Chamberlain’s response to the dilemma was to adopt a course not unknown to political opportunists: he would take care ‘not to know too much’. If the plot failed he could plead official ignorance; if it succeeded he could share (privately) the credit with Rhodes and Beit.20 But this was not merely a policy of opportunism; it was extremely dangerous. To have knowledge, without complicity in the plot, was to tread a moral and political tightrope. Who but a brave man (or a lunatic) would share a tightrope with Cecil Rhodes?
On that fateful day when Jameson set out on his ride, Chamberlain was at home in Birmingham, waiting anxiously for news of the coup.21 Characteristically, he had kept the Prime Minister and Balfour almost completely in the dark. The first the Prime Minister knew about the plot, it appears, was when he was told by Chamberlain, a week earlier, that a rising was imminent and they must ‘watch the event’ as it might ‘turn out to their advantage’.22 A few days later Chamberlain informed him that the rising was going to ‘fizzle out’ – partly because of the tiresome way in which the Uitlanders would not agree to exchange the Boer republic for a British colony.23 Two days later, Chamberlain received the astonishing news that, despite everything, Jameson was going in. It was the night of the servants’ ball at Highbury, and he was dressing for dinner when the special messenger arrived. He rose to the occasion. ‘If this succeeds, it will ruin me,’ he is supposed to have told his family, clenching his hands. ‘I am going up to London to crush it.’24 He dashed off in a cab from the servants’ ball at midnight like the hero of a novel by Ouida.
In fact, when Rhodes fell from the tightrope, he nearly brought Chamberlain down with him. The policy of official deafness proved unworkable. At both ends of operations – in London and the Cape – members of Chamberlain’s staff had been fully briefed by Rhodes and the plotters, and had taken action to help Rhodes which amounted to complicity. Chamberlain himself had become caught up in the web of half-knowledge and half-truth. Not only would it be most discreditable if those nods and winks ever came to light.25 He had also personally intervened at one crucial moment in the plot – this was the time of a crisis over Venezuela – to remind Rhodes of the international situation, and a cable had been sent to ‘hurry things along’.26 And soon, after the opening of Bobby White’s trunk, the whole world was buzzing with stories of the British government’s complicity.27
Chamberlain’s part in the great cover-up that followed Jameson’s Raid – Jameson’s break-in, so to speak – was not, one would imagine, an episode on which he looked back with any great pride. To Lord Salisbury he wrote a long memorandum in tones of injured innocence.28 In Parliament he was his usual bland and masterful self, the Pushful Joe of the cartoonists. He gave as good as he got. Yet to his inner circle of friends, he made no secret of the fact that he had his back to the wall. ‘I don’t care a twopenny damn,’ he said, ‘for the whole lot of them.’29 But how to suppress, or neutralize, the evidence that would come before the Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry? In the event, Lord Salisbury showed his confidence in his Colonial Secretary by insisting that he should himself serve on the Committee.30 And in addition, certain other arrangements were made which effectively saved his bacon.
First, Chamberlain came to a sensible arrangement with Rhodes, Beit and their men. Jameson was secretly visited in prison by Chamberlain; and Jameson kept his mouth shut.31 On their part, Rhodes and Beit agreed not to produce in court the so-called ‘missing telegrams’. These were the cables from Rhodes’s London office to Cape Town and the most damning evidence against Chamberlain outside his own red boxes. They detailed the course of his dealings with the Colonial Office and included the ‘hurry-up’ telegram, which especially implicated Chamberlain.32 In return for Rhodes’s and Jameson’s good sense, Chamberlain agreed not to tamper with the charter of the Chartered Company, which could have been revoked as a result of the revelations about Rhodes’s part in the Raid.33
Second, Chamberlain found someone on the Colonial Office staff who was prepared to offer himself as a scapegoat. This was Sir Graham Bower, the Imperial Secretary at the Cape, who had personally handled negotiations with the plotters. Out of patriotism – ‘naval standards’, he called it – he agreed to pretend he had not told his chiefs about the Jameson plan. His reward was swift: censure by the Committee and the ruin of his career.34 Another possible scapegoat was also considered by Chamberlain: Bower’s counterpart, Edward Fairfield, who had handled the London end of the negotiations, including the ‘hurry-up’ telegram. But Fairfield apparently did not feel like being sacrificed. It was fortunate for everyone that, shortly after he was told what was expected of him, he had a stroke and died.35
And so Chamberlain was able to appear at the London enquiry, and say with his hand on his heart, ‘I had not then and … never had, any knowledge, or, until I think it was the day before the actual raid took place, the slightest suspicion of anything in the nature of a hostile or armed invasion of the Transvaal.’ And he went on to pay eloquent tribute to poor Fairfield; how sad it was, he could say, somehow keeping a straight face, that Fairfield had misunderstood his orders, being so unusually deaf.36
In fact, it needed more than Chamberlain’s eloquence, Fairfield’s stroke, Bower’s quixotic self-sacrifice and the deal with Rhodes and Beit to save the Colonial Secretary. He was saved by his enemies.
