Perhaps the risk of discovery, the brinkmanship, added spice to the adventure. Certainly one of the features of the week that Milner must have felt most was its dream-like incongruity. What other great Victorian proconsul could vanish from the side of his Queen at Windsor and re-emerge at the side of his mistress in a seedy back-street of Brixton?
Indeed, there was an extraordinary episode on the fourth day when Milner had to return to the official world for a few hours to celebrate a great ‘hooroosh’: a send-off for George Curzon. He deposited his bike at Vauxhall Station, and took a cab to his chambers in Duke Street. He dealt hastily with the backlog of official letters. He dressed in his white tie; an hour later he was sitting in the Hotel Cecil between the Hon. Mrs Maguire and Lady Ulrica Duncombe at the table of the Duke of Marlborough. ‘It was a most brilliant function and I greatly enjoyed it,’ he recorded.63 At eleven o’clock the party began to break up, and his companions drove off westwards to Mayfair. Milner walked alone across Waterloo Bridge, and then, when the coast was clear, hailed a cab and drove back to the other world south of the river.
It was all recorded in his diary – in the style of a maiden aunt describing a picnic. ‘In most beautiful weather,’ he wrote on 8 December, ‘we rode by the Devil’s Punch Bowl from Milford to Liphook, taking a late lunch at the Royal Hants Hotel and reaching Liphook just at sunset. It was really a wonderful day, more like mild autumn than winter, and the view from the top of Hind Head splendid.’64
Yet there were other splendid views from the top Milner had to consider – and they included the view from Government House. Perhaps Milner already knew in his heart that this was the last adventure with Cécile. On 23 January, two days before leaving for South Africa, he was to write in his diary in his meticulous italic hand, ‘To Brixton … to see C.’ Then he added three words, curiously emotional words in that prim, dry record of facts, crossed them out and then scrawled them again in the margin of the page: ‘to say goodbye’.65
Meanwhile, a new political strategy had taken shape in Milner’s mind after the interview with Chamberlain. The ‘no-war policy’ did not tie his hands. Everything depended on the British subjects in the Transvaal. If they could be ‘bucked up’ and given competent leadership; if Wernher, Beit and the other ‘gold-bugs’ could be brought into line, too; if both their grievances could be presented to the British public in the correct light, in short, if the Uitlanders could be manoeuvred into the right, and Kruger into the wrong, then they could still ‘screw Kruger’.66 In other words, if Milner supplied the plan and the horse, that ‘idiot’ Jameson could ride again.
To arrange this himself he would have to wait till he reached the Cape. In the meantime he must pray to the Higher Powers that General Sir William Butler, the acting governor, acted with discretion, and that a premature crisis did not blow up in his absence.
CHAPTER 3
Champagne for the Volk
Pretoria,
23–29 December 1898
Geologist to Kruger in 1886: ‘Mr President, the conglomerate gold-beds and enclosing sandstones and quartzites were sea-shore deposits formed during the subsidence of a coast line in …’ Kruger to his wife: ‘Mama, meet the gentleman who was there when God made the earth.’
A fortnight after Milner had attended the great ‘hooroosh’ for George Curzon in London, another kind of celebration took place in Pretoria, six thousand miles away: a victory banquet for burghers and government. The conquering hero was the Transvaal Commander-in-Chief, Commandant-General Piet Joubert, and they were not giving him a send-off, like Curzon’s; they were celebrating his safe return. Joubert and his commandos had just marched back to Pretoria after subduing, with the help of their Creusot artillery, a troublesome African chief called Mpefu.1
For the battle-hardened commandos, it was the triumphant end to half a dozen native wars in nearly as many years. No wonder that in the Grand Hotel, Pretoria, that evening the candlelight playing on the blue-and-gold uniforms of the state artillery and the green sash of the President reflected a certain swagger – a kind of imperial glow, Afrikaner-style – that would not have been out of place in the Hotel Cecil, London. The champagne, too, was excellent in Pretoria. Since they had grown rich on the profits of the Rand, the Boers had come to recognize how imported French wine, like imported French artillery, could add to the success of most occasions.2
Oom Paul (‘Uncle Paul’, as the burghers affectionately called Kruger) spoke briefly at the banquet. For the last few years he had been visibly failing in health, plagued by eye trouble and other infirmities. Still, he remained a prodigy. At seventy-three he was a national monument in his own lifetime, a heroic survival from the Great Trek.3 It was those days he recalled in his speech. He told the story, as he loved to tell it on every possible occasion, of his own part in crushing Dingaan and the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River.
‘I do not say what I have heard,’ he said, speaking the taal (Afrikaans) in his gruff, jerky voice, ‘but what I have seen with my own eyes.’ He went on to describe the battle in his homely way: the circle of covered wagons chained together in the laager; the gaps between the wagons closed by bundles of mimosa thorn; the attack of the Zulus, the air thick with assegais; the children melting down lead for bullets; the women hacking off the arms of the Zulus who tried to break through the thorn bushes. And the Lord, praise the Lord; He had given His people a great victory.
Kruger’s extraordinary life had spanned the whole life of the State from the Battle of Blood River to Jameson’s defeat at the Battle of Doornkop. It was now nearly the third anniversary of that victory. Kruger, under doctor’s orders, retired early from the banquet, after receiving an ovation, to his small, whitewashed house in Church Street.4
It was in this same modest house that the news of the Raid had reached Kruger three years before, when Jameson was riding to Johannesburg. It was ten o’clock; his friends had found him asleep; a single sentry on duty at the gate; the house in darkness, apart from one electric bulb. On hearing the news, Kruger reluctantly agreed to have a horse saddled ready in case he had to leave Pretoria in a hurry. But had he already guessed what was afoot? He showed no sign of excitement. After agreeing to call out the commandos, he went back to sleep as if nothing had happened.5
To mark the anniversary of the Raid, people had now suggested that the government set up a monument. There was even talk of celebrating Jameson Day, equivalent to the Englishman’s Guy Fawkes.6 Kruger let it be known that he frowned on the latter idea. They had already one day of national rejoicing, Dingaan’s Day (16 December) to celebrate the destruction of the Zulus. Perhaps Kruger added with characteristically heavy humour that it was not the moment – not yet, at any rate – to celebrate the destruction of the British.
The chief speech at that night’s banquet was given by General Joubert. He rose to his feet, his Majuba medal agleam on his scarlet uniform, tall, bearded, suave, the leading Boer of his generation after President Kruger, and the runner-up in three presidential contests. Although he, too, had witnessed the Great Trek, as a child, Joubert presented a striking contrast to Kruger. If Kruger was the archetypal Boer of the backveld, Joubert typified the Boer of the towns. Not for him the baggy black suits of the old President, the clouds of smoke puffed from an enormous pipe, and the habit of underlining his words by spitting on the ground.7 Joubert dressed like a gentleman, and was known for his progressive ideas. He had taught himself to read and write English as well as Dutch. His business acumen had earned him the name of ‘Slim (Clever) Piet’ as well as investments in land and gold shares that totalled, after his death, £230,000 – a tidy sum even by the standards of the Rand.
If Joubert had a weakness it was, the Boers said, his lack of moral courage. As a general, he hated imposing unpopular duties on the burghers; as a politician, he shrank from standing up to Kruger in the Raad (the Volksraad, alias the Transvaal Parliament). Not that he could be accused of being soft towards Africans, any more than any other ‘Progressive’ polit
icians. On the contrary, in both the Raad and on the battlefield he had proved himself a firm advocate of keeping the Kaffirs in their place.8
Tonight Joubert was almost apologetic as he explained why there had been so little fighting in the campaign against Mpefu. There was no need to kill many Kaffirs. They fled into their caves. Mpefu fled across the Limpopo. Yet the war was just and necessary. Mpefu, the so-called ‘Lion of the North’, had the impertinence to call himself the King of Zoutpansberg, and claim some white settlers as his subjects. So the government sent the burghers and stopped the Lion’s roar for ever.
