Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (53 page)

Disraeli, who became Prime Minister for the second time in 1874,
viewed with concern the spectacle of this organically imperial waterway in alien hands. He liked to say winsomely that the real key to India was London, a conceit he had filched from the Russian Ambassador, but more than any other British statesman he was fascinated by the Eastern Question. The east suited him; the concerns of oriental empire gilded his public image, and enhanced his aura of subtle glitter. Besides, his novelist’s imagination made him see the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, with its attendant Khedive, as an interloper astride a highway of Empire. Palmerston, it is true, had defined Egypt as no more than an inn on the road to India—all that Britain needed was a well-kept establishment, ‘always accessible’, and well-supplied with ‘mutton chops and post-houses’. To Disraeli, though, foreign control of the canal meant that at any time the inn might be barred and shuttered against British clients, a threat from which the Empire must be released.

In 1875 a promising prospect was reported to him. The profligate Khedive was bankrupt, the interest on his foreign debts being about equal to the national income of his country, and almost his only remaining assets were his shares in the canal. Finding himself in even more appalling straits than usual, he was now disposing of them, and already two French banking groups were in pursuit, one group wanting to buy, one offering a mortgage. Disraeli heard of it all in a characteristically Disraelian way—from his millionaire Foreign Secretary, Lord Derby, who had heard it from the proprietor of the
Pall
Mall
Gazette
,
who had heard it from Henry Oppenheimer the French Jewish banker at a private dinner party.

The Prime Minister’s fancy was fired. He instructed the British Consul-General in Cairo to investigate the reports, and to tell the Khedive that ‘Her Majesty’s Government are disposed to purchase if terms can be arranged’. He told the Queen in his best conspiratorial style: ‘’Tis an affair of millions, about four at least; but it could give the possessor an immense, not to say preponderating, influence in the management of the Canal’. He threw himself with enthusiasm, if at long range, into the veiled negotiations in Cairo, the comings and going of emissaries, the half-truths and the secret commitments, the proposals and counter-proposals of Nubar Pasha, Sherif Pasha, and many another tasselled eminence of the Egyptian
scene. He warned off the French Government with a stiff statement by Lord Derby. And when the Consul-General in Egypt reported that de Lesseps himself had offered 1oo million francs for the Khedive’s shares, but that the Khedive would prefer to sell them to the British Government, Disraeli instantly agreed. ‘The Viceroy’s offer is accepted. Her Majesty’s Government agree to purchase the 177,646 shares of the Viceroy for four million pounds sterling.’ ‘It is settled,’ the Prime Minister told the Queen. ‘You have it, Madam.’

Disraeli raised the purchase price from his friends the Rothschilds. His private secretary, Montague Corry, loved to tell how the Prime Minister had sent him to the office of Baron Lionel de Rothschild to ask for a loan of four million pounds. 

When the shares were counted they proved to be forty short, and the price was accordingly amended to
£
3,976,582—doubtless pleasing the thrifty Mr Gladstone, who thought the whole transaction deplorable. The documents were packed in seven zinc boxes, and the troopship
Malabar
, en route to England from Bombay, was ordered to call at Alexandria to ‘receive certain cases’. A special train took the cases from Cairo to the coast; an armed guard waited at Portsmouth to receive them; on December 1, 1875, they were deposited in the vaults of the Bank of England.
1

The British were delighted at this coup. Commercially their control of the company remained vestigial, British Government directors still constituting only one eighth of the Board, and for the rest of the century the conduct of the canal remained a frustration to British shipowners and strategists alike. But the shares did give Britain a permanent and powerful stake in Suez, and to the world at large it seemed, in a vague but suggestive way, to give them possession—Bismarck called the canal the Empire’s ‘spinal cord’. Disraeli’s acquisition of the shares, transmuted into legend over the years, entered the national myth as the acquisition of the canal itself, and in the end that is what it became. Out of a two-fifths commercial share, itself a highly profitable investment, the British evolved complete military control of the canal, so that before long the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime, still preponderantly French in ownership and altogether French in management, was operating under the protection and patronage of the British Empire.

So the seal was set upon British command of the oceans, and thus of the Empire. It was now absolute, and any merchant ship captain sailing the imperial routes in the last decades of the Victorian century found himself moving in effect from one British bastion to another. For two decades after the acquisition of the canal shares, British military supremacy was scarcely tested, and the Royal Navy sailed the world, convoying its expeditionary forces, showing the Queen’s flag, as though its admirals owned the oceans. The public responded with growing pride, and for the first and probably the last time in their history, the British people acquired a taste for drums, guns and glory.

Y
ET there were forebodings. To many the Empire seemed too diffuse an organism, set against taut new Powers like Germany or the United States, and throughout the 1870s and 1880s there were repeated attempts to give it
logic The sloppiness jarred, and imperialist intellectuals applied themselves to the task of binding the Empire more closely, and sharing its responsibilities more rationally among its members. It took some mental readjustment, to think of all the scattered millions of Victoria’s subjects, Hindus and Muslims and Buddhists and pagans, black, brown, yellow or white, Sioux or Burmese, Chinese or Ashanti, as fellow-citizens of a single immense super-State: but in the new vision of Empire, often figuratively interpreted in mosaics and bas-reliefs, they stood there shoulder to shoulder in comradely profile, backed by scenes of pastoral prosperity or victorious pride, and gazing trustfully upwards, as often as not, towards the bulk of Her Imperial Majesty. The vaguely formulated ideology of British Imperialism had something in common with Soviet Communism half a century later: an innocent optimism, a facile disregard of unwelcome truths, an instinct to simplify and categorize, and a dreadful taste in propaganda.

How could one rationalize the Empire, which was stuck together more by habit than design, had been acquired piecemeal over the centuries, and was held together by force? Some kind of federalism was the fashionable answer, most forcibly expressed by the historians Sir John Seeley and J. A. Froude, and an eager proponent of this solution was Lord Carnarvon, ‘Twitters’, Disraeli’s Colonial Secretary, Carnarvon thought the first step towards a super-Power should be a grouping of the Empire into larger sub-units, starting
with the white self-governing colonies. Canada seemed to offer a successful precedent, and Carnarvon prided himself on having fathered Canadian Confederation in Parliament. Australia, where there were five separate colonies, would doubtless soon be federated too—perhaps with New Zealand, a country which, though separated from Australia by a thousand miles of ocean, seemed to many Whitehall theorists more or less the same place. And the third constituent federacy, Lord Carnarvon thought, to form another pillar of the grander imperial structure, should be established in South Africa, which undeniably needed order or collectivism, and was also very expensive to rule.

The South African scene had changed, in the forty odd years since the Great Trek, but had changed predictably. There were now two British colonies, Cape Colony and Natal, and two independent Boer Republics. The Orange Free State, with its capital at Bloemfontein beyond the Orange River, was generally moderate and on friendly terms with the British. The Transvaal republic, called the South African Republic, was the high retreat of everything most doggedly Boer, and was not generally on friendly terms with anyone. Around these four white settlements swirled the black peoples in their diverse tribes, outnumbering the Europeans by twenty to one, generically known to the whites as Kaffirs or Bantus, but possessing ancient tribal loyalties of their own, to the chiefs of Bechuana or Basuto, to the misty divinities of the bushmen or the tremendous feathered kings of Zululand.

In 1875 this magnificent slab of country, ranging from the heavenly wine valleys of the Cape to the arid plateau of the Transvaal, was as usual in tumult. The obdurate Transvaal Boers were constantly at war with the blacks upon their ill-defined frontiers, and were also threatening to cock a snook at the Empire by building a railway to Delagoa Bay, in Portuguese East Africa, to give themselves an independent outlet to the world. The Zulus were in a fighting mood, their young warriors chafing for battle, their elders resentful of Boers and Britons alike. The British had internecine squabbles of their own, and by employing the imperial sleight of
hand to acquire the newly discovered diamond field area in Griqualand East, they had gravely offended the Afrikaners of the Orange Free State.
1

Over it all, though, the British believed themselves to have rights of paramountcy, or at least trusteeship, and the whole inflammatory muddle, Carnarvon reasoned, could be cleared if Africa south of the Zambesi could be amalgamated into a single imperial unit. In particular the South African Republic of the Transvaal, which prescient imperialists already foresaw as the future epicentre of South Africa, must be drawn back into the imperial brotherhood which its leaders had so stubbornly eluded for so long. The British would outnumber the Boers in such an association, the blacks would be subdued by sweet reason, and the imperial authority could devolve its authority and cut its costs without taking undue risks (for as a Colonial Office specialist had declared only a few years before the opening of the Suez Canal, the Cape was unquestionably ‘the true centre of the Empire’, and upon the security of the Simonstown base might depend the whole imperial future).

First Carnarvon tried persuasion, sending out to Durban that inescapable champion of empire, Major-General Sir Garnet Wolseley, K.C.B.—ostensibly as Governor of Natal, really as an apostle of federation. For a time he hoped that a confederation might actually be convened under the chairmanship of Britain’s Only General, but Wolseley’s charm proved less effective with the Boers than with the susceptible British colonists, and the plan came to nothing. Carnarvon was therefore goaded into a very different tactic. In the spring of 1877 he ordered, if not explicitly at least between the lines of his instructions, the annexation of the South African Republic.

The Transvaal had this in common with the British Empire, that it
distinctly lacked system. The Voortrekkers who had pushed across the Vaal and encamped upon that bitter and remote plateau had taken with them their own ideas of an acceptable society—one in which Government interference was limited to the minimum, and burghers were free to trek where they liked, farm how they liked, treat their natives as the Bible taught them and their elected rulers with absolute familiarity. They were an intensely political people, but parochial. Their little State was racked always with dissension, and the writ of the Republic ran feebly among the scattered farmsteads of the veld. As always, the Boers wanted only to live the
lekker
lewe
. For the most part they left commerce to the thousand or so English settlers in the Republic. They honoured their own ideals
of privacy—farms so big that one could not see the smoke from the next man’s chimney—and they maintained a labour system that still looked to foreigners very like slavery. The Transvaal was a fundamentalist State. It had no real frontiers, only a rudimentary administration, and no regular army, but it believed in God’s hierarchy: whites on top, blacks below, and an unquestioning obedience to the Mosaic law.

Federation apart, there were persuasive arguments for the seizure of this queer republic. Disraeli was taking the imperialist bit between his teeth, and probably reasoned that a small and successful coup would win votes. There were rumours of gold up there; the Boer treatment of the blacks still stuck in British gullets; the idea that the Boers might be plotting with the Germans, the French or the Portuguese was disturbing to the imperialists; there was a very real possibility that the Zulus might overwhelm the Republic and precipitate a wider war. Besides, the Republic was in such a miserable condition that it only deserved annexation. It was bankrupt, official salaries sometimes being paid in postage stamps, and its President, the mild-mannered predikant Thomas Burgers, was constantly at odds with the extreme fundamentalists, the Doppers, who thought him an irreligious heretic—he did not believe, it was reliably rumoured, that the devil had a tail, and he had sacrilegiously allowed his own head to be engraved upon the Transvaal gold sovereign. Split by the endemic Boer antipathies, threatened by its black neighbours, the South African Republic seemed ripe for Victoria’s maternal embrace.

The Empire’s agent in the affair was Sir Theophilus Shepstone, one of the best-known Englishmen in South Africa, and a veteran imperialist. Shepstone had spent most of his life in Africa, being the son of a Wesleyan missionary, and his clan was to figure repeatedly throughout the late Victorian history of South Africa. He had been Secretary for Native Affairs in Natal, he spoke Zulu and Xhosa, he was called by the Africans ‘Somtseu’, or Mighty Hunter, and had no love for the Boers. A silent cunning man, his high brow and dark eyes, set above a large severe mouth and a cleft chin, made him look paradoxically piratical, like an evangelical Disraeli. Shepstone was sent to Pretoria, the Transvaal capital, as
Special Commissioner to the South African Republic, ostensibly to report on the situation there, but with secret instructions to annex the republic if he found that enough Transvaalers wanted it—or for that matter, he was told verbally, if they did not. Such a mission suited his temperament. He was not a very straightforward man. A lifetime of African intrigue had given him an African approach to life and affairs, and he rode into the Transvaal in what might be called a tribal frame of mind.

