The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (28 page)

Churchill held Mountbatten partially culpable for the disaster of independence—and for the death knell it sounded for the British Empire. The result might have been inevitable, given the policy of the Labour government, but Churchill was appalled that Mountbatten would lend his hand to it, and only with the passage of time could he reconcile with his former favorite. Churchill well knew the difficulties Mountbatten faced, yet could but mourn in 1947 that “We are of course only at the beginning of these horrors and butcheries, perpetrated upon one another, men, women, and children, with the ferocity of cannibals, by races gifted with capacities of the highest culture and who had for generations dwelt side by side in general peace under the broad, tolerant and impartial rule of the British Crown and Parliament.”
⁷
Churchill did not see how the removal of that broad, tolerant, and impartial rule—to be replaced by fanatic sectarianism—could possibly be a good thing.

Mountbatten believed that history—no less than the praise he received from Nehru, Jinnah, the Labour government, and much of the liberal press—would vindicate his viceroyship, if for no other reason than that he had contrived to bring both India and Pakistan into the British Commonwealth. If that seems a trifling bauble today, it was thought to be worth much more in 1947 (so much so that Indian nationalists suspected it and British politicians and civil servants fretted about it overstretching British resources and commitments). In Mountbatten's vision, India and Pakistan would join
Australia and Canada as real and lasting allies of Britain, tied to the Mother Country by mystic chords of memory. Mountbatten was as sentimental in his progressive liberalism as Churchill was in his nostalgic conservatism; both thought Britain and India (and Pakistan) belonged together.
⁸
As a reward for his service, Lord Louis became Earl Mountbatten of Burma.

There were other consolations. His nephew, and fellow naval officer, Prince Philip took on his maternal grandparents' surname of Mountbatten and married Princess Elizabeth, future queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; Mountbatten became a mentor to the couple's first-born son, Prince Charles. And there was the sea and his career as a naval officer, which reached its apotheosis in his elevation to First Sea Lord (1955–59), after a stint as commander in chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, and promotion to the highest naval rank, Admiral of the Fleet. It was followed by his appointment as Chief of the Defence Staff (1959–65), his last military posting. He was instrumental in Britain's adoption of nuclear-powered submarines, advocated nuclear arms reductions (but not unilateral nuclear disarmament), pushed for interservice cooperation, and argued for a mobile British strike force based on aircraft carriers.

In his retirement, Mountbatten acted as an unofficial ambassador for Britain, devoted himself to a vast number of worthy organizations and charities, and became president of United World Colleges, which were meant to spread the progressive spirit of internationalism. The denouement of Mountbatten's life was appropriately, if unfortunately and gruesomely, imperial. He kept a summer home in Ireland, from which he enjoyed boating. On 27 August 1979, the IRA blew up his boat, killing Mountbatten, his grandson, another young boy, and an eighty-three-year-old woman, as well as seriously injuring three others. It was a typical pointless and bloodthirsty act of murder by the IRA, timed to coincide with an ambush on a British patrol in Northern Ireland that left eighteen paratroopers dead. Mountbatten might have appreciated the irony that, in assassinating him, the IRA
had killed an impeccable liberal who actually, if privately, supported the idea of a united Ireland.

T
he irony of the British Empire in Africa is that while it started with slave ships tapping into the millennium-old slave trade of the Dark Continent, Britain became the most powerful force in the world for ending slavery and the slave trade, and the anti-slaving campaign drove the expansion of the British Empire.

British slave ships plied the Atlantic in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, bringing their human cargo to work the plantations of the West Indies and continental North America. But by 1807, Britain's parliament had banned the slave trade, and in true imperial nanny fashion prohibited it for everyone else too, declaring slavery a crime—like piracy, at which the British had also formerly excelled. The Royal Navy now had as one of its chief and most dangerous duties the patrolling of West Africa against the slavers. As the British flag traveled across the continent, so too did its mission to squelch the slave trade, convert the heathen, and deliver law, ports, and roads. In addition, in southern Africa the British unearthed diamonds and gold; in eastern Africa they established farms and ranches; in northern Africa they took command of the Suez Canal; and everywhere in Africa they were motivated by something else: a desire for discovery—most famously, to find the source of the Nile.

Britain's West African colonies—the Gambia, the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), Nigeria (which didn't become an official British protectorate until 1901), and Sierra Leone—were established as outposts for the Royal Navy's anti-slavery missions, with Sierra Leone set aside as a colony for freed slaves. West Africa was dangerous largely because of disease, but there was also the danger of hostile tribes—the conflict with one such tribe created the epic conflict of British West Africa, the Ashanti Wars.

The Ashanti, the great inland kingdom of the Gold Coast, had fought the British repeatedly (with long intervals of peace), largely over strips of shoreline where the British protected coastal tribes. Sir Charles MacCarthy (1764–1824), an Irish soldier-of-fortune whom the British made governor of Sierra Leone, was one of the Ashanti's most celebrated early victims.

In 1821, the British Crown absorbed the Gold Coast from the British African Company of Merchants, which was judged too feeble in suppressing the slave trade. It was put under the jurisdiction of MacCarthy, who fought slavers and established schools for children orphaned by the slave trade. But for all his good works he came into conflict with the Ashanti, and in a punitive expedition against them he was killed; his corpse was decapitated, and his skull, gold plated, became a goblet for the Ashanti king.

But the great Anglo-Ashanti War is reckoned to be the one of 1873–74, which pitted the Ashanti Empire and its 100,000-strong army (though only 40,000 took the field) against a British force led by Garnet Wolseley. The immediate cause of the war was the British Empire's acquisition of another strip of the Gold Coast, this one formerly held by the Dutch. The Ashanti refused to recognize Britain's claims. The British—eager to avenge the decapitation of MacCarthy and, among other frustrations, punish the Ashanti kingdom's refusal to countenance free trade—braced themselves for the Ashanti assault.

The Ashanti army was well-organized and led, and equipped with ill-aimed (actually not aimed at all) muskets that the warriors seemed to value as much for their gunpowdery bang as for anything else. For the British troops, the Gold Coast was known as the “white man's grave,” made such by tropical disease. But Wolseley, a forty-year-old major-general—the modern major-general of future Gilbert and Sullivan fame—was, as ever, prepared: his troops were issued quinine and a pamphlet on tropical warfare, written by Wolseley himself, which was chock full of tips for keeping bugs and disease at bay.

When Wolseley's force of 1,500 British and 700 black troops arrived ashore in January 1874, the Ashanti were already withdrawing, racked by sickness. So the chase was on—the Ashanti hoping to lure Wolseley into the interior and sure defeat; Wolseley looking to strike hard and fast so that he could crush the Ashanti quickly before disease caught up with his men. The first engagement, the Battle of Amoaful, was fought in dense jungle. Wolseley had made allowances for the terrain, dividing his army into small units, each led by an officer. The British came “creeping through the bush... gaining ground foot by foot... pouring a ceaseless fire into every bush which might conceal an invisible foe.” As war correspondent G. A. Henty (later a famous author of adventure stories for boys) observed, “Nothing could have been better than Sir Garnet Wolseley's plan of battle.... Where [the enemy] attacked us he found himself opposed by a continuous front of men. . . . ”
¹
The British juggernaut cut through to the Ashanti capital of Kumasi, torched it (in lieu of finding anyone with whom to negotiate), and then quick-marched to the coast in hopes of keeping the sick list from exploding. The Ashanti had troubles of their own—not only had British martial vigor surprised them, but subject tribes had risen in rebellion against the Ashanti king. Ashanti ambassadors caught up with Wolseley, agreed to the principle of free trade, and signed a peace treaty.