London,
22 November — December 1898
‘A war in South Africa would be one of the most serious wars that could possibly be waged. It would be in the nature of a Civil War. It would be a long war, a bitter war and a costly war . . . it would leave behind it the embers of a strife which I believe generations would hardly be long enough to extinguish ... to go to war with President Kruger, to force upon him reforms in the internal affairs of his state, with which [we] have repudiated all right of interference — that would have been a course of action as immoral as it would have been unwise.’
Joseph Chamberlain, speaking
as Colonial Secretary in the House
of Commons, May 1896
Earlier that day, 22 November, the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, had briefed himself for Milner’s visit. He worked, we are told, smoothly and efficiently in his office like an imperious machine.
His biographer has described with awe the Chamberlain of this period. Every day he arrived by cab from his home in Princes Gardens. In the Private Secretary’s room — a sort of ante-chamber between the main corridor and the blue baize door of Chamberlain’s room — three or four distinguished-looking men in frock-coats are awaiting his arrival. These are the hierarchy, the high priests of the Colonial Office. They warm their hands at the coal fire; one of them goes to the brass rack on the mahogany table and picks up a file; it is tied up in the proverbial red-tape, and the spidery sequence of minutes culminates in the welcome initials, ‘J.C.’. Now there is the ring of the table bell and the blue baize door opens. The Master has arrived. ‘The machine is ready to take some more,’ he says to the Private Secretary, who shuffles in with the files. He is only half in jest. ‘The sleeping city wakened at his touch,’ as one of his admirers put it.[1]
From his desk Chamberlain eyed the world through his eye-glass, and it was no wonder if the world trembled. Queen Victoria was the symbol of the mother country, the Empire made flesh; Chamberlain seemed to epitomize its other side, the dreadnought spirit. There he sat, the self-made man from Birmingham, with a home-grown orchid in his button-hole and a diamond pin in his stock, his face as cool and handsome as a piece of his own Birmingham steel. His right hand rested on the huge brown globe, traced with the spider’s web of cable routes and steamer lanes. It was this strong right hand that would pull the Empire together.[2]
Such was the impression Chamberlain liked, no doubt, to convey, and he conveyed it brilliantly. Yet there was another Joe Chamberlain, better known to his political colleagues than to his office staff or the public: emotional and impulsive, moody and sometimes despondent. For the frustrations of the last two and a half years at the CO had left their inner mark on him, not to speak of the wrangles in the Cabinet — and, of course, the searing experience of the Raid.
Yet the central trauma of Chamberlain’s life was none of these. It had occurred twelve years earlier, and it haunted him still.
In 1886 Chamberlain was President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone’s cabinet, and his prospects were dazzling. He had risen from the bed-rock of the British middle-class by way of a successful industrial career to the commanding heights of politics.[3] Head and shoulders above his fellow radicals, he could expect, when Gladstone retired, to be the next Liberal Prime Minister: perhaps one of the greatest of Britain’s Prime Ministers. Then, in 1886, the Irish Home Rule ulcer burst and engulfed the Liberal Party, and he discovered he was that strange hybrid, both a radical and an imperialist. With Lord Hartington (later Duke of Devonshire), he founded the Liberal Unionists, and for nine long years he was in the wilderness.[4]
To Chamberlain the sacrifice seemed devastating. As he later blurted out to Lord Selborne, the son-in-law of Lord Salisbury, the ‘dream of his life’ had been to be Prime Minister; for the sake of principle he had sacrificed ‘all his ambitions, all his hopes, all his dreams ... they had gone for ever into limbo’. Now he was exposed to the attacks of both parties, there were ‘venomous and malignant attacks’ from the right of the Tory party, while from his old friends among the radicals he had been abused as ‘no public man before him ever had been’.
In April 1895 he had seriously considered resigning from politics. In the event, of course, he thought better of it; he had been impulsive; besides, the Tories were anxious to smooth his ruffled feathers.[5] A couple of months later the working agreement between Liberal Unionists and Conservatives took shape as a formal coalition. And one afternoon in June, the Parliamentary majority of the Liberal rump, now led by Lard Rosebery, vanished in a puff of smoke (it was actually during a debate on the supply of cordite). Chamberlain had come in from the cold. Lord Salisbury, the Tory Prime Minister, then offered him virtually any office he cared to name: the Treasury, Foreign Affairs, the War Office. The whole field was open to him. He chose the Colonies. The appointment was welcomed.[6] Yet it surprised those who, like Salisbury, had imagined he was only a ‘theoretic imperialist’, or thought him too ambitious to choose what had hitherto been a minor Cabinet post.[7]
The ensuing partnership had borne fruit much as might have been predicted: a measure of success, and a good deal of frustration for everyone.
