SS Scot and South Africa,
18 November 1898 and before
As he spoke his eyelids seemed to tremble and to fall a little
over his keen grey eyes. In a flash the phrase of Scudder’s came
back to me, when he had described the man he most dreaded
in the world. He had said that he ‘could hood his eyes
like a hawk’. Then I saw that I had walked straight into the enemy’s headquarters.
John Buchan (Sir Alfred Milner’s
Private Secretary in South Africa,
1901-3), The Thirty-Nine Steps
In the small hours, Sir Alfred Milner, High Commissioner for South Africa and Lieutenant-Governor of Cape Colony, was woken by a bright light in his eyes. He had a stateroom on the starboard side of the upper deck. It was 4.oo a.m., he noted in his diary (the small red diary which was the only companion and confidant of his travels). That must be the Ushant lighthouse, the first land they had sighted since Madeira. The wind was still blowing hard, but a big ship like the 7,000-ton Scot took it in her stride.[1] Making 18½ knots, she was the holder of the record for the Cape Town run.[2] If she kept this up, Milner would be in time to see Chamberlain at the Colonial Office on the 22nd. And tonight he might be able to dine with his friends at Brooks’s. How very jolly it would be to see the blessed old boys again!
Milner slept once more and when he next awoke it was morning: a fine morning, though cold. They were now about 120 miles from the Needles. Grand. After eighteen gruelling months at the Cape, he felt he had earned a holiday in England, even if it was to be a working holiday. His friend, Philip Gell, his closest friend since schooldays at King’s College, knew what he meant when he wrote to say how he was longing to be back at ‘Headquarters’.[3] Cape society he had not enjoyed, to put it mildly; as Ozzy Walrond, his Private Secretary (and a treasure), remarked, Cape Town was a fourth-rate provincial town full of ‘the most awful cads’.[4]
His own feelings for the dark continent were, understandably, more complicated, though he once admitted to Philip that Cape Town ‘was a rather beastly hole’; in fact, when Milner compared his life at the Cape with his life in Egypt six years before, as Baring’s financial secretary, he could find nothing whatever in favour of the Cape. The people — the whites, that is — were much more congenial in Egypt. It was nearer England. Besides, Egypt, run by the British, was a place where it was easy to get things done.[5]
Of course, he had not arrived at the Cape at the best moment to enjoy its amenities. It was 1897. He had been sent out to pick up the pieces after Jameson’s Raid.
The Raid: that had been the most extraordinary business. Despite the choppy seas and the cold wind, Milner spent most of the day pacing the port side of the deck, as one by one those delightful landmarks of the English coast swung into view: the Dorset Downs, the Purbeck hills, and the heady curves of Portland Bill.
His thoughts returned to South Africa. The ‘Higher Powers’ (as he put it in his donnish way) seemed to have achieved a miracle for the Afrikaners twice in the past. First at Majuba, then at Doornkop. How to avoid their winning a third time? He had views about that — increasingly strong views, although these had to remain, for the time being, a private heresy of his own.[6]
By now, Milner was a familiar sight to his fellow-passengers — fellow-prisoners, he would have called them — on the interminable voyage from the Cape. He hated the trip, tired as he was, for he hated being cooped up for nearly three weeks in a tub of a liner. He had always tried to play his part in the jollities on board ship, including (and this proved an appalling experience) some amateur theatricals. But for most of the voyage home he paced the deck, read the annual report of the Inland Revenue, or worked at his black box full of papers.[7]
The other passengers probably thought him a shy, austere, melancholy man. People generally did. With his long, thin face and downcast grey-brown eyes, he looked older than his forty-four years, and sadder than a brilliantly successful diplomatist should be. In fact, nothing surprised people, on first meeting him, more than his appearance. Was this really Sir Alfred Milner, the High Commissioner and Lieutenant-Governor of the Cape? Was this the man chosen by Joe Chamberlain to cut President Kruger down to size? He looked so gentle and detached. There was a whiff of All Souls or the British Museum about him.
People who knew him intimately received quite a different impression. When he began to talk his expression was as mobile as a kaleidoscope, and his smile was a sunburst. Suddenly that cold, thin face, the colour of ivory browned by age, became extraordinarily sweet and gentle.[8] Of course, few people ever did get to know him intimately. To these friends he showed a side of his nature that was both ardent and affectionate. As for his enemies, they hardly existed at this time, though soon enough he was to have his share.
To what did Milner owe his meteoric rise in the public service? It was a question he sometimes asked himself. Certainly not to his family connections — though in a different sense he felt he owed everything to his family. His parentage was unusual. If you listened hard when he pronounced his ‘ths’ there was a trace of a German accent. He was born in Giessen, near Frankfurt-on-Main, the son of a half-German medical student and an English gentlewoman who had come to Germany in straitened circumstances. His upbringing was divided between Germany and England, and marred by the fecklessness of his father and the ill-health of his mother. When he was fifteen his mother died, and he was sent to school in England. All these experiences left their stamp on him.[9] His heart was still to some extent divided between the two countries; his schoolboy heroes included Bismarck and Frederick the Great, as well as Cromwell and the younger Pitt; in the hurly-burly of London and South Africa he often longed for the solitude of the Bavarian woods.
