The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (81 page)

At the Battle of Majuba Hill in 1881 the First Boer War ended in the crushing defeat of the British, and Gladstone granted the Transvaal her independence once more. Now that the Zulu threat had been removed the Boers had no reason to be federated with the British. In Britain the battle was seen as a mortifying failure for the British army and for Gladstone, who, many federationists considered, should have continued to fight to keep the Transvaal within Cape Colony. In 1880 Britain withdrew from Afghanistan. British forces had helped establish Abdur Rahman on the throne in the hope that the widespread support for him would make Afghanistan a firm barrier between India and the Russians. When in 1885 Russian forces occupied Penjdeh within Afghanistan’s borders it seemed as though Britain might be forced into war with Russia. But by submitting the problem to international arbitration–the King of Denmark ruled in favour of giving Penjdeh to Russia–war between the two powers over what had become known as the Great Game was narrowly avoided.

Nevertheless even Gladstone could not completely resist Britain’s tendency to expand into new territories to protect her existing empire. Ironically it was he himself who shifted the axis of Britain’s interests into the Near East when he occupied Egypt in 1882 to prevent a rebel officer from closing the Suez Canal. For the Canal had utterly changed Britain’s priorities–her foreign policy had had to swing round to protect Egypt against all comers. By occupying Egypt, Gladstone set up the base camp for the creation in Africa of an extraordinary forward expansion of the British Empire, what is known as the ‘new colonialism’.

As Turkey continued to disintegrate, Egypt, which was still technically part of the Ottoman Empire under a Turkish governor, had become almost entirely self-reliant. She also became increasingly important as a major part of the world’s shipping now passed through the Suez Canal. But being exposed to the huge amount of new capital that flooded in destabilized her economy. In 1879, when the state was bankrupted under the rule of the unbusinesslike and extravagant khedive, Disraeli joined France in setting up a system of dual control in Egypt. This effectively put the government of the country, which was soon largely financed by British and French shareholders, into the hands of the two western powers.

In 1882 an Arab nationalist revolt broke out under an Egyptian army officer named Arabi Pasha, who seized the crucial harbour and forts of Alexandria and threatened to close the Suez Canal. With Alexandria swept by rioting, against his deepest principles Gladstone was forced to send a British army under Sir Garnet Wolseley to occupy Egypt on behalf of the Canal’s creditors. The khedive and his viceroy Tewfik were reinstated. Britain was alone in this adventure as France refused to help, still exhausted by the devastation of the Franco-Prussian War and the ruinous reparations. The mighty British fleet which had ruled the waves for three-quarters of a century was sent to pound Alexandria until it capitulated. Gladstone believed that there was nothing else he could have done, but he offended all his venerable old Radical colleagues like the Quaker John Bright, who resigned from the government.

As a result of the French no-show, dual control ended. Though the khedive had been reinstated, the real rulers of Egypt were the British army and Sir Evelyn Baring, a practical and efficient financial administrator, sent out by Gladstone to supervise the way Egypt was run and return her chaotic finances to solvency. The British thus found themselves controlling Egypt almost by accident. Only Gladstone’s conscience stopped outright annexation. Although the occupation was never official, in effect Egypt became part of the empire. The British army put into Egypt by Gladstone, friend of small nations struggling for birth, would remain there until 1954.

By the time Baring retired as the first Earl of Cromer in 1907, after almost forty years of his reforming activities Egypt was prosperous and thriving. But once Britain had become embroiled there other problems surfaced. At the beginning of 1880 a fanatical religious leader called the mahdi raised a revolt in the south of the country, in the Egyptian-occupied Sudan, and soon most of the area was under his sway. An English officer, Hicks Pasha, sent south with an Egyptian army to capture the mahdi, was massacred by the rebel leader and his followers, to the outrage of the London papers. This reverse was so conclusive that the government abandoned its attempt to hold the Sudan and decided to evacuate the few Egyptian garrisons that were left round Khartoum in the middle of the country.

The engineer officer chosen to evacuate the Sudan, General Gordon, was a legendary figure to the English public. Nicknamed ‘Chinese’ Gordon for his thirty-three victories in the service of the Chinese, as the khedive’s administrator he had zealously suppressed the slave trade in the Sudan during the 1870s. In 1883, with immense pomp Cabinet ministers and the Duke of Cambridge, the commander-in-chief of the army, saw off Gordon at Charing Cross station, but once the general got to the Sudan the government refused, on grounds of cost, to give him the further troops he needed for a successful expedition. As a result Gordon became marooned in Khartoum, cut off from his headquarters in Egypt. From late March 1884 onwards, Sir Evelyn Baring begged the Cabinet to send an expeditionary force to relieve Khartoum, but ministers could not agree despite a vociferous campaign in the newspapers and in the nation at large in favour of rescuing General Gordon. Gladstone in particular worried about being dug deeper into the African continent. He was unwilling to face the fact that by occupying Egypt he had done exactly that, irreversibly.

Despite the mounting anger in Britain at leaving Gordon, the Cabinet was paralysed for four months. Not until August was Sir Garnet Wolseley sent to the Sudan. And it was not until 28 January 1885 that his deputy Sir Herbert Stewart at last arrived to rescue Gordon, having fought his way up the Nile. But Khartoum had been taken by the mahdi two days before and Gordon himself executed.

The few who survived told of how Gordon, though weak from disease and inanition because the town had run out of food (the soldiers were having to eat the horses and dogs), had impressed everyone by the way he nursed his dying men. Most were so weak that they could no longer stand upright at the palisades of the fort. But, on 26 January, the Nile waters, which had been so low that they impeded the British rescue mission coming upriver, finally receded so far that there was only a trickle of water dividing Khartoum from the mahdi. At twilight the mahdi and his hordes crossed.

Gordon refused to wall himself up in the palace and insisted on dying alongside the inhabitants of the town. He had been killed as he was coming down the steps of the palace just before dawn when the slaughter began. It was there that Sir Herbert Stewart found his headless body. Beside it was Gordon’s diary: ‘If the expeditionary force, and I ask for no more than two hundred men, does not come in ten days, the town may fall; and I have done my best for the honour of our country. Good-bye.’ It was the general’s last entry, written six weeks before in December. Soon afterwards Gordon’s head was discovered in the mahdi’s camp across the river from Khartoum at Omdurman, his blue eyes still half open.

When the news burst on Victorian England there was uproar. The queen herself sent three furious telegrams to the foreign secretary, the war secretary and Gladstone himself. They were deliberately written
en clair
, that is not in the usual governmental code, so that her views would be publicized as widely as possibly by being leaked to the newspapers. It was an extraordinary action. Accusing Gladstone of being directly responsible for Gordon’s death, she wrote: ‘These news from Khartoum are frightful, and to think that this all might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too frightful.’ The question now was whether to avenge Khartoum or abandon the Sudan to the mahdi. It was the news that Russia had taken the Afghan town of Penjdeh and was thus threatening India’s north-west frontier which made Gladstone issue the order to retreat. Fighting both Russia and the mahdi would have been too much for Britain’s never large military resources.

Gladstone became immensely unpopular. His affectionate nickname the GOM, Grand Old Man, was replaced by MOG, Murderer of Gordon. He was booed when he went to the theatre. For Gordon had been exactly the sort of man that the Victorian English prided themselves on producing. Like that other Victorian hero, the African explorer and missionary Dr Livingstone, Gordon had been a good light in a naughty world, heroically spreading abroad the peculiar virtues of British civilization, godliness and dutifulness. To forsake such a man scandalized the British public and caused them to lose faith in the government.

Meanwhile if Gladstone was despised by the public at large he was also embattled within the party. One of the reasons that he had failed to rescue Gordon was that his whole being was dedicated to solving the Irish problem. Not only had civil disorder reached an alarming pitch owing to an organization recently started up by Fenian revolutionaries called the Land League, which was persuading Irish tenant farmers to refuse to pay rent. Its president, Charles Stewart Parnell, had become leader in 1880 of the Irish MPs.

The pale Anglo-Irish Parnell, a Protestant landowner from County Wicklow, was far more formidable and ruthless than Isaac Butt, the ineffectual former leader of the Irish MPs, who had also proposed self-government for the Irish within the Union. Brought up by a mother who hailed from an old American revolutionary family, he was full of visceral hatred for the English. He saw that the large number of Irish MPs the secret ballot had brought to Westminster could be used to obstruct Parliamentary business so thoroughly that Westminster might be forced to give Ireland her independence back. Meanwhile the Land League, by making Ireland ungovernable through a land war, would put pressure on Westminster to grant Parliamentary independence to Ireland.

