Kruger, promising to be brief, took most of Wednesday afternoon to reply. (Milner to Chamberlain that night: the old gentleman ‘rambled fearfully’.)34 The nub of Kruger’s case was that the political demands of the Uitlanders conflicted with the national rights of the Transvaal. In other countries there was no threat of new burghers out-voting old burghers. Given the same franchise policy in the Transvaal, ‘in a very short time those who are brought in can turn the laws topsy turvy, and do as they like and, with that, my independence would fall’. So he must let the newcomers in gradually: ‘If we give them the franchise tomorrow we may as well give up the Republic.’ Milner was left once again protesting his sincerity. He was not threatening the Transvaal’s independence. ‘I do not want to swamp the old population,’ he declared in a phrase that his enemies would recall later; all he asked was an ‘immediate voice’ for the Uitlanders.35
Thursday, the second day, followed the same pattern: Milner, polite and generous to a fault, protesting his sincerity, and Kruger yielding nothing, and gaining nothing. True, Kruger scored a debating point when someone mentioned military preparations. Who could blame the burghers for arming themselves after the Jameson Raid? His Excellency, said Kruger, could ‘follow their spoor’ since the Great Trek. They had never been attackers, always defenders. They followed the words of the Lord: ‘Accursed be he who removeth his neighbour’s landmark.’36 (Major Hanbury Williams to Intelligence Department: ‘How the old man wept crocodile tears about the Raid!’)37
But Milner soon brought the discussion back to the franchise, and now put his first trump on the table. He asked Kruger to go the whole hog: give the Uitlanders back the five-year franchise, and make it retrospective. Any man who had settled in the Transvaal before 1894, and had enough property to qualify – sixty thousand to seventy thousand men, according to Kruger – would thus have the vote for the asking. Back from Kruger came the dogged refrain: no chance of a five-year franchise at all; it would be political suicide for the volk.38
On Friday, the third day, the President stopped stone-walling, and negotiations seemed about to begin. He sprang a surprise. He wanted to meet Milner as far as possible on the franchise, and he laid on the table a ‘complete Reform Bill, worked out in clauses and sub-clauses’ (as Milner reported back to London) that he must have had ‘in his pocket all the time’.39 In return, he wanted Milner to meet him on three outstanding questions: the Raid indemnity, the Boers’ control of Swaziland and, most important, arbitration on rival interpretations of the London Convention of 1884. He added, not without pathos, that he had to think of his burghers: ‘If I have to go back and convince them on matters, I must tell them something has been given in to me, if I give in to something.’40
If Milner had wished to do business with Kruger, here was the golden opportunity. He had been given a remarkably free hand by Chamberlain. He could certainly have offered Kruger something to show his burghers. Chamberlain had agreed in principle that the Chartered Company must pay substantial damages for the Raid. It remained for the sum to be fixed; the Transvaal was claiming £1,677,938 3s. 3d. including £1 million for ‘moral and intellectual damages’.41 (In fact, Beit and Rhodes would have to fork out from their own pockets, as the Chartered Company was too near bankruptcy since the Matabele and Mashona revolts.)42 Both the Swaziland and the arbitration questions were more complicated. But here again, Milner could certainly have helped Kruger’s difficulties with his burghers. Indeed, Chamberlain specifically empowered Milner to humour Kruger about arbitration.43
In return, Milner was being offered a deal on the franchise which he admitted in private was a ‘great advance’ on the existing position.44 Kruger was prepared to slash the residence qualification from fourteen to seven years. True, Milner had all sorts of objections to the way the proposal would work. It would not give, as he had stated it must, ‘substantial and immediate’ representation to the Uitlanders. For it was to be only partially retrospective, and the length of delay would vary according to a sliding scale. And Kruger was only offering a total of five out of twenty-eight seats in the Raad for the gold-mining districts, compared to Milner’s proposal for these districts to have a minimum of seven seats.45
Yet, despite everything, could it not have been bridged, that gap which now divided the two men: five years for the franchise against seven: seven seats for the Raad against five? So it would, without a doubt, if Milner had aimed to negotiate, and not to ‘screw’ Kruger.46
Milner brushed aside Kruger’s Reform Bill. It was a ‘Kaffir-bargain’. He made a counter-offer that could only infuriate the old man: what about some form of self-government for the Rand?47 Kruger knew enough about English politics to see the irony in this. Chamberlain had broken with the Liberals because he refused, on principle, to accept Home Rule for Ireland; here he was trying to impose Home Rule on the Rand. Inevitably, the offer was rebuffed by Kruger, who said the Uitlanders were ‘like naughty children’. ‘If you give them a finger they will want the whole hand, then an arm, then a head, and then they want the whole body bit by bit.48