A few days after the Raid the Kaiser committed a blunder almost as colossal as Rhodes’s, Beit’s and Jameson’s. He sent a telegram to congratulate Kruger on his escape. This immediately invested the Raid with the status of an international incident. In England, it provoked a storm of anti-German feeling. What infernal cheek, people said, for the Kaiser (Wilhelm II) to meddle in our sphere of influence. Queen Victoria wagged her finger at her impertinent grandson Willy. And everyone swung back behind the government. The fleet was mobilized before the sudden squall subsided. As for Jameson, instead of having to endure the expected jibes about the White Flag, he was the hero of the hour. From his prison cell he learnt that his ride had been set to music. ‘Then, over the Transvaal border,/And gallop for life or death,’ sang Alfred Austin, the Poet Laureate.37 Jameson’s statue was cast in Staffordshire clay. Grim-faced on his black stallion, he rode across a thousand mantelpieces.
Some of the admiration for Jameson did not fail to rub off on Chamberlain. Certainly it compounded the problems of Chamberlain’s chief political enemies – the radical wing of the Liberal Party. How far could they go in pressing the charge of complicity against Chamberlain? With public opinion in this mood, they would be on dangerous ground. Moreover, there were all sorts of other reasons why Liberals were squeamish about pressing the charges. The leading Liberal imperialist, Lord Rosebery, was believed to have heard about the Raid from Rhodes’s own lips much too early for Rosebery’s own good. The leading radical, Sir William Harcourt, was a personal friend of Joe’s and, apart from this, there was the call of patriotism. Who wanted to wash their dirty linen in front of the world?38
So Joseph Chamberlain appeared at the parliamentary enquiry and was met by a barrage of silence. The enquiry itself passed into folk-lore as the Lying-in-State at Westminster.39
What were the effects on Chamberlain of this two-year ordeal? His discomfiture certainly made him no more conciliatory to Kruger. He now had a personal score to settle with the old man – ‘an ignorant, dirty, cunning and obstinate man who had known how to feather his own nest and to enrich all his family and dependants’. But nor had his sympathy for Kruger’s opponents – the Uitlanders – increased with the Raid. He found them ‘a lot of cowardly, blatant, selfish speculators who would sell their souls to have the power of rigging the market’. As for their leader, Cecil Rhodes, whom he had always privately distrusted, he now regarded him not only as a ‘blunderer’ who had alienated the Cape Afrikaners, but as a ‘blackmailer’ who had threatened to publish the missing telegrams if the Charter was revoked. ‘What is there in South Africa,’ he burst out, ‘that makes blackguards of all who get involved in its pol
itics?’ Yet these were the men who, since the Raid, were Britain’s only allies in South Africa.40
One can well imagine Chamberlain’s feelings of frustration. The Raid had made him keener than ever to have a go at the Transvaal. By alienating the Cape Afrikaners, however, it had also deprived him of the means. In short, the effects of the Raid were not unlike the effects of drink, as described by the Porter in Macbeth: ‘It provokes and unprovokes; it increases the desire and takes away the performance.’41
At 2.30 p.m. on 22 November Chamberlain received Milner in his room beyond the blue baize door, and Milner put the case for ‘working up to a crisis’.42 There is no record on the Colonial Office files of the interview, but we know the two men’s lines of argument. The gap between them was still as wide as ever.