But it was his English mother who was the driving force behind his life. At eighteen he won a senior scholarship to Oxford, an unheard-of feat for a boy from a London day school. He carried off the Craven, the Hertford — a whole litany of university prizes. He became the most brilliant son of Balliol, the Oxford college where Dr Jowett held court among a golden generation of undergraduates. As he progressed from prize to prize and triumph to triumph he had only one regret: if only she had lived to see it all.[10]
Against his father he was in complete reaction, so it appeared, though not at all disloyal or unfilial. That relentless capacity for work, that single-minded devotion to a cause — it was almost as though young Alfred was doing penance for the sins of his father.
Yet behind the upright young man, the paragon of English Victorian virtues, private and public, people occasionally detected something different. There was a frighteningly strained air to his self-control, as though most of his life was lived against the grain of his nature. He had strange eyes: keen grey eyes which he could hood like a hawk’s. Inside Milner, repressed but not altogether extinguished, was something of the spirit of his father — romantic, Bohemian, restless, and perhaps even reckless as well.[11]
Of course, this dualism in his nature was well concealed from all but his closest friends. Milner’s rise to fame could, as he reckoned himself, be attributed to one thing above all: he was absolutely sound and reliable. This was the reason, not merely his flair for writing or his financial expertise, for his having proved so useful to the leading men in both political parties: first as private secretary to Goschen, the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer; next, as financial secretary to Sir Evelyn Baring (later Lord Cromer), the British ruler of Egypt; then, as Chairman of the Inland Revenue, right-hand man to Sir William Harcourt, the Liberal Chancellor.
In due course, he was promoted by Joe Chamberlain to his job as High Commissioner — the man responsible for British colonies in South Africa. Milner was not told exactly why he had been chosen. But no doubt he had been given a shrewd idea by Joe and his Cabinet colleagues. They had had enough of men like Jameson and Rhodes — of schoolboy heroes and bungling empire-builders. Milner had a solid reputation in imperial questions. His best-selling book, England in Egypt, sounded a trumpet call for the Empire. But he was also an expert on death duties — not a bad preparation, perhaps, for the deadly grind of modern diplomacy. At all events, Milner was selected for his strength of character and his patience.[12] It was impatience, as the current Chancellor, Sir Michael Hicks. Beach, observed to Milner, that lay at the root of all Britain’s mistakes in the past — from before Majuba to the Raid.[13]
Milner undoubtedly agreed. His own comment on his appointment to the Cape was characteristically modest. His only fear was that the job might fall through because no one at the Cape had ever heard of him. ‘It would be rather awkward,’ as he had told Philip Gell, if they jibbed, taking him to be ‘the nephew of some great man who had to be provided for, or an inconvenient official who had to be got rid of’.[14]
In fact, few colonial viceroys had ever had a more splendid send-off than Milner’s, when his friends gathered at the Café Monico to honour him before he left England. Numerous Balliol contemporaries attended — fellow-disciples of the great Dr Jowett: not only Philip Gell but Gell’s brother-in-law, St John Brodrick, and Henry Asquith and George Curzon, the rising stars of the Liberal and Tory parties. ‘Hurrah for the meek and the humble men of Balliol,’ someone remarked, ‘for they shall inherit the earth.’ Leaders of the main political parties were there too: Joe Chamberlain shared with Asquith the honour of proposing Milner’s health, and made a rousing imperialist speech — too rousing, some thought. In reply, Milner struck a more sympathetic note. He was cursed with the ‘cross-bench mind’. He tended to see too many sides to every question. Though he added, disarmingly, that there was ‘one question’ on which he had ‘never been able to see the other side’, and that was imperial unity, the consolidation of the British Empire.[15]
And so he set off for the Cape, fêted on all sides, so charming and tactful and clever, so sound, above all, as everyone said at that dinner — the perfect emissary to restore British supremacy in South Africa and consolidate the far-flung Empire.
Two years at the Cape had taught him that his patience had a limit. It was not merely the endless wrangling with the Transvaal over minor issues, and the wrestling with the Afrikaners at the Cape. It was the legacy of the past that so appalled him — not merely the Raid but the chain of mistakes that preceded it. ‘I hope South Africa is not going to be our one point of failure, but I feel very uneasy,’ he wrote to Gell in April 1898. ‘Somehow or other the more I know about it, the more profound is the abyss of our blunders in the past.’[16]
What did men like Milner mean when they talked in that mystical voice of ‘imperial unity’ and ‘consolidating the Empire’? Was it all rhetoric, just a mood and an enthusiasm?[17] One must look back into South African history, into that ‘abyss of blunders’.
Milner, he himself confessed, could not see two sides to the imperial question. In his eyes the nineteenth century in South Africa was a century of struggle for supremacy between Britain and Boer — and of abysmal blunders from the imperial standpoint.
During most of the century British policy was weak and vacillating, like British imperial policy in general.[18] On three occasions a positive attempt was made to solve the Boer question by adopting an active ‘forward’ (that is, expansionist) policy. On each occasion, and for various reasons — including impatience and the see-saw of party politics — the forward policy ended in disaster.
Yet the alternatives proved a set of still bigger blunders: years of drift and compromise. All the time their Boer adversaries, expanding their strongholds in the interior, squeezing the natives into the poorest land, yet still leaving an Afrikaner (Afrikaans-speaking) majority at the Cape, grew richer and more numerous, more dangerous to Britain and her Empire.
