Pax Britannica Read online

  PAX BRITANNICA

  The Climax of an Empire

  JAN MORRIS

  For

  TOM MORRIS

  tea-time imperialist

  Set in this stormy Northern sea,

  Queen of these restless fields of tide,

  England! what shall men say of thee,

  Before whose feet the worlds divide?

  OSCAR WILDE

  INTRODUCTION

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

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

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

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

  TREFAN MORYS, 1998

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  INTRODUCTION

  THE BRITISH EMPIRE, 1897

  CHAPTER ONE: THE HEIRS OF ROME

  The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, its celebration as a festival of Empire and the explosion of national emotion known as the New Imperialism

  CHAPTER TWO: PALM AND PINE

  The extent of the British Empire at its climax, and something of its tangled origins

  CHAPTER THREE: LIFE-LINES

  The shipping routes, mails and cables that bound the British possessions together

  CHAPTER FOUR: MIGRATIONS

  How the existence of the British Empire disseminated seed and stock across the world

  CHAPTER FIVE: PIONEERS

  An imperial frontier town: Salisbury, Rhodesia

  CHAPTER SIX: THE PROFIT

  The first incentive of imperialism: gain

  CHAPTER SEVEN: THE GLORY

  Secondary motives: aspects of glory, aggressive, defensive, romantic, evangelist and plain patriotic

  CHAPTER EIGHT: CASTE

  Attitudes of the British towards their subject peoples, and reasons for the aloofness that was fundamental to their method

  CHAPTER NINE: ISLANDERS

  An island fortress: St Lucia in the Windward Islands

  CHAPTER TEN: IMPERIAL ORDER

  The theoretical structure of Empire, its basic system and its laws

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: IMPERIAL COMPLEXITY

  Exceptions, anomalies and complications of Empire, from larrikins to Lord Cromer

  CHAPTER TWELVE: IMPERIALISTS IN GENERAL

  The run of Empire-builders: their type, look and social aspirations

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: IMPERIALISTS IN PARTICULAR

  Two explorers, three soldiers, an admiral, two administrators, two politicians, a couple of adventurers and a Queen

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: PROCONSULS

  Simla and the British Government of India

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: CONSOLATIONS

  Some pleasures of Empire, sporting and social

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: CHALLENGE AND RESPONSES

  Adventure: living dangerously and dying young

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: STONES OF EMPIRE

  Imperial architecture, sacred and secular, with parks and gardens too

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: TRIBAL LAYS AND IMAGES

  Imperial muses: painting, sculpture, literature, music and intimations of folk-art

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: ALL BY STEAM!

  The British Empire as a development agency: irrigation, roads, railways, mapping, medicine and a specimen millennium

  CHAPTER TWENTY: FREEDMEN

  A self-governing colony of the Empire: Canada

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: ON GUARD

  The armies of the Crown, British and Indian: their past glories and their present weaknesses

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: AT SEA

  Splendours and absurdities of the Royal Navy, with glimpses of élan

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: IMPERIAL EFFECTS

  Spoils and influences of Empire, and what they did for England

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: OVERLORDS

  The Other Island: Ireland

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: OMENS

  Troubles of Empire and possible threats to its future, with plans for evading them

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: ‘THE SONG ON YOUR BUGLES BLOWN’

  Did the British Empire have an ideology? Religion, Englishness, imperial monarchy, radicalism and Fair Play

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: FINALE

  Queen Victoria writes up her diary, the British survey their position in the world, and we bring the Empire to a close

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INDEX

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THE BRITISH EMPIRE, 1897

  IN EUROPE: Great Britain and Ireland: Channel Islands: Gibraltar: Isle of Man: Malta

  IN AFRICA: Ashanti: Basutoland: Bechuanaland: British East Africa: Cape Province: Gambia: Gold Coast: Natal: Nigeria: Nyasaland: Rhodesia: Sierra Leone: Somaliland: Uganda: Zanzibar

  IN AMERICA: Bahamas: Barbados: British Guiana: British Honduras: British Virgin Islands: Canada: Falkland Islands: Jamaica: Leeward Islands: Newfoundland: Tobago: Trinidad: Turks and Caicos Islands: Windward Islands

  IN ASIA: Aden: Brunei: Ceylon: Hong Kong: India: Labuan: Malay Federated States: North Borneo: Papua: Sarawak: Singapore

  IN AUSTRALASIA: New South Wales: New Zealand: Queensland: South Australia: Tasmania: Victoria: Western Australia

  IN THE ATLANTIC OCEAN: Ascension: Bermuda: St Helena: Tristan da Cunha

  IN THE INDIAN OCEAN: Mauritius: Seychelles: seven other groups and islands

  IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN: Ellice, Gilbert, Southern Solomon, Union groups: Fiji: Pitcairn: twenty-four other groups, islands and reefs

  Transvaal was debatably subject to British suzerainty: Egypt was under British military occupation : Cyprus was British-administered, but nominally under Turkish
sovereignty

  Area: about 11m square miles

  Population: about 372m

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Heirs of Rome

  But hush—the Nations come from overseas,

  Attend, with trumpets blown and flags unfurled,

  To swell thy Jubilee of Jubilees,

  Heart of the World!

  Cosmo Monkhouse

  Punch, June 26, 1897

  1

  BERORE she set out on her Diamond Jubilee procession, on the morning of June 22, 1897, Queen Victoria of England went to the telegraph room at Buckingham Palace, wearing a dress of black moiré with panels of pigeon grey, embroidered all over with silver roses, shamrocks and thistles. It was a few minutes after eleven o’clock. She pressed an electric button; an impulse was transmitted to the Central Telegraph Office in St Martin’s le Grand; in a matter of seconds her Jubilee message was on its way to every corner of her Empire.

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

  2

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

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

  3

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

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

  Politically the Liberals were in eclipse, and Gladstone’s voice, the voice of the English conscience, was silent1 The perennial discontent of the Irish, a squalid constant of English politics, had hardened rather than weakened the British will to rule, and that summer Kitchener was gloriously revenging the death of Gordon, twelve years before, with his imperial armies in the Sudan.2 To the innocent public everything seemed to be going right. The monarchy was more popular than ever. The prestige of the Royal Navy had reached an almost mystical plane. The spectacle of other peoples coalescing in powerful federations—in Germany, in Italy, in America—made the British wonder if they might not also combine their scattered communities, all over the world, into an unapproachable super-state. Jingo imperialism was intoxicating fodder for the newly enfranchised working classes, and the Conservative-Unionist Government was dominated by imperialists of complementary styles: Lord Salisbury the Prime Minister, stroking the surface of affairs with his patrician and scholarly hand; Joseph Chamberlain the Colonial Secretary, an expansionist of the new kind, impulsive and insatiable, who had even gone so far as to install electric light in the Colonial Office. It all went with an almost frantic gusto, like universal craze.

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

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