Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (4 page)

Lord Randolph applied himself more to high society than to the House of Commons, but he soon made a catastrophic social faux pas. His elder brother, the Marquis of Blandford, had an affair with Lady Aylesford while her husband was visiting India in 1875. Lord Aylesford wanted a divorce, which, if it went ahead, would drag Blandford’s name into a public scandal. To avoid this, Lord Randolph pressed his friend the Prince of Wales to use his influence to halt the proceedings. Were this not done, he threatened to make public the Prince’s own indiscreet letters to Lady Aylesford. The Prince was naturally outraged at this attempted blackmail, and Lord Randolph was ostracized from society as a result. A kind of exile followed when the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, offered his father the Lord-Lieutenancy of Ireland, and Lord Randolph went with him as his private secretary. Winston Churchill’s first memory was of the Duke, his grandfather, unveiling a statue of the imperial hero, Lord Gough, in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. The statue is no longer there, removed following the IRA’s attempts to blow it up in the 1950s.

Ireland was already troubled by violence during Winston Churchill’s childhood. Attempts at religious and educational reform by Gladstone’s Liberals had failed to quell a nationalist upsurge driven by economic distress and a sharp sense of resentment at British rule. The armed revolutionaries of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, often referred to as the Fenians, were not of the political mainstream but they conjured a fearsome reputation. ‘My nurse, Mrs Everest, was nervous about the Fenians’, Churchill recalled. ‘I gathered these were wicked people and there was no end to what they would do if they had their way.’
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Later on, Gladstone was converted to the concept of Home Rule, under which control of Irish affairs would have been delegated from Westminster to Dublin. Lord Randolph, for his part, adopted a notoriously hard line against this plan. It would, he argued, plunge a knife into the heart of the British Empire. Moreover, the north of Ireland was dominated by Protestants, who feared subjection to the will of the Catholic majority. ‘Ulster will fight,’ Lord Randolph declared at a crucial moment during the battles of the 1880s; ‘Ulster will be right’.
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Yet although Winston Churchill for some years shared his father’s opposition to Home Rule, he was to prove much more flexible once he became a minister. Although protective of his father’s memory, he did not adhere slavishly to his political positions.

In 1880 Disraeli was defeated at the general election and the Duke of Marlborough’s time in Dublin came to an end. The social boycott of Lord Randolph had eased, and he began to make his mark as a Tory MP. He led a small group known as the ‘Fourth Party’, attacking Gladstone’s Liberal government vigorously; he also fell out with the new leaders on account of his failure to toe the official party line. He became known as an advocate of ‘Tory Democracy’, a slogan Winston Churchill would adopt, although in Lord Randolph’s hands it did not have much substance; some historians have accused him of inconsistency and opportunism. There was, however, something attractive in his very unpredictability, which extended to imperial issues, as the question of Egypt showed.

Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled inefficiently by the Khedive, the Sultan’s representative, and was massively indebted to European bondholders. In 1882 Britain intervened to put down a nationalist revolt and thus protect her investments. After the rebels were defeated by her forces at the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir in September, real power in Egypt was exercised by the British, although the Khedive still owed nominal allegiance to the Sultan. To some it seemed a dirty business. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, poet, horse-breeder, womanizer and adventurer, was the anti-imperialist in chief. (He is best known for his later verse riposte to Rudyard Kipling: ‘The White Man’s Burden, Lord, is the burden of his cash’.)
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A supporter of the Egyptian nationalists, he had returned from Cairo to put their case to Gladstone, but had been unable to forestall the British action. He came to believe that the Khedive had deliberately inspired a deadly riot that took place at Alexandria (and was then blamed on the nationalists) in order to draw the British in. Seeking help in drawing attention to his allegations, Blunt approached Lord Randolph, whom he recalled as a ‘distinctly good-looking young man’ with a ‘certain distinction of manner’ and a curling moustache that ‘gave an aggressive tone to his countenance’.
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Lord Randolph was persuaded of Blunt’s case, and during 1883 publicly pressed the charge that the government was complicit in the actions of the Khedive, their ‘puppet and ally’.
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(He also described the execution of one nationalist officer, after a trial of doubtful fairness, as ‘the grossest and vilest judicial murder that ever stained the annals of Oriental justice’.)
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He may not have proven his accusations beyond all doubt, but he certainly made the government feel deeply uncomfortable. As Winston Churchill observed in his biography of his father, it was remarkable that, in officially rejecting the evidence he provided, ‘the Government took no steps, by rebutting it in detail, to discredit their pertinacious assailant’.
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Lord Randolph had undoubtedly demonstrated his unconventionality but he was no opponent of the Empire. He objected not to imperial rule per se, but to the halfway-house situation whereby the British propped up an unjust regime in Cairo. He declared that the government should either withdraw entirely or take total control: ‘Let them take Egypt altogether if they liked, but let the country be under persons responsible to the English Government who would rid the country of its burdens and raise up the fellaheen from their present low state.’
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His chief concern was to find sticks with which to beat the government. The following year he lacerated ministers for their failure to go to the rescue of General Charles Gordon, Governor-General of the Sudan, who was under siege in Khartoum. The government eventually sent a relief mission, but too late. It arrived, in January 1885, two days after the city had fallen to the forces of the Mahdi (‘The Expected One’), the charismatic Islamic leader who was determined to end Egyptian rule in his country. Gordon’s brutal death by spearing at the hands of the Mahdi’s warriors turned him into an imperial icon and helped seal the fate of Gladstone’s government, which fell in June. In spite of Lord Randolph’s tense relationship with his own party’s leadership, he had won national popularity, bolstered by speeches in which he urged ‘a policy of activity for the national welfare, combined with a zeal for Imperial security’.
²⁴
Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister of the new minority Tory administration, could not fail to give him a Cabinet post, and appointed him Secretary of State for India.

