The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (82 page)

Fortunately for Gladstone Parnell was ready to negotiate. In April 1882 the two reached an understanding via intermediaries which is known as the Kilmainham Treaty. Only a month later an event occurred which smashed Gladstone’s policy to ruins and made most of the Liberals want as little to do with Parnell as possible. Forster had already resigned from the Cabinet in disgust, and his place as Irish secretary taken by the Whig Liberal Lord Frederick Cavendish, who was married to one of Mrs Gladstone’s nieces. But his tenure was to be brief. A few days after arriving in Dublin, as he and his under-secretary Thomas Burke walked in Phoenix Park, they were attacked and hacked to death by a splinter group of Parnell’s allies, the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

The Phoenix Park murders shattered the unofficial alliance between Parnell and the Liberals in favour of Home Rule. Any further concessions to Ireland were stymied; the murdered Cavendish had been the younger brother of Lord Hartington, who was the leader of the Whig section of the Liberal party. For fear of splitting the party, Gladstone now had to take a very hard line indeed towards Ireland. For a large number of Liberal MPs, dislike of Parnell, who made no secret of his hatred of the English, hardened into enmity, along with the most vehement conviction that Ireland should never be ruled by such a man. To the further outrage of the Liberals Parnell threw in his lot with the Conservatives by voting against Gladstone.

He caused the government to fall in June 1885 and a minority Conservative government took over under Lord Salisbury, Disraeli’s foreign secretary, until an election should be held in November. Parnell, who held the same sort of secret meetings in London with the Conservatives he had had with the Liberals, believed that Salisbury if returned to office would bring in Home Rule. He therefore primed his troops on the British mainland to vote Conservative in the November election to add to the Conservative vote, while his own Irish MPs would ally themselves with Salisbury.

Meanwhile the Liberals themselves were in disarray–Gladstone’s relations with his own party were fraying. The old anti-imperialist Liberals of his own generation had turned against him over Egypt. His hesitancy over further franchise reform had angered the new generation of Radicals led by the former mayor of Birmingham, the screw manufacturer Joe Chamberlain. The Radicals nevertheless pushed the 1884 Third Reform Bill through, which brought the farm worker within the franchise. When the Conservative Lords headed by Salisbury resisted the bill, to Gladstone’s alarm Chamberlain responded with a campaign to discredit a class of whose power he violently disapproved. To him, a self-made man (his father had been a cobbler), the Tory Lords sitting on their ancestral acres, ‘who toil not neither do they spin’, had no right to interfere with a proposal to give the vote to decent working people. A series of strikingly phrased speeches calling to the country to ‘Mend Them or End Them’ proposed doing away with the House of Lords if it did not pass the bill. It passed, however, adding two million to the electorate of Great Britain. Its impact was magnified by a separate Redistribution of Seats Act in 1885.

At a personal level Gladstone never got on with Chamberlain. Though Gladstone himself hailed from a commercial family, his classical education put him in a different league from Chamberlain. Chamberlain, on the other hand, was angered by the way his leader played his cards so close to his chest. There were also philosophical differences. Unlike the penny-pinching Gladstone, Chamberlain and his friends saw state interference as a positive good and believed that there was great untapped potential in the colonies and the empire. But despite his ability and his influence in the country at large, Chamberlain was only president of the Board of Trade.

By the 1885 autumn election campaign, relations between Chamberlain and Gladstone were so poor that Radical Joe went out on the stump with his own ‘unauthorized programme’ (so called because Gladstone had not approved it) for social and agrarian reform. Each worker should have three acres and a cow. Chamberlain was a thrilling speaker and developed an immense following, particularly in the midlands. The success that the Liberals had at the polls was due to him. But the Third Reform Act had the most dramatic effect in Ireland. At the November election Parnell came back with twenty-five more Home Rulers than before. His 86 Nationalist MPs added to the 249 Conservatives gave Salisbury the majority he needed to continue in power, though the Liberals themselves had 335 members. Thanks to Parnell, Salisbury remained prime minister. But the strange alliance rapidly unravelled.

Despite Salisbury’s courting of Parnell and the Irish Nationalist vote to achieve power, it went too much against the grain for the Tories to give the Irish Home Rule. There were rumours that they were about to abandon it. Meanwhile, unknown to all, by mid-December Gladstone had finally come to the decision that it was imperative that Home Rule be achieved. The strength of the Home Rule vote in Ireland in the election caused him to fear Irish secession and the possible reconquest of Ireland if a Home Rule Bill was not put through fast. Now he had heard that if the Conservatives would not do so, the Liberals must. Unfortunately Gladstone did not reveal to his shadow Cabinet his decision to throw himself behind a self-governing status for Ireland. Leaked to the newspapers on 17 December 1885 by his son Herbert Gladstone, it incensed the two key players in the power structure of the Liberal party: Joe Chamberlain was affronted at once again being kept in the dark, while Lord Hartington was incensed at the idea of giving in to terrorism.

The leak put an end to the brief Conservative government. When Salisbury announced that the Tories would not pass Home Rule, Parnell moved back into alliance with Gladstone, the minority Tory government fell and Gladstone was back in office by February 1886, having pledged to put through a Home Rule Bill for Ireland. But by the spring both Chamberlain and Hartington had not only resigned, they had crossed the floor to defeat the Home Rule Bill and their former leader from the Conservative benches. Home Rule had split the Liberal party.

With Chamberlain (denounced as ‘Judas’ by one Liberal MP) on his side, Salisbury defeated Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill. Ninety-three Liberals, who called themselves Liberal Unionists, joined the Conservatives. They feared that Gladstone’s bill, which proposed an Irish Parliament to govern all domestic Irish affairs, would be the first step towards the break-up of the Union, because Irish MPs would no longer be represented at Westminster, which henceforth would deal with external affairs. Chamberlain in particular refused to believe that the Home Rulers really meant it when they said that Home Rule would not mean independence for Ireland.

The heated atmosphere in Parliament was added to by a member of the Conservative so-called ‘ginger group’, Lord Randolph Churchill, the younger son of the Duke of Marlborough. He stirred up the longstanding insecurity of the Presbyterian Ulstermen, who ever since they had been planted in Catholic Ulster in the seventeenth century had felt beleaguered. Mischievously Churchill told them they would be badly disadvantaged by a largely Catholic Dublin government. Ulstermen should do everything in their power to stop Home Rule. The slogan ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’ was first heard in 1886.

In June the Conservative party’s ninety-three new allies stopped the bill from passing by thirty votes, and Gladstone resigned. The election of July 1886 gave the allied Liberal Unionist and Conservative parties a huge majority over the followers of Gladstone and Parnell. Their prime minister was Salisbury, whose great expertise was in the field of foreign affairs. With their Liberal Unionist allies the Tories would remain in power for most of the next twenty years.

Those twenty years were the heyday of the empire, especially in Africa where diamonds had been discovered in the 1860s and gold in the 1880s. The British presence in Africa grew so rapidly that the adventurer Cecil Rhodes dreamed of a railway on British territory between the Cape and Cairo. The two million new voters were fascinated by flamboyant figures like Rhodes, who dominated the period. Their curiosity was fed by sensationalist newspapers like George Newnes’s
Titbits
, begun in 1880, the
Pall Mall Gazette
and the first mass-circulation paper, the
Daily Mail
, which went on sale in 1896.

Though the British might have obtained some of their empire in a fit of absence of mind, as was claimed a little disingenuously, for a brief period until the end of the century they suddenly exulted in it. The dedication to the cause of the empire known as imperialism was only a little short of religious fervour. It even infected the Liberals: ‘The greatest secular agency for good now known to the world’, Gladstone’s colleague the future prime minister Lord Rosebery called it.

Imperialism and Socialism (1886–1901)

Unlike its Roman predecessors, the British Empire did not consist of contiguous territory. It was higgledy piggledy and amorphous. That was because it had been created in an
ad hoc
way over the previous 250 years by a mixture of daring adventurers, chartered companies and, very occasionally, deliberate government policy. Trade was the driving force behind the British Empire, and ever since the American colonies became independent it was the trade centred on India that controlled its direction. India was the ‘jewel in the imperial crown’, and protecting India was what the empire was all about.

From the beginning of the seventeenth century India had made the East India Company extremely wealthy with its spices, as well as its luxury goods of silks and printed calicoes. Two hundred years later India was the entrepôt for a very sophisticated three-cornered trade. It continued to make all concerned in it, British merchants and manufacturers, Indian merchants and maharajahs, Chinese merchants and Mandarins, and the British Treasury, very rich. After the industrial revolution Britain exported cheap finished cotton, woollen and metal goods to India, India sent some of these goods to China and China exported tea to Britain. By the mid-nineteenth century a domestic Indian cotton industry was supplying cotton for British manufacturers, as well as tea from the Indian tea plantations created for the British export market.

Britain’s was never a militaristic or centrally planned empire like those of Spain and France. Nevertheless, during the eighteenth century and in the course of her duel with France for colonial supremacy in India and America, Britain used war to gain territory, and she used war to protect her commerce. Her position as the world’s premier trading nation began with her gains at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which she consolidated after the Napoleonic Wars. By the late nineteenth century her occupation of strategic harbours meant that safe ports for British ships were strung like a helpful safety net from the coast of China via India, through the Arabian Sea round the coast of Africa. They ran from Hong Kong, to Labuan island off North Borneo, to Aden at the entrance to the Red Sea. Keeping Ceylon after the Napoleonic Wars enabled Britain to defend India from attack from both east and west. The tea trade with China was secured in 1819 when Stamford Raffles had seized Singapore. Britain thus commanded the Straits of Malacca with what became one of the empire’s most important naval bases. Her emphasis on commerce tended to ensure that the flag of official government followed unofficial traders.

The inestimable financial value of India kept even so reluctant an imperialist as Gladstone occupying Egypt to protect the Suez Canal, and it was the need to consolidate the defence of an empire centred on India that determined the government’s foreign policy. Protecting India often meant extending the empire’s territories. Burma, which provided India’s border to the east, was annexed in 1886 as a result of fear of French activity in Indo-China. Protecting India’s north-west border would have led to a protectorate over Afghanistan had her conquest not proved so elusive; it required the occupation of Baluchistan in 1876, and in 1907 the establishment of a protectorate over southern Iran. All of these moves derived from the need to control the land route to India, and that also provoked the persistent antagonism towards Russia over her own expansion into central Asia.

The empire bred its own colonial imperialists too. By 1900 Singapore, which had begun as a small island trading colony, insisted on occupying the Malay States to protect herself. In the late nineteenth century Australians and New Zealanders added about one hundred Pacific islands to their territories, such as New Guinea in 1883 and the New Hebrides in 1887. By the late 1880s South Africa, where a struggle for dominance between British and Boer had been going on for close to a century, had produced the most vocal of the colonial imperialists, an MP for Cape Colony named Cecil Rhodes. Well over six feet tall he soon became known as the Colossus, a pun on his name and on his ambitions for the British Empire.

The son of an East Anglican vicar the young Rhodes had been sent out to South Africa to cure the weak heart which eventually killed him at the age of forty-nine. Instead he made a fortune with the De Beers diamond company at Kimberley. He was patriotic to the core. His views that British territory in South Africa had to extend much further north coincided with Lord Salisbury’s desire to find additional markets for British trade and to stymie German ambitions.

Rhodes was just one of the three most famous late-nineteenth-century empire-builders–the others were Sir William Mackinnon and Sir George Taubman Goldie–whose activities vastly expanded British territory in Africa. By 1900, out of thirty European protectorates in Africa fifteen were British. From the late 1880s Britain’s economy was faltering under the threat of industrial competition from Germany and America. Most European countries had abandoned free trade and adopted tariffs to protect their infant chemical and electrical industries. The seeds of very widespread discontent had been sown in Britain by the depression and unemployment. Energetic, patriotic businessmen like Rhodes, Goldie and Mackinnon believed that Africa, where Britain already had a considerable presence, was the answer. Not only was Britain the occupying power in Egypt and the dominant power at the Cape, as a result of her taking the lead in the anti-slavery movement fifty years before she had ousted the Dutch and Danish settlements on the west coast of Africa. By the mid-1870s after the defeat of the Ashantis Britain controlled the Gambia, the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone.