Milner was trying to squeeze support out of Schreiner for the diplomatic campaign against Kruger – suitably negative support – to help prove that Kruger was irredeemable. In short, the Cape Afrikaners’ mediation could only succeed, from Milner’s point of view, by failing. And so far they had been alarmingly successful in getting plausible-looking concessions from Kruger. Hence that ‘very great feeling of depression’.7
On the military front he required positive help from Schreiner. Instead, he had found his attempts to reinforce the frontier areas of the Cape actively obstructed by the Cape government. Milner’s military advisers had given him a warning (absurdly optimistic, it would prove in a few months) that to defend Kimberley – Rhodes’s diamond capital on the borders of the Cape and the Free State – would need a garrison of a thousand men.8 In early August, after the Cape Parliament had resumed its sitting, Milner summoned Schreiner to Government House, explaining that the Free State forces and their Transvaal allies might be tempted to ‘raid’ Kimberley. Could Schreiner sanction the reinforcements? ‘It was a very unpleasant interview,’ Milner noted. Schreiner refused point-blank. Kimberley would be safer unarmed. Sending colonial (Cape government) troops to the frontier could only raise the political temperature and threaten the Transvaal negotiations then in progress. The sight of British troops might unsettle the natives. In fact, Schreiner had correctly guessed one of Milner’s motives in trying to push troops to the frontier: they could be used by Milner for invading the Boer republics.9
For the moment, Milner had to bite his lip and accept the rebuff. The arms affair then took a new twist with the revelation that the Free State was importing quantities of ammunition by way of Cape Colony, its chief trading partner: nearly 1½ million rounds of Mauser ammunition had passed up the railway line since the beginning of July. Milner was furious with his Afrikaner ministers. How characteristic of them to leave the colony defenceless, while giving every assistance to the enemy over the border! Schreiner pronounced in Parliament: It is the duty of everyone… to maintain this colony at any rate as a place of peace – a little port, perhaps, in South Africa that is not to be riddled and rent by storm and thunder.’ To Milner the idea of the Cape’s neutrality was preposterous. It was little short of a declaration of independence.10
The crisis with Schreiner in August coincided with the appalling news on 19 August that, for the second time, the crisis with Kruger was over. He was conceding a five-year franchise, and ten seats (a quarter of the Raad) for the gold-fields: the same franchise as, and three more seats than, Milner himself had demanded at Bloemfontein.11
How could Milner now avert the settlement that fell so far short of his own monumental plan for ‘bursting the mould’ – annexing the Transvaal and then recasting it from its foundations? He had always recognized one fatal flaw in his Bloemfontein terms. Kruger might actually accept them. In that case the crisis would be over, and with it the hope of taking over Kruger’s republic – during his own term of office, at any rate. For the Cabinet would never reject an unequivocal offer of a settlement.12
All he could do was to use the same blocking tactics as he had used ever since Bloemfontein. He sent a snubbing cable to Conyngham Greene, the British Agent in Pretoria, who had personally negotiated the new offer with Smuts.13 He warned Chamberlain that the new offer was, like its predecessors, full of traps and pitfalls. He arranged – though it is possible that this was an accident – that Greene’s despatch, commending the offer to Chamberlain, went off to London by sea mail, arriving too late to influence Chamberlain.14
A week later Milner learnt Chamberlain’s response. His warnings had been believed. At any rate, he had gained a respite.15 Now for a twist of the military screw, which he knew in his heart – contrary to everything he told Chamberlain – would precipitate war.16
When Fleetwood Wilson had written that cheery letter telling Milner he should not count on any support at home, Milner perhaps smiled wryly to himself. Did old Fleetwood Wilson really imagine he would leave the key to the success of his South African policy – political support at home – in the lap of the gods? What of those Balliol friends at ‘Headquarters’, Dr Jowett’s young men and their wives (he called them his First and Second Elevens),17 who trusted him and supported him uncritically? In fact, their work at ‘Headquarters’ was beginning to take effect.