His seven-month tenure at the India Office gave full play to the contradictions in his imperial attitudes. He had already made a long visit to India in advance of his appointment, and taken the trouble to meet a range of Indian intellectuals, politicians and journalists. Lala Baijnath, a lawyer, was ‘greatly astonished at his intimate knowledge of Indian subjects as well as those discussed by the native papers’.
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Nationalism was just beginning to flower in the country – the first Indian National Congress was held later in 1885 – and Lord Randolph appeared to be a polite and intelligent listener. He wrote to his mother: ‘The natives are much pleased when one goes to their houses, for the officials out here hold themselves much too high and never seek any intercourse with the natives out of official lines; they are very foolish.’
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He seemed genuinely to like the country (something that cannot be said of his son) and he won praise from papers such as the
Indian Spectator
, the
Bengalee
and the
Hindoo Patriot
.
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Back in England, and in office, Lord Randolph changed his tune. He had never doubted the benefits of British rule in India, even if – like many of its other supporters at the time – he admitted it to be ‘purely despotic’.
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(In a remark particularly admired by his son, he described the Raj as ‘a sheet of oil spread out over the surface of, and keeping calm and quiet and unruffled by storms, an immense and profound ocean of humanity’.)
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There was, however, the question of emphasis, and in language and policy he now showed himself a reactionary. The change was exemplified by his treatment of a delegation of Indians that came to Britain ‘to advocate advanced native views of a Home Rule kind’.
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At an interview arranged by Blunt, Churchill was charm itself, if politically noncommittal. ‘Nothing could have exceeded the grace and kindliness with which Lord Randolph shook hands with us’, recollected N. G. Chandavarkar. ‘I do not wonder that they make a hero of him on Tory platforms.’
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During that November’s general election, however, the delegates lent support to John Bright, Lord Randolph’s Liberal opponent in Central Birmingham, the constituency he was now fighting. He now mocked the ‘ignorance and credulity’ of the Indians, and added: ‘what must be the desperation of the radical party when, in order to secure the return of Mr Bright, they had to bring down on the platform of that great Town Hall three Bengalee baboos’.
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In the meantime Churchill had set in train the annexation of Upper Burma, which he clearly hoped would win him further Birmingham votes. The apparent liberality of the sentiments he had expressed in India had been replaced by military expansionism and cheap platform sneers.

Lord Randolph lost narrowly in Birmingham (although he easily found a new London seat) and the Tories lost the election as a whole. After Salisbury’s government fell in January 1886, Gladstone became Prime Minister again, but his determination to press ahead with Home Rule in Ireland led to his defeat and split his party in two. At a further election in July the Liberals met with disaster, and were thereafter to be denied effective power for nearly twenty years. Lord Randolph, though, was to gain little in career terms from the new Tory hegemony. At first his star continued to rise. Salisbury appointed him – when he was still only thirty-seven – Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons. But his marriage was in difficulty (money worries may have contributed to this), he appeared ill, and he proved to be a mercurial, intemperate and ultimately impossible colleague. In December 1886, in an attempt to secure economy in naval spending, he offered his resignation. Greatly to his surprise, Salisbury accepted it. Lord Randolph never held office again. But his strangest imperial adventure was yet to come.

Within a few years, he was convinced that the Tory leaders meant to drive him out of the party: ‘I am not yet however clear that being driven out of the party is equivalent to being driven out of public life.’
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Indeed not. In February 1891
The Times
reported that he had decided to visit South Africa; three months later the
Daily Graphic
announced that he had given its proprietors ‘the exclusive right to publish a Series of Letters signed by himself, giving a detailed account of his experiences’.
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He was to be paid the incredible sum of two thousand guineas for twenty letters. Owing to his and Jennie’s wild extravagance, he needed the money; he hoped to further boost his fortunes through the gold-prospecting syndicate he had formed. The
Graphic
was certainly to get its money’s worth, for once he arrived at Cape Town in May he began to generate spectacular and controversial copy. Almost everything he wrote – even his complaints about the catering onboard ship – generated heated debate at home. He attracted much criticism when he wrote that diamonds were mined in order to satisfy an ‘essentially barbaric’ feminine lust for personal adornment, and suggested that ‘whatever may be the origin of man, woman is descended from an ape’.
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His political pronouncements were startling too. He provocatively urged the British occupation of Portuguese territory on the Mozambique coast, following skirmishes between Portuguese soldiers and the forces of the British South Africa Company, at a time when the governments of Britain and Portugal were negotiating over the region. Perhaps most surprisingly, he endorsed the policy Gladstone had followed in South Africa in 1881. In that year, British defeat at the Battle of Majuba Hill had been followed by the restoration of the independent Boer republic of the Transvaal. (The Boers were Calvinists of mainly Dutch descent.) Many Conservatives had seen this as a pusillanimous imperial retreat, but Churchill now declared that the magnanimity of the peace settlement had allowed the British to escape ‘a wretched and discreditable muddle, not without harm and damage, but probably in the best possible manner’ given the circumstances.
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In the future, the value of conciliating the Boers was not to be lost on Winston Churchill, although many factors weighed on him quite apart from his late father’s opinions.

Lord Randolph’s unexpected remarks about the Majuba episode did not prevent him being magnificently rude about the Boers themselves: