Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (12 page)

There was a revulsion against the ‘stock-jobbing imperialism’ which had, so many people thought, dragged Britain into the conflict. The mostly Jewish ‘Randlords’, the mining magnates of the Transvaal, became figures of contumely and derision, and there were hints of corruption and speculation nearer home—‘the more the Empire expands,’ suggested
Punch
disagreeably, ‘the more the Chamberlains contract.’

When the brave Lord Dundonald volunteered for the war, taking the Secret Plan with him, his aged mother did her best to dissuade him: ‘I do not like your going out to fight the Boers. It is an
unrighteous war and Kruger is a religious good man and reads the Bible.’ Kipling’s aunt, Lady Burne-Jones, hung a black flag from her window at the news of the Boer capitulation, with the text: ‘We have Killed and Taken Possession.’ The popular writer H. H. Munro (‘Saki’) passionately opposed the war in the
Westminster
Gazette,
and the
Manchester
Guardian
was burnt on the Stock Exchange for its pro-Boer attitudes, surviving at all only because it was commercially indispensable to Lancashire.

Emily Hobhouse, the daughter of a distinguished Liberal family, furiously denounced to the world the dreadful conditions inside Kitchener’s internment camps. The general called her ‘that bloody woman’, but Campbell-Bannerman told the House of Commons that the camps were a ‘barbaric’ method of winning a war, while Field-Marshal Sir Neville Chamberlain said there had been nothing so shameful in the annals of the British Army.
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The war brought to fame, too, a British politician of an altogether new kind, David Lloyd George, the cobbler’s ward from Llanystumdwy in North Wales—a man not simply of the people, but of a fringe of the people, somebody totally alien to the English traditions of hierarchy and dominion, an iconoclast, a man who did not even believe English to be necessarily best, but surrounded himself with Welsh aides and secretaries, talked Welsh most of the time, and paid no attention to British conventions of reticence and decorum.

These were no more than omens. The mass of the British remained loyal to the imperial cause and the British way of things, and few people yet wondered whether it was actually wrong in principle for one nation forcibly to rule another. When Lloyd George presumed to express his heresies in Birmingham, he was so furiously attacked by a patriotic mob that he had to be whisked away in a police van, and when the Government went to the country in the Khaki Election of 1900, it was easily re-elected. The epitaphists of Empire could still write, as one did on a memorial at Wagon Hill, Ladysmith:

But somehow it had lost its innocence. Take that celebrated imperial occasion, Mafeking Day, May 17, 1900. On the face of it this was a simple expression of joy and relief, but there was something hysterical to it, something at once self-conscious and self-delusory. It was only a little railway town that had been relieved, far away, of small importance to the course of the war: yet London in all its tremendous history had never known such scenes of celebration. It was a kind of madness. Every class of Londoner poured rambunctious and often drunken into the streets, and the capital gave itself over to three days and nights of carnival.

In retrospect it seems a very different festival, and we see it almost as a mourning dance. Just as in adult life a suggestion of nursery fire or bedtime story conjures from the past the comforts of childhood, so Mafeking seems to have satisfied a wistful yearning in the public mind, a yearning for lost years of certainty and fulfilment. The magic was leaving the British Empire. Six months later Queen Victoria died, and with her went the imperial virtue. She was like a great old oak, whose roots run deep into a parkland, whose branches shade half a meadow, and when she died some old instinct died too, the British lost some sense of favour, the world a sense of awe.
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M
ANY aspects of Victorianism died with Victoria, and many aspects of imperialism too. All of a sudden, it seemed, the giants were leaving. Gladstone had already gone, wistfully longing for death but often breaking into ‘Praise to the Holiest in the height’. Salisbury soon took his last tricycle ride round the estate. Rhodes was buried in the Matopo Hills, having instructed his portrait-painter to give him ‘the eyes of the sphinx looking over the desert into eternity for the future, only in my case for the Empire of the race that I believe to be the best…’. Ruskin, who had once offered the British Empire an ideology, died incoherent at the height of the Boer War. G. A. Henty, who had made it one long adventure, died as soon as he had completed
With
Roberts
to
Pretoria
. W. E. Henley, who saw it as a heroic sacrament, had time before going in 1903 to hear his ‘Last Post’ set to music by Sir Charles Stanford, and to publish his threnody for the Queen herself—

The new king, Edward VII, was not very interested in his Empire, and the Edwardian age never did recapture the flair, conviction or vulgarity of the great enterprise. Asked long before what was the secret of the imperial system, one of its practitioners had shortly replied: ‘It’s not the system, it’s the men.’ By King Edward’s day, though, the individualism of Empire had inevitably waned. The paladin imperialists of Victoria’s prime, who seized whole provinces, deposed kings, established regimes on their own initiative, could not survive in the twentieth century. Rhodes the Colossus left no successor, never another Raffles created a Singapore.
The Edwardian gentleman of England, though truly an ornament of western civilization, lacked the effrontery of Empire.

