All posts tagged nonconformism

Radical Joe: A life of Joseph Chamberlain by Denis Judd (1977)

‘The great problem of our civilisation is still unsolved. We have to account for and grapple with the mass of misery and destitution in our midst, co-existent as it is with the evidence for abundant wealth and teeming prosperity.’
(Joseph Chamberlain in 1885, quoted on page 122)

Joe Chamberlain was to become the only politician in British history to split two parties and destroy two governments of which he was a member.
(The Edwardians by Roy Hattersley, page 105)

Joseph Chamberlain (1836 to 1914) shot like a charismatic meteor across the late-Victorian and Edwardian political scene.

Chamberlain made his name as a Liberal reforming mayor of Birmingham, where he cleared the slums and introduced municipal control of gas, water and electricity supplies, rousing loyal support and bating entrenched interests with his fire-breathing, radical oratory. He entered the House of Commons in 1876 at the relatively advanced age of 39, as a Liberal Party MP for his home turf, Birmingham. He rose quickly and after just 4 years the Liberal leader, Gladstone, gave him a cabinet position as President of the Board of Trade in 1880.

What is enjoyable and interesting about Judd’s biography is he takes you right into the nitty-gritty of the local administration of a dirty, polluted but relentlessly growing late-Victorian city like Birmingham, and then into the knotty detail of Chamberlain’s Parliamentary career. He gives you a powerful sense of how difficult it is to get into any position of power, how challenging it is to formulate meaningful policies, and then of the struggle to co-opt support and create coalitions ready to take on often very entrenched interests, if you want to change and improve things.

Reforming acts

Take, for example, the acts Chamberlain supervised as President of the Board of Trade, 1880 to 1885:

  • a Grain Cargoes Bill for the safer stowing of cargoes
  • a Seaman’s Wages Bill for fairer wages
  • an Electric Lighting Bill which enabled municipalities to set up electricity supplies either themselves or through private companies
  • a Bankruptcy Bill which created a body of official receivers in order to investigate and speed up bankruptcies, where necessary
  • a Merchant Shipping Bill designed to stop owners sending to sea unworthy ships, known as ‘coffin ships’, in the expectancy that they would sink and the owners claim the insurance money; due to the resistance of big business, the Bill failed (pages 106 to 108)

Radical Joe

Although Chamberlain rose to prominence as a crusading, reforming mayor of Birmingham, the opening chapter of the book details the surprising fact that he was born and bred in London, first in semi-rural Camberwell, then in smart Canonbury. His father was a successful merchant with a shop in Cheapside and Chamberlain didn’t go to university but left his private school at 18 and went to work for his father’s firm. It was only when a business opportunity arose in Birmingham, to invest in a new firm being set up to exploit a new technique to mass manufacture pointed screws, that his father dispatched him to England’s second city to look into the opportunity.

Chamberlain was by all accounts an extremely effective businessman or, as his enemies put it, relentless and ruthless. But he was from the start interested in local politics, active as a counsellor and then elected mayor in 1873 where he set new standards for slum clearance, clean water and sewage facilities etc. With the same ruthless efficiency he had brought to business, Chamberlain now embarked on a systematic programme of municipal improvement; this included the building of branch and central libraries, raising money for the art gallery and other public collections to be augmented, founding public swimming pools, new parks and gardens.

Judd liberally quotes from Chamberlain’s speeches and letters which are very enjoyable, pithy, clear and forceful. (Many contemporaries testified to what Beatrice Potter called his ‘energy and personal magnetism… [that he possessed] masculine force in a superlative degree.’ p.76.)

These letters, articles and speeches show how, right from the start of his career, Chamberlain really understood the misery and poverty of many in Victorian cities. Take this excerpt from an article in The Fortnightly Review, the Liberal periodical edited by his friend and political ally, John Morley:

We are compelled occasionally to turn aside from the contemplation of our virtues and intelligence and wealth, to recognise the fact that we have in our midst a vast population more ignorant than the barbarians whom we profess to convert, more miserable than the most wretched in other countries to whom we attempt from time to time to carry succour and relief. (p.72)

And he had, right from the start, a firm belief in the ability of local and national government to physically improve the environment of the poor and, by so doing, significantly improve their lives, as expressed in a speech he gave when opening Highgate Park in Birmingham:

‘It is simply nonsense to wonder at the want of refinement of our people when no opportunity is given to innocent enjoyment. We are too apt to forget that the ugliness of our ordinary English existence has a bad influence on us.’ (quoted page 67)

It was this kind of straight-talking support of the poor, and his acts and bills which aggressively took on entrenched interests, which quickly earned him the reputation as a radical – a socialist or even a communist – although Judd makes clear he was neither. Chamberlain is quoted in numerous contexts clarifying that he thought the improvement of the lot of the poor was not only a moral good in itself but was a form of social insurance which would ensure the ongoing survival of the wealthy, propertied classes, classes which he never seriously threatened (p.117).

Nonetheless the accusation that he was a fire-breathing republican led to much popular entertainment, for example the rash of humorous cartoons when he was obliged to kiss the Queen-Empress Victoria’s hand upon taking his Cabinet post (p.102).

In July 1885 Chamberlain wrote the preface to a pamphlet titled the ‘Radical Programme’, the first campaign handbook in British political history. The Programme proposed:

  • free elementary education
  • land reform, including measures to help people buy land, taxes on unoccupied or unused land, provision of allotments and smallholdings by local authorities
  • higher rates for big landed estates
  • progressive income tax on land owned
  • an increase in direct as opposed to indirect tax
  • encouragement of local government and housing schemes
  • as well as free public education
  • the disestablishment of the Church of England
  • universal male suffrage
  • more protection for trade unions

He also proposed to separate the goal of free education for every child from the religious groups which wanted to maintain their stranglehold over it. His policy was rejected by groups on all sides, who continued to use education as a political weapon, including the National Liberal Federation, Nonconformists, Catholics, and the Church of England-supporting establishment.

The Radical Programme earned the scorn of Whigs and Conservatives alike. Chamberlain had written to his friend, John Morley, that with Radical solidarity ‘we will utterly destroy the Whigs, and have a Radical government before many years are out.’ But in the event nothing came of it. Gladstone’s Liberal government was defeated on an amendment to its budget and Gladstone resigned, to be replaced by a minority administration led by Lord Salisbury (who had replaced Benjamin Disraeli as leader of the Conservative Party when Disraeli died in 1881; Salisbury led the party from the House of Lords, with a deputy in the Commons, still a possibility in those days).

Insults and abuse

Chamberlain established from the start of his career a reputation for plain speaking which sometimes overstepped the boundaries of decorum. Before he’d even been elected as an MP, soon after being nominated to stand, he rashly denounced the then-Prime Minister Disraeli, as ‘a man who never told the truth except by accident; a man who went down to the House of Commons and flung at the British Parliament the first lie that entered his head.’ (p.75). He was quickly forced to apologise.

During the intense period of manoeuvring between the various factions of both the Liberal and Conservative Parties which led up to the 1884 Reform Act, Chamberlain notoriously declared in a speech that Salisbury was ‘himself the spokesman of a class – a class to which he himself belongs, who toil not neither do they spin’ (p.118). In response, Salisbury branded Chamberlain a ‘Sicilian bandit’ and his deputy in the Commons, Stafford Northcote, called Chamberlain ‘Jack Cade’.

1. Home Rule

Chamberlain’s first big contribution to history was to split the Liberal Party in 1886 over Home Rule for Ireland. In early 1886 a new Liberal administration was elected and Gladstone made widely known his determination to push through a bill permitting home rule for the Irish. Chamberlain vehemently objected, on the basis that it would weaken the power of the British House of Commons and introduce fractures into the foundations of the wider British Empire. Chamberlain’s alternative was a plan for a federal system for not only Ireland but Scotland too, which would create an Irish devolved administration with powers over internal affairs. It was a masterpiece of compromise which satisfied none of the parties involved.

After a lot of manoeuvring, Chamberlain led a group which came to be called the Liberal Unionists out of the Liberal Party proper and into independent existence, thus severely weakening Gladstone’s Liberal government. There then followed years of complex machinations, but Chamberlain’s Liberal Unionists as they came to be known, by their very nature, came into closer tactical alliances with the Conservative Party and eventually merged with them.

2. Liberal Imperialism

Chamberlain’s second massive contribution was to become the cheerleader for British Imperialism during the peak of jingoistic enthusiasm from the mid-1890s to the middle Edwardian years. (The British Empire didn’t reach its geographic peak until after the Great War when Britain awarded itself various colonies belonging to the defeated Germans and also adopted ‘mandates’ in the Middle East.)

Secretary of State for the Colonies

When a Conservative government was returned after the 1895 general election with the help of Chamberlain’s bloc of 50 or so Liberal Unionists, the new leader, Lord Salisbury, offered Chamberlain a cabinet position. To many people’s surprise, Chamberlain turned down more senior departments and chose the Colonial Office, becoming Secretary of State for the Colonies, an office he held for the next eight years.

It is fascinating to read about how the British Empire was actually administered. In modern cultural discourse it is dismissed as one big evil monolith but, of course, it was a lot more complicated than that, run, like most British affairs, in a ramshackle, amateurish way. The Indian Empire was run by a separate office, the Secretary of State for India and, anyway, Chamberlain never showed much interest in it. His responsibility was for 11 self-governing colonies of white settlement with a European population of 11 million, and a jumble of crown colonies, protectorates and chartered territories, with a population of around 40 million (p.187).

Chamberlain’s Liberal Imperialism was an extension of the Radical reforming approach he’d brought to Birmingham. He thought that by wise investment, the disparate territories clumped together as ‘the Empire’ could be made more economically efficient and productive, its people educated and provided better jobs, housing, amenities, infrastructure and so on. He was a hard-working and diligent colonial secretary (notably unlike many of his predecessors) but his tenure is remembered for two policies which were out and out failures.

1. The Boer War

Chamberlain encouraged the ill-fated and derided Jameson Raid of December to January 1895, a force of 500 British soldiers led into the Boer-held Transvaal in expectation that the large number of British labourers working in its gold mines would rise up, join them, and together the Brits would seize government from the properly constituted Boer government. Not only was this a shameful attempt at a coup, but a shambles and dismal failure. How much exactly Chamberlain a) knew about it b) encouraged the conspirators, is unclear to this day. But the fact that establishing his role was one of the aims of the subsequent British government enquiry shows there was widespread belief that he was involved.

His continued support of the parties who wanted to take on and conquer the Boer republics (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) so as to absorb them into an unambiguously British country of South Africa, meant that when the Boer War commenced in October 1899, many critics saw it as ‘Joe’s War’. Thus his name became associated with the military disasters of the first six months of the war, with the humiliating failure to end it, with its long drawn-out two years of guerrilla fighting, with the shameful policy of rounding up Boer farmers’ wives and families into concentration camps which were so appallingly run (by the shambolic British army) that some 28,000 died of hunger and disease. Not a good look for someone who had once been a radical, reforming politician, always on the side of the poor.

What makes the Boer War all the more of a pitiful shambles was that, within a few years, the Boers were restored to full power over their own republics. It need never have been fought at all.

2. Tariff reform

As to tariff reform, Judd details the complexities of Chamberlain’s decisions, first to commit himself wholeheartedly to trying to create a tariff or customs union between the nations of the empire, and secondly, once he’d made this decision, the very complicated negotiations with Arthur Balfour, who had taken over leadership of the Conservative Party in 1902. These led Chamberlain, ultimately, to resign from the Conservative cabinet and to set up a well-funded and well-organised national campaign for tariff reform.

Judd shows in sad detail how it was doomed, for at least two reasons. Chamberlain, like plenty of other British politicians, businessmen and commentators, had realised that British business was being out-performed by its international rivals, America and Germany. His solution was to unite the white imperial nations – Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand – into a customs union to encourage mutual trade and create a powerful economic and agricultural bloc which could hold its own against competitors. The only problems were:

a) Economic reality

  • Experts showed him that trade between the colonies and Britain had been steadily declining i.e. we did more trade with the rest of the world and that percentage was increasing.
  • There was no getting round the fact that, if we imposed extra tariffs on goods entering the union from outside, that would increase the cost of food, seeing as most of the UK’s foodstuffs were imported. Hence the slogan developed by the Liberal opposition, ‘Big loaf, little loaf’, meaning big loaf under the Liberals, little loaf under the tariff reforming Tories.

So Chamberlain was forced to abandon hard facts in preference for rhetoric about the Empire as a civilising force and the power of the Anglo-Saxon peoples when united, and so on. Although he started from Radical roots, he ended up sounding as pompous as the windiest Conservative. But this kind of rhetoric about the great British Empire and the great Anglo-Saxon peoples was extremely popular. His movement distributed posters and banners and badges and placards, and held countless meetings, and was widely supported by leading newspapers of the time. It was wildly popular and it was a complete failure.

b) Political reality

Unfortunately, the other ‘white’ colonies (or the dominions, to give them their technical name) weren’t all that interested in Chamberlain’s rhetoric. A meeting was held of all the dominion leaders in London at the time of Queen Victoria’s jubilee (1887), another one was held (in Ottowa) in 1894, then Chamberlain organised another one in 1897, and arranged for them to be held at regular intervals thereafter. And so they were: 1902, 1907, 1911, 1917, 1918, 1921 and so on, being replaced, after the Second World War, by the Commonwealth Prime Ministers meeting.

But at those early meetings Chamberlain was disappointed to discover that the colonial governments were very hard bargainers indeed, cared nothing for his imperialist rhetoric, and were only prepared to negotiate tough deals to their own advantage.

The 1906 Liberal landslide

Balfour’s Conservative government was plainly running out of steam during 1905, and Chamberlain’s aggressive tariff reform campaign did it a lot of damage by attacking Balfour’s refusal to commit to it wholeheartedly. The election held in January 1906 proved a devastating defeat for the Conservative and Unionist Party, leaving them with the fewest seats in the party’s history (156), and the Liberal Party with a record landslide victory which kept them in government till the middle of the Great War.

Summary

So it’s a fascinating story, fascinating in the detail of Chamberlain’s youth and young business success, and how he parlayed that into a dazzlingly successful career in local politics leading to him becoming the superstar mayor of Britain’s second city. Fascinating to learn how, when he entered Parliament then government, he continued his radical approach with bills and acts designed to help the poor and exploited. And then fascinating to watch the distortion of these early principles when he came to apply them as Colonial Secretary, the man who had once been feared as a communist revolutionary ending up encouraging the Boer War and trying to create an entirely impractical policy of imperial union which ended up dividing the nation.

When I picked up this book second-hand I didn’t realise it was quite so old (1977). Partly because it comes from the era before critical theory became widespread in the humanities, it is a wonderfully readable account, short on politically correct carping and long on a sympathetic understanding of the Unitarian, non-conformist origins of the Chamberlain family. The older reader such as myself is perfectly capable of recognising the racism and the sexism prevalent throughout the age and often found in Chamberlain’s attitudes, without having it made the centre of the account to the neglect of the other important aspects of his political theory and practice. The sympathetic way Judd handles Chamberlain’s non-conformist origins makes it all the more poignant when we read the letters in which he confessed to close friends how the death of his wife in childbirth had made him question and then completely reject his native religion.

The art of the possible

More interestingly, like the Richard Shannon book I read recently only more so, Judd’s account takes you deep into the nitty-gritty of real, actual politics, which is the art of the possible and how this, in practice, comes down to endless number-crunching – how policy-makers are mainly concerned with: a) how many people will vote for them at a general election; b) what number of MPs they will gain in the election; and then c) how to mobilise these numbers in order to get actual bills passed into law.

(It was, apparently, Bismarck who said that: ‘Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best’.)

It is eye-opening to read so many accounts of the back-room horse-trading and negotiations, of the creation of coalitions, of the offers and counter-offers and endless behind-the-scenes negotiations which were required to get even the simplest piece of legislation passed through Parliament.

It makes you realise the immense distance between, on the one hand, the grand and rousing rhetoric of politicians’ speeches and articles and party manifestos and the broad hopes of commentators and critics on the Left or Right for sweeping social change, for Noble Principles and Grand Visions – and, on the other hand, the extremely cramped and narrow room for manoeuvre most actual governments and politicians in power have to operate within.

Immersing yourself in the clotted realities of the politics of this faraway era, and studying Chamberlain’s brilliant but ultimately frustrated career, really helps you understand why politics so consistently ends in disappointment. Chamberlain’s sorry career suggests that the high hopes of all commentators, of both left and right, are always going to be disappointed.

Remember the high hopes which greeted the election of Tony Blair and New Labour in 1997? How is he regarded now? Remember the high hopes of Gordon Brown’s supporters that, when he assumed the leadership, we would finally have a proper democratic socialist government. How did that pan out? Remember the Liberals going into coalition with the Conservatives telling their supporters how it would allow them to implement lovely Liberal policies? How did that end up for them?

And then the past five years of Brexit mayhem, 2016 to 2021, including the hilarious decision of Theresa May’s advisers to go for a snap general election in April 2017, promising it would lead to ‘strong and stable’ leadership – but which in fact led to a hung parliament in which she was entirely dependent on the support of the tiny Democratic Unionist Party to stay in power? And then faced a series of no confidence votes until she was replaced by Boris Johnson, the same Boris Johnson who sacked all his moderate MPs and bulldozed through the worst possible Brexit deal, which we will all now have to live with for a generation?

Politics = disappointment.

In fact it was in an essay precisely about Joseph Chamberlain that Enoch Powell MP wrote his often-quoted judgement:

‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’

So Chamberlain is not just a disappointing politician but, in Powell’s view, the epitome of the politician who had all the gifts, who worked hard, who had deeply held principles and yet… whose political career fizzled out in failure and disappointment.

Two divorces

The book features two high-profile divorces from the period.

Dilke and the Crawford divorce

Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, Second Baronet (1843 to 1911) was an English Liberal, Radical politician and good friend of Chamberlain’s. He helped the passage of the Third Reform Act and supported laws giving the municipal franchise to women, legalising labour unions, improving working conditions and limiting working hours, as well as being one of the earliest campaigners for universal schooling. In July 1886 the MP Donald Crawford sued his wife, Virginia, for divorce, citing Dilke. At the trial in February 1886, the judge found in Crawford’s favour.

Two months later, determined to clear his name, Dilke reopened the case but was subject to a withering cross-examination from which he emerged much worse off. Virginia alleged that Dilke had introduced her to every type of French vice and even that he had introduced a serving girl into their bed. The result was that Dilke’s name became a byword for lurid sexual scandal and he became the butt of music-hall songs. Dilke lost his seat in the 1886 general election, the Queen demanded he be stripped of his membership of the Privy Council and his career as a high-flying politician was over.

What is, in a way, most striking about the whole story is that modern historians now think Dilke was actually having a long-term affair with Virginia’s mother, and it was this fact which made so many of his answers during the cross-examination evasive or contradictory – and that he knew the family in the first place because his younger brother, Ashton, was married to one of the other Crawford daughters. In other words, Dilke was accused of having an affair with his brother’s wife’s married sister, but made a hash of denying it because he was in fact having an affair with his brother’s wife’s mother! (p.142)

Parnell and the O’Shea divorce

Charles Stewart Parnell (1846 to 1891) was an Irish nationalist politician who was Leader of the Home Rule League from 1880 to 1882, then leader of its successor, the Irish Parliamentary Party, from 1882 to 1891.

It is vital to an understanding of the politics of the period to realise just how much the issue of Irish Home Rule dominated British politics from, say, 1880 right up to the outbreak of the Great War, and the fact that the bloc of 80 or so Irish MPs who sat in the House of Commons often held the balance of power. Parnell rose to become leader of this bloc and the decisive figure in Irish nationalism, the man who Gladstone and all English politicians had to negotiate with.

Parnell was at the peak of his power when, in December 1889, one of his most loyal lieutenants, Captain William O’Shea, sued his wife, Katharine O’Shea, for divorce and named Parnell as co-respondent. In fact, political society had known that O’Shea and his wife had been separated for years and that Parnell was her lover. In 1886 he moved into her home in Eltham and had three children with her (!). Political leaders knew all about the situation and accepted it; Mrs O’Shea even acted as liaison in 1885 with Gladstone during proposals for the First Home Rule Bill. However, the wider public, and the devoted members of Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party knew nothing.

Parnell assured his followers that he had nothing to hide and would be exonerated in the divorce proceedings, and loyal supporters, not only in Ireland but in faraway America, held meetings, passed resolutions, created posters and leaflets and bullishly supported their Chief. So it came as a devastating shock to all these people, many if not most of them devout Catholics, when the full details of Parnell’s living in sin with a married woman came out in the divorce case in November 1890. Supporters were dumbfounded and heart-broken. The Catholic hierarchy in Ireland condemned him. Gladstone, as always having to cater to the very strong nonconformist faction of the Liberal Party, was also forced to abandon Parnell as his negotiating partner.

The crunch came at a committee meeting in Whitehall where senior figures in his party tried to expel him, he refused to go, and so the majority of anti-Parnellites left to form the Irish National Federation. The bitterness of the split tore Ireland apart, set back the cause of Irish independence by decades, and resonated well into the next century (p.145).

The record from Charles Parnell to Matt Hancock shows that: a) politicians are just normal people like you and me, with messy complicated private lives, and b) how rubbish British society, or political and media society, has always been at dealing with fairly straightforward relations between the sexes i.e. how ‘scandalous’ the Press still find the crushingly banal idea of a politician having an affair. Compared to how badly they’re screwing the entire country, who cares who they’re screwing in their private lives.

Credit

Radical Joe: A life of Joseph Chamberlain by Denis Judd was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1977. All references are to the 1993 University of Wales Press paperback edition.

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on August 25, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, Books, British Empire, History, imperialism, Politics
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on August 25, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/08/25/radical-joe-a-life-of-joseph-chamberlain-denis-judd/

Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts (1999) part 2

‘Whatever happens will be for the worse and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.’
(Salisbury writing about the Balkan crisis of 1887 in a sentence which sums up his political philosophy)

‘Salisbury: Victorian Titan’ is divided into two equal parts of about 430 pages each:

  1. Tory Tribune, 1830 to 1885 (pages 5 to 422)
  2. Tory Titan, 1885 to 1903 (pages 425 to 852)

By the second half I thought I had a good handle on the book’s strengths and weaknesses. Its obvious strength is the way it examines all the major political events and issues in British and international politics between about 1865 and 1902 in fantastic detail, as seen from the point of view of the hero of this enormous biography, Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury.

Using extensive quotes from Salisbury’s correspondence and speeches, plus citations from the letters or reported remarks of those around him (principally his political colleagues, occasionally his family) we get day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour recreations of how it seemed to Salisbury, what his thoughts and strategems were, how he manoeuvred those around him or attacked those on the opposition party, how he managed the relentless, hyper-complex task of managing British domestic, international, and imperial challenges.

So: amazing insights into a figure who really does emerge as a giant of his times, Prime Minister from 1885 to 1902, with only a three year gap. And yet the book’s strength is also, I think, its weakness, which is that the focus is so unrelentingly on Salisbury, what he said and thought and wrote, his speeches around the country and in the House of Lords, his comments over dinner or at parties, what family and confidantes recorded him saying to them – that, although the book covers an amazing number of issues, I began to realise that you fail to get a well-rounded presentation of those issues.

One example stands for many: only as much of the ill-fated expedition of General Gordon to Khartoum is explained and described as is necessary to understand what a political opportunity it presented to Salisbury to attack Gladstone for failing to relieved besieged Gordon in time. But the full background to the Mahdi’s rising, explaining the context of his rise, his appeal, and previous military engagements, and the subsequent history of British involvement in the Sudan are mostly missing. The topic swims into view as it affects Salisbury then, when it ceases to be relevant to him, disappears.

A bigger, more dominant and recurring theme is Ireland and Irish nationalism. Again, it initially feels like you’re getting a lot of information but, after a while, I realised it was a lot of information only about Salisbury’s day-to-day management of the way successive Irish crises impinged on British politics. So Roberts mentions agrarian disturbances, the regular murders and atrocities, and he mentions that this is mostly caused by inequalities to do with land and rents – BUT you don’t get a clear explanation of why. There’s no stopping to give a broader explanation of the context of Irish discontent, the rise of nationalism, the background to rural violence and so on. Roberts mentions a number of organisations, such as the Irish Brotherhood, but without any background on their formation and activities.

The great tragic Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell appears in the narrative mainly in a very detailed account of his trial which Salisbury helped to organise and provided evidence for. Yet after reading pages and pages about this I was still left feeling unclear what the distinctive thing about Parnell and his party was. And Roberts throws away the event that ruined Parnell, his being mentioned in a divorce case, which led his puritanical supporters to abandon him, in a few phrases. So I didn’t get a full, rounded, thorough explanation of Parnell’s success and rise, just a few episodes as they impinged on Salisbury’s concerns to manage the Irish Problem.

I hope by now you’ve got my drift: this is an awesomely huge, thoroughly researched, insightful, clever and beautifully written biography of Salisbury BUT it is not a good history of Britain during his times. Every page is plastered with quotes and citations from his letters and speeches but these focus entirely on how Salisbury used events to manipulate the politics around him.

It is an extraordinarily detailed view of what politics is actually like i.e. the ceaseless calculating of what is to your own or your party’s advantage, the constant jostling and politicking against the opposition party and just as much with enemies within your own party. Reading about Salisbury’s Machiavellian manipulations is wonderfully insightful and entertaining. But time and again I felt I was being short-changed on the issues themselves. It’s perfectly logical and entirely sensible that we only see events or issues insofar as they impinge on our man Salisbury. But as page 400 turned to page 500, and then on to page 600, I became a little irked at a sense that I was missing out on the actual history of the period.

Contents

Roberts gives sub-titles to his chapters which summarise the issues each one covers, so an effective way of conveying its scope is simply to copy that:

Chapter 26: Reconstruction at home and abroad (January to April 1887)

  • 1887: Salisbury reshuffles his cabinet, coming to rely on George Joachim Goschen, 1st Viscount Goschen, a former Liberal, then Liberal Unionist, who he makes Chancellor of the Exchequer; Sir Michael Hicks Beach as the Chief Secretary for Ireland
  • death of Stafford Henry Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh, formerly Lord Northcote, Salisbury’s challenger in the Commons to leadership of the Tories
  • 1887: The Mediterranean Agreements, a series of treaties with Italy, Austria-Hungary and Spain
  • Bulgaria: Alexander of Battenberg, prince of Bulgaria, abdicated in 1886 after a pro-Russian coup, triggering a Balkan crisis about who to replace him: the constant worry was that Russia would interfere, prompting Austria to retaliate, triggering a general European war
  • 1888 June: Kaiser Wilhelm II ascends the throne of the German Empire, worrying everyone with his impetuous outbursts and lack of understanding of the intricate skeins of European diplomacy
  • Egypt: ‘I heartily wish we had never gone into Egypt’, Salisbury wrote. British influence was necessary to safeguard the Suez Canal but upset the Ottoman Sultan, the rival Power, France, and the people of Egypt who resented British influence
  • The French were afflicted by a permanent ‘inferiority complex’ and so behaved badly at every opportunity, in a dispute about the Newfoundland fisheries, in the New Hebrides in the Pacific, obstructive in Egypt, planting a flag in the empty wastes of Somalia

Chapter 27: ‘Bloody Balfour’ (March 1887 to July 1891)

  • March 1887 Salisbury appointed his nephew Arthur Balfour the Chief Secretary for Ireland. An aloof, philosophical man, commentators thought he would be a soft touch but he implemented Salisbury’s strategy of cracking down on lawlessness that, in the wake of the Mitchelstown Massacre when Irish police opened fire on protesters killing 3 (9 September 1887) and Balfour gave them his full support, he was nicknamed ‘Bloody Balfour’. Conversely, Balfour’s sternness impressed the future defender of Ulster, Edward Carson.
  • (It speaks volumes about this society and this ruling class, that the Irish Viceroy, the 6th Marquess of Londonderry, had been Balfour’s fag at Eton.)
  • July 1887: Balfour steered the passage of the ‘Perpetual Crimes Act’, a Coercion Act to prevent boycotting, intimidation, unlawful assembly and the organisation of conspiracies against the payment of agreed rents which led to the imprisonment of hundreds of people including over twenty MPs
  • March and April 1887: The Times newspaper published letters they claimed proved Parnell’s association with the Phoenix Park murders and violent crimes. Parnell sued the newspaper whereupon it emerged that the letters were all forged by a notorious crook. Salisbury backed the Times and the prosecution i.e. Tories talk about ‘honour’ and ‘the law’ when it suits them, but break it or ignore it when it suits them

28: ‘The genie of imperialism’ (May 1887 to January 1888)

  • June 1887: Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee; interesting to learn what a struggle the authorities had to know how to mark it appropriately; in the end it was the template or trial run for the much bigger Diamond Jubilee ten years later; of course a cartload of ‘honours’ were doled out, usually as a reward to the Unionist cause (p.461)
  • The Colonial Conference: Salisbury was not a doctrinaire imperialist and was against the idea of forging a closer union or federation with the (mostly white) colonies i.e. Canada, the Cape Colony, Australia and New Zealand; but the Colonial Secretary Sir Henry Holland took advantage of all the premiers being in London for the Jubilee to stage one anyway
  • In the 1880s Britain took control of Bechuanaland, Burma, Nigeria, Somaliland, Zululand, Kenya, Sarawak, Rhodesian and Zanzibar
  • 13 November 1887 ‘Bloody Sunday’: a crowd of marchers protesting about unemployment and the Irish Coercion Acts, and demanding the release of Irish Nationalist MP William O’Brien, clashed with the Metropolitan Police, with 400, 75 badly injured, two policemen were stabbed and one protester was bayonetted
  • Tithes: an example of Salisbury’s defence of the Church of England, his Tithe Rent-Charge Bill was wrangled over for 4 years, from 1887 to 1891; it aimed to get non-payers of tithes to the Church subject to County Court judgements which would make it easier for the clergy to obtain their money
  • Allotments: Salisbury strongly objected to a Bill brought to allow local councils to compulsorily purchase land in order to create allotments for the poor;
  • Fiscal retaliation: this was another phrase for protectionism which Salisbury was also vehemently against; the issue was to grow and grow, reflecting the fact that sometime in the 1880s Britain lost the industrial and economic lead she had enjoyed for most of the century; protectionism was raised at party conferences again and again but Salisbury managed to stave it off; after his retirement the policy of imperial protectionism would tear the party apart and contribute to the Tories’ catastrophic defeat in 1906

Chapter 29: Rumours of Wars (February to July 1888)

  • A reshuffle:
  • ‘Pom’ Macdonnell: Salisbury appointed as his personal private secretary Schomberg ‘Pom’ McDonnell, fifth son of the Earl of Antrim who turned out to be an outstanding administrator and confidante
  • The Vienna Incident: the new young touchy Kaiser thought that his diplomatic overtures had been snubbed and so made it known that he planned to ‘cut’ his uncle, the Prince of Wales, when they were both on visits to Vienna; diplomatic panic; chancelleries and embassies go into overdrive; children
  • General Boulanger’s war scare: Georges Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger, nicknamed ‘General Revenge’, was a French general and politician, an enormously popular public figure who won multiple elections in the 1880s, vowing revenge for the defeat of 1870, taking on not only Germany but Britain if necessary, causing many sleepless nights in the Foreign Office; at the height of his popularity in 1889 it was widely was feared that he might make himself a dictator; as usual with French bluster, it came to nothing
  • Newfoundland and Bering Sea disputes: diplomatic fracas with France about fishing rights off Newfoundland and then with America about ownership of the sea around the Bering Straits; the point of all these quarrels is the way Salisbury managed them down, without letting them escalating into fighting talk
  • House of Lords reform: surprisingly, Salisbury supported reform of the House of Lords (mainly to kick out crooks) but was predictably against professionalising it; he defended the House of Lords not for its members’ achievements or intelligence but because simply by dint of being wealthier and better educated than most people, they were less likely to be influenced by ‘sordid greed’ (p.493); this of course sits at odds with the reams of evidence throughout the book that those who sought ‘honours’ were precisely the ambitious and greedy
  • February to July 1888: Sir Garnet Wolseley, hero of the (unsuccessful) march to relieve Gordon at Khartoum (1885), was promoted to Adjutant-General to the Forces in the War Office from where he issued a series of alarmist warnings about the threat of a sudden invasion from France and cuts to the army budget, all of which an irritated Salisbury had to manage down

Chapter 30: The Business of Government (August to December 1888)

  • County councils: the most important piece of domestic legislation of 1888 was the creation of County Councils as the primary instruments of local government replacing the previous ad hoc and regionally varying procedures (p.499)
  • The Drinks trade: the nonconformist and Temperance interest among the Liberal Unionists tried to add to the local government bill provisions to limit pub opening hours and cut back on the drinks trade; Salisbury opposed this, believing every Englishman should be free to go to hell his own way
  • Votes for women: in the County Council elections which were held in 1889 women candidates were elected for the first time (p.502); Salisbury wasn’t against women having the vote, and is cited as saying he had no problem with educated women having it; he was against extending the franchise to the lower classes; in the event, like lots of other pressing issues he managed to block and delay it so women’s suffrage became an issue which damaged the Edwardian Liberal governments
  • In 1888 Sir Lionel Sackville-West, British minister at the Washington legation, made a rookie error by replying to a letter, ostensibly from an Englishman in America, asking who he should support in the presidential election; Sackville-West wrote back suggesting Grover Cleveland would be better for Britain; the letter was a ruse, written by an American, Sackville-West’s reply was published in the newspapers and the US government kicked him out for this undiplomatic faux pas i.e. an ambassador expressing about an election in a foreign country; Salisbury was furious; during the fracas Sackville-West succeeded to his father’s title and went back to the huge Knole Park estate with a state pension
  • A ‘black man’: in 1885 a Tory colonel had won the Holborn by-election against an Indian, Dadabhai Naoroji; in 1888 Salisbury made a speech in which he referred to this event and made the remark that ‘I doubt if we have yet got to the point where a British constituency will elect a black man to represent them’; not only the Liberals but many commentators came down on him like a ton of bricks; interestingly, the Queen wrote to criticise him; Dadabhai Naoroji was elected MP for Finsbury Central in 1895, becoming Britain’s second ethnic minority MP; he enjoyed referring to himself as ‘Lord Salisbury’s black man’
  • The Viceroy’s India proposals: before Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was sent off to India to be viceroy (in 1884) he had drawn up proposals to extend the powers of viceregal and local legislative councils, including an element of direct voting; Salisbury quashed these as all other hints at Indian self-rule
  • This leads Roberts into a consideration of Salisbury’s diplomatic style which was highly secretive; he often didn’t inform cabinet colleagues about initiatives; this was partly because he considered the Foreign Office ‘a nest of Whiggery’ and the level of ambassadorial competence generally very low (p.514); Roberts discusses the basis of his diplomatic thinking which was utterly pragmatic – most treaties, he admitted, are based on force or the threat of force (p.512) or, as he put it somewhere else, bluster and bluff; 15 years later, as the world entered the new century, that bluster and bluff would no longer do – big armies, big navies and heavy industry increasingly became key to international affairs
  • Fascinating fact: before 1914 Britain only had 9 ambassadors (compared to 149 in 1997) and just 125 diplomatic posts abroad

Chapter 31: Africa (1885 to 1892)

When Salisbury left the Foreign Office in 1880, nobody talked about Africa. When he returned in 1885, everyone was talking about Africa, and the quarrels it was causing between the Powers (p.518).

Between 1885 and 1900 most of the borders of modern Africa were set by European statesmen who’d never been there. To this day, this is one of the root causes of the chronic instability, political and economic backwardness of Africa. But at the time the various deals the nations of Europe struck, and the straight lines they drew through jungles and deserts, represented a triumph because the primary aim was never fairness or the interests of Africans, it was to prevent European nations going to war.

The lines on the map weren’t drawn in accordance with the logic of geography or tribes, traditional territory, language or commerce. The aim was to stop Europeans going to war.

‘We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s foot has ever trod. We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.’ (p.529)

(Some) reasons the European colonisation of Africa accelerated in the last decades of the nineteenth century:

  • the discovery of gold and diamonds in South Africa
  • the opening up of East Africa by the Suez Canal
  • the evangelical impulse to eliminate the slave trade and convert the heathen
  • France’s lust for la gloire after her ignominious defeat in the Prussian War
  • private adventurism and entrepreneurship (Rhodes)
  • the quests of each nation’s industry to sources of raw materials and markets
  • the evil greed of Belgian’s King Leopold II
  • Britain’s need for a safe route to India
  • the invention of steamships and advanced weaponry (the Gatling gun)
  • the development of medicines for tropical diseases (p.518)

African issues:

  • Bullying Portugal: ‘a tiresome little Power’ (p.520) I was surprised how much trouble it was to negotiate a treaty with Portugal to stop their incursions into what we called Nyasaland, thus preventing the Portuguese owning a belt right across the middle of Africa, from Angola in the west to Mozambique in the East
  • Zanzibar: managing German attempts to overthrow the Sultan of Zanzibar and to establish Uganda as a German protectorate; Salisbury was appalled at the Germans’ brutality to Africans; acquiring Zanzibar involved a trade-off whereby we accepted France’s acquisition of Madagascar (p.529)
  • March 1890 the Kaiser abruptly sacked Bismarck (p.525); Salisbury negotiated a deal to hand Germany Heligoland in the Baltic in exchange for sole protectorate over Zanzibar
  • Britain acquired the future Uganda and Kenya, Germany kept Tanganyika, Rwanda and Burundi;
  • 1890 The Sahara: Salisbury agreed Conventions with France whereby we backed the Royal Niger Company’s claim to the Niger valley in exchange for agreeing French control of the western Sahara and the Algerian hinterland as far as Lake Chad
  • Italian ambitions: in exchange for British control of the Nile valley Salisbury let the Italians stake the Red Sea coast i.e. Eritrea and Somalia
  • Cecil Rhodes: Salisbury though Rhodes a chancer but backed his request for a royal charter to develop the huge area in south-central Africa which would develop into Rhodesia; in thanks for his support Rhodes named the dusty capital of his new territory Salisbury (which would become the city of Harare, capital of modern Zimbabwe) (p.534)

During a seven year period Salisbury laid down the outlines of colonial Africa which were to last well into the twentieth century.

Chapter 32: Mid-Term Crises (January 1889 to December 1890)

  • The Kaiser pays Victoria a visit, potentially embarrassing because he had been rude to the Prince of Wales the previous year
  • General Boulanger, a bellicose right-winger who had threatened a coup in Paris, in the event fled to Brussels
  • Royal grants: Salisbury became very close to the Queen, they thought alike on many matters, and so he tried to move the question of grants to minor royals out of the Commons, where it had become a regular peg for Liberals and Radicals to make republican remarks
  • The two-power standard: Salisbury secured cabinet support to greatly increase spending on the navy and invented a new rule of thumb, that the Royal Navy should be as big as the next two largest navies (of France and Russia) combined
  • The Paris Exhibition: Salisbury refused to let the British ambassador attend the centenary celebrations of the French Revolution, an event which haunted Salisbury and informed his reactionary Toryism
  • The Shah’s visit: after initial reluctance Salisbury hosted Nasr-el-Din in London and at his Hatfield home
  • The ‘socialist’ current: the London dock strike from August to September 1889 and the huge marches to support it worried gloomy Salisbury that socialism was on its way; he thought it represented an attack on property and law (of contracts, rents etc)
  • The Cleveland Street Scandal: scandal about a male brothel just north of Oxford Street, frequented by members of the royal household and some posh army officers
  • A mid-term crisis: objections to a slew of domestic bills bring his government close to losing a vote and having to quit
  • Prince Eddy in love: Eddy being Prince Edward’s eldest son, second in line to the throne; when he fell in love with a French princess it threatened the delicate balance of European power because Salisbury’s general aim was to keep in with the central powers (Germany and Austria) as protection against France and Russia; having a potential French queen-in-waiting would wreck his whole strategy so he moved heaven and earth to get Victoria to forbid the marriage
  • Trouble at Barings bank which faced bankruptcy until the ruling class rallied round to refund it

Chapter 33: Alliance Politics (January to October 1891)

  • Visitors at Hatfield: the Kaiser visits; Salisbury thinks he is mad and dangerous; and then Crown Prince Victor Emmanuel of Italy
  • Free education: a policy of Chamberlain and the Radical Unionists to which Salisbury acquiesces, creating an Education Bill which passed in August 1891
  • The Prince of Wales in difficulties: Salisbury negotiates peace in a bitter row between the prince and some offended aristocrats
  • The death of W.H. Smith, a steadfast and loyal supporter of Salisbury as Leader of the House of Commons; after careful politicking Salisbury has the post filled y his nephew Arthur Balfour
  • Party organisation: the importance of chief agent of the conservative party, Richard Middleton, and Chief Whip, Aretas Akers-Douglas
  • The Liberal Unionist alliance: the importance of the good working relationship with the super-posh Marquess of Hartington, 8th Duke of Devonshire, leader of the Liberal Unionists

Chapter 34: Leaving Office (November 1891 to August 1892)

  • The general election: friends and colleagues die; the Tory government finds it hard to pass bills; by-elections go against them; much debate whether to call an election for the end of the year (Salisbury’s preference) or June; July 1892 it was and although the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists won 314 seats and the Liberals 272, the balance of power was held by the Irish Nationalist MPs who won 72, and who went into alliance with the Liberals on the understanding that Gladstone would introduce a Home Rule bill
  • Gladstone: Salisbury considered Eton and Christ Church-educated, Anglican Gladstone a traitor to his class in the long bloodless civil war which is how he saw British politics
  • Cabinet style: Salisbury accepted the result and in August tendered his resignation to the Queen, who was very upset; she loathed Gladstone; his cabinet colleagues testify to Salisbury’s calm and cheerful collegiate style; once they got rid of Randolph Churchill, it had been a successful and good tempered cabinet

Chapter 35: Opposition (August 1892 to June 1895)

  • The Second Irish Home Rule bill: Gladstone lost no time in forming an administration, then moving his Home Rule Bill on 13 February 1893; Salisbury’s calculations about the best strategy to block it, his effectiveness because it was defeated by 10 to 1 in the House of Lords
  • Gladstone resigns: Gladstone found himself increasingly at odds with his own cabinet, in particular opposing the ongoing increase of the Royal Navy; he was the oldest person ever to be Prime Minister, aged 84, and on 2 March resigned
  • Lord Rosebery: the Queen couldn’t call for her favourite, Salisbury, because the Liberals still had a majority in the Commons, so Gladstone was replaced by the Liberal Imperialist Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, who was Prime Minister from March 1894 to June 1895 when he called, and lost, a general election; Rosebery was naive and fell into Parliamentary traps Salisbury laid for him, undermining confidence in his government
  • Evolution: Salisbury was sympathetic to science and Roberts describes a major speech he gave at Oxford about Darwin’s theory of evolution which, however, basing itself on Lord Kelvin’s completely erroneous theory about the age of the earth, claimed there wasn’t enough time for Darwin’s theory to have taken place; all completely wrong, as Kelvin’s theories were utterly wrong: Kelvin thought the sun about 20 million years old, whereas we now know it is about 4.5 billion years old, and that the earliest life on earth probably developed about 3.5 billion years ago
  • Dissolution: The Spectator called Lord Rosebery ‘the butterfly Premier’ and he couldn’t heal the widening divide between his form of Liberal Imperialism, aggressive abroad, radical at home, with the Liberal core; his cabinet split on all its policies, namely the annexation of Uganda, the increased navy budget and appointing Lord Kimberley foreign minister, and Home Rule and the introduction of a graduated death duty at home
  • 21 June 1895 Rosebery lost a minor vote, when his war minister was censured for a supposed lack of cordite for the army, and chose to take the opportunity to resign; the Queen called for Salisbury who agreed to take office and prepare a general election for July
  • Chamberlain: though he disagreed with some of his Radical policies Salisbury came to respect Chamberlain for his forthright character and that, not having gone to public school or university, he didn’t give himself airs

Chapter 36: Problems with Non-Alignment (June to December 1895)

  • A landslide: oddly, to us, Salisbury formed his government before holding the election; it was a landslide, the Tories taking 340 seats, their allies the Liberal Unionists 71, with the Liberals on 177, and 82 Irish Nationalists; the cabinet numbered 19, compared to 1886’s 15 (today it is 22)
  • The Hamidian massacres: series of atrocities carried out by Ottoman forces and Kurdish irregulars against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire between 1894 and 1896, named after the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II, up to 100,000 died; Salisbury wanted to send the fleet to the Dardanelles but was over-ruled by his cabinet and the reluctant Royal Navy, infuriating him, and then he was castigated in the press and by the opposition for being weak

I was particularly interested in the fervid debate about this because lots of well-meaning liberals and churchmen insisted that ‘something must be done’, just as they do nowadays when there are atrocities in the Arab/Muslim world, but Salisbury’s objections remind me of the modern debate I’ve followed in the pages of Michael Ignatieff, Frank Ledwidge and so on, which is, there’s only so much we can do? Exasperated, Salisbury asked one correspondent would he have us invade Turkey and take on the Sultan’s army of 200,000? And then other European powers come in on Turkey’s side thus triggering a European war? No.

  • The signing of a Franco-Russian Entente led to the setting up of a Joint Naval and Military Defence Committee
  • Walmer Castle: his other nominees crying off because of the cost, Salisbury ended up appointing himself Warden of the Cinque Ports
  • Venezuela: the problem – America takes a very tough line about a border dispute between Venezuela and British colony, British Guiana, with President Cleveland seeking re-election, populists and the yellow press calling for war; Salisbury loftily ignores the fuss

Chapter 37: ‘Splendid Isolation’ (December 1895 to January 1896)

  • The Jameson Raid: the foolishness and failure is dealt with in my review of The Boer War by Thomas Packenham
  • The Kruger telegram: the Kaiser congratulated the Boer president, Paul Kruger, for snuffing out the Jameson Raid before it got started; the British press went mad with anti-German hysteria; rumour had it Germany was sending marines to help the Boers; Britain responded by sending battleships; it knocked British trust in German good faith
  • The poet laureate: Tennyson died in 1892. In 1895 Salisbury appointed his sometime all, the small poet and pamphleteer Alfred Austen to the job; Roberts thinks was a joke at the expense of the literary establishment
  • ‘Splendid isolation’: Roberts is at pains to show that Salisbury was never a splendid isolationist, a phrase coined by a Canadian politician and which he rejected; on the contrary he had signed various treaties and deals which allied us with various European powers, but his belief was that the country should act independently of treaties, in response to ever-changing events
  • Venezuela: the solution – the Americans continued very belligerent and Canada made plans to repel an American attack and Salisbury asked the war office to make plans to send Canada help, but after months of bombast an international tribunal resolved the Venezuela question

Chapter 38: Great Power Politics (February 1896 to May 1897)

  • The Jameson aftermath: i.e. the raiders were handed back over to the British authorities who brought them back to Britain for trial, as well as setting up a Royal Commission which, as usual, exonerated the senior political figures (most notably Chamberlain who almost certainly encouraged the raid) while sending to prison some small fry
  • The march on Dongola: on 1 March 1896 the army of the Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia defeated the Italian army of Eritrea at Adowa. This raised fears that he might incurse into Sudan and so threaten southern Egypt. This was the pretext Salisbury needed to send an army south into Sudan to retake it from the Dervishes also known as the Mahdi Army, who had held it ever since the killing of Gordon at Khartoum in 1885
  • September 1896: The Balmoral Conversations: against the backdrop of another pogrom against Armenians, with Tsar Nicholas II about Turkey in which Salisbury raised his hobby horse that the Powers partition the Ottoman Empire while the Tsar said his country wanted control of the Dardanelles
  • The ‘wrong horse’ speech: Salisbury’s speech to the House of Lords on 19 January 1897 announcing an end to support for Turkey and its bloody Sultan, saying British policy since Lord Palmerston (the 1850s) and the Crimean War (1853 to 1856) had been mistaken; ‘we put all our money the wrong horse’ (p.646); British Near Eastern policy had shifted from Turkey to Egypt (p.703); a major foreign policy rethink; into the vacuum left by Britain’s rescinded support stepped Germany, as described in The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898 to 1918 by Sean McMeekin
  • Crisis on Crete: Christian Greeks outnumbered Muslim Turks 7 to 1 and wanted to be united with Greece; Salisbury thought it ridiculous that the territory or policy of a modern nation ought to be based on its literary history; he blockaded Crete ports to try and enforce peace but representatives of Greek Prince George landed and acclaimed him leader of liberated Crete at which point both Greece and Turkey started preparing for a major land war. Salisbury cajoled the cabinet into blockading Greece but war broke out in April 1897 with Turkey quickly invading northern Greece who promptly begged the Powers to intervene for peace: ‘The Greeks are a contemptible race’
  • Gerald Balfour: Salisbury appointed another nephew, Gerald Balfour, Chief Secretary for Ireland, and he promptly brought out an Irish Land Bill which Salisbury thought contemptible and worked to defeat in the Lords; then the idea of a permanent royal residence in Ireland, like Sandringham, except none of the royal family approved; then the 1898 Irish Local Government Bill
  • The Transvaal: the economic and political build-up to the Boer War, namely that British experts predicted that the Transvaal’s mineral wealth would soon make it the pre-eminent power in South Africa to which the Cape Colony would defer; Salisbury appointed Lord Milner as Governor of the Cape Colony and High Commissioner for Southern Africa; Salisbury himself wanted to avoid a conflict with the Boers, but in his first official meeting with British officials in SA, Milner made it clear he was determined to engineer one

Chapter 39: Apogee of Empire (June 1897)

  • The Diamond Jubilee: detailed description
  • Jingoism: Salisbury was against extreme patriotism and sabre rattling in speeches and articles; in practice he believed all international affairs derived from physical force but a permanent aggressive imperialist stance hemmed in a foreign policy which he believed had to remain agile and adaptive; scornful of the two Jingo pipe-dreams of 1) a Cape to Cairo railway entirely through British territory, 2) an Imperial Federation behind protective tariffs
  • The three high points of Jingoism were the Diamond Jubilee, Mafeking Night and the Khaki Election (p.835)
  • Honours: Roberts gives a sustained consideration of Salisbury’s attitude to, and record of, giving ‘honours’ (see section below)
  • Bishop-making: as with the honours, an assessment of his policy of bishop making which was pragmatic i.e. he tried to make equal appointments from the Low, Broad and High church traditions in order to keep the Church of England together, something he believed vital for the nation
  • The Munshi: Victoria became irrationally attached to an Indian Muslim named Abdul Karim, aka the Munshi, meaning ‘teacher’, who came to represent all her Indian subjects to her; unfortunately, pretty much the entire Royal household hated him and Salisbury was called in on several occasions to calm arguments

(It’s worth noting Queen Victoria’s striking lack of racism, the reverse, her active wish to promote and encourage subjects of all races from across the empire. Thus she repeatedly demanded that the army in South Africa be supplemented by Sikhs, Gurkhas and Zulus, only to be met by obstructiveness from the War Office, Cabinet and Salisbury himself. Their arguments were 1) distributing arms to coloured subjects set a bad precedent and 2) in a tight spot, English squaddies might refuse to take orders from a person of colour; p.756.)

Chapter 40: Choosing his ground (July 1897 to September 1898)

  • Imperial Federation: pipe-dream Salisbury pooh-poohed; thought Britain stood to lose out economically and, if every citizen in the Federation got a vote, politically, too
  • A French convention:
  • Port Arthur: the Russians seized Port Arthur on the coast of China forcing British ships to vacate the area, signalling a ramping up of the scramble for China; newspapers, politicians and even his own cabinet saw this as a humiliation and claimed Salisbury’s policy of splendid isolation had failed, but Salisbury’s mild response was because he saw trouble brewing with France
  • Anglo-German relations: when Salisbury was off sick his Secretary for the Colonies, Chamberlain, suggested to the German ambassador that Britain and Germany sign a non-aggression pact
  • 4 May 1898 the ‘dying nations’ speech: to a packed audience of the Primrose League at the Royal Albert Hall describing a Darwinian vision of nation states, that weak states become weaker whilst strong states become stronger; “The nations of the earth are divided into the sheep and the wolves – the fat and defenceless against the hungry and strong”; as a comment on the rise and fall of nations it was banal enough; its real purpose was to justify Realpolitik
  • The death of Gladstone: Salisbury was one of the coffin bearers and was genuinely upset which is strange given his deep-seated loathing of Gladstone as a traitor to his class, not least in Ireland (p.693)
  • Curzon as Viceroy: January 1899, Salisbury appointed George Nathaniel Curzon, aged just 40, Viceroy of India; he was to be an inspired choice (p.694)
  • Secret Convention with Germany (‘the Delagoa Bay agreement’, p.719) agreeing no other Power allowed to intervene in Angola or Mozambique the two huge colonies of the weak Power, Portugal, and how the 2 colonies would be divided if Portugal collapsed
  • 2 September 1898 The Battle of Omdurman: part of General Kitchener’s campaign to retake Sudan from the Mahdist Islamic State, revenge for the death of Gordon, a disciplined Anglo-Egyptian force let 50,000 or so Mahdists charge their lines and massacred them with machine guns; around 12,000 Muslim warriors were killed, 13,000 wounded and 5,000 taken prisoner while Kitchener’s force lost 47 men killed and 382 wounded (p.697); journalists present with the British force, and young Winston Churchill in his account of it, were critical of Kitchener for allowing the wounded Sudanese to be murdered; Kitchener was rewarded by being made Baron Kitchener of Khartoum
  • 1898: Winston Churchill published his first book, aged 24

Chapter 41: The Fashoda Crisis (September to November 1898)

  • The Fashoda Crisis was the biggest international crisis since 1878. The intrepid Captain Marchand of the French army marched across the Sahara and planted the French flag at the abandoned mud-brick fort on the banks of the White Nile named Fashoda. A week later General Kitchener, fresh from the victory of Omdurman, arrived with his army and insisted that Fashoda, like all of the Sudan, belonged to Britain. There was a real risk Britain and France would go to war. Salisbury wasn’t fussed about places in mosquito-ridden West Africa (about which we signed Conventions with France) but was insistent that British control of the Nile valley was a sacrosanct principle of British foreign policy
  • France was being disputatious over colonies around the world including Siam (Thailand), Tunis, Madagascar, Niger; ‘They [the French] are so unreasonable and have so much incurable hatred of England’ (p.480)
  • It’s worth remembering how rubbish France was; a century of revolutions, not least the 1871 Commune, had left its society riven by religious and class hatred which had been revived by the bitter Dreyfus Affair – Émile Zola published his famous letter ‘J’Accuse…!’ on 13 January 1898 – and France was on her seventh government since 1893; that’s why its governments and ruling class were so touchy about Britain’s apparently effortless superiority; that’s why populist press and politicians whipped up patriotic feeling against Britain – to try to paper over the large cracks in French society
  • The Marchand expedition: the impressive achievement of Captain Marchand who led 20 French officers and NCOs and 130 French Senegalese over 2,000 miles on a 24-month trek on foot and by boat from Loango at the mouth of the Congo to the Nile
  • When Kitchener met up with Marchand at Fashoda the two men raised their respective flags, denied each other’s right to occupy it, then settled down into a cordial friendship while they let the politicians back in Europe sort things out
  • Parisian politics: the British ambassador worried that war fever was running so high there might be a military coup in Paris led by generals who would use a war with Britain to smother the ongoing Dreyfus scandal; while her populist press ranted for war, ministers were uneasily aware of Germany’s ongoing animosity, and when the Tsar explicitly proclaimed the Franco-Russian entente didn’t apply outside Europe France’s position got steadily weaker; the French government looked like collapsing (again)
  • Triumph: realising they couldn’t win, the French backed down, covering their pusillanimity with vaunting rhetoric; Marchand was ordered to make his way to the Red Sea through Abyssinia (he didn’t have enough provisions to return the way he’d come and returning down the Nile under British supervision would have been humiliated)
  • In February 1899 a Convention was signed with a new French ambassador laying out clear demarcation between the zone of French influence in west Africa and the Maghreb, giving Britain exclusive influence over Egypt and Sudan

Chapter 42: The Outbreak of the Boer War (December 1898 to October 1899)

  • grossly overweight Salisbury had a tricycle with raised handlebars made for him and cycle paths laid out in the grounds of Hatfield House
  • like many grandees back in London, Salisbury had a low opinion of the Boers who he had met on his travels 30 years earlier and thought rough, ignorant slave drivers of the native Africans;

Background: Britain had annexed the Cape Colony, the band of territory right at the bottom of Africa, with the results that the Boer population, descendants of the original Dutch settlers, undertook their ‘Great Trek’ into the interior and set up what developed into two states, the Orange Free State and, to its north, the much larger Transvaal, so called because it was on the other side of the River Vaal. Their descendants called themselves the voortrekkers.

In the 1880s diamonds and gold were discovered which promised to make the Boer government rich. In 1882 the Boers elected as president Paul Kruger, a hard-core, unrepentant Boer nationalist.

The issue was that tens of thousands of migrants had moved into the Transvaal, to work in the ever-growing mines. The Boers referred to them as ‘Uitlanders’ and subjected them to an array of discriminatory laws: they were heavily taxed but in return had worse schools, poor accommodation, were subject to high prices, police brutality, arbitrary arrest, biased legal decisions, censorship of the press and so on. Above all, although they paid taxes, they were forbidden from voting. In Roberts’ opinion the Boers ran little less than ‘a tight, tough, quasi police state’ (p.717). Most of these Uitlanders were ‘freeborn’ Britons so that when the British Uitlanders petitioned the Queen to intervene on their behalf, the war party could claim that lack of help undermined the prestige and authority of Britons throughout her empire.

So British men of the war party, such as Cecil Rhodes, Joe Chamberlain and Lord Milner, kept up a steady barrage of propaganda back to their masters in London, claiming the Boers subjected their black workers to slave-like tyranny, were backward and uneducated, were liable to declare war on friendly black tribes, as well as all the injustices meted out to the Uitlanders.

The fundamental argument was that the ongoing existence of two troublesome, unjust, unpredictable colonies disturbed Britain’s settled rule in South Africa and would only get worse. The war party argued that conflict was inevitable, and so helped to create the expectation, in Parliament and the press, for war. Milner sent Salisbury a note comparing the British workers were treated like ‘helots’ (p.721), Salisbury said they were treated like serfs.

The Boer view was it was their country which they had founded by the sweat of their brows in the face of native reprisals, and that they had their own, highly puritanical ultra-protestant belief and culture, all of which were being swamped by tens of thousands of incomers, and also by the booming immigrant population in the Cape. In other words, they felt their entire identity and heritage was being threatened (p.726).

  • Sir Alfred Milner: High Commissioner of the Cape Colony, was instructed to negotiate better rights for Britons at the so-called Bloemfontein Conference, but found Kruger unmoveable and called him ‘a frock-coated neanderthal’ (p.722)
  • Appeasing Germany: Britain and Germany had been haggling about possession of the islands of Samoa; Salisbury didn’t care tuppence about Samoa so happily gave them all to Germany with a view to mollifying the ever-aggrieved Kaiser
  • Lady Salisbury’s illness: she suffered a stroke and showed signs of dementia, partly distracting Salisbury from his duties; you wonder whether Roberts inserts this as an extenuating factor, softening Salisbury’s responsibility for the war
  • Exasperation with the Transvaal: Kruger offers to give Uitlanders the vote once they had been resident for 7 years, plus guaranteed seats in the small Transvaal parliament; some in the cabinet thought the crisis was over
  • (The Aliens Bill: Roberts points out that at the same time as Salisbury et al were supporting unlimited emigration to the Cape and were compelling it on the Boers, his cabinet passed an Aliens Bill designed to severely restrict immigration into Britain; this was to address the flood of Jewish immigrants who were fleeing antisemitic pogroms in Poland and Russia)
  • Both sides arm: British intelligence reported that both the Transvaal and Orange Free State were buying arms in Europe and importing it via Delagoa Bay, the major port right at the bottom of Mozambique, only 30 or so miles from the border with Transvaal (p.724); for their part the British government moved troops into Natal
  • The Smuts Proposals: Transvaal’s Attorney General Jan Smuts contacts the ambassador to make a series of proposals which represent significant concessions around offering Uitlanders the vote and representation in parliament, but premised on the Transvaal remaining independent and outside British suzerainty
  • The Boer Ultimatum: the British government ramped the pressure up on the Boers, with a series of demands which the Boers, initially, acceded to; so it was a surprise when it was the Boers who issued the set of demands or ultimatum which finally triggered the conflict, setting out a list of demands which must be met by 5pm on Wednesday 11 October

Chapter 43: ‘The Possibilities of Defeat’ (October 1899 to May 1900)

I was wrong about Roberts mentioning Lady Salisbury’s illness in a bid to exonerate his hero because he does the opposite; he heavily blames Salisbury for the Boer War. He cites AJP Taylor who apparently said that Milner dragged Chamberlain who dragged Salisbury into the conflict – but in order to flatly contradict him (Taylor).

No, Salisbury had masterminded British foreign policy for over a decade, was a master of far-seeing strategy; he personally approved every dispatch sent to the Boers, and Roberts cites memos and messages between the key ministers which show Salisbury approving the escalation of Britain’s demands, approving the sending of troops to Natal, and manipulating the presentation of the issues so as to ensure the casus belli (cause of war) was one which would rouse and unite the widest number of the population, or politicians and the press (p.736).

Salisbury should have known better. He should have accepted Kruger’s very fair offers to address the issue of the Uitlanders and worked to extend British suzerainty slowly, by economic means maybe. He should have thought of a clever solution.

Instead he let himself and the British government be painted into a corner where the only two options were fight or have British prestige around the world undermined (p.734). This was an epic failure of statecraft. It was Salisbury’s war and, although he proved remarkably phlegmatic about its initial reverses (so-called ‘Black Week’, Sunday 10 December to Sunday 17 December, when the British Army suffered three devastating defeats) its length, bitterness, cost, the way it divided the nation, the enmity it raised in the other Powers, especially Germany, and the sheer cost of death and misery, all are down to Salisbury.

As Britain’s powerful and long-serving Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, Salisbury must bear overall responsibility for the situation. (p.732)

Moreover, it was entirely his responsibility that the War Office and the British Army were so poorly prepared to fight such a war (p.756).

  • The death of Lady Salisbury: Salisbury was devastated and never the same again
  • ‘Black week’: Sunday 10 December to Sunday 17 December (p.749): the British army began its war the same way it had begun every one since Waterloo, led by useless generals to a series of disastrous defeats
  • A peace offer: the presidents of the two Boer republics (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) offered peace, so long as they retained sovereignty, which Salisbury contemptuously refused, claiming they had started the war
  • In the first weeks of the war the Boers surrounded and besieged three major towns, Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. The military turning point probably came when Ladysmith was relieved on 28 February 1900 but the psychological breakthrough came with the relief of Mafeking on 17 May 1900 after 217 days (p.761) though not before 478 people had died of starvation

Chapter 44: Resolution (May to October 1900)

  • Curzon: Curzon was an outstanding Viceroy in India but was obsessed with the idea that Russia was extending its influence into Persia and that we must fight back; Salisbury put up with Curzon’s criticisms but complained that he spoke as if Salisbury had an army of 500,000 at his back (as the Czar did) when a) there weren’t that many British troops in the whole world and b) the most active forces were tied up in South Africa
  • The Boxer Rebellion: see my review of The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China by David J. Silbey (2012)
  • On 3 September General Frederick Roberts formally annexed the Transvaal
  • Social policy: Liberal Unionist Joe Chamberlain bombarded Salisbury with proposals for social reform bills almost all of which Salisbury managed to reject; they did manage:
    • 1897 Workmen’s Compensation Act
    • 1899 Small Dwellings Acquisition Act
  • The ‘Khaki’ election: held between 26 September and 24 October 1900, when popular opinion believed the Boer War was won, the Boer president Kruger had fled to Holland and all their regular forces had surrendered; result: the Conservative and Liberal Unionist Party 402, Liberal Party 183
  • The Unionist alliance: a short review of the effectiveness of Salisbury’s coalition of Conservatives with Liberal Unionists; Chamberlain said he was treated with more respect as a Liberal Unionist in a Conservative cabinet than he had been as a Radical in Gladstone’s Liberal cabinet

Chapter 45: Reconstruction (October 1900 to January 1901)

The ‘Hotel Cecil’: Salisbury handed out so many official positions to members of his extended family that he prompted widespread accusations of nepotism and croneyism (pages 789 to 790), something he himself acknowledged (p.825). Conservative MP Sir George C. T. Bartley wrote to Salisbury in 1898 complaining that in the Tory Party:

‘all honours, emoluments and places are reserved for the friends and relations of the favoured few’ (p.788)

It says it all that, when he finally resigned as Prime Minister, on 11 July 1902, he was succeeded by his nephew, Arthur Balfour.

The death of Queen Victoria: they had become very close, and even if they disagreed, the Queen was always a fixed point of reference to navigate by, so Salisbury took her sudden death (on 22 January 1901) very hard. Late in her life her eyesight was failing and notes to her had to be written in letters one inch high, often only ten words to a page. In return she sent replies written in a handwriting which had become so indecipherable that special experts were called on to explicate it (p.794).

What this kind of anecdote displays is not so much something about Victoria, but about Roberts and the kind of book he wants to write, namely popular, unacademic, accessible, strewn with humorous anecdotes and so, very readable.

Chapter 46: ‘Methods of Barbarism’ (January to December 1901)

  • King Edward VII: Salisbury had had some professional encounters with the new king, when they sat on committees, but he generally ignored his suggestions and limited what government papers he saw; but to his own surprise they quickly formed an effective working relationship
  • The Boer War, the second phase: the main fighting ended but the Boers upset everyone by mounting a scattered guerrilla war; when you consider that they were fighting for the land they had settled and called their own, for land they and their forefathers had worked for generations, it’s entirely understandable
  • Anglo-German relations: after victory in the Khaki election of 1900, Salisbury reshuffled his cabinet but the biggest change was him giving into cabinet pressure and relinquishing the dual role he had had of Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary; he was replaced by Lord Lansdowne, a Liberal Unionist, who had had a poor reputation at the War Office (but then, everyone did); Lansdowne’s arrival marked a break with what had come to be regarded, rightly or wrongly, as Salisbury’s policy of ‘Splendid Isolation’ i.e. refusing to commit to alliances with any of the major European Powers (France, Germany, Austria, Russia)
  • The concentration camps: Roberts seeks to set the record straight: the concentration camp was not invented by the British but by the Spanish in the war against America 2 years earlier; the camps came about because thousands of Boer women and children, left undefended when their men went off to join commando unit, were at the mercy of the Blacks and/or unable to fend for themselves; plus the deliberate British policy of deliberately burning homesteads anywhere near where a commando attack took place rendered them homeless; but the British were completely unprepared for the scale of the immigration and coralling all underfed people in barbed wire encampments quickly led to the spread of epidemic disease; at their peak the numerous camps held some 118,000 white and 43,000 coloured inmates; the Royal Army Medical Corps had planned to serve 40,000 soldiers – in the event they had to cater to 200,000 soldiers and over 200,000 refugees; some 20,000 women and children died (4,000 adults, 16,000 women); these were obviously not extermination camps like the Nazi ones, but British incompetence led to a holocaust of innocents which is held against us to this day; Roberts lists all the possible extenuating circumstances (a handy list) but is robust regarding his hero: Salisbury ‘must bear the ultimate responsibility for what happened’ (p.806) campaigner Emma Hobhouse blamed it on ‘crass male ignorance’ i.e of the hygiene and accommodation required by women and children

It’s worth pointing out that even in Roberts’s broadly sympathetic account, Salisbury, as I understand it, habituates himself to lying about the causes of the war; its origins were all about redressing the injustices suffered by the Uitlanders; once the fighting started, some Boer units mounted incursions over the border into the Cape Colony; and this allowed Salisbury to completely change his rhetoric and claim that the British were acting in self defence against a dastardly invasion. He took to repeating this in public speeches, in private correspondence and diplomatic replies to the Powers, for example in a note to the new king, advising him how to reply to a personal communication from Tsar Nicholas:

‘The war was begun and elaborately prepared for many previous years by the Boers and was unprovoked by any single act of England’ (p.808)

Obviously, he is presenting the strongest, most unambiguous case possible to one of the great Powers, and during a time of war but it was a line he peddled in a variety of contexts, including private correspondence. Here he is writing to his son:

‘This unhappy war has lasted much longer than we expected…but I have no doubt that it was forced upon us and that we had no choice in regard to it.’ (p.810)

This strikes me as being a very Big Lie. Moreover, if Salisbury and his ilk based their claim to rule the country on the idea that they represented a disinterested values of honour and legality, then bare-faced lies and distortions like this undermined that claim, and showed them up to be just another special interest group protecting their own interests (and grotesque mistakes).

The cost of the Boer War

Salisbury spent a lifetime castigating the Liberals for the costs of their policies and claimed to run a fiscally responsible administration. Roberts shows how the Boer War blew that claim out of the water. It ended up costing some £223 million, led to increases in income and other taxes, and a vast increase in government borrowing. Salisbury left his successor (Balfour) a fiscal disaster.

  • The Taff Vale judgement: on 22 July 1901 the House of Lords handed down a judgement that a trade union could be sued (by employers who suffered from a strike). Superficially a victory for the forces of Reaction, this decision single-handedly galvanised working class movements and activists to realise they needed organised representation in Parliament and led to the setting up of the Labour Party.

Chapter 47: A Weary Victory (January 1902 to August 1903)

  • The Anglo-Japanese alliance: 30 January 1902 Britain departed the splendid isolation she had enjoyed for decades by making a defensive pact with Japan to last 5 years; this was to counter relentless Russian expansion into decaying China and the worry that the Russian and French fleets combined outnumbered the British one and so could, potentially, disrupt Britain’s Pacific trade
  • Coronation honours: Salisbury strongly opposed some of the names the new King Edward put forward for his coronation honours, particularly Thomas Lipton who he thought entirely unworthy of entering the House of Lords
  • The Education Bill: English education policy was stymied because the core of the system was so-called Voluntary schools which were run by the Church of England and taught Anglican religion; many of these schools were poorly funded and so Salisbury wanted to give them government support; however, ratepayers from other religions, some Catholic but many non-conformists, refused to pay rates if they were going to support their children being taught a different religion; the solution was, obviously, to increase the provision of non-denominational state schools but Salisbury blocked this because a) of his deep attachment to defending the Church of England and b) because of his scepticism about teaching the children of the working classes, anyway; Roberts digs up some scandalous comments from his journalism period, in which Salisbury says what’s the point of educating working class kids if they’re just going to return to the plough or the factory; this was not only a scandalously snobbish, privileged point of view, but economically stupid; while Britain wasted a huge amount of political time and money fussing about these issues, the Germans and Americans were instituting practical educational systems appropriate to the needs of a modern industrial economy i.e. technical and engineering apprenticeships and colleges; Salisbury embodied the kind of ‘principled’ and ‘honourable’ Reaction which condemned Britain to slow economic decline
  • Peace at Vereeniging: 31 May, after prolonged negotiations, a peace was signed ending the Boer War; Milner had wanted to fight on until every Boer combatant was killed but head of the army Kitchener thought enough had been done, a difference of opinion reflected in fierce arguments in the cabinet; the treaty terms were surprisingly lenient, amnestying most Boer fighters and letting them return to their farms (the ones that hadn’t been burned down) and families (the ones who hadn’t died in the British camps)
  • Retirement: Salisbury had said he would go when the war ended; with his wife dead and Queen Victoria dead and the war over, he began to feel his age and infirmities, nodding off in cabinet meetings;

‘I thought I had much better resign and get out of the way; especially as, since the death of the last Queen, politics have lost their zest for me.’ (p.829)

  • Salisbury prepared the way for his retirement with his cabinet colleagues; he rejected the plan to have his nephew, Balfour, replace him on the same day as smacking too much nepotism; and went to see the King to hand over the seals of office on 11 July 1902; the King was prepared for the visit and handed him the Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order; within 24 hours his nephew was appointed Prime Minister, to much mocking from the Liberal and Irish Nationalist benches; allegedly, this is the origin of the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’, though that is disputed; Balfour found it difficult to fill his uncle’s giant shoes, the coalition began losing by-elections, and was eventually massacred in the landslide Liberal victory at the 1906 election
  • Death: he went steadily downhill after retiring, suffering a series of ailments (ulcers, kidney problems) then a heart attack which led to the final decline and he died on 22 August 1903

The legacy

What an enormous biography this is, overflowing with facts and insights, completely achieving its goal of persuading the reader that Salisbury was one of the titans of the Victorian age. Roberts makes a sustained case for his hero but the more he defends him, the more negative the final impression one has, of a big reactionary buffalo who set his face against all change in any aspect of British society, and solidly, intransigently in defence of his class, the landed aristocracy, its wealth, privileges and power.

The nature of the Conservative Party

‘Hostility to Radicalism, incessant, implacable hostility, is the essential definition of conservatism.’

‘The use of Conservatism is to delay changes till they become harmless.’ (writing to Lady Raleigh after the 1892 election defeat; p.841)

Salisbury engaged in a lifelong struggle against what he saw as the forces of atheism and political progressivism, becoming a master of patient obstructionism. (p.841)

The Conservative Party opposed the extension of the franchise, votes for women, reform of the voting system, home rule let alone independence for Ireland or any of the other colonies, opposed trade unions and workers’ rights, opposed universal education, opposed old age pensions, opposed the welfare state, opposed the National Health System, opposed the abolition of the death penalty, equal rights for women, gay liberation, opposed the expansion of universities and every new artistic movement for the past 200 years. In other words, the Conservative Party opposed every political measure and social achievement which most modern people would describe the hallmarks of a civilised society. They defended the privileges of the aristocracy and the bigoted Church of England, hanging, fox hunting, the brutal administration of Britain’s colonies, and corrupt nepotism. In international affairs they gave us the Boer War, Munich and the Suez Crisis. In every argument, on every issue, they have been the enemy of enlightenment, peace and civilisation.

And what kind of people are attracted to this small-minded, snobbish, xenophobic party of reaction? Admittedly he was writing in a private letter to the Radical Liberal Unionist Joe Chamberlain, but in 1900 Salisbury described the Conservative Party as:

‘a party shackled by tradition; all the cautious people, all the timid, all the unimaginative, belong to it. It stumbles slowly and painfully from precedent to precedent with its eyes fixed on the ground.’ (p.800)

Roberts reports this all quite candidly. It’s for the reader to decide how much this description still applies to the Conservative Party of today.

No policies

To explain, or put the case for the defence, Salisbury’s was a strong disbeliever in theories, manifestos and policies. He distrusted all such claptrap. He despised continental philosophy and was proud of being a philistine in the arts. 1) He thought general theories (such as everything the Liberals espoused) led to unintended consequences, and tended to overthrow the established practices he was so attached to (see the French Revolution, proclaiming brotherhood and ending in tyranny). And 2) he thought a politician needed to be free of pre-commitments in order to react to each issue or crisis as it arose, with the maximum of flexibility, without having his hands tied by promises made to get elected years previously. Epitome of pragmatism.

‘I believe that freedom from the self-imposed trammels of particular theories is necessary if you want to deal with the world as it is.’ (p.475)

He could barely be persuaded to issue any kind of manifesto or platform before the general elections he fought. He thought it sufficed to say the government of the country would be in safe, conservative hands.

Foreign policy

The case is stronger for Salisbury’s foreign policy. Here his dislike of prior commitments was (arguably) a virtue, as it led him to reject every suggestion by his cabinet colleagues to form alliances with this or that of the Powers (France, Germany, Austria or Russia). The central portion of the book makes it clear that this was important as it allowed Salisbury maximum freedom of manoeuvre in handling the many crises which kept coming up, especially in the decaying Ottoman Empire. In fact the major learning from the diplomacy of the 1880s and 90s was how close Europe repeatedly came to a general conflagration, and Roberts shows that Salisbury’s adept diplomacy often prevented that coming about.

Roberts calls the period from Salisbury’s becoming Foreign Secretary to his retirement the Pax Saliburiana. On the face of it the Boer War is a massive, disastrous stain on that claim but from Salisbury’s point of view the single most important thing about it was that none of the major Powers got involved. They complained but the crisis didn’t trigger a general European war.

Same with the Scramble for Africa. In most modern books this is viewed from a woke perspective as a scandal, a historic crime. But seen in context, the thing is not that Africa was arbitrarily carved up with no consultation of the people who lived there, but that none of the potential conflicts between the Powers led to actual war. At the back of his mind was fear of a vast European conflict and he was 100% successful in avoiding this. As Roberts pithily puts it, one of the most remarkable things about the First World War was not that it occurred, but that it didn’t break out earlier.

Everything changed as soon as he retired, and the Entente Cordiale of 1904, far from securing Britain’s security and the peace of Europe, was just the first of the web of alliances which was to plunge Europe into the catastrophic World War ten years later. Would the war have occurred if Britain had stuck to Salisbury’s policy of splendid isolation? Discuss.

Salisbury sayings

‘I was delighted to see you had run Wilfred Blunt in. The great heart of the people always chuckles when a gentleman gets into the clutches of the law.’ (p.448)

The Pope is ‘to be looked upon in the light of a big gun, to be kept in good order and turned the right way.’ (p.449)

‘Always tell the Queen everything.’ (p.515)

Salisbury cynicism

Salisbury was brutally honest about imperialism. He didn’t waste his time with fancy ideas of civilising and morality and whatnot. He really disliked colonial adventurers and chancers. He saw imperialism as an extension of the precarious balance of power between the ‘powers’ or main countries of Europe (Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Russia). Thus he was under no illusion that empire was anything other than the imposition of force to maintain Britain’s interests. Thus Egypt and Sudan had to be held in order to secure the Suez Canal as the conduit to India (p.519), whereas he frankly rubbished the fantasy the fantasy of Cecil Rhodes and the Jingoists of building a railway running from Cairo to the Cape without leaving British territory (p.534).

Thus Britain installed a new pliable ruler of Zanzibar who was installed:

as soon as British warships had bombarded the palace and ousted the pretender. (p.52)

Overthrowing the Ottoman Sultan for a more biddable alternative; overthrowing the king of Burma; overthrowing the Khedive of Egypt; overthrowing the Amir of Afghanistan; overthrowing the heir to the Zanzibar throne, and so it goes on, Britain bringing ‘civilisation’ to the rest of the world and then lecturing everyone about rights and duties and law and honour. No wonder the French despised the British establishment for its deep-dyed hypocrisy.

Imperialism

Poor Lord Curzon saw all his grand schemes for India and beyond (winning influence in Persia, building railways lines across the Middle East) stymied by Salisbury’s basic principle of not alienating Russia and then, when the Boer War drained Britain’s finances, by chronic lack of money. In one of his many letters to Curzon Salisbury gives a (maybe exaggerated) insight into imperial policy earlier in the century:

‘In the last generation we did much what we liked in the East by force or threats, by squadrons and tall talk. But we now have “allies” – French, German, Russian: and the day of free, individual, coercive action is almost passed by. For years to come, Eastern advance must depend largely on payment: and I fear that in this race England will seldom win.’ (p.809)

Salisbury was always gloomy about the present, but this suggests the interesting idea that the empire was created during a unique ‘window’ when force and bluster won huge territories but, by 1900, that era had ended. (Cf taking colonies by force, p.511)

Manipulating the legal system

One of the things that comes across powerfully is the way the ruling class of all flavours (Tory, Liberal, Liberal Unionist) blithely manipulated the legal system, throwing their weight behind prosecutions or releasing individuals early, as it suited them, for example, releasing Irish MP John Dillon early from prison because he was ill, to ensure he didn’t die behind bars and become a martyr (p.451). In the case of the Cleveland Street scandal, Roberts casually mentions that his hero ‘technically’ conspired to pervert the course of justice and committed misprision of a felony, but he did it in a good cause so that’s alright (p.546).

The rotten ‘honours’ system

And the way politicians treated the ‘honours’ system as a simple set of partisan rewards. There was absolutely nothing ‘honourable’ about them, as there isn’t to this day. ‘Honours’ were used to reward loyal service to the government or big financial donors or, frequently, to get rid of unwanted colleagues, ‘kicking them upstairs’ to the House of Lords. Talking of the Liberal Unionists, Robert remarks:

although they refused the rewards of office Salisbury ensured that they were liberally sprayed by the fountain of honours. (p.427)

Home Secretary Henry Matthews was considered to have performed badly during the Jack the Ripper crisis (3 April 1888 to 13 February 1891):

and in 1895 he was awarded a viscountcy as a consolation for not being asked to return to office. (p.507)

The Duke of Beaufort, an important Tory magnate:

corresponded with Salisbury over twenty-five years on the usual aristocratic subjects of cadging arch-deaconries for friends, baronetcies for neighbours and honours for the mayors of towns on his estate. (p.546)

The only reason the Lord Mayor was keen on the visit of Kaiser William was that he thought ‘he might cadge a baronetcy out of it’ (p.555). In 1890 some Tories planned to lure the Liberal Lord Bernard over to their party with the offer of an earldom (p.569). Salisbury himself turned down the Queen’s offer of a dukedom not once but twice, but allowed his son (already Lord Cranbrook) to be raised from a viscount to an earl (p.579).

When forming his 1895 cabinet Salisbury did not appoint Henry Holland, Lord Knutsford, and so gave him a ‘consolation’ viscountcy; Matthews was no reappointed but made Viscount Llandaff; Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett wasn’t given a job, but ‘picked up a consolation knighthood’ (p.602).

Thomas Lipton the tea magnate brown-nosed the queen by donating a huge £25,000 to the Princess of Wales’s project to give London’s poor a banquet at the Diamond Jubilee. Salisbury considered him ‘worthless’ (p.796) but he was a friend of the Prince of Wales and so ‘duly received his knighthood the next year’ (p.661). Basically, you can buy these ‘honours’ if you pay enough and put in enough brown-nosing.

Salisbury despised ‘the rage for distinctions’ but used it as cynically as any other prime minister (pages 668 to 673). In fact in the 6 months of his short caretaker government, he doled out no fewer than 13 peerages, 17 baronetcies, and 23 privy councillors. As Roberts says, not a bad haul for party hacks the party faithful (p.670).

The man more responsible than anybody else for the self-defeating fiasco of the Boer War, Lord Milner, was, of course, given a barony as reward (p.800). Then, as now, colossal failure was rewarded by corrupt politicians.

(Roberts uses the verb ‘cadge’ so many times to describe pushy officials grubbing for honours that I looked it up. ‘Cadge’ is defined, formally, as: ‘to ask for or obtain something to which one is not strictly entitled’, less formally as: ‘to get (food, money, etc) by sponging or begging.’ So you can think of all those Victorians jostling and bothering the Prime Minister for honours as well-heeled beggars and pompous spongers.)

The endless queue of people in the worlds of politics, the church or local government relentlessly pestering him for awards and honours made Salisbury’s view of human nature even more cynical and jaded:

‘Directly a man has satisfied his most elementary material wants, the first aspiration of his amiable heart is for the privilege of being able to look down upon his neighbours.’ (p.668)

And yet he continued to hand them out like smarties, as politicians have continued to do right down to the present day.

Credit

Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts was published in hardback by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in 1999. References are to the 2000 Phoenix paperback edition.

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on August 23, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, History, imperialism, Politics, Russia, War
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on August 23, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/08/23/salisbury-victorian-titan-andrew-roberts-part-2/