The first to seize the South African nettle was Sir Benjamin D’Urban, appointed Governor of eastern Cape Colony in 1833. It was by then forty years since Britain had first annexed the Cape, seizing the colony from Holland, for reasons of strategy, during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The strategic motive was compelling for England — as it was to remain. Hold the Cape and she could protect the sea lanes to the East. This was the main reason why the Dutch had originally founded Cape Colony in the seventeenth century; it was a stepping-stone on the way to the Dutch East Indies. Now for the British it could be the Gibraltar of the South, the chief link in the chain of imperial defence between England and her most important overseas possession — India.
But how to ensure that the Cape remained under British control? This was the political puzzle that haunted Sir Benjamin D’Urban, and was to haunt all his successors. For the Cape was more than a base; it was a colony; and a colony whose Afrikaner inhabitants’ loyalty was (to put it mildly) not beyond dispute. In this respect there was soon no parallel with the problem of the French in British Canada or any other British colonial problem. For the flood of British immigrants that would have provided a pro-British majority never materialized at the Capes. The country was too poor and arid to attract British immigration on any scale, and only for a period during the 1820s did the British government subsidize immigration. As a result, the Afrikaans-speaking South Africans remained a majority, and a stubborn one at that.[19]
When D’Urban arrived in 1833 he found the place in turmoil. With their seventeenth-century Dutch Protestant tradition —fundamentalist and egalitarian — the scattered Dutch colonists had always proved awkward to govern. In the days of Dutch rule there was frequent friction with the colonial government, and occasional bloodshed. After the British take-over, there were risings in 1795, 1799 and 1815. The 1815 affair resulted in the hanging at Slachter’s Nek of five men who came to be regarded as the first political martyrs of the Afrikaner nation, though in fact they were condemned by Dutch-speaking judge and jurymen; moreover, they had forfeited the sympathy of most of their countrymen by a reckless alliance with some Xhosas, the local African tribe who greatly outnumbered both white communities combined.[20]
It is at this point — when one touches on the native side of the problem — that the difficulties of policy-making in South Africa, for both a colonial governor and his home government, become apparent. For it was not only the British who remained a minority among the population as a whole. The whites were a minority among the Africans. Any humanitarian attempt to reconcile the interests of the black majority with the colonists was certain to compound the other two problems: to reconcile two rival colonial communities with each other, and their interests, in turn, with those of the imperial power. In short, history presented South Africa with a triple formula for conflict — black against white, white against white, white against the mother country — and only a miracle could spare South Africa from an endless war.[21]
In the event, Sir Benjamin D’Urban was no miracle-worker. He was a heavy-handed veteran of the Peninsular War. He sacrificed the black Africans’ interests, and bowed to white political pressures, in just the same way as so many rulers of South Africa were to do in the future. To conciliate the Boers — the frontier farmers — and unite the colony in loyalty to the Crown, he adopted a tough ‘forward’ policy towards the Xhosa. He supported the Boers who were in a state of endemic feud with the Xhosa over the frontier lands. He sent English red-coats to help locally commandeered troops — the Boer commandos. Together, D’Urban and the Boers sliced off a hundred-mile strip of new territory to add to the Cape. But, meanwhile, vacillations at Downing Street had hardened into a determination not to increase the size of the colony at the expense of the natives. Under pressure from British missionaries the Colonial Secretary of the day repudiated D’Urban’s annexation. Worse than this, from his own point of view, D’Urban was, in 1834, now instructed to put into effect a humanitarian new edict outlawing slavery from the British Empire, which he did with characteristic heavy-handedness.
This was the last straw for the Boers on the frontier. Away they trekked, beyond the Orange River and the Vaal, into new, seemingly empty territory where they could govern themselves — and handle the natives — as they thought fit. By 1837 these pioneers numbered five thousand, although the great majority of Afrikaans-speaking colonists remained at the Cape. The voortrekkers, as the pioneers became known, were organized on military lines, and included one young boy who would become famous, Paul Kruger. They took everything they needed with them, as they set off in their covered wagons across the endless brown veld: their sheep and their cattle, enough guns and gunpowder to subdue the natives, and enough resentment against England to last a century. So began the great exodus — a kind of inverted rebellion — that passed into folklore as the Great Trek, and created the two voortrekker republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, as a national home for the Boers.[22]
D’Urban had blundered, that was clear; and D’Urban was recalled. But the blunder was shared by the Colonial Secretary, who failed to support the forward policy in the Cabinet. This, at any rate, was the moral to be drawn by later imperialists like Milner.[23]
The same mistake, as Milner must have seen it, was made on the next occasion when the forward policy was tried — by another Peninsular general-turned-governor, Sir Harry Smith. At first, after D’Urban’s recall, it was decided to let the voortrekkers stew in their own juice. No steps were taken to stop them crossing the fords of the Orange River, which would have been easy, nor was trade with them forbidden. Instead, the Cape government issued a fiery proclamation reasserting authority over the erring Boers — and took good care not to enforce it.[24]
But by 1847, when Smith took over, events had prodded Britain once more into facing the Boer problem. In their progress north, the voortrekkers had stirred up a hornet’s nest in Natal, till then the preserve of the Zulus. The Boers, crushed Dingaan and his Zulu warriors at the Battle of Blood River on 16 December 1838. But their handling of African tribes elsewhere threatened to be a source of permanent unrest. Reluctantly, Whitehall was persuaded that a British colony of Natal, expensive as it might prove for the Crown, was at least a lesser evil than another Boer republic. For Natal was not in the middle of nowhere like the other Boer territories. It was plumb on the trade route to India. In 1843 it was annexed by Britain and the chief port was renamed after D’Urban.[25] (In contrast, the main town in the Zulu country to the north of the Tugela River was called after Lady Smith, the Spanish bride whom dashing Sir Harry had carried off from the Peninsula.)
As a British general, Sir Harry had seized Natal for the Crown. As a British governor, he now proceeded to outplay the Boer expansionists at their own game. He doubled the size of the Cape Colony, pushing out the frontier to the Atlantic on the north-west, and across the Kei River to the east. A still greater coup was to annex the voortrekkers’ territory across the Orange and the Vaal Rivers. When their neighbours in the Transvaal, led by Pretorius, marched against him, Sir Harry dealt them a resounding defeat at the Battle of Boomplaatz. The result was political chaos in the Transvaal. Its annexation seemed certain to follow.
But just then the Westminster see-saw came down with a bump, unseating Sir Harry and miraculously restoring the power of the voortrekkers. New British governments, successively led by Lord John Russell and Lord Derby, decided to take a firm stand against colonial adventures. Sir Harry was recalled and his conquests were repudiated. By the Sand (Zand) River Convention of 1852 and the Bloemfontein Convention of 1854, the internal independence of the two Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State was guaranteed by Britain.[26]
Why the sudden reversion to a policy of compromise? This time the forward policy was not repudiated for humanitarian reasons, as at the time of D’Urban’s debacle. The pressure came not from the missionaries of Exeter Hall but from the Lords of the Treasury whose aim was financial retrenchment. The new government was determined to economize as much as possible on the Empire. For this was the heyday of Lord Palmerston and Free Trade. Britain had grown rich by exploiting markets in regions, like Europe and the United States, where she had no political control. Why pay for an empire, when Britain had free access to the markets of the world? In 1872 Cape Colony followed Canada, New Zealand and the Australian colonies in being granted ‘responsible government’ — in other words, internal autonomy. And at the same time a discovery was made that seemed to set the seal on the success of this policy: the discovery of the world’s largest pipe of diamonds at Kimberley in the Free State, close to the Cape frontier.
The ensuing diamond boom in the Cape (which had, by some smart mapreading, hastily incorporated Kimberley in its territory) transformed the economy of the region. Trade flourished. Railways spread across the veld. At last Britain’s Cinderella colony had goods to sell to the mother country and the money to buy her goods.[27] For her part, the mother country responded by returning once more to the attack on the problem of the Boers.
The aim this time was a good deal more sophisticated than the fumblings of D’Urban or the buccaneering of Sir Harry Smith. It had long struck British statesmen that the central problem of South Africa — to impose British control, despite the Afrikaners at the Cape and the Boers of the Transvaal — had analogies with the problem of the French in Canada. In Canada, it was true, the British settlers had soon swamped the French, whereas the Afrikaners would remain in the majority at the Cape for the foreseeable future. But a federal constitution had worked wonders in the French Canadian provinces. What about a federal constitution for all four South African states, the two British colonies and the two Boer republics? This was the plan of the new High Commissioner in 1877, Sir Bartle Frere.
Strange to say, it was not the Boer republics that seemed the chief obstacles to this scheme. The Boers in the Transvaal were in such a desperate state at this time — hemmed in by the Zulus, their treasury bankrupt — that they seemed prepared to acquiesce in becoming a British colony. The real obstacle was the degree of colonial nationalism at the Cape that had been stimulated both by responsible government and the diamond boom. In a reckless fit of impatience, the British tried to force the hand of the Cape government by annexing the Transvaal before federation was agreed. It was back to a forward policy with a vengeance.[28]
Hence the third great blunder, which culminated in Majuba. At least Frere did not begin by making the mistake committed by his predecessors, of acting without authority from home. Together, he and the Tory Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, concerted their scheme. The first step was to woo the Boers with the same tactic as D’Urban had used: letting loose the British army on the Boers’ African adversaries.
Accordingly, the British precipitated the Zulu War of 1879, which, despite some initial success for the Zulus, resulted in their extinction as a military nation (and a peerage for the British commander, Sir Garnet Wolseley). Meanwhile, without firing a shot, the British army had marched north to Pretoria. By 1877 the Union Jack was flying over the government buildings of the new British colony of the Transvaal.[29]
For a moment it looked like a triumph of the forward policy. Pretoria occupied, its loyalty secure, the Free State sure to follow, soon the great federation of British South Africa. But the verge of triumph was the verge of the abyss. The Conservatives had not managed to secure full Liberal support for the annexation, and now Gladstone thundered at Midlothian: he would repudiate the take-over. His arguments were based as much on financial orthodoxy (that is, economy) as on political radicalism. It became clear that the Liberals were as deeply divided on South Africa as they were on Ireland. The British annexation was left in the air. Sir Bartle Frere was recalled under a cloud. No money was invested in the colony, there were no improvements in business or administration to offset the loss of political independence for the Boers. Accordingly, the Boers’ powerful tradition of nationalism, temporarily paralysed by an empty treasury and the Zulu menace, was suddenly given new life.
