The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (77 page)

He still suffered endlessly from malaria, but the quinine enabled him to stay alive, and he refused to give up his mission. Like all missionary endeavours it was kept going purely by public subscription. And on those journeys of conversion Livingstone was the first European to discover Lake Ngami, the Victoria Falls, the Zambezi valley, Lake Nyasa and the River Luabala, which turned out to be the mighty River Congo.

From 1865 to 1871 Livingstone vanished in the jungles of Africa. Such was the world’s anxiety about the whereabouts of this amazing man that the journalist and explorer H. M. Stanley was sent out by the
New York Herald
to look for him. Alone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika Stanley spotted an elderly white man and it was then that he hailed him with the immortal words, ‘Dr Livingstone I presume?’

Livingstone had been intent on finding the source of the Nile, the river which flows from south to north. This had become an obsession for the Victorians, and was a mystery unsolved since Herodotus. Rumours emanating from Egyptian explorers and missionaries, and from Livingstone himself, suggesting that the source lay in the great lakes rather than in Herodotus’ four fountains at the heart of Africa, sent a number of British expeditions to Africa in the 1850s. The most talked about was that of the flamboyant Arabist Sir Richard Burton, who had entered the Holy City of Mecca in disguise, and the explorer and soldier John Hanning Speke. Together they discovered Lake Tanganyika in 1858. But it was Speke who courageously travelled on alone to find where the Nile river rises out of a great lake he named Victoria in 1862, in honour of the queen. As he made his way down waters unmapped by Europeans, Speke came upon the explorer Sir Samuel Baker, who was slowly making his way up the Nile, charting it as he went. In fact the various sources of the Nile continued to be disputed, so that in 1864 Baker would discover another source, Lake Nyanza, which he called Lake Albert in honour of the prince consort.

By 1864, however, Prince Albert had been dead for three years. In 1861, at the age of forty-two, the prince consort had fallen victim to typhoid, scourge of rich and poor before the arrival of proper sewage disposal. Queen Victoria had always been obsessed with the unhealthy and ancient nature of the drains at Windsor, and had been putting in new ones when her husband became ill. After a locum doctor’s initial failure to diagnose typhoid, nothing could save him. Once widowed, Prince Albert’s adoring wife, mother of nine children, became a recluse, quite unable to appear at any state occasions so terrible was her grief. Colossal new buildings in London, the Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial opposite one another in Kensington, provided public expression of her unhappiness. The monarchy became extremely unpopular as the queen, soon known as the Widow of Windsor, withdrew from public life to live in the deepest seclusion. Ever after she blamed the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, for his father’s death, because she believed that Prince Albert had caught the fatal disease while visiting him.

Queen Victoria’s ten-year period of mourning coincided with a low in Britain’s external relations, when the ageing Palmerston lost his touch. He became preoccupied with the danger posed by Napoleon III to British security and–as Prince Albert’s death had removed a very useful source of information about German affairs–failed to understand the significance of what was going on in Prussia, where in September 1862 Bismarck had become first minister.

Palmerston had looked with the strongest approval on the Italian wars of unification, which began in April 1859, soon after the end of the Indian Mutiny. England preserved a decisive and helpful neutrality. The three most important members of the government, Palmerston, his foreign secretary Lord John Russell and Gladstone his chancellor of the Exchequer, had the greatest sympathy with the Italian cause–the Risorgimento or rebirth–as did most of the
bien pensant
, educated, anti-papal middle classes, for Britain had long been a home from home to Italian nationalist exiles. In 1861 the first Italian Parliament proclaimed Victor Emmanuel king of a unified Italy.

The Italian wars of liberation had begun after a secret deal between Napoleon III and the Italian nationalist leader Count Camillo Cavour that they should attack Austria together and drive her out of Italy. When it emerged that the price for the emperor’s help in Italy was the lands of Savoy and Nice, which brought the French frontier in the south up to the Alpine passes, Palmerston never trusted the French leader again. It confirmed the British belief that Napoleon III was a warmonger who would do anything to enlarge France’s territories. The final insult came in 1859 when the French engineer Ferdinand De Lesseps in a moment of inspiration began building the Suez Canal–a passage by water across Egypt from the Mediterranean through to the Red Sea. Palmerston believed it was intended to threaten the British Empire in India.

So Britain began to draw apart from France, just when she might have begun to need an ally on the continent, though relations between Italy and England remained warm for over half a century. By 1859, the war scares which had alarmed Britain throughout Napoleon III’s reign brought about a Royal Commission to look into British defences. It pronounced them inadequate. Napoleon not only had a fleet of steam-powered boats, he was said to be building a huge naval base at Cherbourg just across the Channel. From there would he not one day try launching an invasion of England from Boulogne, just as his uncle had planned?

Demands for the expenditure needed to put Britain on a war footing led to endless rows between Palmerston and Gladstone. Fortifying Portsmouth and Plymouth in the manner Palmerston required would involve drastically raising the taxation that Gladstone tried every year to reduce, morally convinced as he was of the wickedness of war. With Gladstone’s encouragement, in 1860 the Radical Richard Cobden brought about the Franco-British commercial treaty reducing tariffs between the two countries, as part of their commitment to the doctrine of free trade which both men believed was the most enduring way of maintaining peace. But distrust of France continued.

In 1861 the American Civil War broke out when Abraham Lincoln became president on an anti-slavery ticket. The Southern states’ wealth depended on a slave economy if they were to run their cotton and tobacco plantations at profit, so Lincoln’s arrival in the White House prompted them to announce that they would exercise their right to secede from the Union, forming the Confederate States under the presidency of Jefferson Davis. But the Northerners refused to allow this to happen. When the Southerners tried to seize Fort Sumter near Charleston, the capital of South Carolina, civil war erupted. Despite their abhorrence of slavery, the majority of the British were sympathetic to the South. Gladstone, who was convinced of each nation’s right to self-determination, said that Jefferson Davis had created a nation, and Palmerston himself preferred the gentlemanly ways of the South and their aristocratic society to the crude energy of the Northern Yankee. Nevertheless it would have been a great mistake for Britain to take sides and be drawn into the war. Palmerston successfully insisted that Britain remained neutral.

In northern England, however, manufacturers wanted the government to lift the Northerners’ blockade of the Southerners’ shipping. This was preventing the Southerners’ exporting their cotton, on which much of Lancashire’s multi-million-pound industry was based. However, even if Britain had succeeded in lifting the blockade, the partial ruin of the Lancashire cotton industry would still have taken place, for the men and women who worked the machines announced a boycott of all Southern cotton on the ground that they did not want to support the cause of slavery. The result was a million people in Lancashire living on the rates, a situation a hundred times more pitiful than the Hungry Forties. Nevertheless, the principled operatives continued to insist that they would rather starve than support slavery. As a result of the war, Egypt soon became preferred as one of the chief sources of cotton for British manufacturing, all the more so after it was occupied by British forces in 1882.

The American Civil War came to an end after four years of fighting in 1865. The North had won under the military genius of Ulysses S. Grant, helped by their greater wealth, their industrial economy and a larger population which triumphed over the agrarian and less populated South. Their swift action in creating a powerful navy to paralyse the Southerners’ principal exports of cotton and tobacco was also decisive. In the course of the war all black slaves were declared to be free.

Napoleon III used the United States’ civil war to venture into what America by the Monroe Doctrine defined as her sphere of influence. Mexico was a part of the ‘back yard’ she considered a no-go area for the European powers. But war-torn America was too preoccupied to object when alongside a British force sent to demand the repayment of a debt owed to foreign bondholders came a French expedition to make the bankrupt Mexico a client state of France. Napoleon III thus turned the younger brother of the Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph I into the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. However, with the end of the American Civil War in 1865 the Americans were able to force Napoleon to withdraw his soldiers and abandon the so-called emperor to be executed by the Mexicans.

The Mexican adventure confirmed Napoleon’s reputation for reckless meddling. But it was his European activities the British worried about. British diplomats were convinced that the emperor’s policy was to move the French frontier up to the Rhine, as indeed it was. Despite the favourednation status France and Britain now had with one another, the threat this would pose to Belgium, always Britain’s first priority for her security, increasingly entailed ruling out any thought of alliance with Napoleon. In 1863 the evident discontent of the Poles, who had rebelled against their Russian overlords, and the claim by the North German Confederation to the Danish duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, gave Napoleon the opportunity to propose a European Congress so that all the post-1815 boundaries could be looked at afresh. The British made it abundantly clear that they had no interest in what they believed would be an excuse for France to shift her own boundaries.

But, in the case of Schleswig and Holstein, Britain suddenly needed an ally. Encouraged by Prussia, the North German Confederation was not frightened off by Palmerston’s command to leave the duchies alone–he had completely underestimated the force of German nationalism. In 1863 the new King of Denmark inherited his throne through the female line. The duchies recognized inheritance only through the male line. Thus the way was open for a German heir. When the King of Denmark promulgated a new constitution which incorporated the more Danish duchy, Schleswig, wholly into Denmark, Austria and Prussia acting for the German Confederation threatened the Danes with war if they would not give up the duchies altogether.

To Palmerston the idea of the Confederation of German states, newcomers in the power games of Europe, deciding who the territories of the ancient Danish monarchy belonged to was preposterous. But he no longer had the grip on current events that had made him such a force to be reckoned with in the past. The septuagenarian Palmerston had first become an MP as long ago as 1809. He had no idea of the significance of Bismarck and the series of wars he had planned to weld the German states into one united Germany, nor of the overwhelming German desire to achieve this. When to Palmerston’s amazement in February 1864 Prussian and Austrian troops called Britain’s bluff and invaded Schleswig–Holstein, seizing the duchies from Denmark, there was nothing he could do.

Palmerston had assumed that the Germans would be frightened off by his warning that the Danes would not be fighting alone. His gallantry was inspired by the marriage of the Prince of Wales to the exquisite Danish princess Alexandra that very year. When the Austro-Prussian preparations for war continued, approaches to Napoleon for an army elicited the information that Bismarck had promised France compensation on the Rhine if she stayed neutral over the Danish provinces. But Schleswig–Holstein could not be saved by the British navy alone. After all Palmerston’s bluster, the Danes had to fight on their own.

Britain’s international reputation, already low after the Crimea, sank lower still. By now Palmerston and Russell were looking increasingly foolish. Queen Victoria called them ‘two dreadful old men’. Lord Derby described their ineffectual posturings over first Poland, when they had fruitlessly demanded a say in the treatment of the Poles, and then Denmark as a policy of ‘meddle and muddle’.

With Britain a spent force and France compliant, to the surprise of the duchies’ inhabitants, not to say the German Confederation and the German Prince Frederick of Augustenberg in whose name the Austrians and Prussians were fighting for the duchies, Schleswig was annexed to Prussia, and Holstein to Austria.

After Schleswig–Holstein, even German liberals began to support Bismarck. They saw the truth of his harsh words about the military means needed to unite Germany. In 1866 the promise of the Austrian-held Veneto to Italy and the Rhine provinces to the emperor Napoleon III prepared the way for a new war. Bismarck had bought off the Russians by supporting them against the Polish rebellion in 1863, and waited for what he called the favourable moment. Now Prussia could be sure of no stab in the back from the east from Russia when she attacked Austria to seize the leadership of the North German Confederation for herself. With Russia and France both neutral, Prussia and Italy attacked Austria together, on the specious pretext of the administration of Holstein.

In three weeks, to the watching world’s amazement, the Austrian army had been defeated by the Prussians, by their superb soldiers, their disciplined tactics and their new needle guns, at the Battle of Königgrätz, or Sadowa as it is known in England, in July 1866. Austria was expelled from the North German Confederation and the Veneto was duly ceded to Italy. But when Napoleon III called in the great prize he believed that he had been bribed with, the shifting of the French frontier to the edge of the Rhine provinces above Alsace–Lorraine, Bismarck made it brutally plain that he had been playing with Napoleon’s dreams. It was out of the question.