Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (68 page)

‘I
EXPRESS to you my sincere congratulations,’ said the Kaiser’s telegram to President Kruger, ‘that without calling on the aid of friendly Powers you and your people, by your own energy against the armed bands which have broken into your country as disturbers of the peace, have succeeded in re-establishing peace, and defending the independence of the country against attack from without.’

He was premature in his satisfaction. The failure of the Jameson Raid was an omen, no more, and the British had not yet lost their imperial resolution. Against such insolence from a foreign ruler, they instantly closed their ranks: Chamberlain was cleared, Jameson was glorified, Rhodes was forgiven.
1
In fact the British were only now reaching the apogee of their public complacency, and when in 1897 good old Queen Victoria celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of her accession to the throne, the nation made it gaudily and joyously a celebration of Empire. Never had the people been more united in pride, and more champagne was imported that year than ever before in British history.
2
What a century it had been for them all! How far the kingdom had come since that distant day when Emily Eden, hearing upon the Ganges bank of the young Queen’s accession, had thought it so charming an invention! What a marvellous drama it had offered the people, now tragic, now exuberant, now uplifting, always rich in colour, and pathos, and laughter, and the glow of patriotism! In 1897 Britain stood alone among the Powers, and to most Britons this isolated splendour was specifically the product of
Empire. Empire was the fount of pride. Empire was the panacea. Empire was God’s gift to the British race, and dominion was their destiny.
1

In some ways it was true. The possession of Empire, and particularly of India, kept Great Britain in the forefront of the Powers. There was a good deal of bluff to it, and much self-deception too, but the universal presence of the British flag made the island kingdom a force to be reckoned with everywhere. Britain’s resources of man-power far exceeded her own paltry population. Her worldwide systems of commerce and intelligence were unrivalled. While it was true that the strategic burden of Empire was heavy, it was also true that Britain could exert pressure around the flank of every other Power—on Russia’s south-east frontiers, on America’s northern frontiers, on the European States from her bases in the Mediterranean.

Besides, the very splendour of the Empire was in itself an asset. If it was not in fact impregnable, it certainly looked it, and its assurance gave it authority. Just as the Royal Navy remained supreme largely by virtue of its own swagger, so the proclamation of Empire possessed the virtue of a decree, and made people think it must be binding. The mystique of it all, the legend of blood, crown, sacrifice, formed a sort of ju-ju. The red looked ingrained on the map, as though it had been stained there in some arcane ritual, and the vast spaces of Greater Britain were like a field of perpetual youth, where future generations of Britons would for ever be regenerated.

Whether it had made the British rich was always to remain debatable. Rich they undoubtedly were, and the pound sterling was the basis of the whole world economy, but how much of this wealth came from the Empire, nobody really knew. There were pros and
cons. On the one hand was India, which had for many generations provided a flow of specie, and during Victoria’s reign had offered an almost limitless field for investment. On the other was the terrible cost of maintaining the vast and ramshackle imperial structure, with its garrisons in every continent, its enormous patrolling fleets, its consumption of talent and energy that might have found more immediate productive uses at home. One could point to the immense flow of trade within the Empire, but equally one could argue that the most profitable British overseas investments were in foreign countries. There was no single year in Victoria’s reign in which Britain’s exports were more valuable than her imports; but she always enjoyed a handsome balance of payments, because of the City of London, the financial and insurance capital of the world, whose preeminence had little to do with Empire. Nobody could really strike a balance: but if economists sometimes argued for less elaborate ways of keeping the nation prosperous, the man in the London street in 1897 had little doubt that the cash in his pocket, like the pride in his spirit and the grand excitement of Jubilee, sprang from the success of Empire, the national vocation.

By now the effects of imperial possession, scattered and particular in 1837, were diffused throughout Great Britain, and formed a familiar part of life’s pattern. There were no longer specific ports, like Bristol or Liverpool, which were imperial gateways: the whole island was a gateway of Empire now, and the imperial products and merchandise flowed through every seaport. Nabobs no longer came home to build their Sezincotes, but there was scarcely a gentleman’s house in the country which was not in some way enriched by the imperial experience, whether by the existence of a bank account stuffed with the profits of colonial trade, or just by the Maori carvings, Benares trays or Sioux beadwork which gave a lick of the exotic to the drawing-room.

London was littered now with imperial statuary, heroes of the Mutiny, great pro-consuls, C. J. Napier in Trafalgar Square, Gordon like a mystical vicar on his plinth. Colonial outfitters, colonial agents,
colonial bankers, the makers of colonial inks, beers, pianofortes, camp beds, portable baths were inescapable in the streets and directories of the kingdom. Whole industries of Birmingham or Lancashire thrived upon the colonial trade. High on its bleak hill in Easter Ross Sir Hector Munro’s gates of Negapatam still intermittently showed through the mist, but by now the trophies and emblems of Empire were generally less theatrical, more accessible, and were beginning to form a homely part of the national heritage.

Not far from Henley-on-Thames, for instance, at the village of Ipsden in Oxfordshire, there stood the Maharajah’s Well, with its attendant orchard. It was covered with a dome of cast iron, and it had been given to the village by His Highness the Maharajah of Benares, in token of his attachment to the British Empire. A charitable trust ensured that the villagers of Ipsden should have free water from the well for ever; a warden lived on the spot, in a pretty circular cottage; an orchard was planted with cherry trees, to provide for the maintenance of the well. Nearby a pleasure garden was created, for the enjoyment of the fortunate villagers: it contained a pond shaped like a fish, the Maharajah’s personal symbol, a mound called Prubhoo Teela, and an ornamental ravine called Saya Khood. The whole was called Ishree Bagh, and around the dome of the well were inscribed in iron letters the words ‘His Highness The Maharajah of Benares, India, Gave This Well’.
1

Not many people doubted the rightness of Empire—‘any question of abstract justice in the matter’, wrote Trollope, ‘seems to have been thrown altogether to the winds’. The British knew that theirs was not a wicked nation, as nations went, and if they were insensitive to the hypocrisies, deceits and brutalities of Empire, they believed genuinely in its civilizing mission. They had no doubt that British rule was best, especially for heathens or primitives, and they had
faith in their own good intentions. In this heyday of their power they were behaving below their own best standards, but they remained as a whole a good-natured people. Their chauvinism was not generally cruel. Their racialism was more ignorant than malicious. Their militarism was skin-deep. Their passion for imperial grandeur was to prove transient and superficial, and was more love of show than love of power. They had grown up in an era of unrivalled national success, and they were displaying the all too human conceit of achievement.

Nor were they ever without their self-critics. Liberalism was out of fashion in the 1890s, and the dying Gladstone was distressed to see politicians of every shade subscribing to the imperial heresy: but there had always been voices of restraint or modesty in England, men who pleaded for gentler values, or plainer ambitions, or who believed in the true equality of all peoples, or wondered if the British Empire really was constituted by divine appointment. Even in 1897 there were dissentients—men like Edward Fairfield of the Colonial Office, who was said to ‘look down upon the British Empire as a profound mistake’, or the poet Wilfrid Blunt, who fought the Empire vehemently on every front, or General William Butler of the Ring, by now a passionate anti-imperialist. The nation was never unanimous about anything, and although at the time of the Diamond Jubilee the New Imperialists had it all their own way, many a dissenting argument was in the formative stage, and Gladstone’s ideals, if discredited, were far from dead.

There were forebodings, too, even then. The British looked all-confident to the world outside, but the very frenzy of the imperial climax was revealing. For all her pomp and circumstance, Britain was more vulnerable than ever before: her population had doubled since 1837, and she was now dependent upon imported food for her survival. A few political scientists sensed that an Empire based upon autocratic resolution sat uneasily upon a democratic foundation. A few maverick economists were arguing that Empire was more trouble than it was worth, and that Britain would be in better condition if she had no overseas possessions at all. There were repeated attempts to give the Empire a tauter meaning: conferences of colonial premiers, proposals for common defence arrangements,
institutions like the Colonial Society, the Imperial Institute, the Empire league. There was a trace of disquiet to it all, as though the imperialists knew by some unadmitted instinct that, however momentous the occasion and unexampled the glory, time was running short.

Still, it was a grand moment of history, and the world recognized it without rancour. Mark Twain, surveying the many-coloured pageant of imperial troops that poured into London for the commemorative parade, called it ‘a sort of suggestion of the Last Day’. During the sixty years of Victoria’s reign the Empire had grown by more than ten times, from a scatter of disregarded possessions to a quarter of the land mass of the earth, and a third of its population. It had changed the face of the continents with its cities, its railways, its churches, its myriad cantonments, and it had changed the manner of life of entire peoples, stamping its own values upon civilizations from the Cree to the Burmese, besides creating several fully-fledged new nations of its own. There had never been such an Empire since history began, and the Powers of the world, envious of its splendour, respectfully if reluctantly acknowledged its supremacy. Even the Kaiser congratulated his grandmother upon her glorious jubilee. Even Kruger released two English prisoners to mark the occasion. Even the
New Y
ork
Times
conceded that the United States, that incorrigible republic of rebels, was really part of Greater Britain all the time.

Before she set out on her Jubilee procession, on the morning of June 22, 1897, Queen Victoria wait to the telegraph room at Buckingham Palace, wearing a dress of black moire with panels of pigeon grey, embroidered all over with silver roses, shamrocks and thistles. She pressed an electric button; an impulse was transmitted to the Central Telegraph Office in St Martin’s le Grand; in a matter of seconds her Jubilee message was on its way to every corner of the Empire.
‘
From
my
heart
I
thank
my
beloved
people
,’
it said, speeding through the cables to Ottawa and Calcutta, Lagos and the Cape, Sydney and Christchurch, the fortress islands of the Mediterranean and the old slave colonies—to Lucknow where the flag still flew
above the shattered Residency, to Winnipeg where Riel lay beneath his stone-clamped tomb, to Truganini’s Hobart, to Cakobau’s Fiji, to Eyre’s shabby Spanish Town, to Ashanti and Zululand and Dublin and Kampala—
‘
From
my
heart
I
thank
my
beloved
people.
May
God
bless
them.
’

The following friends and colleagues most kindly read parts of my manuscript for me, saving me from many errors and stupidities: Mrs Mildred Archer, Mrs Joan Craig, Professor John Gallagher, Mr J.G. Links, Professor Christopher Lloyd, Major-General James Lunt, Miss Mary Lutyens, Professor F. S. L. Lyons, Mr Leo Marquard, Dame Margery Perham, Mr L. T. C. Rolt, Professor A. G. L. Shaw, Professor Jack Simmons and Sir Ronald Wingate. Finally Mr Donald Simpson, librarian of the Royal Commonwealth Society, read the whole book in proof placing me greatly in his debt.

Mr Denys Baker, as usual, drew the maps. Mr Julian Bach, as always, made possible the necessary travel. The Editors of
Horizon
, New York, and
Encounter
, London, have allowed me to reproduce passages first published in their magazines. It is entirely due to my indulgent publishers, on both sides of the Atlantic, that I have been able to devote so much time to the imperial subject.