The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (80 page)

With extraordinary fickleness, however, public opinion suddenly swung round in favour of Turkey after her general of genius, Osman Pasha, kept the Russians at bay for five months at Plevna. The heroic deeds of Turkish defenders during the siege did much to make the British forget the Bulgarian Horrors, as did the British weakness for the underdog. They remembered that the Russian bear extending its great shadow over Asia, threatening India, was the real enemy. A rumour even started that Gladstone was a Russian agent. In December 1877 Osman surrendered, Plevna fell, and at the end of January 1878 the Russian General Skobelev reached Adrianople. Surely Britain now had to make a move or the Russians would be at Constantinople, and unlikely ever to want to move out.

Fortunately for Disraeli, Britain was now violently pro-Turk and anti-Russian: Russia had captured the whole of Armenia and huge swathes of Turkish Asia, arousing alarm right across Europe. Passions were running very high. Gladstone was booed in the street and even had his windows broken. The music-hall song–

–gave its name to the militaristic sentiment of jingoism. It was sung everywhere, and it was a sentiment that became stronger and stronger towards the end of the century. The tiny queen herself was threatening abdication if the British did not go and give ‘those Russians such a beating’.

On 28 January Disraeli, who had been made the Earl of Beaconsfield, obtained a £6 million grant from Parliament for war. The fleet was ordered to leave Besika Bay and move up to Constantinople. By 15 February it was in place. The Russian army was beginning to march down towards that city when the order was suddenly given to pull up. Before its eyes were the massive grey hulls of six British warships tethered like basking sharks off Prinkipo island in the Sea of Marmara, guarding the glistening minarets of Constantinople.

The Russians returned to Adrianople. Though the tsar wanted to speed on to Constantinople, his brother the Grand Duke Nicholas believed it would be madness to proceed. On 3 March, in order to consolidate their gains while still not technically at war with Britain despite those warships, Russia quickly signed a separate peace with Turkey by the Treaty of San Stefano. Disraeli’s action had stopped Russia from entering Constantinople and seizing the Straits, but for how long? For ten weeks England held her breath, believing that an Anglo-Russian war could break out at any moment.

Deeply suspicious of this peace treaty, Disraeli did not stop his preparations for war. When it transpired that the treaty provided for a rearrangement of the Balkan peninsula so that it would be dominated by a ‘Big Bulgaria’ whose Slav population would give the Russians the preponderant influence in the Balkans, the prime minister announced that he was calling up the reserves. Two weeks later he sent 7,000 Indian troops to Malta–a sign that India had been restored to the imperial bosom. These actions convinced the Russian ambassador to London, Count Shuvalov, that the tsar could not seize Constantinople with impunity. The Russian government conceded that the great powers would have to be consulted about these changes because they affected Europe. It was agreed to call a Congress of the great powers, to take place in Berlin, capital of the dominant power of Europe, Prussia.

The Congress was hailed as Disraeli’s triumph, as in many ways it was–when it was over he was offered a dukedom by Queen Victoria. Though he was so pale from the kidney disease which killed him three years later that he wore rouge to go out at night, his actions at the Congress kept the Russians up to the mark. When they tried to stop the Turks controlling the passes of Bulgaria south of the Balkans and claimed a larger area of Armenia, he revealed a secret agreement with the Sultan of Turkey: in return for guaranteeing Turkey in Asia, Britain had been allowed to occupy Cyprus. And Disraeli now gave orders for more of the fleet to move to that island. Faced with two British fleets the Russians agreed to everything.

Disraeli returned home to be acclaimed for having secured peace. By his superior poker-playing he had restored Britain to her old international position of honour: he had reduced Russian influence in the Balkans by preventing Big Bulgaria, he had secured better rights for the Christian subjects of the sultan, who were to be monitored by military consuls, he had kept the Russians out of Constantinople, and he had stopped them gaining too much of Armenia, which could have been the jumping-off ground for penetration into Asia Minor or the Persian Gulf. In any case that danger had been neutralized because Great Britain now had a base at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