In 1880 the Boers under Paul Kruger rose in revolt against their new government, and within a few weeks inflicted three small, but shattering, reverses on the British army, culminating in the Battle of Majuba in British territory just inside the frontiers of Natal.[30]
By this time, Gladstone, Grand Old Man, was back in the seat for his third term. He was quick to seize on a compromise. He agreed to withdraw the large British force now hurrying to the rescue, led by Sir Fred Roberts, the hero of the march to Kandahar. He agreed to restore complete internal self-government to the Boers. There was one major qualification: Britain would reserve for herself ultimate control over the Transvaal’s foreign affairs. Constitutionally it was a unusual, though not unique, arrangement. Britain was continuing to claim her status as paramount power in South Africa, although she did not claim the Transvaal as a colony or even as a member of her Empire.
Under pressure from well-wishers in Cape Colony and the Free State, Kruger consented to this arrangement, which was given the form of an international treaty in Convention of Pretoria of 1881 and the Convention of London of 1884. But Kruger, who became President of the restored Transvaal Republic, did not conceal the fact that he was signing under protest, and would do his best to negotiate a third convention which would remove the shadow of British paramountcy from the Transvaal’s independence. On their part, many British soldiers under Roberts felt deeply humiliated by the settlement. Moreover, it served to quicken, as soon emerged, the rising spirit of Jingoism.[31]
Such was the Abyss of Blunders.
To Milner the talk of avenging Majuba seemed distastefully crude. The battle itself was a conventional enough disaster: a poor tactical position, a diminutive force, a half-baked general. It was the whole annexation that had been hopelessly bungled. Frere had fumbled. Westminster had undermined him. The Treasury had ensured his failure. As for Gladstone’s settlement, Milner could only wince at the thought. By settling for ‘peace-under-defeat’ before the main British army could arrive, Gladstone had taken one more step in confirming the Transvaal as that dangerous anachronism, a quasi-independent nation in Africa.[32]
What was to be done? It was here that the ‘great game’ for South Africa emerged as part of a much greater game — the struggle for world supremacy.
The phrases used — ‘imperial unity’ and ‘consolidating the Empire’ — were vague, conveniently vague. Milner himself knew what he meant by them. He Prided himself on his realism — on the fact that he had no illusions about the true state of the British Empire. He was not misled, like the cruder kind of jingos, by the flag-waving and the drum-beating.[33] He shrank from these theatricals — ‘walking on stilts’, he called his job as viceroy.[34] He ridiculed the philosophy of the Gatling gun and the Last Stand. What he was interested in was power. Not merely for himself, but for England and the English race. This was the love of his life — English ‘race patriotism’, as he called it — pursued with the passion that he denied himself in most other ways.[35] But the power of the English race was not, as he saw it, at its climax. It was already in decline.
The years of drift and compromise in South Africa were part of this general decline. Indeed, in the other settler colonies, for half a century there had not even been an attempt at a forward policy; all policy had been weak and negative. And gradually British power was eroded as, one by one, these white colonies were granted internal self-government. It was true that the colonies themselves had grown richer and more powerful. It was also true that Britain had made vast new tropical conquests — especially during the recent scramble for Africa.
But were these new black colonies to be a source of either wealth or power? Until they were developed, no one could say. In Milner’s eyes, as indeed in the eyes of all the more sophisticated imperialists, Britain’s main concern was not with adding to or even developing the black Empire. It was with reasserting her power in the white Empire. Could the Empire now be made into a reality as a federal Greater Britain? Could it become the supreme world-state with defence and trade controlled by a single grand imperial parliament? Or was the white Empire doomed to dissolve into a medley of nation-states, no closer to Britain than the first great ex-colony, America?
It was in South Africa, Milner believed, that the answer to this question would be found, one way or the other.[36] He thought he knew the dangers. In his personal philosophy of aiming for the ‘Big Things of life’, risks were unavoidable and big risks, too.[37] Perhaps it was already too late. Perhaps the Empire, not the Transvaal, was the anachronism. Perhaps he was one himself. Time would show.[38] Of one thing Milner was certain. The present policy of compromise in South Africa — the backward policy — offered no chance of restoring Britain’s power. In 1886 gold had been discovered in the the Transvaal hills called Witwatersrand — the Rand. It was gold that had lured Rhodes and Beit in 1895 to try to re-annex the Transvaal to the Empire — a scheme in which Chamberlain and the imperial government (so they claimed) had played no part. To the folly of Majuba had now been added the fiasco of the Raid.
Milner’s own feelings towards the Raid and its political results were understandably more complicated than towards the earlier blunders.[39] In a sense he owed everything to the disaster. But for Jameson, he might have still been sitting in his office at Somerset House hiding his yawns as Chairman of the Inland Revenue. And there were aspects of the Raid, total fiasco though it had been, which offered, Milner thought, hopeful lessons for the future.
What no one, least of all Kruger, could have foreseen when the London Convention had been signed in 1884 was that the Rand would be discovered two years later. The resulting explosion in the wealth of the Transvaal had an explosive political result. Quite suddenly the Cape and Transvaal seemed to be exchanging roles, as political leadership of the sub-continent passed to the Transvaal. There was now a double anomaly about the two states. The Cape was a British colony, though the majority of the white inhabitants were Afrikaners; the Transvaal was still a Boer republic, though it appeared that the majority of its inhabitants were, by the mid-1890s, British, for the gold-rush had sucked in so many British immigrants. Who, then, was to control the Transvaal, richest state in Africa?[40] This was the question which Jameson tried to answer with his madcap ride across the veld.
When the Raid was imminent the old President declared, ‘I shall wait until the tortoise puts out its head, then I shall cut it off.’[41] In the event he was far too clever to do anything of the sort. He had the tortoise wrapped up, so to speak, and sent to London as a gift for the Queen. It was to London that he sent Dr Jameson and the Raiders; to be sentenced by a Crown court, to the great embarrassment of all concerned, to terms ranging from fifteen months in gaol. Worse, Rhodes was revealed as the arch-plotter and arch-bungler of the whole affair. This was proved by two official enquiries and two public trials, in London and South Africa. It could not be denied, once Kruger had published to the world the amazing collection of code telegrams and other secret documents found on the battlefield of Doornkop.[42]
It was at the enquiry held by the Cape government that there emerged the answer to the central puzzle: why had the Johannesburg rising, organized by Rhodes, collapsed so ignominiously? As the man who had then been Prime Minister at the Cape, as well as Chairman of the Chartered Company, Rhodes himself was forced to testify — and a wretched figure he cut during the two days, he was in the witness box. It turned out that he and his multi-millionaire backer, Alfred Beit, had hopelessly overestimated the strength of the opposition to Kruger among the Uitlanders. A large minority were not British at all, but were Afrikaners from the Cape, Germans, Frenchmen, even Americans. Of course, they had their grievances, including their lack of political rights. But they were earning good money in the gold mines, and were in no great hurry to overthrow the government. The same applied to many of the independent capitalists who had stakes in the Rand gold-fields. And even the Johannesburg ‘Reformers’ (the cardboard revolutionaries) had not been able to agree on the crucial question: once they had toppled Kruger’s republic of the Transvaal, what would they put in its place? An Uitlander republic? Or, as Rhodes and Beit wanted, a British colony under the British flag?[43]
While the Reformers had pleaded for time to patch up their differences, Rhodes and Beit had kept their heads well buried in the sand. In Belt’s case this was almost literally the case; he took a seaside holiday at Muizenberg during the crucial weekend when Jameson was due to set off. Rhodes had remained hovering about Groote Schuur, his palace in the pine woods above Cape Town, postponing the decision to recall Jameson, although the invasion was immediately repudiated by both the British and Cape governments. William Schreiner, the Cape’s Attorney-General, gave the Cape enquiry an account of an interview with Rhodes during that period: Rhodes utterly broken down by the fiasco of the rising; Rhodes blurting out that Jameson ‘had upset his applecart’; Rhodes refusing to try to stop him with the abject excuse ‘poor Jameson, we’ve been friends for twenty years, how can I ruin him now?’ Yet it also emerged that Rhodes did try to ruin Jameson a few days later. He had sent a message to him in Pretoria gaol instructing him to take the whole blame.[45]
This was the unsavoury story of the Raid as it emerged from the trials and official inquiries. And absurd as were the illusions of the conspirators, the political effects were real enough, as Milner knew to his cost. The Raid had disastrously weakened the imperial position in South Africa. In 1898 Kruger was re-elected as the President of the Transvaal for a fourth term, routing his more progressive Boer opponents, and he was now the hero not only of the Boers in the Transvaal, but of their fellow Afrikaners at the Cape. The bonds of a new kind of Cape colonial nationalism, which Rhodes had inspired, were now broken, and the Cape Afrikaners were forced back into the laager mentality they had abandoned for a decade. Of course, this would not necessarily have been a bad thing for imperialists, if the Cape had not had self-government. But it had, and the Afrikaners remained in the majority.[46]
As for Rhodes, he was severely censured at both the Cape enquiry and the parliamentary enquiry in London. He had been forced to resign both as Chairman of the Chartered Company and as Cape Prime Minister. He then announced that he would abandon Cape politics and in future devote himself to the country that bore his name. It was about time. Rhodes’s gamble in sending off most of the Rhodesian police with Jameson had helped precipitate native risings by the Matabele and Mashona, which were only stamped out at heavy financial cost to the Chartered Company.[47]
When Milner had been sent to the Cape in 1897 it was his job to restore the world destroyed by Jameson. The first problem was how to deal with the ex-colossus and his partners, including Alfred Beit. As Governor and High Commissioner, it was Milner’s job to be on good terms with all the pro-British party, especially these ex-German, naturalized British millionaire ‘gold-bugs’ like Alfred Beit. And on good terms he was. Yet he could not conceal from his close friends his private feelings. Rhodes’s and Beit’s plan for invading the Transvaal had been not only ‘idiotic’; it was ‘unscrupulous’.[48] He did not now trust Rhodes and his associates an inch. ‘They would give me away or anyone else for the least of their own ends,’ he declared in an outburst to Philip Gell. They were ‘money grubbers’ and ‘potential rebels’. Yet he could not help liking Rhodes. It needed a ‘moral and intellectual structure as complex’ as his own to realize that ‘Rhodes is thoroughly untrustworthy yet cordially to admire him’.[49]
This was, of course, for the ears of only his closest friends. Indeed, Milner once called the truth about Rhodes one of the ‘arcana imperii’ (imperial secrets) that could never be divulged except to the ‘fully initiated augur’. ‘For goodness sake,’ he added, ‘do not let Grey’ — Lord Grey was the new chairman of the Chartered Company — ‘ever know what I think ... Grey, excellent, simple-minded fellow, would not be one-tenth of the use he undoubtedly is, if he did not take Rhodes at his own valuation.’[50] Milner had his own motives for telling this to Philip Gell. He wanted to install him, his most intimate and reliable friend, in a crucial position at ‘Headquarters’ — among the London gold-bugs. He hoped Gell could get a job at the London office of Wernher-Beit, the richest and most powerful of all the Rand mining houses.[51] (The personal assets of Wernher and Beit were valued in 1895 at £17 million, compared with Rhodes’s £5 million.)[52] ‘I had rather it were Wernher, Beit and Transvaal things’, he told Philip, explaining this scheme, ‘than Grey, Rhodes and Rhodesian things.’ In fact, Philip had to settle for a seat with Grey on the board of the Chartered Company. But as Beit, too, was a director of Chartered, it would serve as a useful link with the Rand. If Milner had his way, it was Wernher and Beit, richer and less erratic than Rhodes, who had the most important part to play in the ‘Great Game’ in South Africa.[53]
It was for this — to concert a long-term strategy to deal with the Boers — that Milner had now come to see Chamberlain.