Time fought on the side of the enemy, Milner claimed. Kruger had returned after his re-election as President ‘more autocratic and more reactionary than ever’. Now he was arming for the coming struggle with Britain. ‘He has immense resources in money and any amount of ammunition of war, to which he is constantly adding.’ No doubt he ‘suffered from megalomania’. But either his government – a ‘race-oligarchy’ – or the Uitlanders must rule in the Transvaal, and Milner saw no sign of Kruger’s government removing itself. Indeed, if Britain went to war with its European rivals, Kruger might seize the chance to attack the Cape.43
To this, Chamberlain repeated his conviction: the only policy now available was the policy of patience. First, because there were the political effects of that ‘accursed Raid’. It had placed the country in a ‘false position’; the Afrikaners at the Cape had been alienated; he must wait until they resumed their confidence in him. Second, there were positive advantages in playing the waiting game. British influence was increasing all the time; internal opposition to Kruger must develop by reaction and Kruger himself was not getting any younger.
Third and fourth, there were arguments against war. Chamberlain believed that military victories would be self-defeating: their ultimate aim was a union, in every sense, in South Africa. War would only arouse hatred and leave a legacy of bitterness. If war had to come, Kruger must be the aggressor and the Afrikaners at the Cape – or at least a large part of them – on the side of the Empire. War would be ‘extremely unpopular’ in Britain unless Kruger’s behaviour was ‘outrageous’ and he put himself blatantly in the wrong. To do this he would have to make a ‘serious breach’ of the London Convention.44
Give Kruger enough rope, Chamberlain seemed to be saying.45 To which Milner’s reply was in effect that the old President had proved himself far too cunning to hang anyone, least of all himself.
* * * * *
Milner returned to his chambers in Duke Street with the result of his mission to see Chamberlain an apparent anti-climax. Yet Milner was not depressed. He had taken a hint from Joe – from one of those nods and winks – that London’s ‘no-war policy’ did not tie Cape Town’s or Johannesburg’s hands. To ‘get things “forrarder” by my own actions,’ was how he described his policy after the interview.46 It was in South Africa that a way of working up to the crisis must be found.
Meanwhile, he threw himself into the task of softening up public opinion at home, by stamping ‘on rose-coloured illusions about South Africa’. It proved an awful rush. It was delicate work, too, for he had to catch up ‘with all the leading politicians and pressmen – without seeming to run after them.47
Fortunately, Milner could rely on his network of friendships – that finely spun web that stretched from Balliol to the Cabinet room by way of The Times in Printing House Square, Brooks’ Club and Panshanger. At his first political house party that month, a weekend with Lord and Lady Cowper at Panshanger, he bumped into Arthur Balfour, the Deputy Prime Minister, George Curzon (it was a fortnight before Curzon left England to be Viceroy in India) and St John Brodrick, Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. Curzon and Brodrick were Milner’s own Balliol contemporaries, together with a third, Willie Selborne, and Austen Chamberlain; these were the ‘Arthurians’ (as young Winston Churchill was to call them), the men who would soon come to dominate the Tory Party under Balfour’s leadership.48 Already they were a hard, bright centre within the party. No wonder Milner enjoyed the weekend at Panshanger, even if he preferred the long political talks over the port to the party games, like ‘the truth game’, that were such a ‘dangerous’ feature of the Panshanger Friday-to-Monday.49
The guests that weekend also included Margot and Henry Asquith. It was now nine years since Margot had rejected Milner’s proposal of marriage, and the scars had long healed. The Margot he had wooed beside the Pyramids (with what ‘grace and poetry’ she had danced the pas seul at Lady Baring’s Christmas party)50 was now Margot the political hostess, the Margot who shocked everyone by smoking cigarettes on the steps of the House of Commons, the Margot whose ‘colossal indiscretions’ made her such a delightful companion.51 In fact, she had again become one of his most intimate friends. She would drop in to his chambers in Duke Street when he was in London and stay gossiping for hours. It was all absolutely innocent, of course, but not idle gossip by any means on Milner’s part. Henry Asquith was now the leading Liberal in the party after Campbell-Bannerman and it was essential, if Milner were to woo the Liberals, that he should keep in with Henry Asquith. And not only with Henry and the Liberals. For Milner’s aim was to spread the word about South Africa as widely as possible. And if you wanted something shouted from the house-tops, you had only to tell it in strictest confidence to Margot.