Without Willie Selborne’s help at the Colonial Office, Milner would have achieved nothing. Selborne had backed him at every twist and turn of the crisis. He had also sent Milner a stream of private letters – navigation reports, so to speak, to help him steer clear of rocks and sands in the CO and the Cabinet, especially that unpredictable rock, Chamberlain. ‘There was a movement,’ Selborne had written à propos Chamberlain’s eagerness to accept Kruger’s offer of the seven-year franchise on 19 July, ‘in a certain impulsive quarter to assume, even to pretend, that we had now secured all we wanted. We got over that and back on the old right tack in 24 hours….’
Back on the old right tack. How that phrase must have been music in Milner’s ears! Selborne had gone on to report his other triumphs at ‘Headquarters’, like the faithful lieutenant that he was. He had had ‘periodical’ chats with ‘A.J.B.’ (Balfour, the Deputy Prime Minister) to keep him ‘sound’, and he had ‘had it all out’ with the Prime Minister (his father-in-law) at Walmer. The results were ‘wholly pleasing’.18
It was the same with George Wyndham, stuck in what he called ‘the morass’ of the War Office, as Lansdowne’s Parliamentary Under-Secretary. His reports to Milner would have astonished his chief, as much as Selborne’s reports would have astonished his. So far, of course, Wyndham had failed to persuade Lansdowne to send out those ten thousand men as reinforcements. But he was ready with a block of influential Tory MPs who could help swing Parliament behind Milner’s policy. Wyndham was ex-chairman of the South African Association – the principal jingo pressure group in England – and continued (privately) to manipulate this lobby according to Milner’s instructions. ‘The Press are ready and under complete control. I can switch on an agitation at your direction. The French and German shareholders of the [gold-mining companies] are in line … [we] are in your hands and we shall wait and be patient, or charge home, just as you decide.’19
As regards Milner’s network of Liberal admirers, they had helped keep the House of Commons from a division in late July, when the Commons had debated Chamberlain’s South African policy. It was essential for Milner to have the Liberal imperialists personally committed to the urgency of ending the stale-mate. And that he was assured of. ‘You do not need to be told,’ Henry Asquith scribbled, somewhat pompously, ‘that you have the sympathy and good wishes of your old friends in your difficult task.’ Asquith had been shown Milner’s letter by Grey – it was a long, eloquent letter, disclaiming any warlike intentions – and it impressed him.20 (Asquith had also, of course, an eloquent, not-so-little voice at his side to champion Milner – Margot’s.)21
The second skein of Milner’s invisible network was provided by the English (and British South African) Press. After going down from Balliol, he had himself worked for a short time as a journalist on The Pall Mall Gazette in its heyday. W. T. Stead was then editor, and in those days Stead had set everyone’s blood racing with the passion of his imperialist convictions. Stead had later fallen from grace – a Lucifer from the imperialist heaven. His Review of Reviews now adopted an eccentrically pro-Boer line. But Milner’s other cronies from his Pall Mall days were now in a position to show their loyalty, and show it they did. E. T. Cook ran the Liberal imperialist Daily News, which had hammered home, day after day, the need for the ‘amicable compromise’ which Milner purported to believe possible. J. A. Spender edited The Westminster Gazette, the paper of the centre Liberals; he backed Milner’s ‘irreducible minimum’, the five-year franchise. In Cape Town The Cape Times was edited by Edmund Garrett, Milner’s closest confidant, whose inflammatory editorials made Milner’s despatches seem conciliatory indeed.22
/> All these newspapers had taught British public opinion in the last few weeks of the dangers of delay, and of being fobbed off without a settlement on the franchise. It was The Morning Post and The Times, both staunchly pro-government, that banged the jingo drum loudest. The Morning Post (whose leader-writer was Spenser Wilkinson, another crony of Milner’s) warned the nation that delay was now dangerous, and could be ‘disastrous’ for the Uitlanders.23 Next day The Times (whose editor, Buckle, was also an admirer) warned the government that ‘it is time to say distinctly and emphatically that there must quickly be an end to all this delay and prevarication’. And two days later The Times taunted Chamberlain with weakness, as Milner could never have dared: ‘Johannesburg cannot live for ever on statesmen who put their hands on ploughs and stand resolutely still.’25
Such was Milner’s invisible nexus of loyalty, the old friends on whom he could rely to keep Chamberlain ‘on the right tack’. In addition, and still more active on his behalf, were his secret allies, the London ‘gold-bugs’ – especially the financiers of the largest of all the Rand mining houses, Wernher-Beit.
Alfred Beit was the giant – a giant who bestrode the world’s gold market like a gnome. He was short, plump and bald, with large, pale, luminous eyes and a nervous way of tugging at his grey moustache. Publicity, always meat and drink for his old partner of the Raid, Rhodes, was sheer poison for Beit. He had looked half-dead after his ordeal of appearing before the London enquiry into the Raid (where he admitted financing the venture to the tune of £200,000). Since then he had lived almost like a recluse in his palatial home in Park Lane, among his six dazzling Murillos of the Prodigal Son. When he gave to charities – and he gave lavishly – he did it by stealth.25 Occasionally he would throw a small lunch party for an especially good cause, as when, that summer, he introduced Dr Jameson and Sir John Willoughby to the editors of The Daily News and The Westminster Gazette – Milner’s friends, Cook and Spender.26 But Beit, like Rhodes, was in poor health. He entrusted most of his political business to his partner, Wernher, and young Percy Fitzpatrick, brought over to London to put the Uitlander case to the British public.27 Fitzpatrick’s book, The Transvaal from Within (published at Milner’s suggestion), was to be the best-seller of the season.28 No doubt the line at Beit’s Press luncheons was much the same as in Fitzpatrick’s book. The go-it-alone days of the Raid were over. The Prodigal Son had returned. The Uitlanders were now solidly behind Britain, her Empire and Sir Alfred Milner.
But one thing was certainly not known to the public – nor, indeed, to the Press (though one of their most brilliant contributors, J. A. Hobson, guessed it).29 Milner’s capitalist associates – Beit, Wernher and Fitzpatrick – were encouraging his belligerence. Wernher, the most cautious of the three, had originally hoped that war could be avoided.30 But the months of crisis and the uncertainties for the gold industry had made him lose patience. In July he had a two-hour interview with Philip Gell (acting as Milner’s intermediary). Wernher said the financiers were now ‘quite prepared for war’, and that they insisted that ‘the situation must be terminated now’.31 Six weeks later, he wrote to Georges Rouliot, the director of his firm’s South African subsidiary, apologizing for the ‘great hardship’ which the delays in sending troops had caused; he explained that it had been impossible to act earlier because ‘knowledge in the [British] public was absent’. However, finally ‘matters are understood – all admit something must be done’. He added, in his strange, clumsy English (like Alfred Beit, Julius Wernher was a German who had adopted British citizenship and British imperialism), that Britain’s military unpreparedness was ‘incredibable [sic] … for an Empire holding half the world … but this is a cause why delay takes place’.32
Fitzpatrick’s own letter from London to the firm in South Africa during this crisis was discreetly destroyed by them as being too ‘damaging to Joe Chamberlain’.33 However, in a letter he wrote to Eckstein a few weeks later, he showed he was enthusiastically backing Milner’s plan to annex the Transvaal by means of a war, and impatient for results:
This is not a strong Govt … it is a wobbly, nervous, cumbersome & unmanageable one. However one can buck them up, & stick pins in their bottoms when they want to sit down; so I wired you that you might communicate it to H.E. [Milner]. My judgment is that he is master of the position – absolutely – because this government dared not let him go if he gave them an ultimatum. They would be out of office in no time.34
The gold-bugs, contrary to the accepted view of later historians, were thus active partners with Milner in the making of the war.35 Of course, they gave no hint of this to Chamberlain. What made them such wonderful allies was that they repeated over and over again the dictum that there would be no war – that is, if Britain called Kruger’s bluff and sent out troops. Fitzpatrick, acting on Milner’s instructions, had told this story to Selborne at the Colonial Office on 3 July.36 He repeated it to the War Office.37 Cecil Rhodes had told it to Balfour in July38 and repeated it at mixed dinner parties. (Margot Asquith saw him there sitting at the centre of a circle of female worshippers ‘like a great bronze gong’.)38 After Rhodes’s arrival in Cape Town, he cabled Alfred Beit (it was 23 August): ‘President Kruger will give anything demanded he will bluff up to the last moment.’40 Lord Rothschild passed on Rhodes’s message to Balfour.41 Possibly Rhodes believed his own forecasts.42 But Beit, Wernher and Fitzpatrick knew the Boers. The despatch of British troops would precipitate war.43
* * * * * *
With the help of these new allies and old friends, Milner had thus been able to cultivate the ground at ‘Headquarters’, where he had ‘sown the seed’ himself earlier that year. Had the time now come for putting this groundwork to the test? Had the moment come for forcing Joe’s hand? As Milner shrank from this irrevocable step, a new, passionate friendship propelled him forward.
Among the ten special service officers who had arrived at the Cape from England in late July was Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, and his second-in-command, Major Lord Edward Cecil, both destined to organize the force at Mafeking.44 Lord Edward was a tall, drooping, rather melancholy young officer, one of the Prime Minister’s less successful younger sons. He had been accompanied by his wife, Lady Edward, who was neither shy nor melancholy at all. Milner had, of course, met her before.45 Who had not? She was a friend of Margot’s; Margot especially commended her to Milner. She had all Margot’s ‘love for life and love’.46 She was also the sister of the editor of The National Review, Leo Maxse, and she was the Prime Minister’s daughter-in-law.
After months of spiritual isolation, of crushing anxiety alternating with crushing boredom, how Milner revelled in Lady Edward’s company. Together they sent arrows quivering into the target on the lawns of Government House; they galloped down to Green Point, where the surf thundered; and they rode – rode perhaps on bicycles – up the road towards the heights of Groote Schuur, under the great head of Table Mountain. And then, ‘much to my regret’, as his diary primly recorded, Lady Edward left for Mafeking with her husband.47’
Her return to Government House coincided with the new peak of his personal crisis after Kruger’s offer of the five-year franchise. Lady Edward – Violet now – was unaccompanied by her husband. It was she (the ‘Godsend’ he called her) who gave Milner the courage for the impassioned appeal to Chamberlain which he delivered on 30 August.48
He quoted Rhodes’s famous dictum that Kruger would ‘bluff up to the cannon’s mouth’. He begged for the long overdue ‘big expedition’ to be sent out; this would bring Kruger ‘to his knees’. And he solemnly warned Chamberlain that there would be a ‘break away of our people’ – meaning the Uitlanders and Wernher-Beit – unless the troops were sent.49
If he gave it to Chamberlain straight from the shoulder, he gave it to Selborne straight from the heart. ‘Please realize the strain here is really near breaking point all round. This is not screaming…. But really, really, oh! excellent friend and staunch supporter, we have now had nearly three months o
f raging crisis, and it is not too much to ask that things should now be brought to a head.’50
From a very private channel of his own – no less than a cable from Alfred Beit in London, ‘portending a warlike turn of affairs’ – Milner learnt on 5 September that his cri de coeur was at last to be answered.51
The pace of events had indeed suddenly accelerated in England, and Chamberlain had swung ‘back on the old right tack’ with a vengeance. The course had been set by Milner, and his friends and allies. The hand on the helm was Chamberlain’s. The day that he put the helm hard over, so to speak, was Thursday 24 August.
The Cabinet was on holiday. Chamberlain himself was at his beloved Highbury, planning a formal ‘pleasaunce’ and a wild garden beyond. That Saturday there was to be a political garden party in the grounds.52
It was an incongruous moment, one might have thought, for the turning-point in the struggle. Only five days before, the Boers had made that astonishing new offer: the five-year franchise, and a quarter of the seats in the Raad for the Uitlanders. Yet that day, quite suddenly, Chamberlain’s patience began to fail.
Why that day of all days? It was more than a mere impulse, certainly. Chamberlain had just received a long, eloquent letter from Milner pleading for the extra garrison of ten thousand troops, which would probably force Kruger to climb down without a shot being fired.53 He had also received Milner’s latest cables pointing out that the new offer was qualified by impossible conditions: that Britain would abandon her claim to suzerainty, and would promise not to intervene in future on behalf of British subjects in the Transvaal. Milner demanded stiffer terms on their part.54 Moreover, Chamberlain had just seen an alarming new memo of Wolseley’s, repeating his plea to send out the ten thousand men.55
The Boer War Page 15