The Land League had been set up to resist the mass evictions that the 1870s agricultural crisis was causing in Ireland. As the low prices farmers got for wheat were not enough to cover their rent, evictions spiralled into thousands every day. Once again the dreadful but commonplace Irish scenes of the old and sick lying in their beds at the roadside were to be found throughout the country. But this time there was a difference. The Land League organized mass meetings to get rents reduced to reflect the price of wheat.

For with the best intentions Gladstone’s 1870 act had a fatal flaw. Although the landlord was supposed to pay compensation if he evicted a tenant, the statutory wording was that the compensation was payable only if the rent asked for was ‘exorbitant’. This was designed to protect the tenant farmer against unfair price hikes. However, that was not the issue in 1880. The rents demanded by the landlords were at the usual level. It was the farmers’ earnings from crops that had fallen.

The Land League was a formidable success, but it was mainly run by ex-Fenians. They made it a brutal, lawless body founded on the belief that nothing was so efficacious as the threat of force. While by day the Land League was visibly organizing the orderly mass meetings for rent reductions, by night it was a different story. The League was running a land war. Anyone suspected of paying a rent which the League considered to be too high or who had taken over a plot from the evicted would be visited at dead of night by gangs of men. Shots would be fired through their windows, or open graves dug before their doors and signed ‘Captain Moonlight’ in the dirt. After a year of this treatment Ireland was at the mercy of the Land League. There were areas of the country which simply could not be controlled by the British government.

The leadership of the Land League always distanced themselves officially from the violence, as did the League’s president Parnell himself in Parliament. The only course of action Parnell verbally encouraged was a ‘species of moral coventry’. A proclaimed enemy of the Land League should be treated ‘like a leper of old’ by being rigidly denied all social and commercial contact. The most celebrated victim of this treatment, Captain Boycott, was driven out of Ireland and gave his name to this activity in the word ‘boycott’. In actual fact, though, the high-sounding moral coventry was generally broken by a more practical follow-up visit from Captain Moonlight and his friends.

Parnell, however, had a different agenda from most of the Land League and its Irish-American financial patrons. Most of the Americans believed with the Land League that only through violent revolution would Ireland win her independence. Parnell thought that change would come only through constitutional means. Nevertheless he could not afford to offend the League and its shadowy backers, since the whip hand he had over the British government substantially depended on being able to control them. The trouble was that the League began to believe that the chaos that it was creating was the prelude to independence. Thus when in 1881 Gladstone gave Ireland a Land Act which incorporated all the requisites long seen as the solution of the tenant farmers’ difficulties, the Land League in Ireland refused to accept it. The ‘Three Fs’–fixity of tenure, free sale by the tenant of his interest, and fair rents to be determined by land courts–granted by the act might kill off the desire for Home Rule. So the rural crimes did not cease; the violence continued.

Parnell could not call a halt to the lawlessness without enraging or making suspicious the men of the hillsides, whether in America or Ireland, who were willing to go only so far with constitutional channels. But Parnell the consummate political operator, though he did not believe that the revolutionaries’ way could ultimately be successful, at the same time could not lose their support. He had to play both ends against the middle. He was forced to denounce Gladstone’s Land Act and the government. He thus greatly enhanced his credibility among the revolutionaries who feared being sold out, especially when Gladstone sent him to jail for not halting the violence.

But though Gladstone had exasperatedly said that the ‘resources of civilization were not yet exhausted’, when he clapped Parnell and his supporters into Kilmainham Jail, it seemed that they were. From prison Parnell issued a defiant statement that no rent was to be paid at all. Though the Land League was proscribed by the British government, matters had now reached stalemate. As Ireland descended into frightening chaos, the pragmatic Gladstone saw that the only way of controlling the violence was through Parnell–despite the scruples of members of his Cabinet about treating with a man like Parnell, who in their opinion had blood on his hands. To the distaste of the Irish secretary W. E. Forster in particular, Gladstone started to negotiate with Parnell in prison, promising to release him if he brought Ireland under control.