It was a ‘delightful’ excursion, Milner confessed, that weekend at Panshanger. It had set the pattern for the rest of Milner’s trip. He saw George Buckle of The Times, and Spenser Wilkinson of The Morning Post.52 (He found the ‘wobbly Liberals’ of The Manchester Guardian ‘very rotten’ by contrast.’)53 He was invited everywhere: by the Roseberys of Mentmore, the Rothschilds of Tring, not to mention the Queen, the Prime Minister and the Prince of Wales. He found these visits, too, ‘delightful’.54
He would apologize to his friends for troubling them with his ‘boring screed’. ‘You may think me a bore,’ he told Lord Rosebery, the leading Liberal Imperialist, ‘but I should like to tell you some things about that little corner of the imperial chess-board I am especially concerned with. It does not attract much attention at present. Heaven be praised!’ And then he would go on to explain, for the hundredth time, the dangers of ‘Krugerism’; how he wondered if the British government’s ‘policy-of-patience’ would ever heal the South African ulcer, and yet how he himself would exhaust every effort in his search for peace.55
Of course, Milner’s real policy – of ‘working up to a crisis’ – was kept secret from Margot and the Liberals.56 Only a few intimates, like Philip Gell, knew these arcana imperii. And there was another secret of Milner’s character that has remained locked till today in his private papers.
Incongruous as Milner’s figure might seem in High Society, this shy, donnish figure in the boisterous world of drawing-rooms and gun-rooms, these jollities were an accepted by-product of Victorian official life. Still more incongruous – and a great deal less safe – was Milner’s friendship with a girl called Cécile, whose lodgings in Brixton were paid for by him. The story of this strange affair has never been told – or even hinted at. But a careful scrutiny of Milner’s unpublished diary shows that Milner had set up Cécile in a house near, but not too near, his bachelor chambers at Duke Street. It was an ardent friendship that had lasted at least nine years already, and cost Milner about a quarter (at an average of £450 a year) of his free income.57 Together they bicycled over the South Downs; they went punting on the Thames, staying Friday to Monday at a hotel in Marlow; they played piquet and whist when he came to stay in her lodgings. One obvious rule had to be kept: Cécile never came to his chambers, let alone met him in public. Apparently she never met one of his friends.58 Perhaps even Philip Gell never knew of Cécile’s existence.
Milner’s diary makes it clear that his fri
endship with Cécile was one of the dominant themes of his life, even during that working holiday in England. In the first week of December – the busiest phase of his English tour, when he was only able to snatch a few hours successively with Chamberlain at Birmingham, with Salisbury at Hatfield, and with Queen Victoria at Windsor – Milner vanished into the blue on a six-day bicycling trip with Cécile.59
The idea may seem a little absurd today: a middle-aged Viceroy, his mistress, and two bicycles vanishing on a mid-winter’s tour of the South Downs and letting the South African crisis go hang for a week. But then there was nothing absurd about a bicycle in those days. Indeed, the bicycle was the sports car of the nineties, the sporting symbol of the age. (It added spice not only to love, but to politics. Cabinet ministers like Balfour – the ‘divine Arthur’ of the Panshanger set – went dashing down to Hatfield on their bikes to see the Prime Minister. It was on his bike that ‘Pom’ McDonnell, Salisbury’s urbane Private Secretary, had sped from Hatfield to Osterley one sunny weekend in 1895 with the glorious news for Arthur: the Liberal government had fallen.)60
On their own wintry excursion, Milner and Cécile stayed in a Hampshire hotel. Although they had a private sitting-room where they ‘played piquet till bed-time’ (as Milner primly recorded in his diary)61 the risk of exposure must have been considerable. A scandal might have ruined Milner. True, Victorian society winked at men-about-town who kept mistresses. But Viceroys had to avoid any hint of scandal. And the special moral and intellectual position that Milner had built up for himself – the austere ‘civilian soldier of the Empire’,62 the dedicated philosopher-king – would have vanished like a puff of smoke. His enemies, who now thought him a prig, would have written him off as a humbug. His friends would have had a dangerous insight into his character – into that Bohemian side of him that he struggled so hard to control.
The Boer War Page 6
