Pax Britannica (25 page)

O
F these assorted British Empire-builders, perhaps twenty million were scattered across the world, as settlers, administrators, merchants, soldiers. Yet it was an anonymous Empire. The British public could scarcely name one of its Governors. Laurier was the only Colonial Premier whose name they vaguely knew. Over the past half-century of unprecedented imperial expansion only a dozen heroes had arisen to command the public’s loyalty, and many of those were dead. The activists of Empire were remarkable men, but few, and no more than a handful of those alive in 1897, were famous at the time, or would be widely remembered after their deaths.

The age of the great explorers was almost over, but there still lived in England one or two of the giants. Sir Henry Stanley, deliverer of Livingstone, impresario of darkest Africa, namer of lakes and discoverer of mountains, was an inconspicuous Liberal-Unionist backbencher, whose election platform had been ‘the maintenance, the spread, the dignity, the usefulness of the British Empire’. He was 56, a bullet-headed man with a truculent mouth and a walrus moustache, broadly built and very hard of eye. Nobody in England had led a more extraordinary life. Born John Rowlands in Denbighshire, North Wales, he spent nine years of childhood in the St Asaph workhouse, his father dead, his mother uninterested, under the care of a savage schoolmaster who later went mad. He ran away, worked on a farm, in a haberdasher’s shop and a butcher’s, and in 1859 sailed as a cabin-boy from Liverpool to New Orleans. In America he was adopted by a kind cotton-broker, and took his name, only to be left on his own again when the elder Stanley died.
A life of staggering adventure followed: war, on both sides of the American Civil War, in the Indian campaigns of the West, in the United States Navy; journalism, with Napier in Abyssinia, in Spain during the 1869 rising, in search of Livingstone for the
New Y
ork
Herald
; African exploration of the most sensational kind; wealth, great fame, and the long slow struggle for recognition and respect in England. By the late nineties his fighting days were over, and he had become an eminent citizen of mild benevolence, reassuming British nationality, and marrying very respectably in Westminster Abbey. Though the British Empire had not yet recognized his services with a knighthood, he was at least loaded with honorary degrees, and Queen Victoria had herself commissioned a portrait of him, to hang in Windsor Castle. We hear nothing of him in the Jubilee celebrations, though we may assume he joined his fellow M.P.s to watch the procession go by: but it is enthralling to think of him there at all, with his memories of workhouse and celebrity, the colossal journeys into the heart of Africa, the meeting with Livingstone that was to go into the folk-lore, the expedition to rescue Emin Pasha, beleaguered by the Mahdi in the Sudan, which cost 5,000 human lives. Stanley’s journey across Africa in the 1870s had led directly to the ‘scramble for Africa’ which was the mainspring of the New Imperialism. He was the greatest adventurer of the age, an imperial monument in himself.
1

Edward Eyre was still alive, an imperial specimen of a different sort, whose name had been given to a large bump on the southern Australian shoreline, Eyre Peninsula. Eyre was a Yorkshireman who emigrated, aged 17, with
£
400 to Australia. He farmed for a time, served as a magistrate and ‘protector of aborigines’, and discovered a livestock route from New South Wales to the new settlements in South Australia. Then, in 1841, he set off on one of the most desperate of all exploratory journeys, from Adelaide around the Great Australian Bight to King George’s Sound in the extreme south-west. One white man and three native boys started with him, but presently
two of the boys murdered the white overseer and absconded with most of the supplies. Eyre was left with a single aborigine, forty pounds of flour, some tea and some sugar, with five hundred miles of waterless desert behind him, and six hundred ahead. For eight weeks the two men laboured across that terrible slab of country. Often they were reduced to gathering the morning dew in a sponge and sucking it between the two of them: once the aborigine found a dead penguin on the beach, and ate it at a sitting. At Thistle Cove they were picked up by a French whaler, and rested for ten days on board, but Eyre insisted on finishing the journey, went ashore again, and after five months on the march stumbled at last into the settlement at King George’s Sound—soaked to the skin, after so many waterless weeks, by rainstorms. It was a perfectly useless adventure, as it turned out. Nothing was discovered, and nothing proved: but Eyre had made his name as one of the most intrepid of the imperial explorers.

By 1897 he was unfortunately best known in England for other reasons. Eyre became Lieutenant-Governor of New Zealand, Governor of St Vincent, and finally Governor of Jamaica, and there, in 1865, he put down a Negro riot with unusually ferocious zeal, killing or executing more than six hundred people, flogging six hundred more, and burning down a thousand homes. He became a figure of violent controversy at home. Ruskin, Tennyson and Carlyle were among his supporters: John Stuart Mill and T. H. Huxley were members of a committee that secured his prosecution for murder. The Eyre Defence Committee called him ‘a good, humane and valiant man’. The Jamaica Committee, supported by a strong body of what Carlyle called ‘nigger-philanthropists’, hounded him for ten years with accusations of brutality. The legal charges were dismissed, and Eyre’s expenses were officially refunded, but he was never offered another post. In 1897 he was living in seclusion in a Devonshire manor house, a strange, always dignified and self-contained man. Through it all he had hardly bothered to defend himself—as though the sandy silence of the Outback had muffled his soul.
1

There were only three British soldiers whose personalities had caught the fancy of the public. By the nature of things none had held command in a major war, against equal enemies: but they had all distinguished themselves in campaigns against black, brown or yellow men, and their fame was raised to theatrical heights by the new martial pride of the British.

