Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (42 page)

No wonder King George V, still the Emperor of India and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, was often perturbed about his Empire. He had visited all its major territories, the first British monarch to travel widely in his Dominions, and he doubtless looked back nostalgically to the heyday of the imperial meaning—to his Indian visit of 1906, perhaps, when 14,000 people with 600 elephants escorted him on shikari, when a road fifty miles long was built to connect his two hunting camps, and when in a single day he and his party shot 39 tigers, 18 lions and 4 Himalayan bears.

He was concerned to restore some of that old splendour, and to preserve the strength of the Crown Imperial. A proposal that his four princely sons should become Governors-General of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa came to nothing: but instead the heir to his throne, Edward, Prince of Wales, went on a series of imperial tours. One of these took him to India, where he was boycotted by Gandhi, frequently booed by disloyal demonstrators, and assured by old hands that it was no place for a white man any more, but the most successful visits were to the white Dominions: and the flavour of these tours, their period jollity, their mixture of the buoyant and the defensive, the picture they offered of the handsome but unhappy young prince, freed from the restraints of Windsor and Balmoral, almost becoming a colonial himself—the memory of those royal holidays, preserved in many books and thousands of photographs, piquantly reflects the spirit of the colonial Empire during the years of transience.

This is hardly a king-to-be visiting his future Dominions, this is a young man seeing a new world. Gone is the stately progress of the Viceroys, calm beneath their panoplies, or the grave composure of George V himself, when he sat with his wife as in marble on the Coronation dais at Delhi. The Prince of Wales, heir to all this, wore his shirt without a tie, his trousers short, his cap a’tilt, his heart on
his sleeve. It is true that he sailed in the battlecruisers
Repulse
and
Renown,
at 32,000 tons among the great warships of the world. It is true of course that he was greeted everywhere with pomp and eulogy, from the Official Odes of the Torontonians and the Sydneysiders to the drum-poems of the Ashanti:

Edward was fawned on everywhere, naturally, flattered at garden parties, curtsied to by a thousand Lady Eatons, bowed to by innumerable Sir Henrys, blessed by manly bishops in surplices and war ribbons, saluted by old soldiers in crutches and eye-patches. When his battlecruiser passed through the Suez Canal biplanes of the Royal Air Force escorted her to the Red Sea, and Indian troops of the Canal Zone base cheered her on her way. When she put in at Aden a huge banner greeted her beneath massed Union Jacks:
TELL
DADDY WE ARE HAPPY UNDER BRITISH RULE
. The Maharajah of Bharatpur came to meet him in an open landau drawn by eight elephants. The King of Nepal gave him a rhinoceros, a baby elephant, two bears, a leopard, a black panther, an iguana, a python, several partridges and two Tibetan mastiffs.

All visiting royalty met these people, unveiled these monuments, accepted these gifts. The Prince of Wales’s tours were different, though, for he represented in his own person an almost reckless break with tradition. He was glamour, visiting an Empire that was fast losing allure. He was modernity, honouring an ideal that was growing fusty. He seemed to be visiting his future subjects not in a spirit of authority, but almost with fellow-feeling, and so took to life on the Canadian prairies, indeed, that he bought himself a ranch in Alberta. The white colonials loved him, and many of the coloured subjects too, for he seemed a foretaste of emancipation, a young, fresh embodiment of an ancient legend. ‘Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master….’

Daddy was less impressed. Like the Wembley Exhibition, the royal tours seemed to please people for quite the wrong reasons, and the King was much disturbed by the newspaper cuttings which reached him from his far dominions. Riding bucking broncos indeed! Flirting with colonial girls! Foxtrotting in the small hours! This was not the spirit that made the Empire—or rather, his Majesty perhaps corrected himself, for in point of fact it was exactly that, it was not the spirit that would keep the Empire British!

New realities must be recognized. It had been clear since Chanak that the white Empire was not exactly an Empire any more, but a group of independent Powers of more or less common origin and generally compatible policies. Federal solutions had been abandoned—in the short run the Dominions would always be outvoted by Britain, in the long run Britain would always be outvoted by India.Instead, in 1930, the assembled Prime Ministers formally approved a new device of the pragmatic British political imagination, a Commonwealth of Nations. Though the name was old, the idea was said to have been perfected by Arthur Balfour, and it was full of sophistry. Britain and her white Dominions, it was decreed, were ‘autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate to each other in any aspect of their domestic or foreign affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations’.

This proposition aroused long and intricate discussion. It was like a debate among the Schoolmen. Was the Crown indivisible, or could one man be King of England and King of Canada? Could the King give his signature to opposing Acts from different countries? Could he indeed be at war with himself? Since nobody was subordinate, could anybody be expelled? Mr Hughes of Australia called it ‘an almost metaphysical document’, and King George was much disturbed by it—‘I cannot look into the future’, he wrote, straining his grammar to the limit, ‘without feeling no little anxiety about the continued unity of the Empire.’ The New Zealanders felt the same,
and did not subscribe to the new statute.
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Even the Canadians waived the right to alter some aspects of their own constitution, investing it still in the British Parliament at Westminster.
2

Though nobody had ever succeeded in binding together the disparate parts of the Empire, its self-governing Dominions, its Indian Empire, its dependent colonies, its mandated territories, its protectorates and Treaty States and condominiums—though nobody had managed to make a rational structure of it, still the overriding authority of the Crown, exerted through an imperial Parliament at Westminster, had in the past provided a recognizable unity. ‘The British Empire’, is how all the imperial delegates were jointly described, on the roster of the League of Nations. Now even that indeterminate formula was discarded. The King was still the King of all the Dominions, but separately: as the irrepressible Hughes remarked, the King of England was no longer the King of South Africa, but the King of South Africa was also King of England. In future the Governor-Generals, the King’s representatives in each Dominion, would no longer be nominated by the British Government, to represent not only the Crown but the imperial authority itself: in future they would be chosen by the Dominions, and would have no contact with the British Government in London, only with the King.

In many other ways too the Statute disintegrated the imperial whole. Now Dominion Parliaments could pass legislation in direct contradiction to Westminster. Even the grand machinery of the imperial law, all its multifarious courts culminating in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, was now shorn of its certainty: the Dominions were free to withdraw from it when they wished, and so the Empire stepped down from the most truly splendid of its postures. A man could still say
Civis
Britannicus
Sum,
but he could no longer look with certainty to those remote and impartial justices in Westminster:
Civis
Britannicus
my foot, a judge might soon say in Bloemfontein or Montreal, and there would be an end to it.

The British had tried hard, since the death of Queen Victoria, to give substance to a mystery. Now they gave mystery to a substance.
The British Commonwealth of Nations was cloudy from the start. At the time many people claimed to see the Statute of Westminster as a final charter of imperial development, and Balfour himself described it as ‘the most novel and greatest experiment in Empire-building the world has ever seen’. But it was really an admission of failure. The Empire would never be a super-Power now. Its Roman aspirations were abandoned: the only overseas delegates ever to sit in that Tribune of Empire, the House of Commons, were those from Ireland. As the Empire’s diverse parts matured into independent nations, first the Dominions, then India, then inevitably the great African and Asian colonies, so the British Empire would cease to be among the prime movers of the world, and Britishness would hive off once and for all in separate and often conflicting patriotisms.

It soon began to happen. Within a couple of years the Irish Free State took advantage of the Statute of Westminster to abolish the oath of allegiance to the Crown. Within four years Catholic Ireland was proclaimed ‘a sovereign, independent and democratic State’, and before long it was a Republic and not a member of the Commonwealth at all. The British, though dismayed by so bold and contrary an interpretation of their vision, expected no better of the Irish, and had no choice but to acquiesce: but reluctant to admit that even an Irishman could opt out of being British altogether, they decided to classify citizens of the new Republic not as un-British exactly, but as ‘non-foreign’.
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