It was now Saturday, the fourth day of the conference, and the stalemate was unbroken. Milner had sat up half the night preparing an endless list of objections to Kruger’s Reform Bill. He plumped it on to the table and the conference adjourned till Monday. The same afternoon he cabled to London: ‘It seems that the conference will fail…. I have been studiously conciliatory …’49
Next day Milner and his staff, in plain dress, attended a service in the Anglican Cathedral, and heard the Dean’s sermon, ‘Blessed are the Peacemakers’. To the Boer public at large the conference still appeared a triumphant success. ‘Peace Assured – Sir A. Milner’s Statesmanship’, ran the headlines of The Standard and Diggers’ News. ‘Forebodings dispelled.’50 In fact, Milner himself was exhausted by the strain of the last few days. He had failed to ‘screw’ Kruger, but he had not been outmanoeuvred himself. Next day he would have to break off the conference, unless Kruger suddenly caved in. For there was always the danger that Kruger might offer other illusory concessions. ‘If we went on and on,’ he later confessed to Chamberlain, ‘we might get a little more and a little more, each concession being made to appear very big, and finally feel unable, after so many concessions, to break off, and yet find we had a perfectly hollow scheme.’51
Milner’s cabled warning that he might have to break off the conference did not reach Chamberlain till Sunday. Chamberlain immediately replied: ‘I hope you will not break off hastily. Boers do not understand quick decisions…. I am by no means convinced that the President has made his last offer, and you should be very patient and admit a good deal of haggling before you finally abandon the game.52
But before this cable reached Milner, the curtain had already fallen at Bloemfontein. Kruger, his eyes watering, had stood there for the last time, repeating, ‘It is our country you want.’53 Milner had closed the proceedings with the chilling words: ‘This conference is absolutely at an end, and there is no obligation on either side arising from it.’54
What lesson did the antagonists take away with them from the conference, as their two specials steamed back the way they had come?
In Milner’s eyes, the moral was obvious. He had failed to trap Kruger because he had failed to frighten him sufficiently. Now they must turn the ‘war-screw’.55 Before the conference he had warned Selborne privately that they might have to:
If I fail, it will then be your turn… assume at once the diplomatic offensive and back it with a strong show of [military] force…. All the Afrikaners and all the mugwumps will howl at us…. I don’t care. My view is that (I) absolute downright determination plus a large temporary increase of force will ensure a climb down. It is 20 to 1. And (2) that, if it didn’t, and there was a fight, it would be better to fight now than 5 or 10 years hence when the Transvaal, unless the Uitlanders can be taken in, in considerable numbers, will be stronger and more hostile than ever. Bold words these, you will say. But remember I myself am risking a lot
– indeed everything.56
Specifically, Milner wanted the War Office to replace General Butler as Commander-in-Chief. He also wanted some competent officers sent out to organize the Cape border towns, like Mafeking and Kimberley. He also wanted an overwhelming force – the exact number was for military experts to decide, but he thought it might be as high as ten thousand men – pushed up into the dangerous northern triangle of Natal, where General Colley had come to grief at Majuba, both to frustrate a Boer attack and to prove ‘irresistible’ as a political lever. Unless they took the right military precautions ‘before the crash’, they might find themselves involved in ‘not only a biggish war, but much civil dissension afterwards’. However, he maintained ‘in spite of all those alarms and excursions, that if we are perfectly determined we shall win without a war or with a mere apology for one.’57
In short, Milner’s advice to London boiled down to detailed advice on three crucial military questions. First, how many soldiers to send out to guard the Cape and Natal. Second, whom to appoint to organize and lead them. Third, how far forward to station them. If his advice was taken, he assured the Cabinet – disingenuously – there would be no war.58
Kruger was, predictably, less reassured. His suspicions of Chamberlain were confirmed by what he had seen at Bloemfontein. Fortunately, his war preparations were nearly complete – apart from an important consignment of seventy-two field-guns from Creusot which Joubert did not agree to order until July (when it was in fact too late for them to be delivered).59 He knew he could have an overwhelming advantage if he chose to strike the first blow. However, the strategic key remained the Free State. Like the Cape Afrikaners, Steyn had pressed Kruger to be generous to the Uitlanders. Still, Kruger did not doubt that, if war came, the Free State would fight shoulder to shoulder with the Transvaal. As a little encouragement, he now sent the Free Staters half a million Mauser cartridges.60 Yet, though more certain than ever that a collision with England was inevitable, Kruger did not stand in the way of Smuts, who took a different view.
