Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (62 page)

As for Parnell, desolately he wandered Ireland looking for friends. He was the lost leader. He married his Kitty, but this only did him harm—‘the climax of brazened horrors’, declared the Bishop of Raphoe. Rejected by the Liberals, disowned by most of his own party, in Ireland he was abused for immorality or scorned by those who thought of mere Home Rule as supine surrender. The virtue had left him. ‘Our general has betrayed us’, wrote Archbishop Croke. ‘For his own miserable gratification he has sold the pass, preferring an ignoble and licentious life in London to the liberation and advancement of his too confiding countrymen.’ Even the poor people, who had worshipped him, now refused to listen. In Kilkenny they pelted him with mud, and jeered at his passing. At Mallow they ripped the doors off his carriage, while a priest cried ‘Down with libertinism!’ Though Parnell still regularly took his seat in Parliament, and campaigned tirelessly throughout Ireland, still he was broken, and in his unlucky month of October, 1891, 45 years old, he died at Katherine’s side in their house at Brighton.

His memory was to remain ambivalent. Was he true or false, a patriot or an opportunist? Was he ever playing fair with Gladstone, or would he have denounced home rule as soon as he had achieved it? The English generally thought the worst of him, agreeing with Queen Victoria. The Irish, however harshly they treated him in his last years, knew him at least for a genius, as Gladstone did, and never forgot his charisma. When his funeral procession drove up Sackville Street towards Glasnevin cemetery, past the pillar with Nelson on the top, immense silent crowds of Irishmen watched it pass. The air was charged with a special quality of Ireland, familiar to Parnell
all his life—a mingled quality of bitterness, sorrow, conspiracy and pride, British soldiers marched with the procession, and among the onlookers was the imperial commander-in-chief in Ireland, Garnet Wolseley. It was, he later wrote, the only crowd he was ever afraid of.

W
E are approaching the imperial climax. Now the great searchlight of the imperial mission seemed to sweep the world incessantly, here playing upon an Irish funeral, there peering into kraal or heathen temple. The horizons of the British marvellously widened, as the scope of their power and responsibilities dawned upon them, and for the first time ordinary people, as Disraeli had foreseen, began to take a pride in the British Empire. How glorious it was, when one thought about it, to see so much of the map painted the imperial red! What giants there were about! How majestic, Britain’s providential stance at the summit of the world!

In fact Britain’s comparative status, financial and military, was weakening still: but this was not yet apparent to the public, least of all to that newly coherent public, literate for the first time, enfranchised for the first time, and given a window on the world by the new penny Press, which was to provide the chorus of
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  imperialism. To its members Britain was never so unchallengeable; and to more educated Britons too the nation’s right to exert its power in the world, and extend its beneficent sway over less fortunate peoples, admitted of no doubt.

It was a destiny passionately accepted, for good reasons as for bad, watered by tears as it was emblazoned by triumph, noble as well as squalid: and the more fragile the British supremacy became in reality, the more emotional became the idea of Empire. The Raj was growing plumper now, full-blown almost, and since the British themselves habitually saw their Empire in anthropomorphic terms, Britannia with her sceptre or full-whiskered redcoats in sentinel poses, we too may legitimately imagine it a little maudlin in its developing prime, coarsened rather, bosomy. This was an age of
hero-worship, and the Empire idolized its own, showering its protagonists with medals, ribbons and indulgence.

In 1885 all this heightening of emotions, this port-and-ginger sentiment, this beat of drum and heaving of corsage, reached a supreme expression in the death of General Charles Gordon, Commander of the Bath, Royal Engineers, whom Queen Victoria herself described as ‘dear, heroic, noble’, and for whom Lord Tennyson wrote the nation’s epitaph: 

Gordon, than whom in feet the earth has seldom borne a more complicated man, entered the saga of Empire obliquely, at a tangent on the River Nile. Since the geography of that river had been elucidated in the 1860s, the British had felt a possessive interest in it. For one thing they realized that control of the terrible African slave trade, still an issue close to their hearts, lay in the control of the Nile’s headwaters. For another they hazily conceived that the security of India was dependent upon command of the Nile: the Nile governed Egypt, it was reasoned, Egypt contained the Suez Canal, the Suez Canal was the spine of Empire.
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The British repeatedly claimed that they had no designs on Egypt, but nobody believed them for long. Once Disraeli had acquired the Suez Canal shares, Britain’s physical presence on the Nile seemed only a matter of time. The Egyptian State was still in theory a dependency of the Ottoman Empire, with the Khedive as the Sultan’s Viceroy, and its financial condition was so chaotic and
corrupt that the Western Powers had already intervened to control its economy and protect their own interests. When in 1882 an idealist Egyptian Army officer, Arabi Pasha, launched an insurrection to rid the country of all such foreign interference, the moment had come for an imperial occupation. Unsuccessfully inviting the French and the Italians to join them in the enterprise, the British sent an invasion army to Port Said under General Sir Garnet Wolseley, G.C.M.G.—who, swiftly defeating Arabi at the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, and displaying his organizational talents at their most brilliant, in two days occupied Cairo and ran up the Union Jack above Saladin’s citadel.
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This was not, the British declared, an annexation. It was merely a temporary occupation, intended to restore order and stability to Egypt.

