The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (9 page)

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February 4, 1874—the year of Winston Churchill’s birth—British troops led by General Sir Garnet Wolseley entered the small African city of Kumasi, now part of central Ghana, and put it to the torch, thereby ending the Second Ashanti War and winning the general a handsome spread on the weekly page devoted to the Empire in the
Illustrated London News
. He had worked for it. A melancholy martinet with spaniel eyes and a long drooping mustache rather like that of Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, Wolseley had joined Victoria’s army—“putting on the widow’s uniform,” as they later said—while still in his teens. Convinced that the surest way to glory lay in courting death at every opportunity, he had been felled by a severe thigh wound in the Second Burmese War, lost an eye to a bursting shell in the Crimea, and survived hairbreadth escapes while relieving Lucknow in the Indian Mutiny, capturing the Ta-ku Forts and Peking during Britain’s 1860 dispute with the Chinese, and suppressing an insurrection in Canada. After finishing off the Ashantis he fought Zulus and dervishes, and organized campaigns against Boer guerrillas. His concern for soldiers’ welfare won him a reputation among England’s upper classes as a dangerous radical. London’s cockneys loved him, however; their expression for topnotch was “all Sir Garnet.” His great ambition was to die a heroic death in action against the French. That failing, the general, who ended up a viscount, planned to enrich his heirs by writing his memoirs after his retirement. Unfortunately, by then he had completely lost his memory. Visitors who mentioned his conquests to him were met by blank stares. He died in 1913, the last year of England’s golden age.

Wolseley was one of the country’s imperial heroes—others included Clive, Stamford Raffles, Chinese Gordon, Richard Burton, and, of course, Cecil Rhodes—whose feats were held up to the nation as examples of how men of courage and determination could shape the destiny of that noblest achievement of mankind, the Empire. If their lives were metaphors of the Empire’s rise, that of Churchill, their rapt pupil, was the other way around. He entered the world in 1874, when the royal domain was approaching flood tide, and left it in 1965, as the last rays of imperial splendor were vanishing. That is one way of summing him up; it is, in fact, one of the ways he saw himself. Toward the end of his life he told Lord Boothby: “History judges a man, not by his victories or defeats, but by their results.”
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Yet the vitiation of the Empire does not diminish his stature. Alexander was driven out of India; Genghis Khan was undone by his sons; Napoleon lost everything, including France. Indeed, it may be argued that the greater the fall, the greater was a man’s height. If that is true, then Churchill’s stature rises above that of all other statesmen, for no realm, past or present, can match the grandeur of imperial Britain at its sublime peak.

I
t was the Tory journalist John Wilson of
Blackwood’s Magazine
who first observed, in 1817, that “the sun never sets upon the Union Jack.” At any given moment, wherever dawn was breaking, Britain’s colors were rippling up some flagpole. If one could have ascended high enough in one of those balloons which fascinated Jules Verne and were actually used in the Franco-Prussian War, the view of Britain’s colonial sphere would have been breathtaking. Victoria reigned over most of Africa, both ends of the Mediterranean, virtually all that mattered in the Middle East; the entire Indian subcontinent, from Afghanistan to Thailand, including Ceylon, which on a map appeared to be merely the dot below India’s exclamation mark but which was actually the size of Belgium; Malaya, Singapore, Australia, islands spread all over the Pacific and the Atlantic, and Canada. The Canadians, proud of their loyalty to the Queen, issued a stamp depicting a world map with the Empire’s lands colored red. It was a study in crimson splotches. Although the British Isles themselves were dwarfed by czarist Russia, and were smaller than Sweden, France, Spain, or Germany, their inhabitants ruled a quarter of the world’s landmass and more than a quarter of its population—thrice the size of the Roman Empire, far more than the Spanish Empire at full flush, or, for that matter, than the United States or the Soviet Union today.

To its classically educated patricians, London was what Rome had once been:
caput mundi,
the head of the world. The popular aristocrat Lord Palmerston said that colonies were multiplying so rapidly that he had to “keep looking the damned places up on the map.” Disraeli said: “No Caesar or Charlemagne ever presided over a dominion so peculiar. Its flag floats on many waters, it has provinces in every zone, they are inhabited by persons of different races,… manners, customs.” All this had been acquired by imperial conquest, and young Winston Churchill, writing for the
Morning Post
from a colonial battlefield on September 12, 1898, took note of “the odd and bizarre potentates against whom the British arms continually are turned. They pass in a long procession. The Akhund of Swat, Cetewayo brandishing an assegai as naked as himself, Kruger singing a Psalm of Victory, Osman Digna, the Immortal and the Irrepressible, Theebaw with his umbrella, the Mahdi with his banner, Lobengula gazing fondly at the pages of
Truth,
Prompeh abasing himself in the dust, the Mad Mullah on his white ass and, latest of all, the Khalifa in his Coach of State. It is like a pantomime scene at Drury Lane.”
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All these suzerains lost, and all England rejoiced—loudly. The British were very vocal in their allegiance to their Empire. In public schools and public houses boys and men responded to “Three cheers for India!” and roared, to the music of “Pomp and Circumstance,” Edward Elgar’s patriotic hymn, composed in the last weeks of the old Queen’s reign:

On declamation days children recited, from Kipling:

Music hall favorites were “The Death of Nelson,” by S. J. Arnold and John B. Raham; “Annie Laurie,” the great hit of the Crimean War; and, later, the rousing “Soldiers of the Queen.” Today their great-grandsons wince at the public displays of patriotism, but the Victorians responded quickly to calls of Duty, the Flag, the Race, the White Man’s Burden; the lot. Far from feeling manipulated—which they were; most Victorians gained nothing from the nation’s foreign conquests—they memorized lines from W. E. Henley, the balladeer of England’s colonial wars:

Her Britannic Majesty was “by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India.” In thatch-roofed villages of British North Borneo and the steamy jungles of Sierra Leone, her primitive vassals regarded her as divine and slit the throats of propitiatory goats before her image, usually a drab statue of a dowdy woman wearing a tiny crown and holding an orb and scepter. Elsewhere Anglican missionaries prevailed and read their Book of Common Prayer in hundreds of languages and dialects, from Swahili to Urdu, from Maori to Bugi, from Kikuyu to Mandarin, and even, in remote valleys on the Isle of Man, the ancient tongue of Manx. Information from Victoria’s twenty-five turbulent tribal possessions in the Middle East reached Britain from their only contact with the outside world, Aden, on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, which had been acquired as a coaling station for the British fleet. There an Englishman perspiring beneath a gyrating punkah sent the Queen all the news she needed from the sheikhs: “They are content to be governed from London.” No one in Whitehall paid much attention. The only resource the Arabs could offer the Empire was an unpleasant liquid, of limited value, called oil.

Most Englishmen were familiar with scattered facts about the Empire. They had only the haziest idea of where Borneo was, but they had seen its Wild Man exhibited in a traveling cage. They knew the silhouette of lion-shaped Gibraltar, knew the legend that if Gibraltar’s monkeys vanished from its caves, the Empire was finished. (In the midst of World War II Churchill found time to replenish the Rock’s supply of monkeys.) They were proud of the Suez Canal, then considered an engineering marvel, and they were under the impression that all Egypt belonged to them, too. That wasn’t strictly true; Egypt still flew its own flag and paid homage to the sultan of Turkey, but after the Queen’s fleet had pounded Alexandria into submission, the country was run by the British agent and consul general. Thomas Cook and Son, booking clerks for the Empire, reserved Shepheard’s Hotel’s best rooms for Englishmen on official business. Cook’s also ran steamers up the Nile for English tourists, though pilots turned back short of the Sudan border in 1885, after fanatic tribesmen of the Mahdi butchered Chinese Gordon in Khartoum. This tiresome restriction ended in 1898 when Kitchener routed and humiliated the tribesmen under the critical eye of young Churchill.

The British public was aware of the tiny island of Saint Helena, in the middle of the Atlantic, because that was where imprisoned Napoleon spent his last years, but such possessions as Ascension isle, Saint Helena’s neighbor, which provided the turtles for the turtle soup at the traditional banquets of London’s lord mayor, and Tristan da Cunha, the most isolated of the Empire’s outposts, twelve hundred miles south of Saint Helena, in the broadest and most desolate reaches of the Atlantic, were virtually unknown outside the Colonial Office. Yet if ordinary Englishmen were confused about details of their realm, they can scarcely be blamed. The Empire itself was the vaguest of entities. Legally, under the British constitution, it did not exist. It was a kind of stupendous confidence trick. By arms or by arrogance, Englishmen had persuaded darker races that Britain was the home of a race meant to dominate the world. Therefore they ruled by consent. So successful was this bluff that the Mother Country held its possessions with an extraordinarily thin line of bwanas and sahibs; in India, for example, the rule of the Raj was administered by roughly one member of the Indian Civil Service for every 200,000 subjects.

Unless one counts Ireland, England’s first imperial conquest was Newfoundland, discovered by John Cabot in 1497. The East India Company was chartered in 1600, and thereafter explorers like Captain James Cook, roaming the South Pacific, were followed by missionaries and merchants who ruled and exploited the new lands. It is true that the newcomers introduced natives to law, sanitation, hospitals, and, eventually, to self-government, but Dickens’s Mrs. Jellyby, neglecting her family while “educating natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger,” was deceiving herself about her country’s chief imperial motive. Palmerston, under no such illusion, said it was the government’s goal to “open and secure the roads for the merchant,” and Joseph Chamberlain said Whitehall must “find new markets and defend old ones.”
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Expansion of Britain’s maritime strength had led to settlements on America’s east coast and the hoisting of the Union Jack over the West Indies. The conquest of India had begun with a small trading station at Surat, on the west coast. Canada had been an acquisition of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a firm just as zealous in its pursuit of profits as the East India Company. Victorian Australia was built on the need for cargoes of gold and wool. And each new territory meant a further boost of England’s entrepôt trade, expansion of markets for the coal of Wales, the textiles of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the steel of Sheffield and Birmingham. By Churchill’s youth the nation’s foreign trade had reached the astounding total of £669,000,000 a year.

As James Morris pointed out in his masterful
Pax Britannica,
the Empire’s growth had been “a jerky process,” a formless, piecemeal advance which leapfrogged across continents and was never static. Sometimes imperial possessions were lost—Manila and Java were once British, and so, of course, were the American colonies—but the realm always waxed more than it waned. The great prize, “the brightest jewel in the imperial crown,” as Englishmen said then, was the Indian Empire, comprising the modern nations of India, Burma, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. It was the need to secure their ties to India which, they said, justified holding the southern tip of Africa, Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Port Said, and Aden. But the brightest jewel could also be approached from the other direction, so they had to have Sarawak, the Straits Settlements, and Malaya, too. The fact is that just as all roads had once led to Rome, so did all sea-lanes lead to India. When that argument seemed strained, as in Africa, the Queen’s statesmen explained that they had to move in before other great powers did. With this excuse, Victoria’s Lord Salisbury gobbled up the lion’s share of Africa without igniting a European war.