In the first years of the new century, nevertheless, some remarkable Britons still found in the imperial
métier
a satisfaction worthy of their gifts, and brought to their distant offices distinction by international standards (for by and large, as the century progressed, the Empire was to become more and more provincial). Lord Cromer, the
de
facto
ruler of Egypt, Lord Kitchener, Lord Curzon the Viceroy of India, Lord Milner the High Commissioner in South Africa—all these were world figures. In this chapter we look at two of them, to see how they fitted themselves into the imperial structure, and what they made of it.

To understand the posture of Curzon in India, we must first visit Kedleston, the country home in Derbyshire from which he took his title. The Curzons had lived at Kedleston for 800 years, providing not only its squires, but often its vicars too. They were not a particularly distinguished family—none of them appeared in the
Dictionary
of National
Biography
—but they were evidently tenacious.
LET CURZON HOLDE
, ran the family motto,
WHAT CURZON HELDE
.

Kedleston Hall was a famous house, designed by James Paine and Robert Adams in the eighteenth century. With its wide parkland all about, its sweep of colonnade and rose garden, its tremendous Great Hall with columns of pink alabaster, it was also overpoweringly English. It was like a country seat in a novelette (though Dr Johnson, who thought it all much overdone, said it would do ‘excellently well for a town hall’). Here were the deer, grouped picturesquely around the lake. Here was the parish church, like a family chapel, where Curzons of every reign lay beneath their honorifics. Here was the estate graveyard, where gardeners and gamekeepers of many generations lay under their slabs. Ancestral portraits hung thick on every landing, and ever and again one found, sculpted on monument or engraved beneath escutcheon, slogans of familial pride—‘This ancient Family which has inherited
a Good name and ample Possessions in this place From before the
NORMAN CONQUEST
.’
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Out of such a background came George Nathaniel Curzon. He was the eldest boy in a family of two sons and nine daughters, and among the most precocious of his contemporaries at Eton and at Balliol, Oxford, where he was cruelly immortalized in the famous verses:

At an early age Curzon decided that only two ambitions in life were worthy of his pursuit: to be Viceroy of India, to be Prime Minister of England. The first of them, after twenty years of travel and lesser politics, he achieved at the almost unexampled age of thirty-nine when, with his graceful American wife (the first of two). he landed on the blazing quayside at Bombay on December 30, 1898 for the first of two viceregal terms—seven years in all. There had been twenty-two Viceroys or Governor-Generals before him, but none were more truly viceregal, left more striking an image behind, or approached the task with quite such a high-flown pride and reverence.

Curzon was an imperialist out of his class. Not many of the landed gentry were much enthralled by the imperial mission, and it was at
Kedleston indeed that a perceptive young Indian maharajah, viewing the idyllic scene around him, wondered why on earth Englishmen went to India at all, when they could stay at home in such a place, ‘playing the flute and watching the rabbits’. Curzon was one of the few. Having a taste for lordliness, having travelled in his youth extensively in Persia and Central Asia, being by nature an autocrat, a connoisseur, a humorist, he responded readily to the magnificence of Empire, and believed genuinely in its usefulness. He thought it, ‘under Providence, the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen … there has never been anything so great in the world’s history’.

He saw its grand offices of authority as extensions of the British aristocratic condition. The Viceroyalty, he once said, was ‘the dream of my childhood, the fulfilled ambition of my manhood, and my highest conception of duty to the State’. The Governors of Empire stood towards their subject peoples as the landowners of Derbyshire stood towards their tenants, absolute but paternal: it was a true figure of affairs, he considered, that the Governor-General’s great palace at Calcutta, into which he moved that winter, should have been modelled directly if inadequately upon Kedleston Hall.

At home Curzon moved in the quickest and most elegant of English circles, the club called the Souls, a happy alliance of power, intellect and social eminence which thrived in the heady years of
fin
de
siècle
. His closest friends ranged from Arthur Balfour, ‘the last of the Athenians’, to Wilfrid Blunt, the most outspoken of the anti-imperialists, who said he hoped Curzon would be the best but the last of all the Viceroys. In India he found himself among a very different kind of Briton. The men of the Indian Civil Service were, as a whole, less than scintillating. Diligent, incorruptible, highly educated, they distinctly lacked the airy spirit of the Souls. Since the Mutiny half a century before they had become increasingly institutionalized, aloof to the world outside, enthralled by their monumental task of governing a sub-continent, but growing ever more convinced that in India especially there could be nothing new under the sun. Their methods had been tested down the generations, and were by now embodied in a thousand precedents and corollaries,
docketed in a million cubby-holes, and wrapped up in red tape from Dacca to Karachi.

Curzon was much depressed by these colleagues, and by the style of bureaucratic life in India. The pace of it he found unbearably ponderous—‘like the diurnal revolution of the earth’, he wrote, ‘went the files, steady, solemn, sure and slow’—and every initiative he made seemed to be muffled, diverted or referred back. He made few friends in India, he was often in pain from his back, injured in a riding accident twenty years before, and he was sadly homesick. ‘The echo of the great world’, he wrote to a friend, ‘hums like the voice of a seashell in one’s ears.’

So he withdrew ever more haughtily into the powers of his own autocracy: and since the idea of India, India in the abstract, India as a supreme field of British enterprise and imagination, still moved him greatly, in a curious osmosis this most devotedly English of politicians became the most nearly Indian of Viceroys. We see him sphinx-like and elegant at the head of his Executive Council in Calcutta: pink-cheeked still but slightly sneering, dominating the room with an astringency, a sheathed cleverness, that inhibited all but the most self-confident.
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We see him receiving visitors among the trophies of the palace at Calcutta, the treaties and the captured ensigns, the portraits of triumphant predecessors or defeated enemies: the sense of history that always inspired him, his vision of India itself as the noblest trophy of them all, gives him an extraordinary power of presence, so that the most disrespectful visiting MP bows despite himself, and the most determinedly republican American involuntarily curtseys. We see him riding to the manner born in the howdahs of elephants, or passing with benevolent inclinations of his head beneath arches proclaiming him the Benefactor of India, or the Success Fighter of Famine.
2
He was the shadow of the King, taking precedence in ceremonial over the heir to the Throne. He was the Viceroy and Governor-General. He it was whose will could decree events in the remote valleys of Nagaland,
or in mud huts of Travancore. He was the successor to the Moghuls. He was the equal of Princes. He was Curzon of Kedleston.
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This was the romantic view of imperial responsibilities, and as such it was an anachronism. Though Curzon much admired efficiency, and spoke proudly of his own ‘middle-class methods’, still he came to India in the spirit of earlier times, as though there were no obstructive bureaucrats to hamper him, or daily directives from Whitehall. He was excited rather than daunted by the magnitude of the task, and by the daring of the British presence there—‘a speck of foam’, he called it once, ‘upon a dark and unfathomable ocean’. In his ideas if not his methods he was like one of the tremendous enthusiasts who, with gun and Bible and unshakeable assurance, had established British rule in the Punjab sixty years before. Like them, he believed that no aspect of life should be beneath the notice of a great ruler. Land revenues, railway systems, universities, the growth of industry, the control of commerce, irrigation, corruption in the police, provincial administration, border control—in matters petty or incalculable, from the Forward Policy on the frontiers to the smallest detail of office management, Lord Curzon laid down a policy, instituted an inquiry, or at least made his opinions known.

He saw India as a Power in itself—‘a not always friendly Power’, Balfour suggested—and was constantly chafing against the interference of London in Indian affairs. In another age one might imagine him breaking away altogether, a rebellious satrap, to establish his own Empire in the East. As it was, he considered India a suzerain in its own right, with the authority to extend its discipline over lesser neighbours. He sent, as we shall later see, an aggressive expedition into Tibet, the most private of all countries, and in an imperial gesture long remembered he made a viceregal visitation to the sheikhdoms and emirates of the Persian Gulf, impressing upon that fractious and frequently murderous congeries of princelings the power of India and the Empire—the Great Government, as the Arabs gratifyingly learnt to call it.

This was a marvellous progress. Imperial suzerainty over the Gulf was for the most part unwritten, but distinct. It was the
British who had charted the Gulf waters, mapped its shores, marked its reefs with the lights of the Imperial Lighthouse Service, and put down the piracy which, for hundreds of years, had been at once the plague and the mainstay of its seafarers. They had also, from time to time, backed the more useful of the sheikhs against the pretensions of their theoretical overlords, the Turks. Curzon accordingly descended upon the Gulf in seigneurial state, sailing in the brand-new Indian Marine troopship
Hardinge
(6,520 tons), with an escort of six white gunboats. He wanted to impress upon the sheikhs, still innocent, if that is the word, of the world outside the Gulf, that they must have no truck with foreign interlopers in the purlieus of the British Empire—Germans in Iraq, Russians in Persia, or the French who had for 200 years cherished designs upon Muscat.

How he enjoyed himself! Wherever he went he was greeted with elaborate and sometimes Gilbertian deference. At Muscat, ‘the most Byronical place you can possibly imagine’, the melancholy Sultan described Lady Curzon as a pearl, to which the Viceroy pointedly replied that the Persian Gulf was a pearl too, and one the British Empire well realized the value of. At Kuwait, there being no jetty, Curzon was carried ashore on the backs of retainers, and there being no carriages either, a victoria had been especially imported from Bombay.
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Sometimes sheikhs were entertained beneath the awnings of the
Hardinge,
where Lady Curzon, in muslin and white flowered hats, impeccably received them.

It was a truly Curzonian tour, not because of the excursions, pageantries and ludicrous mishaps which so amused him, but because through it all he pursued a purpose which he saw idealistically and nobly expressed: the right of the Raj to impose its own peace and order upon its perimeters. ‘We opened these seas to the ships of all nations’, he told the sheikhs, with justice, ‘and enabled their flags to fly in peace. We have not destroyed your independence but have preserved it. We are not now going to throw away this
century of costly and triumphant enterprise…. The peace of these  waters will be maintained; your independence will continue to be upheld and the influence of the British Government will remain supreme.’