The first was Garnet Wolseley, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, who had been fighting small wars, on and off, for forty-five years. He was Anglo-Irish, and loved a good fight. ‘All other pleasures pale’, he once wrote, ‘before the intense, the maddening delight of leading men into the midst of an enemy, or to the assault of some well-defended place’. The first business of any ambitious young officer, he thought, was to try and get himself killed, and this intent he himself pursued in the Burma War of 1852, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the China War of 1860, the American Civil War, the Canadian rebellion of 1869, the Ashanti War of 1873 and the Zulu War of 1879—in his first twenty-five years of Army life he tried to get himself killed in a war every three years. In 1882 his supreme moment came. Arabi Pasha rose in rebellion against the Egyptian Government. The British intervened, and in a brilliant brief action Wolseley, attacking Arabi from the Suez Canal, defeated him handsomely at Tel-el-Kebir, occupied Cairo, and established the British presence in Egypt. He was given a Government grant of
£
30,000, created Baron Wolseley of Cairo and Wolseley, and became a popular hero. It was Wolseley who was celebrated as ‘The Modern Major-General’ in Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Pirates
of Penzance,
and in the slang of the day ‘All Sir Garnet’ meant ‘all correct’. Even his failure to reach Khartoum in time to rescue Gordon in 1884 did not cost him his public popularity, though it made him many enemies in the Army.

Wolseley was the late Victorian soldier
par
excellence.
Technically he was a reformer and something of a prophet. Temperamentally he was arrogant, snobbish, insensitive. Intellectually he was not only exceedingly methodical, but also deeply religious, with a sense of
dedication never quite fulfilled. He relied on favourites in the Army, erecting around himself a ‘Wolseley Ring’ of officers who had served with him in old campaigns, and who came to dominate, in the absence of a General Staff, the conduct of the late Victorian colonial wars. Some military critics thought Wolseley a fraud, some believed him to be the only great commander of the day, who would in action in a great war, have proved himself a Marlborough or a Wellington. By 1897, at 64, he was a disillusioned man. He thought his luck had turned with his failure before Khartoum, and he was very conscious of his waning powers. Even his reforming zeal, once so virile and direct, seemed to have lost its bite, and jogging along in the Jubilee procession we see his long melancholy face rather like the White Knight’s, a little flabby at the jowls—its moustache, its eyebrows, the shape of its eyes, the hang of its mouth, all drooping sadly with advancing age, beneath the plumed cocked hat of a Field-Marshal. He was Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, but not, as he was once said to have imagined himself, Duke of Khartoum.
1

The second soldier of the Empire was Field-Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar, Commander-in-Chief in Ireland and the most popular man in the British Army. Where Wolseley was daunting, Roberts was endearing. Where Wolseley pressed for change and efficiency, Roberts stood for the old traditions. Wolseley’s professional appeal was to experts, or to his own tight circle of intimates: Roberts was above all beloved of his private soldiers, who called him Bobs. Wolseley was tall and overbearing. Roberts was small, simple, sweet-natured. If Gilbert caustically honoured Wolseley with
The
Modern
Major-General,
Kipling serenaded Roberts with
Bobs
: 

Roberts was another Anglo-Irishman, the son of a general, educated at Eton and Sandhurst, and destined to spend his entire life in the imperial service. Until he assumed his Irish command, in 1895, he had never served in Europe—such was the range of a British military career in those days. He was old enough to have taken his commission in the East India Company’s Bengal Artillery. He served in the Indian Mutiny, in a campaign obscurely remembered as ‘the Umbeyla campaign against the Sitana Fanatics’, in Napiers’ Abyssinian expedition, and in 1878 he commanded the army that occupied Afghanistan in the second British attempt to master that intractable Power. When, in 1880, the Afghans fell upon the British garrison at Kandahar, Roberts took ten thousand men on an epic relief march from Kabul. As Tel-el-Kebir was to Wolseley, the march to Kandahar was to Frederick Roberts. It caught the public imagination. Mounted on his white Arab, the very horse we have already seen in the Jubilee procession, the trim little image of Bobs rode down the imperial sagas, smiling and imperturbable under the gaunt Afghan hills, with ten thousand faithful Tommies at his heels and a horde of brown savages waiting to be routed at the other end. Roberts became Commander-in-Chief in India, devoting several years to the problems of imperial defence against the Russians, and after forty-one years’ Indian service he came home a hero, devout, happily married, victorious and teetotal—