There was cheering in the hall as Joubert reached his peroration: the usual patriotic appeal for unity. They must stand shoulder to shoulder against all opposition in the struggle for the ‘land’. They must shed the last drop of blood for the ‘volk’. Before midnight, the banquet concluded with the customary cheers, three times three, for the guest of honour and his wife. The Boer national anthem, the ‘Volkslied’, was played by the hotel band, the state artillerymen presented arms, and the guests trooped out into the city, where a picturesque contrast presented itself: the backveld Boers, in Pretoria for their Christmas pilgrimage, camped there in their covered wagons;9 while high above the wooded valleys, throwing monstrous shadows in the moonlight, were three enormous forts, the pride of the Transvaal army, equipped with searchlights and the latest European artillery.10
It had been a triumphant evening for Joubert, the conquering hero, and Oom Paul, the father of the republic.
Of course, political realities are never so simple, least of all in a country like the Transvaal, which had leapt two centuries in the space of a decade. Kruger was neither so unyielding nor so secure as he appeared. Joubert, the picture of the loyal general, deeply resented Kruger’s idiosyncratic methods of government and opposed much of his policy. Behind Joubert there had gathered the ‘Progressives’ (the young Turks) mustering about a third of the Raad. They were determined to modernize the ramshackle republic before it was too late.
Hence it was not true to say, as Milner had told Chamberlain, that there was no sign of the Transvaal reforming itself. Change was in the air, radical change, and supported (if reluctantly) by Kruger himself.
Chamberlain had called Kruger an ‘ignorant, dirty, cunning’ old man (borrowing the words, incidentally, from a private letter of that unusual Foreign Office official, Roger Casement).11 Foreigners consistently underrated Kruger. It was partly a matter of style. The massive frame, the puffy features, half-covered by a mat of grey hair, had their counterpart in the gruff voice and the strange syntax.12 Here was the epitome of the peasant; one of Brueghel’s rustics escaped from the sixteenth century; an ‘ugly customer’ indeed (as Disraeli once called him in private) at the helm of government.13
It is true that in some ways Kruger appeared extremely crude. Joubert, who was also self-educated, adopted the European conventions of public speaking; he had mastered the art of saying nothing in a great many words. Kruger often said too much before he had spoken a sentence. And not only that, he actually seemed to believe much of what he said: that the earth was as flat as the Bible said,14 that the Boers were the people of the Book, chosen by the Lord, and (as a kind of corollary) that the rooineks (English) deserved to be damned. Yet to people who knew Kruger well, it was clear that the old man’s mind, like the Rand gold-mines, had its deep levels; that he was complex as well as crude.
He had been born in 1825 somewhere inside the borders of Cape Colony, the third child of an obscure trekboer (a migrant farmer) whose ancestors had come from Germany a century before. When he was ten, the family joined a pioneer column led by Andries Potgieter and set out on the Great Trek. His education was left to the Good Book and the rifle: the Bible read aloud by his father at the supper table, the rifle used to such effect that before long he had shot half a dozen lions. At seventeen he was deputy field cornet, and he did not disappoint his admirers. To his tally of lion, he added a list of African chiefs whom he subdued: Secheli, the Bechuana chieftain, Mapela of Waterberg and Monsioia. And at twenty-six he served on the Boer council of war which negotiated with Britain the Sand River Convention, recognizing Transvaal independence. At thirty-six he was Commandant-General.15
After 1877, when Britain had annexed the Transvaal and Sir Bartle Frere controlled it, Kruger emerged as the national champion. Twice he was sent to London to try to persuade the British to cancel the annexation. He failed, of course. But the First Boer War that followed (regarded by the Boers as the First War of Independence) brought him a double triumph: in the battles that culminated in Majuba, and in the diplomatic victories that followed. It was Kruger who helped persuade Gladstone to settle for peace, subject to the Convention. He was then elected for the first of four terms as President.16
The veld had bred in him the unusual qualities that made a man a successful leader in hunting lions or black men: the mixture of animal strength and human cunning, of self-reliance and faith in the Lord, and the steely will, strong but flexible, equally serviceable in advance and retreat.
But the veld had also bred in Kruger serious defects which emerged in time of peace. He was headstrong and autocratic and tactless.17 One of his political opponents once described the extraordinary methods he used to woo the opposition: ‘First he argues with me and, if that is no good, he gets into a rage and jumps round the room roaring at me like a wild beast … and if I do not give in then he fetches out the Bible and … he even quotes that to help him out. And if all that fails he takes me by the hand and cries like a child and begs and prays me to give in … Say, old friend, who can resist a man like that?’18 But many Boers, quite apart from the British, did not find these methods irresistible at all.