He had no doubt of the lessons of the past. The Raid was Rhodes’s private attempt at a short cut to solve the Transvaal problem. It had failed as abjectly as the forward policy of the imperial government. But that did not prove that intervention was the wrong policy. If Milner was to intervene, his policy must be based on three principles: agreement with loyalists at the Cape, agreement with the Colonial-Office at home, and the support of British public opinion on both sides of the political fence.
He knew what they would reply at the Colonial Office. Why attempt a forward policy at all? Time was on their side: only be patient and the Transvaal would fall into their lap. But time, Milner was sure, was not on their side, now that the Raid had strengthened Kruger’s grip on his own people. So they simply could not afford to go on ‘muddling through’ and letting the Boers ‘stew in their own juice’.[54] In fact, earlier that year, Milner had written to London to ask for permission to ‘work up to crisis’, to force a show-down with Kruger. Not to put too fine a point on it, he wanted to pick a quarrel over some issue or issues, and then let events force the crisis.[55]
At the time Chamberlain (embarrassed by the enquiry into the Raid) had told a friend that he wished ‘everyone would forget the existence of the place [South Africa] for the next year or two’.[56] To Milner he had replied, politely but firmly, ‘For the present at any rate our greatest interest in South Africa is peace ... all our policy must be directed to this object.’[57] This had been the position in early 1898, when Britain had her hands full in dealing with French claims to the Upper Nile. What was Chamberlain’s policy in December — after the British triumph in expelling the French from Fashoda?
Milner now had a doubly delicate diplomatic mission during his working holiday in England. First, he must expose the ‘rose-coloured illusions’ of Chamberlain and the Colonial Office: time, he would prove to them, was not on their side. Second, he must soften up the Press and politicians in general. He had no wish to end up, like Sir Bartle Frere, sacrificed on the altar of public opinion.[58] This in its turn involved attendance at the dinner tables and country house parties of the great political hostesses of the day — a task not uncongenial to Milner.
High society provided an emollient conspicuously lacking in his official life as an administrator. Eight years before, as a thirty-seven-year-old financial secretary in Egypt, he had fallen in love for the first time. The girl was Margot Tennant and Milner asked her to marry him.[59] She had chosen his Balliol friend instead — Henry Asquith, the future Prime Minister. Milner had tried to shrug off the unrequited affair. ‘Dear Blessed Old Boy,’ he had told Philip, ‘Don’t “take on” about it. There are no bones broken. I have not been eaten by an ogress. . . .’[60] But the rebuff intensified the struggle against the romantic yearnings of his father’s temperament. Where could he now give them a better (and safer) outlet than in the towered and castellated homes of the great hostesses, in bicycling with Lady Alice Portal and punting with Ettie Grenfell? And even if he was hopeless at bridge, his welcome was assured. Alfred not only talked brilliantly about his imperial mission. He was a brilliant listener.[61]
That evening, 18 November, at eight, the special saloon coach carrying Milner steamed into Vauxhall Station. He took a cab to his bachelor chambers at 47 Duke Street. He had his ‘old cave’: the big red room on the ground floor. He was too tired to dine at Brooks’. A stack of letters awaited him, a deluge of invitations. Everyone wanted to hear about South Africa.[62]
Four days later Milner crossed the palatial courtyard of the Colonial Office in Whitehall on his way to see Chamberlain. He had every reason to feel depressed. It was not only that row of deceased proconsuls sculpted on the east fagade, whose numbers included (like a kind of Bluebeard’s gallery) the heads of D’Urban, Smith and Frere. He had also just heard the news from some friends in the CO: the Master — Chamberlain — was sticking to the ‘no-war policy’.[63]
His own mind was made up. There were only two ways out of the abyss in South Africa. Either Kruger must make political reforms in his ramshackle republic or there must be a ‘row’. To put it bluntly, the choice was between reform or war. And of the two, he believed ‘war was more likely’.[64]
Head of chapter John Buchan Thirty Nine Steps 62-3 (London 1958)
1. M’s diary 16 Nov 1898, Mil (dep 68)
2. M. Murray Union-Castle Chronicle (London 1953) 121-4. Illustrated London News 27 Jun 1891. M-Fiddes 12 Nov 1898, Mil 8 (SA 45)
3. M-Gell 26 Jun, 7 Jul, 19 Oct 1898, Gell 507, 510, 514
4. O. Walrond-Gell 25 Jun, M-Gell 28 Jun 1897, M-Gell 11 Jan 1898, Gell 360, 361, 501
5. M-Gell 2 Jun, M-E Gell 12 Oct 1897, Gell 359, 363
6. M-Bertha Synge 4 Aug 1898, MP I, 286
7. M’s diary 1-17 Nov 1898, Mil (dep 68). Cf O. Walrond-Gell 6 May 1897, Gell 358
8. Menpes War Impressions 89-100. Cook Garrett 151 fn. Cf Buchan Memory 97-103. Beatrice Webb quoted Marais 171
9. Gell’s note of talk with M 17 Feb 1897, Gell 346. Wrench Milner 19-30. Gollin First Proconsul 4-8
10. Wrench 30-46
11. See Smuts-wife 1 Jun 1899 SP I 242. For ‘Bohemian’ see M-Ly Ilbert 7 Dec 1897, Mil (kept separately at New College)
12. Cape Times 1 Jan 1896 saying he was very nearly chosen by Rosebery’s Cabinet instead of Robinson. See also C’s speech reported Times 27 Jun 1897 p. 10 col 4-6
13. Hicks Beach-M 22 Mar 1897 quoted Wrench 160-1
14. M-Iwan-Müller 9 Feb 1897, Mil 192
15. Times 29 Mar 1897
16. M-Gell 20 Apr 1898, Gell 503
17. M-Goschen 14 Jul 1897, Mil
18. C. Lucas History passim esp 204-5, 213-14, 222, 336-7
19. De Kiewiet British Colonial Policy passim. M. Wilson and L. Thompson Oxford History of South Africa I 244
20. M. Wilson and L. Thompson I, 245
21. De Kiewiet loc cit.
22. M. Wilson and L. Thompson I, 245, 292, 355-63, 405-8
23. Lucas 160-2
24. M. Wilson and L. Thompson I, 368, 409-10
25. Ibid I, 369-373
26. Ibid I, 416-24
27. Robinson, Gallagher etc Africa and the Victorians 2-16. M. Wilson and L. Thompson II, 11-12
28. Ibid II, 2899-298
29. Ibid
30. Ibid II, 298-300
31. Lehmann The First Boer War 262-307
32. C. Lucas 300-1, 336-7
33. M-Mrs Montefiore 12 June 1900, MP II, 104-5. M-Gell 2 Jun 1897. Gell 359
34. M-Ly Ilbert 12 Dec 1897, Mil New College
35. M’s credo Times 2 Jul 1925 quoted Marais Kruger’s Republic 172. See also Gell’s note on M in Gell 346
36. M-Parkin 28 Apr 1897, MP I, 42
37. M-E Gell 26 Jan 1899, Gell 525
38. M-Dawkins 11 Apr 1904, Mil (S3)
39. See M-Gell 22 May 1899, Gell 521
40. See [Selborne’s] memo 26 Mar 1896, Sal
41. Kruger Memoirs II, 261-3. Van der Poel Jameson Raid 104
42. Blue Book 311. Hole 269-71. Van der Poel 166-7
43. Blue Book 311, see esp Q 6827-38. Van der Poel 73-4
44. Garrett etc Crisis 81. Van der Poel 89-90
45. C.311 Q 3304-7, 3401-4. Van der Poel 96-7
46. Robinson and Gallagher 430, 433. Van der Poel 260-2
47. B. Williams Rhodes 225-92. Lockhart and Woodhouse Rhodes 350
48. M-Gell 22 May 1899, Gell 531
49. M-Gell 19 Oct 1898, 3 Mar 1899, Gell 514, 528
50. Ibid
51. M-Gell 3 Jan 1899, Gell 521. See also M-Gell 28 Jul 1898, Gell 510
52. Standard and Diggers News 16 Nov 1895
53. See note 51. Gell’s notes [nd], Gell 518. M-Gell 30 Jan 1899, Gell 527. M’s diary 30 Nov 1899, Mil
54. M-Gell 11 Jan 1898, Gell 501. M-C 23 Feb 1898, MP I, 220-1. M-Bertha Synge 26 Apr 1899, Mil 191
55. M-C 23 Feb 1898, MP I, 222
56. C-Ellis 14 Oct 1897, Cham JC 10/5/1/62
57. C-M 16 Mar 1898, Garvin Chamberlain III, 366
58. M-Fiddes 23 Dec 1898, MP I, 299. See also MP I, 286-7
59. M’s diary 1891-2, Mil 252/161-6. Wrench 111-16, 124-34, 136-54
60. M-Gell 17 Apr 1892, Gell 290
61. For M’s success in society see esp M’s letters to Mrs Grenfell (copies in PC) and diary esp 30 May-4 Jun 1895, bicycling trip in Normandy (‘Lady Alice made little headway against the wind’)
62. M’s diary 18 Nov 1895, Mil (dep 65)
63. M’s diary 22 Nov 1898, Mil (dep 68). M-Fiddes 25 Nov 1898, MP I, 299
64. M-C, M-Selborne 23 Feb, 7 Sep 1898, MP I, 222, 287