In fact the Congress was a piece of gifted stage-management, of smoke and mirrors. Most of the agreements about territory between the great powers which made the Congress go so smoothly had actually been arranged a month before. Alarmed by Disraeli’s continued threat of war the Russians had agreed to divide Big Bulgaria in two. Meanwhile Britain had made a gentleman’s agreement with Austria–Hungary to support her occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Despite the excitement with which it was hailed, there was nothing very lasting about the Congress of Berlin. For all Disraeli’s conviction of the need to keep the Turkish Empire as a bulwark against Russia, it had been partially dismembered and small nations put in its place. Fears of Bulgaria becoming a Russian satellite proved quite illusory. Though seven years later the two Bulgarias reunited, the new nation was resistant to Russian influence and jealous of her independence. Cyprus proved to be a deadweight round the British neck, as it was soon to be superseded as a base in the eastern Mediterranean by Egypt. Moreover Britain was embarrassed by being tied to Turkey, which never kept her promises of reform. Despite the military consuls, the rulers went from bad to worse in their abuse of human rights, the best known being the Armenian massacre of 1892. In fact the most striking effect of the Russo-Turkish War and the Congress of Berlin was that Serbia felt hard done by. Like Montenegro and Romania she had won her independence, but she had a considerable grievance because Austria–Hungary had been allowed to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose populations were mainly Serbian.

Nevertheless most of Britain, with the vehement exception of Gladstone, believed that it was Disraeli’s finest hour. He turned down the dukedom but accepted the Garter on condition that Salisbury, the foreign secretary, was awarded it too. Disraeli’s ‘forward’ policy of expanding British territories in South Africa and India was far less successful, however. Although in west Africa, where Britain had had trading settlements since the eighteenth century, she had defeated the warlike Ashanti tribes on the Gold Coast in 1873, the Zulu War of 1878–9 was a public relations disaster. The Zulus, the most fearsome tribe in southern Africa, had been driven by drought into looking for other lands on which to graze their cattle. By 1877 the bankrupt Transvaal Republic had agreed to be annexed by the British in order to obtain their protection against the Zulus.

The formidable Zulu chief Cetewayo had revived the organization of the tribe on the old military basis. All the young unmarried men had to belong to regiments; removed from their families at puberty to live in barracks beside the royal kraal or palace, they were not allowed to marry until they had wet their spears with blood. When the British demanded an end to Zulu mobilization, the Zulu War began–and, despite the obvious advantages of guns over spears, at Isandhlwana a camp of British soldiers was wiped out by an impi, or Zulu army, of 20,000 men. The Zulus used the land so skilfully, moved so fast and secretly, that no one had the least idea that they were in the vicinity, until they suddenly rose out of the dust in their feathered headdresses to wreak havoc among the British. The war continued badly: Napoleon’s III’s son, the Prince Imperial, who had volunteered for the British army to gain experience, was killed in an ambush. Abandoned by his commanding officer, he was found dead in a pool of his own blood–though Queen Victoria, who liked the Zulus (they were brave and ‘cleanly’, she thought), was impressed by the way the Zulus had been so scientific in severing his arteries that he died without pain.

At Rorke’s Drift, where a handful of British soldiers held out against the entire Zulu army, British honour was to some extent redeemed, and at the Battle of Ulundi the power of the Zulus was broken for many years to come. But the war had made Disraeli unpopular. It had been conducted so badly that it would have been almost comic had the thought of men being pointlessly slaughtered not also made the electorate angry; it was their sons and brothers whose lives were being thrown away so cavalierly.

Afghanistan was another scene of humiliation. Though India herself remained quiet, Russian movements in Asia took on new significance in the summer of 1878 when tension between Britain and Russia was at its height. Fears that the tsar would steal a march in Afghanistan, where the Russian ambassador was received but not the British, instigated an invasion of the country by three British armies. The amir fled, and his son Yakub Khan signed a treaty which appeared to make Afghanistan a British protectorate. But the British resident Sir Louis Cavagnari and his entire staff at the British embassy were murdered in September 1879, and the new Amir was forced to seek refuge in the British camp. A second punitive invasion of Afghanistan followed under the masterly soldier Sir Frederick Roberts, who had won the Victoria Cross for gallantry during the Indian Mutiny.

Though Roberts took Kabul successfully, deposed Yakub Khan and made an extraordinary march from Kabul to Kandahar, the murder of a British consul and of Foreign and Colonial Office personnel and the strikingly incompetent campaign in South Africa combined to wipe the shine off Disraeli’s record popularity as a general election approached in 1880. On top of that, a severe agricultural depression struck in the late 1870s. Though this was not the Conservatives’ fault, it gave the impression of a government which had lost its grip.

For in 1876 the extraordinary economic boom which the British people had enjoyed since the 1840s came to a halt. Other European countries like Germany and France which had industrialized later were now drawing level with Britain. There was a slump and a flurry of bankruptcies in 1879. At the same time British grain prices collapsed. This was the result of successive bad harvests in 1875–80 which made it impossible to do without importing cheap grain, combined with the cheapness of that foreign grain suddenly available from Canada and the Midwest of America.

The tide turned against the Conservatives as thousands of farmers went to the wall. For the cheap foreign corn continued to come into the country, unhampered by protection. And Disraeli, who had pronounced protection ‘dead and damned’, could not bring it back. Though other European countries turned to tariffs to protect their infant industries, free trade was still an article of British nineteenth-century faith. The result was a massive flight from the land. Between 1860 and 1901, some 40 per cent of male labourers went to live in towns or emigrated, and by the beginning of the twentieth century 95 per cent of British food was imported, as it still is. The invention of refrigeration and canning processes at the end of the nineteenth century meant that cheap meat could be bought from the Argentine, where costs were lower.

Disraeli’s government had also failed to manage the House of Commons. A new generation of more militant Irish Nationalist MPs who called themselves Home Rulers was obstructing business at Westminster. The bad harvests, which were even more disastrous for Ireland’s rural economy than for England’s, and the fact that the 1870 Land Act was only partially successful, made them determined to have a Dublin Parliament again.

There was a lot of material for Gladstone to build on and, being a virtuoso orator, he triumphed in his whirlwind Midlothian campaign across Scotland. Disraeli’s foreign policy was made to look perilous and morally wrong as Gladstone denounced any alliance with the Ottomans in energetic and novel stump oratory. He took his views to the people, giving speeches that lasted for several hours, day in, day out, wherever a railway line could be found–a new form of electioneering with whistle-stop train tours across the country. Gladstone had formulated a style to appeal to the massively increased electorate. Instead of voicing the considered views of the sophisticated Victorian gentleman, Gladstone had his eye on greater popular participation and a more emotional, simplistic approach to the issues.

The campaign was enormously successful, and the election brought the Liberals in on a huge majority in 1881–349 Liberals were returned against 243 Conservatives. It elevated the Grand Old Man, as Gladstone was known, to a sort of superstar status. However, thanks to the secret ballot, sixty Irishmen were elected on the Home Rule ticket. That was where the future battleground lay. Meanwhile as Gladstone started to undo most of Disraeli’s imperial policies, withdrawing from Afghanistan, granting independence to the Transvaal, the great man himself was dying. Queen Victoria asked if she might visit Disraeli on his sickbed, but he refused, quipping to intimates that she would only ask him to carry a message to Albert. By April 1881 he was dead. Victoria was so upset that she personally wrote out the announcement of his death in the Court Circular. Though protocol forbade the sovereign from attending a funeral (a custom Queen Elizabeth, her great-great-granddaughter, broke when she attended the funeral of Winston Churchill), Victoria sent a wreath of primroses from Osborne, with a note saying they were Disraeli’s favourite flowers.

The new Liberal Parliament looked destined for even greater success than its radical predecessor of 1868. But instead of further reforms Gladstone’s second government found itself bogged down by Ireland, whose Home Rulers were now headed by a ruthless master of tactics in Charles Stewart Parnell. Much of Gladstone’s time was taken up in dealing with him and his terrorist allies in Ireland, while a series of untoward events in the empire lost him a great deal of popularity. Gladstone’s foreign policy was coloured by his determination to destroy what he contemptuously described as ‘the castle of Beaconsfieldism’–Disraeli’s grandiose imperial projects. He felt strongly that the British Empire could not continue to grow nor to administer such vast swathes of the world’s population and that Britain’s interests were often best served by encouraging self-determination and what he called ‘the healthy growth of local liberty’.