On taking over, Chamberlain found the Colonial Office was almost a parody of a Whitehall department. Behind the glittering Roman facade, commissioned by Lord Palmerston, the place was unbelievably drab: miles of brown dado and lead-lined staircase. ‘We must have all this smartened up,’ Chamberlain told his Private Secretary, peering through his eye-glass at the worn carpet and the broken-down mahogany furniture in his room. Some fresh paint was eventually extorted from the Office of Works and electric light was installed to replace the candles and supplement the gaslights.[8] Yet the office remained bleak enough for a romantic like Chamberlain, whose own house at Highbury, in a Birmingham suburb, was filled with the gleam of Morris glass and the glow of Burne Jones tapestries.[9]
Still more negative than the atmosphere of the building, Chamberlain found, was the spirit of its occupants. Like Milner, Chamberlain believed the new imperialism demanded of Britain a double task: to make a Greater Britain out of the white Empire, and to develop the black one. But how to achieve anything with an office staff of ninety-nine men (including the messengers) dedicated to the Treasury virtues of thrift and prudence?[10] The truth was that the Treasury allocation for the Empire (excluding India and Egypt) was a shoe-string — a mere £130,000 when Chamberlain took over the Colonies.[11] No wonder that the CO staff tended to look on their job with a certain cynicism, and any talk of the ‘great estates’ overseas had a hollow ring.[12]
His Cabinet colleagues were delighted for him to make speeches about imperial unity.[13] They seemed less anxious to take any practical steps to achieve his objects — especially if they cost money. And the second part of the imperial task — developing the black Empire — would hardly be cheap. In due course, Chamberlain had succeeded in persuading his cabinet colleagues to raise the Colonial Office budget to £600,000, but this was largely spent on the pacification of Uganda and a project in Cyprus.[14] It was a shocking fact, as Chamberlain admitted in public, that the great majority of the black colonies for which Britain was directly responsible had still, after a century, received no real benefit from imperial membership.[15]
Still, one must not exaggerate Chamberlain’s own frustrations at this period. He had to admit that he found both Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour, his nephew and deputy, the soul of politeness. They recognized that his imperial ideas were a substitute for the lost dream of being a great radical Prime Minister. They flattered him in their languid, aristocratic way by reminding him of how he was indispensable to the party alliance — though this was only partly flattery. They supported him, to some extent, against the penny-pinching spirit of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Michael Hicks Beach. Above all, they saved him when his career seemed likely to be brought to an untimely end by that tornado from South Africa — the Jameson Raid.
The Raid. Chamberlain, too, had found this an extraordinary business. And if Milner felt baffled about the part Chamberlain had played, it was nothing to what Chamberlain sometimes felt himself. After one and a half years of public enquiries and private heart-searching he confessed to an admirer, ‘The fact is that I can hardly say what I knew and what I did not.’[16]
Yet the evidence was there, whether Chamberlain liked it or not, locked away in those ministerial red boxes in his office. And, eighty years later, we can see that, if published, this evidence would have been the end of Chamberlain and might well have changed the course of history.[17]
The dilemma that faced Chamberlain when he took over the Colonies in 1895 was a delicate one. He shared Milner’s view of South African policy in the past: that it had been one long blunder from the imperial standpoint. He recalled ruefully that he had served in Gladstone’s cabinet, which made the culminating blunders of Majuba, the Pretoria and London Conventions and ‘peace-under-defeat’. He shared Milner’s distaste for Rhodes and the buccaneering of the Chartered Company.[18] But he had inherited from Lord Ripon, the outgoing Liberal Secretary of State, a passive leave-it-to-Rhodes policy for South Africa, which was supposed to result in federation. Soon after Chamberlain took up the seals of office, Rhodes pressed for new negotiations. And here was the dilemma. Chamberlain learned that an Uitlander coup was expected in Johannesburg, organized by Rhodes and Beit. Could the British government safely leave it all to these two men to handle? What if the coup resulted in an Uitlander republic under its own flag. Paradoxically this would be even worse for Britain than the Boer republic. For it could postpone for ever the chance of creating a British federation of South Africa, built up on the gold of the Transvaal.[19]
Chamberlain’s response to the dilemma was to adopt a course not unknown to political opportunists: he would take care ‘not to know too much’. If the plot failed he could plead official ignorance; if it succeeded he could share (privately) the credit with Rhodes and Bait.[20] But this was not merely a policy of opportunism; it was extremely dangerous. To have knowledge, without complicity in the plot, was to tread a moral and political tightrope. Who but a brave man (or a lunatic) would share a tightrope with Cecil Rhodes?