In fact everything about it was anomalous. It never became explicit. The Khedive remained Khedive, the Sultan far away remained the theoretical head of State, in whose name firmans were issued and dignitaries elevated. The British did not provide a Government exactly, they merely supplied compulsory advisers: though their soldiers controlled Egypt, and their officials soon came to run the country, they did not appoint a Governor or even a Resident, their senior representative holding the innocuous rank of Agent-General.

What was more, it was never made clear whether the British, in assuming responsibility for Egypt, also took on the burden of the Sudan, the next territory to the south, which had been for 60 years a dependency of Cairo. A million square miles of desert, its African inhabitants Islamicized and half Arabized, this forbidding country meant nothing whatever to the British public, and not much more to the British authorities in Cairo, but the imperial expansionists were already arguing that without its possession slavery would never be ended and Suez would never be safe. Unfortunately it was in a state of endemic rebellion; its inhabitants, under a magnetic and mysterious Muslim holy man called simply the Mahdi—the
Leader—had risen in arms against the inefficient and impious Egyptian Government. The British thus had a Sudanese problem on their hands almost before they knew where the Sudan was. Should they, as the new suzerains of Egypt, intervene to put the rebellion down? Gladstone, having astonishingly committed the British Empire to the invasion of Eygpt itself, vehemently thought not. There was still an Egyptian Government, he argued, and an Egyptian army in the Sudan. The British were not the rulers of Egypt, only the temporary occupiers, and the Sudan was none of their business. So an Egyptian force it was, though under a British mercenary commander, Colonel Hicks, which marched off in the summer of 1883 to put down the revolt in the name of the Khedive.

The expedition, 10,000 strong, was fallen upon by 50,000 Sudanese in the desert near El Obeid, and annihilated. Hicks and his British staff were never seen again, and only a few hundred Egyptians straggled away from the battlefield. The Mahdi thus became supreme in the southern Sudan, only a few isolated Egyptian garrisons remained in the country, and the scene was set for the appearance on the imperial stage of General Gordon.

The Egyptians had ruled the Sudan with the help of free-lance employees from Europe, men of several nationalities and disparate styles, who frequently rose abruptly from obscurity to be the Governors of vast remote provinces. The most remarkable of them had been Gordon. After a varied career in or around the British Army, including an adventurous rime in China which earned him the life-long sobriquet ‘Chinese’ Gordon, in 1874 he had accepted an Egyptian invitation to be Governor of Equatoria, the southernmost province of the Sudan, in succession to Sir Samuel Baker the explorer. He had seen the task as a Christian call. The Sudan was in the grip of the slave traders, often in corrupt alliance with Egyptian administrators, and for five years Gordon strenuously fought them, making enemies and admirers in equal numbers, upsetting the conventions of generations, prodding his Egyptian masters into action and opening the country to trade and government almost to
the Great Lakes themselves. His work had been much publicized at home as an example of the muscular Christianity then in vogue, and Gordon had persuaded himself that he had achieved some arcane ascendancy over the tribespeople, but his success had really been limited. The Egyptian administrators remained irreformably corrupt, the Egyptian soldiers were cruel racialists, the Khedive himself, though publicly committed to the abolition of the slave trade, could do little about it because several of his most powerful subjects were engaged in it. If Gordon did bring a momentary degree of order to the Sudan, the country soon relapsed into its habitual misery. Gordon resigned once, in 1876, but was persuaded back as Governor-General in Khartoum: in 1879 he resigned again, and this time it seemed he would never return to the Nile.

His Chinese and African adventures, his lofty Christian ideals, had made him a legend in England already, but he loitered the years away. Once he accepted the job of private secretary to the Viceroy of India, only to change his mind before his ship reached Bombay. Once he went to China again, to persuade the Chinese against war with Russia. He was in Ireland for a time, briefly commanded the Royal Engineers in Mauritius, went to South Africa as commandant of the colonial forces in the Cape, spent a year in Palestine investigating the sites of the Holy Places, and was about to resign his commission and take employment with the King of the Belgians when, in January 1884, he was summoned to London by telegram for an interview with Mr Gladstone’s Cabinet.

More than ever, after the catastrophe at El Obeid, the British Government wanted nothing to do with the Sudan. Gladstone was not only unwilling to send an imperial expedition to avenge Hicks and reconquer the country for Egypt, he also insisted that the Khedive should withdraw all the Egyptian garrisons and trading communities left in the Sudan, abandoning the country in effect to the Mahdi. While this was, in its anti-expansionist aspects, a properly Gladstonian decision, in other ways it was uncharacteristic of the Grand Old Man. To many of his supporters it seemed unworthy, to most of his opponents it seemed feeble. It was abandoning the work of civilization. It was leaving the field to slavers and Muslim fanatics. It was a betrayal of all that Gordon and his colleagues had
achieved, not to speak of Livingstone and the missionaries of central Africa. There was a growing public agitation to do something about the Sudan—just what, nobody was quite certain—and the man most often mentioned for the job was Gordon, a hero unemployed.

So on January 18 Gordon presented himself at the War Office in Pall Mall, chaperoned by the Adjutant-General of the British Army, Baron Wolseley of Cairo and Wolseley—so old a friend that the two men, we are told, remembered each other nightly in their prayers. Gladstone was ill at home, but his senior Cabinet colleagues were present, and most of them were more Empire-minded than he was himself: Lord Harrington the War Minister (‘Harty-Tarty’), Lord Granville the Foreign Minister (‘weak as water’, in the Queen’s opinion), Lord Northbrooke the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Charles Dilke of
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fame. Did they know what they were doing? Did they really wish, as Dilke perhaps wished, to acquire the Sudan for the British Empire? Or did they hope, as Gladstone more probably hoped, that General Gordon would simply settle the Sudan himself, in his own inimitable way, and enable them to forget it? We can never be sure. They commissioned Gordon only to report on the prospects of evacuating the Egyptian garrisons from the Sudan—instructions vaguely worded, and perhaps imprecisely meant. Gladstone, away in his bed at Hawarden, limply telegraphed his acquiescence, and Gordon agreed to leave upon this nebulous mission that very evening, by the night train to Paris and Brindisi which connected with a P. and O. steam packet to Alexandria.

Lord Granville, Lord Wolseley and the Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, all went to Charing Cross to see him off. Wolseley, finding that the hero had no money in his pockets, gave him the cash from his own wallet, together with his watch and chain. The Duke of Cambridge opened the carriage door for him. Removing their top hats in farewell, holding their kid gloves in their hands, the three great men watched the train crossing the Thames into South London’s murky dusk, before returning to their carriages and dinner. They had, as Gladstone later said, let loose a genie from a bottle: or more pertinently, launched to his apotheosis an imperial martyr.

Here are a few facts about Charles Gordon, who was 51 in 1884, unmarried, a passionate Christian fundamentalist, and who was shortly to become, for a few months, the most celebrated man alive. He was a slight man of 5' 5", with brown curly hair, a smile of great sweetness, and eyes of a piercing cold blue—unnaturally bright eyes, magical eyes some people thought, ‘filled with the beauty of holiness’, ‘an eye and expression that might have lived a thousand years’, ‘eyes with a depth like that of reason’, or as a Sudanese child once put it, ‘eyes very blue, very bright, and I frighted when I see eyes’. It was said that he could see in the dark: certainly he was so colour-blind that he could tell one postage stamp from another only by the number on it.

Gordon had been a zealous evangelist since being stationed as an engineer officer at Gravesend, when he used to stick tracts on walls or trees, and throw them out of train windows. He loved boys, with a love apparently innocuous but nonetheless intense, running a youth club at Gravesend, and curiously describing his efforts to evangelize its members as ‘adventures with Royalty’. He was also an indefatigable visitor to the sick and the old: in Gravesend, where dying people often asked for him instead of the doctor, one sometimes saw the graffito ‘God Bless the Kernel’ on the walls of slums. He believed implicitly in Heaven, though perhaps not in Hell, and regarded death as a triumphant release, to be coveted all through life—‘the glorious gate of eternity, of glory and joy unmixed with a taint of sorrow’. ‘I went to Polly’s’, he recorded of one death-bed visit, ‘and saw her off to the Golden City. She left at ten minutes to 12, very happily and beautifully. “What are those bands playing for?” she said just before her departure. It was the Harpers with their harps, harping….’