The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (9 page)

Salisbury did not like the changes even though he was clearly one of the more fortunate ones. ‘Things that have been secure for centuries,’ he said, ‘are secure no longer.’ Mass democracy was undermining the traditional upper classes and this was bad for society. ‘He thought and fought for his order,’ said his fellow politician Lord George Hamilton, ‘not to ensure to them privileges or exemptions, but because he believed their maintenance did supply the best material for sound and reliable government.’ Salisbury sought office, so Hamilton believed, solely for the promotion of his country’s welfare.
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If so, he sought with success. By the time of the Diamond Jubilee Salisbury had been Prime Minister three times, Foreign Minister three times, and Secretary of State for India twice. Fortunately, he had a great capacity for hard work and an equally important ability to cope with pressure. He did not lose sleep over worry, he told a niece, and when he had to make decisions, he told his family, he simply did his best even if it was something as trivial as trying to decide whether to take an overcoat for a walk. ‘I feel it is exactly the same way, but no more, when I am writing a despatch upon which peace or war may depend. Its degree depends upon the materials for decision that are available and not in the least upon the magnitude of the results which may follow. With the results I have nothing to do.’
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When he became Prime Minister for his last time in 1895 he chose, as he had done before, to be his own Foreign Minister. ‘Our first duty’, he told an audience a few months after the Diamond Jubilee, ‘is towards the people of this country, to maintain their interests and their rights; our second is to all humanity.’ Since he believed that British hegemony in the world was generally benevolent, the two goals were not in his mind incompatible. His strategy in foreign affairs was a simple one: to protect Great Britain, its interests and its position in the world, preferably without unnecessary complications – such as alliances and secret agreements. He did not like what he described to the queen as ‘active measures’.
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Perhaps he was referring obliquely to his great rival William Gladstone and his Liberal Party, who did believe in intervening in
Europe and, if necessary, for humanitarian reasons. At best, Salisbury thought, Britain should use its influence to prevent its neighbours from ‘flying at each other’s throats’ because that was generally bad for everyone.
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And he was prepared, where he felt British interests were at stake, to be firm, even to the point of threatening military action. With the opening of the Suez Canal, Egypt became of crucial importance to British links with India and the Far East. Britain had to control it whatever other nations thought and, as a further safeguard, the upper reaches of the Nile as well. At the end of the 1890s, Salisbury was to find himself in a military confrontation with France there.

Like so many of his countrymen, Salisbury tended to assume that foreigners were more selfish and less reliable than the British and, in the case of the Latins, more emotional. The Greeks were ‘the blackmailers of Europe’ and when the French moved in on Tunisia, it was ‘well within the French code of honour as habitually practised’.
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When Britain and Germany competed for influence in East Africa in the 1880s, Salisbury warned a young consul who was being sent to the island of Zanzibar: ‘The whole question of Zanzibar is both difficult and dangerous, for we are perforce partners with the Germans whose political morality diverges considerably from ours on many points.’
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Although he could muse about the ‘vanity’ of expanding the empire, he was determined that Britain should have its share of whatever was going: ‘the instinct of the nation will never be content without a share in the booty which it sees its neighbours greedily dividing’.
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He does not seem to have disliked any one nation more than another – except for the United States. He found in Americans everything he disliked about the modern world: they were greedy, materialistic, hypocritical, and vulgar and believed that democracy was the best form of government. During the Civil War he was a passionate supporter of the Confederate side, partly because he thought that Southerners were gentlemen and Northerners were not. In addition, though, he feared the growth of American power. As he wrote gloomily in 1902: ‘It is very sad, but I am afraid America is bound to forge ahead and nothing can restore the equality between us. If we had interfered in the Confederate War it was then possible for us to reduce the power of the United States to manageable proportions. But
two
such chances are not given to a nation in the course of its career.’
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His views on foreigners did not prevent Salisbury, when he was in charge of foreign affairs, working for specific ends with other powers. He made agreements, for example, with Italy and Austria at the end of the 1880s to maintain the status quo in and around the Mediterranean. To keep Egypt safe from the French, who had not forgiven Britain for taking over its management in 1882, he kept on good terms with Germany. At times, although he disliked the growing importance of public opinion in foreign affairs, he found it useful in refusing unwanted commitments and alliances. In the 1890s, when the Germans suggested a common front against the French, Salisbury regretted that his hands were tied: ‘Parliament and people would not be guided in any degree by the fact that the Government had some years before signed a secret agreement to go to war.’
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He also made the further argument, easier perhaps with an unwritten constitution, that Great Britain was constitutionally barred from making peacetime agreements that could lead to war.
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More importantly, the Royal Navy – the largest in the world – and the geographical advantages that came from being an island, meant Britain had the freedom to choose to remain relatively independent in world affairs.

While he did his best to keep Britain free of entanglements, Salisbury also tried to prevent strong blocs coalescing against it. As he explained in a speech at Caernarvon in 1888, nations should behave like sensible householders with their neighbours.

If you wish to get on with the people with whom you are living, you must not be looking for perpetual opportunities of getting a little advantage over them; you must view your own claims and theirs in a just and neighbourly spirit, – on the one hand never sacrificing any important and genuine right in respect to which you think that oppression or encroachment is being attempted, – and, on the other hand, abstaining from erecting small controversies into envenomed disputes and treating every difference as a matter of vital principle.

Those who are not careful to behave in a reasonable and neighbourly fashion, he went on, ‘will find that they are opposed by a combination of those neighbours …’
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If there were to be combinations, Salisbury felt, and this reflected a
long-standing British policy, it was better that they should be two or more and against each other rather than Britain. Britain’s relations with Europe usually worked best when Britain was on as friendly a footing with as many of the other powers as possible and when there was a rough balance of power on the Continent which enabled Britain to manoeuvre among the different groupings. Salisbury managed to convince himself, if not the other European powers, that Britain was in this way contributing to the greater good of all. As he put it in his Caernarvon speech, ‘There is all the difference in the world between good natured, good humoured effort to keep well with your neighbours, and that spirit of haughty and sullen “isolation” which has been dignified by the name of “non-intervention”. We are part of the community of Europe and we must do our duty as such.’
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Although Salisbury disliked what he called ‘jargon about isolation’,
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that is how his foreign policy has come to be characterised. When Queen Victoria protested in January 1896 that Britain seemed somewhat isolated, Salisbury replied sharply that isolation ‘is much less danger than the danger of being dragged into wars which do not concern us’. It was a view shared by his Conservative colleagues. ‘Our isolation’, Lord Goschen, the First Lord of the Admiralty, told a Conservative gathering in 1896, ‘is not an isolation of weakness, or of contempt for ourselves; it is deliberately chosen, the freedom to act as we choose in any circumstances that may arise.’
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In the same year first a Canadian politician and then Joseph Chamberlain added the adjective ‘splendid’ and the term spread with surprising rapidity. ‘Splendid isolation’ and Britain’s skilful manipulation of the balance of power were, so it was argued, not only a deliberate policy choice but one sanctified by tradition at least as far back as the great Queen Elizabeth I herself as she manoeuvred between her rivals of France and Spain to ensure Britain’s safety. ‘A balance of power on the Continent’, said an historian of her reign, ‘was what suited her, as it has generally suited this country.’
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Montagu Burrows, the Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford, vested it with almost mystical significance as ‘the Balance’ and quoted Edmund Burke with approval as saying that Britain was of all powers the most suited to look after it. ‘It is not too much say’, he said proudly, ‘that it has been the saving of Europe.’
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In retrospect, how complacent it seems. Even at the time there was
something defiant about it all. In 1897, as it celebrated the Diamond Jubilee, Britain was indeed isolated but its position in the world was not all that splendid. It had no secure friendships in Europe. It was engaged in a number of disputes and rivalries around the world, with the United States over Venezuela, with France in several parts of the world, with Germany in Africa and the Pacific, and with Russia in Central Asia and China. The empire itself was a mixed blessing. To be sure it brought Britain prestige and it gave British manufacturing protected markets and in theory it brought greater power as well. A cartoon in
Punch
at the time of the great naval review showed an old British lion rowing four young lions – Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the Cape – out to see the fleet.
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Yet the young lions did not always show much enthusiasm for taking on the burden of defending themselves, much less the empire as a whole.

And the empire kept growing as Britain took on still more colonies and protectorates around the world, partly in an attempt to protect what it already had. As other powers joined in the scramble for territory its empire became increasingly vulnerable. Sir Thomas Sanderson, the Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, said a few years later: ‘It has sometimes seemed to me that to a foreigner reading our Press the British Empire must appear in the light of some huge giant sprawling over the globe, with gouty fingers and toes outstretched in every direction which cannot be approached without soliciting a scream.’
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The term ‘imperial over-stretch’ had not yet been coined but Britain was suffering from it by the 1890s. Kipling’s poem ‘Recessional’, which he wrote just after he saw the great naval review at Spithead, contained a warning:

Far-called our navies melt away –

On dune and headland sinks the fire –

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget – lest we forget!

While Britain was still the world’s leading manufacturer, its industries were being overtaken by newer and more dynamic ones in Germany
or the United States, which were also cutting into its overseas markets. The stories that toy soldiers for British children were made in Germany may not have been true but they reflected a growing anxiety – including about Britain’s ability to defend itself.

Because it was an island, Britain had been able to get away with having a tiny army and relying on its navy for its own defence and that of its empire. The advances in technology meant that navies were increasingly expensive and the burden on the budget correspondingly greater. ‘The weary Titan,’ said Joseph Chamberlain, ‘staggering under the too-vast orb of his fate.’
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Moreover, there were worries that the global commitments of the Royal Navy left the British Isles themselves underprotected. Pessimists in the military had been warning since the late 1880s that the French, if they chose, could easily sweep aside a British naval force in the Channel and land an invasion force in England. Salisbury himself sketched out a scenario in 1888 in a memorandum to the Cabinet in which he envisaged the French, led ‘by the kind of soldier who comes to the top in a revolution’, landing on a Saturday night when the British were enjoying the weekend. With the help of ‘two or three Irish patriots’, the invaders could cut the telegraph wires and make their way to London before anyone in the British military could react.
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The prospect – and how much he really believed in it is questionable – did not stop him, however, from continuing to take his holidays in France.