There he goes along the dusty road to the capital, in many ways the archetype of the British imperialist in Africa—shrewd, calculating, pious, half-educated, overbearing, elated by his recent KCMG and accompanied by his private secretary Rider Haggard (‘a leggy-looking youth’, as was said at the time, ‘who seems the picture of weakness and dullness’). Two or three clerks rode with him, and they were escorted by a troop of mounted policemen. The Boer farmers along the way, lounging outside their farmsteads in their floppy hats and corduroy leggings, smoked their pipes impassively as the little convoy passed; and the British traders whose stores they used for lodgings along the road, when the troopers had fed their horses and His Excellency had retired to his tent for dinner with young Haggard, curiously inquired after the purpose of the mission, and doubtless drew their own conclusions.

After a month’s leisurely travel they reached Pretoria. It was the simplest of capitals then. It had not existed at all until 1856, when four squabbling Trekker republics had united, and it was still little more than a village on the veld, flowered and dusty. An avenue of blue gum trees led into town from the south, and trees and gardens were everywhere—fig trees beside every verandah, roses on every trellis, willow-trees to mark the bungalow boundaries, with rows of rich vegetables behind. Along the dirt-streets rumbled the great ox-wagons of the Boers, not much changed since the days of the Trek, their long teams of oxen flicked still by ox-hide whips from wagoners far behind. On the stoeps the burghers comfortably sat, and the women wore clogs and poke bonnets. Sparkling watercourses gave the town vivacity, and all was bathed in the brilliant smokeless light of the high veld, the most exhilarating light on earth.

In the centre of town was Church Square, the heart of the republic, and of Afrikanerdom. There stood the thatched Reform Church, and the Raadsaal with its broad steps, where the burghers of the Volksraad deliberated, and outside whose doors, every three months, the people met in Nachtmaal—half a religious ceremony, half a folk-gathering, when marriages were celebrated, babies were baptized, feuds were consummated and the square was cluttered with market stalls, tents and wagons. Into this symbolic spot, this kraal of the Boers, Sir Theophilus Shepstone confidently rode: and presenting himself to the President, who cautiously welcomed him as ‘a friendly adviser’, he presently set in train the extinction of the Republic

Shepstone was soon able to persuade himself that most of the Boers wished to join the Empire again. ‘Great majority of Boers,’ he cabled Carnarvon, ‘welcome change.’ This was quite untrue. The vast majority of the Boers had not shifted their views about the British Empire since their forebears first escaped from it forty years before. The Transvaalers were, however, unprepared and divided; President Burgers was sick and weak; on April 12, 1877, the annexation of the South African Republic was declared. Shepstone’s mounted policemen paraded smartly in Church Square, and Haggard himself ran the Union Jack up the Raadsaal flagstaff. The Volksraad was suspended. The President was pensioned off. Sir Garnet Wolseley arrived to assume the administration, proclaiming the Queen’s will that the Transvaal should continue to be for ever an integral part of her dominions in South Africa—until, he added, warming to his theme, the River Vaal reversed its flow. Two generations after the Great Trek, the British had caught up with the last of the Voortrekkers.

At home the Liberals fiercely attacked the annexation. Gladstone, as leader of the Opposition, called the Transvaal a country ‘where we have chosen most unwisely, I am tempted to say insanely, to place ourselves in the strange predicament of the free subjects of a monarchy going to coerce the free subjects of a republic’. The public,
though, generally approved of the move, and Carnarvon was encouraged to proceed with further plans for federation. He appointed to the Governorship of Cape Colony Sir Bartle Frere, an eminent Anglo-Indian administrator, who would he hoped be the first Governor-General of the confederacy.