Characteristically, his experiences at Bloemfontein had made Smuts oscillate still more violently between his hopes for peace and his instinct for war.
The politician in him declared that war could still be avoided. ‘Britain will never go to war after she knows what the true opinion of the Colonial Afrikaners is,’ he told Hofmeyr. By a display of Afrikaner solidarity – discreet enough, at the same time, not to attract ‘well-founded’ charges of disloyalty – they could force the British government to give up its aggressive designs on the Transvaal. For a war could only be launched from the Cape, and if the Cape government and the majority of its people were hostile, then war was clearly impossible. Moreover, Smuts had high hopes of persuading Kruger to improve on the franchise reforms he had put on the table at Bloemfontein. This would cut the ground once and for all from under the feet of the English war-mongers.61
Yet, even while he penned these cool, diplomatic sentences to his friends at the Cape, the passionate side of Smuts’s nature asserted itself. ‘Milner is as sweet as honey,’ he scribbled in a note to ‘Lappie’ (the pet name for his wife) during the conference, ‘but there is something in his very intelligent eyes that tells me he is very dangerous.62
Later, when the conference was over, the pieces of the puzzle began to fit into place. It was Milner who was the clue – Milner, who had contemptuously broken off the conference, Milner who was ‘much more dangerous than Rhodes’. Was he playing this part under Chamberlain’s orders, or was he the driving force? Smuts confessed he did not know.63 But he saw ominous parallels between the current situation and the situation on the eve of Britain’s first annexation of the Transvaal in 1877: the same ‘lying petitions’ for imperial intervention, the same outside forces working for war to ‘defeat the work of time’. It filled him with indignation to think that this ‘academic nobody’, this man who fancied himself ‘a great imperial statesman’, was trying to destroy in a moment everything they had tried to create.64
Well, in due course, Milner must pay the price. He had insulted the ‘spirit of Afrikanerdom’. Smuts did not conceal the personal satisfaction it would give him to force Chamberlain to have Milner recalled in disgrace, like that other great English proconsul, Sir Bartle Frere.65
CHAPTER 7
Milner’s Three Questions
Pall Mall, London,
8 June – 19 July 1899
‘It is perhaps not altogether remarkable under the circumstances described [the war inside the British War Office] that no plan of campaign ever existed for operations in South Africa.’
Report of the Royal Commission on the South African War (1903)
The breakdown at Bloemfontein had increased the risk of war. No one, not even Lord Lansdowne, the Secretary of State for War, could deny that. And for the first time he and his advisers at the War Office had to consider those three crucial military questions posed by Milner, questions that were to echo and re-echo in successive disasters later that year.