Among the Progressives, Kruger’s reputation had suffered in the years of peace after Majuba. His diplomatic policies were dealt a near-fatal blow by British success in encircling the country during the scramble for Africa. Many Boers, including Joubert, believed in the 1880s that the Transvaal should expand northwards across the Limpopo; Rhodes trekked there first. The Boers also had their eyes on Tongaland as an outlet to the sea; the British took Tonga-land. Kruger had to be content with a railway link to Lourenco Marques in Portuguese territory, which took years to build.19
By 1893 – two years before this railway was opened – Kruger’s stock in the Transvaal had fallen so low that he almost lost the presidency to Joubert. Joubert’s supporters in the Progressive Party maintained that he had won a majority of the votes, but the poll had been rigged. Joubert failed, characteristically, to insist on new elections.20
Joubert’s party continued to harry Kruger inside and outside the Raad throughout the next three years. In their party newspaper Land en Volk they hammered home the message: ‘Krugerism’ was corrupt, inefficient and a ridiculous anachronism; high time Kruger was put in a museum. They baited Kruger for giving his country away to foreigners: the plum jobs were given to the Hollanders (Dutch immigrants) who acted as the administrators and technicians of the young state; the railway monopoly given to a foreign company, the Netherlands Railway Company; and the dynamite monopoly given to foreign speculators, the German and French shareholders of two foreign arms-manufacturing companies. In a country where the mines had such an insatiable appetite for dynamite, this monopoly was to make nearly £2 million profit, almost a licence to print money. Even some of Kruger’s staunchest supporters thought this monopoly indefensible.21
By 1895 Kruger seemed to be coming to the end of his tether.22 And then rescue came – from Dr Jameson.
The first great debt that Kruger owed Dr Jameson was that Jameson united the volk behind the Transvaal government. At a stroke, the fumbling old President became the hero of the Raid. The sneers of the Progressives were forgotten for the moment, and when the backveld burghers were cheerfully planning to hang Jameson and the Reformers (on the famous beam from Slachter’s Nek) it was Kruger who showed studied moderation.23
The second great debt that Kruger owed Jameson was th
at the Raid rallied the volk outside the borders of the Transvaal – especially in the Orange Free State. The Free State was the sister republic of the Transvaal, the first of the twin homelands founded by the voortrekkers. And how enviable was its history in comparison with the Transvaal’s. The British had long regarded it as a model republic: a show-piece of tolerance and good sense. For half a century – ever since the Bloemfontein Convention of 1854 – they had recognized it as a fully independent nation. On their part, the Free State Boers welcomed foreign immigrants and treated them well when they came. The Uitlanders in the Free State had all the political rights denied their counterparts in the Transvaal. But then how easy it was for everybody to behave impeccably in the Free State. Not an ounce of gold had been found – in those days – under its rolling veld. Only a trickle of immigrants came: no threat to its independence or national character.24
Now, since the Raid, a subtle change had come over the arcadian state. The President elected in 1896 was Marthinus Steyn, dedicated to closer union with the Transvaal. In 1897 a military pact had been concluded between the two republics, and Steyn had set the seal on this pact by visiting Pretoria in November 1898. In diplomacy, President Steyn could be expected to exert a moderating influence. But, if all failed, blood was thicker than water.25 No wonder Kruger fêted President Steyn in Pretoria with a brass band and a State banquet; and in his official speech, Kruger brought the house down. It was his favourite kind of clowning: ‘I’m just an old simpleton,’ compared to those ‘brilliant educated gentlemen from the Free State’. Kruger had every reason to celebrate. With the new military pact, he had pulled off a diplomatic coup. If it came to the crunch, the Free State could add fifteen thousand burghers to the Transvaal army of twenty-five thousand.26
These were two of the political effects of the Raid: uniting the volk inside and outside the Transvaal. But Dr Jameson’s crowning achievement was to teach Kruger how deplorable was the state of his own burgher army.
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