Pax Britannica

This book, though self-contained, forms the centre-piece of a trilogy about the rise, climax and fall of the Victorian Empire. It is specifically concerned with the climax, as exemplified and dramatized by Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

When I wrote it, in the 1960s, there were people still alive who remembered that spectacularly theatrical event, and the immense world-wide dominion which it represented – my own mother was one, and recalled the sailor-caps emblazoned with the names of Royal Navy battleships which she and her brother had worn to celebrate the occasion. Today it seems to most Britons almost a matter of myth: the aged Queen so very nearly divine, the British Empire sprawled across all the world’s continents, the immense muddle of motives good and bad which were the impulses of imperialism, the aura of power, wealth and majesty which surrounded the very name of Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. Was that really
us
?, British citizens of another
fin-de-siècle
might well ask themselves.

But it was, and in trying to evoke the feeling of Britishness in 1897, as it was manifested throughout the globe, I have not tried to hide my own astonishment. The book is a microcosm of its subject, but also a record of one’s citizens’ own responses a couple of generations later. It is a kind of historical travel book or reportage, and I have not tried to conceal, either, a sensual sympathy for the period, haunted as it is in retrospect by our knowledge of tragedies to come – for soon after the Diamond Jubilee the miseries of the Boer War cracked the imperial spirit, and still more terrible events would presently destroy it.

In 1997, the centenary of the Diamond Jubilee, as it happened,
was marked by the British withdrawal from the very last of the great colonial possessions, Hong Kong, but by then the frisson of imperial achievement had long since evaporated. In this book I try to revive it. I have fondly imagined the work orchestrated by the young Elgar, and illustrated by Frith; its pages are perfumed for me with saddle-oil, joss-stick and railway steam; I hope my readers will feel, as they close its pages, that they have spent a few hours looking through a big sash window at a scene of immense variety and some splendour, across whose landscapes there swarms a remarkable people at the height of its vigour, in an outburst of creativity, pride, greed and command that has affected all our lives ever since.

TREFAN MORYS,
1998    

B
ERORE she set out on her Diamond Jubilee procession, on the morning of June 22, 1897, Queen Victoria of England went to the telegraph room at Buckingham Palace, wearing a dress of black moiré with panels of pigeon grey, embroidered all over with silver roses, shamrocks and thistles. It was a few minutes after eleven o’clock. 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 her Empire.

It was the largest Empire in the history of the world, comprising nearly a quarter of the land mass of the earth, and a quarter of its population. Victoria herself was a Queen-Empress of such aged majesty that some of her simpler subjects considered her divine, and slaughtered propitiatory goats before her image. The sixtieth anniversary of her accession to the throne was being celebrated as a festival of imperial strength, splendour and unity—a mammoth exhibition of power, in a capital that loved things to be colossal. Yet the Queen’s message was simple—
‘Thank
my
beloved
people.
May
God
bless
then
’—and the technicians at St Martin’s le Grand later reported that the royal dot on the Morse paper at their end was followed by a couple of unexpected clicks: indicating, they thought, ‘a certain amount of nervousness on the part of the aged Sovereign at that supreme moment in her illustrious career’.

The crowds outside waited in proud excitement. They were citizens of a kingdom which, particularly in its own estimation, was of unique consequence in the world. The nineteenth century had been pre-eminently Britain’s century, and the British saw themselves still
as top dogs. Ever since the triumphant conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars they had seemed to be arbiters of the world’s affairs, righting a balance here, dismissing a potentate there, ringing the earth with railways and submarine cables, lending money everywhere, peopling the empty places with men of the British stock, grandly revenging wrongs, converting pagans, discovering unknown lakes, setting up dynasties, emancipating slaves, winning wars, putting down mutinies, keeping Turks in their place and building bigger and faster battleships.

By June 1897 all this vigour and self-esteem, all this famous history, had been fused into an explosive emotional force. The nation had been carried away by the enthusiasm known as the New Imperialism, an expansionist, sensational concept of Empire which exactly fitted the spirit of the nineties. It was an era of dazzle and innovation—a time of heightened responses, a quickened time, with a taste for things bizarre and overstimulating, and a sense of history on the turn. This was
fin
de
siècle
at last, and the very French phrase carried undertones of excitement, suggestions of racing pulse and melodrama. Out of this inflamed setting the New Imperialism started. The Empire had been growing steadily throughout the century, generally without much public excitement, but since the 1870s it had expanded so violently that the statistics and reference books could scarcely keep up, and were full of addenda and hasty footnotes. Recalled now from the grand junction of the Jubilee, the separate lines of the Victorian story seemed to have been leading the British inexorably towards the suzerainty of the world—the methodical distribution of their systems, their values, their power and their stock across the continents. Their Empire, hitherto seen as a fairly haphazard accretion of possessions, now appeared to be settling into some gigantic pattern: and like gamblers on a lucky streak, they felt that their power was self-engendering, that they were riding a wave of destiny, sweeping them on to fulfilment. The New Imperialism was the one certain political winner of the day. With its help the Conservatives and their Liberal Unionist allies had won the 1895 General Election so completely that they seemed destined to stay in office for decades to come. Supremacy, dominion, authority, size, were the watchwords of the time. Social progress
rarely cropped up in the literature of the Jubilee, and even the arts had mostly succumbed to the national taste for elaborate grandeur, expressing themselves in mass choirs and enormous set-pieces. All was summed up in that splurge of red across the map, and was now deliberately commemorated in the pageantries of the Diamond Jubilee—the first pan-Britannic festival,
The
Times
called it.