Milner’s own proposals, we saw, were to send at once an ‘overwhelming force’ – ‘it may be perhaps 10,000 men;’ to replace General Sir William Butler, the C-in-C in South Africa, with a British general politically and militarily capable of doing the job; to push most of the reinforcements forward into the frontier-land of northern Natal.1 At the War Office, the Commander-in-Chief of the British army, Field Marshal Lord Wolseley, took an even stronger line than Milner. On 8 June he proposed that they should mobilize the whole of General Sir Redvers Buller’s 1st Army Corps and a cavalry division (about thirty-five thousand) and make a ‘demonstration’ to overawe Kruger from Salisbury Plain. Wolseley’s belligerent minutes, scrawled on the green War Office files, passed to the desk of the Secretary of State.2
The desk was neat and business-like – so it seems, in contemporary photographs.3 What a contrast to the War Office in which it stood! A century earlier, this old War Office in Pall Mall had been a row of houses, including the strange ‘Temple of Health and Hymen’ where Emma Hart (later Emma Hamilton) was installed as a ‘Goddess’. Then, in the fever of army reform that swept England after the reverses in the Crimea, the War Office had swallowed the row of houses. Few were demolished; cheaper to botch the buildings together, to knock holes in the walls and connect up the buildings without even changing the floor levels. The result was a labyrinth. It was all stairs and passages and landings, like some rambling old country house left behind in central London. There was the whiff of colza-oil lamps and leather fire-buckets: an office where private documents and public men could be lost without trace for weeks at a time.4
It was this antiquated and laborious machine, patched and repatched over two centuries, that was supposed to control and direct Britain’s new imperial army of 340,000 regulars and reservists.5’ And at its hub, as smooth and flawless as a pillar of black and white marble and utterly out of sympathy with Wolseley’s soldiers around him, sat the Secretary of State for War, Henry Charles Keith (‘Clan’) Petty-Fitzmaurice, fifth Marquess of Lansdowne.
To say that Lansdowne came from one of the great patrician families of England would be to understate his blessings. On his father’s side, he was both English and Irish; on his mother’s, both Scottish and French. His swarthy good looks were attributed to his French grandfather, Bonaparte’s ADC, General Comte de Flahault, supposed to be an illegitimate son of Talleyrand. From his other ancestors, estates had showered on him in a golden rain. Lansdowne House in Piccadilly, Bowood in Wiltshire, Meikleour in Perthshire, Dereen in County Kerry – they straddled half the British Isles. Yet there was nothing vulgar or sensual in the way he disposed of his vast income. You could hardly imagine him romping with Emma Hamilton in the ‘Temple of Health and Hymen’ like his randy Whig ancestors. From childhood he had been taught the Victorian ideals of service. Dr Jowett had taken him firmly in hand as one of his first pupils at Balliol.6 Soon it was observed that ‘Clan’ was a kind of phenomenon.
His abilities were modest. He
had flunked his First in Greats, despite all Jowett’s coaching. But he had not failed again. At twenty-four, he was chosen by Gladstone for the Liberal front bench. At thirty, he had crossed the floor – understandably disturbed, as an Irish landlord, by Gladstone’s first Irish Land Act. At thirty-eight, he had been sent to Canada as Governor-General; at forty-three, to India as Viceroy. Everywhere he had proved himself supremely conscientious. What a credit to Dr Jowett he had turned out after all! He was stylish and patrician and courteous, especially to Indian Maharajahs. He displayed no flaw in his character, unlike men of later vintages from Balliol.7 He did not drink like Asquith, or put on airs like Grey, or fancy himself a genius like Curzon. In short, Lansdowne was an epitome of the mid-Victorian virtues – the victory of education over breeding, and of character over both (of priggery, so to speak, over Whiggery). He had triumphed over all his advantages.
Yet there was, people had to admit, something missing in ‘Clan’ Lansdowne. He was too conscientious. If only he had sometimes forgotten his duty. If only he had had something to repress. And in 1895 when he had been brought back from India to be Minister of War, there was little enthusiasm for the appointment. Had people guessed that in 1899 the War Office would suffer its greatest ordeal since the Crimea, how they would have protested! In this crisis, the army needed fire and steel in the man at its head. Lansdowne, pillar of state that he was, had neither – nor the faintest spark of imagination.8
It was now mid June and Lansdowne had to answer that belligerent minute of Wolseley’s in the green file – the one calling for the mobilization of thirty-five thousand troops, in response to Milner’s request for a twist of the war screw.
The Boer War Page 12