On that fateful day when Jameson set out on his ride, Chamberlain was at home in Birmingham, waiting anxiously for news of the coup.[21] Characteristically, he had kept the Prime Minister and Balfour almost completely in the dark. The first the Prime Minister knew about the plot, it appears, was when he was told by Chamberlain, a week earlier, that a rising was imminent and they must ‘watch the event’ as it might ‘turn out to their advantage’.[22] A few days later Chamberlain informed him that the rising was going to ‘fizzle out’ — partly because of the tiresome way in which the Uitlanders would not agree to exchange the Boer republic for a British colony.[23] Two days later, Chamberlain received the astonishing news that, despite everything, Jameson was going in. It was the night of the servants’ ball at Highbury, and he was dressing for dinner when the special messenger arrived. He rose to the occasion. ‘If this succeeds, it will ruin me,’ he is supposed to have told his family, clenching his hands. ‘I am going up to London to crush it.’[24] He dashed off in a cab from the servants’ ball at midnight like the hero of a novel by Ouida.
In fact, when Rhodes fell from the tightrope, he nearly brought Chamberlain down with him. The policy of official deafness proved unworkable. At bot ends of operations — in London and the Cape — members of Chamberlain’s staff had been fully briefed by Rhodes and the plotters, and had taken action to help Rhodes which amounted to complicity. Chamberlain himself had become caught up in the web of half-knowledge and half-truth. Not only would it be most discreditable if those nods and winks ever came to light.[25] He had also personally intervened at one crucial moment in the plot — this was the time of a crisis over Venezuela — to remind Rhodes of the international situation, and a cable had been sent to ‘hurry things along’.[26] And soon, after the opening of Bobby White’s trunk, the whole world was buzzing with stories of the British government’s complicity.[27]
Chamberlain’s part in the great cover-up that followed Jameson’s Raid — Jameson’s break-in, so to speak — was not, one would imagine, an episode on which he looked back with any great pride. To Lord Salisbury he wrote a long memorandum in tones of injured innocence.[28] In Parliament he was his usual bland and masterful self, the Pushful Joe of the cartoonists. He gave as good as he got. Yet to his inner circle of friends, he made no secret of the fact that he had his back to the wall. ‘I don’t care a twopenny damn,’ he said, ‘for the whole lot of them.’[29] But how to suppress, or neutralize, the evidence that would come before the Parliamentary Committee of Enquiry? In the event, Lord Salisbury showed his confidence in his Colonial Secretary by insisting that he should himself serve on the Committee.[30] And in addition, certain other arrangements were made which effectively saved his bacon.
First, Chamberlain came to a sensible arrangement with Rhodes, Beit and their men. Jameson was secretly visited in prison by Chamberlain; and Jameson kept his mouth shut.[31] On their par Rhodes and Beit agreed not to produce in court the so-called ‘missing telegrams’. These were the cables from Rhodes’s London office to Cape Town and the most damning evidence against Chamberlain outside his own red boxes. They detailed the course of his dealings with the Colonial Office and included the ‘hurry-up’ telegram, which especially implicated Chamberlain.[32] In return for Rhodes’s and Jameson’s good sense, Chamberlain agreed not to tamper with the charter of the Chartered Company, which could have been revoked as a result of the revelations about Rhodes’s part in the Raid.[33]
Second, Chamberlain found someone on the Colonial Office staff who was prepared to offer himself as a scapegoat. This was Sir Graham Bower, the Imperial Secretary at the Cape, who had personally handled negotiations with the plotters. Out of patriotism — ‘naval standards’, he called it — he agreed to pretend he had not told his chiefs about the Jameson plan. His reward was swift: censure by the Committee and the ruin of his career.[34] Another possible scapegoat was also considered by Chamberlain: Bower’s counterpart, Edward Fairfield, who had handled the London end of the negotiations, including the ‘hurry-up’ telegram. But Fairfield apparently did not feel like being sacrificed. It was fortunate for everyone that, shortly after he was told what was expected of him, he had a stroke and died.[35]
And so Chamberlain was able to appear at the London enquiry, and say with his hand on his heart, ‘I had not then and ... never had, any knowledge, or, until I think it was the day before the actual raid took place, the slightest suspicion of anything in the nature of a hostile or armed invasion of the Transvaal.’ And he went on to pay eloquent tribute to poor Fairfield; how sad it was, he could say, somehow keeping a straight face, that Fairfield had misunderstood his orders, being so unusually deaf.[36]
In fact, it needed more than Chamberlain’s eloquence, Fairfield’s stroke, Bower’s quixotic self-sacrifice and the deal with Rhodes and Belt to save the Colonial Secretary. He was saved by his enemies.
A few days after the Raid the Kaiser committed a blunder almost as colossal as Rhodes’s, Beit’s and Jameson’s. He sent a telegram to congratulate Kruger on his escape. This immediately invested the Raid with the status of an international incident. In England, it provoked a storm of anti-German feeling. What infernal cheek, people said, for the Kaiser (Wilhelm II) to meddle in our sphere of influence. Queen Victoria wagged her finger at her impertinent grandson Willy. And everyone swung back behind the government. The fleet was mobilized before the sudden squall subsided. As for Jameson, instead of having to endure the expected jibes about the White Flag, he was the hero of the hour. From his prison cell he learnt that his ride had been set to music. ‘Then, over the Transvaal border,/And gallop for life or death,’ sang Alfred Austin, the Poet Laureate.[37] Jameson’s statue was cast in Staffordshire clay. Grim-faced on his black stallion, he rode across a thousand mantelpieces.
Some of the admiration for Jameson did not fail to rub off on Chamberlain. Certainly it compounded the problems of Chamberlain’s chief political enemies — the radical wing of the Liberal Party. How far could they go in pressing the charge of complicity against Chamberlain? With public opinion in this mood, they would be on dangerous ground. Moreover, there were all sorts of other reasons why Liberals were squeamish about pressing the charges. The leading Liberal imperialist, Lord Rosebery, was believed to have heard about the Raid from Rhodes’s own lips much too early for Rosebery’s own good. The leading radical, Sir William Harcourt, was a personal friend of Joe’s and, apart from this, there was the call of patriotism. Who wanted to wash their dirty linen in front of the world?[38]
So Joseph Chamberlain appeared at the parliamentary enquiry and was met by a barrage of silence. The enquiry itself passed into folk-lore as the Lying-in-State at Westminster.[39]
What were the effects on Chamberlain of this two-year ordeal? His discomfiture certainly made him no more conciliatory to Kruger. He now had a personal score to settle with the old man — ‘an ignorant, dirty, cunning and obstinate man who had known how to feather his own nest and to enrich all his family and dependants’. But nor had his sympathy for Kruger’s opponents — the Uitlanders — increased with the Raid. He found them ‘a lot of cowardly, blatant, selfish speculators who would sell their souls to have the power of rigging the market’. As for their leader, Cecil Rhodes, whom he had always privately distrusted, he now regarded him not only as a ‘blunderer’ who had alienated the Cape Afrikaners, but as a ‘blackmailer’ who had threatened to publish the missing telegrams if the Charter was revoked. ‘What is there in South Africa,’ he burst out, ‘that makes blackguards of all who get involved in its politics?’ Yet these were the men who, since the Raid, were Britain’s only allies in South Africa.[40]
One can well imagine Chamberlain’s feelings of frustration. The Raid had made him keener than ever to have a go at the Transvaal. By alienating the Cape Afrikaners, however, it had also deprived him of the means. In short, the effects of the Raid were not unlike the effects of drink, as described by the Porter in Macbeth: ‘It provokes and unprovokes; it increases the desire and takes away the performance.’[41]
At 2.30 p.m. on 22 November Chamberlain received Milner in his room beyond the blue baize door, and Milner put the case for ‘working up to a crisis’.[42] There is no record on the Colonial Office files of the interview, but we know the two men’s lines of argument. The gap between them was still as wide as ever.
Time fought on the side of the enemy, Milner claimed. Kruger had returned after his re-election as President more autocratic and more reactionary than ever’. Now he was arming for the coming struggle with Britain. ‘He has immense resources in money and any amount of ammunition of war, to which he is constantly adding.’ No doubt he ‘suffered from megalomania’. But either his government — a ‘race-oligarchy’ — or the Uitlanders must rule in the Transvaal, and Milner saw no sign of Kruger’s government removing itself. Indeed, if Britain went to war with its European rivals, Kruger might seize the chance to attack the Cape.[43]
To this, Chamberlain repeated his conviction: the only policy now available was the policy of patience. First, because there were the political effects of that ‘accursed Raid’. It had placed the country in a ‘false position’; the Afrikaners at the Cape had been alienated; he must wait until they resumed their confidence in him. Second, there were positive advantages in playing the waiting game. British influence was increasing all the time; internal opposition to Kruger must develop by reaction and Kruger himself was not getting any younger.
Third and fourth, there were arguments against war Chamberlain believed that military victories would be self-defeating: their ultimate aim was a union, in every sense, in South Africa. War would only arouse hatred and leave a legacy of bitterness. If war had to come, Kruger must be the aggressor and the Afrikaners at the Cape — or at least a large part of them — on the side of the Empire. War would be ‘extremely unpopular’ in Britain unless Kruger’s behaviour was ‘outrageaous’ and he put himself blatantly in the wrong. To do this he would have to make a ‘serious breach’ of the London Convention.[44]
Give Kruger enough rope, Chamberlain seemed to be saying.[45] To which Milner’s reply was in effect that the old President had proved himself far too cunning to hang anyone, least of all himself.
* * * * *
Milner returned to his chambers in Duke Street with the result of his mission to see Chamberlain an apparent anti-climax. Yet Milner was not depressed. He had taken a hint from Joe — from one of those nods and winks — that London’s ‘no-war policy’ did not tie Cape Town’s or Johannesburg’s hands. To ‘get things “forrarder” by my own actions,’ was how he described his policy after the interview.[46] It was in South Africa that a way of working up to the crisis must be found.
Meanwhile, he threw himself into the task of softening up public opinion at home, by stamping ‘on rose-coloured illusions about South Africa’. It proved an awful rush. It was delicate work, too, for he had to catch up ‘with all the leading politicians and pressmen — without seeming to run after them’.[47]
Fortunately, Milner could rely on his network of friendships — that finely spun web that stretched from Balliol to the Cabinet room by way of The Times in Printing House Square, Brooks’ Club and Panshanger. At his first political house party that month, a weekend with Lord and Lady Cowper at Panshanger, he bumped into Arthur Balfour, the Deputy Prime Minister, George Curzon (it was a fortnight before Curzon left England to be Viceroy in India) and St John Brodrick, Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. Curzon and Brodrick were Milner’s own Balliol contemporaries, together with a third, Willie Selborne, and Austen Chamberlain; these were the ‘Arthurians’ (as young Winston Churchill was to call them), the men who would soon come to dominate the Tory Party under Balfour’s leadership.[48] Already they were a hard, bright centre within the party. No wonder Milner enjoyed the weekend at Panshanger, even if he preferred the long political talks over the port to the party games, like ‘the truth game’, that were such a ‘dangerous’ feature of the Panshanger Friday-to-Monday.[49]
The guests that weekend also included Margot and Henry Asquith. It was now nine years since Margot had rejected Milner’s proposal of marriage, and the scars had long healed. The Margot he had wooed beside the Pyramids (with what ‘grace and poetry’ she had danced the pas seul at Lady Baring’s Christmas party)[50] was now Margot the political hostess, the Margot who shocked everyone by smoking cigarettes on the steps of the House of Commons, the Margot whose ‘colossal indiscretions’ made her such a delightful companion.[51] In fact, she had again become one of his most intimate friends. She would drop in to his chambers in Duke Street when he was in London and stay gossiping for hours. It was all absolutely innocent, of course, but not idle gossip by any means on Milner’s part. Henry Asquith was now the leading Liberal in the party after Campbell-Bannerman and it was essential, if Milner were to woo the Liberals, that he should keep in with Henry Asquith. And not only with Henry and the Liberals. For Milner’s aim was to spread the word about South Africa as widely as possible. And if you wanted something shouted from the house-tops, you had only to tell it in strictest confidence to Margot.
It was a ‘delightful’ excursion, Milner confessed, that weekend at Panshanger. It had set the pattern for the rest of Milner’s trip. He saw George Buckle of The Times, and Spenser Wilkinson of The Morning Post.[52] (He found the ‘wobbly Liberals’ of The Manchester Guardian ‘very rotten’ by contrast.’)[53] He was invited everywhere: by the Roseberys of Mentmore, the Rothschilds of Tring, not to mention the Queen, the Prime Minister and the Prince of Wales. He found these visits, too, ‘delightful’.[54]
He would apologize to his friends for troubling them with his ‘boring screed’. ‘You may think me a bore,’ he told Lord Rosebery, the leading Liberal Imperialist, ‘but I should like to tell you some things about that little corner of the imperial chess-board I am especially concerned with. It does not attract much attention at present. Heaven be praised!’ And then he would go on to explain, for the hundredth time, the dangers of ‘Krugerism’; how he wondered if the British government’s ‘policy-of-patience’ would ever heal the South African ulcer, and yet how he himself would exhaust every effort in his search for peace.[55]
Of course, Milner’s real policy — of ‘working up to a crisis’ — was kept secret from Margot and the Liberals.[56] Only a few intimates, like Philip Gell, knew these arcana imperii. And there was another secret of Milner’s character that has remained locked till today in his private papers.
Incongruous as Milner’s figure might seem in High Society, this shy, donnish figure in the boisterous world of drawing-rooms and gun-rooms, these jollities were an accepted by-product of Victorian official life. Still more incongruous — and a great deal less safe — was Milner’s friendship with a girl called Cécile, whose lodgings in Brixton were paid for by him. The story of this strange affair has never been told — or even hinted at. But a careful scrutiny of Milner’s unpublished diary shows that Milner had set up Cecile in a house near, but not too near, his bachelor chambers at Duke Street. It was an ardent friendship that had lasted at least nine years already, and cost Milner about a quarter (at an average Of £450 a year) of his free income.[57] Together they bicycled over the South Downs; they went punting on the Thames, staying Friday to Monday at a hotel in Marlow; they played piquet and whist when he came to stay in her lodgings. One obvious rule had to be kept: Cécile never came to his chambers, let alone met him in public. Apparently she never met one of his friends.[58] Perhaps even Philip Gell never knew of Cécile’s existence.
Milner’s diary makes it clear that his friendship with Cécile was one of the dominant themes of his life, even during that working holiday in England. In the first week of December — the busiest phase of his English tour, when he was only able to snatch a few hours successively with Chamberlain at Birmingham, with Salisbury at Hatfield, and with Queen Victoria at Windsor — Milner vanished into the blue on a six-day bicycling trip with Cécile.[59]
The idea may seem a little absurd today: a middle-aged Viceroy, his mistress, and two bicycles vanishing on a mid-winter’s tour of the South Downs and letting the South African crisis go hang for a week. But then there was nothing absurd about a bicycle in those days. Indeed, the bicycle was the sports car of the nineties, the sporting symbol of the age. (It added spice not only to love, but to politics. Cabinet ministers like Balfour — the ‘divine Arthur’ of the Panshanger set — went dashing down to Hatfield on their bikes to see the Prime Minister. It was on his bike that ‘Pom’ McDonnell, Salisbury’s urbane Private Secretary, had sped from Hatfield to Osterley one sunny weekend in 1895 with the glorious news for Arthur: the Liberal government had fallen.)[60]
On their own wintry excursion, Milner and Cecile stayed in a Hampshire hotel. Although they had a private sitting-room where they ‘played piquet till bed-time’ (as Milner primly recorded in his diary)[61] the risk of exposure must have been considerable. A scandal might have ruined Milner. True, Victorian society winked at men-about-town who kept mistresses. But Viceroys had to avoid any hint of scandal. And the special moral and intellectual position that Milner had built up for himself — the austere ‘civilian soldier of the Empire’,[62] the dedicated philosopher-king — would have vanished like a puff of smoke. His enemies, who now thought him a prig, would have written him off as a humbug. His friends would have had a dangerous insight into his character — into that Bohemian side of him that lie struggled so hard to control.
Perhaps the risk of discovery, the brinkmanship, added spice to the adventure. Certainly one of the features of the week that Milner must have felt most was its dream-like incongruity. What other great Victorian proconsul could vanish from the side of his Queen at Windsor and re-emerge at the side of his mistress in a seedy back-street of Brixton?
Indeed, there was an extraordinary episode on the fourth day when Milner had to return to the official world for a few hours to celebrate a great ‘hooroosh’: a send-off for George Curzon. He deposited his bike at Vauxhall Station, and took a cab to his chambers in Duke Street. He dealt hastily with the backlog of official letters. He dressed in his white tie; an hour later he was sitting in the Hotel Cecil between the Hon. Mrs Maguire and Lady Ulrica Duncombe at the table of the Duke of Marlborough. ‘It was a most brilliant function and I greatly enjoyed it,’ he recorded.[63] At eleven o’clock the party began to break up, and his companions drove off westwards to Mayfair. Milner walked alone across Waterloo Bridge, and then, when the coast was clear, hailed a cab and drove back to the other world south of the river.
It was all recorded in his diary — in the style of a maiden aunt describing a picnic. ‘In most beautiful weather,’ he wrote on 8 December, ‘we rode by the Devil’s Punch Bowl from Milford to Liphook, taking a late lunch at the Royal Hants Hotel and reaching Liphook just at sunset. It was really a wonderful day, more like mild autumn than winter, and the view from the top of Hind Head splendid.’[64]
Yet there were other splendid views from the top Milner had to consider — and they included the view from Government House. Perhaps Milner already knew in his heart that this was the last adventure with Cecile. On 23 January, two days before leaving for South Africa, he was to write in his diary in his meticulous italic hand, ‘To Brixton ... to see C.’ Then he added three words, curiously emotional words in that prim, dry record of facts, crossed them out and then scrawled them again in the margin of the page: ‘to say goodbye’.[65]
Meanwhile, a new political strategy had taken shape in Milner’s mind after the interview with Chamberlain. The ‘no-war policy’ did not tie his hands. Everything depended on the British subjects in the Transvaal. If they could be ‘bucked up’ and given competent leadership; if Wernher, Beit and the other ‘gold-bugs’ could be brought into line, too; if both their grievances could be presented to the British public in the correct light, in short, if the Uitlanders could be manoeuvred into the right, and Kruger into the wrong, then they could still ‘screw Kruger’.[66] In other words, if Milner supplied the plan and the horse, that ‘idiot’ Jameson could ride again.
To arrange this himself he would have to wait till he reached the Cape. In the meantime he must pray to the Higher Powers that General Sir William Butler, the acting governor, acted with discretion, and that a premature crisis did not blow up in his absence.
Head of chapter C, House of Commons 8 May 1896 Hansard XL/914-15
1. Garvin Chamberlain III, 10-14 quoting Sir H. Wilson and Ly Lugard. Sir R. Furse Aucuparius (London 1962) 22-3
2. Garvin III, 11-12
3. DNB
4. See esp Balfour-Salisbury 31 Jul 1892, Sal E/Balfour. Garvin II, passim
5. Selborne-Salisbury 7 Apr E/Selborne
6. Garvin III, 4-5
7. Salisbury-Selborne 30 Jun 1895, Sel Box 5/31
8. Garvin (quoting H. Wilson) III, 15. See contemporary photo album of CO in FCO library
9. For Highbury see account in Edward Hamilton’s diary 22 Jan 1899, BM 48764
10. See C-Selborne 14 Oct 1896, Sel Box 8
11. Statesmen’s Yearbook CO figures for 1895-6
12. Garvin III, 19-20 quoting C in Times 24 Aug 1895. Cf Lucas History passim
13. Times 7 Nov 1895
14. Statesmen’s Yearbook CO figures for 1899
15. C 22 Aug 1895 Hansard XXXVI/641-2. Garvin III, 20
16. C-Flora Shaw quoted Garvin II, 82-3
17. Van der Poel 261-2
18. C-Salisbury 13 Nov 1895, Sal E/Chamberlain. Selborne-C 6 Oct, C-Selborne 14 Oct, Sel-C 18 Oct 1896, Sel Box 8/91 etc. C-Harcourt 4 Sep, C-Ellis 14 Oct 1897, Cham JC 5/38/2261 JC 10/5/1/62. See also note 40
19. Wilde Archives Year Book !, 1956, 9-18. Drus Documents 49
20. Van der Poel passim esp 27-30, 34-6, 47-51, 54-6. Wilde 19
21. Garvin III, 88-9
22. C-Salisbury 26 Dec 1895, Sal E/Chamberlain
23. C-Salisbury 29 Dec 1895 ibid
24. Garvin III, 89
25. See note 20
26. Maguire-Rhodes 20 Dec 1895 quoted Van der Poel 66-72. Drus Report 49-50
27. C. 8380 App 168 foll reprinted from Green Bk no 2 of Transvaal
28. C’s memo June 1896, Drus Report 47-8
29. Garvin III, 106-8
30. Report of Select Cttee of Commons, House paper 311
31. E. Longford Victoria RI 684 (Pan edit 1976)
32. Van der Poel 259. See Lockhart & Woodhouse 342-4. Note the relative absence of material on Raid now in CO 417/152, 160, 177-80 and CO 879/44 etc.
33. Van der Poel 195-6
34. Van der Poel 227, 234, 244-8
35. Fairfield-Bower 31 Oct 1896, Bower-Ommaney 11 May 1906, Bower-Rose Innes 3 Feb 1932 cited Van der Poel 189-95
36. C’s ev at Select Cttee Inquiry Q 6223-7 etc.
37. E. Pakenham Jameson’s Raid 97-101, 64. Garvin III, 92-7
38. For rumours re Rosebery see C-Selborne 30 Dec 1896, Sel Box 8/144
39. Morley’s phrase quoted Van der Poel 230
40. C’s minute 15 Apr 1896, Drus Documents 160-2. E. Pakenham 248-9
41. Shakespeare Macbeth Act II scene 3 lines 33-5
42. M’s diary 22, 30 Nov 1898, Mil (dep 68)
43. M-Selborne 9 May 1898, MP I 232-5. M-Fiddes 3 Jan 1899, Mil 8/28-33
44. C-M 16 Mar 1898; MP I 227-9. Cf Selborne-M 23 Mar, MP I 229-31
45. See C-Selborne 3 Mar 1897, Sel Box 11/162: will ‘end in self-strangulation’
46. M-Selborne 31 Jan 1899, MP I, 301-2 (clauses reversed)
47. M-Fiddes 23 Dec 1898, MP I, 299-300
48. M’s diary 24-6 Nov 1898, Mil (dep 68). W Churchill-Rosebery 13 Aug 1903, Rose. B-Selborne 16 Aug 1898, Sel Box 2
49. M’s diary 24-6 Nov 1898, Mil. See other visits to Panshanger 20-22 Apr, 18-21 Nov 1895, Mil 258
50. M’s diary Dec 1891, Mil 252/161-6
51. M-Gell 17 Apr 1892, Gell 290
52. MP I, 301. M’s diary 18 Nov Jan 27 1898-9, Mil (dep 68)
53. M-Gell 19 Jun 1899, Gell 534
54. See note 52
55. M-Rosebery 12 Dec 1898, Rose 75/160-4. M-Selborne 23 Jan 1899, MP I, 301
56. See Margot-M 9 Jul 1900, Mil 29 (SA 32)
57. M’s diary 1891-1901. ‘CD’ lived at Norwood until 1893 then Croydon till 1896 then Brixton. She cost M £392 in 1893, £359 in 1894, £378 in 1895, £354 in 1896. In 1901 she cost £600
58. See M’s diary 1891-7, 98-9, Mil (dep 60-69)
59. M’s diary 1-2 Dec 1898 (Windsor), 4-5 Dec (Highbury), 5-6 Dec (Hatfield), 6-11 Dec with ‘CD’, Mil (dep 68)
60. Countess of Jersey Fifty-one Years of Victorian Life (London 1923) p. 370
61. M’s diary 8 Dec 1898, Mil (dep 68)
62. M’s credo, Times 27 Jul 1925
63. M’s diary 9-10 Dec 1898, Mil (dep 68)
64. M’s diary 8 Dec 1898, Mil (dep 68)
65. M’s diary 23 Jan 1898, Mil (dep 68)
66. M-Fiddes 3 Jan 1899, Mil 45 (SA 37). M-Gell 27 May 18 Jun 1899, Gell 531, 533