Many and varied energies had swept the British to this meridian. Impulses shoddy and honourable, pagan and pious, had turned them into imperialists—a word which had itself shifted its value from the dubiously pejorative to the almost unarguably proper.

First there was simply the wealth, vigour and inventiveness of Victorian Britain, a dynamic State in an age of excitement: capital looking for markets, vitality looking for opportunity, success looking for new fields. Then a succession of disparate prophets, from Jeremy Bentham and Tennyson to Disraeli and Cardinal Newman, had excited the instincts of the people for space, power and sacramental dazzle. Darwin, a half-understood household sage, seemed to have demonstrated that some races, like some animals, were more efficiently evolved than others, and had a right to leadership and possession. The Evangelical movement had drawn attention to the plight of the ignorant heathen of the tropics, only awaiting redemption—‘educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha’, as Mrs Jellyby expressed it, ‘on the left bank of the Niger’. Among the gentry Dr Arnold and his reformers of the public schools had implanted concepts of privileged service that led logically to the idea of a new Rome; among the masses popular education had opened a generation’s eyes to the thrill of the world outside, contrasting so compellingly with the drabness of the new industrial cities at home. The new penny Press, led by the brilliantly boastful
Daily
Mail—
‘the embodiment and mouthpiece of the imperial idea’—assiduously fanned the aggressive patriotism of the people. The more blustering sort of Briton reacted violently to the Yellow Book decadence of the intellectuals, whose notions seemed the very
antithesis of Nelson, the Pound Sterling and the Charge of the Light Brigade.

Politically the Liberals were in eclipse, and Gladstone’s voice, the voice of the English conscience, was silent
1
The perennial discontent of the Irish, a squalid constant of English politics, had hardened rather than weakened the British will to rule, and that summer Kitchener was gloriously revenging the death of Gordon, twelve years before, with his imperial armies in the Sudan.
2
To the innocent public everything seemed to be going right. The monarchy was more popular than ever. The prestige of the Royal Navy had reached an almost mystical plane. The spectacle of other peoples coalescing in powerful federations—in Germany, in Italy, in America—made the British wonder if they might not also combine their scattered communities, all over the world, into an unapproachable super-state. Jingo imperialism was intoxicating fodder for the newly enfranchised working classes, and the Conservative-Unionist Government was dominated by imperialists of complementary styles: Lord Salisbury the Prime Minister, stroking the surface of affairs with his patrician and scholarly hand; Joseph Chamberlain the Colonial Secretary, an expansionist of the new kind, impulsive and insatiable, who had even gone so far as to install electric light in the Colonial Office. It all went with an almost frantic gusto, like universal craze.

Among the better-informed, doubts also played their part. Complete though British supremacy might appear to be, the era of
splendid isolation was ending. New rivalries abroad seemed to compel the British towards an imperial, rather than an insular, sufficiency. The rise of Germany was apparently forcing Britain out of Europe, while Bismarck’s bid for German colonies in Africa and the Pacific had transformed the leisurely old habits of Empire-building into urgent power politics. There were technical challenges from Germany, too, commercial challenges from America, and standing political challenges from the Russians and the French. Britain’s essential vulnerability, with her extended colonial frontiers, her dependence upon imported food, her excess of population and her
smallness
—the basic fragility of the British position in the world goaded her into imperialism. European reactions to the fiasco of the Jameson Raid had brought home to the British how bitterly they were envied and disliked on the Continent.
1
Britain’s industrial lead was still absolute, but it was lessening each year. Both the Germans and the French were building powerful new navies. There was a subconscious feeling, perhaps, that British ascendancy could not last much longer, and must therefore be propped up with pomp and ceremony. The ghosts of imperial heroes seemed to be calling out of the past, urging the nation to be mightier yet—Livingstone and ‘Chinese’ Gordon, dead in the Christian cause; Nicholson and Havelock from the shambles of the Indian Mutiny;
2
philanthropists like Wilberforce; explorers like Burton and Baker;
generals like Lord Napier of Magdala; Disraeli, the glittering impresario of Empire; Raffles, the saintly merchant-venturer.

