But it wasn’t that easy. It took half a year to present his credentials. Leyds put it down to ‘fate’, which wasn’t ‘kind to me’. But it had at least as much to do with diplomatic sensitivities in the various capitals. He realised this when he first presented his credentials in Paris. He was received by President Faure at the Elysée Palace on 8 July 1898. Diplomatic protocol was observed, including his arrival in a coach with a guard of honour of cuirassiers. But when he subsequently paid his courtesy calls on other diplomats in Paris, the British closed the door in his face. On Lord Salisbury’s instructions, the ambassador, Sir Edward Monson, avoided an official meeting with him.
This was a taste of what Leyds could expect all over the Continent. London did not officially challenge his accreditation, but British diplomats were advised to avoid formal contact with him. This unofficial boycott affected the way other governments treated him, the Netherlands less than some others. In early August, Queen Regent Emma and young Princess Wilhelmina, the future queen, received him at Soestdijk Palace, observing the rules of diplomatic etiquette. But elsewhere the atmosphere was strained. Kaiser Wilhelm II and King Leopold II of Belgium made a point of keeping him waiting. Also under British pressure, Tsar Nicholas of Russia decided not to invite the Transvaal—or the Orange Free State—to the International Peace Conference, which was held, at his initiative, in The Hague in 1899.144
Leyds had to do something about the journalists as well as the diplomats. He soon realised that ‘the mood in Europe, especially France, is hostile towards the Republic’. He knew who was behind it: Milner and Rhodes. They were far away, but their tentacles reached all the way to the French press. Through the South African Association in London they filled newspaper pages with half-truths about the Transvaal, outright lies about Kruger and fabrications about him. Le Figaro, La Liberté, Le Matin. All of them could be bought, for heaps of money; but that was no problem for the mining magnates from Kimberley and Johannesburg.
For Leyds it was a very serious problem. He wasn’t in a position to repay them in kind. It would cost thousands of pounds. ‘The Republic cannot afford to spend as much to defend itself as its enemies spend to attack it.’ But something had to be done ‘to tell people the truth’. A press office in Paris, to begin with. ‘The most reliable person and one I believe would be suitable for the job’ was the French journalist E. Roels. For £1000 a month, Roels collected cuttings from scores of newspapers—French, German, British, Portuguese and even Russian—and launched a pro-Boer campaign. The other side had a great deal more money, but it was for a good cause and that was also worth something. ‘It’s a contest between money and justice.’145
Justice for the Boer cause. That was still the ideal Leyds was pursuing. His goal remained unchanged, but the kind of life he was dedicating to it was totally different. It was refined, civilised, extrovert, with more variety and pageantry. And of course it gave more opportunity to travel. As envoy-at-large, he was constantly on the move, visiting one capital after another. Towards the end of the year, he began to suffer from ‘the fatigue caused by excessive travel and work. The distances here in Europe are considerable too.’
But there was more to come. He still had to present his credentials in Lisbon and St Petersburg. In late November 1898 he travelled to Lisbon, where he was received first by King Carlos, subsequently in another palace by Queen Amélie, and finally by the queen mother, Maria Pia, who lived in Cascais. The train journey to Cascais was an experience he would never forget. To enjoy the view he went to sit outdoors on the balcony of the lounge car, where his eyes were suddenly ‘filled with grit’. He attended the audience regardless—with tears streaming down his cheeks—but back in Lisbon he needed ‘two surgical interventions to relieve me of my load of coal’. Blinded by coal soot on a train journey. Land en Volk would have relished the symbolism.
He never made it to St Petersburg. He hadn’t been keen to go in the first place. ‘It must be bitterly cold in Russia,’ he wrote to Pretoria on 16 December 1898. ‘I’m not looking forward to the journey for that reason, and I hope I get through it all right as far as my health is concerned.’ To be on the safe side he went to see his doctor anyway. That put an end to the trip. He was ‘absolutely’ forbidden to go to St Petersburg. The old complaints had come back. ‘My nose and throat... need immediate attention, daily.’ He had been told off for ‘not coming sooner. But how could I? I rush from city to city and when I get there I hardly have time to breathe.’ Fortunately the Russian government was sympathetic. The second secretary of the mission, Van der Hoeven, whose mother was a member of the Russian aristocracy, was authorised to present his credentials to Tsar Nicholas II. At the end of December 1898, Leyds was accredited as an envoy of the South African Republic in Russia as well.146
Chamberlain wasn’t pleased. Leyds hadn’t made a bad impression on him when they had met at the Diamond Jubilee in the summer of 1897. Even Lord Selborne, the colonial under-secretary, had a good word for him. Leyds was sociable, he thought, intelligent and pleasant-looking. And Chamberlain had admired his ‘shrewd evasions’ at the time of the Naval Review. At least Leyds wasn’t a backward Boer.
But that made him all the more dangerous. The Colonial Office’s South Africa expert, Fred Graham, had made this very point to his minister. Leyds was known to be totally unreliable, he reported. He was considered their most dangerous opponent. That was more important than the man’s personal charm, Selborne agreed. ‘All British South Africa... are united in believing him to be the enemy.’ True or not, what mattered was what people thought. The Transvaal’s new envoy in Europe, with his ‘Hollander policy’, was seen as the Boers’ evil genius. They had to keep that idea alive and nurture it.147
The Colonial Office and the Foreign Office kept Leyds under surveillance, observing his every move with suspicion. They had instructions to make his life difficult and tarnish his reputation in the press. Not officially, because that would be counterproductive. Objecting to his accreditation would embarrass the British government, Lord Salisbury wrote to Chamberlain. It would raise questions in the capitals of Europe and, before you knew it, that wretched arbitration business would raise its ugly head again. A disastrous scenario. Next, they would also be challenging Britain’s suzerainty over the Transvaal.148
That was the last thing Salisbury or Chamberlain wanted. Britain was making good progress with its colonial ambitions. In the summer of 1898, they would actually be sitting at the negotiation table with Germany to stake their claims in southern Africa. This had come about because of Portugal’s ongoing financial problems. The Portuguese had turned to London to secure a loan, offering the revenue from their colonies as security. Berlin had got wind of this and proposed talks. The British government had agreed. The two countries had discussed the matter—without Portugal—and then proceeded to negotiate in earnest. Their talks culminated in a British–German treaty, signed on 30 August 1898.
It had far-reaching implications. If there was to be a loan, they would extend it jointly. As security, Britain claimed the revenues from central Angola and Mozambique south of the Zambezi—including Delagoa Bay. The Germans would get the proceeds from the rest. If Portugal failed to recover financially, they would divide its colonial territories between themselves according to the same formula. This arrangement was a strategic coup for Britain, regardless of how things turned out for Portugal. At least Germany was out of the running for Delagoa Bay. It made no difference that Portugal managed to save its colonies by taking a loan in Paris: they had pre-empted an alliance between Germany and the Transvaal.149
This wasn’t their only successful manoeuvre. A new opportunity soon presented itself, this time in North Africa, where the age-old colonial rivalry between Britain and France was building up and threatening to erupt into a violent confrontation. The British imperialists’ vision of the Union Jack spanning the continent from the Cape to Cairo was incompatible with the French colonial party’s dream of the tricolour flying over Africa, from the Ni
ger to the Nile. At some point the north-south and east-west lines would inevitably intersect. This happened at Fashoda, on the upper reaches of the Nile in present-day southern Sudan, in September 1898.
The main local protagonists were Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand and Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, two unevenly matched forces. Marchand limped in with barely a hundred men at the end of a gruelling two-year tramp through the African jungle. Meanwhile, Kitchener had arrived with a victorious army, straight from the city where he had defeated the formidable Sudanese Mahdi, and whose name he was subsequently entitled to use. If it had come to a battle, there was no doubt who would have won. But it never reached that point. The hostilities went no further than Marchand hoisting the French tricolour and Kitchener the Egyptian flag under protest. The conflict was thus taken to the level at which it belonged, that of international power politics.
In London, Lord Salisbury and Chamberlain confidently picked up the gauntlet. Their opposite number in Paris was Théophile Delcassé, the foreign minister, who was no less certain than they that his claims were justified, and no less driven by imperialist zeal. The big difference lay in the trumps the two sides could and were actually prepared to play. In that respect the game was just as unequal as Fashoda had been. Politically, Salisbury and Chamberlain were firmly in power, safe in the knowledge that their backs were covered by the recent treaty with Germany, and that they outnumbered their opponents in the region. Delcassé was in the middle of a political crisis. He received no support from his Russian ally, and was powerless to change the military balance of power. It was true that France had a far bigger army than Britain, but how could you get your soldiers to Africa as long as Britannia ruled the waves? There was nothing to do but pass. On 3 November 1898 Delcassé instructed Marchand to call the whole thing off.150
Britain was doing well on all colonial fronts. Chamberlain had every reason to gloat. France had been cut off from North Africa. Agreements with Germany had been bought off with Portuguese territory. Britain held sway over southern Africa. Now there were just the Boers. There was still a memorandum from Pretoria from six months earlier. Probably some nit-picking over that suzerainty business, and it was undoubtedly Leyds’s doing. It still had to be dealt with. Chamberlain’s staff had advised him not to respond to any of the points it raised, especially not the question of arbitration. Ignore it, they said, and rather insist on some issue that was open to debate; that always gets them flustered. It was 15 December 1898. Chamberlain began to dictate.
Last chances
Atlantic Ocean, January 1899
Reconciliation. A plan to keep the peace. Resolve the differences between Pretoria and Johannesburg. Hold talks in a spirit of mutual understanding. Make concessions. It wouldn’t be easy but it was certainly worth the try. War would destroy everything. It was a question of getting the right people and doing the right things in the right order. He had an idea.
Willem Leyds didn’t waste his time on trivialities during the voyage from Southampton to Cape Town. War or peace, the future of South Africa, the survival of the Transvaal as an independent state. He was on his way to Pretoria to report his findings in Europe after his first six months as the Transvaal’s official agent. He had plenty to think about, and at sea everything fell into place. There could only be one conclusion. No matter how fiercely he defended the Boer cause, the problem could not be solved by diplomatic exchanges or press campaigns. The problem was in the Transvaal itself. It lay in the conflict with the Randlords and the Uitlanders.
Only when that was resolved would there be a reasonable chance of winning the support of the gold-mining shareholders, the politicians and public opinion in the European countries that mattered—France, Germany and Russia. Only then would the Boers be in a position to cast themselves as the injured party, driven into a corner by Britain’s lust for power. As long as the conflict persisted, people would continue to believe that the Boers were in part to blame, that they blackmailed the mine owners and discriminated against their employees. Diplomacy and public relations could not move mountains.
On 28 January 1899, Leyds was back in Pretoria, where he had lived and worked for almost 14 years. Little had changed in the past six months except for the incumbents of two key positions. When Leyds became an envoy, his position as state secretary was taken over by the former president of the Orange Free State, F.W. Reitz, with whom Kruger had sought closer ties of friendship in 1889. Reitz had been obliged to resign for health reasons, but he had since recovered and was keen to continue his political career in the Transvaal. The young Jan Smuts was the new state attorney, on the brink of a long and dazzling career. Both men had been born in the Cape Colony and had studied law in Britain, from where they returned with their fanatical Afrikaner nationalism intact. Sons of the soil with knowledge of the world—it showed in all they did. Self-assured, erudite Boers with an easy commanding presence, a quality Leyds the Hollander had never managed to cultivate. Together with the old president they formed the new leadership in Pretoria, spanning three generations: Kruger was already 73, Reitz 54 and Smuts 28 years old.
All three agreed with Leyds’s ideas about reconciliation with Johannesburg and the intermediary he had in mind: Eduard Lippert, cousin of Alfred Beit, the uncrowned king of the Rand. Lippert was also the nuisance from the days of the railway and dynamite affairs, but after the Jameson Raid and the support he’d given Leyds in Germany, he had become a trusted friend. He presented the opening bid to representatives of the mining industry in late February 1899. The Transvaal government was offering to make substantial concessions on three points: it would amend the terms of the dynamite monopoly, relax the rules on the enfranchisement of Uitlanders and appoint a ‘treasurer’ to put the state’s financial affairs in order. In return, Pretoria wanted the mine owners to stop the press from agitating against the government, and to distance themselves from the South African League.
It was a genuine attempt to negotiate a deal. At first the prospects looked good. A number of Randlords were sufficiently interested to consider further talks—and put forward serious counter-proposals. Kruger emphasised his honourable intentions in three reconciliatory speeches, in Heidelberg (18 March), Rustenburg (27 March) and Johannesburg (1 April). If it had come to an agreement, he would have been honoured for this spectacular Great Deal. And Leyds, the man behind it, might have gone down in history as Willem the Conciliator.
But that was not to be. Honesty has to come from both sides. At least one of their negotiating partners was not playing the game. Percy FitzPatrick had been one of the Johannesburg conspirators sentenced for complicity in the Jameson Raid, first to death, then to imprisonment and in the end to a fine. The remissions had not appeased him. He still harboured a grudge against the Boer regime and against Kruger and Leyds in particular. The mere fact that he had been chosen to liaise on the mine owners’ behalf gave pause for thought. Even so, the Boer leaders gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Smuts had several confidential meetings with him, unaware that FitzPatrick’s real intention was to sabotage the talks. In close consultation with his superiors in London, Beit and Wernher, and the British representative in Pretoria, Conyngham Greene—and through him with the high commissioner in Cape Town, Sir Alfred Milner—FitzPatrick brought the episode to an abrupt end in late March 1899. He leaked the outcome of the secret talks to English-language newspapers in Johannesburg, Cape Town and London—with the expected results. At the beginning of April everything was out in the open, and anyone who had stuck out their neck went back on their word. The Great Deal had fizzled out, the opportunity to reach an internal solution between Pretoria and Johannesburg had passed. This was driven home by a petition drawn up by the South African League around the same time. Addressed to Queen Victoria, it was an appeal signed by 21,000 Uitlanders for measures to improve their legal status in the Transvaal.151
Leyds wasn’t around to witness the failure of his initiative. He had left Pretoria on 24 March 1899 to resume his life in
Europe. He had a superficial encounter with Milner in Cape Town—the two men exchanged pleasantries, not a word about politics—and he completed a last chore. Chamberlain’s dispatch of 15 December 1898 on the question of suzerainty still needed a reply. Kruger and Reitz had asked Leyds to deal with it. He was, after all, their expert in that field. He hadn’t managed to work on it in Pretoria. Only in Cape Town was he able to give it his full attention. He sent his draft to Pretoria at the very last minute, before embarking for Europe on 30 March.
All the talk on board the Carisbrooke Castle was about the looming war and the rapidly fading chance of peace. Most of the British passengers feared that war was inevitable. It would also have ‘the support of the entire British nation’. Leyds found their conversation depressing. Two months earlier, on the voyage out, he had been optimistic. This time the waves broke against the ship’s hull like ominous portents. ‘It is clear that after the Fashoda Incident and its coalition with Germany, Britain considers itself master of the whole world.’152
Sir Alfred Milner was pleasantly surprised. Radical reforms in Pretoria, including recognition of British paramountcy in the whole of southern Africa—either that or war. This was what he had demanded in his Graaff-Reinet speech, more than a year earlier. He had been preparing himself for it ever since, and growing more and more impatient. Reconciliation between the Boers and the Randlords, disregarding Britain’s imperial claims, would have been a disaster, he felt. So he was pleased when FitzPatrick torpedoed the Great Deal. Add to that the Uitlanders’ widely supported petition to Queen Victoria and it was obvious: this was a golden opportunity to mobilise public opinion in Britain and put pressure on Chamberlain to take action.
The Boer War Page 17
