordite). Chamberlain had come in from the cold. Lord Salisbury, the Tory Prime Minister, then offered him virtually any office he cared to name: the Treasury, Foreign Affairs, the War Office. The whole field was open to him. He chose the Colonies. The appointment was welcomed.6 Yet it surprised those who, like Salisbury, had imagined he was only a ‘theoretic imperialist’, or thought him too ambitious to choose what had hitherto been a minor Cabinet post.’7
The ensuing partnership had borne fruit much as might have been predicted: a measure of success, and a good deal of frustration for everyone.
On taking over, Chamberlain found the Colonial Office was almost a parody of a Whitehall department. Behind the glittering Roman façade, commissioned by Lord Palmerston, the place was unbelievably drab: miles of brown dado and lead-lined staircase. ‘We must have all this smartened up,’ Chamberlain told his Private Secretary, peering through his eye-glass at the worn carpet and the broken-down mahogany furniture in his room. Some fresh paint was eventually extorted from the Office of Works and electric light was installed to replace the candles and supplement the gaslights.8 Yet the office remained bleak enough for a romantic like Chamberlain, whose own house at Highbury, in a Birmingham suburb, was filled with the gleam of Morris glass and the glow of Burne-Jones tapestries.9
Still more negative than the atmosphere of the building, Chamberlain found, was the spirit of its occupants. Like Milner, Chamberlain believed the new imperialism demanded of Britain a double task: to make a Greater Britain out of the white Empire, and to develop the black one. But how to achieve anything with an office staff of ninety-nine men (including the messengers) dedicated to the Treasury virtues of thrift and prudence?10 The truth was that the Treasury allocation for the Empire (excluding India and Egypt) was a shoe-string – a mere £130,000 when Chamberlain took over the Colonies.11 No wonder that the CO staff tended to look on their job with a certain cynicism, and any talk of the ‘great estates’ overseas had a hollow ring.12
His Cabinet colleagues were delighted for him to make speeches about imperial unity.13 They seemed less anxious to take any practical steps to achieve his objects – especially if they cost money. And the second part of the imperial task – developing the black Empire – would hardly be cheap. In due course, Chamberlain had succeeded in persuading his cabinet colleagues to raise the Colonial Office budget to £600,000, but this was largely spent on the pacification of Uganda and a project in Cyprus.14 It was a shocking fact, as Chamberlain admitted in public, that the great majority of the black colonies for which Britain was directly responsible had still, after a century, received no real benefit from imperial membership.15
Still, one must not exaggerate Chamberlain’s own frustrations at this period. He had to admit that he found both Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour, his nephew and deputy, the soul of politeness. They recognized that his imperial ideas were a substitute for the lost dream of being a great radical Prime Minister. They flattered him in their languid, aristocratic way by reminding him of how he was indispensable to the party alliance – though this was only partly flattery. They supported him, to some extent, against the penny-pinching spirit of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Michael Hicks Beach. Above all, they saved him when his career seemed likely to be brought to an untimely end by that tornado from South Africa – the Jameson Raid.
The Raid. Chamberlain, too, had found this an extraordinary business. And if Milner felt baffled about the part Ch
amberlain had played, it was nothing to what Chamberlain sometimes felt himself. After one and a half years of public enquiries and private heart-searching he confessed to an admirer, ‘The fact is that I can hardly say what I knew and what I did not.’16
Yet the evidence was there, whether Chamberlain liked it or not, locked away in those ministerial red boxes in his office. And, eighty years later, we can see that, if published, this evidence would have been the end of Chamberlain and might well have changed the course of history.17
The dilemma that faced Chamberlain when he took over the Colonies in 1895 was a delicate one. He shared Milner’s view of South African policy in the past: that it had been one long blunder from the imperial standpoint. He recalled ruefully that he had served in Gladstone’s cabinet, which made the culminating blunders of Majuba, the Pretoria and London Conventions and ‘peace-under-defeat’. He shared Milner’s distaste for Rhodes and the buccaneering of the Chartered Company.18 But he had inherited from Lord Ripon, the outgoing Liberal Secretary of State, a passive leave-it-to-Rhodes policy for South Africa, which was supposed to result in federation. Soon after Chamberlain took up the seals of office, Rhodes pressed for new negotiations. And here was the dilemma. Chamberlain learned that an Uitlander coup was expected in Johannesburg, organized by Rhodes and Beit. Could the British government safely leave it all to these two men to handle? What if the coup resulted in an Uitlander republic under its own flag? Paradoxically, this would be even worse for Britain than the Boer republic. For it could postpone for ever the chance of creating a British federation of South Africa, built up on the gold of the Transvaal.19
The Boer War Page 5