All these circumstances, these memories, these currents of thought, these men, had so worked upon the British that the grand flourish of the New Imperialism properly represented, as G. M. Young once wrote, ‘the concentrated emotion of a generation’. ‘Imperialism in the air’, Beatrice Webb recorded in her diary that June, ‘all classes drunk with sightseeing and hysterical loyalty.’ The Diamond Jubilee celebrated not only sixty years of the Victorian era, but the final assembly of the forces and satisfactions of imperialism. The idea of Empire had reached a climax, too. It had meant different things to different generations in Britain—military power, commercial opportunity, prestige. It had been discredited in the middle years of the century, when the colonies generally seemed more nuisance than they were worth, and to some Britons it still meant pre-eminently the establishment of British settlements abroad, rather than the subjugation of alien peoples. But in these last years of the Victorian century, these last decades, perhaps, of the Christian epoch, it was achieving the status of a creed. It was not merely the right of the British to rule a quarter of the world, so the imperialists thought, it was actually their duty. They were called. They would so distribute across the earth their own methods, principles and liberal traditions that the future of mankind would be reshaped. Justice would be established, miseries relieved, ignorant savages enlightened, all by the agency of British power and money.

Among the professionals of Empire, and among the governing classes in general, whatever their politics, this imperial duty became as self-evident as patriotism itself. The young Bertrand Russell was a self-confessed imperialist. H. G. Wells and Sidney Webb both declared imperialist sympathies.
1
Arnold Wilson, recalling his apprenticeship
in the imperial service, described himself and his colleagues as ‘acolytes of a cult—Pax Britannica—for which we worked happily and, if need be, died gladly. We read our Bibles, many of us, lived full lives, and loved and laughed much, but we knew, as we did so, that though for us all, the wise and the foolish, the slaves and the great, for emperor and for anarchist, there is one end, yet would our work live after us, and by our fruits we should be judged in the days to come.’
1

Not so long before, when men spoke of Empire they were thinking of Napoleon III, the Tsar, or lesser foreign despots. Now they thought only of Victoria, Regina et Imperatrix. The British Empire was reaching its full flush—it had, thought the Indian administrator Sir George Campbell, ‘pretty well reached the limits set by nature’.
2
Within the past ten years it had acquired new territories fifty times as large as Britain itself. Light had burst upon the British people, said Sir West Ridgeway, the Governor of Ceylon, in his Jubilee speech that day. ‘It dispelled the darkness of ignorance, the scales fell from their eyes, the sordid mists which obscured their view were driven away, and they saw for the first time before them, the bright realm of a glorious Empire.’

Within two minutes, we are told, the Queen’s message had passed through Teheran on its way to the eastern dominions of the Crown. By the time her carriage was clattering down the Mall, bobbed about by cavalry, her thanks and blessings had reached Ottawa, the Cape, the colonies of West Africa, the strongholds of the Mediterranean and the sugar islands of the Caribbean. London was a self-consciously imperial city, symbolically central, with channels of authority reaching out east and west across the oceans.
Punch
celebrated the occasion with a cartoon of The Queen’s Messenger—a winged, long-haired and androgynous figure of love, holding a dove close to the chest, flying very low over the sea and flourishing a piece of paper inscribed
Message
V.R.
There was not much else in sight—only a very subservient sea and a few hangdog islands—and the effect of the picture was one of effortless mastery, universal right of way. As never before, London seemed the heart of the world.

Even the better-disposed foreigners generously recognized the fact. Animosities were suspended, and the London newspapers gratefully recorded the comments of their more flattering contemporaries abroad.
Le
Figaro
roundly declared that Rome itself had been ‘equalled, if not surpassed, by the Power which in Canada, Australia, India, in the China Seas, in Egypt, Central and Southern Africa, in the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean rules the peoples and governs their interests’. The
New
York
Times
claimed: ‘We are a part, and a great part, of the Greater Britain which seems so plainly destined to dominate this planet.’ Even the
Kreuz
Zeitung
in Berlin, the mouthpiece of the hostile Junkers, described the Empire as ‘practically unassailable’. Everywhere, in paying their respects to the Queen, the nations appeared to be paying homage to Britain. In Vienna the Emperor Franz Josef called at the British Embassy wearing the Garter and the uniform of his British regiment. In Gibraltar the Governor of Algeciras, swallowing two centuries of Spanish resentment, drove to the Rock for a parade of British troops. In Brooklyn the Women’s Health Protective Association sang
God
Save
the
Queen
at a jubilee meeting, and in Philadelphia the poet Alfred Raleigh Goldsmith eulogized England in epic verse: